Essay Questions

The author subtly suggests that the widespread prejudices, narrow-mindedness and conservative thought characterizing towns in the Midwest was due in larger part to isolation and alienation. What are some examples?

Weather played a role in keeping turn-of-the-century perspectives, opinions and biases from being either broadened or infected by outside alternative views. The state of transport was not easy and infrastructure is key to empowering new ideas and differing viewpoints:

“Even in town the roads were a furrowed welter of mud, hideous to view and difficult to cross. Main Street was a black swamp from curb to curb; on residence streets the grass parking beside the walks oozed gray water. It was prickly hot, yet the town was barren under the bleak sky.”

Even the steam-powered gorilla which opened the west and changed America forever could not be counted on with regularity in every single village and hamlet charting the course toward the Pacific:

“During blizzards everything about the railroad was melodramatic. There were days when the town was completely shut off, when they had no mail, no express, no fresh meat, no newspapers.”

The opposite of Carol is not gossipy Mrs. Bogart, the promiscuous Mrs. Swiftwaite or even Vida the schoolmarm, but her maid and perhaps closest friend, Bea Sorensen. How does the author implicate Bea as the anti-Carol?

Carol thinks rather highly of herself in comparison to the conservative, dull-witted, incurious denizens of Gopher Prairie, but in some ways she manifests an outlook as uncritical and unaccepting as those whom she criticizes. The inescapable fact—so inescapable that even Carol eventually comes around to grudgingly recognizing it—is that Carol actually has a great deal in common with the small minds who rule the small town. It is Bea Sorenson who is portrayed as standing most starkly in contrast to Carol. As the narrator pointedly observes, “The train which brought Carol to Gopher Prairie also brought Miss Bea Sorenson.” The reaction of each woman to the sights of the town could not diverge more absolutely. Where Carol sees a sparse population of dull citizens, Bea wonders how it could be “was possible there could be so many folks all in one place at the same time.” Where Carol finds the grocery store window display uninspiring, Bea is so overwhelmed by the Bon Ton store employing seven or eight clerks that “it would simply scare a person to go in there.” What the two women’s views of the same places on the same day suggests is that everything in life is really just a matter of experience and perspective and no one person has a monopoly over any anyone else.

In the end, what appears to be the fundamental proverbial moral the story for Carol Kennicott in particular?

When Carol first arrives in Gopher Prairie after having lived for some time in the big cities of Chicago and Minneapolis, she almost immediately characterizes it as a kind of hell of earth. She make up her mind a less than intellectually honest fashion by comparing the small town with what she knows rather than getting to know the small town. Having set herself up in opposition to an entire municipal state of mind, Carol can never fully find happiness living in a place that isn’t the big city. Until, ironically, she briefly leaves to take up residence in another big city; the nation’s capital of Washington, D.C. Only by comparing apples to apples does Carol reluctantly come to a latent appreciation of oranges. To mix metaphors, the moral of the story for Carol is that the grass always seems to be greener wherever she ain’t.