Main Street

Kennicott is Carol’s husband, a round and dynamic character who acts by turns as her partner and her antagonist. He is a country doctor whose competence is real, whose affection is not feigned, and whose limits are the town’s limits writ small. The novel takes care to give him professional credibility. He works hard, endures weather and distance, and is reliable in emergencies. In contrast to the town’s class prejudices, he is kind to his poor patients. This establishes him as a credible person, giving him the authority to speak for a community that trusts him. This authority is the crux of Kennicott’s character and the difficulty that Carol has in loving him. For all his good qualities as a man and a doctor, Kennicott is very much the avatar of Gopher Prairie life. Though he shows flashes of sympathy to the poor farmers, this sympathy—much like his muddled German—only stretches so far. Whenever anyone suggests economic reform, for example, he is hostile. He is a true believer in the supposed small-town values that have brought him success and wealth, even though he knows that the town’s proclaimed moral righteousness is utterly hollow. Kennicott’s virtues therefore complicate him. He is not a villain; he is a guardian of an order that has kept babies alive, bones set, and harvests insured. He is generous with his time and often patient with his wife. He also expects that generosity to purchase consent. Carol’s hunger for cultural variety and visual delight seems to him a form of restlessness that he is duty bound to calm. He likes that his life is understandable to his neighbors and he would prefer his household to be equally legible.

Though Carol and Kennicott often agree on principles, he is much more eager to stay in the town’s good graces than she is. To keep the peace, he proposes what he thinks are reasonable compromises. He tells Carol that she can have nice things, that people will come around, but that she should be careful not to appear “eccentric” (86) in her décor or her friendliness with the maid. He sincerely believes that he is protecting her from ridicule and himself from being turned into a spectacle. In doing so, he allows social caution to place limits on her imagination. He wants the town’s approval for his wife because he understands how fragile reputation can be and because his practice depends on trust. This dependence narrows his appetite for experiment, as does his own comfortable lifestyle. The doctor’s car is a symbol in this regard. It gives him speed and reach and supplies the pleasures of the open country, but it also keeps him within a circuit of predictability that he values. The car is a symbol of status and a constant conversation topic with his fellow members of the community. It makes him a part of the community that he wants to preserve as is. He uses technology to strengthen existing rhythms, not change them. His idea of progress is better roads, cleaner offices, and an efficient furnace, but only for the benefit of him and his peers and certainly not at their expense.

Kennicott is also separate from Carol in his morality. While Carol is tempted by other men, she never acts upon this temptation. In the chapter from Kennicott’s perspective, he cheats on his wife with Maud Dyer. Maud’s continued politeness toward Carol suggests that this affair continues for a long time. Furthermore, it shows that Kennicott is aware that the townspeople do not live by the values and morals they claim to defend. They are a town of hypocrites; their supposed desire to preserve the morality of the town is a desire to preserve their own status, which negates their arguments against Carol’s reforms. At the end of the novel, Kennicott decides to give Carol her independence. This suggests a growing understanding of Carol as a person. He will not force her to come back to Gopher Prairie on anything other than her own terms. This “second wooing” (395) suggests that the man who was so negative toward the idea of reform has, in effect, accepted a slight reformation of his character, as he learns empathy for his wife and her needs. For this, he is rewarded with her return, even if he does not quite understand the terms on which she comes back to him. As she explains her faith in future change, he is left searching for the screwdriver, lost in domestic chores while his wife works toward a more equitable world.

Miles Bjornstam initially represents a degree of freedom from conformity that Carol admires and envies. By his own admission, the townspeople see him as “a radical that wears jeans” (104), an attitude that betrays the local bourgeoisie’s prejudice toward those who earn their living through manual labor. Miles’s plain speech, workmen’s clothing, and leftist politics threaten the respectable atmosphere of the town. Miles’s posture of irony toward bank managers, merchants, and pastors is a response to the daily experience of being seen as a threat rather than as a neighbor. In his readiness to puncture the pretensions of those who police respectability, he refuses the premise that status grants insight. The town’s social mechanisms are public, so his critiques are public. He jeers at the rituals of the Jolly Seventeen, at the confident banalities sold on Main Street, and at a civic speech culture that confuses volume with truth. As Carol gets to know him, she comes to realize that he is better-read and more interesting than almost anyone else in the town. Miles is pleased that she recognizes this, as she sees him as an individual rather than a specter of socialism. By allowing Carol to know him in his own terms, the novel frames Miles as a control case for the town’s claims about order: a working man with humor, nerve, and judgment, who declines the demand that he flatter what he does not respect.

The household that Miles and Bea build is a counterargument to the town’s view of hierarchy as natural. It is also an indictment of the way reputations stick. Even as Miles shows steadiness and care, neighbors continue to view him as a dangerous radical. If anything, they view his settled family life and his small business as a repudiation of everything they hold dear, even as he conforms to their purported ideals. Miles sees how moral talk is used to maintain class distinctions, and he refuses that use. The narrative places Miles at the edge of many gatherings, close enough to hear and answer, distant enough to avoid absorption. In that position, he becomes a witness to the gap between stated values and practiced ones. The town will praise industry, thrift, and family, and will still withhold fellowship from a man who does not perform class deference. Carol’s friendship with Miles is an experiment in crossing that gap. She listens, laughs, and learns how much of the town’s certainty is theater. He, in turn, treats her without the courtesy that masks disagreement. Their exchanges are direct and sometimes rough, showing mutual respect rather than flattery.

When typhoid strikes and Bea dies, the town performs shock and then returns to form, unfairly blaming Miles for the death of his wife and child. Miles’s grief and anger come from his recognition that a community able to coordinate opinion with speed is slow to coordinate care for those it holds at arm’s length. The man who was caricatured as a cynic turns out to be the one who asked least of others and gave most to the life immediately in front of him. The novel does not sentimentalize his departure from the center of the social picture. To remain honest in a hypocritical culture is to accept exclusion and to risk isolation when disaster arrives. Miles’s function, finally, is double. He is a character with distinct loves and wounds; he is a test of the town’s claim that usefulness, loyalty, and decency are its standards. Miles’s steady rejection of hypocrisy is not heroic in any simple way. It is a lived critique. His stance helps the novel specify what it means to live without illusions.