Socially Mapping the 1920s Midwest

In both Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt (1922) and the sociological study by Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (1929), an attempt is made to systematically document and map the practice of everyday life in a representative American town. For the Lynds, this meant choosing the midwest as “the common denominator” of the US, a city with a population between 25,000 and 50,000, one in which there were more than one industry, and a city in which “social problems” would not overshadow the study’s findings (race is carefully elided throughout the book). For Lewis, this meant constructing a fictional city Zenith in the fictional state of Winnemac, a state which would be “more typical than any state in the Union” (Lewis’s own maps of which are included throughout this post–more info on them below).

“Middletown” was revealed later to be Muncie, Indiana–most famously by photographer Margaret Bourke-White who was sent by Life Magazine to document the town in May 1937. Muncie underwent a “gas boom” when a massive natural gas reserve was found in the area in 1886, ballooning the town to a population of tens of thousands and attracting outside capital to this thriving “gasopolis.” Due to severe misuse and waste–it was thought cheaper to keep gas valves in the house open and burning than to waste a match relighting the flame–the field was all but depleted by 1890. The Middletown study takes place in the wake of this unevenly distributed and underdeveloped industrialization of the formerly agricultural town.

Characterizing Muncie’s current state of labor and production in 1925, they write:

“If the working class in Middletown does not make the material necessities of its everyday life, the activities of the business class appear at many points even more remote. As the population has forsaken the less vicarious life of the farm or village and as industrial tools have become increasingly elaborated, there has been a noticeable swelling in the number and complexity of the institutional rituals by which the specialized products of the individual worker are converted into the biological and social essentials of living. It is by carrying on these institutional rituals that the business group gets its living.” (44)

Paradoxically, this “increasing elaboration” of the technics of everyday life is coupled with an “increasing standardization of leisure-time pursuits.” Perhaps the most significant change found in the Lynds’ study can be attributed to the triad of automobiles, movies, and radio, which together spawned a “cluster of habits that have grown up overnight.” They write: “Indeed, at no point is one brought up more sharply against the impossibility of studying Middletown as a self-contained, self-starting community than when one watches these space-binding leisure-time inventions imported from without—automobile, motion picture, and radio—reshaping the city.” Here, the case study of social anthropology seems to come up against its limits when the “underlying groundwork of folk-play and folk-talk” is integrated into a web of cultural production and technological innovation that necessarily extends the boundaries of this town beyond its traditional patterns.

Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt on the other hand provides us with a very different type of perspective on the networks and systems organizing a representative midwestern town. George F. Babbitt–perhaps a reference to the frequently worn out automobile babbitt metal, a soft alloy “used for bearings connecting the piston rods to the crankshaft”–is the quintessential middle man. Breaking with the precedence of American businessmen novels that gave us portraits of tycoons, leaders of the masses–Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Norris’s The Pit(1903), Dreiser’s The Financier (1912)–Babbitt is little more than middle management in a small real estate development company owned by his father-in-law, spending his non-working hours at booster club meetings and indulging in flights of heroic fancy while parking his car in tight spots: “It was a virile adventure masterfully executed” (28). Read the rest of this entry »

Henry James considered as a hippopotamus retrieving a pea

In several essays on Henry James, I’ve found mentioned a duality in his critical description of writing fiction. The process is simultaneously described as projection and reception, as self-expression and recording.

Dorothy Hale:

A superior sensibility is revealed precisely to the degree that it ‘records’ ‘dramatically and objectively,’ without, that is, the self-interest that would interfere with the appreciation of the subject’s virtues. By the same token, the more beautifully—which is to say, vividly and completely—the ‘thing’ is represented, the more it bespeaks its indebtedness to the viewer/artist’s sensibility.

What interests me about this seemingly insoluble cornerstone of the realist aesthetic is the degree to which it resurfaces in discussions on the materialities of inscription in James. In other words, I want to think through the way this toggling between privileged subject and unmediated object resurfaces (and is perhaps better thought through) when one considers, for instance, James’s method of dictation to a typewriter, and the presence of cables and telegrams in his fiction. In Jamesian language, this is a question of “relations”–not only between individuals but between raw materials and their organization–relations between infinitesimal clues given meaning by the particular, “frail structure of wood and wire” of “In the Cage” (1898) or the “wild weed of delusion [that] easily grew too fast, and the the Atlantic cable [that] alone could race with it” in The Ambassadors (1903). Perhaps a bit of a jump, but let’s just see what happens. And, disclaimer, what follows is some provisional rambling.

In any discussion of James, one can’t help but draw on/push against some of the caricatures and complaints about his unwieldy prose style or trivial subject matter. My new personal favorite comes from H.G. Wells, who devoted an entire satirical novel–Boon (1915)–to the topic. “His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle. … It is leviathan retrieving pebbles. It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost even at the cost of its dignity upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den. Most things it insists are beyond it but it can at any rate modestly and with an artistic singleness of mind pick up that pea…”

By the time of his late work, James was almost exclusively composing his novels by dictating to a typewriter (a term which at that time referred to both the machine and its operator, most likely a young woman), and some attribute the peculiarly maundering quality of his sentences to this method of composition. Several bits of biographical history deserve mention here. According to one of his typists, Mary Weld, James’s dictation was “remarkably fluent” and “when working I was just part of the machinery.” According to another, Theodora Bosanquet, James wanted his typists to be “without a mind.” As in James’s Preface to The Ambassadors, the presence of the “author’s vision” fades into the background; it paradoxically “hangs there ever in place like the white sheet suspended for the figures of a child’s magic-lantern” … upon which it is the “charming office” of the protagonist Lambert Strether to project “a more fantastic and more moveable shadow” (again, here we have the unity of projection and reception). Read the rest of this entry »