On two distinct authors
and works that together embody a dominant popular trend.
Sinclair Lewis
was the first American
writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in the course of a forty-year publishing
career engaged with some of 20th century America’s most complex and
serious themes. Grace
Metalious wrote four controversial pot-boilers in the span of seven years,
before dying at the tragically young age of 39 from cirrhosis of the liver. Similarly,
while Main Street (1920)
and Peyton
Place (1956) can both be described as the novels that launched these
two writers’ respective careers, they occupy profoundly distinct places in
those arcs: Lewis followed Main Street
with more than 15 other novels, including the more consistently acclaimed Babbitt (1922),
Arrowsmith (1925),
and Elmer Gantry
(1927); while Metalious followed Peyton
Place with a sequel, Return
to Peyton Place (1959), attempting unsuccessfully to recapture that
first book’s meteoric success.
So they’re
different, these two authors overall and these two novels in particular. But as
their titles might suggest, the novels are also pretty similar on a couple key
levels: they both focus on a realistic yet also symbolic setting, a defining
small-town locale (Lewis’ in the Midwest, Metalious’ in New England) that represents
such environments across the nation; and they both seek to complicate and
undermine the ideals
associated with that setting, revealing some of the more secretive and
divisive forces operating underneath the pastoral surface. Like the mega-hit TV
show Desperate Housewives
in our own era, that is (or like the ever-increasing reality TV spin-offs about
“Real Housewives,”
although those tend to be set in bigger cities), both of these novels, whatever
their differences, can perhaps best be described as part of a century-long
American obsession with small-town soap operas.
So how would an
AmericanStudier account for that genre’s consistent popularity? I’d have to
start by thinking about two distinct but ultimately interconnected ways in
which it appeals to American (and probably human, but I am an AmericanStudier) audiences. For one
thing, there’s our
collective nostalgia, which as I’ve argued before in this space connects to
idyllic past spaces even if, for many of us, we’ve never actually had them in
our communities and lives. Small town main street is one such shared, nostalgic
place to be sure (just ask
Bob Seger). But on the other hand, I think we like nothing better than to
imagine the tawdry realities beneath such perfect exteriors, perhaps to make
ourselves feel better about all the darker (or just more human) sides to our
own communities and identities. These aren’t, again, uniquely American
impulses, as Flaubert
and his famous Madame nicely illustrate. But in a nation so defined by the
image of “Main Street,” they’re particularly prominent and popular ones I’d
say.
Next popular
fiction post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Thoughts on these texts and themes? Suggestions, favorites, or other
responses?
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