Sinclair Lewis. Main Street. New York: New American Library, 1980. Orig. pub. 1920.
Carol Kinnecot, nee Milford, first appears in Sinclair Lewis' Main Street as "a rebellious girl in the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Midwest" (p. 8). The Indians have vanished, Sinclair tells us--though their final vanishing from the Great Plains, it should be remembered, had at that time taken place only a generation before. But already the world of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota had taken on an air of timeless eternity. New though it was in historical terms, the present generation had no memory of it having been very different, and no anticipation that it would or could become very different in the future.
Carol Milford finds herself dissatisfied with the routine of small-town American life that presents itself to her there, and she remains dissatisfied with it even after marrying and becoming Carol Milford. Stifled, she becomes rebellious. Her small escapes from the ordinariness of life, such as music, become ineffectual. "Her violin lay on top of the upright piano. She picked it up. Since she had had last touched it the dried strings had snapped, and upon it lay a gold and crimson cigar-band" (p. 196). The course of events thenceforth then one not very different from that of many female coming-of-age novels written since that time. Presently Carol has an affair, or at least tiptoes at the edge of one. Ultimately she escapes entirely, going to Washington to get a job in war work, "though the armistice with Germany was signed a few weeks after her coming to Washington, the work of the bureau continued." She dabbles in feminism, or suffragism as it was at that time.
But in the end--unlike the case in most more recent novels of the genre, perhaps--she tires of her life of petty adventures, and returns to Gopher Prairie.
She had left a city which sat up nights to talk of universal transition; of European...