cowardly, call me anything you want to! I’ve been ruled too long by fear of being called things. I’m going away to be quiet and think. I’m—I’m going! I have a right to my own life.”
“So have I to mine!”
“Well?”
“I have a right to my life—and you’re it, you’re my life! You’ve made yourself so. I’m damned if I’ll agree to all your freak notions, but I will say I’ve got to depend on you. Never thought of that complication, did you, in this ‘off to Bohemia and express yourself, and free love, and live your own life’ stuff!”
“You have a right to keep me if you can keep me. Can you?”
He moved uneasily.

Summary

After five years of living in Gopher Prairie, Carol has had enough—enough gossip, enough unsophistication, enough suspicion. After the young English teacher is driven from town by the false accusations of a drunken youth, and Carol’s own fascination with Erik Volborg, Carol convinces Will to take her for an extended vacation to California. Hoping that such a trip will finally convince Carol to give up her dissatisfaction and criticism of Gopher Prairie, as well as save their marriage, Will agrees. Yet on their return, Carol again complains of the smallness of the minds of the town’s inhabitants. Will has reached his limit, and so has Carol. She announces that she wants to leave for an indefinite period of time, perhaps forever. She has reached the breaking point where she will not continue living the life that has been handed to her, to “be content with even the healthiest mud.” She says that she will go to Washington, DC, ostensibly to help with the war efforts in World War One. Will pleads with her, telling her that she is his entire life, though he has in effect been having an entirely separate life from her for some time. But his efforts are to no avail. She will leave and be gone for almost two years.

Essential Passage 3:Chapter 39

“But I have won in this: I’ve never excused my failures by sneering at my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them. I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith.”

Summary

At the end of two years, Carol returns to Gopher Prairie, pregnant with her second child and her first daughter. On her return, she finds that the citizens of Gopher Prairie are genuinely glad to see her, welcoming her back and stating repeatedly how much they have missed her. She is sure of their sincerity and begins to have a new viewpoint concerning the town that she has hated for so long. She sees that her fight has really been against institutions rather than individuals. She is thus prepared to accept the people of Gopher Prairie, with all their flaws and shortcomings. She does not give up her hope of changing the small town to a place of beauty and culture. Though through all the years since her marriage Carol has not managed to succeed in either of these areas, she still holds out hope. Paraphrasing St. Paul’s words from II Timothy 4:7, she admits that, while she may not have fought the good fight in the sense of winning, she has kept the faith in not giving up her dreams.

Analysis of Essential Passages

Published in 1920, Main Street examines with an extremely critical eye the small town life that, at that time, was the epitome of the American existence. Although small town life of the late nineteenth century is often seen as idyllic by those living in the twenty-first century, Lewis destroys that illusion. The vast cultural change brought about by the First World War began to erode small town life. Sinclair Lewis presciently saw, if not the coming change, at least a self-perceived need for change. He saw a way of life that was out of step with the changing world, especially in Europe. Carol Milford Kennicott is the epitome of that change.

Carol begins the novel much like a tragic hero, receiving the call to adventure to bring light into the darkness. With the idealism of youth, she accepts Will Kennicott’s proposal, not so much out of love for the man, but for the opportunity he represents to fulfill her calling. Throughout the novel she endeavors to achieve her quest, the beautification, culturalization, and modernization of Gopher Prairie. Will, while he is the man who sounded the call, has the dual role of the “villain.” He repeatedly tries to stop Carol from fulfilling her quest. Battling against her husband’s control and the town’s viciousness, Carol continues to fight the good fight, despite repeated losses.

After several years, Carol must undergo a dark period, her separation from her husband and her sojourn in Washington, to gain some perspective of her quest. The dullness she found in Gopher Prairie is apparent even in the fast-paced post-war world of the nation’s capital. In Washington, Carol plays a role of active participant; in Gopher Prairie, she is forced into the role of a docile homemaker. From that perspective, she can see the good in Will and her need for him, as well as the true focus of her battles in the institutions of a hypocritical form of Christianity and a government rooted in the nineteenth century. She begins to accept the people of Gopher Prairie as flawed individuals, but still lovable. She sees that she herself has become an important part of the town, a part that was not apparent until she had absented herself for a long period of time. With that understanding, Carol returns to the town she has despised.

Carol recognizes that, in a way, she has failed in her quest. Her efforts to bring some measure of modern culture to the town still fails after her return from Washington, yet she no longer sees such failure as a threat to her vision; her will remains strong. The reader is left with a sense that, though small town Gopher Prairie is still narrow-minded and uncultured, change is coming, a change that even Sinclair Lewis could not imagine himself. The end of the Victorian era and the coming of the modern jazz age will penetrate even Gopher Prairie’s hardened shell. Carol Kennicott has been merely the harbinger of a new America that would have come even if she had never married Will Kennicott. The demise of the small town in favor of the suburbs is still a generation in the future, but the “eyes of the blind” have been opened, but no less a healer than Carol Milford Kennicott, with her message that “the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

Essential Passage 1: Introduction

This is America—a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves.
The town is, in our tale, called “Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.” But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere. The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and not very differently would it be told Up York State or in the Carolina Hills.
Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters. What Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea; whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction, that thin is heresy, worthless for knowing and wicked to consider.
Our railway station is the final aspiration of architecture. Sam Clark’s annual hardware turnover is the envy of the four counties which constitute God’s Country. In the sensitive art of the Rosebud Movie Palace there is a Message, and humor strictly moral.
Such is our comfortable tradition and sure faith. Would he not betray himself an alien cynic who should otherwise portray Main Street, or distress the citizens by speculating whether there may not be other faiths?

Summary

In this introduction to Main Street, Sinclair Lewis sets forth his thesis statement for the novel. He states that Gopher Prairie is a symbol for every small town in American during the first half of the twentieth century. The events, emotions, and exchanges that occur in Gopher Prairie could easily happen in any other place. Lewis also presents Gopher Prairie’s society (with the symbolic title of “Main Street”) as the climax of all of Western Civilization. It is for the opinions expressed and the lives lived out on Main Street that Greeks and Romans battled for supremacy. The ancient philosophers and theologians prepared the way for the small town point of view. Furthermore, as Main Street society is a reflection of America, it is also a major influence for what transpires eventually in the rest of the Western world, throughout Europe, and even throughout the rest of the nations. The “American Way of Life” that will pervade the planet following the Second World War finds its source in small town America.

Essential Passage 2:Chapter 13

“…I’m a confirmed doubter of myself. (Probably I’m conceited about my lack of conceit!) Anyway, Gopher Prairie isn’t particularly bad. It’s like all villages in all countries. Most places that have lost the smell of earth but not yet acquired the smell of patchouli –or of factory-smoke—are just as suspicious and righteous. I wonder if the small town isn’t with some lovely exceptions, a social appendix? Some day these dull market-towns may be as obsolete as monasteries. I can imagine the farmer and his local store-manager going by monorail, at the end of the day, into a city more charming than any William Morris Utopia—music, a university clubs for loafers like me. (Lord, how I’d like to have a real club!)”
She asked impulsively. “You, why do you stay here?”
“I have the Village Virus.”
“It sounds dangerous.”
“It is. More dangers than the cancer that will certainly get me at fifty unless I stop this smoking. The Village Virus is the germ which—it’s extraordinarily like the hook-worm—it infects ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces. You’ll find it epidemic among lawyers and doctors and ministers and college-bred merchants—all these people who have had a glimpse of the world that thinks and laughs, but have returned to their swamp. I’m a perfect example….”

Summary

Carol Kennicott stops by the flat of Guy Pollock on a visit to the Perrys (who are not home, somewhat to her relief), and they begin to chat about Carol’s attempts to revolutionize Gopher Prairie. Guy points out that the Perrys were pioneers to the area, settling before the town was built. He cannot imagine that they will want to look that far into the future in order to pull the town into it. Carol asks outright what exactly is the matter with Gopher Prairie. In a backhanded manner, Guy defends Gopher Prairie for being what it is. It is the same as all the other small towns in America, neither behind them or in front of them. He states that they are currently in a state of transition between the rural nineteenth century and the urban twentieth. It has not left the smell of the herbs and the forest (the meaning of his term “patchouli”) for the scent of the smoke of factories. He foresees a time when, in a strange reversal of the current “bedroom community,” people will work in the small towns and live in the cities (contrary to the opposite practice in many metropolitan locations in the twenty-first century). When asked by Carol why he remains in a place that he finds so unsatisfactory, Pollock states that he has the “Village Virus,” a “disease” that overtakes many professional people who stay too long in small towns. They find in the Main Street society a kind of security that the larger world threatens.

Essential Passage 3:Chapter 22

In reading popular stories and seeing plays, asserted Carol, she had found only two traditions of the American small town. The first tradition, repeated in scores of magazines every month, is that the American village remains the one sure abode of friendship, honesty, and clean sweet marriageable girls. Therefore all men who succeed in painting in Paris or in finance in New York at last become weary of smart women, return to their native towns, assert that cities are vicious, marry their childhood sweethearts and, presumably, joyously abide in those towns until death. 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 “kicks” and who ejaculate “Waal I swan.” This altogether admirable tradition rules the vaudeville stage, facetious illustrators, and syndicated newspaper humor, but out of actual life it passed forty years ago. Carol’s small town thinks not in hoss-swapping but in cheap motor cars, telephones, ready-made clothes, silos, alfalfa, kodaks, phonographs, leather-upholstered Morris chairs, bridge-prizes, oil-stocks, motion-pictures, land-deals, unread sets of Mark Twain, and a chase version of national politics.
With such a small-town life a Kennicott or a Champ Perry is content, but there are also hundreds of thousands, particularly women and young men, who are not at all content. The more intelligent young people (and the fortunate widows!) flee to the cities with agility and, despite the fictional tradition, resolutely stay there, seldom returning even for the holidays. The most protesting patriots of the towns leave them in old age, if they can afford it, and go to live in California or in the cities.
The reason, Carol insisted, is not a whiskered rusticity. It is nothing so amusing!
It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment…the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. it is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God.
A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanic things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.

Summary

Carol reflects on the two versions of the small town that are presented to the American public in the media and entertainment of the day. First of all, the Main Streets of the nation are seen as the last refuge for the tired soul. It is there that one finds comfort, friendship, and understanding. It is a sure foundation in a time of storm, a storm that is coming from the outside world during the war waging in Europe. Yet it is also portrayed as a comic centerpiece of the nation, in which the inhabitants are “hicks,” ignorant, self-satisfied, and unsophisticated. Those men who were born in the small towns are satisfied with the things as they are. But, as Carol reflects, it is the women and young men who yield to the dissatisfaction, moving to the cities and never returning. It is through this younger generation that the small town will be lost. Carol sees in the very contentment of the Main Street society the source of the destruction of the small town. Contentment instead of happiness will pull down the society that the small town people so ardently try to preserve from the “evil” influence of the outside world.

Analysis of Essential Passages

Sinclair Lewis presents a diatribe against a world that was already disappearing when Main Street was published in 1920. The post-World War I culture had begun the transition from the small-town/rural lifestyle to the urban/suburban world that would predominate after World War II. Main Street thus can be viewed as the obituary of a world that was quickly dying but (in Lewis’s view) should have died a long time ago.

Patterned on his own hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Gopher Prairie is Lewis’ mirror by which he holds up the shortcomings of the small-town society on American at the turn of the century. One of the major causes of its demise, according to Lewis, is the small town’s hubris in its own greatness. His introduction presents in a satirical tone the commonly held view of the small town’s greatness. It is the height of all human history. It is for this reason that mankind was placed on earth.

Yet, as the story relates, that greatness is merely an illusion. Virtue is merely hypocrisy, industry is simply fraud, and family is the source of tension and heartache. Instead of being the solid foundation of the American Dream, the American small town is built on sand. It is constructed from the narrow minds and defeated dreams of its residents. Lewis repeatedly seems to predict its downfall, but by the end of the novel, it survives. And indeed, in 1920, the small town still had a couple of decades of life in it. But Lewis foresees the change and even predicts the bedroom community, though he mistakenly sees the small town as the workplace and the city as the home. However, he still predicts that the small town will no longer be seen as all-inclusive. It is a nice place to live, but only part time. The real life is in the city. The small town is simply a place to sleep.

Small town people refuse to accept change or to even see change as a viable option. They are content with the way things have “always been,” regardless of whether that perception is accurate. But change is indeed coming. With the development of technology, the shift will be toward a industrial and technological society, in which needs may be met without the hard work and helping hands of the neighbors. Ironically, the viciousness of the small town hides behind the idea of the peaceful community. It is not only on the fields of France that enemies are slain, but on Main Street itself. Those who do not fit in to the small town society are quietly but effectively destroyed in one way or another. The espionage of the village gossips supplants the ties that are supposed to bind one to another. The tyranny of “public opinion” has as much sway as any dictator.

In the end, Carol does not manage to change the society of Gopher Prairie. As she states, she has not fought the good fight (meaning that she has not won any battles), but she has kept the faith. Her vision (and Lewis’s) for the transformation of the small town into a mirror of the new civilization that was arising from the ashes of the Great War remain strong, though unfulfilled. Carol Kennicott has effectively revealed the small town for what it is, yet she has been unable to change it. She is a few years ahead of her time. She is the prophet of a future that is not her own.