Erik Valborg. The similarities of the two cases are inescapable, which makes the differences that much more telling. They are both artistic outcasts, both cases in which her need for intellectual companionship nearly draws her over a line into infidelity. In many ways, her tension over Erik is a simple repeat of the internal struggle that she underwent several years and hundreds of pages earlier when, walking home after a heartfelt moment with Guy, she asked herself, “Am I to be trusted?” Not much seems to have been changed from one case to the next, until the reader adds an awareness of the relative circumstances. Guy is older and makes Carol feel young; Erik is younger and makes her feel old. Guy is a loner who shuts himself up in his office, hoping to be ignored by the town; Erik is an extrovert who draws attention to himself because he is able to laugh at negative public opinion. The trajectory from the first case to the second defines Carol’s growth, her movement from uncertainty to defiance, even as the other events in her life seem to be dragging her down into defeat. The relationship between these two would not be so telling about who Carol is if they were not so eerily similar, even though, in making them so, Lewis supports some critics in their thesis that the main character fails to grow.

But, even though these opportunities for infidelity are the most attention-grabbing in Carol’s story, they are not necessarily the most significant elements in the character profile laid out for readers in Main Street. There are other cases in which this style of repetition is just as obvious. Throughout the book, ideas, motifs, and characterizations come back in familiar forms, again and again, building to an overall impression of the inescapable sameness that engulfs Carol’s life once she moves to Gopher Prairie.

Her character grows in ways that she is not even aware of, affected by the patterns of the world around her. The book traces Carol’s hunt for identity, but only a few of the significant moments Lewis describes are part of an active search. The others are reminders. Beside her romantic affairs, there are at least four other identities that she tries on, and each identity takes on a life beyond the one that she thought she was adopting. She tries her hand at being a pillar of the community, an arbiter of artistic sensibilities, and a modern woman. If Lewis had allowed the failures of all of these endeavors to fall on Carol’s head, he would have ended up with a much more hopeless story than he intended. It makes sense to blend her failures with the failures of others and to let readers draw their own connections.

When she first arrives in Gopher Prairie, for instance, Carol tries to petition the town leaders to build an important and ambitious civic center, but she meets with disappointment and frustration. The point is made strongly enough, but then it is made again when Vida Sherwin shames her into leading a Campfire Girl troop and yet again when she arranges the fund for a visiting nurse for the poor families on the outskirts of town. After involving herself and extracting herself from countless town projects, the last example from this line comes at the end of the book when the “Community Day” of her dreams is intercepted by a local political hack, who corrupts her concept for his own glory.

Carol’s attempts to change the social life of Gopher Prairie meet with more and more success as she becomes less and less involved in them, a point that exists more in the circumstances around her than in her psyche. To follow a traditional plot thread of one defeat leading to the next attempt would miss this point.

Carol tries to make her mark on the town’s artistic sensibilities. She attends a meeting of the “women’s study group,” the Thanatopsis Society, only to find that the Gopher Prairie women think they can adequately explore all of English poetry in one afternoon. Her shaky social standing prevents her from pointing out the flaw in this thinking. She takes the lead in forming a “Little Theater” group, hoping to be more influential, but the same forces that suppress her in the Thanatopsis Society drag the theater group down to mediocrity. Both examples are needed to show how strongly the town is resistant to change. Late in the story, the theater group that mirrored the Thanatopsis society is itself mirrored in a new theater group that is planned by Carol and her friends Fern Mullins and Erik Valborg. The inability to even get this new idea past the talking stage, due to the personal calamities that befall the participants, makes the earlier watered-down version look desirable. Carol’s artistic endeavors may seem to go over and over the same material, but in fact they represent a downward spiral, making true artistry in that town seem impossible.

One more noteworthy identity that Carol tries to adopt is that of an independent, modern woman. This is almost impossible in Gopher Prairie, where people only know her as the wife Will Kennicott brought to town. At a party soon after her arrival, Carol tries to shake off the stereotypical “wife” personality by talking openly and frankly about forbidden subjects such as labor unions, experimental education, and daring her husband to strip to his underwear and jump into a cold lake on their honeymoon. Her attempt to shake up the social order is only moderately successful: she does not liberate her neighbors’ minds, but she does make them look at her as someone who is different from them. Her youthful unwillingness to conform later shows up in Fern Mullins, who comes to town and ignores the standards of behavior expected of a schoolteacher. Unlike Carol’s case, in which nonconformity led to discomfort among her neighbors, Fern’s openness about moderate drinking and being in the presence of men leads to her losing her career before she has started her first job, and being run out of town. Again, this familiar occurrence, mirroring Carol’s bid for freedom, has yet another echo later in the book when a speaker from the National Nonpartisan League is run out of town on a rail.

Main Street is filled with dozens of other instances that are replayed by ghostly shadows of themselves. Jim Blausser, the real-estate developer and feel-good guru, has a function in the book almost identical to that performed by Percy Bresnahan. Aunt Bessie Smail is almost indistinguishable from Mrs. Bogart in her opinions. The trip to Red Squaw Lake, with the women left behind to cook while the men fish, is the basis for the hunting trip in the last chapter that has Carol shooting with the men. The trip to California, which Kennicott takes to soothe Carol’s frustration, is later copied by the short trip to South Carolina during which she presumably becomes pregnant. The two children of Carol and Will Kennicott provide a clear opportunity to view different attitudes, because they are from different times in the marriage and of different genders.

The novel does not follow any direct path in tracking Carol’s growth but instead offers a series of instances and examples. Readers and critics might find this to indicate a weakness on the part of Sinclair Lewis, and they would probably be right: his other novels are also episodic. But the author’s presumed weakness does not negate the fact that this technique works in this book. Life in Gopher Prairie is bleak and hopeless for Carol, and readers come to feel this best when they discover the enigmatic ways in which things relate to each other.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on Main Street, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2002. Kelly is an adjunct professor of English at College of Lake County and Oakton Community College in Illinois.

Sinclair Lewis’s attitude toward the activity of writing can be seen in his letters to his publisher reporting his progress with Main Street. The letters overflow with excitement, even though the making of an important novel was for him then, as always, a job as wearing as the most strenuous manual labor. “Whether it’s good or not,” he wrote, “of course I can’t tell, but there is this fact usually indicative of some excellence: I’m enormously enjoying writing it . . . indeed I’m not thinking of much else.” He was thinking of other matters, however; as a former writer of commercial fiction and as a former employee of a publisher’s promotion department, he could not help but concern himself with sales. He gave some thought to marketing his short stories and to advertising his recent novel Free Air. He was involved in all the activities of his profession.

He sensed, according to these letters, what Main Street might mean to him: “.. . all my thoughts and planning are centered in Main Street—which may, perhaps, be the real beginning of my career as a writer.” And later: “I believe that it will be the real beginning of my writing. No book and no number of short stories I’ve ever done have ever meant a quarter of what this does to me.” In the spring of 1920 he wrote that the pace was exhausting, but his excitement was unabated: “Yesterday . . . was the first day I’d taken off in eleven days; even last Sunday I worked till 5:30 P.M. I’m revising with the most minute care and, I fancy, with success.”

Then at the end of July he completed the book. He had managed to finish it, Lewis said, “only by working eight hours a day, seven days in most weeks, though a normal number of daily hours of creative writing is supposed to be about four. . . .[sic] I never worked so hard, and never shall work so hard, again . . . unless Comes the Revolution and I am driven from writing to real work, like bricklaying or soldiering or being a nursemaid.” He thus concludes with characteristic irony, belittling enough and repeated often enough so that one may wonder what his reservations about writing were. He spoke of writing as “sweaty and nerve-jangling,” and said that pure research in a laboratory would have pleased him more. To some extent such yearning is one of Lewis’s poses. Yet a study of his books does show that he chose research in the laboratory as a metaphor for the life best lived, though he also commended the careers of the physician, the inn-keeper, and the architect. For instance, “I never quite get over the feeling,” Lewis told an interviewer in 1947, “that writing isn’t much of a profession, compared with being a doctor, that it’s not quite manly to be sitting there on the seat of your pants all the time.” Professor Perry Miller remembered a conversation following an outburst of temper when Lewis discovered that his brother Claude would not attend one of the novelist’s lectures during their tour of Europe. Miller writes that Lewis cried out: “It’s been that way from the beginning. . . . I wanted to write, and I’ve worked like hell at it, and the whole of Sauk Centre and my family and America have never understood that it is work, that I haven’t just been playing around, that this is every bit as serious a proposition as Claude’s hospital. When you said that Claude did not want to hear my lecture . . . you set up all the resentments I have had ever since I can remember.” Even after he returned to Sauk Centre in 1916 as a successful young author of two novels and a number of stories that had appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, the townspeople let him know they considered writing as only “nearly” as choice a trade as medicine, law, the ministry, or even manufacturing. Against these feelings, which he would have throughout his life, Lewis set to work—to hard work—composing Main Street.

In his studies of the influence of Cervantes on European and American literature, Professor Harry Levin mentions the resemblance Carol Kennicott bears to Emma Bovary, who is the archetype of the “female quixote.” But neither Carol nor Main Street has been analyzed thoroughly as an expression of quixotism, though such an analysis can uncover sources of the novel’s vitality and appeal. An approach through quixotism can bring us to a better understanding of Carol’s ambitions, illusions, conflicts, persistence, and defeat. When seen as the story of a woman with a mind shaped by romantic notions, who challenges the community with her impractical idealism and suffers rebuffs and selfdoubt, Main Street appears to have more purpose, unity, and psychological interest than many readers have been willing to concede to it.

The quixote’s career begins in the library. Of Emma Bovary, Professor Levin writes: “From the drab milieu she has known as a farmer’s daughter, her extracurricular reading conjures up the allurements of escape: steeds and guitars, balconies and fountains, medieval and Oriental vistas.” We may say much the same thing about Carol, for she can conjure up a bower of roses, a château, a Chinese entertainment, an exotic Frenchman, a poet-lover. She brings to Gopher Prairie a romantic model of what a village should be and a fantasy of her role in life. However, as she settles into her plain and frigid Gopher Prairie home, so different from the one she has imagined, she cries, “How these stories lie!”

The opening chapters of Main Street give only fragmentary information about Carol’s childhood, but they suggest an environment that encouraged romanticizing. She recalls that her father was “the tenderest man in the world.” He created “Christmas fantasies” from “the sacred old rag doll at the tops of the tree,” and he would transform the terrors of the night into a “hearth-mythology” of “beneficent and bright-eyed creatures.” There were the “tam htab, who is woolly and blue and lives in the bathroom” and “the ferruginous oil stove, who purrs and knows stories.” Her father let her read anything she wished, and she is said to have “absorbed” Balzac, Rabelais, Thoreau, and Max Müller at an early age. But what Carol saw in Thoreau, one suspects, was woodsy escapism and inaction, for at one point she recalls, “I used to sit there on the cliffs above Mankato for hours at a time, my chin in my hand, looking way down the valley, wanting to write poems.”

At college she announces that she hopes to “conquer the world.” Vaporous images from her further reading point to the reformist mission that she must undertake. “She wanted, just now, to have a cell in a settlement-house, like a nun without the bother of a black robe”; from the cell she will improve “a horde of grateful poor.” The icon of her dormitory room is “a miniature of the Dancing Bacchante.” Having glanced at a book on town improvement, she plans to convert a village to the greens and garden-walls of France. Or she wishes to “turn a prairie town into Georgian houses and Japanese bungalows.” She declares, “I don’t understand myself but I want—everything in the world! Maybe I can’t sing or write, but I know I can be an influence in library work. Just suppose I encouraged some boy and he became a great artist!”

Meanwhile she is learning to transmute reality. For instance, as she climbs along the banks of the Mississippi, she sees the river as her fanciful mind dictates. She listens to the fables of the river “about the wide land of yellow waters and bleached buffalo bones to the West; the Southern levees and singing darkies and palm trees toward which it was forever mysteriously gliding; and she heard again the startled bells and thick pulling of high-stacked river steamers wrecked on sand-reefs sixty years ago. Along the decks she saw missionaries, gamblers in tall pot hats, and Dakota chiefs with scarlet blankets.” She has created a tableau peopled with figures of her own imagining—dreams, Lewis says later, “governed by the fiction she had read, drawn from the pictures she had envied.” To give another illustration of her fancy, at the commencement exercises at Blodgett College “she saw the palms as a jungle, the pink-shaded electric globes as an opaline haze, and the eyeglassed faculty as Olympians.”

During a year in Chicago after graduation, these impulses are strengthened. Carol spends an evening at a bohemian studio party, where she hears talk of “Freud, Romain Rolland, syndicalism, the Confédération Générale du Travail, feminism vs. haremism, Chinese lyrics, nationalization of mines, Christian Science, and fishing in Ontario.” Significantly, her first job is at the library in St. Paul where, while she works, she reads “scores of books.” The subject list is especially suited to the development of her fancy: “volumes of anthropology . . ., Parisian imagistes, Hindu recipes for curry, voyages to the Solomon Isles, theosophy with modern American improvements.” At dances, “in dread of life’s slipping past, she turned into a bacchanal.” Her sense of mission returns; she will transform and redesign a prairie town.

At this point, Dr. Will Kennicott enters her life. He woos her by exploiting her desire to find a purpose for herself, declaring that his village needs her. Dr. Kennicott provides a notable occasion for us to apprehend the way in which the vision of the quixote converts reality to illusion. As we noted earlier, he shows Carol some photographs, and, though they are streaked and vague, she perceives them as (in her need for adventure) she must. She sees his amateurish snapshots of lakes as “etchings” that delineate “snow in crevices of a boggy bank, the mound of a muskrat house, reeds in thin black lines.” Intuiting Carol’s nature, Kennicott uses one picture especially well. It shows a forest clearing and a log cabin. In front of the cabin is “a sagging woman with tight-drawn hair, and a baby bedraggled, smeary, glorious-eyed.” Kennicott tempts Carol by saying, “Look at that scared baby! Needs some woman with hands like yours. Waiting for you!” Carol succumbs. Such photographs will return later in the novel, when Kennicott is courting Carol again after her flight from Gopher Prairie. At the middle when she visits the home of this baby in the snapshot, she would tell him of Prince Charming, but he doesn’t understand.

After Carol and the doctor marry, they ride the train into Gopher Prairie, the town she will “conquer” and reform. She has her first view of the reality she must work with. When she sees their house and her room, the shock is great. She blames her reading. “She glanced at the houses; tried not to see what she saw; gave way in: ‘Why do these stories lie so? They always make the bride’s homecoming a bower of roses. Complete trust in the noble spouse. Lies about marriage. . . . And this town— O my God! I can’t go through with it. This junkheap!’” She has read “too many books.” She goes to the bedroom window “with a purely literary thought of village charm—hollyhocks and lanes and apple-cheeked cottagers.” What she sees is “the side of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church—a plain clapboard wall of a sour liver color.” This was “the terraced garden below her boudoir”—“How these stories lie!” Muttering, “I’m mildly insane,” she goes out to see the village, the “empire” she is going to “conquer.” She takes that memorable promenade which we have already noted. She finds a Main Street characterized by the reek of blood from the meat market, by yellow buildings, by a cat sleeping on the lettuce in the grocery window. But Carol is not broken by that view of the village. For a long time she survives and returns to the fray.

Her resiliency originates in her transmuting imagination; she is like Don Quixote with bandaged head taking to the road once more. Her enthusiasm, at least at first and in one so young (“plastic” and “innocent,” as Lewis says) is even engaging. Her adventures test not only Carol’s notions but also the beliefs and actions of society. In the face of the challenge that she brings, members of the community reveal themselves as corrupt and hypocritical—or at least foolish in their own way. For instance, when Carol attends her first party in Gopher Prairie, she carries to it the image of herself as “a smart young married woman in a drawing room, fencing with clever men.” She expects good talk, and she believes that she can enter into conversation as an equal to the men. But they have been arguing all evening about the kind of dog an old-timer had owned years ago. When Carol confronts them with a question about labor relations, she draws from them remarks that are the hallmark of Lewis’s satire. Jackson Elder asserts that he is for freedom and constitutional rights: “If any man don’t like my shop, he can get up and git. Same way, if I don’t like him, he gits. And that’s all there is to it.” He mumbles on about such “poppycock” as profit-sharing, welfare work, insurance, old-age pensions. It “enfeebles a workman’s independence— and wastes a lot of honest profit.”

By such a pattern of challenge and reaction throughout the novel, each satiric monologue achieves its organic place. At every thrust from Carol, a villager exposes his own foolishness or hypocrisy about education, economics, politics, religion. Each encounter provides Lewis with the opportunity to exhibit his virtuosity in creating the grotesque rantings of gossips, churchwomen, preachers, journalists, and boosters. Carol induces the community to expose itself. Her own response to these encounters remains unchanging, nonetheless. Even as she drags herself homeward from them, past a “hulking house,” “a streaky yellow pool,” a “morass,” she tells herself that “her beautiful town” still exists—in her mind. She believes in the village she has imagined. What she is now seeking is a person to share it with.

Several secondary figures in Main Street reinforce Carol’s quixotism. Guy Pollock, whom Lewis declared to have been the protagonist of the book in its earliest conception (though no draft of that version exists and Lewis’s biographer doubts whether such a version ever got on paper)—Pollock too is maddened by reading. He “hints his love” for Sir Thomas Browne, Thoreau, Agnes Reppelier, Arthur Symons, Claude Washburne, and Charles Flandrau, authors who can nourish the fancy. Carol visits Pollock at his rooms, where he reveals the content of his imagination. Here, he says, are his “office, town-house, and château in Picardy. But you can’t see the château and townhouse (next to the Duke of Sutherland’s).” Of course Carol can see them, quite as well as he can. Carol and Pollock discuss the possibility of reforming the town, but Pollock is by now incapable of rebellion. Like Prufrock, he wishes only to be an attendant, “the confidant of the old French plays, the tiring-maid with the mirror and the loyal ears.” Carol wonders whether Pollock might be her Prince Charming, but she later realizes that he was only a frame on which she hung “shining garments.”

Toward her husband, Carol feels a genuinely painful conflict. Kennicott is a capable doctor, but his very competence is paradoxically a problem for Carol, who finds that capable people are often shallow and bigoted. At their best, without what Lewis would two years later call “babbittry,” these figures are heroes, “doers,” for whom “all this romance stuff is simply moonshine.” Kennicott shows admirable courage and ability as a physician and surgeon in several crises. But even at such moments Carol must recreate him in romanticized and literary terms: she “saw the drama of his riding by night to the frightened household on the distant farm; pictured children standing at a window, waiting for him. He suddenly had in her eyes the heroism of a wireless operator on a ship in a collision; of an explorer, fever-clawed, deserted by his bearers, but going on—.” She tells Pollock that he and she are “a pair of hypercritical loafers, . . . while [Will] quietly goes and does things.” She restates the dichotomy: to deal with the farmers Kennicott “speaks a vulgar, common, incorrect German of life and death and birth and the soil,” while she reads “the French and German of sentimental lovers and Christmas garlands.” Such a division lies at the heart of the book, though Will calls Carol neurotic, and she labels him stupid. But Carol, the doctor, and the novel itself are considerably more complex than this formulation suggests, and Carol knows it upon reflection. This complexity is creditable in ways that have been forgotten by Lewis’s detractors. Carol knows that Kennicott is not simply a quiet doer. He is noisy, opinionated, narrow, prejudiced, quarrelsome, and unfaithful, and the novel takes pains to display him as such. Carol’s neurosis, meanwhile, is compounded of idealism, enthusiasm, doubt, disillusionment, and alienation.

In the midst of her despair, Carol inquires into books once more in an effort to understand herself and her village. Formerly, in reading popular stories and plays, Carol had found only two traditions about the American town. The first tradition, she reports, “is that the American village remains the one sure abode of friendship, honesty, and clean sweet marriageable girls . . . The other tradition is that the significant features of all villages are whiskers, iron dogs upon lawns, gold bricks, checkers, jars of gilded cat-tails, and shrewd comic old men who are known as ‘hicks’ and who ejaculate ‘Waal I swan.’” Her experience of Gopher Prairie, however, tells her that the town thinks “in cheap motor cars, telephones, ready-made clothes, silos, alfalfa, kodaks, phonographs, leather-upholstered Morris chairs, bridge-prizes, oil-stocks, motionpictures, land-deals, unread sets of Mark Twain, and a chaste version of national politics.” With this small town, Carol—along with hundreds of thousands of young people like her—is not content. She believes that she has derived insight and other “convictions” from her recent reading. She has “driven” her way through books of a somewhat different kind from those she read as a girl. These books were written by the “young American sociologists, young English realists, Russian horrorists; Anatole France, Rolland, Nexo, Wells, Shaw, Key, Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Henry Mencken, and all the other subversive philosophers and artists whom women were consulting everywhere.”

One night she talks to her friend Vida Sherwin about the dullness, the rigidity, and the sterility of the village. Vida, a “realist,” suggests measured steps toward reform. But Carol, for all her new reading and thought, replies that she wants “startling, exotic things”: “Strindberg plays, and classic dancers—exquisite legs beneath tulle—and (I can see him so clearly!) a thick, black-bearded, cynical Frenchman who would sit about and drink and sing opera and tell bawdy stories and laugh at our proprieties and quote Rabelais and not be ashamed to kiss my hand!” This is a moment of considerable psychological importance. Whatever the booklist of “American sociologists, French realists, Russian horrorists” may have brought her, Carol’s quixotic nature defeats her efforts at new understanding. Her transforming imagination turns Gopher Prairie back into fantasy land.

Romantic love, the motif that particularly directs the yearnings of the female quixote, enters Main Street about three-fourths of the way towards its end. When Erik Valborg appears in Gopher Prairie, he is less a substantial character than a projection of what Carol fancies him to be. Much of the confusion surrounding her platonic escapade with Erik occurs because she waivers between at least two images of him. At times she recognizes that he is a commonplace, uneducated, shallow young man; at other times she believes him to be a poet—a Keats or Shelley or (as Lewis plays with Carol’s values) an Arthur Upson. Carol is insistent: “He’s Keats—sensitive to silken things. . . . Keats, here! A bewildered spirit fallen on Main Street. And Main Street laughs.” Thinking of him later, however, she asks herself, “Was he anything but a small-town youth bred on an illiberal farm and in cheap tailor shops?” Valborg himself, like Pollock, brings to his relationship with Carol his own quixotism. It is reported that he reads a great deal, but his taste tends toward “Suppressed Desires” and “The Black Mask.” He recalls that, when he lived in Minneapolis, he used to “tramp clear around Lake Harriet, or hike out to the Gates house and imagine it was a château in Italy and I lived in it. I was a marquis and collected tapestries—that was after I was wounded in Padua.”

Valborg continues to stimulate and confuse Carol’s romantic imagination. While she is doing household tasks, she pictures “herself and a young artist—an Apollo nameless and evasive—building a house in the Berkshires or in Virginia; exuberantly buying a chair with his first check; reading poetry together.” She wishes him to be a “playmate,” not a lover. She is always dissatisfied, however. In moments of self-awareness, she calls her love affair “pitiful and tawdry. . . . A self-deceived little woman whispering in corners with a pretentious little man.” Then she makes a sudden quixotic shift: “No, he is not. He is fine. Aspiring.” She is in a turmoil of distraction. She wishes Erik were “a fighter, an artist with bearded surly lips.” But “they’re only in books.” Her mind is spinning, but not toward suicide, like Emma’s; Carol knows all too well that the tragedy of her life is “that I shall never know tragedy, never find anything but blustery complications that turn out to be a farce.” One moment she is convinced she loves Erik; the next she cannot love him because his wrists are too large, his nose is too snub. She knows that the poem he writes her (“Little and tender and merry and wise/ With eyes that meet my eyes”) is bad. After Carol and Erik have wandered, talked, and daydreamed for some time, Kennicott confronts her. He is certain he knows what has poisoned her mind: “these fool stories about wives that don’t know when they’re well off.” Her affair ends when Will chases Erik out of town.

About forty pages remain in the novel. Now the problem is whether Carol will retain her illusions or face whatever reality Gopher Prairie presents. She might somehow find a balance of dream and fact that would result in growth. In fact, Levin suggests that the quixotic experience need not end negatively, for it can lead to maturity. But when Carol breaks from Gopher Prairie and settles in Washington, she seems not much different from the person she was before, though she believes herself to be changing. For instance, the “Washington” she finds (or, one suspects, creates) is a city of “leafy parks, spacious avenues, twisty alleys,” of “negro shanties turned into studios, with orange curtains and pots of mignonette,” of marble houses and butlers and limousines, and “men who looked like fictional explorers and aviators.” After a year, her husband comes to woo her back. His gesture is exactly the one he had made when he first courted her about ten years earlier, and her response is just what we expect and fear. “He tossed over to her thirty prints of Gopher Prairie and the country about. . . . She remembered that he had lured her with photographs in courtship days; she made a note of his sameness, his satisfaction with the tactics which had proved good before; but she forgot it in the familiar places.” She has built no defense against this wellintuited appeal to her illusions, though she thinks that she has developed what she calls “personal solidarity.” Back in Gopher Prairie she wears her eyeglasses on the street (perhaps because she wishes to see more clearly now). The townsmen say of her that “she knows a good deal about books—or fiction anyway,” and of her affair with Valborg that it was “just talking books and all that junk.” She believes that, though she may not have “fought the good fight,” she has kept faith with her ideals.

By seeing Carol Kennicott as a quixote, we come to realize that Lewis could criticize both his heroine and the village. He tried, in his flamboyant, crude, and often careless way, to anatomize a woman torn among illusions and realities. For Carol, Lewis drew upon an archetype, so that Carol touched familiar responses in readers in America, where quixotism has long existed but has not been fully recognized as an important aspect of the national character. In the sub-literature and popular culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, romance flourished. We have already noted the cults associated with the Orient, the medieval, the adventurous, the Kiplingesque, poesy, and vagabondia. These formed a state of mind which attracted and repelled several generations of writers. Mark Twain, who understood much of what made and moved America, portrayed quixotism in Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Life on the Mississippi, and A Connecticut Yankee. A towering figure like Mark Twain gathers ideas from the past and opens up potentialities for future writers. His indications of the presence of quixotism in American life are significant; Lewis also sensed such a presence and the conflict that attends it.

Quixotism induces an ambivalent and confusing response, for it embodies both foolishness and idealism. The story of Carol Kennicott is a record of resultant ambiguities. Recognizing that the book is uneven and in some ways inconclusive, we can speculate that the quixotic elements in Lewis’s nature disallowed the kind of transcendence that Cervantes and Flaubert achieved. Lewis came to Main Street after writing five apprentice novels, among them The Trail of the Hawk and Free Air, in which young Americans travel the roads in pursuit of adventure and golden ladies. Perhaps he called Main Street “the real beginning” of his career because he believed that he was freeing himself from the shackles of romance by satirizing a literary idea of the village that maddens its readers and that had misled him for too long. Carol was his vehicle and victim. Now he was joining a realistic movement that was already well under way without him.

At any rate, I think that we are better informed about Main Street—and better able to assess it— if we see it as an account of a quixotic figure— idealistic, disillusioned, of limited vision, yet a challenge to the community. Amidst the comedy, she is, if not tragic, at least worthy of our concern, because her idealism drives her into further suffering. She has been shown that her vision is faulty, weakly inspired, and mistaken, but she continues to see as her aspirations demand. She is more honest and more deceived than anyone around her, and thereby both more trapped and more alive.

Yet Carol continues to seem bewildered in a postscript to the novel, when, later, in an article called “Main Street’s Been Paved” written for the Nation magazine during the presidential election of 1924, Lewis glanced again at his characters and the condition of their lives. His attitude toward Will Kennicott remained ambivalent. At first, he indicated high praise for the doctor, such praise as he consistently expressed toward the practical “doers” in America: “. . . for him I held, and hold, a Little Brother awe. He is merely a country practitioner, not vastly better than the average; yet he is one of these assured, deep-chested, easy men who are always to be found when you want them, and who are rather amused by persons like myself that go sniffing about, wondering what it all means.” This statement seems an echo of Sauk Centre’s disapproval of young Harry’s “readin’ and readin’” in contrast to its admiration for the practical physicians of the Lewis family. It reflects the doubts implanted by the provincial attitude that thought and writing— that art itself—are of no value. Who of the village inquisitors could understand that preparation for the writing career required dreaming and reading and scribbling, and that money and recognition would be slow to appear? One thinks of Lewis’s return to Sauk Centre at about thirty-two as an established writer, of his pride in telling the townspeople that he was paid fifteen hundred dollars for a magazine serial which he turned out in two weeks’ time; they were awed but not convinced.

Unfortunately, his heroine in Main Street falls into the category of small town failures (along with the other impractical dissenters of Gopher Prairie— Miles Bjornstam, Fern Mullins, and Guy Pollock). In “Main Street’s Been Paved” Lewis shows us a very beaten “Carol.” I have argued that at the end of the novel itself her change or growth was unconvincing. If one considers the Nation essay, one doubts even more all Lewis’s pretense about her important Washington experience and her personal solidarity. She is hardly recognizable; she appears tired and timid and dumpy; she intends to vote, not for liberal and humanitarian LaFollette, but for Coolidge. Guy Pollock reports that “the doctor has convinced her that to be denunciatory or even very enthusiastic isn’t quite respectable.” Apparently there was some miscalculation of Carol’s “solidarity.” But we are not to be left with a simple approval of Kennicott; Lewis, in spite of his awe, is nevertheless aware of Kennicott as a symbol of something dangerous. Lewis lets Guy Pollock, the village lawyer, have the last word. Pollock says, “We’ve been bullied too long by the Doc Kennicotts and by the beautiful big balloon tires that roll over the new pavement on Main Street—and over our souls.” Lewis seems to have shifted to Pollock as spokesman, while meting out to Carol, who will vote for Coolidge, a kind of punishment for the inadequacy of the fanciful notions she, after all, was given by him.

Does Main Street pose a choice between Carol’s way and Will’s way? If he must choose between Carol’s qualities as expressed in the novel itself (sensitivity, humanitarianism, curiosity, thoughtfulness, and desire for change and improvement— mixed, however, with impracticality, pretentiousness, artiness, and foolish dreaming) and Will’s qualities (practicality, courage, and bluntness—mixed, similarly, with insensitivity, dullness, and scorn for art), which way would Lewis choose? Some critics feel an uncertainty in the novel because of the equivocation between these qualities. Others may feel that the strength of the novel lies in such complexities. Of herself and her husband, Carol theorizes: “There are two races of people, only two, and they live side by side. His calls mine ‘neurotic’; mine calls his ‘stupid.’ We’ll never understand each other, never.” The tension of the book may be that there is an impossible choice between sensitivity/foolishness and practicality/ dullness. But Lewis does shift back and forth in attitude—now praising, now mocking, now admiring, now satirizing. The people of the empire of the Middle West have posed a difficult problem. Lewis continued to ponder the question in subsequent novels until he achieved a resolution in Dodsworth. It is sufficient for the moment, though, that in Main Street he had taken auspicious steps forward in his attempt to define man, woman, and marriage, and in his continuing search to understand America. Here he had vividly portrayed the provincial locale, commenting upon it in satire which helped open the American mind to new perceptions. He had aroused sleeping consciences to an awareness of hypocrisies and social injustices. He had touched some deeper notes in his portrayal of the heroine—through her loneliness, her misdirected aspirations, and her difficult struggle to find an identity.

Source: Martin Light, “Chapter 6: Main Street,” in The Quixotic Vision of Sinclair Lewis, Purdue University Press, 1975, pp. 60–72.