Babbitt (novel)

Babbitt, first published in 1922, is a work of fiction by the American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright Sinclair Lewis. Largely a satire of American culture, society, and behavior, its main theme focuses on the power of conformity, and the vacuity of middle-class American life.

As is indicated in many editions of the book, the working title of Babbitt was Pumphrey.

Plot

The book takes its name from the principal character, George F. Babbitt, a middle-aged partner, with his father-in-law, in a real-estate firm. When the story begins, in April 1920, Babbitt is 46 years old. He is married, has three children (Verona, 22; Ted, 17; and Tinka, 10), and has a well-appointed house in the prosperous Floral Heights neighborhood of “Zenith," a fictitious city in the equally fictitious state of “Winnemac,” which is adjacent to Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. (Babbitt does not mention Winnemac by name, though Lewis's later novel Arrowsmith elaborates on its location.) When Babbitt was published, newspapers in Cincinnati, Duluth, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis each claimed that their city was the model for Sinclair's Zenith. Cincinnati possessed perhaps the strongest argument for such a claim because Lewis had lived there for a time while researching Babbitt. Lewis's own correspondence suggests, however, that Zenith is meant to be any midwestern city with a population between about 200,000 and 300,000.

Zenith's chief virtue is conformity, and its religion is “boosterism.” Prominent boosters in Zenith include Vergil Gunch, the coal-dealer; Sidney Finkelstein, the ladies'-ready-to-wear buyer for Parcher & Stein's department-store; and Professor Joseph K. Pumphrey, owner of the Riteway Business College and “instructor in Public Speaking, Business English, Scenario Writing, and Commercial Law.”

Babbitt lives a professionally successful life, but is nevertheless unhappy. Lewis juxtaposes Babbitt's success as a businessman with his ignorance of contemporary social and economic conditions existing outside of his own family circle. His character lives with only the vaguest awareness of the lives and deaths of his contemporaries — he focuses instead on the drama of his own life, and the lives of those immediately connected to him. Gradually, though, he becomes dissatisfied with this perception, and eventually rebels against it — only to lapse back into conformity by the end of the novel.

Themes and Structure

The novel is divided roughly into thirds. The first seven chapters follow Babbitt closely through a typical workday, from his restless dreaming before he awakens in the morning to his struggle to fall asleep that night. The middle third of the novel reveals Babbitt in various settings: on vacation, attending a business convention, campaigning for the conservative mayoral candidate, giving dinner parties, giving speeches, attempting (in vain) to climb socially, serving as a member of the Sunday School Advisory Committee of the Chatham Road Presbyterian Church, and so on. This section of the novel has drawn criticism about the thread of the plot becoming lost; critics have argued that Lewis seems to move aimlessly from one set-piece to another. The final third of the novel reprises the pattern of Babbitt's midlife crisis: He rebels, is “punished,” and “repents (conforms),” but, toward the end of the story, the possibility of redemptive change is implied in the rebelliousness of Babbitt's son.

Though written well before the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, and the post-war economic boom, Lewis's comic novel has remained popular into the 21st century. Critics have posed reasons for the book's continuing accessibility to include Lewis's seeming success in identifying and portraying emotions, challenges, and concerns that remain relatively viable over time, and with which modern readers — especially white-collar workers and professionals, dissatisfied housewives, and middle-aged representatives of middle-class America — seem to still easily identify. By the 1920s, the United States was already concluding the process described by historian Olivier Zunz as “making America corporate.” Thus, if the continued popularity of Lewis's characters is any indication, despite the many intervening, superficial advances and changes in technology, in Babbitt's fictional world can still be recognized much of today's, non-fiction one.

In the characterization of the work Babbitt does for a living, Lewis implies a critique of capitalism. In the novel's opening chapter, we are told that Babbitt makes “nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry,” but that he is “nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.” Likewise, while he is home sick in bed, Babbitt, too, reflects on his career; he exclaims to himself that his work is “mechanical business — a brisk selling of badly built houses.”

Historically significant is the author's use, throughout, of the political word “liberal.” The book was written not long after the project of “new liberalism” began, and the term had not yet congealed in the United States as a definition of a specific brand of ideology belonging to moderate left-wing politics. Babbitt’s warped interpretation of the word, and his (and other characters’) equally skewed practical application of it, are examples of one of the humorous literary devices in which Lewis uses satire to illustrate and simplify complex ideas.

Films

Babbitt was filmed in 1924 as a silent film, and again in 1934 as a talkie, both times by Warner Bros. The 1934 film starred Guy Kibbee as George Babbitt.

References

External links

• Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis