Character of Carol in Main Street

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 t

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nd meddle with before the year 2000! She may see an industrial union of the whole world, she may see aeroplanes going to Mars" (p. 432). GATT is perhaps less dramatic than an "industrial union of the world," and the aeroplanes have not reached Mars (at least, not manned ones), though they have reached the Moon. But the real, everyday world has changed surprisingly little since 1920. The imagined ideal future has not come to pass; if it had, surely our personal helicopters would be caught in airborne traffic jams, and the monorails would be shabby and run late. In the end, unable to find what we seek in the larger world, we perhaps are like Carol in having to settle for Gopher Prairie. Malcolm Cowley. Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. New York: Penguin, 1976. Orig. pub. 1934. The era centering upon the 1920s was a remarkable epoch in American letters. It saw the fullest flowering of what the standard literary canon regards as characteristic modern American literature. It was the era of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder. On a more modest and popular level, the 1920s saw the development of two modern genres, the hardboiled detective novel and science fiction
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Approximate Word count = 1499
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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