SOLS ASPECTS OF THE SMALL TOWN

IN CERTAIN MAJOR AMERICAN NOVELS SINCE 1918

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF'ATLANTA UNIVERSITY

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR

THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

BY

DORIS DUNGILL HOUES

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

ATLANTA, GEORGIA

AUGUST 1947 fU v T c \o<6 3 k PR3FACS

The small tovm has been of tremendous importance in the development, expansion, and civilization of America; and ita salient characteristics have inspired writers of both non-fiction and fiction to attempt to capture elements, at least, of its spirit. The present study is designed to point out some aspects of the small town in certain major American novels since

1918. More accurately, perhaps, it is a study of the varying attitudes toward the American small town which have been maintained by certain novelists ana revealed in some of their novels. It does not attempt to account for these attitudes; it merely enueavors to isolate, and, if possible, to categorize them. This study is purposely net exhaustive; it deals specifically and primarily with a few novels from certain key figures—

Booth Tarkington, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood

Anderson, and John Steinbeck—who have been noted for their marked interest in the small town arm its inhabitants.

Because World siar I stimulated many American novelists toward a

consideration of the fundamental ele lents in our way of life, and because

it caused them to either re-assemble or re-accept their values—especially

concerning the small towns of America which had developed under the impetus

of Puritanism and the pioneer spirit, the foundation of our way of life— the author has selected 1918 as a point of approach.

In developing this thesis, the author discovered that various authors

have differing conceptions of the exact meaning of the term "email town."

ii To some, the small town is a sparcely populated district; to others, it has a maximum population of five thousand inhabitants; and to still others, it means an area which has no definite population limitation but is distinguished by its Puritan standards. Although the term is flexible, in

this study, "small town" or "village" refers to those areas which range from sparcely populated localities to incorporated units of not more than eighty-five thousanu inhabitants; ano to those areas in which some or all

of the Puritan or pioneer traditions of thrift, smugness, respectability,

insularity, complacency, determination, conservatism, and optimism dominate--to a great extent—the lives of the inhabitants.

To the beat of the author's knowledge, there has been no other study made which indicates a treatment of the small town by this specific

grouping of American novelists. And the conclusion reached in this study— that though it has been of great importance in American civilization, the

small town, often treated in fiction and non-fiction, has not, for the most part, been fairly, adequately, and artistically interpreted or appraised in the American n^vel, especially in that of recent years—is supported only by the validity of the analysis of the works studied and by the evidence which these works yielded. In view of this fact, the author has deemed it necessary to classify her material into the following chapters! the first chapter is primarily concerned with showing, by a brief survey, th6 significance of the small town ir. the development and expansion of America and with the role which the town has played in the body of American letters the seconu chapter deals with certain works of two .imerican novelists who

have befriended the town--Booth Tarkington and Dorothy Canfield Fisher; the third chapter attempts to discover the attitudes of Sinclair Lewis,

Sherwood ^mderson, ano John Steinbeck toward the small town as revealed in iv certain cf their novels; and the fourth chapter is concerned with an appraisal of the small town as it has been treated in the Junerican novel.

In compiling her material, the author collected the following: (l) novels, both primary and secondary, which might reveal to her specific attitudes toward the small town of net only the key figures of this study, but also of others who have a professed interest in the small town; (2) critical material in the form of reviews, articles, and texts, which would throw light on the subject under preparation and which would, ecause of divergent opinions, stimulate the author toward an unbiased study; and (3) histories and biographies which would provide the necessary factual and authentic background of the thesis, after compiling these materials, the author assorted and assembled her data, grouping together the novels of writers who seemed to concur in viewpoint, without attempting, at the time, to formulate any definite thesis. The appraisal assumes the form of a summary and an interpretation based on the preceding material.

The author wishes to acknowledge her appreciation of the inspiration and aid B ie has received from her critic and advisor, Professor Gladstone

L. Ghanoler TABLS OF CONTENTS

PREFACE ii

CHAPTER It THE SMALL TOW IN AMERICAN LIFE AND LETTERSt A

BRIEF SURVEY.. 1

CHAPTER III THE SMALL TOW BEFRIENDED 25

BOOTH TARKINGTCNt

THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS 26

THE MIDLANDER 33

DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER*

THE BRIMMING CUP 38

ROUGH HEW 43

CHAPTER III* THE SMALL TOW UNDER FIRE 50

SINCLAIR LEATS*

MAIN STREET ..55

ARROUSMITH 58

ELMER GANTRY .-..62

KINGSBLOOD ROYAL. 64

SHERWOOD ANDERSON*

POOR WHITE 73

KIT BRANDON.. 78

JOHN STEINBECK*

THE GRAPES OF WRATH 84

CANNERY ROW 88

CHAPTER IT* THE SMALL TOWN * AN APPRAISAL 95

BIBLIOGRAPHY 104

v CHAPTER I

THE SMALL TCÜW IN AMERICAN LIFE AND LETTERS.- A BRIEF SURVEY

The village or small town has played a major role in the develop¬ ment of American life and American letters. Its means of livelihood, its iddals or staunch beliefs, its methods of thought have been agents of inspiration to its inhabitants anu to those who have chosen to write of its existence. It has grown, sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly, depending upon its resources; or it has remained relatively static. It has broadened the viewpoints of its dwellers, or it has caused them to main¬ tain insular standards. It has expanded culturally and intellectually with its universities, small colleges, and auditoriums; or it has smothered itself with complacency. Its growth, its concepts, its customs have furnished men of letters with an abundance of material for artistic or propagandistic purposes.

Indeed, America's expansion has been a gradual growth from the small colonial aggregations, from tiny Eastern port towns, from treks toward the

Mid-West, to a great sweeping settlement of lands throughout the far

West. What is often called the "frontier movement" has been the backbone 1 of American expansion. Small towns dotted the plains. They traded with

1 American expansion is not to be merely limited to the occupation of lands from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts, but is to include also the development of resources such as land, trees, coal ano iron mines and later water power; the growth of a spirit of democracy; and the emergence of a type of men who had to struggle against the pressures of an environment

1 2

Indians and were array posts; they promoted further advancement. They became the nucleus of the inevitable fluidity of American life—a life characterized by a consciousness of opening spheres*

Ifherever towns have sprung up ana thrived—in the East, the South, the Mid-West, or the extreme West—th6ir inhabitants have had to adjust to the surrounding circumstances. The stories of the people, their ad¬ justments, and the formation of town patterns based on the amalgamated traditions have contributed a great deal to American civilization. Thus writers have been attracted to make studies and interpretations of small towns. The« have formed impressions. They have written these impressions.

Some of them, like a Goldsmith, have possessed a sentimental fondness for what they have found; and they have expressed their favoritism in glowing terms. Others have eliminated nothing in their examinations of the small town; they have bitterly shown their disapproval, and they have advocated changes in the town. Whatever the viewpoint of writers has been, or is, the fact remains that the small town was and is fecund ma¬ terial for the writer. There is no doubt that from the time of the earliest American settlers, whatever it has done, or whatever it has neglected to do, the village or small town has been important in the 1 growth of America.

strange to them—men who needed improvements for their new land and fought for them. The Westward movement and life on the frontier were stimuli to the growth of America. For their conceptions of the significance of the Westward movement, see Harold U. Faulkner, American Economic History (New York, 1924), p. 117; Thomas Dickinson, The Making of American Literature (New York, 1932), p. 509; and Lucy Hazard, The Frontier in American Litera ture (New York, 1927), xv-xx.

1 Ibid.. p. 242. 3

In New England, in the Mid-Atlantic states, in the South, and later

in the frontier region, many of the early settlers of our country tended

to band together as villagers because of their dependence upon each other

for protection, for aid in their problems of work, and for entertainment

purposes. This condition of interdependence led to a unity of thought, duty, ano responsibility which often colored the entire spirit of a town.

In a New England Puritan village, for example, the main focus was

the church. For the Puritans built their lives around a religion averse

to frivolity in man. The bitter winters of their new home seemed to

BymboliZ6 and justify their religious beliefs.

...they found an environment that tended to foster the virtues that Calvinism prized. Industry, thrift, pains¬ taking care and unceasing watchfulness flourished...under the vigilant ey6 of the Puritan church and the relentless pressure of the New England environment.

The people of the compact Puritan small town were homogeneous and in many

ways differed from those in the middle states.

Differences in nationality, in church affiliation, and in ideals were

the bases for distinction between the New England small town and the small

town of the mid-Atlantic states, if/hereas in the Puritan villages the

settlers were predominantly English, the middle states were comprised of

Scotch-Irish, German, Dutch, some English—and these were cf Presbyterian, 2 Lutheran, Catholic, Reformed, and Quaker denominations. There was, in

1 Russell Blankenship, American Literature (New York, 1930), p. 6. Cf. Ralph P. Boas and Katherine Burton, Social Backgrounds of American Literature (Boston, 1940), pp. 24-26.

2 Russell Blankenship, op.cit.. p. 8. 4 general, no fanatical clinging to the tenets of theology and no obsession

of politics, Many of the small towns of the M|d-Atlantic states grew 1 rapidly into huge cities, such as New York, Philadelphia, ana Baltimore; but they had their inevitable beginnings as villages or small towns with congenial farmers as group leaders. Boas and Burton state that although these areas increased in population and in size, they, however, changed

but little in their basic tenets.

...there was little change in essentials. Boston was still a quiet, orderly, respectable town....New York was spreading into a city, but it still depended for cleanli¬ ness upon the droves of hogs which roamed through its streets....With no knowledge of modern sanitation and with medicine only a little abov6 superstition, men were at the mercy of malignant Nature.

In the South, the large estates and plantations were put to profitable

agricultural usage and formed the bases for congregation of certain types

of individuals. Baronial-like in aspect, these estates were similar to

small towns wit.) the social classes subtly organized. The independent

farmer of small holdings often linked himself to others of his less

important economical status and migrated to the region called the Pied¬

mont. He was an insignificant figure in the feudal-like South.

1 Ralph Boas and Katherine Burton, op. cit.. pp. 56-59. These authors express further the extent of the growth of American cities in the following*

When Washington was inaugurated, in 1789, there were perhaps four million people in the thirteen states; when Andrew Jackson became the seventh president, in 1829, the popu¬ lation was nearly thirteen millions...New York City was becoming the chief town of the country....In the South, cotton growing, stimulated by the invention of the cotton gin, ...began to develop huge plantations manned by slave gangs. In the cities and Eastern towns, life was broadening...with the spread of wealth. Ibid.. p. 58. 2 Ibia. 5

Features of the Southern villages, as well as those of the Mid-

Atlantic and New England Puritan small towns, fostered methods of thought, action, and belief into certain molds. New England thinking was rather unified because of the basic elements of Calvinism and of nationality;

Mid-Atlantic thinking was diversified because of the heterogeneous stocks 1 of-people and denominations; and Southern thinking wa9 based upon the economic and social division of human beings into classes and ranks.

Cf further importance in the consideration of the small town in 2 American life is the westward movement. At first, as we have seen, the extreme line of settlement of America was the Atlantic coast. European

habits thrived there, as is quite natural. Gradually, the trek toward the

Mid-West, then the West itself, resulted. With each movement away from

1 Boas and Burton tell us*

The greatest mistake of Puritanism was to suppose that unity is possible in a commonwealth. America was to prove that in union of differing groupe liee strength.... Ibid », p. 24r.

2 Thomas Dickinson, op. cit., pp. 381-83. Dickinson, in the following passage, describes the development of life in the West*

The West too was developing a life of its own....These new settlements were quite unlike the first settlements in the New World....Now there developed the backwoodsman and the man of the prairie....The lands, forests, and mirws ...were giving them independence. These men proceeded to establish the West and before long they had built there an industrial civilization not unlike that cf the East. Out of this there came the rise of the common man which has had an important place in the history of this country ana the making of its literature. Meanwhile the West had taken on another meaning for American life. This was in the introduction of the adventure strain, never entirely absent from the American temper. This comes from the discovery of gold in California. Ibid., p. 382. 6 the Atlantic coast and colonial settlements, there has been a "steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of indepen- 1 dance on American lines»" Indian traders, ranchers, farmers, army officers— each of these held a place in the town and districts which sprang up in the West. But the men and women who were so important in the development of towns in the West found that they had to adapt themselves to the demands of the area. Frederick J. Turner's challenging essay indicates the trans¬ forming force of the obstacles which the frontiersman had to meet and finally overcome.

The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin....Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environ¬ ment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails.2

Adjusting to these new conditions, the pioneer had of necessity to lead a hard, rough-and-tumble life often without sanitation and the conveniences of civilization. In the following statement, Boas and Burton throw powerful light on the harsh village life of the frontier.

For the common man of their time there was indsed much from which to escape. Whatever the virtues and the charm of the little villages with their spreading elms and their quaint houses, whatever the romance of the frontier and of

1 Frederick J. Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," An Approach to Literature, edited by Cleanth Brooks, John Purser, and Robert Warren (New York, 1946), p. 406.

2 Ibid. 7

clipper ships, there was also a harsh and stern reality. None of the elementary household conveniences which we know were in existence} medicine and surgery sere rudi¬ mentary; crime, filth and pestilence rioted....Village cemeteries tell the story of women worn out in youth by hard work and large families.^

Because h6 had to adjust to new and hard circumstances and conditions, the settler of the West bravely did so; but he also took his old traditions with him. The forces of the new area and the molding of his habitual methods of doing things into this new area, caused the formation fifi a place distinctive in aspect. "Little by little he transforms the 2 wilderness... .The fact is, that here is a new product that is American."

Seekers of gold and new fortunes, explorers in search of aaventure, stakers of mines, families desirous of land—these and more left their homes in the East, in the middle states and in the South, taking their ideas with tiem. They formed new towns, built new homes, and found common interests in new undertakings.

The most salient characteristics of the small town of the early settlers and of the participants in the frontier movement have persisted 3 to the present day. As has already been pointed out, they have proved

1 Ralph Boas and Katherine Burton, oo.cit.. p. 98.

2 Frederick Turner, ou. cit.. p. 407.

3 Lucy Hazard defines the underlying spirit of the frontier as she says»

These successive frontiers present differences in location and occupation; but they display a common facto1' which we may call the pioneering spirit; a spirit of determination, of endurance, of independence, of ingenuity, of flexibility, of individualism, of optimism....Op,cit.. xviii. 8 themselves vantage points in the provision of material for American wri¬ ters, major and minor, recent and early.

Early literature in America, for example, from approximately 1607 1 to 1790 was primarily concerned with life in small areas. The numerous reports, journals, essays, sermons, speeches, and some nationalistic ballads and poems attest to this. So occupied were they with the practical phases of their daily lives, however, the colonials, as a whole, wrote no works which indicated artistic intent.

A few writings there were....Made by men under intense strain, earnest men tremendously convinced, men saturated with the English Bible which they read daily in its strong idioms, men who wasted no words, all they wrote had real worth. It Bprang hot from actual living, and it was recorded without thought of art.

1 Indeed, the areas were so small and the daily events were of such importance to the people that even a Governor’s journal contains facts which are not always official. John Winthrop, for example, wrote for the Colony of Massachusetts Bay; and his Journal contains many human interest touches that^are an indication of the compactness and commonality within the provinces. The following passages are taken from John Winthrop» . * This month, when our first harvest wa3 near had in, the pigeons came again all over the country, but did no harm (harvest being just in) but proved a great blessing.

The synod met at Cambridge by adjournment from the (4) June last. Mr. Allen of Dedham preached out of acts 15, a very goaly, learned, and particular handling....It fell out, about the midst of his sermon, there came a snake into the seat, where many of the elders sate behind th6 preacher. It came in at the door where people stood thick upon the stairs. "Extracts from the Journal," Century Readings in American Literature, edited by Frederick Lewis Pattes (New York, 1932), p. 19.

2 Frederick L. Pattes, op. cit.. p. 5. Sea, i.e., the essays of Nathaniel Ward ("On Toleration" and "On Women's Fashions") and of Roger Williams; the speeches of Cotton and Increase Mather, of Jonathan Edwards; the letters of John Dickinson; and th6 diary of Sewall. 9

Nevertheless, it is from this early material that we are able to glean much information about the ways of early village life and customs.

From about 1790 to 1830, after the formation of the new republic,

"writers for the periodicals began to plead for a native literature, one 1 independent of England, a 'republic of letters.'" Sincere attempts were made to form this kind of literature. As a consequence, many of the books 2 were revolutionary, many too drastic for America; but this attempt to¬ wards putting into concrete form the visions and ideals, life and customs, of a frontier nation heightened the pride which Americans felt for them¬ selves and for their country. A literary form new for America was introduced—the novel. The form became fairly popular; and, later, "Charles 3 Brockden Brown mystified and shocked his countrymen" with his persistence in writing novels. Sarah Morton's Power of Sympathy was suppressed by virtue of the Puritanical standards of Boston. Mrs. Rowson's novel 4 Charlotte Temple became the first best seller in American literary history.

But Brown was the first novelist to attempt writing a story of adventure

1 Ibidw p. 145.

2 Ibid.

3 Grant Overton, An Hour of the American Novel (Philadelphia, 1929), p. 9.

4 Frederick L. Pattee, op. cit.. p. 145. This author adequately describes the prevailing geographic and literary trends of this period as he states: At the opening of the seventeen-nineties when the new repbblic inaugurated its first president, three cities were prominent. The metropolitan city .vas Philadelphia, largest of American cities, soon to be the national capital; next in size was New York, even then the leader in business and shipping and commerce. Smallest of the three was Boston. Literature, so far as there was a literature, was confined generally to these cities. Ibid. 10 along the frontier. However, "Although realizing the value of this 1 American material, the city boy could do nothing with it." He quite obviously did not understand fully the modes of thought, action, and belief which lay behind the settlement of small towns, or the forces which dominated tthe frontier.

Up to this point we have considered the small town in general, its formation through the dependence of individuals upon each other, its basic tenets and ideals as characterized by the prevailing stimulus of religion

or economic activity, its methods of thought, belief and action as based upon these ideals. We have glanced very briefly at the literature of

Amefica during the colonial period and the revolutionary era to notice tnat after the formation of the new republic a clamor arose for a litera¬ ture which would be America’s own, and that among the many books written in answer to this plea, the novel began to find its way into the body of

American letters. But the novels written before Charles Brockden Brown are, eaya Grant Overton, "the concern of the scholar and the book collector r- -, 2 ...iSvenJ Brown deserves our polite recognition and that is all." Our

concern here is not primarily with the advent and the development of the novel in American literature; but it is with those novels which sig¬ nificantly present or interpret American small town life and the forces

underlying that life.

1 Grant Overton, op. cit.. p. 9.

2 Ibid. 11

As Overton states, American novelists by 1870 began to seek material 1 from the regions that they knew best. They examined characters they knew, settings they knew, and they wrote about events with which they were familiar* Novels of New England revealed the environment and the ways of thinking of New England people. Novela of the South reflected the habits and methods of believing of the Southerners. Novels of the opening West 2 indicated the aspects of the new land and the customs of the emigrants.

The writings of novels dealing with areas of America spread; and to the present, American novelists still treat the farmlands, the towns, the cities of the United States as familiar subject-matter.

Francis Bret Harte, in his short story "The Luck of Roaring Camp,'* wrote of the wild and scenic background of California during the frantic gold era. The mining camp, occupied by reckless men, some criminals, some bitter fugitives from justice, is in a valley in the Sierra foothills.

However, Harte was not the only writer to center his attention on the

Sierra; for Joaquin Millar's poems flamboyantly picture the excitement and colorful glories of the traveling caravans placed against a background of beauty. Hie "Westward HoJ* and his "Préludé to 'Even So'" are ex¬ pressive of a joy in the sheer beauty and a love for the challenges of the

West. Further, Ramona, a romance written by Helen Hunt Jackaon, lays stress upon the mission lands and the indomitable, stoic survivals of the old Spanish regime. Senora Moreno, who clifags to her land which had once

1 Ibid.

2 For a graphic pDrtraÿal of the frontier and its advancements, see David S. Muzzey, The American Adventure- (New York, 1927), p. 82. 12 belonged to the; missions of San Fernando and Benaventura, and Ramona, a part Indian, part Spanish maiden, are two of Helen Jackson's dramatic character conceptions of the vivid 7est. Still another mho used the .ï6st as a setting for his material is Mark Twain, v.ho ia his Roughing It, to mention just one of his frontier works, describes frontier days in America with zest and nostalgia. He writes of the Mississippi Valley, of Overland coach trips to such outposts as Carson City, Nevada; of the white-peaked

Rocky Mountains; of the Mormons and their hospitality; and of the fever which men who loved adventure had contracted, a fever which caused men to prospect, to silver-mine, to leave their homes. These are but a few who portrayed the vast Western portion of America, a portion which attracted thousands of settlers.

In addition, th6 Civil War had brought with it a restlessness; and a "great tiae of emigration, especially from New England, moved into the 1 West, and the rapidly extended railroads bore it along." These writers enabled their American readers to discover through the written page new places in their own land. Mining towns, small towns grown rapidly rich or wretchedly poor, both fortunate and unfortunate gold-seekers—these were subjects which the novelist and short story writer used to his advantage. Here again the forces of the ways of thinking of small town people came to the fore. The free thinkers of the middle states and the

Puritan New England inhabitants were attracted to new areas, taking with them their ideals and methods of activity. It is no wonder that many novels of the small town portray certain similarities in analyses of

1 Fred L. Pattee, op. cit., p. 738. See also Ralph Boas and Katherine Burton, op. cit., pp. 127-62. Cf. Thomas Dickinson, op. cit., p. 507. 13 characters and events. Perhaps Overton expresses the feelings of many when he says! "...we hav6 suffered a good deal from the increasing sameness of 1 American life."

Not only in the West, but in the South, too, there emerged a body of literature which portrayed the plantation tradition usually in a highly sentimental manner. Henry ¥. Grady, who interpreted ihe spirit of the South after the Civil War, found and wrote of a new kind of romanticism for the

South. The manner in thich the Southerners worked—as cheerful and confident as possible—provided him with rich material, and Grady wrote his The New

South in the optimistic vein by which he was inspired. George Washington

Cable also wrote of the South, but he centered his interest upon the quaintly exotic Louisiana, which has long been outstanding for its survival of

French mannerisms rather than American customs. Cable injects the French exquisiteness and daintiness in his Old Creole Days. He has written other books, but he is best remembered for this. Mary Noailles Murfree joined the ranks of those who wrote of the South, but her stories of the great

Smoky Mountains in Tennessee are concerned more with the neighboring folk of the mountains rather than with the aristocracy which Cable stresse». Mary

Dickinson shows clearly the rapid changes in size and in fundamentals of America as he says* Railroads had increased from twenty-three miles in 1830 to 10,000 in 1850 and 30,000 in 1860. They had first been considered simply feeders to canals and rivers. Soon they were putting river and canal transportation oât of business, By the Civil War there were trunk lines from the seaboard to the Mississippi, and the Middle States had become a network of railroads. In building the railroads capital had been assisted by the government. The Illinois Central received a gift of 3,000,000 acres of public domain. There was the seed of corruption in this. But it opened lands to settle¬ ment, and the people cultivated the lands. Ibid.

1 Grant Overton, op. cit.. p. 15. 14

Murfree, known also as Charles Egbert Craddock, makes the setting assume the important role in her stories. In her "Over on tne T'other Mounting," for example, both Cld Rocky-Top and T'Other Mounting possess personalities and fine character traits. The sun shines brightly on the former, but 1 T'other Mounting, "It's the onluckiest place ennywhar nigh about.” In addition to these writers, another, Joel Chandler Harris, has written of the plantation days when Negroes were simple, unaffected people who catered to the whims of an established order without, for the most part, knowing why. Harris' Uncle Remus Stories have served to typify the slave into a devoted, happy, at-times-but-not-too-often clever, follower of the plan¬ tation owner.

These writers of the South capitalized ano romanticized conditions and types, such as "the Georgia 'Crackers', the Missouri 'Pikes', the 2 Creoles of Louisiana." After the Civil "fer critics and readers of fiction increasingly demanded portraitures of actual life; and then authors dwelled often upon the Negro as a central figure, showing him as Southerners knew 3 him.

The South had not, however, been alone in its romanticized literature; for the earlier writers of New England had done the same for the literature of their area. Sarah Orne Jewett had written of settings along the Maine

1 Mary Noailles Murfree, "Over on the T’other Mounting," taken from In the Tennessee Mountains, edited by Fred L. Pattee, op. cit.. p. 797.

2 Fred L. Pàttee, op. cit.. p. 779.

3 Ibid. See also Thomas Dickinson, op. cit.. pp. 560-62. 15 and New Hampshire coasts (we remember her pictures of Wimby and Kanaota in “A Native of Wimby"), and Harrièt Beecher Stowe (who wrote of both

Southern and New England areas in the later Puritan days) depicted New

England in a romantic hue. It was Miss Jewett, however, who pictured

New England leae sentimentally and more realistically than others. The trek westward by many New Englanders, together with other forces, caused

New England to lose her literary leadership and to suffer depopulation in both large and small communities. For this reason, much of the later fiction of New England deals with the results of the mass emigration to the West and with the tragedy of the small town.

The town, as we have seen, was a subject for the printed page.

Pictured romantically in earlier American literature, it became more realistic in later letters; for after the Civil V/ar a trend toward showing real life ano actual conditions began to assert itself. This demand for verisimilitude, for actuality, for authenticity, grew.

Parrington attempts to account for this growth of realism in the following statement:

Between 1C15 ana 1870, romanticism, economic even more than literary, had been the national religion. It had written a golden creed in terms of material expansion, of a buoyant and pervasive optimism to which every child of the Zeitgeist loyally subscribed....But with the early seventies came the first stirrings of change. The gorgeous romantic-soap bubbles were bursting on every hand. Disillusioned farmers and dissatisfied proletarians were beginning to question the ways of capitalism, anc from that questioning was eventually to emerge a more realistic attitude towards life and letters. Realism in America, it would appear, rose out of the ashes of romantic faith. It sprang from social discontent, and it came to maturity when that discontent was clarified in the light of Old World thought.^-

Vernon L. Parrington, "The Development of Realism,' pretatian of American. Literatura, edited by Norman Foerster (New York, 1928), p. 87. 16

By 1900, the American novi-1 had emerged as a body of serious litera¬ ture, compelling international attention. Hatcher believes that this spread

of the American novel was "begotten by the invigorating tonic of the 1 realistic movement appliea to the American scene." In order to attempt to understand fully the significance and the influence of this realistic movement upon the novel of the small town--for it did indeed play an important role—it may be wise to glance at realism as a literary concept.

Beach believes that realism must be objective* "The effort of realism 2 is to present human nature objectively, to label it scientifically."

Fundamentally, Annie Russell Marble is in accord with Beach's interpre¬ tation, but she is of the opinion, too, that realism is a result of a

faithful recording of the facts* "Realism is a new sincerity,...a search 3 for truth at whatever cost of ease and pleasantness." Grabo, however,

realizes the difficulties which arise in attempting to set definitive

boundaries to the term when he says*

Realism is too loose and controversial a term to permit precise definition. The "realistic" novelist may, however, be distinguished by his purpose, various ae his product is. He seeks, I take it, toeee life without prejudice, and if there is such a thing as truth to experience, to report it with as much fidelity as his limitations per¬ mit. He endeavors to live without anodyne; he does not blink because life is unpleasant....He must be faithful to his findings in his study of life, however contradictory,

1 Harlan Hatcher, Creating the Modern American Novel (New Tor It, 1935), pp. 4-5.

2 Joseph W. Beach, American Fiction (New York, 1941), p. 4.

3 Annie Russell Marble, A Study of the Modern Novel (New York, 1928), p. 362. 17

harsh, and inharmonious these may be; and he has^also the task of fashioning these into a thing of beauty.

These ideas of whut realism is ana what the purpose of the novelist is agree on a fundamental point; truth is sought regardless of what the truth may be. ïfhat a change this is from the unquestioning faith in dreams of the romanticist! The change was not only in purpose and scope, but realism also made great changes in the technique of the novel.

iffhereas the romantic novel wends its way to a happy conclusion symbolic of eternal good fortune, the realistic novel lays stress on the commonplace occurrences of life, and its conclusions may indicate a less happy future, but a probable one. Edward Eggleston, Joseph Kirkland and

Ed Howe were early realistic novelists; and William Dean Howells, Hamlin

Garland, Henry James, and Edith ’«harton are the names of later realists who made the realistic technique significant to our body of literature.

In the nineties, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser

"created for America the type of realism to which Zola had given the name 2 naturalism." This was the work of an impersonal and objective form which rather pessimistically places man under the victimizing influence 3 of drives and forces. It is these phases of navel writing which play such important roles in our study of American small towns as represented in certain major American novels of the twentieth century.

Realism which assumed the form of social criticism and reform

1 Carl Grabo, The Technique of the Novel (New York, 1928), p. 250.

2 Vernon Parrington, op. cit.. p. 154.

3 Ibid. 18 measures became predominant in literature prior to 1918. The group called

'Muck-rakere*--Ray Baker, Ida Jarrell, Upton Sinclair, and Charles Russell

(to name but a few)--crusaded against the moneyed classes v»ho were in 1 control of political and educational Bystems. For a short time after 1918, however, American fiction seemed to undergo a distinct change frdm caustic criticism to chauvinism. Much of this was due to the change in American thought and social conditions.

The keynote of thought during the years of the first ’.7orld War was 2 restlessness. Naturally war brings with it a feeling of uncertainty about the future, and the result of thi3 was a craving for excitement and novelty. The social criticism which was apparent in the muck-rakers was disappearing. Pride in the United States grew. After the ®ar, economic conditions were bettered for many, and "the old distinction between capital and labor became somewhat blurred. With the resultant better 3 relations between capital and labor, social criticism became outmoded."

1 During the nineties ano the opening of the twentieth century, full realization of the cruel but actual facts about their lives struck many writers. The Haymarket Riots and the Knights of Labor, the strikes, the disappointments of the Klondike Gold Rush, the labor of children, problems of sanitation and drainage in houses and towns, the slums, the unbalanced economic scale, the greed of corporations, corruption of politics and other ills caused realistic writing to assume the form of problem novels and what was called muck-raking. These writers almost reviled America with their brutal and ruthless details of American life. See David Huzzey, op. cit... p. 429.

2 Ralph Boas and Katherine. Burton, op. cit.. pp. 210-20.

3 Russell Blankenship, op. cit.. p. 649. See also Preston Slossen, The Great Crusade anc After (New York, 1930); Mark Sullivan, Our Times» The Twenties (New York, 1928); Samuel Adams, Incredible Bra (Boston, 1939); and Gamaliel Bradford, The Quick and the Dead (New York, 1231). 19

In the following statement, Blankenship further elucidates this point:

The whole temper of American economic life and popular thinking had changed,...ana our fiction reflected the change....Wartime psychology had put an end to social criticism. During the great struggle, conformity to mass thinking had been imposed as the first price of concerted effort. But criticism is so native to out people that it could not be quenched by official re¬ pression.. ..After 1918 the fault-finders...turned their attention to fundamental elements in our cultural life. Cosmopolitanism had a revival.

ThiB cosmopolitanism was enhanced by the fact that many American men and women, representatives of minority groups as well as of those who were in the majority, had been abooad because of the war. Returning to their own homes in the cities, towns, and villages of America and imbued with cosmopolitan ideas, they eitner found fault with the American ways of life, or calmly re-accepted toe values they had left.

With this "revival of cosmopolitanism," some critics began to attack

1 Russell Blankenship, op. cit., p. 649. The period from 1918 to at least 1923 marked the post-war span, anu it was characterized by many developments. Prior to 1919 women had not voted; but now the amendment which forbade the restrictions of franchise on the basis of sex, was started on its tour of state legislatures. Equal suffrage.won. Then a radical attempt was made to prohibit the production ana sale of alcoholic drinks, and in 1919 the Eighteenth amendment became a part of the Constitution. Further, there was a deliberate political movement to shift industry from & capitalistic to a communistic basis. America forged to the front with its Big Business and its standardizations, its efficiency, its use of natural resources. These phases, along with others, colored American thinking. For a description of the important trends whica followed World War I and which influenced the thoughts of Americans, Dickinson enumerates the following: Important among the movements following the war were: (l) the reaction against the idealisms and romantic conceptions by which was had been promoted; (2) the vouth Movement in which the younger generation demanded a Voice in affairs; (3) a tendency toward isolation of America...; and (4) a no lees important tendency on the part of the minority to pay greater heed to influences beyond the sea. Op. cit.. pp. 665-66. 20 what might be called the Puritan tradition and all that it represented.

These critics were the persons to whom Europe had given ideas foreign to 1 their customary ways of thinking. To these critics, "the villages scattered over the Middle West had developed as living monpments to Puritanism and 2 the pioneer spirit." Yet, prior to this movement, the Puritan concept in small towns had been iaealized and romanticized. What was there about this "Puritanism" of America that incited bitter attack and criticism?

ïïhat causeu a change in approach to subject matter which dealt with the small town?

If we glance back to the formation of towns of early New England, we shall possibly remember that the main focus was the church, and that

Calvinism fostered industry, thrift, ana caution in its adherents. With the westward trek of New Englanders in search of their Golden Opportunity, some of these ideas were dispersed. Also, as new towns were formed along the opening frontier, these ideals formed the bases for activity ana belief.

A certain "smugness of respectability grew wnich was declared to be more 3 concerned iith superficial propriety than fundamental virtues." This

superficiality has been assaulted, Blankenship tell9 us, from many sidest

Its intellectual conformity, its gospel of thrift and in¬ dustry, its democracy, and especially its optimism were subjected to every kind of attack from ridiculé to a reasoned examination of premises.

1 Many felt, for example, that the French standards, particularly Parisian ones, symbolized the true democracy toward which America was striving.

2 Russell Blankenship, op. cit., p. 650.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid. 21

Since those who, having been taught and having believed in the Puritan tradition, moved West, formed towns and helped educate the offspring of

these new towns, certainly they would "stamp upon part of the ever-moving

frontier the impress of a die but in New England by the strong hands of 1 Puritans." This in part accounts for the nearly all-round sameness or

standardization of small American towns. Andr^ Maurois notices this

tendency toward uniformity in a recent article in which he compares

America with Europe.

To a European the first striking fact about the United States is its unity. Wherever I traveled I found a standard town, with its five-and-ten-cent store, its supermarket, its Neo-Gothic churches and the collonade of its local bank. That external unity was a symbol of a deeper unity....From New York to Seattle they had about the same standards of living and the same philosophy of life. The reactions of public opinion were of continental magnitude. Not so in Europe where you cannot travel 500 miles (sometimes much lessj^without discovering an entirely new type of civilization.

This Puritanism—this idea of the optimistic, the respectable, the thrifty,

the cautious, the smug complacency—which had been, prior to the end of

Worlu War I, a source of satisfaction to Americans, became, after 1913, a

subject for realistic analysis and excoriation.

However, there have been some American novelists who have written of the

town in a sentimental, romanticized manner. These writers extol the small

town for its Puritan concepts, for its pioneer traditions, simplicity,

decency, democracy, law and order, and for it9 policies of conservatism.

In this group of writers we might include Meredith Nicholson, William Allen

White, Booth Tarkington, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and more recently, James

1 Kenneth Murdock, "The Puritan Tradition," edited by Norman Foerster, op. cit., p. 87.

2 Andr/ Maurois, "What I Learned About america," Redbook. LXXXVIII (February, 1947), 28. 22 1 McConnaughey, James Gôuld Cozzens, ana Phil Stong. On the other hand, there are such writers as Harold Frederic, Homer Croy, Edgar Lee Masters,

Edward Kimbrough, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Carl Van Vechten, and John Steinbeck, who have revolted against the romanticized versions of the town and have frankly exposed its follies, backwardness, and

uniformity.

There is another group of writers of the small town, however, who have swung with the pendulum of fancy. When it was acceptable to befriend the small town, they did so. 7/hen realistic and objective portrayals

of the village became current, they made exacting studies of the areas.

This is not a fault; it is to be considered in many ways meritorious.

It indicates that one is not averse to suggestion; that one i9 sensitive to vital issues concomitant in significant changes. Zona Gale and '.Villa

Cather may be placed here. In 1908, Gale wrote an overly sentimental work which she called Friendship Village. In 1923, whe changed her tecnnique ana point of view entirely in Miss Lulu Bett. Miss Cather

loves the rugged pioneer period, but at the same time she indicates that

th6 West is full of problems and hardships.

The defending of the small town in novels is generally a romantic tendency, ana to expose it for what it actually is, may be considered a realistic tendency. What attitudes certain novelists since 1918 have

1 In his Village Chronicle, published in 1936, McConnaughey exposes the follies of Southern thinking in the small university town of Churchill, North Carolina. However, the optimistic conclusion indicates a faith in the power of the small town to right any wrongs which might have been in evidence. This conclusion tends to counteract what he has revealed through¬ out the text: that bigoted, small town thinking is a wrong which is badly in need of correction. McConnaughey's position is, therefore, debatable, but the author of this thesis prefers to place him in the list of writers favorable to the town, because of the force of his romantic conclusion. 23 taken toward the small tov.n is our primary concern here. Have they defended it? Have they attacked it? Have they been favorably impressed with the town at one time and unfavorably affeoted at another? An attempt to meet this problem of discovering the attitudes which Booth

Tarkington and Dorothy Canfield Fisher have toward the small town since

1913 will be made in the second chapter. How these differ from such writers as Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and John Steinbeck, fill be discussed in the third chapter. CHAPTER II

THE SMALL TO'viN BEFRIENDED

Many writers consider the small town as a place of idyllic felicities.

They blandly support it and complacently elucidate its highly beneficial and advantageous points. To them, the town is full of peace of mind and contentment of spirit; it embodies all of the qualities of a Utopia; it has few, if any, economic, political, or social problems because the people are good, forthright, neighborly, ana blessed in spirit and in physical comfort; in fact, it is the epitome- of democratic principles.

This extremely favorable attitude toward the town has been expressed in 1 the works of several major American novelists, notably Booth Tarkington and Dorothy Canfield Fisher.

Tarkington is noted for his novels which are laid in his native

Mid-Western state of Indiana. He is genuinely fond of the inhabitants of the towns in his stories, excessively sentimental about their activities, and totally unimpressed with—in fact, unaware of~the disagreeable ramifications of small town life as a whole. He does not see—or h6 does

1 The names of several who have upheld the small town are to be found at the conclusion of Chapter I of this theses. Although each of those named has treated of the small town sentimentally, there is to be found a difference in stress. One, like Cozzens in his The Just and the Un.iust. may subordinate the town and emphasize the inhabitants; another, like Cather in her 0 Pioneers, may make the setting the main character of the plot. Because Tarkington ana Dorothy Canfield Fisher—although they, too, differ in methcas of approach--have consistently marked their novels with the force of the town upon the lives ôf its inhabitants, the author has selected them for purposes of study.

24 25

not admit to—-the existence of faults; the smugness of email town folk;

the superficial standards of propriety; the unfounded optimism—these

are the factors he ignores. Tarkington writes a good-humoured, "folksy"

story which is full of nostalgia and romantic yearnings: he is a promoter

of the "good-ole-days" formula.

Indeed, throughout the pages of his novels which deal with the small

town, we may note his love for the past and his failure to accept kindly

the changes wrought by the invasion of forms of Big Business. Some of his

novels in which he treats of the small town are The Gentleman From Indiana,

the story of a college man who returns to his home-town, helps his people

by ending the rule of a corrupt group, and finally finds joy and satis¬

faction in the simple pleasures of a small town; Penrod, the depiction

of the trials of the adolescent in a .Vest6rn town; Alice Adams, the story

of a young woman beset by feelings of both superiority and inferiority

because she cannot compete in the struggle for social position; The

Magnificent Ambersons, a picture showing the rise and fall of the socially

prominent and immensely wealthy Aaberson family, who succumb, finally, to

the parvenu heads of the new factory system; and The Midlander, a

romanticized version of small-town superiority over and above New York

inferiority and the extension of this debate to apply to the merits of the

villager over the natural faults of the urban individual. We shall confine

our discussion to two of Tarkington's novels written since 1918, The

Magnificent Ambersons and The Midlander ; for they are typical of his

sympathetic, sentimental, “extolling of middle-class virtues as they are

admiringly exhibited in the course of pleasant courtships that move to 1 a happy conclusion."

1 Russell Blankenship, op. cit., p. 653. 26

Parrington recognizes Tarkington's spirit of adherence to small town tenets, and he skillfully analyzes the author *s virtues and weaknesses as he sayst

Tarkington...possesses the virtues of cleverness, optimism, humor, respectability. He honors all the Victorian taboos. Life is an agreeable experience—to the successful, hence it is well to rise. His chief theme is middle-class romance as exemplified in the "valley of democracy": courtship of nice young people through the agencies of parties and picnics. He is a skillful writer, with a light touch, but his art is destroyed by love of popularity— a novel ends well that ends happily. A perennial sophomore, purveyor of comfortable literature to middle-class America.-

The Magnificent Ambersons is set in a locale which Tarkington calls

the Midland area. This Midland town is close enough to Hew York that

George Araberson Minafer, the self-assured hero of the story, may go in to

buy a picture frame; but it is far enough away from that great metropolis

to resent the interference of large city standards by which everyofae in

the town could not speak to, or socialize with, everyone else. Although

Tarkington does not state explicitly the numerical population of this

Midland town, he so emphasizes certain customs of the townspeople that

one may easily assume the limitations of both inhabitants and area. In

the following passage, for example, Tarkington subtly states that the

town is small, so small, in fact, that everyone not only knew everyone

else, but knew intimate details about them.

In that town, in those days, all the women who wore silk and velvet knew all the other women who wore silk and velvet, and when there was a new purchase of sealskin, sick people were got to windows to see it go by....For that matter, everybody knew everybody else's family's horse- and-carriage, could identify such a silhouette half a mile down the street, and thereby was sure who was goin£ to

1 Vernon Parrington, fhe Beginnings of Critical Realism in America (New York, 1930), p. 373. 27

market, or to a reception or coming home from office or store to noon dinner or evening supper.1

Indeed, Midland ie a "homey" town, a small, "homey" town and a curious one that must know and does know what the neighbors plan to do or actually execute. It has inhabitants who think that the greatest joy to be achieved from living is to know nearly everyone else and to ignore—‘as much as is possible—the fact that there are often monetary differences which cause social differences. These differences of financial status which dis¬ tinguished the Ambersons from other members of the town did not at all cause resentment, for the townsmen considered the Amberson family a landmark, a point of pride, and a tradition to be cherished. Further, why should they resent the superior position of the Ambersons? Were they not all invited to the grand balls which the family gave? Were they not made welcome when they entered the ballroom? Why, the Ambersons spoke to everyone in the town. Tarkington implies here that there is liberality, neighborliness, and social democracy in Midland.

The people went to the theatre whenever someone very special, like

Edwin Booth, came to town; "but the theatre did not often do so well; the 2 people of the town were still too thrifty." Tarkington clearly and accurately explains why they were too thrifty, basing his conceptions upon the pioneer heritage of conserving what was on hand for future use.

As we have seen, the early settlers had to surmount many difficulties and face extreme hardships in order to survive in the areas of America which

1 Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons (New York, 1924), pp. 3-4.

2 IbicU, p. 13. 28 were new to them. Thrift became their credos they must save or suffer. These people of Midland were thrifty too, and Tarkington explains whyt

They were thrifty because they were the sons ot* grandsons of the "early settlers," who had opened the wilderness and had reached it from the East and the South with wagons and axes and guns, but with no money at all. The pioneers were thrifty or they would have perished. They had to store away food for the winter, or goods to trade for food, and they often feared they had not stored enough— they left traces of that fear in their sons and grandsons. In the minds of most of these, indeed, their thrift was next to their religion* to save, even for the sake of saving, was their earliest lesson and discipline. No matter how prosperous they were, they could not spend money either upon "art," or upon mere luxury and enter¬ tainment, without a sense of sin.^

Transmitted from one generation to another, the pioneer spirit has

survived; it has manifested itself in many areas, but it is particularly

outstanding within the small town localities of America* Tarkington's

Midland town, too, shows evidences of this spirit, not only of thrift,

but of a certain smugness as well, a smugness which stems from the small

town patriotic belief that any innovation which seems speculative or

drastic-drastic, that is, according to conservative town ideas based on

George Amberson Minafer exemplifies this spirit of complacency toward what Midland has already as he smugly, but kindly, discourages Lucy

for daring to hope that her father*s modern invention will be a

success, particularly in Midland*

1 Ibid.

2 The pioneer or Puritan spirit, as has been pointed out in Chapter I of this thesis, is characterized by intellectual conformity, thrift, industry, democracy, optimism, decency, and smug complacency. 29

"We’ve lived all over," she answered. "Papa used to live here in this town, but that was before I was born." "What do you keep moving around eo for? Is he a promoter?" "No. He's an inventor." "What’s he invented?" "Just lately," said Lucy, "he's been working on a new kind of horseless carriage." "Well, I'm sorry for him," George said, in no unkindly spirit. "Those things are never going to amount to anything. People aren’t going to spend their lives lying on their backs in the road and letting grease drip in their faces. Horselese carriages are pretty much a failure, and your father better not waste hie time on 'em."

So sure is George here, that he can afford to be gentle with Lucy in curbing her enthusiasm. "He spoke as a tolerant, elderly statesman might 2 speak of a promising young politician." But Tarkington does not resent this smugness in George or in Midland* he seems to smile with favor upon it.

This favorable attitude of Tarkington toward the town is further expressed in his glowing descriptions of the outward appearance of Midland also. The architecture, the landscaping, the sites themselves are beautiful, but standardized—a fact which Sinclair Lewis deplores, as we shall see—and Tarkington looks with pleasure upon them.

They stood in commodious yards, well shaded by left-over forest trees, elm and walnut and beech, with here and there a line of tall sycamores where the land had been made by filling bayous from the creek. The houee of a "prominent resident,"...was built of brick upon a stone foundation. Usually it had a "front porch" and a "back porch"} often a "side porch" too. There was a "front hall"; there was a "side hall"} and sometimes a “back hall."

1 Ibid., p. 6.

2 30

Commonly, the family eat more in the library than in the "sitting room," while callers, when they came formally, were kept to the "parlour" a place of formidable polish and discomfort.1

These homes, the way they are set on the comfortable streets, the rooms which have special functions—these are some of the types of uniformity

found in the town which Tarkington looks with favor upon. Too, he possesses a fondness for the social customs of the town.

He tells us of games of croquet ana archery, of the quarrels of the

"girl" and the "hired man," of the dances (the "racquette," the "Portland

Fancy," and the "lancers"), of the songs, of the custom of "Keeping Open

House," and of the fashion in courting and serenading in the old days.

He later tells us, however, of the changes which came as the town grew, and the picture is a rather grim one.

...new faces appeared at the dances of the winter; new faces had been appearing everywhere, for that matter, and familiar ones were disappearing, merged in the increasing crown, or gone forever and missed a little and not long; for the town was gwoving and changing as it never had grown and changed before.*

Gone are the good old day9, says Tarkington, in essence. This nostalgic

touch occurs often in his novels, and is a vital part of his technique in

befriending the town. Indeed, the small towns of America have been

distinguished by their habitual tendency to cling to venerable traditions,

to established patterns of decency and conservatism, to pre-formed ideals

of thrift and determination. The inhabitants of these small towns tend

to love the old; they are intolerant of the new. As illustration of this,

Tarkington draws distinctions between the old town and the new city, a

1 Ibid.. p. 6.

2 31 city which changed the fundamental compactness and neighborliness of the small town into the impersonal sophistication of the city.

You drove between pleasant fields and woodlanu groves one spring day; and in the autumn, passing over the same ground, you were warned off the tracks by an interurban trolley-car's gonging, and beheld, beyond cement sidewalks just dry, new house-owners busy "moving in." Gasoline and l electricity were performing the miracles Eugene had predicted.

It was heaving up in the middle incredibly; it was spreading incredibly; and as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself and darkened its sky. Its boundary was mere shapelessness on the road; four or five others would presently be built at intervals between it and the outskirts of the town; the country road would turn into aa asphalt street with a brick¬ faced drugstore and a frame grocery at a corner; then bungalows and six-room cottages would swiftly speckle the open green spaces—and a farm had become a suburb.*5

Upon these changes, Tarkington looks with disfavor. He is indeed a friend of the small town as he resents the changes which have come upon Midland as a result of the success of the factory system. As he expresses his disapproval of change through the thoughts of George Minafer, one is stimulated to draw a comparison between the spirit of England and that of the small town.

In a sense, the two are alike: both seem to resent change, both cling pertinaciously to the established order, both~if an innovation is inflicted upon them—insist upon a gradual alteration, one that is not too drastic.

It is the tradition fixed by time that holds the respect of England; it is the tradition fixed by custom and sanction that holds the small town in bondage. To be sure, Tarkington does not consider that a resentment of change is bondagel It is, rather, if we consider the emotions aroused in the citizens of old Midland, indicative of strength and of a staunch pride in

1 Ibid., p. 387.

2 32 one’s town, a pride that refuses to ho shaken by the olatter of now machines or the "hustle and bustle" of the new oitizenry* Therefore, the town main¬ tains its pride, but it does so by lauding and oelebrating the days gone by* It looks upon the changes that have been wrought, not only upon the appearance of the town from a clean and quiet place into a grime-covered city, but also upon the citizenry*

But the great change was in the oitizenry itself* What was left of the patrietio old-stook generation that had . fought the Civil War, and subsequently controlled politics, had become venerable and was little hetoded. The descendants of the pioneers and early settlers were emerging into the new crown, becoming pert of it, little to be distinguished from it*.. .A new spirit of citizenship had already sharply defined itself* It was idealistio, and its ideals were expressed in the new kind of young men in business downtown.*

With these distinctions drawn between the old town and the new city,

Tarkington leans heavily toward an almost nostalgic preference for the town as it used to be* He is definitely proud of the Midland that was; and, as definitely, he does not like the dirt and the new prosperity of the new city as the following passage reveals*

They were happiest when the tearing down and building up were most riotous, and when new faotory districts were thundering into life* In truth, the city came to be like the body of a great dirty man, skinned, to shew his busy works, yet wearing a few barbaric ornaments; and such a figure carved, ooloured, and disooloured, and set up in this marketplace, would have done well enough as the god of the new people**

Throughout the final portion of The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth

Tarkington laments the disappearance of the old town, of the cozy oneness

1Ibid*, pp. 377-78*

2Ibid., p. 390. 33 of the people, of the respect toward a central controlling family; and even if

George Amberson Kinafer--a once self-satisfied, smug, assured young man who caused the villagers to hope that some day he might get his "come-uppance"— suffered a financial complication and was subdued to the n6W ways of living,

Tarkington seems to regret the outcome. The pioneer spirit which motivated the lives of so many of the people of Midland is smiled upon by Tarkington.

Indeed, he possesses and expresses a love for the small town.

In The Magnificent Ambersons. Tarkington compares and contrasts factors of the old town as it grows into a city; in The Midlander. however, he draws a decided contrast between a great metropolis, New York, and another

Midland location which is the home of Dan and Harlan Oliphant. Tarkington makes his preference for the Midland area most pronounced; for he not only ranks the location as superior to New York, but he also places the inha¬ bitants of the town in a position higher than those of the city. Indeed,

The Mid lander reflects the author's buoyant optimism and enthusiasm for the small town.

It is the story of Dan Oliphant and his real-estate business venture, of his love and engagement to Lena McMillan (who represents the East and whom

Dan's grandmother calls "the photograph girl"), and of the opposition of the leading men of the town toward Dan's plan of business. The entire story is an extended controversy about the merits of the town against the city, the local girls against the city girls, and th6 Mid-West as against the East.

That in this controversy Tarkington favors the small town is obvious, particularly when Dan, the main character of the story, tells Martha Shelby, a home-town friend,

*‘3hy, the people you see on the stree here, they've all got time enough and interest enough in each other to stop and shake hands and ask about each other's families, and 34

they're mighty nice, intelligent-looking people, too. In New York everybody hurries by; they don't know each other anyway, of course $ and if you g6t off Broadway and Fifty Avenue and Madison Avenue, and one or two other streets, you’re liable to see about as many foreigners as you will Americans} it's kind of a satisfaction to see the good, old-fashioned faces people have in this city.

In addition to praising his town for its neighborliness and its "Americanism," Dan is so proud of the way it ranks over New York that he becomes a booster* "...why, you go down to the Sast Side in New York and look at the way people are crowded, with millions and millions more every year tryin' to find footroom....Thousands and hundreds of 'em have got to come here. That's not all; we’ve got the finest climate in the world, and the babies that get born here practically all of ’em live, and there’s tens of thousands of 'em born every year. In fact, this Midland town is the finest in the country, according to Dan, as he refutes his brother Harlan's statement that it is squalid: "...'squalid' was what he said. He makes me tired....In some ways I think myself it is about the finest...in the country. It kind of came over me when I got off the train yesterday and drove up home through the broad old streets with the big trees and big houses. Another phase of the controversy in The Midlander is the portrayal of the merits of the small town girl over the cosmopolitan New Yorker. Dan's grandmother, as he tells her of his infatuation for Lena McMillan, feels strongly that Martha Shelby is the epitome of fine quality, and that Lena

cannot possibly equal her. The grandmother becomes irritable as she attempts to make Dan realize the value of pioneer stocks "...Martha comes of good stock, ana she's like her stock." "There are other 'good stocks' in the country," he thought peoper to remind her gently.

1 Booth Tarkington, The Midlanaer (New York, 1924), p. 51.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., p. 40. 35

"There are a few people in New York of fairly good ’stock*, you know, grandma." "Maybe a feu," she said5--"but not our kind. The surest way to make misery is to mix stocks." "But good graciousi" he cried, "who's talking of my mixing it with a — "Never mind," she interrupted crossly. "I know what those New York girls are like....They don't know anything in the world except French and soirees, and it's no wonder when you- look at their stocks!"^

As if this tirade is not sufficient i;o convince Da* of the importance of pioneer stock, the grandmother tells him thats "The strongest in mind and body out of the English yeoman stocks came to America; they fought the Indians 2 and the French and the British anu got themselves a country of their own."

After she realizes that she has digressed somewhat from the subject of Lena, she resumes her point and insists that New York girls are ignorants

"...they're so ignorant if you asked their opinion of Lalla Rookh they wouldn’t know what you were talking about; but they think you're funny if you don't know that some fancy milliner of theirs keeps store on Broadway and not on the Bowery. That's about the measure of ’em."^ and with this avowal of disapproval, Dan's grandmother re-echoes the opinion of many I'idland small town folk about New Yorkers.

Just as in The Magnificent ambersons Tarkington opens the story with glowing praises of the town and the houses of the town, so does he in The

Midlander open with a description of the Cliphant homestead.

It stood in a great, fine yard, in that row of great, fine yards at the upper end of National Avenue, before the avenue

1 Ibid.. pp. 65-66.

2 Ibid.. p. 66.

3 Ibid.. p. 69. 36

swung off obliquely and changed its name to Amberson Boulevard. The houses in the long row were such houses as are built no more; bricklayers worked for a dollar a oay and the workman's day was ten hours long when National Avenue grew into its glory. Those houses were of a big-walled solidity to withstand time, fire, and tornado....

This impregnability of the houses is outstanding, but the comparison which

Tarkington draws between the homes of Midland people anu those of New Yorkers is even more marked*

The New Yorker, admitted to these interiors on a visit westward, discovered an amplitude with which he had little familiarity at home, where the brownstone fronts and squeezed apartments whowed him no such suites of big rooms; for, of all the million people in New York, only a dozen families could have houses comparable in size or stateliness.

Pride in the architecture of homes in the Kid-West, faith in the value of

pioneer stock, caution in accepting the proposals for a speculative business,

conservatism in investments, optimism as to the future of an undertaking which

seems to be safe--these are the standards which Tarkington seems to extol in

The I'idlanoer. also, respectability and thrift are enhancing characteristics

of the town, according to this author. In fact, there is nothing about the

9mall town that Tarkington feels is in need of attack except the invasion of

faetors foreign to town tradition! For example, the factory system which creates

an impersonal atmosphere, causes change in th- appearance of the town, stimulates

men to forsake one another in their greed for prof its—these are repulsive to

Tarkington. Repulsion, inaeed, is what he feels -toward any change in the town.

i He so loves the town which holds to tradition that he says himself in The

Llidlander: "In change there perished something romantic and charming, some¬

thing that a true poet used to call Bagdad.The key word here is "romantic";

1 , p. 1.

2 Ibid., p. 2.

3 Ibid., p, 26. 37 for Tarkington is very much the romanticist toward the town, he sentimentalizes the neighbors ano friends of the small town; he sympathetically regrets the influx of people and new ideas; he heralds the past for its customs, fads and ideals; and he impatitntly and with distast expresses rue for the loss of easy camaraderie in the small town as a result of Big Business. Generally his characters do not develop independent of tne towns it controls them and they respect it fully.

Hiddle-class virtues are admired by Tarkington, and "for more than thirty years...he has taken good care never to offend even the most sensitive by an interest in any ideas other than those incontrovertibly fixed 1 in the minds of his readers." There is a superficial sparkle to Tarkington, however, that may act as an anodyne to many readers, but which must—because of its marked lack of penetration into either characters or obvious conditions of the town—act as an irritating stimulant to others. His tender enthusiasms of the town give it the iorce of character: the town is never antagonistic to its own; it is, rather, completely and satisfyingly benevolent and humane. In Tarkington’s novels, it is never the town which has been established by tradition that is hostile to its inhabitants; it is the town wnicn has grown into a city, the town which has allowed alterations in the form of large-scale businesses to invade its ranks, waich is hostile.

Tenaerly, benignly, fatherly, Tarkington has considered the town his preference for a highly beneficial life, and his novels reflect this favoritism fully.

Another novelist who expresses keen interest and a favorable attitude

1 Russell Elanlcenship, op. cit., pp. 652-53. 38

toward the small town in her novels is Dorothy Canfield Fisher; however, whereas Tarkington's interest is a sentimental one, Mrs. Fisher’s is cultural.

Like Tarkington, though, she fails to find any factors in the small town

that are uirectly hostile to culture; therefore she, too, befriends the

village. Blankenship has adequately categorized Mrs. Fisher's position

in what might be called the village controversy, as he says*

Mrs. Dorothy Caulfield Fish6r has perfectly good grounds for denying any interest in the battle of the village as such, but it is undeniable that some of her books have been very comforting to those people who charge Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson with perversely bad sight. Mrs. Fisher has never attempted a conscious defense of the village, nor has she implied a defense by attacking the city. Her chief interest is in culture rather narrowly interpreted, and all her books contribute something to a discussion of this subject. She is drawn into the village controversy through her insistent refusal to find anything in the small town that is innately hostile to culture. Specifically she is concerned with the problem of education and with the 1 price that a shallow social life exacts of cultured people.

That the email town is not barren of culture is a vital contention of Mrs.

Fisher. V/e see this conviction brought to the fore in several of her 2 novels, but we shall examine her The Brimming Cup and Rou^h Hewn; for

they are typical of her deep respect for dignity and culture as they may

be found in the small town.

In The Brimming Cup, a story which emphasizes the correct methods of rearing children, we see the mother, Marise, departing—to a certain extent —

from the normal, well-adjusted life of a woman in a Vermont village to

become enamoured of Vincent, a supremely cultured young man who feels that the way to live is to do exactly as one wishes. It is only in a moment of

1 Ibid., p. 654.

2 Others of Mrs. Fisher's novels are The Bent Twig. The Home-Maker. Her Son's Wife. The Deepening: Stream, and Bonfire. 39

grief and strife that Marise realizes the value of Neale, her affectionate,

kindly husband. The story concludes on an optimistic note, with Marise and

Neale re-united, and the children soothed by the reconciliation.

Culture adds tremendously to the mental lives of people, says Mrs.

Fisher in essence; and it may be maintained and cultivated even in small towns

where one is apt to succumb to a form of lethargic dullness. We see her

point of view clearly in the conversation between Marise and Mr. Marsh, a

gentleman who is to become a neighbor of the Crittendens. Marise is ex¬

plaining her satisfaction in the results of an evening of intellectual

enlightenment :

“It's amazing. It's enough to make a mystic out of a granite boulder. I don't know how many times I've dragged myself to a practice-evening dog-tired physically with work and care of the children, stale morally, sure that I had nothing in me that was profitable for any purpose, feeling that I'd do anything to be allowed to stay at home to doze on the couch and read a poor novel.* "Hell...?" prompted Mr. Marsh. She wondered if she were mistaken in thinking he sounded a little irritable. "well,* she answered, "it has not failed a single time. I have never come back otherwise than stronger, and rested, the fatigue and staleness all gone, buried deep in some¬ thing living."

Too, there is a lack of interest in cities expressed here, and this is due

to the too-worla weary, too-unwholesome people of the cities. Marise, in the

following passage, defends her love of Ashley over New York to Mr. Marsh:

"Oh, I suppose the real 'reason why I go less and less to New York, is that it doesn't interest me as it used to. Human significance is what makes interest for me, and when you're used to looking deep into human lives out of a com¬ plete knowledge of them as we do up here, it’s very tan¬ talizing and tormenting ano after a while gets boring, the superficial, incoherent glimpses you get in such a smooth,

1 Ibid.. pp. 54-55. 40

glib-tongued circle as the people I happen to know in Ne» York. It's like trying to read something in a language of which you knov, only a few words, and having the book shown to you by jerks at thatï"^

Tarkington also, we remember, ha3 drawn a comparison between the city of

New York and the tlid-Yfestern small town; but his dislike for the city was based upon its impersonality, its lack of neighborlinees, its economic

greed and speculative practices. Nrs. Fisher's lack of approval of the

city is based upon the city’s lack of human understanding and upon its

glaring superficiality. Above all, she is impressed with the small town

as against the city for its sincere appreciation of the simple, but

beautiful, factors of life. For example, she devotes an entire chapter to an outstanding event of the Vermont towns the watching pmpatiently for a night blooming cereus to unfold its splendid aspect for the benefit of the

community. As Narise describes the plant to her neighbor, I.lr. Harsh, she also gives him insight into the wonderful quality «.shley people possess

of snaring beauty with eacu other. She tells Harsh*

"It is a plant of the cactus family, as native to America as is Ashley's peculiar sense of beauty which you won't acknowledge. It is as ugly to look at, the plant is, all spines ana thick, graceless, fleshy pads; as ugly as Ashley life looks to you. And this crabbed, ungainly plant-creature is faithfully, religiously tended all the year around by the wife of a farmer, because once a year, just once, it puts forth a wonderful exotic flower of extreme beauty,...when the bud begins to show its color she sends out word to all her neighbors to be ready. And we are all ready. For days, in the back of our minds as we go about our dull, routine life, thers is the thought that the cereus is near to bloom.**

This element of sharing on the part of small town people creates light in

1 Ibid., p. 54.

2 Ibid., p. S3. 41 the lives of mmy: it is humanitarian, ana it is understanding. Nelly

Powers' night-blooming cereus is a part of everyone in tae Vermont hills n6ar ashley; she is neighborly, understanding, and kind, and Marise recog¬ nizes that Nelly's kindness buoys the thoughts of many as she says:

“And all up ano down this end of the valley, in those ugly little wooden houses that look so mean ano dreary to you, everywhere people tired from their day's struggle with the earth, rise up and go their pilgrimage through the night...for what? To see something rarr and beautiful."^-

Indeed, Nelly typifies the small town inhabitant who enjoys doing things for others, not in order to be praised, but for the sheer joy of being kind. LIrs. Fisher stresses this throughout} but she is not, like

Tarkington, blatant in her favoritism for the small town; she possesses a quietly fond sentiment. She seems to accept the neighborliness of people like Nelly and aunt Hetty; she does not repeat glowingly enthusiastic terms to describe them. To the contrary, she appears to present the people

of Ashley, Vermont, as they are anu does not deem it nevessary to flaunt their values or uef-nd their merits. The, are small town friends, and sne befriends them.

The small town atmosphere which Dorothy Canfield Fisher seems to enjoy is the quiet, comfortable, ;eaceful type which is conducive to content¬ ment of spirit and minu. This we see in her description of a hot summer day in the kitchen;

The big pine was good for one thing, anyhow, if it did keep the house as dark a? a cellar with the black shade it made. The side-porch was nice and cool even on a hot summer day, just right for making butter....The churning was getting along fine too. The dasher was beginning

1 Ibid. 42

to go the blob-blob way that showed in a minute or two the butter wuuld be there.

Marisa finds the comfort she is so much in need of (after she hears of

her Aunt Hetty’s death) in the solid appearance of her home»

Marise went through into the dining-room where the table laid for breakfast stood in a quiet expectancy. The old house, well-kept and well-loved, wore a tranquil expression of permanence and security.

Thie "expression of permanence and security" is a natural part of life in

Ashley, Vermont, not only in the form of tne homes but in the characters of

the inhabitants as well. Marise's husband, Neale, is an excellent example

of Dorothy Canfield's praise of the simple and kind-hearted, as we see in the

following passage:

Neale leaned back in his chair now, looked around for his cap, took it up, and looked back at her, quietly, still smiling a little. Marise thought,"Neale is as natural in his life as a very great actor is in his art. Whatever he does, even to the most trifling gesture, ie done with so great a simplicity that it makes people like me feel fussy and paltry." ®

Neale's "simplicity" is marked, but he is not the only Ashley inhabitant

who is "natural," humane, and sincerely interested in his fellowmen in

Mrs. Fisher's novel; she stresses permanent humanity in Ashley. Marise

impresses this fact upon Mr. Marsh as she says»

"We all know all about everybody and everything you know. If you live in the country you're really married to humanity, for better or worse, not just on speaking terms _ with it, as you are in the city."^

1 Ibid,, p. 266.

2 Ibid.. p. 291.

3 Ibid.. p. 336.

4 Ibid., p. 37. 43

Thoroughly fond of the Ashley inhabitants who are "married to humanity,"

Dorothy Canfield Fisher handles these small town people with warmth.

She recognizes that they possess th6 finest qualities of culture, for they share and enjoy beauty together, as a community. Indeed, she believes that community fellowship "breeds an artistic spirit finer than old-world 1 art and culture can offer." Mrs. Fisher is decidedly a friend of the small town as we see also in her Rough Hewn.

Rough Hewn is the story of Neale Crittenden and Marise Allen, who, although they have widely differing backgrounds (Neale was reared in Union

Hill, New York, and Marise was educated in France), eventually meet in

Rome and find they have a common interest* Ashley, Vermont. Neale had

inherited his uncle's mill in Ashley, and Marise had spent a wonderful early childhood there. The two fall in love; and although Neale loves to travel and Marise loves art and her music, they find complete satisfaction not in Europe, but on the mill place at Ashley, Vermont.

Neale was reared in a suburban district of New York, a place which holds many pleasant memories for him because of the congeniality of his

childhood friends and the quietly comfortable location of his home.

Neale's father, like many other business men, wanted his family to enjoy

the beneficial aspects of life in a Bmall area in preference to life in a congested city, as we see in the following passage*

...a few well-to-do business men had built comfortable, roomy homes in an uninspired compromise between their business connections in the city and their preference for open-air life for their families.

1 Vernon Parrington, op. cit.. p. 101.

2 Dorothy Canfield, Rough Hewn (New York, 1922), p. 7. 44

However, Mrs. Fisher does not seem to think that suburban life is com¬ pletely satisfying; for it—like the city, and because it is close to the city—suffers from many of the ills of too largely populated areas. She says of the decision to live in Union Hill*

It was a one-side sort of compromise in which the families came out rather badly....Whatever natural beauty might be inherent in the site was largely nullified by the tawdry imaginings of small architects and building con¬ tractors, and despite popular medical theories, the malaria was about the same on the hill as on the flats.1

Instead, the author of Rough Hewn indicates, through Marise, that the place to find perpetual happiness is in a town like Ashley, Vermont—a place where not only the houses and scenery are picturesque and restful, but also where the people are sincere and good. This is all the more outstanding because of the extent to which Marise has traveled. Despite her treks, she prefers life in Ashley to any other place.

Marise, although she was taken abroad by her parents when she was but a youngster of ten years, has always longed nostalgically for Ashley, her

Cousin Hetty, and the feeling of security which she associates with the

Vermont town. This we see as she, a ohild of eleven, daydreams at her lessons while in France*

Marise loved it so there at Ashley, the dear darling old house in the mountains, with its nice atticky small that no other house in the world had! It just fitted all around you, when you went in the door, the way Cousin Hetty's arms fitted around you, when she took you up on her lap, and rocked and sang, "Yfe hunted and hallooed.* At the memory, Marise's heart gave a home-sick throb. How far away she was from Cousin Hetty and Ashley nowi^

1 Ibid.

2 Ibid.. p. 41. 45

When she eventually meets Neale in Rome, M&rise has become a skilled

pianist and is in the company of two sight-seeing Americana, Miss Mills and Mr, Livingstone. Livingstone, a small town American who has decided to

live in Europe, is imbued with basically faulty ideas about culture. To

him, the digesting of a guide-book of sites and the imitation of continen¬

tal customs is indicative of European polish and refinement, as we see in

the following passage*

He knew so well how to learn to like pictures, because (although he would not have admitted it to any one) he had begun as crassly as Crittenden. He knew what to do; he could tell Crittenden step by step how to pull himself up to a higher level, because he had done it himself. You read esthetic books, lots of them, and all the descriptions of paintings you could lay your hands on, and all the stories you could find in Vasari or any one else about the lives of the painters (Livingstone had a whole shelf of books of that Bort that were fascinating reading—as amusing as La Vie Parisienne)—and you read what Ruskin and Symonds had thought about this or that canvas, and what Berenson’s researches had proved about its authenticity. If you could, you took the book right along with you to the gallery, reading about the picture as you looksd at it; and you kept at it till you did ses in it what people said was there. That was the way to form your taste! *■

That a former small town American like Livingstone should so eagerly seek

Burface culture is distasteful to Mrs. Fisher, but it supports her con¬

tention that the small town is not innately hostile to culture. She, unlike

Tarkington, recognizes the existence of those who forsake the town;

however, she implies that they, like Livingstone, are the unstable exception

rather than the stable whole. The true picture, Mrs. Fisher seems to s?y,

is to be found in people like Marise and Neale, who plan to return to the

small town in order to find happiness.

Indeed, Marise is exuberant about returning to the mill village, and 46 she animatedly expresses her pleasure to Neale as she says*

"But you see when I was a little girl I used often to play in and out of old Mr. Crittenden's house and mill. I've.never seen anything since in all my life that seemed as wonderful and mighty to me as the way the saw used to gnash its teeth at the great logs and slowly, shriekingly tear them apart into boards.

Still, although an adult, full of fond memories about the mill place at

Ashley, Marise continues to paint glowing and vivid pictures of the town.

Her eagerness and enthusiasm transmit themselves to Neale as she sayst

"And in the phaeton you jog through the village, past the church, under the elms with the white houses each under its thick green trees, and such green, green grass every- where--not like Italy, all brown and parched; and then down the road till the turn-off for Crittenden's." 2

In addition to her account of Ashley scenery, Marise exclaims over the merits of small town homes*

"Truly it has its own sort of architectural beauty. It doesn't have a bit of the packing box, brought-in-and- dumped-down look that most dwelling-houses have, no matter how they're planned. It seems to have grown that way." ®

However, when Marise tells Livingstone of her decision to marry

Neale and return to the small town of Ashley in Vermont, Livingstone is incredulous and shocked to discover that anyone—especially one so refined, eo sophisticated, and so cultured ae Marise Allen who had spent the greater portion of her life in Europe—could consider, even momentarily, returning to America. We see the effect of Marise'e words upon Livingstone ae she speakst

1 Ibid.. p. 399.

2 Ibid., p. 406.

3 Ibid., p. 407. 47

"Yes and we're going to live in ashley, Vermont.” ”0h, no! Nol No! No!” he cried to her as though he were clutching at her aa she sank to ruin. "No! Don't say that! You've no idea...my dear young lady, you haven't the faintest idea what an impossible life that would be. You mustn't consider it for a moment* Crittenden, you mustn't let her consider it. An American country village, Good God! You don't know what it is, v«hat the people are.”

This outburst by Livingstone a ffords a striking contrast to ïlarise's calm assurance and faith.in the goodness and permanent stability of the small town'people of America; a^d because this faith is firmly based upon friendships that have endured, it é'annot be shaken, regardless of

Livingstone's opposition.

Like ^ntonia Shimerda, the Bohemian heroine of «ilia Cather's My

-Antonia* Marise is self-reliant ana sure of the feeling of security the ✓ rural area will give her. Just as Antonia has been cut off from ordinary pleasures because of the difficult and rigorous life on a Nebraska farm, so, too, has Marise been cut off from a normal life because of her parents' decision to . ove the family to France, her mother's lack of understanding and affection for the sensitive daughter, and her father's main interest in business affairs. Marise has never known—except for the memorable days spent with her Cousin Hetty in Ashley—the meaning of home. Also, like Antonia, who finally finds contentment and happiness on the farm as the wife of the companionable Cuzak and as the mother of several happy, well-behaved children, Marise presumably finds security and peace in the little Vermont mountain town.

Vermont village folk constitute the main body of Dorothy Canfield

Fisher's studies. She recognizes that there is a pull, a force which

1 Ibid.. p. 502. 48 these people exercise upon one another’s lives and she sympathetically-- not nostalgically, like Tarlcington in his The Magnificent Ambersons. The

I.îidlander, or The Gentleman From Indiana; nor sentimentally, like Zona

Gale in her Friendship Village of 1908} nor even too idealistically ro¬ mantic, like nilliam Allen 3hite in his A Certain Rich IZan—attempts to understand them. She finds that through years of habit and custom, certain standards of humanitarianism have been established in the village.

The inhabitants of her small Vermont towns do not perform good deeds merely because they expect to receive the same in return or because they wish to be praised; they are good to each other because custom has ordained it and because they sincerely enjoy it. Urs. Fisher's village inhabitants have a quiet strength of character.

Not only are good traits manifest in Mrs. Fisher's village folk, but the village itself, as she presents it, possesses a depth of character, also.

It stands for permanence ana ' ecurity; it is a haven to which one may turn for comfort; and it represents a solid and stable background for its posterity. Like Tarlcington, Mrs. Fisher is enthusiastically friendly toward the small town. He, however, deals with the middle-class people of his native Hid-aestern state of Indiana, and she deals specifically with her surroundings in Vermont. She shows us that the town is not barren of culture; he shows 03 that, although not barren of culture, the town— because of its pioneer heritage—cannot lavish attention of "'art* without 1 a sense of guilt." He is often blatantly full of zeal about the small town; she is more quietly cognizant of its finer points. Both may be listed as staunchly sympathetic upholders of the small town; both of them may be

1 Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons, p. 15. 49 called members of the group of novelists «ho befriended the town despite the charges made against it. In the next chapter we shall study these charges and see how the small town has been attacked. CHAPTER III

THE SMALL TOM UNDER FIRE

The town—that small area of America often distinguished by its

limited population, its established (but not necessarily written) laws, its local sentiments, its middle-class concepts, and its Puritan tradi¬ tions—has been for some time a target site for attack from American writers.

Long before Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and John Steinbeck assaulted

it, the town had been indicted.

In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne published his The Scarlet Letter, a novel in which an early Puritan New England town maintains a rigid code of conduct which holds the inhabitants firmly in its grasp. The stern, un¬ relenting, and cold Boston and Salem standards do not allow any digression from the set morality patterns to go unpunishedt Hester Prynne has committed a sin in the eyes of the Puritan leaders of the town and must, therefore, be doomed to wear until her death, the embroidered scarlet *A' (which designates her as an adulteress). Hawthorne, in this novel, while he indicates that there was a certain dignity and nobleness to Puritan ethics, subtly indicts the small New England village for the narrowness, inflexi¬ bility, and cruelty of its cods.

Later, in 1883, E. W. Howe, who was an early realist, published his

Story of a Country Town, a novel in which the hero laments that in Twin

Mounds, Kansas, there are no sincere or heartfelt religious beliefs, friendships, or ideals} there are no unselfish or generous neighbors (their main interest is slanderous gossip)} and there are no simple and unaffected 51 people. Instead, the inhabitants of this prudish and bigoted town are perpetually envious of each otherj they imitate the habits of people from large towns, and they—as the philosopher Little Biggs shrewdly points out- are representative of a very poor class of people who attempt to live in a town like Twin Mounds because they are unable to thrive and compete intellectually or spiritually in any other area.

Indeed, Howe’s was not an idyllic picture, and, although Blankenship ie of the opinion that "Howe’s work was too early to stir up either a 1 defense or further attack on the village," Hartwick states that it"... 2 fired the opening gun against the village in America." Van Doren agrees with Hartwick that this novel by Howe was an important stimulus in opening the eyes of readers and other writers to the faults of the town, as he reveals in the following statement!

Mr. Howe in The Story of a Country Town had long ago made it cynically clear to the few who read him that villages which prided themselves upon their pioneer energy might in fact be stagnant backwaters or dusty centers of fu¬ tility, where existence went round and round while else¬ where the broad current moved away from them.

Whatever the conflicting opinions of Howe's work may be concerning itB position in the village controversy, the ideas promulgated in the story speak for themselves* Twin Mounds, which obviously represents any American small town, contains many elements which are hostile to a life of happiness and of intellectual or spiritual satisfaction.

1 Russell Blankenship, op. cit.. p. 655.

2 Harry Hartwick, op, cit.. pp. 257-58.

3 Carl Van Doren, Contemporary American Novelists (New York, 1928), p. 147 $2

However, it was not until 1915 and the publication of Edgar Lee Masters'

poetic exposure of the town in his Spoon River Anthology that a general

uproar concerning the status of the village became apparent. Masters' poems are brief epitaphs supposedly placed on the tombstones of a Midwestern

graveyard, epitaphs whieh reveal both the character and the occupation of

the deceased. The graveyard truths subtly indict the village for its

standard convention of respectability, and for its conditions which cause the

minds of its inhabitants to rest abnormally on sexual matters. In "Harry

Williams," we see a dreadful and bitter resentment seething in a twenty-

one year old youth who had been inspired by the noble phrases of Phipps, the

Sunday School superintendent, to go to war. In "Lucinda Matlock," we see

the life span of a typical village housewife, reflective of pleasure in

doing what was expected of her at all times. Masters, however, is

pessimistic toward this form of conventional life. On Lucinda's tombstone are to be found the following word's:

And then I found DaviB. le were married and lived together for seventy years, Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children, Eight of whom we lost Ere I had reached the age of sixty. 1 I spun, I wove, I kept the house, 1 nursed the sick...

Graveyard revelations, like those of Lucinda's, Harry Williams', Petit,the V

Poèt, R.F. Tanner, and numerous others, produced a marked effect on the

reading public, and Van Boren indicates this as he states:

Conventional readers had the thrill of being shocked and of finding an opportunity to defend the eustomary reticences; ironical readers, had the delight of coming upon a host of witnesses to the contrast which irony perpetually observes between appearance and reality; readers militant for the "truth" discovered an occasion to demand that pious fictions

1 Edgar Lee Masters, "Lucinda Matlock," edited by Fred L. Pattee, op, cit.. p. 1098. 53

should be done away with, and the marked facte exposed to the sanative glare of noon. And all these readers, most of them unconsciously no doubt, shared the fearful joy of sitting down at an almost incomparably abundant feast of scandal* Where now were the mild*deeencieé of Tiverton, of Old Chester, of Friendship Village?

Yes, "where now were the mild decencies...?" The small town wae in a pre¬ carious position, a position where it teas vulnerable! but with the American participation in the War, it received relief.

World War I stopped, temporarily, the assaults on the venerable tra¬ ditions of the small town. We have seen that the resultant economic con¬ ditions of the War changed American thinking and American fiction. Blanken¬ ship supports this by stating that» "Critics who came into prominence after 2 1918 were cosmopolitans interested in culture and life of the spirit."

Consequently, the battle waged over the small town concentrated itself on those Puritan qualities advanced by the colonial fathers. Thrift, optimism, smug respectability, conformity—these with other spiritual aspects bore the brunt of bitter criticism. But these aspects of the email town were not the only ones under fire.

The town was attacked from other angles also* the "friendly" inhabi¬ tants were not so friendly as they were inquisitive; the family life was not actually so pleasant as it was suppressive; the corner store was not so representative of a congeniality of atmosphere as it was a poor sub¬ stitute for entertainment; and the wide, elm-covered streets with com¬ fortably set homes were not so quiet and comfortable as they were dull.

This dullness received the brunt of criticism as we see in the following

1 Carl Van Boren, op. cit.. pp. 148-49.

2 Russell Blankenship, op. cit.. p. 655. 54 statementi

...the chief criticism was leveled at dullness....Lacking the secure sanction of name and family tradition for his thinking, the pioneer instinctively sought sanction in the solidarity of his group. Few ideas and speculations were tolerated that could not gain the approval of the mass. This fact caused the intellectual life of the village to settle on a rather low level....The home slumbered on generation after generation with little change.*

This refusal to change, to adapt new bases for living, to forget pioneer traditions when the betterment of the town was at stake--these charac¬ teristics of the town were attacked.

In this attack on the small town, three American novelists—Sinclair

Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and John Steinbeck—have forged to the front with their explosive methods of stressing the significance of the village as a vital force behind the lives of their characters. The first of these named, Sinclair Lewis, not merely laid flaming coals to the fire of the small town which had been smoldering since 1915, but he dropped a terrific bomb in 1920 with the publication of Main Street.

Fundamentally, Lewis is a promoter of social ideals. But he employs both realism and satire to express these ideals. With his realism, he documents his individual opinions and observations of our ways of thinking and doing; with his satire, he often exaggerates incidents and events and molds his characters to echo his indictment of our ways of life. In short, with a marvelous passion for detail, he hurls painful invectives and uncomfortable ridicule at the imperfections of the small town, its dullness, hypocrisy, and false standards. With his own realization that the home villages were "dull in comparison with the more variegated worlds

1 Ibid.. p. 656. 55 spread before them by newspapers, motion pictures, excursions in train or 1 automobiles,1* Lewis wrote Main Street, a novel which shocked the American 2 reading public out of its customary faith in the small town.

What was there about this novel which hae earned for itself the repu¬ tation of being shocking? What, specifically, are Lewis* attitudes toward the small town?

First of all, people do not like to see themselves ridiculed in print, exposed to the entire reading public, made victims of a writer's pen*

In Main Street. Lewis satirically indicts the small town and its inhabitants for its economic waste, for its lack of real culture, for its ranks and classes of society, for its insincerity, for its self-complacency, for its insularity. Through Carol Milford, a student at Blodgett College, Lewis maintains that the villages of America need to be radically changed. Speaking with determination, Carol makes the following ultimatum*

"I want to get my hands on one of these prairie towns and make it beautiful. Be an inspiration.

1 Carl Van Doren and Harvey Taylor, Sinclair Lewis (Garden City, 1931), p. 71. 2 Harlan Hatcher pictures the condition of the American mind at the time of the publication of Main Street as he states*

Main Street was published in October, 1920, when the citizens were so weary of idealism and world improvement that they were turning to a small town newspaper-man senator for their new lwader. While the typesetters were putting the book into print, Senator Warren G. Harding was standing on his front porch assuring a people fatigued with internationalism that "there is more happiness in the American village than in any place on the face of the earth." Op. cit.. p. 115.

3 Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (New York, 1921), p. 5. 56

She marries a doctor, Will Kennicott, and goes to live with him in Gopher

Prairie, Minnesota. After they are settled, Carol learns that she is con¬

fronted by a task far more difficult than she had realized. She tries to

find virtues in Gopher Prairie, becomes disappointed, tries again, is

disappointed again. She would like to see Strindberg's plays, classic

dancers, and other outward manifestations of culture as a natural and

inseparable part of Gopher Prairie. The town refuses to be transformed,

however; for it believes itself to be fully established on cultural

and progressive traditions:

Gopher Prairie regards itself as a part of the Great World, compares itself to Rome and Vienna. It will now acquire the scientific spirit which will make it great.*

Sven Carol's husband Will, a good, pleasant, conscientious man, has

acquired the smugness, the dull pleasure in respectability, the blustering

optimism of the small town professional which Lewis paints eo boldly, so

penetratingly.

Since Carol cannot tolerate Gopher Prairie's lack of liberalism, she

attempts to advance her ideas. The town, however, the dull, repressed,

proverb-quoting, hypocritical town, maintains—in fact, clings possessively—

to its biases, its materialism, its mediocrity, never slightly suspecting

that it is biased, materialistic, mediocre. It apes some aspects of the

larger cities, and it flaunts its own banner as it does sol The ensuing

characteristics of Gopher Prairie are symbolic of the elements which

Lewis deplores in any small town:

...an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggish¬ ness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit

1 57

by the desir6 to appear respectable. It is contentment... the contentment of the quiet dead who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized ae the one positive virtue. It is the pro¬ hibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and aelf-defenoed. It is dullness made God.

In such an atmosphere, Carol's good intentions flag; ano 9he, too, succumbs to the 'virus' of the small town. She, too, falls prey to the Puritan tradition, to the dullness, to the conventions of the village. 2 Lewis' assault is severe. He leaves one with no doubt as to his attitude toward the small town. If Carol anu Guy Pollack, the town lawyer, represent the author's conception that the village may have individuals in it struggling against its temperament and laws, then Gopher Prairie itself plays th6 part of a character that is representative of hundreds of American small towns.

1 Ibid., p. 265.

2 authorities and critics vary rather radically in their estimate of Lewis' veritism in Pain Street. See Harlan Hatcher, for a criticism of Lewis' characters ana his abusive treatment of the town in this novel.

She ECaroJ] is a silly girl, dreamy, naive, impractical, unsettled by her"culture“ like hundreds of other co-eds of her day. It was right and proper for the natives to resent her puerile superiorities and to consider her flip and stuck-up ana faintly scarlet when she spoke of legs, silk stockings, high wage3 for servants, and B.V.D's in mixed company. But the finer side of village life is carefully omitted in this satire, and the people are somewhat manhandled as a result. The truth is that ©very single quality that is castigated in Main Street was and is as much a part of metropolitan life as of small-tpwn life. Only it is easier to isolate it in Gopher Prairie. Op. cit., p. 120.

Compare this with Carl Van Doren's statement:

...Mr. Lewis satisfies himself with a slashing portrait of Gopher Prairie done' to the life with the fingers of ridicule. 58

Lewis' primary objective in Main Street was to attack bose conditions of the small town which stimulate smugness, dullness and standardization.

He slashes into the very lives of Gopher Prairie inhabitants and points out the gross imperfections of small town standards of conduct and belief.

His attack on standardization is repeated—but a great deal more force¬ fully because he concentrates almost solely upon this aspect—in Babbitt.

In 1922, Lewis published Babbitt, the story of the life of George

Babbitt, businessman in Zenith, Minnesota. Zenith has a total population of 361,000 persons, and may not, therefore, be considered in this study.

It has, however, small town concepts, and we mo y be able to realize the extent of this fact then Lewis tells us that "Nautilus Ü°v;i is to Zenith 1 what Zenith is to Chicago." Although Babbitt reveals some of Lewis' basic ideas about the small town, we shall not single it oQt for detailed analysis--8ince its setting, as already pointed out, is in an urban area

(however countryfied) and deals primarily with urban situations. Ne shall treat, however, with Arrowsmith. for it sets forth very clearly

Lewis' attitude toward the town.

In this novel, published in 1925, not one, but several towns are pictured; and the factors to be found in one may be easily found in

He has photographic gifts of accuracy; he has all the arts of mimicry; he has a tireless gusto in his pursuit of the tedious commonplace. Each item of his evidence is convincing, and the accumulation is irresistible. No other American small town has been drawn with such exactness of detail.... Contemporary American Novelists, p. 161.

1 Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith (New York, 1925), p. 193, 59 another. The story begins in a small town called Elk Mills, Win^emac.

It was in this village that Martin, the young medic who assumes the im¬ portant role in Arrowsmith, was to receive his inspiration to pursue medicine; and Doc Vickerson, a drink-sodden old man supplied him with it. From Elk Mills to the state university, to Zenith and a large hospital, to Wheatsylvania in North Dakota, to Nautilus in Iowa,

Martin's life seems to be set perpetually in small areas. Despite the devoted attention of his snail-town wife Leora, Martin's life as a coun¬ try doctor is full of trials. The community must approve what he does, or he is an outcast. The community must see proof that he is a good doctor (although it refuses to call upon him for services), or it will continue to patronize the elderly physician who has more than served his time in the medical profession. The community must never suspect that he indulges in any vice, or he will be ostracized. The community — with its standards of superficial propriety—reignéd supremely.

Despite the force of small town customs, Martin does not resign him¬ self to becoming the country doctor who "...often has to be not only physician but dentist, yes, and priest, divorce lawyer, blacksmith, 1 chauffeur, and road engineer." He has one driving ambition* to do pure experimental research. This, coupled with the fact that the towns do not offer him facilities or the stimulus to pursue his hope, causes him to' seek and strive to outwit the limitations of a Bmall town. Through¬ out his experiences, however, the pettiness and the trivialities of the village relentlesely hamper him, until he finally—at the conclusion of the novel—escapes to a desolate spot in Vermont and spends, we presume,

1 Ibid., p. 155. 60

the rest of his life doing experimental research.

Each small town to which Martin goes has its share of trivial stan¬

dards, false distinctions of society, and petty criteria of an individual's worth. In each town, he finds stock characters—leaders whose actual habits vilify their surface appearances, men whose sole ambition is to make

more money, medics who live on past laurels and community approval based

on habit. Full of these characters, ArroWBmith gives us the Bright Young

Couples, the Boosters, the Nice Society Members, the Drinking Element, the

Sheltered (and too suppressed, and therefore wild) girl, and others rep¬

resentative of the rank and file of town membership. For their personal

and small town idiosyncrasies and intellectual sterility, Lewis ridicules

and caricatures the inhabitants of Nautilus. In describing the home of

Dr. and Mrs. Almus Pickerbaugh, for instance, Lewis is almost as devas¬ tating in his irony as Swift or Defoet

The home of Dr. and Mrs. Pickerbaugh, on the steeple- prickly West Side, was a Real Old-fashioned Home. It was a wooden house with towers, swings, hammocks, rather mussy shade trees, a rather mangy lawn, a rather damp arbor, and an old carriage-house with a line of steel pikes along the ridge-pole. Over their front gate was the name* UNEEDiiREST.

He shows us how desperately Mrs. Pickerbaugh attempts to escape convention—

perhaps not realizing why—by naming her daughters such extremely imagi¬ native names as Orchid, Verbena, Daisy, Jonquil, Hibisca, Narcissa, Arbuta, and Gladiola. She says, "I do so hate these conventional phrases that 2 everybody uses, don't you?* But this is her only deviation from the

1 Ibid.. p. 200. Compare this description of a prominent home in a small town with that of Tarkington in any of his novels. The contrast between the realist-satirist and the sentimental romanticist will then become immediately apparent.

2 Ibid.. p. 201. 61 accepted behavior norms of Nautilus society. She, like others in the town, conforms to the orthodox methods of action, considering orthodox as being that which generation after generation of Nautilus people have thought and done for years.

Fundamentally and obliquely, Lewis is telling us that what is of such primary importance to the small town is, in reality, trivia. He abhors the petty standards of the town which make it almost totally blind to the need of the world as a whole for advancements in science. Lewis seems to dis¬ like intensely that the deadly ’virus' of Nautilus, Wheatsylvania, Elk

Kills, and other email towns of America seems to make a man succumb to its

Puritanical standards, its dullness, and its complacency. The town, he seems to say, lives out of deference to standards set by generations before.

Pete Yeska, druggist of WTieatsylvanis, supports this contention of Lewis' as h6 tells Arro«smit|i,

"You young docs make me sick," said Pete. "I was putting up prescriptions when you was in the cradle. The old doc that used to be here sent everything to me. My way o' doing things suits me, and I don't figure on changing it for you or any other half-baked atringbean.*^

Pete and others like him, townsmen who are held captive by custom, unknowingly reach out to draw others into their circle of insularity. They attempt to enmesh Martin, indirectly; for he is unable to branch out and pursue the course of experimentation that he wants. When he has an opportunity to perform a service which will not only benefit the county, but the state as well, he is discouraged and resented, as we may see from the following passages

1 62

There was blackleg among the cattle in Crynnsen County. The state veterinarian had been called and Dawson Hunziker vaccine had been injected, but the disease spread....Uith no excuse and less encouragement, he isolated blackleg organisms from sick cattle and prepared an attenuated vaccine of his own. It took much time...after three efforts with two absurd failures, he had a viccine which satisfied him, and he injected a stricken herd. The blackleg stopped....The veterinarians of the county denounced him for intruding on their right to save or kill cattle ; the phyeioians hinted, “That's the kind of monkey-business that ruins the dignity of the profession. I tell you ArrowBmith's a medical nihilist and a notoriety seeker, that's what he ie.*^

Indeed, people represented in the small towns of Arrowsmith need correction; they need to expand intellectually, wpiritually, and religiously; and they need to avoid habitual clinging to custom.

Blankenship tells us that “Arrowsmith is the thoughtful, sad story 2 of the difficulties that beset an idealist in an acquisitive society."

Thus, we might easily assume that Sinclair Lewis sincerely wants the towns of America to change, not only superficially but radically. In this portion of his assault on the village, Lewis hits his target squarely, just as he does also in Klmer Gantry.

In Elmer Gantry, Lewis takes one stock character, a small town clergyman, and endows him without the virtues which are considered so necessary to- one in his chosen profession. A profligate clergyman, a proud hypocrite, a boastful usurper of women's affections and their money, Gantry drifts through town after town, attracting the inhabitants, appropriating their money, and seducing local girls. In the small towns to which he travels, there may be found elements of the dullness and

1 Ibid.. p. 180.

2 Russell Blankenship, op. cit.. p. 661. See also Fred L. Pattee, The New American Literature (New York, 1930), p. 343. 63 standardization, elements which Lewis does not find satisfactory.

Cato, Missouri; Paris, Kansas; Concordia, Kansas; Babylon, Minnesota;

Sautersville, Nebraska; Banjo Crossing, Minnesota—these are the towns which experience Gantry’s platitudes, haranguing oratory, seduction of females, and drunken orgies. They do not differ basically. Bach has its saloon-keepers, its fanatic religious converts, its members desirous of

’faith healing’, its Baptist laymen, its housepainters, its druggists.

None of these admits that his town is dull, despite the fact that a traveling evangelist can draw an immense crowd, appropriate their earnings, and dupe them with his sermonB. None sees that his town is backward and that the family life is suppressive, even when the sheltered young ladies are thrilled by the meaningless attentions of a wayward minister. ïïhen we consider with what excitement and flurry young women like Lulu Bains receive Gantry's imprudent actions, we see that Lewis is showing us that small town life is gullible, ignorant, stupid.

A score of times before March, in her own house, in an abandoned log barn, at the church, Elmer contrived to have meetings with Lulu. But he wearied of her trusting babble. Even her admiration, since she always gushed the same things in the same way, began to irritate him. Her love-making was equally unimaginative. She always kissed and expected to be kissed in the same way. Even before March he had had enough, but she was so completely devoted to him that he wondered if he might hot have to give up the Schoenheim church to get rid of her.1

Lulu Bains is but a symbol of small town gullibility. Other hamlets,

American towns, numerous little villages—each of these has its Lulu

Bainses, its ’followers of the gospel’, and its wide-eyed inhabitants who, because of their suppressed lives, may be duped by those a bit more worldly or ambitious.

1 64

Although in Main Street, and to a certain extent in Arrowsmith, the town assumes as much importance as the characters themselves, in Elmer

Gantry. the small town is subordinate to the clergyman. But the places to which he goes to preach and proselyte are small towns; and Elmer Gantry cannot help forming his own ideas about the people in these towns. Through him, Lewis expresses his own lack of admiration for certain phases of small town life.

As he walked toward the house of the Widow Clark, to which a loafer directed him, he hated the shabby village, hated the chicken-coops in the yards, the frowsy lawns, the old buggies staggering by, the women with plump aprons and wet red arms—women who made his delights of amorous adventures seem revolting—and all the plodding yokels 1 with their dead eyes and sagging jaws and sudden guffawing.

Elmer Gantry is not the only novel by Sinclair Lewis which has viciously lashed out at the follies of small towns in a subtle and indirect, rather than in an obvious and direct, attack. In his most recent novel—Kingsblood

Royal—he uses a small town for the background of deep-set prejudices and petty discriminatory practices.

Kingsblood Royal has as its setting the town of Grand Republic,

Minnesota, a town which has a population of 85, 000 people. Its leading character, Neil Kingsblood, is representative of the slightly-above- average ambitious American; he owns his own home, he has a wife who is active in community affairs and a daughter for whom he is building a sound future; and he—by virtue of both ability and the aid of his wealthy and socially prominent father-in-law—has an excellent position at

1 Ibid., p. 263. Contrast this exaggerated and satirical picture of stifling small town scenes and ridiculous characters with any of Dorothy Canfield Fisher's descriptions. You may possibly notice the marked dis¬ tinction between Lewis' high ridicule and Fisher's quiet approval, between Lewis' outstanding distaste and Fisher's calm acceptance, of the ordinary small town inhabitant and his routine existence. Unlike Lewis, Fisher sees hope and intellectuality in her small town characters. 65 the Second National Bank of Grand Republic. He, like others of his set,

is complacent and self-satisfied, is happy and upset only by trivial matters

(such as, for illustration, the irresponsible attitude of Belfreda, the

Negro maid), and is comfortably sure that his position in life is secure.

However, Neil's father sets in motion—unwittingly, at the time-

forces which upset n<5t only the lives of the immediate family, but the beliefs and standards of nearly everyone in Grand Republic. He tells

Neil that according to an old legend, the Kingsblood family is directly descended from the English line of royalty; and he urges Neil to trace the facts as far as he is able, in order to discover if the legend has some elements of truth in it. It is in Neil's efforts to discover the truth, that he brings disaster into the lives of his family* he uncovers the facts, and realizes that he is of l/32 per cent Negro blood—but according to set American standards, total Negro.

Neil's life hereafter is a veritable nightmare. He haunts the Negro i section of town; he bewilderedly wanders through a maze of conflicting ideas; he cannot decide whether to admit his position or to veil it. Having lived within a group of people whosé standards call for a condescending, half-jesting, half-cruel attitude toward the Negro, Neil is fully awqre of the problems that will arise if he admits his discovery. Finally, his father,

Shortly after Neil reveals the truth of the myth to him, calls a family conference and exposes the facts. From this point on, none of the family members is the same. Shock, disbelief, hatred—each emotion finds a victim within the family circle. Even Neil experiences shock, but because he is basically a just man, he cannot live between two worlds for very long* he exposes himself and his family at a stag dinner given at his very exclusive club. This action places him on the side of the inferior, the minority, 66 the insignificant, the Negro; and he is segrated, snubbed, and dropped socially. Even the Negroes of Grand Republic do not know whether to accept him, and, ironically enough, many of them distrust him. No one can under¬ stand how a man can have lived so long ae a white American only to suddenly admit to being a Negro; for the word Negro in Grand Republic stands for

Prejudice, for Isolation from the best residential districts, for Blows and Brutalities. It is this prejudice and segregation, this cruelty and unfair intolerance, which Lewis attacks in Kingsblood Royal.

This novel presents issues in the small town which Lewis feels must be abolished. He gnashes into Grand Republic's faults but makes us realize that this Minnesota town is not the only of its kind in America which manifests petty traditions and established ideas about the superiority of races; which has separate living districts for different races; which has unwritten codes against minority groups that eliminate a qualified member of these groups to obtain of hold a worthwhile position; and which lividly castigates, assaults, and hates an educated Negro. Lewis dispels any illusions one may hold about the fairness of the small town in so far as racial issues are concerned. He laughs at those white Americans, like

Violet Crenway, who patronizingly pat Negroes on the back and call them their “friends.“ He ridicules those whites who, although extremely crude and ignorant themselves, abhor crudeness in, and resent intelligence in, members of a minority group.

YiTith his penetrating insight, Lewis crushes the small town for harboring unfounded, technically and scientifically incorrect, beliefs; and Grand Republic becomes, like Gopher Prairie, a symbol of folly.

Grand Republic is described in retrospect by a family of New Yorkers who are traveling through Minnesota. Because they are New Yorkers, the 67

Blinghams take pleasure in scoffing at the “hick" towns through which they pass. In the following discussion, they laugh at Grand Republic*

Miss Blingham looked at the map. "Grand Republic, Minnesota. That seems to be about forty miles from here, and it's quite a village—65,000 people." “Let's try it. They ought to have some sort of a hotel to eat at," yawned Mr. Blingham.... “All the best people there eat at the Salvation Army Shelter!" yelped Mrs. Blingham.

Although the Blinghams exaggerate the small compactness of the town, with this touch, Lewis establishes fully that Grand Republic is a small town which manifests small town concepts; but it is not until later that he indicates what these concepts are. We glean from his introduction that the town is small enough for nearly everyone to at least be aware of the lives

of the leaders of the town, rind Neil 'a family, his set, his wife's family, and its set, are prominent residents of Grand Republic. In the ensuing passage from Kingsblood Royal. Lewis characterizes Neil's friends*

They were all good neighbors, ready to lend the lawn- mower or a bottle of gin, all good customers at the bank, speaking well of his courtesy and steadiness, and they were all lynchers, of the Northern or inoperative variety, who had "built up good businesses by their own unaided industry and efforts, and didn't for one by God second intend to let any sentimental love for the lazy bums or workers stand in the way of th6ir holding onto what they got."2

It is because he knows that his friends are like this that makes Neil

realize the disastrous results which would accrue if he exposes his secret, and this is a great contributory factor to his indecision* he does not want his wife Vestal, nor his daughter Biddy,to suffer. That a man must

fear his friends is an intolerable idea to Lewis. But what is even more

1 Sinclair Lewis, Kingsblood Royal (New York, 1947), p. 3.

2 Ibid., p. 79. 68

intolerable is that these same friends who have respected Neil fully before

the revelation, later completely shun him. "tfhy do they do this?" Lewis

seems to ask. Has his character changed? Have his features changed? Has

his personality undergone a radical alteration? The obvious answer to each of these questions is "No," and Lewis resents that the narrowness of these 9mall town inhabitants will not allow them to s6e the answer.

Taken as individual cases, Neil's associates manifest the small town

custom of doing what tne community sanctions. At least one brave soul,

Judd Bowler, who nad declared firmly (at first) that he would "stick by"

Neil, is not so brave after all, as he says to Neils

"Neil, a9 you know, I haven't got any prejudices nyself, but everybody seems to think I ought to protect my wife and daughter, so maybe it would look better if you and I just didn't see each other from now on, when we can avoid it."l

And another, Mayor Fleeron, one-time friend and still neighbor to Neil,

becomes highly antagonistic toward Neil since he has discovered that the

man is part Negro. He angrily bursts into the Kingsblood home and the

following discussion occurs:

"I'm the mayor of this city, and a neighbor of yours— unf ortunately1" Neil wa9 adequately angry. "Oh, are you, Ed? I thought you lived in Swede Hollow." "I don't want any of your lip, KingsbloodJ I'm the mayor of this city—* "Still?" "—and I tell you we don't want any of you niggers horning into decent white neighborhoods, corrupting the kids and frightening the women." "And bringing down real-estate values? That's the usual line, Ed."2

Neil was correct in his surmise. The next step of community disapproval

1 Ibid., p. 237.

2 Ibia., p. 23c. 69 came in the form of an agent for a real-estate firm*

He did not mention Negroes; he chirped, "Neil—Mrs. Kings- blood—I*ve got a customer that’s crazy to move out here to the Park and likes the looks of your house, and same time, I have a lovely little house in Canoe Heights, right near that wonderful fellow, Lucian Firelock.* He did not suggest that this would also make it near to Dr. Ash Davis, and not far from Sugar Growse.... Neil said, "No. This is our home." Vestal said, “Certainly not. It's a silly idea. Why Canoe Heights? There’s a terrible mixed population there — Jews and Italians and even—Oh. I see." *

Community standards of thinking, small town elements of narrowness, powerful creeds of bigotry and prejudice—these reach a crescendo in

Kingsblood Royal, in a display of privilege and right being governed by insolent bias; Neil’s neighbors, at the conclusion of the novel, employ force and the support of the police, to oust the Kingsbloods from their home.

As has already been stated, in Kingsblood Royal the town is indirectly attacked for harboring, as it does, its underlying follies in thinking.

These forces, however, govern the lives of the Kingsbloods, their friends, their families, and—inevitably, of course—the future course of the Negroes of Grand Republic. Not one of the men of Grand Republic has courage ènough to stand against the forces of Social Sanction; not one of Neil's former friends is strong enough to deviate from the trend of established custom.

Lewis has written other novels which deal, directly or indirectly, with the cultural and sociological faults of the small town; but these four—Main Street. Arrowsmith. Elmer Gantry, and Kings blood Royal—are typical expressions of his views. In them, the small town, more or less,

1 Ibid., p. 239. 70 assumes the role of a sadistic giant, sometimes (for his own sport) playing with his victims, sometimes—also for his own sport—crushing them. We

see also in Babbitt (1922), Dodaworth (1929), Ann Vickers (1933), Cass

Timberlaine (1943), and, again, Kinzsblood Royal (1947)—that the significant

characters are engaged in a struggle to relieve themselves of the gigantic

clutches of certain types of provincialism and stupidity. Carol tries to

free herself from the complacency and lethargy of Gopher Prairie in Main

Street; Martin from the insularity of Wheatsylvania and Nautilus in Arrow-

smith; Gantry and Sharon from the dullnesses of numerous small towns in

Elmer Gantri; Fran (who is Sam Dodsworth's wife) from the repressions and

standardisations of Zenith in Dodeworth; Ann from the superficial propriety

and false standards of respectability of Waubanakee, Illinois in Ann Vickers;

Jenny from the false ideals of marriage in Grand Republic in Cass Timberlaine and Neil and Vestal Kingsblood from the prejudices of Grand Republic,

Minnesota, in Kingsblood Royal.

In some of these, the small town, admittedly, is not the central theme,

rather some other phases of American life which Lewis, the reformer and

satirist, would have changed or ameliorated. He strikes, for instance, at

American business in Babbitt. He attacks the ministry in Elmer Gantry. He assaults American marriages in Cass Timberlaine and Dodeworth. He exposes

the hypocrisy and absurdity of race prejudice in Kingsblood Royal. In others

however, Lewis sets out deliberately and directly to a attack the small town and its stultifying influence. In so doing, he attacks any aspect of the

small town not in keeping with his ideals of democracy and toleration in

America. And, as his words in the following passage reveal, Lewis feels that America has become an amalgamation of wisdom and folly, truth and

contradictions, progress and backwardness* 71

My own conviction that one of the most amusing, exasperating, exciting and completely mysterious peoples in the world is the Americans may well be ignored. My delight in watching the small Middle-Western cities grow, sometimes beautifully and sometimes hideously, and usually both together, from sod shanties to log huts to embarrassed-looking skinny white frame buildings to sixteen-story hotels and thirty- story bank buildings, may be commented on casually. There is a miracle in the story of how all this has happened in • two or three generations. Yet, after this period, we have a settled civilization with traditions and virtues and foolishness as fixed as those of the oldest tribe of Europe.1

This note which Lewis writes in reference to his latest book, Kingsblood

Royal, might easily reflect his ideas so basic in the writing of his other

novels. Certain it is that Gopher Prairie and Wheatsylvania and others of

Lewis' fictional towns maintain "traditions ano virtues and foolishness as

fixed as those of the oldest tribe of Europe." Certain it is, also, that

Lewis has assaulted, not sentimentalized, the small town.

Another writer, Sherwood Anderson, has also blazed away against the

town. Hie attack, however, is aimed at those economic and political ele¬ ments in the American small town which bind an individual, limit his free¬

dom, and frustrate his very soul. Specifically, Anderson deplores the loss

of the spirit of freedom which men had when overcoming the obstacles of the frontier. He feels that standardized America suppresses men and makes

them victime of the assembly line. It is with this suppression of men's

desires that Anderson is impatient as we Bee in the following comment

by Blankenship:

It is the shift from the old physically free frontier to the new, industrialized Middle West that oppresses men, declares Anderson. They long for physical escape as their fathers longed for physical freedom. But today there is no

1 Sinclair Lewis, "A Note About Kingsblood Royal." Wings (June, 1947), 72

public domain of the human spirit; men have been blocked and thwarted until their spirits, like animals on tread¬ mills, can only strive. They never get anywhere. They cannot escape their inner selves. Thus in a very definite sense Anderson becomes the most bitter of the village rebels.^-

It is apparent in Anderson's novels that he, as a naturalist, is primarily

concerned with man's inner life rather than his overt actions# The urges

and drives of his characters are important to him; but he also places the

small town under an intensely brilliant light in a totally bare room and

points out—through the thwarted lives of his characters—its errors.

Opinions of critics vary concerning Anderson's work. Hatcher, as we see in

the ensuing comment, extols the author's writing which deals specifically with the small towns

Some of the best writing about village life from the point of view of the underdog has come from Sherwood Anderson. No one who has yet written in America can surpass him in handling those materials offered to a mind with a Fgeudian bent by the poor but sensitive boy in a small town.

On the other hand, Pattee characterizes Anderson differently, as is revealed

in the following passage!

Anderson is a paradox in our hopeful America, a literary agnostic, and an intellectual hobo, a grown man still adolescent, an agitator with no program, a poet soul with no foundations, a romanticist turned cynic, a man from the westward march deflected eastward, a frontier individualist who has lived into the age of industrialism and chain stores and combinations. Such men build no foundations. They stir the waters to rauddiness, but they do nothing permanent.

Whatever the conflicting opinions of «nderson's intellectual prowess,

1 Russell Blankenship, op. cit.. p. 671.

2 Harlan Hatcher, op. eit.. p. 159.

3 Fred L. Pattee, New American Literature, p. 337. 73

literary skill, and motivation for writing may be, his works indicate his

interest in studies of small town disillusionments. In order to discover

Anders,on’s attitudes toward the small town, ws shall consider two of his books—“Poor White and Kit Brandon.

Poor White, published in 1920, is the story of Hugh McVey, who was

born in Mudcat Landing, “a little hole of a town stuck on a mud bank on the 1 western shore of the Mississippi River in the state of Missouri." Hugh

long remembers Mudcat landing for its miseries* his home, which was a mere

fishing shack; his father, who was continually in a drunken stupor* and

his own menial jobs in the town, which varied from the cleaning of cisterns

to the sweeping of a railroad yard. But he also remembers Mudcat for one

inspiring note in his youthful life* a kind, generous, and ambitious woman, Sarah Shephard, gave him the real home he so direly needed. Sarah's

optimism is spite of adversity, and her pet motto—-"Do everything well!"— transmitted themselves to Hugh; and he, by her prodding, finally leaves

Mudcat Landing in search of a richer life. He eventually settles in Bid- well, Ohio; and, after a time, he invents a mechanism to set plants. With the success of his invention, McVey becomes a wealthy cog in the Wheel of

Industry. He marries Clara, the daughter of a prosperous farmer; and just when it seems that he has fulfilled his great hopes for a satisfactory life, he realizes that his invention and its accoutrements--the factory, mass

production, and management problems—have led to strikes, cutthroat com¬

petition, and other labor ills. Again life seems futile to McVey.

In fact, this is a story of futility. From the wretched economic con¬ ditions of Mudcat Landing to the labor disturbances of Bidwell, Hugh sees

1 Sherwood Anderson, Poor White (New York, 1928), p. 3. 74

little to inspire him. Even success has not brought him mental freedom.

Whether he lives in Bidwell or Mudcat, North or South, he finds that the town

is full of underlying forces which continuously drive him.

It is with these forces that Anderson is primarily concerned. He

attacks the economic waste of Mudcat Landing and considers it a force which

contributes to the chronic discouragement of Mudcat men. The town has no

stable or permanent form of work for its men. It has no fixed system of

financial transactions except the credit system which keeps everyone, for

the most part, poori

The merchants, who ran their stores—poor tumbledown ram¬ shackle affair8~on the credit system, could not get pay for the goods they handed out over their counters and the artisans, the shoemakers, carpenters and harnessmakers, could not get pay for the work they didi Only the town's two saloons prospered. The saloon keepers sold their wares for cash and, as the men of the town and the farmers who drove into town felt that without drink life was unbearable, cash always could be found for the purpose of getting drunk. ^

À Sarah Shephard, the sharp-tongued, good woman with whom Hugh makes his

life until he becomes an adult, deplores her home town and says of the 2 inhabitants* "They're a lot of miserable lazy louts." Although he under¬

stands that Sarah's opinion is based upon her hatred of inactivity and

dislike of a lack of ambition in others, Anderson attempts to go beyond

Sarah's description of Mudcat men, in order to understand why these people

are "miserable lazy louts." He blames both the economic and social patterns

of the South*

Practically all of the people of Hugh's home town were of

1 \ Ibid.. p. 3.

2 Ibid., p. 18. 75

Southern origin. Living originally in a land where all physical labor was performed by slaves, they had come to have a deep aversion to physical labor. In the South, their fathers, having no money to buy slaves of their own and being unwilling to compete with slave labor, had tried to live without labor....Their food was meager and their bodies degenerate, children grew up long and gaunt and yellow like badly nourished plants. Vague indefinite hungers took hold of them and they gave themselves over to dreams.^

Many emigrated; few ever got very far out of the Southern region. Those who did reach Southern Indiana and Illinois "were merged into the life 2 about them and with the infusion of new blood, they a little awoke.*

Anderson places his character McVey into this slothful environment, analyzes Mudcat’s fallacies, takes McVsy from Mudcat and places him in

Ohio, and analyzes the environment of Bidwell. Into whatever setting he places McVsy, however, Anderson persists in his attempts to discover the

forces that drive the character, the factors which create dissatisfaction, and the aspects which interfere with his complete enjoyment of life. It is the covert functions of a town which interest Anderson, and he tries to make his readers understand the existence of the forces which govern his characters. However, he does not indicate that each small town of

America is alike in the types of drives and underlying impact; he shows

us, in fact, that even Mudcat Landing and Bidwell, Ohio, may be contrasted.

The contrast which Anderson draws between the miserable and economi¬ cally wasteful email town in Missouri and the energetic manufacturing town in Ohio is striking. In fact, one might consider Mudcat Landing, Missouri, the exact opposite of Bidwell, which is described heres

1 Ibid.

2 Ibid., p. 19. 76

In every part of the town of Bidwell, the new impulse to¬ ward progress was felt. Old men, who had become settled in their ways and had begun to pass their days in a sort of sleepy submission to the idea of the gradual passing away of their lives, awoke and went into Main Street in the evening to argue with skeptical farmers.^

This energetic impulse is enhanced by the introduction and success of KcVey's plant-setting device, and the victory of the Machine over individual entep- prise. The factory system expands in Bidwell, and everyone who is able, works; they are attracted by large wages and routine jobs. However, with the advent and growth of mass production and standardization, private artisans suffer. Hers again, Anderson attacks an economic factor which causes men to suffer) mass production. Because large-scale production attracts a majority of the workers, private artisans can get no apprectices to remain with them. As an example, Joe Wainsworth, a harness-maker, is ruined by the competition of industry. Anderson gives us Joe's side of the issue :

"It isn't like the old times," he said, "things are changing....Vse always knew the men we did business with and always wouId know them. Now it's different. The men now, you see, who are here in this town to work—well, next mohth or next year they’ll be somewhere else. All they care about you and me's how much work they can get for a dollar..That'a what they're up to."2

A further contrast between the factory system and that of individual enterprise is offered by Jim, an employee of Joe's, who, however, greatly favors the industrialists, as he says to 'Wainsworth*

"0, the devil," he cried* "Can't you understand what you're up against? The factories are bound to win. For why? Look here, there can't anyone but some old moss-back who has worked around horses all his life tell the difference

I Ibid., p. 121.

2 77

between hand- and machine-sewed harness. The machine-made can be sold cheaper. It looks all right and the factories are able to put on a lot of do-dads. That catches the young fellows. It's good business, ^uick sales and profits, that's the story." *■

KcVey does not seem to understand fully the technological crises which invariably arise in an industrial society. He is bewildered when the harness-maker becomes the slayer of two men, when strikes result, and when he realizes that he is in some way responsible for these drastic acts.

Hatcher describes the bewilderment which enveloped Hugh as he ponders upon the ills of the Machine Agei

...the bewildered Hugh got something of a vision from the disease of thinking. He discovered that growth was not in itself good, that there was some kind of unformulated re¬ lease and satisfaction in the presence of his pregnant 2 wife as he walked with his arm around her into the house.

Hartwick also gleans from the novel that Hugh McVey suffers from bewil¬ derment; but whereas Hatcher notices a ray of hope in the conclusion of the story, Hartwick believes that futility is the final keynote, as we see in

Ms following interpretation»

...and in the end McVey himself is left fettered to a gnawing sense of blighted hope, as he realizes what terrible 3 genii have been released upon America by his hands and brain.

The chaos which is an integral part of both Kudcat Landing and Bidwell,

Ohio, is a part of any town beset by the problems of either economic waste or large-scale production, Anderson seems to say. He is tremendously in¬ terested in what happens to men living in a democracy and an industrialized

1 Ibid.

2 Harlan Hatcher, op. cit.. pp. 165-66.

3 Harry Hartwick, op. cit.. p. 122 78

society, and he triee to understand the forces of towns which drive men into other areas in continuous search for richer lives. Anderson’B novels are not too sharply localized, .'/hat happens in a Southern town might easily occur in a Mid-Western town. The individuals of an Eastern village might suffer just as severely from the throes of economic waste as the persons

in a Northern village.

Another of Anderson's novels, Kit Brandon, published in 1936, indioatee that the social, political, and economic forces of a mountain village are not at all to be desired in a world which might wish for progress and

advancement. Kit is a handsome, shrewd, hard—but sometimes wistfully tender--woman who wants those facts of her life published which would help

others know everything about a mill village. With this in mind, she approaches a reporter and asks him to write her story, which deals, for the most part, with the mountain towns of East Tennessee. As the novel opens,

Kit is telling the writer her story as the two drive along a highway.

Born in a sparcely populated mountain district,- she was soon taught to

fend for herself; to do her mother’s chores; to maintain a passive indifference when revenue officers came to search for stills; to avoid—as she grew older--

the untoward attentions of men who came to her father's shack; to learn that

a woman must do certain things which she does not want to do if she is to

finally achieve her aim. She became determined to earn money, and Bhe

decided to make her way in the world alone. The writer, who has known many

mountain folk and is aware of their customs, wonders about Kit’s decision

to face life alone:

"I was curious about her leaving home, striking out for her¬ self. Other women and girls had gone out of the hills... but they seldom went alone.

1 Sherwood Anderson, Kit Brandon (New York, 1936), p. IS. 79

However, Kit*s decision servea to indicate her unusual determination, her

indomitable reserve and pride; and the writer learns that although Kit has been a factory worker, a sales-girl in a dime store, a speed-demon for rum¬ runners, a rum-runner herself, and a constant victim of the advances of men, vestiges of this determination, pride, and reserve remain. As Kit continues

her revelations, she talks of her determination not to have a child by

Gordon Halsey, whom she cleverly managed into marrying her; of her insatiable hunger for expensive clothes and fast cars to drive; and, yet, throughout all her experiences, she does not really know what she actually wants. 1 "What did I want? What have I always wanted?" are the questions ehe asks herself over and over again.

As Kit talks, she paints vividly representative pictures of her environment, and, because she is perfectly candid, she omits no details which will enable her confidant to understand her. Of her birthplace, she saysî

There were, she explained, plenty of people, thousands and many thousands of them, when she was a child, living as her family had lived,"if you can call it a living," she said. They hung up there in their hills, a quite isolated, a strong enough people, in the very heart of America, sticking tight to their barren hills, "like fleas on a dog,” she said....The little houses, usually very small, tucked away on some side road, very narrow, winding and stony, almost always the house standing by a mountain stream. Sometimes three or four men could build a house in three or four days.2

Anderson, through the lips of Kit Brandon, describes the inhabitants of the

villages, exposing the folly of prejudices and stereotyping, oommon to

Americans t

1 Ibid.. p. 350.

2 Ibid.. pp. 4-5. 80

Every man with a bottle of moon whiskey in his hip pocket. There would be fair, straight-shooting fellows and mean, cheap ones. All would be miserably clad. As a mangoes along in life he finds out something very important to this business of living. It is that you can't go through America, or I dare say any other country, in the way so many of us do, saying, "The highlanders are so and so, the Southerners, . the workers, the rich, the poor, the proletariat, the bourgeoisie so and so," making these terrible Maeon and Dixon line judgments, believiiig in them. Drunken fights—stabbings, and shootings sometimes among the hill men, horse trading—thus, men always lived, horse¬ trading. It was a part of the game being played.^

Even in the mountaineer-rnonopolied business of manufacturing moonshine,

Anderson allows us to see that the speed-up and industrialization of raw whiskey operations in small towns in the mountains has far-reaching conse¬ quences.

There were great quantities of mountain-made moon...pfcetty raw stuff it was...being made in the mountain country of the upper South. More and more Tom and his crowd had begun to dominate the industry. It was the story of every big American industry. Tom hud grown more and more greedy. The little makers in the hills, the ola type of mountain moonshiner of romance, w&s being wiped out. In the patter of the communists he was being "liquidated." In many of the mountain counties Tom had made an arrangement with the local officials. He and his men helped catch the smaller offenders. They "turned them up.* ^

Thus, even in a small mountain area, democr.-.cy exacte a toll. It is the monopolists who control the strings of law and order; they are the on6s who are able to pay for their security. It is against forces such as this, too, that Anderson rebels.

As Kit continues to talk of her past experiences, it is not difficult to discover that she is restless and ill at ease. '.Vhat does she want from

1 Ibid.. p. 7.

2 Ibid.. p. 117. 81

life? one is tempted to ask. She has had a background of financial inse¬

curity; she seeks for and finds financial security. She has lived in an environment which is unstable morally; she seeks marriage anu gets it.

She deplores « he dullness of the quiet mountain shack which was her home,

and she craves excitement; sh6 drives big cars ano becomes an operator.

But she constantly searches for some cure for her restlessness. Even at

the conclusion of her story she has not found exactly what she wants, but

she thinks so.

There «as in her ind an almost definite notion of a new kind of adventure she might begin. She felt warm and alive.1

The town has driven Kit, Anderson serais to say, into a search which

has no goal. It has frustrated her. She cannot find relief, but she

continues her search. Kit is, perhaps, fighting against the social st-mdards

of the mountain which ordain that women are inferior to men.

You saw a mountain man coming into some little mountain town afoot. He strode along the road ahead of his woman, did not walk beside her. Kany of the mountain men had big families....'.Then a son of the family had reached maturity, began to think of himself as a man, he stepped ahead of his mother and walked just at the heels of his father. The 9 women submitted.*

Or perhaps Kit is swept on by the rapid flow of the infilterir.g elements of

power and riches, whatever it is that drives her is what Anderson attacks.

He resents those elements in the town that oppress and thwart an individual

until he is forced to leave in continuous pursuit of peace of mind.

Indeed, Anderson seems to be thoroughly disgusted with the ills of

American life. As Blankenship roints out, the author reveals his animosity

1 Ibid.. p. 373.

- 2 Ibid.. pp. 113-14. 82 toward "the stupid repressions that a standardized society inflicts on its victims, and...the baffled and frustrated lives that are by-products of a 1 regimented social life and thought." He is intolerant of standardizations and monopolistic controls which an industrialised society inflicts upon the masses of human beings and tends to high-light biïarre and exceptional cases. For this reason, Thomas Dickinson feels that Anderson's attack is not fully justified*

But Anderson is more convinced than is Lewis that the city is wrong. So he studies derelicts, sorry specimens who even in being twisted into strange shapes keep some flavor of primitive passion and feeling.

At times, it is difficult to discover just what forces Anderson is attacking, for his symbolisms are often obscure. For example, even at the conclusion of Kit Brandon, one may not easily discern for what Kit is searching.

Anderson makes it perfectly clear that his characters are fleeing from environments which lack the necessary social or economic elements condu¬ cive to perpetual happiness or fruitful lives, but he neglects to clarify where one may find the Golden Pot at the End of the Rainbow, His characters leave a village or town because they are dissatisfied; they settle in another town to search for satisfaction. Here again they become unhappy because of antagonistic forces. But where now may they go? Anderson does not seem quite sure about hie havens. Perhaps Parrington's conception of. Anderson's attack on town environments characterizes the author accurately*

Anderson is a lean and sparing writer whose èymbolisme are obscure and puzzling. He has a single theme* the disastrous effect of frustrations and repressions that create gro¬ tesques...Due to (1) Crude, narrow environment that drives to strange aberrations; (2) Repressed instincts that break

1 Russell Blankenship, op. cit.. p. 665.

2 Thomas Dickinson, op. cit.. p. 678. 83

forth in abnormal action. The consequence is a black loneliness—the hunger of fellowship and its denial.1

Despite his obscurity, however, Anderson allows one point to remain out¬ standing* he does attack the town. He fails to see merit in those small areas which suppress a man’s life, and he writes accordingly.

Another writer has recently emerged to indict the small town. He is

John Steinbeck, former ranch hand, carpenter, painter, newspaper man, and playwright, a man who—with his bold, direct statements and economy of words—strikes unswervingly at the major economic problems of the thirties in his Of Mice and lien, and Grapes of Kfrath. and of the forties in his

Cannery Row and The Wayward Bus. We are to be concerned here with his Grapes of "Jrath ana Cannery Row in studying Steinbeck’s attitude toward the villages and small towns in America—these because each is representative and expresses the outstanding economic crises of its decade.

Joseph Warren Beach adequately expresses the type of characters with which Steinbeck deals in his novels, a9 he says*

John Steinbeck deals with children of th6 earth. By this I mean human beings more lowly than prosperous ranchers— I mean those helpless children of earth who can never raise themselves more than a few feet from its surface, and for whom th6 question of the next meal remains a major operation.^

Indeed, with his handling of these poverty-stricken people, Steinbeck opens America's eyes to its own errors. Such vivid descriptions of tha distressing conditions of farm and village life cannot help being sociological in scope} and, yet, the “children of the earth” with which

Steinbeck deals, stand out in our minds not merely as a mass which needs

1 Vernon Parrington, op. cit.. p. 370.

2 Joseph Warren Beach, op. cit., p. 316. 84 both guidance and understanding, but as possessors of spirit as well. Candidly this author reveals every phase in the wretched lives of his characters in need of change, tie leaves no atone unturned in portraying the disastrous social, political and economic ills so prevalent in America; and if he is too frank, too boldly out-spoken, it is because he feels that the conditions call for frankness and boldness of expression.

In Grapes of ffrath. the story is about a family of tenant farmers, the

Joads, in tne state of Oklahoma. The «Toads' crops are destroyed by a great dust storm; and they are forced—through economic pressure—to give up their land which is to be nandled by a syndicate of bankers. Large scale proauction drives the Joads and other tenant farmers out of Oklahoma, as may be seen in the following passage from the novels

The owners of the land came onto the land; or more often a spokesman for the owners came. They came in closed cars, and they felt the dry earth with their fingers.»..The tenants, from their sun-beaten dooryards, watched uneasily when the closed cars drove along the fields....They were silent. Some of the owner men were kind because they heted what they had to do, and ome of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold.*

The tenant farmers learn that "one man on a tractor can take the place of 2 twelve or fourteen families." They learn that a bank can seem like a tyrant,

like a hypnotist, controlling both men and land; but they learn the difficult way—they are compelled to leave the land. Too, because they have spent their lives on the land they have learned to call theirs, they feel more acutely that the bank is taking away that which is rightfully their own; and we see with what futility they appeal to the agents of the bank!

1 John Steinbeck, Grapes of

2 Ibid.. p. 44. 85

...being born on it, working on it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it. We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't like a man. Yes, but the bank is only made of men. No, you're wrong there--quite wrong there. The bank is . something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does,,,yet the bank does it...Oh, it's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.1

The Joads--in a used car which they c onvert into a sort of covered wagon-- go to California in search of work in the orchards. The entire family goes, the grandparents, the parents, six children and one son-in-law, one uncle, and Casy the preacher. Their trip, long and arduous, is full of hardships.

The grandparents die on the way; supplies and limited cash dwindle; and to add to the family's misery, when they reach their destination of hope, 2 thev do not find a welcome. California, the Promised Land, has refused them the opportunities for which they had hoped, and their trip has been in vain. They are a displaced people in a confused economic set-up.

1 Ibid,, p. 45.

2 Frank J. Taylor pictures California's reception of the book in the following passage*

Californians are wrathy over The Grapes of Wrath. John Steinbeck's best-selling novel of migrant agricultural wor¬ kers. Though the book is fiction, many readers accept it as fact. By implication, it brands California farmers with un¬ believable cruelty in their dealings with refugees from the "dust bowl."...The experiences of the Joad family, whose misfortunes in their trek from Oklahoma -fco California Steinbeck portrays so graphically, are not typical of those real migrants I fend in the course of two reportori&l tours of the agricultural valleys....The lot of the "fruit tramp" is admittedly no bed of roses, but neither-is it the bitter fate desoribeo in The Grapes of Wrath. "California's 'Grapes of l/rath'," Forum, CII (December, 1939), 232- 38. 86

Through Casy, we are given an idea of Steinbeck's dissatisfaction with the problems of tenant life on a farm.

Casy said, "I been walkin' aroun* in the country. Ever'.*- body's askin that... .»/hat we cornin' to? Seems to me we don't never come to nothin.' Always on the way. Always goin' and goin'....Movin' 'cause they got to. That's why folks alY^ays move. Movin' 'cause they want aomepin better'n what they got.^-

Indeed, in each town through which the Joads travel, Casy sees other families

on the verge of being driven away. In a town called Paden, for example, a

gas station attendant laments his existence to Casy. He says*

"Well, I don* know what the country's cornin' to. I jus* don' know. Here's me tryin' to get along, too. Think any them big new cars stops here? No, sir! They go on to them yella-painted company stations in town.

Despite this note of futility in The Grapes of Wrath, however, the

neighborliness, the kind sharing of what little each had, the sincere

welcomes to fellow-travelers—each of these made the trip seem, for a

moment at least, easier to bear. But Steinbeck really accentuates the

harshness of their condition by revealing their kindnesses to each other

in spite of adversity. Consider, for example, the pleasure with which

one traveler shares the spot which he and his wife have camped upon*

The lean man's face broke into a smile. "Why, sure, come on off the road. Proud to have ya',..

And notice how Tom Joad, too, welcomes—in his casual way, however-r-a family

who is desirous of enjoying a cool spot by the river*

1 Ibid., p. 173. a Ibid.. p. 171.

3 Ibid., p. 183. 87

"Mind if we come in and set?" 1 "She ain't our river,we'll len' you a little piece of her.

All along the trip with the Joads, we see countless others drawn into

the swift current of unsatisfactory social patterns. Large-scale production

. for the purpose of profit and economy victimize families like the Joads. 2 Land syndicates in California are as powerful as the bank syndicate back

on the farm in Oklahoma.

Steinbeck seems to be telling us in Grapes of Wrath that America's

system of finances and production is unnecessarily unfair, intolerant, and

intensely cruel. The farmers, the people of small towns, the villagers—

those whom we see as the Joads wearily spin westward--cannot forttrol this

system. The economic problem is too great; the social patterns are too

complex. A man in California with a million acres and a man in a rickety

1 Ibid., p. 278.

2 In direct contrast to Frank Taylor's article an California's reception of the book, Carey McWilliams made a study which indicates that Steinbeck's portrayals are true. Compare the two following passages which reveal the results of the analyses of each man. Consider, first, an excerpt from Frank Taylor* Along three thousand miles of highways and byways, I was unable to find a single counterpart of the Joad family. Nor have I discovered one during fifteen years of residence in the Santa ClaLra (the same valley where John Steinbeck lives), which is crowded each summer with transient workers harves¬ ting the fruit crops. Cp, cit.. p. 576. Compare this with the introduction to Carey McWilliam's study, which states*

A few months ago the world was startled by John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Not only was it an outstanding American novel, but it revealed almost unbelievable con¬ ditions among California's thousands of migratory agricultural workers. The question ran around the world, "Is it true?" Despite efforts of Chambers of Commerce and other conservative groups in California, people speedily learned that it was true....The urgent question now is what is being done about it? "What's Being Done About the Joads?" New Republic LXXXXX (September, 1939), 178-80. 88

Hudson-Six with no home, no land, no job and many mouths to feed—these contrasts stand out in bold relief against a grim background of involved sociological implications. Steinbeck best expresses his hatred for the condition when he writesl

...ana in the eyes of the people there is the failure? and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vihtage.^-

John Steinbeck does not stress the farm or town life so much as he does the antagonistic forces in the towns. Rather, one feels the sparcely inhabi¬ ted areas in the background. In this respect he somewhat resembles Anderson.

He impresses upon us, however, that the vicious system of one area extends into another. Thus a family like the Joads is being continually driven and shoved onward. Thus it suffers, without ever knowing why. 2 Cannery Row was published in 1945. Its setting is in Monterey, California, near Carmel and Salinas. The lives of the characters must be pulled from the stories which evolve about th^m. Cannery Row is one part of the town, “a

1 Ibid., p. 477.

2 Orville Prescott has written a decidedly negative review of Cannery Row. The following passage is taken from the article!

This little tribute to a waterfront block in Monterey and its indecorous inhabitants has some of the Steinbeck mannerisms, ' much of the Steinbeck charm and simple felicity of ex¬ pression, but it is as transparent as cobweb. For all its 208 pages, it is less substantial than a short story. There isn't much here, no real characters, no "story," no purpose. Instead, with a considerable pointless vul¬ garity and occasional mildly humorous scenes, a series of loosely connected incidents is thrown casually together....If its characters have no personality, Cannery Row itself has some of its author's personality....But this is John Steinbeck in an off moment. "Books of the Times," New York Times. January 2, 1945, p. 17, col. 5. 89 poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a nostalgia, 1 a dream.* Its inhabitants are a motley group, distinguished by their calm acceptance of whatever life has in store for them and by their unruffled attitude toward the blows they receive from the "higher-minded ladies of the 2 town who demanded that dens of vice must close to protect young manhood."

Bums and gamblers, prostitutes and a canny store-keeper, mechanics and an artist, a "Doc” and a Dora Flood—these characters emerge as living repre¬ sentations of the sub-ranks of Monterey society. They live their lives in a town where the fish dannery is the dominant source of labor, where, as we see in the following passage, even the appearance of the town changes with the sounds of the cannery whistles*

...cannery whistles scream and all over the town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row to go to work. Then shining cars bring the upper classes down; superintendents, accountants, owners who disappear into offices. Then from the town pour Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women in rubber coats and oilcloth aprons...then the whistles scream again and men and women straggle out and droop their ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again—quiet and peaceful.

It is the life in Cannery Row after dark that Steinbeck pictures. Lee

Chong, the shrewd grocer, Dora anu her girls, Doc of the Western Biological

Laboratory, and the bums called Mack, Gay, Hughie, and Eddie—these are

the members of the town who do not merit—according to Monterey's upper

classes-respect. These are the townsmen who accumulate debts cheerfully and ignore them just as good-naturedly. These are the persons who live in

1 John Steinbeck, Cannery Row (New York, 1945), p. 1.

2 Ibid., p. 152.

3 - Ibid., pp. 1-2. 90 boilers disposed of by the Hediondo Cannery; who sit on rusty pipes in the vacant lot as if they were in a park; who run houses of prostitution and are hated by the "lascivious sisterhood of married spinsters whose husbands reaps ct 1 the home but don't like it very much;1* who sometimes commit suicide because they feel lonely and unwanted; who form society barriers of their own. For example, William, a night-watchman and general handyman at Dora's, finds himself unable to make friends among the bums on the block; and he suffers deeply because of his isolated position:

Now William's heart broke. The bums would not receive him socially. The» felt he was too far beneath them. William had always been introspective and self-accusing....William thought dark and broody thoughts. No one loved him. No one cared about him. And then he thought how he had a right to live and be happy just like anyone else, by God he had.^

William's determination flags when he confronts others with his troubles; for they, being more interested in what they are doing at the moment than in anyone's troubles, casually shrug him off. When the Greek jestingly agrees with William that suicide is the best step to take, the night-watchman make s the drastic move:

William knew he had to do it....His hand rose and the ice-pick snapped into his heart. d

False social barriers, even among the lower ranks of society, often cause disastrous consequences in any town.

At first, the town seems to recede into the background as one reads

1 Ibid., p. 16.

2 Ibid., p. 19

3 Ibid., p. 21. 91

Cannery Row, but in reality, it is not at all subordinate. Of «hat is Cannery

Row a part but the town? Upon what do69 tr.e responsibility fall for the conditions existent in Cannery Row but the town? Indeed, Steinbeck does not minimize the town; neither, however, does he make the town a strong character as do Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis. But he does paint such eye¬ opening pictures of conditions in Cannery Row that he challenges the reader to find the town blameless. Let us consider, for example, Lonterey's vicious system of politics that weaves Dora into its web*

A s for Dora—she leads a ticklish existence. Being against the law, at least against its letter, she must be twice as law abiding as anyone else. There must be no drunks, no fighting, no vulgarity, or they close Dora up. Also being illegal Dora must be especially philanthropic. Sveryone puts the bite on her. If the police give a dance for their pension fund and everyone elso gives a dollar, Dora has to give fifty dollars, '.ihen the Chamber of Commerce improved its gardens, the merchants each gave five dollars but Dora was asked for and gave a hundred, \7ith everÿhing else it is the same, Red Cross, Community Chest, Boy Scouts, Dora's unsung, unpublicized shameless dirty wages of sin lead the list of donations. But during the depression, she was hardest hit.1

The boy Frankie, who loves Doc but who is not mentally sound, is arrested

first anu then "put away" because he takes a clock from a jewelry store. He wanted to give the clock to Coc for a birthday present, because everyone else was contributing. '«Vhen Doc finds out about the theft, he asks the policemans

‘ *lShat did he take?" Doc asked. "A great big clock and a bronze statue." "I'll pay for it." "Oh, we got it back. I don't think the judge will hear of it. It'll just happen again. You know that." '."Yes," said Doc softly. "I know. But maybe he had a reason. Frankie," he said, "why did you take it?" Frankie looked a long time at him. "I love you."2

1 Ibid., p. 17.

2 Ibid «. p. 186. 92

Thua it is that the generous and kind-hearted suffer, and they suffer because they cannot meet the standards of a society which are, in many way9, superficial. Is it sincerity of purpose which causes the upper- classes of the town to crusade against the vices of the socially unaccep¬ table? Or i3 it that these same reformers organize and form campaigns of disapproval because they are inactive during the duller seasons of the year and are, whimsically enough, in need of some method by which they may expend energy? Notioe what Steinbeck says about these self-appointed crusaders*

...a group of high-minded ladies in the town demanded that dens of vice must close to protect young American manhood. This happened about once a year in the dead period between the Fourth of July a«d the County Fair. ...But this year, the ladies went on a real crusade. They wanted somebody's scalp. It had been a dull summer and they were restless. It got so bad that they had to be told who actually owned the property where vice was practiced, what the rents were and what little hardships might be the results of their closing.

And so Cannery Row must be victimized by the upper classes of Monterey, victimized because the “higher-ups" must relieve themselves of boredom, and because these same reformers fail to realize that people like Doc,

Dora, Lee Chong, and even the “bums1*, must settle in some area and create

some means of livelihood.

In Cannery Row. Steinbeck—unlike Lewis who considers the town a dynamic force which is fully capable of crushing its inhabitants, of stultifying its leaders with its lethargy and dullnesses—allows the town to play a subordinate role, a role in which it is the backdrop for the baseness and impotence of a social system. It is the people who primarily interest Steinbeck; they, with their codes of conduct,

1 Ibid.. pp. 152-53. 93

their perversities, their individual tragedies, are responsible for the

milieu of the town. Obliquely, then, John Steinbeck attacks the^towç, not because of its characteristics, but because of the distinctive charac¬

teristics of its inhabitants. In The Grapes of ?frath. for example,

Steinbeck does not indicate that it is the land itself which drives the

Joads awayj rather, it is a land syndicate composed of toen which stimu¬

lates the trek westward. He—like Cather, whose "art was essentially

a representation of...reaction between the soul of man and its environ- 1 ment*—sees tragedies in life but a revivifying hope in human nature.

But whereas Miss Cather creates a harmonious blend of character and

environment, of soul and setting, in her novels, Steinbeck creates a soul,

first of all ( a self-respecting soul but one which has suffered injus¬

tices), flings it against a backdrop--the setting, if you will—and this

soul stands out boldly, making the environment more a part of it than

it a part of the environment. That Steinbeck is no staunch admirer of

the town cannot be denied; "it is clear that he holds the community responsible for the man without work, home, or food. He seems to intimate

that what cannot be cured by individual effort must be met by collective 2 mea8urea." He resents those aspects of American life which condemn mankind but do not offer a solution to its problems. Today, he is one

of the most active foes of the follies—economic, social, and political— existent in the small areas -of America.

1 Henry Seidel Canby, "Willa Cather (1876-1947)," Saturday Review of Literature. XXX (May 10, 1947), 23.

2 Joseph barren Beach, op. cit.. p. 345. 94

We have, up to this point, considered the early indictments of the village; the factors which emerged after World ?/ar I to cause writers to form definite attitudes toward the small town; the satirical attacks of

Sinclair Lewis in his Main Street. Arrowsmith. Elmer Gantry, and Kings- blood Royal, upon the town's dullnes, stupidity, hypocrisy, and preju¬ dices; the venomous and naturalistic attacks of Sherwood Anderson upon the unstable economic conditions and the suppressive factors which result from large-scale production of a standardized and industrialized society, as in his Poor White and Kit Brandon; and the objective humanistic attitude of John Steinbeck toward the faulty economic, social and political complications as indicated in his The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row.

Although each of these writers, as has been pointed out, is intolerant

i of certain phases of life in small areas, each approaches the problem of attack in a different manner. Lewis deplores village dullness and bigotry; he satirizes incidents, details and characters in order to make his attack marked. Andsrson dislikes village insecurity and oppressions; he uses a great deal of symbolism and fatalism to set in bold relief many of the problems his characters face. Steinbeck feelB that many mass economic problems are in need of drastic improvement; he realistically, but hu¬ manely also, pictures the squalid conditions of certain American areas.

These three have assaulted the ills and many of the venerable traditions of American small towns, and they have done much to destroy the traditionally idyllic picture of the town which had long been seeped in sentimentality. CHAPTER IV

THE SMALL TOWN: AN APPRAISAL

In literature, the treatment of the village and its inhabitants is - not a recent innovation; it hag long been an accepted concept. Indeed,

4 many writers have, prior to this century, expressed their attitudes toward the village or small town life in their works. In Shakespeare's comedy "As You Like It," for example, we find that high raillery and ridicule are directed toward Audrey, the lively country wench, and William, 1 2 the dull country bumpkin; in William V/ycherly's The Country Wife, we discover a prevailing seventeenth century attitude which points toward the artifice of city dwellers as contrasted with the wholesomeness but ignorance of country folk; and in the works of' many writers of the eighteenth century, we recognize an outstanding divergence of opinion: some prefer the merits of the city and actively oppose the outlying dis-

1 Shakespeare, in his “As You Like," fashions the rustics Audrey and William in direct contrast to the Court Fool, Touchstone. They, by vir¬ tue of the clown's sophistication and wit—he has, of course, been indoc¬ trinated to the ways of Court—appear both stupid and gullible.

2 William Wycherly implies—through the character Mr. Pinchwife,who (to avoid being a laughingstock and a cuckold) goes to the country to secure himself a pure end faithful wiffi—that the ignorant behaviour and customs of villagers are considered safer than those of the tricky city dwellers. Pinchwife's comments to his country wife, such as the following, indicate this* Pinch. Ay, my dear, you must love me only, and not be like the naughty town-women who only hate their hus¬ bands and love every man else; love plays, visits, fine coaches, Tine clothes, fiddles, balls, and so lead a wicked town life. II, i.

95 96

tricts, while others possess a sincere appreciation for life in the village. 1 Thus, Samuel Pepya' Diary and Samuel Butler's "A Bumpkin or a Country Squire"

reveal a definite inclination for the city and candid ridicule of the villagers

John Dyer's "Grongar Hill,* Joseph rfarton's "The Enthusiasts or, The Lover

of Nature," James Thomson's "The Seasons"—and others, of course—are

indicative of a genuine fondness for village or rural life; and Eernard Llande-

ville's "Tbs Grumbling Hives or, Knaves Turned Honest" and John Gay's "Trivia”

attack the ills of the city by pointing out sharp distinctions between London

and the peaceful rural areas. Ramifications of these opposing viewpoints

were continued also in the works of Oliver Goldsmith and George Crabbe.

Goldsmith, in 1770, published his "The Deserted Village," a romantically

sentimental poem in wnich "Sweet Auburn...is proclaimed...the loveliest 2 village of the plain;" and George Crabbe, in 1783, issued his "The Village,"

a realistic and indignant attack on an impoverished borough and the bigotry

1 Samuel Butler sees nothing whatever that might be considered meritorious about rural inhabitants^ as we see from the following passage*

...is a clown of rank and degree....The custom of being the best man in his own territories has made him the worst every where else. ...He does his endeavor to appear a drole, but his wit being, like his estate, within the compass of a hedge, is so profound and obscure to a stranger, that it requires a commentary, and is not to be understood without a perfect knowledge of all circumstances of person and the particular idion of the place. "A Bumpkin or a Country Squire," Eighteenth Century Poetry and Prose, edited by Bredvold, L'cKLllop, and t'hitney (New York, 1939), p, 11.

2 Oliver Goldsmith,"The Deserted Village," Twelve Centuries of English Poetry and Prose, edited by Newcomer, Andrews and Hall (Atlanta, 1928), p. 405. This nostalgic treatment of the small town holds that Auburn is an ideal place, place where the village minister modestly serves his peuple and ignores the temptations of graft and power; where the schoolmaster advances hie ideas severely, but possesses great fondness for his pupils. Goldsmith regrets that Auburn's simple pleasantries should be consumed by the follies of politics. 97 and rudenesses of its inhabitants.

Sentimentally or candidly, nostagically or with verisimilitude, writers have, prior to and including today, expressed their attitudes toward the small town and its inhabitants in various literary fields. In poetry, drama, the essay, and—although these forms are comparatively recent, particularly in

America—the short story and the novel, the small town has often been treated.

Although it may be considered a relatively new form in American letters, the novel, has made rapid strides toward extablishing itself as a prominent type of literature. It has proved itself especially flexible and adaptable to the demands of American writers who have chosen to put into concrete form the visions and ideals, the customs and activities of a frontier nation, a nation which has tended to look with pride to its beginnings in tiny settlements and small towns. Too, the American novel, like older forms of literature, has learned to adjust itself to the currents of American thought. When, for 1 example, a buoyant idealism and zealous patriotism have prevailed, it has assumed, in many cases, the tone of romanticism; when disillusionment and dis¬ satisfaction have accrued as the possible results of a questioning attitude on 2 the part of a people toward the controlling form of government, it has often become realistic—even naturalistic, and just as it has shov.n evidences of both romanticism anu realism, so, too, has its treatment of the small town been either romantic or realistic, sentimental or factual. Just as Dyer,

Thomson, Goldsmith and others have been affectedly tender toward the town;

1 Between 1815 and 1870, for example, because America was expanding materially, a glowingly optimistic spirit prevailed. This spirit was re-echoed in i,he literary productions of—to name but a few—John Pendleton Kennedy,John Esten Cooke, Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Thoreau, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

2 Refer to Chapter I, page 17, of this thesis. 98

Shakespeare, Pepys, ana Butler often satirical toward it; and Mandeville,

Gay, and Grabbe realistic toward it; so have oertain major American novelists, since 1918 in particular, either lauded the small town for its venerable pioneer traditions or assaulted and ridiculed the superficialities associated with them.

In this study, we have examined, primarily, the attitudes of Booth

Tarkington, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and John Steinbeck toward the small town; and we have discovered that whereas

Tarkington and Fisher have befriended the town, Lewis, Anderson and Steinbeck have attacked it. Also, however, we have seen that even in their concurrent viewpoints, each differs basically in his approach ana treatment of the small town. Let us consider first those who have given the town their staunch support—Booth Tarkington and Dorothy Canfield Fisher.

Tarkington, in his The Magnificent Ambersons and Tne Mid lander, writes of his native Mid-Western state of Indiana; ana he proves that his interest in the small town is sentimental and nostalgic by lauding the pioneer spirit of optimism, thrift, conservatism and respectability, and by deploring the loss of these through the infiltration of innovations such as the factory system and the quick profits of large-scale production. He resents the im¬ personality of the citizenry which is an inevitable accompaniment to growth and progress of a town; end as he resents, Tarkington yearns for the old days, the days when everyone in town knew everyone else, when homes were epacious and rambling, and when the streets were broad, beautifully shaded, and quiet. He, like Mandeville and William Allen White, contrasts the town with the city and finds the city lacking in the primary requisites of a peaceful and happy life; and, because he finds that the city does not measure up to town standards, he extols the town more highly. To him the town is a 99 person--a fatherly, gentle person who leaves an inheritance of fine pioneer traits which should b6 held in reverence. Tarkington is indeed a friend of the town. How is it, then, that he differs from Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who also supports the town?

Primarily, as we saw in her The Brimming. Sup and Rough Hewn, Fisher is interested in the cultural aspects of the town; and because she does not find the town barren of culture, she sees it as a place of dignified and refined living. True, she recognizes that there are elements of impoverishment and social inequalities, but these are subordinate to her particular interest.

She, like Tarkington, prefers the humanity of small town inhabitants to the glib, superficial traits of city-dwellers. To her, the village is a character wnich influences the lives of the inhabitants, not forcible—as Lewis so vividly portrays it--but gently, implying that it stands for permanent security and lasting contentment of spirit. Whereas Mrs. Fisher’s characters are intelligent people endowed with humanity and dignity, Tarkington's characters are, often, middle-class in financial status and mediocre in intellectual prowess. Though these two possess many points in agreement, they do not concur in stress. Not only, however, do these who have befriended the town differ, but tnose who have attacked the town also differ basically in approach and method.

Each of the three writers—Lewis, Anderson, and Steinbeck—stresses his oislike of certain factors of life in small towns of America. Lewis, for example, concentrates, for the most part, upon the areas of the Mid-Nest. He is "...indignant at things he loves for their stupidity. Further, he attacks the abuses of democracy, never democracy itself, for he is not for revolution, 1 but for reform." In his Main Street, ^rrowsmith. Elmer Gantry, he, by -

G. Lewis Chandler, "Sinclair Lewis, Man and ïïriter" (Lecture delivered to class in English 478, Atlanta University, Atlanta, Georgia, jipril, 1946). 100 employing satire, holds up for ridicule the Puritan elements of propriety, convention, thrift, and optimism. He exaggerates these traits in his characters and causes them to stand out boldly as aspects in need of correction* In his

Kingsblood Royal* he launches a vicious attack upon prejudice, exposing what he believes to be a chief American ill. Lewis considers the small town a giant force, capable of bending at will, its inhabitants. He, like Anderson, objects to the small town but does not draw a contrast between it and the city which might indicate a fondness for the large metropolis.

Anderson, although he too endows the town with enourmous strength, a strength which seems to suppress and render insecure an individual inhabitant, attacks the town for the ills of standardization, for its economic instability, and for its oppressions, ^'ith symbolism, he, in many of his novels, indicates his impatience with the town’s inability to satisfy man's inner drives and urges. Anderson offers no solutions to the problems he attacks; he merely points out social and economic ills which are based on the patterns of past generations and are, to him, wrong. His Poor White and Kit Brandon portray these follies.

Steinbeck focuses his attack upon the people who comprise the social, political, and economic systems of America. He is interested in all walks of life and in all people, but primarily in the people who have suffered injus¬ tices at the hands of a controlling group. He appears, in his The Grapes of

ïïrath and Cannery Row, to possess a warm sympathy with many of the people he pictures. He is more humanist than skeptic as he seems to advocate collective measures to help the masses rather than individual aid, which, he feels, is useless. Labor problems, political problems, and social problems ar6 Steinbeck's province, and he obliquely attacks the small town through its inhabitants. Indeed, the town is highly subordinate in Steinbeck's novels, and 101 this subordination is directly traceable to his vital and intense interest in people, in the inhabitants of a town rather than the town itself.

Each of these five novelists has expressed in his novels since 1918* cer¬ tain attitudes toward the small town; they have not, however, been the only

American writers to indicate opinions of this same subject. Zona Gale, once the promulgator of â sickening anu sweetly sentimental work about the village— cbnsider, for example, her Friendship Village (1908), in which there are no no sick and no poor, and in which Calliope heaped blessings upon those already blessed—became, after 1918, a realistic observer of the faults of the town as we see in her Kiss Lulu Bett, Birth, and Faint Perfume. Ruth Suckow, who

(it is thought by both Hatcher ana Hartwick) has given us the best interpreta¬ tion of the small town because of her "careful observation behind her writihg, 1 the exact detail necessary to illuminate rather than to extend," also exposes the dullness of quiet and routine living in her The Folks. Edward Kimbrough, who published his Night Fire in 1946, a regional novel based upon racial and

labor problems of Mississippi, realistically analyzes vital racial and

economic problems and issues of his native Southern state. Each of these, and

others, has attacked the small town for certain follies, but there have been

other recent writers who have proved themselves friends of the small town.

Phil Stong's State Fair. James Gould Cozzenô* The Last Adam and The Just end the

Unjust, and Jame9 McGonnaughey'a The Village Chronicle—to name but three—are

indications of a firm belief in the virtues of the town. But is there a

Golden Mean between these extremes of attitude toward the small town? Have the

befrienders been wholly correct in their appraisals of the small town? Or

have the attackers been just?

1 Harlan Hatcher, op. cit.. p. 104. 102

On one extreme, we have seen the viewpoints of the befriender3 of the town. Sentimentally, nostagically, romantically, they have included issues and scenes which support their contentions that the :town is an idyllic place, a haven, a Utopia of sorts. Either consciously or unintentionally, they have illustrated glowing scenes of humanity, marked incidents charged with spirituality, and buoyant instances of town perfection. It is re¬ markable how they, for the most part, simply ignore the obvious fact that pleasure and happiness are not the only aspects to be found in any town; their sentiment renders obscure any faults of the town. On the other hand, have the attackers expressed their attitudes of the town fairly? Realistically, sometimes naturalistically, they have exaggerated both characters and situations to expose the town's ills. They have tended to isolate specific exceptions to prove a point, rather than to form an opinion baaed on a composite study; they have extended their material to emphasize a contention. They, aware only of the ills they wish to. expose, are blind to pleasantries. They are begetters of reform; and, therefore, they prefer not to see the aspects which refute their issues, inhere is there justice? Writers at either extreme interpret good and evil in terms of their own ideals and beliefs» the romantic observers of the small town tend to see only the good; the realistic observers, only the evil. The mirrors of neither group has cast back a clear reflection. For what town exists which ha9 not both excellent ana repellent characteristics? It is the opinion of the author of this study1 that none-of the writers at either extreme, either romantically or realistically, either sentimentally or with verisimilitude, has mace a balanced or sharply penetrating interpretation of the small town. Indeed, although it has greatly influenced American expansion and jimerican 103

civilization, the small town has not, for the most part, been fairly, adequately, and artistically interpreted or appraised in the American novel,

particularly since 1918. Because it is such an integral part of the

composite structure and formation of America, because now, just as in the days of colonial settlement, the town is the nucleus around which many

of America's principles are transmitted, the small town deserves fair,

impartial treatment. BIBLIOGRAPHY

I» Books of Specific Reference

Anderson, Sherwood. Beyond Desire. New York* Liveright, Inc., 1932.

. Dark Laughter. New York* Boni & Liveright, 1925.

. Kit Brandon. New York* Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936.

. ' Many Marriages. New York* B.'df. Huebsch, Inc., 1923.

. Poor White. New York* B.W. Huebsch, Inc., 1920.

Fisher, Dorothy Canfield. The Brimming Cup. New York* Grosset and Dunlap, 1919.

. Rav; Material. New Yorks Grosset and Dunlap, 1923.

. Rough Hewn. New Yorks Grosset and Dunlap, 1922.

Lewis, Sinclair. .Inn Vickers. Garden City: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1933.

Arrowsmith. New York* Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925.

Dodsworth. New York* Haroourt, Brace and Company, 1929.

Elmer Gantry. New York* Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1927.

Kingsblood Royal. New York* Random House, 1947.

Main Street. New York* Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1920.

Steinbeck, John. Cannery Row. New York* The Viking Press, 1945.

» The Grapes of Wrath. New York* The Viking Press, 1939.

Of Mice and Men. New York* Triangle Books, 1937.

Tarkington, Booth • Alice Adams. Garden City* Doubleday, Page and Company, 1921.

» Claire Ambler. Garden City* Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc., 1928.

• The Magnificent Ambersons. New York* Doubleday, Page, and Company, 1924.

. Seventeen. New York* Grosset and Dunlap, 1915.

104 105

II. Books of General Reference

A. Novels

Cather, Willa. A Lost Lady. New York* Alfred A. Knopf, 1923.

. Lucy Gayheart. New York* Alfred A. Knopf, 1935.

. My Antonia. Boston* Houghton Mifflin Company, 1918.

. 0 Pioneer8. Boston* Houghton Mifflin Company, 1926.

. One of Ours. New York* Alfred A. Knopf, 1922.

Gozzens, James G. The Just a^d the Unjust. New Yorkt Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942.

Gale, 2ona. Faint Perfume. New York* D. Appleton, 1923.

. Friendship Village. New Yorkt The Macmillan Company, }926.

. Miss Lulu Bett. New York* Grosset and Dunlap, 1920.

McConnaughey, James. Village Chronicle. New York* Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1936.

Kimbrough, Edward. Night Fire. New York* Rinehart and Company, 1946.

Suckow, Ruth. The Folks. New York* Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1934.

TBhite, William Allen. A Certain Rich Man. New York* The Macmillan Company, 1909.

B. Biography and Criticism

Baldwin, G. C. The Men Who Make Our NoVgls. New Yorkt Dodd, Meqd, and Co., 1924.

Beach, Joseph ¥. American Fiction 1920-1940. New York* The Macmillan Company, 1941.

Black, J. W. The Outlook of American Prose. Chicago* The University of Chicago Press, 1926.

Blankenship, Russell. American Literature. New York* Henry Holt and Company, 1931.

Boyd, Ernest. Portraits* Realand Imaginary. New York* George H. Doran Co., 1924.

Dickinson, Thomas H. The Making of American Literature. New York* The Century Co., 1932. 106

Foerster, Norman (ed.). The Reinterpretation of American Literature. New York» Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1928.

Geiemar, Maxwell. Writers in Crisis. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942.

Grabo, Carl. The Technique of the Novel. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1928.

Hartwick, Harry. The Foreground of American Fiction. Atlanta: American Book Company, 1931.

Hatcher, Harlan. Creating the Modern American Novel. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1935.

Hazard, Lucy L. The Frontier in American Literature. New York* Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1927.

Hicks, Granville. The C-reat Tradition. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933.

Knight, Grant. The Novel in English. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inci, 1935.

Lewisohn, Ludwig. Bxprassion in America. New York: Harpers and Brothers, 193

Marble, Annie R. A Study of the Modern Novel, British and American. New York» D. Appleton and Company, 1928.

Michaud, Regis. The American Novel Today. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1931.

Overton, Grant. An Hour of the American Novel. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippin¬ cott and Company, 1929.

Parrington, Vernon Louis. The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930.

Pattee, Fred L. (ed.). Century Readings in American Literature. New York: D. Appleton-Gentury Co., Inc., 1932.

. New American Literature. New York: The Century Co., 1930.

Quinn, A. H. American Fiction. New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1936.

Van Doren, Carl. The American Novel. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929.

. Contemporary American Novelists. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1928,

C. History

Boas, Ralph P. and Burton, Katherine. Social Backgrounds of American Litera- 107

ture. Boston* Little, Brown, and Company, 1940.

Brooks, Van lyck. America's Coming of Age. Ne® York* B. ¥. Huebsch, 1924.

Faulkner, Harold. American Economic History! New York* Harpers and Brothers, 1924.

Muzzey, David S. The American Adventure. New York* Harpers and Brothers, 1927.

Paxson, Fred. The New Nation. Chicago* Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915.

III. Periodicals

Binsse, H. and Trounstine, J.J. "Europe Looks at Sinclair Lewis," The Bookman. LXXII (January, 1931), 453-57.

Cabell, J. B. "A Note as to Sinclair Lewis,** American Mercury. XX (August, 1930), 394-97.

Canby, Henry Seidel. "Willa Gather," Saturday Review of Literature. XXX (May 10, 1947), 22-24.

Cerf, B. "Trade Winds," Saturday Review of Literature, XXWII (November, 1945), 20.

Gannett, Lewis. "John Steinbeck* Novelist at Work," Atlantic Monthly. CLXXVI (December, 1945), 55-60.

H., W. E. "'Kit Brandon,'" Boston Transcript. October 10, 1936, p. 6.

"John Bull and Sinclair Lewis," The Living Age-. CXXV (May, 1925), 429-30.

Marshall, Margaret. "Writers in the Wildernes8," Nation. CXLIX (Novem¬ ber, 1939), 576-79.

Maurois, Andre. "What I Learned About America," Redbook (February, 1941), p. 28.

McWilliams, Carey. "What's Being Done About the Joads?" New Republic. LXXXXX (September, 1939), 178-80.

Nathan, George Jean. "Art of the Night," Saturday Review of Literature. XV (November 28, 1936), 20.

Prescott, Orville, "Cannery Row* A Review," New York Times. January 2, 1945, p. 17*, col. 5.

Taylor, Frank. "California’s 'Grapes of Wrath'," Forum. CII (December. 1939), 232-38. 108

Woolf, S* J* "Sinclair Lewis is Back on Main Street: Interview," New York Times Magazine, October 28, 1945, p. 3.

Young, Stanley. "'Kit Brandon': A Review," New York Times. October 11, 1936, p. 3.

IV. Viséelianeous

Anderson, Sherwood. Hello Towns! New York: Horace Liveright, 1929.

Bredvold, L. I., McKillop, Alan D., and Whitney, Lois (eds.). Eighteenth Century Poetry and Prose. New York: Thomas Nelson and Son, 1939.

Funk and Wagnalls. New Standard Dictionary of the English Language. New York: Funk and Wagnalls Co., 1913.

Renter, Edward Byron. Handbook of Sociology. New York: The Dryden Press, 1941.