Main Street 713the ambiguity of romantic literature, but with a
great deal of ambivalence. In short, Lewis presents
family life as positive, as productive, and as mod-
erately fulfilling; but at the same time he portrays
it as frustrating, as limiting, and perhaps even as a
bit unnatural.
Gerard M. Sweeney
individual and Society in Main Street
In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of America’s
greatest advocates of individualism and self-reliance,
wrote the following: “Society everywhere is in
conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its
members. . . . The virtue in most request is confor-
mity. . . . Whoso would be a man, must be a noncon-
formist.” These words, written roughly six decades
before the publication of Main Street, could be said
to summarize one of the novel’s major themes: the
conflict between the individual and the society of
which he or she is a part.
This conflict can be seen in the novel’s depiction
of three important characters, each of whom finds
a different way to deal with the individual-versus-
society conflict. First, there is Miles Bjornstam, the
town handyman and jack-of-all-trades. When the
novel’s main character, Carol Kennicott, first meets
Miles, he is living in a one-room shanty that can
easily remind the reader of Henry Thoreau’s cabin
in Walden. Miles soon becomes a friend of Carol;
and Carol quickly comes to admire—and, indeed,
feel exhilarated by—Miles’s independence of spirit,
an independence that is frequently at odds with the
narrowness of Gopher Prairie society. Miles sums up
his brand of classless and free-thinking individual-
ism as follows: “Yeh, I’m probably a yahoo, but by
gum I do keep my independence by doing odd jobs,
and that’s more ‘n these polite cusses like the clerks
in the bank do.” Miles eventually marries Bea Soren-
son, a country girl who is both Carol’s friend and her
housemaid. This marriage is a happy one, resulting
in the birth of a son, Olaf; and thus it serves to help
anchor the independent Miles in the social world.
But Bea and Olaf suddenly die of typhoid fever;
and Miles, his anchors gone, leaves Gopher Prairie
for Canada.
In short, Miles Bjornstam, having become even
more isolated by his tragic losses, asserts his indi-
vidualism by escaping from the society he has come
to dislike intensely. Another way of dealing with
the individual-versus-society conflict represents the
exact opposite of Miles’s way: succumbing to society,
allowing society to defeat—even to obliterate—one’s
sense of individualism. Guy Pollock, another friend
and confidante of Carol, chooses this path. A bach-
elor, Guy is one of Gopher Prairie’s lawyers, and this
very fact serves to hinder any conspicuous mani-
festations of individualism, since Guy’s profession
involves a commitment to the rules and regulations
of the society of which he is a part. A handyman
such as Miles Bjornstam can live on the outskirts,
both literally and figuratively; but a lawyer is far less
able to do so.
But it is not exactly Guy’s profession that saps
the man’s individualism. Rather, it is something
more insidious, a phenomenon he refers to as the
“Village Virus.” This, as he describes it to Carol, “is
a germ which—it’s extraordinarily like the hook-
worm—it infects ambitious people who stay too
long in the provinces. You’ll find it epidemic among
lawyers and doctors and ministers and college-
bred merchants—all these people who have had a
glimpse of the world that thinks and laughs, but
have returned to their swamp.” Several years before
Carol’s arrival in town, Guy realized that his life
in Gopher Prairie was becoming more and more
an empty husk. So he decided to leave. But, unlike
Miles Bjornstam, Guy Pollock found that he could
not leave; he discovered that “the Village Virus had
me, absolute.” And so he concludes his brief history
by describing himself as “a living dead man.”
It is, finally, the novel’s main character, Carol
Kennicott, who manages to avoid the Village Virus
of Guy. Here we should note that Lewis cannot
have his heroine escape from society in the manner
of Miles—because she is a woman and also, more
significantly, because she is a wife and a mother.
After all, Lewis wants to present Carol as a realisti-
cally flawed character, but at the same time main-
tain the reader’s empathy for her. But Carol does
“escape” for a time; to Washington, D.C., where she
works for about two years for the federal govern-
ment. As a result of this temporary “escape,” as a
result of her realizing from a distance that Gopher
Prairie is, after all, not such a reprehensible society,