712 Lewis, sinclair
such as Madeline Usher, the sister of Roderick
Usher in “The Fall of the House of Usher,”
and the unnamed wife of the narrator of “The Black
Cat”—the family member appears only briefly and
then dies before the tale concludes. In James Feni-
more Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, the author’s
most widely known character, Natty Bumppo, sub-
stitutes for the family he lacks a type of wilderness
brotherhood with Native Americans such as Chin-
gachgook and Uncas. In these relationships, there is
both comradeship and loyalty; but what Cooper is
depicting is male bonding, not family.
Family becomes much more important in real-
istic, post-Civil War American literature, in the
fiction of writers such as William Dean Howells,
Henry James, and Edith Wharton. Parents, children,
husbands, and wives are all central in most of the
major and minor fictions of the period. It is in this
tradition that Main Street is to be found; but at the
same time the novel reveals strong romantic currents
in its depiction of the heroine as an orphan. In short,
family in Main Street is simultaneously a realistically
drawn social phenomenon and, more abstractly, a
force that powerfully affects an individual’s life.
Like the major—and mostly male—characters
of classic American literature, Carol Milford Ken-
nicott begins her career as “an orphan; her only near
relative was a vanilla-flavored sister married to an
optician in St. Paul.” Her mother died when Carol
was nine, and her father passed away four years later.
These biographical facts, summarized briefly in the
first few pages of the novel, come to have an enor-
mous impact on the character, and thus the destiny,
of the heroine.
Carol’s “independence from relatives” is a major
factor underlying her rejection of her first marriage
proposal, an offer proffered by Stewart Snyder, a
fellow student at Blodgett College. In rejecting him,
Carol says, “No! No! You’re a dear, but I want to do
things. I don’t understand myself but I want—every-
thing in the world! . . . Stewart dear, I can’t settle
down to nothing but dish washing!”
Doing “nothing,” or being “vanilla flavored” like
her married sister, is what the independent Carol
ardently wants to avoid. Ironically, the opposite—
doing something—becomes connected for Carol
with her acceptance of the marriage proposal of Dr.
Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Will
clearly realizes the importance Carol places on doing
things, and so he strikes this note as part of his pro-
posal: “Come on. Come to Gopher Prairie. Show us.
Make the town—well—make it artistic. . . . Make
us change!” Thus for Carol, in becoming engaged to
Will, marriage is not so much a matter of family as
it is an opportunity to be an urban planner, to do
something for, to help to improve, the small town of
Gopher Prairie.
But Gopher Prairie resists the improvements
Carol envisions; and Carol resists—we are not certain
whether by choice or by her nature—the benefits of
family life. When she first contemplates the possibil-
ity of pregnancy, she reacts with revulsion: “I’d hate
it! I’d be scared to death! Some day but—Please, dear
nebulous Lord, not now!” Carol’s original love of
Will, such as it was, transmutes into fondness. This
she admits to herself one day while she walks home
from a visit to Guy Pollock, a bachelor to whom Carol
is attracted: “I am, I am fond of Will, and—Can’t
I ever find another word than ‘fond’?” Shortly after
this soliloquy, Carol asks Will for a monthly allow-
ance, stating her request in quasi-legalistic language:
“Either I’m your partner, in charge of the household
department of our business, with a regular budget for
it, or else I’m nothing.” Fondness and a partnership:
both terms suggest that the family in Main Street is
decidedly less than ideal.
And it remains less than ideal, as is character-
istic of a family in a realistic novel. Will engages
in an essentially meaningless affair with one of
the Gopher Prairie women. And as for Carol, the
birth of a son, Hugh, does strengthen her familial
feelings; and therefore, for a time, she feels “no
apparent desire for escape.” But eventually she
does escape, with Hugh, and with Will’s acqui-
escence, to Washington, D.C., where she remains
for two years. But this arrangement, a type of
compromise, is ultimately not satisfactory, in large
measure because it amounts to only half a family.
Even as she leaves Gopher Prairie for Washington,
Carol realizes that she “had her freedom, and it
was empty.” And so she returns to Gopher Prairie,
pregnant with a daughter who will, Carol hopes, go
to Vassar and “become a feminist leader or marry
a scientist or both.” Thus the novel ends with not