Returning to Regionalism
I want to say that regionalism is a way of talking about texts that describe or image the local. Texts that concern themselves with a bounded setting, and do not attempt to broaden that setting into something more, or universal.
So Main Street is not quite localism, according to this definition.
But perhaps it should be? I don't think that I've seen anyone try to put this text into the genre of regionalism. (We need to be careful about that term - we aren't sure if it's a genre or a form. Perhaps a genre, because it's not linked to structure in quite the way that form - or literary structure - is. We might need to just stick to "group.") It has the other ingredients - according to Richard Brodhead, regionalism should describe an out-of-the-way place, should make use of dialect or locally-inflected speech patterns, and should otherwise depict non-mainstream cultures.
Perhaps it's that last part that prevents the entrance of Main Street into the group. Lewis is not trying to describe how the local culture and/or local knowledge of Gopher Prairie (GP) are different from other small towns. Part of the point is exactly how similar GP is to other small towns, and how common and ordinary life in GP really is. That's what drives Carol crazy about living there - as in her thinking about the scenery on her initial train ride out to her new home with Kennicott.
So, then, Main Street is a text that could be described as anti-localism, or a text that tries to convince its readers that the local context, the restraints of local cultures and local knowledges, are something to be overcome, put in perspective, and otherwise relegated to minor, peripheral status. Great Art seems to transcend place (and not everyone can appreciate it, or not everyone wants to appreciate it because it might mean letting go of too many everyday sources of power and comfort). This is a book about perspective, about scales, and about transcendence. Carol gains perspective in Washington. She sees Gopher Prairie for what it is, and stops treating it as the only important place in the world.
But things get much more complicated when they are inflected by ethnicity. Main Street really doesn't address issues of race/ethnicity/Otherness except to comment on some ethnic prejudices. Carol's new-found perspective doesn't really address the prejudice of the GP upper class against the mostly Scandinavian immigrants who settle there. Though her struggle for change continues, it seems to be less important. Her own solution renders her activism trivial. In other words, Main Street opens the issue of ethnic (and class) rivalries, without really detailing the problems or exploring the issue in any meaningful way. (Olaf is an interesting counter-example, and might point to the potential rewards of a heavy influx of immigrants, and the dangers to the current class structure inherent in such a diverse underclass.) And you can make reference to a larger perspective, or otherwise resuscitate a character like Carol Kennicott by linking her with a larger, cosmopolitan (danger word!) world. As a "modern" (danger word!) woman, she aligns herself with women's suffrage, the labor movement, and otherwise perceives and responds to the "ideoscapes" that Appadurai refers to - the globalizing understanding of Enlightenment power words like "democracy."
In other words, because Carol is a "white" woman, it's not dangerous for her to appeal to a "larger" perspective of human rights and international struggle. What is much more dangerous is for someone like Zora Neale Hurston to appeal to a larger perspective.
That's a complicated point, and it's going to take a lot of heavy lifting to get that properly qualified.
What I mean is this - the local, particular life of Gopher Prairie, as imaged by Lewis, is not the kind of life worth celebrating. Carol's decision to abandon her connection or her identification (perhaps that's the important move that I want to make here) with her home and to instead maintain a "perspective" that permits her to take the small town less seriously, does not destroy her right to exist or to be an individual person.
That doesn't make sense. Let's back up a little. By connecting her desire for change with universal rights, and by otherwise pursuing or valuing things that seem to be "larger" or more important (the hint, of course, is that Carol is paying attention to social issues in GP, but that they aren't important or aren't as important as social issues in a global sense), Carol loses the urgency that drove her throughout the rest of the book. In other words, this larger perspective has had the undesired effect of reducing her motivation for change.
We could call this "larger perspective" a cosmopolitanism (danger word!), a word that connotes an internationalism, an ability to circulate among varying cultures, to gather and employ local knowledges. I'm thinking of synonyms like "worldliness," or "cultured," or "well-traveled." It's interesting, too, how this sense of the term is inflected by gender - we have the phrase "man of the world," but not really "woman of the world." It's usually men who thus circulate, or who circulate in the sense of gathering local knowledges (I'm thinking here of people like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, men who put their erudite preciosity on display.)
So Carol, who struggles in her role as a regional subject for most of the book, leaves the region to live in Washington for a few years, and discovers the larger perspective that allows her to cope with regionality. (Let's slip back into the phrase "localism." It's a little less freighted.) But this move, this acquired cosmopolitanism (yes, it becomes a kind of object, like a postcard or other tourist trash) threatens Carol's claims to specificity. Without a local reference to frame her identity (or with a weakened, less powerful bond to locality), Carol has reduced the strength of her own claims to difference, of identity through difference.
But that's also complicated. Carol is different, in the sense that not many people in GP have this cosmopolitanism. So, her "perspective," though it weakens her personal bond with the local and makes her a less local subject, still makes her unique and different from other GP residents, and gives her a unique identity in that community.
Carol, and Gopher Prairie, then, become almost a representative small town (if such a thing can be accepted, and we can assume from Lewis's remarks in his narrative that he accepts such a possibility of representativeness), with wholly local subjects (most of the residents) and worldly men and women (like Carol).
I'm not sure that I'm appropriately explicating Carol's identity here. I think that her upbringing in St. Paul makes her a bit different already, and more likely to accept the cosmopolitan perspective than residents of GP. It is, after all, closely akin to the metropolitan identity that she had already adopted through her father, and her former life.
I'll need to return to this later.