On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky.
Following a brief introduction, this is the opening line of the novel. The girl will very soon be identified as Carol Milford and the novel follows the narrative of her marriage to Dr. Will Kennicott and the decision to move to his home town, the very small village of Gopher Prairie where right from the outset Carol feels utterly out of place and devoid of hope.
“The Village Virus is the germ which--it's extraordinarily like the hook-worm--it infects ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces.”
Intellectual Pollock represents the only likely escape from the smothering provincial conformity that Carol Kennicott finds in her husband’s home town of Gopher Prairie. He has created a name for the metaphorical condition of giving into small town crushing of ambition, dreams and hopes for something better.
She saw the furniture as a circle of elderly judges, condemning her to death by smothering.
The first time Carol is left alone in the home her husband had shared with his mother before marrying her, she is instantly overcome with anxiety that almost instantly surrenders to anguish. Gazing at the furniture after being left alone by her husband, she wonders out loud how people could possibly live with among such dismal surroundings before taking her reaction to the encroaching unpleasantness into the level of disquieting—and slightly paranoid—metaphor.
Mrs. Bogart was not the acid type of Good Influence. She was the soft, damp, fat, sighing, indigestive, clinging, melancholy, depressingly hopeful kind.
Standing in direct opposition to Carol is her neighbor, Mrs. Bogart. She is epitome of the assault on the worst aspects of small town narrow-mindedness which permeates through the novel. Her pettiness does not end with being judgmental and closed to anything approaching a progressive idea; she is also the iconic figure of the ultimate in small town dangers to a person like Carol: Mrs. Bogart is an inveterate gossip prone to always assume the worst in those who not believe and behave exactly like her.
She turned to the Chautauqua as she had turned to the dramatic association, to the library-board.
The “she” in question is Carol and this quote directly addresses how Carol tries one thing after another to escape the stifling boredom of small town life as well as to enact some kind of change in its narrow-minded self-satisfied sense of its own perfection. On a deeper level, however, this quote may serve as an acknowledgement by the author that the protagonist of his novel is reduced to an episodic series of attempts to find meaning in her life. If so, then this acknowledgement can appropriately be interpreted as a subtle pre-emptive strike against what he likely expected would be the major criticism leveled against his book. Like Carol, Main Street is a series of episodes that point out his themes rather than a coherent narrative in which characters are allowed to develop and grow as a result of their experiences. Indeed, Main Street is much like the city at its center; a place where lots of things happen, but nothing much changes.
