Main Street

In the novel, the titular Main Street is presented as a metonym for the habits, values, and blind spots of Gopher Prairie, representing all these cultural traits in a single physical space. The narrator’s universalizing claim that “Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere” (i) suggests that this use of the town’s main street as a stand-in for the town itself is also applicable to the other prairie towns across the Midwest. If Main Street symbolizes the small-town ethos of Gopher Prairie, then it symbolizes the small-town ethos of all the similar towns across the Midwest that are prone to the same mindset. It is the symbol of a national pattern in which commerce, social life, and moral surveillance overlap. The street’s shops and offices advertise utility and progress, but the deeper function is normalizing repetition. When the banker’s authority is invoked as a standard of legitimacy, the town’s creed is summarized in the warning that anything that breaks from the authority of Main Street should be considered “heresy” (i). The symbolic work of Main Street lies in how it connects the concrete to the prescriptive: The line of storefronts becomes an index of what is allowed to be seen, sold, and said.