69 pages • 2-hour read
Main Street
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Symbols & Motifs
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. Carol Kennicott enters this space with a reformer’s eye, remarking the “muddy expanse” (29) of certain facades and the signs. Her target is not ugliness alone, but the closing of possibility under the cover of the practical. The street’s proud uniformity teaches that improvement is an insult.
As Carol tests the limits of the imaginable, Main Street functions as a symbolic stage where a social expectation is performed and defended. Whenever she proposes something new, neighbors respond with skepticism and opprobrium. Gossipy criticisms circulate along the street through shop talk, church talk, and the conversations in which the town locates a proper midpoint. The street thus symbolizes the circulation of judgments that turn private energy into public conformity. To Carol, Main Street represents the intersection of these criticisms, the inflection point of a critical community in which she does not feel welcome. Main Street is where the town polices deviations and distributes permission to be earnest or ironic. Carol’s sense of hitting a wall is therefore not only psychological. It is the experience of moving within a grid designed to keep the familiar centered and the new peripheral.
Carol’s exhaustion centers Main Street as a symbol of her woes. She claims that “Main Street has done this [to her]” (327), which Kennicott understands to mean the town. Later, Carol returns to the symbolic importance of Main Street in her refusal to conform to the town. She will not admit that “Main Street is as beautiful as it should be” (406). She will not be cowed by the street, nor what it represents. She will not ascribe to it beauty and morality just because it is expected of her. The refusal does not overthrow the street’s authority in town, but it dislodges its claim to be the measure of reality in Carol’s mind. The symbol continues to train perception and desire, but as far as Carol is concerned, it is no longer uncontested. In this sense, Main Street is a durable symbol of American civic life and The Dialectic of Progress and Backlash.
Village Virus
The novel names the cultural mechanism that makes reform stall. Guy Pollard tells Carol about the “village virus” (140), a compact, alliterative phrase that symbolizes a complicated tangle of social theories and expectations. The term classifies a set of symptoms that afflict newcomers and veterans alike: lowered expectations, ironic resignation, and a preference for peace over candor. As a symbol, “village virus” (140) captures how habit can become contagious. One does not decide to be complacent, Guy warns; one catches it through routine, through the small bargains that make life agreeable. Carol feels the onset when she hears herself rationalizing comfort, telling herself to “stop this fever of reforming everything” (116). The admonition sounds like a prudent response to her failure, but it is the virus speaking in the voice of moderation. She is in danger of internalizing the local expectations and abandoning her own ambitions, thereby exhibiting the early symptoms of the virus just as Guy warned. When Carol’s projects meet with delays, she further internalizes the town’s doubt and begins to scale back her aims, convincing herself that a little library work and better curtains might be enough to placate her yearning to bring about change. The phrase “village virus” does symbolic work here, as it turns what might be seen as individual failure into a recognizable social process. Furthermore, the medical nature of the terminology turns the social process into a pathology, one that infects Carol in a way that she can neither see nor guard against until she has recognized her own infection.
The virus reduces ambition and reframes judgment so that principled effort appears as vanity. Carol discovers that the seriousness she brings to a play or a committee is treated as an effort to stand out, a breach of “good form” (203). In this sense the virus is a hermeneutic—a tool of interpretation that teaches people how to interpret motives. When she tries to share her ambitions with others, her own husband criticizes her for imposing her “high-brow junk” (155) on other people. When she tries to honor labor in the home by paying Bea a reasonable wage or by taking on the chores for herself, she is scolded by Kennicott for being “so chummy” (86). Kennicott is critical of Carol for breaking social conventions because he is already infected by the village virus, yet he presents Carol’s actions as aberrant. The symbolic pressure of the virus lies in this conversion of virtues into targets. It spreads because to resist it is to risk loneliness, while to accept it is to inherit a local fluency that makes the days pass without friction. The novel does not paint the afflicted—such as Kennicott—as villains. They are part of the community, people who prize stability. The virus symbolically allows the novel to separate culpability from effect. People who want to be kind participate in a system that neutralizes dissent before it is spoken and that views the postponement of change as maturity.
The final function of the symbol is to show how resistance can be sustained without illusions. The virus is not cured by a single victory, because it is a climate of feeling as much as a set of opinions. Carol understands this when she says that “[she] may not have fought the good fight, but [she has] kept the faith” (406). Against the virus’s promise of ease and integration, Carol holds to a definition of satisfaction that includes public usefulness. She will not accept that washing dishes is enough for her, just as she will not allow the virus to wholly own her. The village virus would isolate such a statement as a personal complaint; Carol insists that it is a civic observation about how a community allocates talent and time. By ending with a tempered defiance rather than a rout, the novel keeps the symbol honest. The village virus continues to operate, but it is named, and naming it allows for a vocabulary of discernment by which future residents (and Carol’s daughter) can measure whether their compromises are humane or merely habitual. The symbol’s value lies in that discernment. It turns a mood into a knowable condition and preserves the possibility that a later effort, made by different people, might escape infection.
Trains and Automobiles
Transportation in Main Street is not limited to the background. Trains and automobiles symbolize two visions of connection and movement that structure the novel’s social map. The railroad binds Gopher Prairie to a wider economy while fixing its status within a network of emerging Midwest identity. The arriving train promises news and novelty, but it also regularizes time and expectation. The station, with its schedules and waiting room, symbolizes a horizon that is not chosen by the town but accepted by it. Carol’s first approach to Gopher Prairie is mediated by the train that delivers her to a place she intends to transform. She arrives within a network of routes and timetables that already exist. She is shocked to see so many “ugly” (20) towns from the train window, only to arrive in Gopher Prairie and realize that it is just like them. The train connects these ugly towns into a network of smug self-righteous prairie identity. At the same time, the train’s mechanical certainty mirrors the town’s reliance on established and reliable paths. It suggests that movement can be repetitive, a return rather than an exploration. Town pride in dependable schedules coexists with suspicion of disruptive ideas. When locals boast about the community’s commercial health, the train’s whistle is an audible measure of goods moving in and out, but the sound also marks a loop that brings the same back to the same. The train powers the regional economy while enforcing fixed habits; for Carol, this is a negative, but for the townspeople, it is a positive.
The automobile, by contrast, introduces a flexible and personal form of motion that changes how people occupy space and how they imagine distance. Will Kennicott’s car is an instrument of status and a means of escape that does not require departure from the town. He makes the automobile his hobby, much to Carol’s dismay. With it, the couple can drive into the country, visit farm patients, and perform the rituals of Sunday leisure. It elevates them to a level of middle-class status and financial freedom mirrored in Kennicott’s simple love of driving. He loves to drive because—in his mind—to drive is to consecrate his status. For many residents, the automobile symbolizes a technological modernity that does not challenge existing power structures. It allows for novelty while leaving Main Street’s authority intact. Carol experiences both freedom and constraint in the car. The freedom is the velocity and the provisional privacy; the constraint is the car’s incorporation into the same social pattern, a routine that her husband adores but that she finds dull. A drive becomes another occasion for small talk about crops, roads, and weather, and another way to demonstrate that one is living as others live. Rather than a symbol of status, Carol sees the car as a limitation. The car makes it easier to circulate, but circulation here often means returning to recognizable stops. The more people can move, the more they can measure each other against shared routines. In this way, the automobile symbolizes the paradox of mobility without transformation.
For men like Kennicott, the car is a symbol of identity—a symbol of middle-class freedom that differentiates them from the poor farmers and links them to an emergent small-town identity, a link to the ugly towns Carol glimpsed from the train. To Carol, the proliferation of cars and trains as markers of identity are as ugly as the towns themselves. The tension between Carol and Kennicott is expressed in their symbolic relationship to cars. For Carol, a car is a tool that could theoretically bring culture and refinement to the town. For Kennicott, the car is a tool for the preservation of the status quo. The conflict between these two interpretations reflects why Carol feels so frustrated by the town: There is a great deal of potential, she feels, but men like her husband are locked into a self-serving interpretation of the world with themselves at the very center. In effect, Carol comes to see cars as a squandering of the same ambition that makes Gopher Prairie so alien and ugly to her.
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