Published in 1922, Babbitt won praise from contemporary critics for Sinclair Lewis’s use of photographic realism, believable American dialogue, and satirical portrayal of small-town America. The novel relates the experience of businessman George Folansbee Babbitt in the typical Midwestern city of Zenith. Though he has been used to middle-class conventions and believes in the virtues of home life, he suddenly feels tired of his life and takes a vacation with Paul Riesling, who finds it difficult to live as a busy man with a nagging wife. Paul has also been largely interpreted as a sensitive artist figure and, occasionally, as object of Babbitt’s unacknowledged homosexual leanings. Babbitt finds it impossible to escape from the conventional business life, but he soon discovers pleasure in campaigning for a friend running for mayor, in negotiating several profitable real-estate deals, in holding the vice presidency of the Boosters’ Club, and in giving speeches on important social occasions.

Paul’s imprisonment for shooting his wife Zilla gives Babbitt a deep shock. Burdened with business engagements and bored with conventions, Babbitt finds an outlet from Zenith standards by having an affair with a widow, Mrs. Tanis Judique, during his wife’s absence. He then turns to liberalism until he is threatened with losing his chances for making profits. He is able to embrace the Zenith standards when his wife Myra is suddenly taken ill, but he is disillusioned with a life in which he has never done anything he likes, and he expects his son to live a better life. H. L. Mencken, in his “Portrait of an American Citizen,” writes that Babbitt, as a representative of American culture, lacks any originality. Stephen S. Conroy summarizes Babbitt as a person of “conformity” and “adjustment” who has a “vague hope for a freer future” (in Bloom, 76). In a review for The Nation, Ludwig Lewisohn noted that “the future historian of American civilization will turn to [Babbitt] with infinite profit, with mingled amusement, astonishment, and pity” (284).

The conformist adventurer’s tragic experience points to the characteristics of the national business culture. The mechanical business life has reduced individuals to machines good at producing profits yet poor at expressing their emotions. The writer, in recounting the protagonist’s adventures, does, however, offer healing sources: work, vacation, and love affairs, all of which are effective only briefly. By the end, the protagonist’s pathetic lamentation over the meaninglessness of his life provokes the complacent reader into asking vital questions: How can a person stick to something that he or she dislikes? What are the elements of true individuality? Since society and individuals are never separate, individuals remain imprisoned as long as the society imposes upon them rigid beliefs about the nature of success.

The agents of such a culture range from the successful to the unsuccessful, from men to women, from the young to the old. Paul’s tragedy illustrates the destructive consequences of imposing the ideal of material success on an individual. His shooting of his wife can be interpreted as a protest against the dominant business culture. It is the ceaseless gaining and purchasing that drives individuals to the brink of madness. Men are expected to increase their earnings so that they can maintain their masculine pride. Women and children yearn for more luxuries so that they might be envied. Social status is established according to the luxury items each family owns. The richness of material life, therefore, forms a glaring contrast to the poverty of emotional life. No wonder domestic harmony is threatened and spiritual death becomes a distinct possibility.

The novel as a whole examines not only American marriages but also the poverty of the working class, the influence of fringe religious groups, and the nature of politics and government. Indeed, critic George H. Douglas, writing in 1972, claims that the novel still has something to teach us. He maintains that Lewis remains an important writer “because he grappled doggedly with some elemental qualities of our experience,” qualities that are “as persistent today as they were in the 1920s” (661). What qualities, then, should an ideal citizen possess? With the fluid boundaries between work and life, it is possible to think that work is a kind of life and vice versa. The quality that counts is perhaps this: The fortunate individual chooses between conventionality and individualism. Certainly the United States is home to millions of Babbitts and Pauls, yet how many happy individuals does it contain? In Douglas’s words, Lewis’s genius lay in his ability to perceive that, within the 20th century’s social and moral complexities, the “great American dream was often nothing but a faint and powerless shadow, consigned to the dark recesses of the mind” (662).

Analysis of Sinclair Lewis’s Novels

SOURCES
Bloom, Harold. Sinclair Lewis. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.
Douglas, George H. “Babbitt at Fifty—The Truth Still Hurts.” Nation, 22 May 1972, pp. 661–662.
Lewis, Sinclair. Babbitt. 1922. Reprint, New York: Signet Classic, 1950.
Lewisohn, Ludwig. Review of Babbitt. Nation, 20 September 1922, pp. 284–285.

Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis

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