Making It New: 1900–1945 341Virus is the germ which ... infects ambitious people who stay too long in the
provinces,” he tells her. “You’ll find it epidemic among lawyers and doctors and
ministers and college-bred merchants – all those people who have had a glimpse of
the world that thinks and laughs, but have returned to the swamp.” Unable to settle
for the quiet contentment of her husband or the cynical, bitter defeatism of Guy
Pollock, Carol tries to turn her “active hatred” to positive use, attempting to wake
her neighbors up out of what she defines as “the quiet contentment of the quiet
dead.” When this fails, she flees to Washington. There, she discovers the pleasure of
being “no longer half of a marriage but the whole of a human being.” But she also
learns tolerance for Gopher Prairie. Returning to the small town finally, she admits
the dashing of her hopes for reform but reassures herself that, at least, she clings to
her own opinions. “I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous
than Europe!” she stoutly maintains. “I may not have fought the good fight, but I
have kept the faith.” So the pattern that characterizes all Lewis’s satires of American
provincialism is established: the impulse to escape the restrictions of class or routine
leads to flight, but the flight meets with only partial success and is followed by a
necessary compromise with convention. In the end, the critique is muted, not least
because the last word is given to Will Kennicott who, for all his stolidity, is portrayed
as honest, hardworking, kindly, and thrifty. The worst qualities of the American
middle class, such as materialism, smugness, and hypocrisy, are castigated in Main
Street. The better qualities, however, those embodied in Will Kennicott, are those in
which the narrative seeks moral investment: Carol is captured, eventually, by the
Village Virus, but so perhaps is Lewis.
In Babbitt (1922) Lewis continued his critique of the American provincial. This
time the setting is Zenith City, boasting three or four hundred thousand inhabit-
ants and towers that “aspired above the morning mist.” But the satirical thrust
remains much the same. The central character, George F. Babbitt, is a hollow man,
defined by the objects that surround him, his possessions, and determined, in
every detail, by the conventions of middle-class dress and behavior and the dull
aim of material success. It was in writing Babbitt that Lewis established what was
to be his characteristic method of work, which was to choose a social area, usually
a subset within the middle class, and then research it by mingling with the kind of
people he would write about armed with notebooks. Only after completing this
research would he compile what he called a “plan,” with every scene of the projected
novel sketched out. And in Babbitt the plan is clear enough: to take the reader
systematically through the various elements that comprise the protagonist’s social
life and community. Babbitt is a typical Lewis hero: someone who can neither give
himself wholly over to the business of being a businessman nor commit himself
fully to the more difficult business of being a man. He has dreams of escaping,
which for him are expressed in the feebly romantic visions of a “fairy child” that
come to him at random moments, such as when he awakens from sleep. He even
makes gestures toward escape. He goes away on a hunting trip with a friend, in an
episode which reads almost like a parody of the “buddy theme” and the impulse to
break away that circulate through much American writing. He has an affair, heGGray_c04.indd 341ray_c 04 .indd 341 8 8/1/2011 7:53:48 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 48 AM