Babbitt

Babbitt
1st edition cover
Author	Sinclair Lewis
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject(s)	American Values
Genre(s)	Satire
Publisher	Harcourt, Brace & Co.
Publication date	1922
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
ISBN	NA
Preceded by	Main Street
Followed by	Arrowsmith

Babbitt, first published in 1922, is a novel by 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 has a wife, Myra, three children (Verona, 22; Ted, 17; and Tinka, 10), and 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.^[1] Cincinnati possessed perhaps the strongest argument for such a claim because Lewis had lived there for a time while researching Babbitt.^[2] 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.^[3] 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; Professor Joseph K. Pumphrey, owner of the Riteway Business College and “instructor in Public Speaking, Business English, Scenario Writing, and Commercial Law;” and T. Cholmondeley "Chum" Frink, a famous poet of dubious talent.

Babbitt is professionally successful as a realtor. He lives with only the vaguest awareness of the lives and deaths of his contemporaries. Much of his energy in the beginning is spent on climbing the social ladder through booster functions, real estate sales, and making well with various dignitaries. Lewis paints humorous scenes of Babbitt foolishly bartering for liquor (illegal at the time due to Prohibition), hosting dinner parties, and taking clients to view property. All of this is juxtaposed against backdrops both of Babbitt's incessant materialism and his growing discontent.

Gradually, Babbitt realizes his dissatisfaction with "The American Dream" and attempts to quell these feelings by going camping with Paul Reisling in Maine. It has no great effect. After Paul shoots his abrasive, emasculating wife Zilla during an argument, Paul is sent to prison, and Babbitt is devastated by the loss of his best friend and by his contemplations on how equally suffocating and changeless their lives are. In time, he rebels against it all: he jumps into liberal politics with famous socialist litigator Seneca Doane; conducts an extramarital affair with client Tanis Judique; goes on various vacations; and cavorts around Zenith with would-be Bohemians and flappers, friends of Tanis. But each effort ends up disillusioning him to the concept of rebellion, as when Babbitt vacations in Chicago and encounters Paul's alleged mistress. On his excursions with Tanis and "the bunch," he learns that even they have just as rigid standards for their subculture. And when Virgil Gunch and others discover Babbitt's activities concerning Seneca Doane and Tanis Judique, Virgil tries to convince Babbitt to return to conformity. Babbitt refuses. His former friends then ostracize him, forming the "Good Citizens' League," which boycotts Babbitt's real estate ventures and shuns him publicly from clubs around town.

Babbitt slowly becomes aware that his forays into nonconformity are not only futile but also destructive of the life and the friends he once loved. Yet he continues with them — that is, until Myra suspects Babbitt's affair, though she has no proof or specific knowledge. Unrelated to these events, Myra falls seriously ill. Babbitt, in a near-epiphany, rushes home and relinquishes all rebellion in order to care for his wife, realizing that there is value in marriage even though it not be romanticized or passionate love. In consequence of his disgruntled philosophical wanderings being met with practical events of life, he reverts into dispassionate conformity by the end; however, Babbitt never quite loses hold of the sentimentality, empathy, and hope for a meaningful life which he has developed. In the final scene, all has been righted in his life and he is back on a traditional track. He is awakened in the night to find that Ted and Eunice have not returned from a party. In the morning his wife informs him that the two have been discovered in the house, having been married that night. While an assemblage of friends and family gather to denounce this development, Babbitt excuses himself and Ted to be alone. He offers his approval of the marriage stating that though he does not agree he admires the fact that Ted has chosen to lead his life by his own lights and not that of conformity.

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.^[4] 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.”^[5] 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 in 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 centre 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.

It's not a stretch to think the idea for the name came from George F. Babbitt, The American businessman and inventor who made his fortune in the soap industry. It has been suggested that "Hobbit" from The Hobbit may be derived from "Babbitt", as the character Bilbo is also living in a confining upper-middle-class existence before the wizard Gandalf drags him out of it and into a series of adventures. As Charlie and Raymond Babbitt in "Rain Man" are from Cincinnati, one of the proposed models for Zenith, the idea that they may be George Babbitt's great-grandsons is not too far-fetched.

Films

Babbitt was filmed in 1924 as a silent film,^[6] and again in 1934 as a talkie,^[7] both times by Warner Bros. The 1934 film starred Guy Kibbee as George Babbitt.

References

1. ^ Schorer, M.: Sinclair Lewis: An American Life, page 344. McGraw-Hill, 1961.
2. ^ Ibid., page 301.
3. ^ Ibid., pages 301-2.
4. ^ Schorer, M.: “Afterword,” in 1961 reprint ed., Babbitt, New American Library.
5. ^ Zunz, O.: Making America Corporate, 1870-1920. Univ. of Chicago, 1990.
6. ^ Babbitt at the Internet Movie Database
7. ^ Babbitt at the Internet Movie Database

External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Babbitt

• Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
• Babbitt at Project Gutenberg