714 Lewis, sinclair
and also as a result of the gentle encouragement of
her husband, Carol finally returns to Gopher Prai-
rie. And there she manages to achieve what Miles
Bjornstam and Guy Pollock could not achieve: a
type of compromise between being an individual
and being a member of a larger social unit. In the
novel’s conclusion, Carol’s “active hatred of Gopher
Prairie had run out,” and “she again saw Gopher
Prairie as her home.”
Gerard M. Sweeney
Social claSS in Main Street
Perhaps the most interesting—and certainly the
most original—of the many minor characters in
Main Street is Erik Valborg. Erik comes to Gopher
Prairie after leaving—really, escaping from—farm
life and the stern management of his father. In
Gopher Prairie, Erik becomes a tailor; he expresses
bookish and artistic interests he could not express
on the farm; and finally he leaves the stultifying
Gopher Prairie for Hollywood and the motion pic-
ture industry, there changing his name to the softer
“Erik Valour.” The most striking and original char-
acteristic of Erik lies in his gender identity. Erik has
a pronounced feminine nature. He is described by
one of Gopher Prairie’s matrons as “the most awful
mollycoddle—looks just like a girl”; and he is jok-
ingly referred to as “Elizabeth.” He describes himself
as being “crazy about fabrics—textures and colors
and design” (364); and his original goal is to work as
a designer of women’s dresses. But for the town of
Gopher Prairie, Erik’s most defining characteristic
is that he is “nothing but a Swede tailor.” In other
words, Erik is defined not by his uniqueness; rather,
he is defined—and dismissed—by his social class.
In miniature, the town’s labeling of Erik Val-
borg illustrates much about the novel’s depiction
of Americans of the early 20th century. In Gopher
Prairie, residents’ opinions about others and also
their relationships with others are rigidly controlled
by conceptions of social class.
The social class we see the most is the town’s
upper class. This is to be expected because the
novel’s main characters, Carol and Dr. Will Ken-
nicott, are members of this class, as are most of
the people with whom they associate. This class is
composed of the town’s professionals (chiefly the
doctors) and the entrepreneurs (chiefly the business
owners) and, of course, their wives. Indeed, it is the
wives who voice most of the upper-class comments.
This is the case because the wives are the charac-
ters most in contact with Carol, and most of the
novel is presented through her perspective. Carol
converses with the upper-class wives at meetings of
the Jolly Seventeen, the women’s social group, and
the Thanatopsis Club, the women’s cultural society.
These meetings illustrate that Sinclair Lewis can
be alternately light-hearted and severe in his social
criticism.
The more light-hearted side of Lewis can be
seen in his depictions of the intellectual pretentious-
ness of Gopher Prairie’s upper-class women. These
women think of themselves as the guardians of cul-
ture. So they have meetings to discuss literature, but
the discussions never rise above the simplistic. All
of the English poets, for example, are discussed in a
single meeting, although there are no references to
or quotations from actual poetry. Similarly, one sin-
gle meeting is scheduled for a discussion of “English
Fiction and Essays,” thus suggesting that, for these
women, a topic so enormous in scope and cultural
importance can be adequately treated in a matter of
minutes. All of this is humorous, but there is also
an acerbic side to Lewis’s social satire. This we can
see in the discussions Carol hears about the immi-
grant and working-class members of Gopher Prairie
society. On this subject, the upper-class women are
brutally mean-spirited. One woman reports her hus-
band’s assertion that the Scandinavian mill-workers
“are perfectly terrible—so silent and cranky, and so
selfish, the way they keep demanding raises” (99).
And then another woman adds this about the Scan-
dinavian house servants: “They’re ungrateful, all that
class of people. . . . I don’t know what the country’s
coming to, with these Scandahoofian clodhoppers
demanding every cent you can save, and so ignorant
and impertinent. . . .”
What we see here is not merely class differences,
but real class animosity. And the animosity flows
not only from the upper class toward the lower class,
but also from the lower class toward the upper class.
We see this late in the novel when Adolph Valborg,