I. SUBJECT Carol Milford is a scholar of Blodgett School, and the protagonist of Main Street by Sinclair Lewis. Her ambition is to cool down in a prairie village and rework it into a spot of magnificence. She works as a librarian at St. Paul after her commencement. She marries the physician Kennicott, whom she met at a good friend’s home. Life in Gopher Prairie provides no challenges. Kennicott takes her on an extended tour to California and different locations. Carol returns to Gopher Prairie and tries to be enthusiastic concerning the city however feels drained of the hypocrisy and decides to go away.
Kennicott feels distressed and he or she assures him that she would come again if she is ready to discover out what she wants. She works in Washington for 2 years. Kennicott visits her in Washington to woo her for the second time. Carol mellows and admits her want to return to Gopher Prairie. Kennicott asks her to return solely when she is ready. She talks to the chief of the suffrage motion who tells her that she can not obtain something with out whole dedication.
She convinces Carol that she will be able to play a minimum of a small position in altering life by persistently asking questions every time she finds something that hinders social change. Her life in Washington helps her to accumulate a mature outlook in the direction of life and is ultimately capable of settle for Gopher Prairie and its individuals as they’re, however she doesn’t hand over her struggle to make Gopher Prairie a greater place. She offers beginning to a daughter and feels optimistic that her daughter will keep it up the struggle that she had began and witness a united world. II. THEME
The principle theme of the story is rise up and reformation. The rise up is in opposition to materialism, lack of equality between the wealthy and the poor, the ugliness of the city, its narrow-mindedness and its prejudices. Carol needs to reform the city by educating the individuals to understand poetry and to encompass themselves with magnificence and by educating them to play. She tries to place up a play, learn poetry to Kennicott and marketing campaign for a brand new metropolis corridor, college and a greater toilet and in addition by organizing events and video games. Although she can not result in any radical modifications, her triumph lies in utting up a struggle and conserving her religion. Main Street brings to gentle the discontent of the protagonist as a result of of her incapability to deliver a few change within the attitudes of the individuals of Gopher Prairie. She appreciates magnificence of simplicity. She believes that life ought to uphold the virtues of equality and freedom. She disapproves of exploitation. Due to this fact she opposes the industrialization which wipes out the sweetness of the land and the spirit of journey of the pioneers of America. She additionally rebels in opposition to the exploitation of the farmers and the laborers.
She incurs the wrath of the matrons of Gopher Prairie by paying six every week to her maid and in addition by justifying the wages by declaring that the job they did could be very tedious. She insists that the remaining room for the farmer’s wives ought to have higher amenities, as a result of it introduced the farmer’s enterprise to the retailers of the city. The reforms she proposes are quite simple. She needs lovely buildings. She needs to domesticate the style of the individuals. She needs to show the farmer’s wives the correct option to care for his or her infants and to make good stew.
She suggests organising an employment bureau in order that they won’t rely on charity. The ladies of Gopher Prairie snigger at Carol’s solutions. They oppose the thought of empowering the poor ladies to be self-sufficient as a result of that can deny them the prospect to be charitable. When Carol means that they need to mend the garments earlier than handing them out as charity, the ladies pounce as soon as once more on Carol and overrule the suggestion as pointless as a result of it might encourage these ladies to be lazy. Carol feels pissed off by this mindlessness.
Therefore she leaves Gopher Prairie in order that she will be able to discover out what she will be able to obtain in life. In Washington, she positive aspects the objectivity mandatory for any reformer. She positive aspects braveness and learns direct her power to impact modifications, and returns to Gopher Prairie reconciled. The minor theme of the novel is that marriage is to not be taken frivolously. Carol doesn’t settle for the establishment of marriage blindly. Her expectations and calls for as a spouse are juxtaposed with the opposite wives in Gopher Prairie. Her rise up seeps into her private life as properly and makes it a lot the higher for it.
III. DICTION Sinclair Lewis has a vivid model. His description of nature offers the suitable background for the temper of the characters. When Carol goes out for a stroll with Erik they cross a grove of “scrub poplars… looming now like a menacing wall” (392). When she is with Kennicott beside the lake she watches “lengthy grass… mossy bogs and crimson winged black birds” (57). When she is brooding she sees grey fields closing in on her. He makes use of verbs very successfully. Carol “perceives” when she observes one thing significantly.
When she is upset with Kennicott for forgetting to present her cash, she “instructions” him to come back upstairs as a result of she doesn’t want to talk about the matter within the presence of firm and Kennicott “clumps” after her. His use of satire could be very efficient and provides shade to his narration. Carol watches an expert play, which to her is boringly odd in all elements and finds the viewers lapping it up. She feedback sarcastically that “the one hassle with The Lady from Kankakee is that it’s too refined for Gopher Prairie” (225). The outline of the idiosyncrasies of the occupants of Gopher Prairie is full of humor.
When Raymie praises concerning the belief of Kennicott’s sufferers within the physician feedback wryly, “It’s me that obtained to do all of the trusting”, and in a dramatic apart, whispers to Carol “gentleman hen” (59). When Kennicott is worked up concerning the motor journey he expects Carol “to be effusive about educational questions as ‘now I ponder if we may cease at Baraboo… ’” (196). Kennicott’s religion in vehicles is a “high-church cult with electrical sparks for candles, and Piston rings develop into the alter-vessels” and “liturgy” composed of “intoned and metrical highway feedback” (196).
The plot strikes by a mix of dialogue and narrative. With minor pauses in some seemingly meaningless dialog, the diction reveals the inside workings in Carol’s thoughts and all through the opposite characters of Gopher Prairie, resembling Vida who was a religious Christian. The narrative half of the plot offers perception characterization. For example, she says this to nobody, however Vida had thought of her second with “Professor’ George Edwin Mott” by some means naughty, and thought that she was “superior… to have stored her virginity” (251).
The diction upholds the topic and theme by the utilization of phrases resembling “reformer”, “suffragist”, and different alternative phrases involving civil rights. It pertains to Carol’s fixed wish to change the city of Gopher Prairie, and the opposite reformations occurring in Washington, D. C. and the opposition she faces in her city, and in her own residence. In occasions of despair, she finds her environment closing in round her: “She noticed the furnishings as a circle of aged judges condemning her to dying by smothering” (31). IV. TONE
The environment of hostility is produced by the battle between Carol’s want to alter the city and the city’s resistance to Carol’s concepts. She is bewildered and harm by the rebukes and rebuttals. Carol develops the fitting attitudes mandatory for a reformer within the final three chapters of the novel. This helps her to face life with extra sympathy, tolerance and hope. V. SYMBOLISM Carol’s pursuits in trains, books, and nature all symbolize her want to flee the slender confines Gopher Prairie. In Chapter 19, she daydreams about taking a prepare to flee the city.
In Chapter 22, she escapes the city mentally by studying a quantity of books. Starting in Chapter 5, she finds pure magnificence within the countryside that she doesn’t discover on the town. Certainly, all through the novel, Carol typically takes walks and spends time within the countryside so as to escape Gopher Prairie. In Chapter 2 and Chapter 38, Kennicott reveals his spouse footage of Gopher Prairie as he makes an attempt to courtroom her and persuade her return to the city. In Chapter 2, Carol sees solely “streaky” footage of “bushes, shrubbery, a porch vague in leafy shadows, [and] lakes” (18).
The truth that she sees the photographs in Chapter 2 as “streaky” and “vague” symbolizes her detachment from the neighborhood. Nevertheless, in Chapter 38, she sees her personal home and acquainted faces within the pictures, symbolizing her connection to the city. As Lewis signifies in his preface, Gopher Prairie represents a microcosm of America within the early twentieth century. Lewis creates many characters as exaggerations, or typical, reasonably than people, to counsel that the individuals and establishments present in Gopher Prairie might be discovered anyplace. By criticizing Gopher Prairie, Lewis subsequently assaults American society as a complete.
Carol and Vida appear to be foils in that Carol is a reformer, whereas Vida is the illustration of a society reluctant to let go of their methods. Although in a passage Vida thinks that she is, “and all the time shall be, a reformer, a liberal” (253), she places deceive this assertion initially of the chapter: she shows as a lot open-mindedness as a nun when Lewis writes that “[s]he hated even the sound of the phrase ‘intercourse’… and prayed to Jesus…addressing him as her everlasting lover” (251). Carol, alternatively, certainly does attempt to deliver reform to the city.
She tries to deliver magnificence and tradition, however is met by the bulwark of Gopher Prairie. But nonetheless she pushes on, introducing an expert play, music and poetry. Regardless of all her makes an attempt, she nonetheless fails. Although some battles can’t be gained, she needs to present her preventing spirit to her daughter. VI. SPEAKER The speaker of Main Street is in third individual, who’s omniscient of the happenings and minds of the residents of Gopher Prairie. VII. STRUCTURE The novel is split into six components, plot-wise. The primary half introduces Carol, the heroine of the novel.
The second half offers along with her marriage and elaborates on her fears of life because the spouse of Dr. Kennicott within the small prairie city. The third half describes her home warming get together through which Carol makes a press release about her style and angle adopted by the main points of the trials and tribulations of Carol as a reformer of the smug city. The fourth half is the thirty-sixth chapter, which can be known as the climax of the story as a result of Carol walks out of her marriage and Gopher Prairie. The next two chapters kind the fifth half which describes Carol’s work in
Washington, her reconciliation to life in Gopher Prairie and it additionally reunites Carol and Kennicott. The bodily building of the novel consists of a yellow and black cowl, with a small portrait of the writer within the approximate center. It’s 4 hundred and fifty-one pages, divided into thirty-nine chapters, that are then sub-divided; each are numbered by Roman numerals. Previous the story is a miniature biography of the writer (viii) and a small preface that explains Gopher Prairie is a small pocket of America, however America nonetheless, whose residents are set of their methods.
VIII. IMAGERY That is an instance of personification: “the land buzzing” (139). This describes the sweetness of the land round Gopher Prairie and evokes Carol, since she needs to make the city simply as lovely by her reforms. That is an instance of a simile: “Kennicott was as mounted in routine as an remoted outdated man” (291). With the use of “as”, Kennicott is in contrast an outdated man being set in his methods. An instance of antithesis could be that when Kennicott, earlier than his marriage to Carol, had put his arm round Vida “carelessly”. Whereas she strained away, she longed to maneuver nearer to him” (251). On this instance of personification, “the deep-bosomed mattress stiffened in disgust” (32) at having such an extravagant shirt laid on it. In the identical paragraph, the stated “chemise and lace was a hussy” (32) and appeared overly lavish within the easy home through which Carol lived. On this conceit, Lewis writes that “[a] village is…a power searching for to dominate the earth, drain the hills and seas of shade” (267).
He’s saying that such a village drains the world of its pure magnificence, to get replaced by man-made materialistic issues, with a normal model. The rest would appear out of place. Carol calls the individuals who dwell within the Northern Middlewest “pioneers, these sweaty wayfarers” (24). They’ve simply begun to construct a society in that space, and he or she thinks that such an space has a lot hope. When Dr. Kennicott takes Carol looking, she wonders why he hasn’t fired when a “crash” sounded and “two birds turned somersaults within the air, plumped down” (55). Such is an instance of onomatopoeia.
