Main Street 711winter is the form evil has taken in Narnia. The
White Witch controls the country through nature:
The natural environment is at her complete mercy
until the four Pevensie children arrive to fulfil the
prophecy and Aslan comes back to Narnia. Their
mission acquires a new significance if one reads the
story by paying attention to the role of nature: The
final goal of Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy is not
merely to destroy the White Witch and her evil
magic but also to renew the whole country, to give
Narnia a new birth, a new beginning. The children
must set nature in motion again, giving Narnia and
its magical creatures the safe course of the seasons
and take nature back to normal.
Of course, what is normal in Narnia is a mythi-
cal scenario in which flora and fauna are alive in the
widest meaning of the word: Animals talk, trees are
spies in the pay of the White Witch, and the dryads,
nymphs, and fauns of the primary world’s mythol-
ogy are real. Therefore, nature in all her forms takes
part in the story. Natural elements and magical
creatures fight on both sides, either supporting the
evil power of the Witch or resisting it. The rebels
gather around Aslan, the true king of Narnia but
also a lion, king of the animals. Nature changes as
Aslan approaches and spring wins over winter. The
natural environment rejoices in the return of the
true king and life starts to blossom again in Narnia,
to the utmost disappointment of the White Witch.
It is not by mere chance that, after the nocturnal
sacrifice, Aslan comes back to life at dawn. While
Lucy and Susan weep over the lion’s death, nature
stops for a second: a moment of silence and mourn-
ing before the new dawn. This image is powerful
and can be considered the climax of the nature
images in the book and of the story itself. The birds
start to sing in the wood and a pale light appears
on the horizon. Soon the red light of dawn changes
into gold and the sun peeps out. The moment of
Aslan’s resurrection coincides with sunrise. It is
more than just a new day: It is the new beginning
for Narnia and the Narnians, the final goal to which
the children and the good creatures have struggled
throughout the story and the necessary step toward
the final victory and the resolution of the conflict
between good and evil.
Chiara Sgro
LEWiS, SinCLair Main Street (1920)
Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street is important because
of its depiction of Carol Kennicott of Gopher
Prairie, Minnesota, one of American literature’s
few truly individualistic female characters. Carol is
independent and self-reliant, intelligent and cre-
ative, a thinker and a planner. She sincerely wants
to do something in her life; she wants to maintain
her individuality and also be of service to the com-
munity around her, even if this service places her in
conflict with the community she wants to improve.
Carol is akin in a number of ways to such self-
assertive literary heroines as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
Hester Prynne in The sCaRlet letteR and Henry
James’s daisy MilleR. But Carol manages to main-
tain her individualism more than many independent
heroines, who find they must submit to societal
constraints or who, perhaps, even perish by the time
their stories are concluded.
The second reason for Main Street’s permanence
is its depiction of the “revolt against the village”
theme, an early-20th-century theme that perfectly
complements the theme of the independent woman.
This motif—which is also seen in Sherwood Ander-
son’s WinesbeRg, ohio and Edgar Lee Masters’s
Spoon River Anthology, as well as in Main Street—
underlies depictions of small-town life as narrow-
minded, intolerant, and stultifying, and as requiring
conformity.
Carol’s husband, Dr. Will Kennicott, gives Carol
the wherewithal to try to achieve a modicum of
independence from the constrictions of small-town
life. But at the same time, since he is deeply fond
of Gopher Prairie, he is part of the problem. And
thus, finally, the novel expands into additional
themes, such as marriage and the family. In short,
Main Street is, thematically, a wide-ranging piece of
literature.
Gerard M. SweeneyFamily in Main Street
In much of classic, pre-Civil War American litera-
ture, especially the literature of the romantic period,
family is a subject of relatively slight importance. In
the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, for example, there
are very few references to family; and in those tales
where family members are mentioned—characters