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
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