Main Street and Uptown

I recently read Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, both published in 1920 and both contenders for the Pulitzer Prize. The Pulitzer Prize Committee of 1921 first recommended Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street for the prize. Lewis’s novel is a proto-feminist tale about Carol Milford, a romantic girl who frantically pursued culture at Blodgett College and who marries Will Kennicott, a capable but completely unimaginative doctor in the small town of Gopher Prairie. Carol is almost ill when she walks Main Street for the first time, and the feeling doesn’t ever go away. The ugliness of the town and the insensitivity of its citizens to ugliness is matched with an inner ugliness in which gossip substitutes for morality: the town gossip Bogart, whose son drunkenly assaults Fern the schoolteacher, turns his evil into hers and gets her fired and run out of town.

            Carol looks for allies, but Vida Sherwin turns out to imagine herself as a rival instead, Guy Pollock is weak and has “the village virus,” and the only free spirit in town, the “Red Swede” Miles Bjornstam, is tamed when he has a family and broken when his wife and son die of typhoid—the cause is a neighbor’s stinginess in sharing water. Carol is too prudent to have the affair most of the village thinks she is having with the son of a Swedish farmer, Eric Valborg the tailor. She survives by getting Will to travel with her for several months, and then spending two years on her own in Washington, D. C. She comes back determined to stick it out, but not to like it.

            The problem with the book is Lewis’s lack of humor, which turns what should have been satire into polemic. It is intensely descriptive, almost turning into catalogues at times. If Mencken had been a novelist, this is the book he would have written, but it would have been funny.

            The committee’s recommendation was not followed, and the Pulitzer judges made a political decision to award the prize to Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Wharton was the first woman winner. In her novel, Newland Archer falls in love with his wife’s cousin, Ellen Olenska, who ran away from the philandering count her husband and manages to keep away from him, despite his “generous” offer of a settlement if she returns, and despite the pressure of everyone in the family except Archer. He is ready to throw his wife May Welland Archer over to follow Ellen, but the toils of the family close upon him.

            The judges seem to have been unaware of the numerous ironies in their decision. Wharton celebrated the triumph of the conventional, and her book shows in a different way from her The House of Mirth the ineluctable toils which grip women but also their men. Lewis’s book shows a woman who never stops kicking against the traces, whose vision of freedom is confused and never completely articulated, but as she says at the end, in words borrowed from Paul to Timothy, “I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith.”