영어로 읽는 고전 _ 싱클레어 루이스의 메인 스트리트
싱클레어 루이스의 “메인 스트리트”는 1920년에 출간된 소설이다. 이 작품은 이상주의적인 젊은 여성 캐럴 밀퍼드 케니콧을 통해 소도시의 삶을 풍자한다. 그녀는 미네소타주의 고퍼 프레리로 이주하지만, 편협한 주민들과 끊임없이 부딪친다. 칙칙한 마을에 진보적 변화와 아름다움을 가져오려 결심한 캐럴은 보수적인 공동체로부터 줄곧 저항에 직면한다. 이 소설은 자신의 비전을 받아들이기를 거부하는 미국 지방 사회를 배경으로, 순응과 독립, 전통과 개혁 사이에서 갈등하는 그녀의 분투를 그려낸다.
Classics Read in English _ Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
Published in 1920, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street satirizes small-town life through Carol Milford Kennicott, an idealistic young woman who settles in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, only to find herself at odds with its narrow-minded inhabitants. Determined to bring progressive change and a measure of beauty to the dreary town, Carol meets unrelenting resistance from its conservative community. Against the backdrop of a provincial America that refuses to embrace her vision, the novel traces her struggle between conformity and independence, tradition and reform.
Among the contents
ON a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Nor was she thinking of squaws and portages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about her. She was meditating upon walnut fudge, the plays of Brieux, the reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the chemistry instructor had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears.
A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom.
