The Revolt from the Village, 1915-1930

Anthony Channell Hilfer

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780807836064, 9780807811023
• eBook ISBN: 9780807836071
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This incisive book traces the attack on American provincialism that ended the myth of the Happy Village. Replacing the idyllic life as a theme, American writers in revolt turned to a more realistic interpretation of the town, stressing its repressiveness, dullness, and conformity. This book analyzes the literary technique employed by these writers and explores their sensibilities to evaluate both their artistic accomplishments and their contributions to American thought and feeling.

Originally published 1969.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition — UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

1.The Revolt: What It Was About

Carl Van Doren identified “The Revolt from the Village” in 1921 in one of a series of articles on contemporary American fiction which he wrote for the Nation. Certain American novelists, Van Doren announced, were attacking one of the most cherished American beliefs: the belief that the American small town is a place characterized by sweet innocence, an environment in which the best in human nature could flower serenely, a rural paradise exempt from the vices, complexities, and irremediable tragedies of the city. These American writers were presenting a quite different and more realistic interpretation of the town, emphasizing its moral repressiveness and stultifying conformity, and protesting its standardized dullness. The protest began with Spoon River Anthology in 1915 and continued in Winesburg, Ohio (1919) but its annus mirabilis was 1920 with the publication of Main Street, which led what had become a full-scale assault.¹

Since Van Doren’s article, the term “Revolt from the Village” has become an accepted rubric of historical criticism. On the other hand, the term has for many critics unpleasant connotations; for every writer in this study, a critic can be found who admits that there may have been a “revolt from the village” movement but denies that any writer he likes belonged to it. A satisfactory definition of the revolt will show how a writer could belong to it and not lose his respectability. The terms “revolt” and “village” have caused most of the confusion by being taken in too simplistic a manner.

Some critics presume that to show a writer’s having ambivalent attitudes toward the village is to prove that he was not a part of the revolt. In fact all of the writers in this study had ambivalent attitudes. Since their fictive small towns were based on the real small towns of their childhood, an ambivalence between nostalgia and revolt was natural. Between 1915 and 1930, however, the revolt was more emphatic than the nostalgia. After 1930, as I shall show in my last chapter, the pendulum swang back, and the village was idealized by some of the same spirits who had led the twenties’ attack—a switch that did not so much result from new attitudes as from a reordering and change in emphasis of the old. The revolt, even at its most extreme, was never total, for, bad as the village was, no alternative way of life did much more to satisfy the heart’s desire.

The revolt, after all, should not be conceived too literally. It did not consist in a rabble of writers in red caps and sans-culottes charging up Main Street and flinging torches into the sheriff’s office. The authors drew on the real towns of their childhood, but their creations are fictions, simpler and more patterned than any reality. What they opposed was not an actual village existing in time and space but a mental conception of the village existing in the mind of a great number of Americans.

The village was synechdoche and metaphor. The village represented what Americans thought they were, what they sometimes pretended (to themselves as well as others) they wanted to be, and if the small town was typically American, the Midwestern small town was doubly typical. The basic civilization of America was middle class, a fact somewhat obscured in city novels that tended to treat the extremes of the very rich and the very poor to the exclusion of the middle. Even the East, dominated by its cities, usually granted the superior “Americanism” of the Middle West. Thus the Midwestern novelists of the teens and twenties could see their locale as a microcosm of the nation and, provincial bourgeoises that they were, of the world. But their view was critical. The town was the focus of what was in actuality an over-all attack on middle-class American civilization.²

The town was especially vulnerable because it had been mythicized out of all reality. The myth of the small town was based on a set of ideal antitheses to the city. The cold impersonality of the city contrasted with the “togetherness” of the town; the vice of the city with the innocence of the town; the complexity of the city with the simplicity of the town. The sociological cause of the myth is evident enough: the myth of the small town served as a mental escape from the complexities, insecurities, and continual changes of a society in rapid transition from a dominantly rural to a dominantly urban and industrial civilization. The myth was a symptom of immaturity; it was sentimental, escapist, and simple-minded.

To understand the myth, it is necessary to clearly demarcate the small town from the city, on the one hand, and the farm, on the other. The U.S. Bureau of Census defines a place as rural if 2,499 people live there; with a single addition, the town is magically urbanized. The census definition may be operationally useful for the purpose of governmental statistics, but it does not accord with the commonly accepted meaning of “small town” and “city.” As Max Lerner points out, the small town is “an entity hard to define, especially in drawing a line between the small town and the city.” Even the more realistic figure of ten thousand to fifteen thousand would be arbitrary.³ Fortunately, Mr. Lerner proposes a definition that perfectly correlates with the emotional meaning of “small town” which I am investigating in this chapter: “The test is at what point the town grows too big to make life compassable. The value of small-town living lies in the face-to-face relations that it makes possible throughout the community. One might say that a small town ceases to be one as soon as someone who has lived in it a number of years finds unfamiliar faces as he walks down the street and is not moved to discover who they are and how they got there.”⁴

Thus, the small town is difficult to distinguish from the city (the small city, at least) in hard and fast physical and statistical terms, but in emotional and attitudinal terms the difference is clear: the small town is where people know each other as opposed to the faceless metropolis. The farm, on the other hand, is easily distinguishable from the small town in objective terms. Physically, the American farm, particularly in the Midwest, has always been more isolated from the village than farms in England and on the Continent. Whereas the European farmer sometimes even lived in a village, the American farmer lived on his farm, the village serving him primarily as a supply base. Before the coming of the automobile, the farmer’s trips to town were relatively infrequent, something of an undertaking and an adventure, particularly from the children’s point of view when they were allowed to go along. Indeed, for a young boy on an isolated farm, a trip to town had some of the glamor that the trip to the city had for the town boy.

But if the town and farm are easily distinguishable in objective terms, they are far less so in emotional and attitudinal terms. To the nostalgic mind, the two often melt together as the serene and tranquil country opposed to the strident and vicious city. The scornful urbanite also identified the farm and town as the common home of the rube and the hayseed. Farm and small town often did agree in their common adherence to a narrow religious fundamentalism and a simplistic and puritanical social code. The escapist notion of a simple and innocent way of life was even more associated with the farm than with the small town. The agrarian myth of the virtuous farmer is in some of its aspects indistinguishable from the myth of the small town. Lewis Atherton points out that in McGuffey’s readers, “Children learned that village and country life surpassed that in cities. As a rule, McGuffey simply ignored urban ways or used them as examples of corruption.”⁵

Townsmen and farmer might temporarily ally themselves against the supposed corruption of the cities, but their more usual relation was one of mutual hostility. Thorstein Veblen saw the small town as an economic parasite, living off the farmer.⁶ Indeed, the small town merchants were the groups that most bitterly fought against rural free delivery (and its consequent expansion of the mail-order trade), thereby further exacerbating the already unfriendly feelings of the farmers.⁷ Moreover, the townspeople envied the city as much as they distrusted it. Looking to the city for his social values, the townsman was scornful of his country cousin, all the more so because of his lurking knowledge of their kinship.⁸

Of course, these actual differences between town and farm were often blurred or ignored in the myth of country virtue. But there was one important aspect in which the town myth thoroughly differed from the agrarian myth and this was in its emphasis on community. American farm life might be extolled for its home and family life, but it put somewhat too much of a strain on credulity to idealize the community life of the relatively isolated American farmer. The small town myth, by contrast, is primarily a myth of community. If some of the classic American writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James tried to create through the verbal structures of their fiction an ideal community, “a world elsewhere,”⁹ those who glorified the American village complacently assured their readers that the ideal community really existed: it was the American small town. Because the town myth appeals so strongly to the American desire for community, it has been much more important to American literature than the agrarian myth. As Meredith Nicholson notes: “Imaginative literature has done little to invest the farm with glamour. The sailor and the warrior, the fisherman and the hunter are celebrated in song and story, but the farmer has inspired no ringing saga or iliad, and the lyric muse has only added to the general joyless impression of the farmer’s life.”¹⁰

The small town, it is true, equally lacks glamour, but its very freedom from glamour and excitement was one of its endearing qualities to the American consciousness, and it has never lacked a literature of glorification. We shall now examine some varying examples of this literature, concentrating on the major motifs in the myth of the village: the vision of stasis, and the folks and their folksiness.

The classic celebration of the village is Oliver Goldsmith’s poem, The Deserted Village (1770). As Ima Honaker Herron shows, the first American praises of village innocence, Philip Freneau’s The American Village (1772) and Timothy Dwight’s Greenfield Hill (1794), were mere mediocre imitative transplantations of the Goldsmithian village tradition to America.¹¹ Americans read Goldsmith far more than they read his imitators, and it is to Goldsmith himself that we must look for one of the most revealing avatars of the myth of the small town.

Of course, Goldsmith’s poem is about the English village, a community that, as we have seen, differed from the small town as English and Continental farmers sometimes lived in the villages rather than on isolated farms. In Goldsmith’s poem then, the agrarian and town myth are one and the same. “Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain” is characterized by “innocence and ease,” by “humble happiness.” Most revealing of the emotions evoked by the village is that the poet thinks of it as a place to retire to, an escape from strife to the original refuge:

And as an hare whom hounds and horns pursue,

Pants to the place from whence at first she flew,

I still had hopes, my long vexations past,

Here to return—and die at home at last.

The symbolic identity of home and womb hardly needs stressing. Although Goldsmith’s poem was intended as a protest against the enclosure movement that was forcing the English farmer off his traditionally held lands, the mood evoked is escapist rather than critical. In keeping with the masterfully maintained womb-like quietude and serenity of the poem is Goldsmith’s avoidance of sharp-edged particularities; everything is seen from a softening and tranquilizing distance:

Sweet was the sound when oft at evening’s close,

Up yonder hill the village murmur rose;

There as I past with careless steps and slow,

The mingling notes came softened from below.

Neither ambition nor pride exists to jar this atmosphere. One of the chief men of the village is the preacher, but he has no pride of place:

A man he was, to all the country dear,

And passing rich with forty pounds a year

Remote from towns he ran his goodly race;

Nor e’er had changed, nor wished to change his place;

Unpractised he to fawn, or seek for power,

By doctrines fashioned to the varying hour;

Far other aims his heart had learned to prize,

More skilled to raise the wretched than to rise.

To the urbanite, Goldsmith’s village may sound sweet but rather lifeless. His defense is that the village offers natural and spontaneous joys as opposed to the artificial pleasures of the city which can lead only to ennui:

Yes! let the rich deride, the proud disdain

These simple blessings of the lowly train;

To me more dear, congenial to my heart,

One native charm, than all the gloss of art;

Spontaneous joys, where Nature has its play,

The soul adopts, and owns their first born sway;

Lightly they frolic o’er the vacant mind,

Unenvied, unmolested, unconfined,

But the long pomp, the midnight masquerade,

With all the freaks of wanton wealth amazed,

In these, ere triflers half their wish obtain,

The toiling pleasure sickens into pain;

And even while fashion’s brightest arts decoy,

The heart distrusting asks, if this be joy.

The suggestion of regression in the spontaneous joys in which “the vacant mind” delights needs no elaboration, but as a pre-Freudian poet, Goldsmith identifies natural “first-born” joys with innocence and peace rather than with aggression and greed. The village is a natural world and nature is innocent, akin to heaven; even the villager’s transition from life to death is natural and peaceful. One hardly knows he has left the village:

But on he moves to meet his latter end

Angels around befriending virtue’s friend;

Bends to the grave with unperceived decay,

While resignation gently slopes the way;

And all his prospects brightening to the last

His heaven commences ere the world be past!

In summary, the village world of Goldsmith’s poem is evoked as a womb-like refuge, closer to death than life in its complete absence of competition and conflict. Being a completely natural world, it offers an escape from metaphysical as well as social conflicts. There is no need to question what is only “natural”; the villagers go gently into their good nights.

Goldsmith’s imaginary refuge has little relation to any real village, this being its charm. The real English village is more to be found in George Crabbe’s The Village (1783). Emphasizing the poverty and disease of rural life, Crabbe issues a challenge to his readers:

No longer truth, though shown in verse, disdain,

But own the Village Life a life of pain.

The English village life was in reality a “life of pain,” and Crabbe’s picture of it was far truer than Goldsmith’s. Yet it is not hard to understand why Goldsmith’s poem had a far more lasting and pervasive influence as it only purports to be about a real English village. Its setting is a mythological retreat, the great good place, a Heaven-haven. The poem’s power derives from its assurance that the great good place really did exist, that it was,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• 1. The Revolt: What It Was About
• 2. Eggleston to Frederic
• 3. Mark Twain: The Southwest and the Satirist
• 4. Willa Cather: The Home Place, Stultification and Inspiration
• 5. Brooks, Mencken, and the New Zona Gale
• 6. Masters and Anderson
• 7. Sinclair Lewis: Caricaturist of the Village Mind
• 8. Elmer Gantry and That Old Time Religion
• 9. Stribling and Wolfe
• 10. The Thirties and After
• 11. Conclusion: The Village Rebels and the Kicking Season
• Notes
• Index