Main Street

Main Street es una novela satírica de Sinclair Lewis, publicada en 1920…

ON a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Nor was she thinking of women and carriages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about her. She was meditating upon walnut candy, the plays of Brieux, the reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the chemistry instructor had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears.

A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands inflated her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to vagueness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and shone, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth.

It is Carol Milford, fleeing for an hour from Blodgett College.

The days of pioneering, of girls in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in woods, are deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest.

Blodgett College is on the edge of Minneapolis. It is a barricade of sound religion. It is still combating the recent heresies of Voltaire, Darwin, and Robert Ingersoll. Pious families in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the Dakotas send their children there, and Blodgett protects them from the wickedness of the universities. But it secretes friendly girls, young men who sing, and one lady instructress who really likes Milton and Carlyle. So the four years which Carol spent at Blodgett were not altogether wasted. The smallness of the school, the fewness of rivals, permitted her to experiment with her perilous versatility. She played tennis, gave parties, took a graduate seminar in the drama, went smoking, and joined half a dozen societies for the practice of the arts or the tense coming from General Culture.

In her class there were two or three prettier girls, but none more eager. She was noticeable equally in the classroom word and at dances, though out of the three hundred students of Blodgett, scores recited more accurately and dozens danced more smoothly. Every cell of her body was alive—thin wrists, beautiful skin, ingenue eyes, black hair.

The other girls in her dormitory marveled at the slightness of her body when they saw her in sheer negligee, or darting out wet from a shower-bath. She seemed then but half as large as they had supposed; a fragile child who must be cloaked with understanding kindness. "Psychic," the girls whispered, and "spiritual." Yet so radioactive were her nerves, so adventurous her trust in rather vaguely conceived sweetness and light, that she was more energetic than any of the hulking young women who, with calves bulging in heavy-ribbed woolen stockings beneath decorous blue underpants, noisily galloped across the floor of the "gym" in practise for the Blodgett Ladies' Basket-Ball Team.

 Even when she was tired her dark eyes were observant. She did not yet know the immense ability of the world to be casually cruel and proudly dull, but if she should ever learn those dismaying powers, her eyes would never become sullen or heavy or cold amorous.

For all her enthusiasms, for all the fondness and the "crushes" which she inspired, Carol's acquaintances were shy of her. When she was most ardently singing hymns or planning deviltry she yet seemed gently distant and critical. She was credulous, perhaps; a born hero-worshipper; yet she did question and examine unceasingly. Whatever she might become she would never be immobile… (Paragraphs from Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis)

Para saber

Chippewa: grupo de nativos americanos. Hay comunidades en Canadá y Estados Unidos. Es la segunda población más grande sobrepasados solo por los Cree.

Eugene Brieux (1858 -1932): periodista y escritor francés.

Robert Ingersoll (1833 - 1899) fue veterano de la Guerra civil, líder político, y orador, notable por su defensa del agnosticismo. Muchos de los discursos de Ingersoll apoyaban el libre pensamiento y el humanismo y frecuentemente se burlaba de las creencias religiosas.

Crítica

Algunos contemporarios de Lewis dijeron que la novela era demasiado deprimente, sin humor, en su transmisión de la vida de un pequeño pueblo. Sin embargo, Main Street es generalmente considerada uno de los trabajos más significativos de Lewis, junto con Babbitt

Artículo relacionado

Main Street, síntesis
Recursos

Main Street, context