Habits Of Mind: Studies In The Literature Of The Middle West In The 20th Century.

Abstract

The Middle West is nowhere, Glenway Wescott once wrote, an abstract nowhere. His judgement typifies responses of midwestern writers in this century who have found the place in mind to be curiously out of focus, unfixed, and amorphous. Together, their descriptions of the region compose a multiple exposure of disparate images that reveal their complex ambivalence about the home place, and that ambivalence has been otherwise evident in the writer's real or imagined flights from the Middle West and his attempted returns to it. With a view to historical conditions of settlement and growth that help explain the region's chimerical identity and the regional writer's ambivalence, I then turn to midwestern fiction from approximately 1890-1940 in order to discover regional habits of mind shared by midwestern writers. By habits of mind I mean: characteristic responses passively evident in the writer's fictive treatment of life at home, in his attitude toward the inhabitants of the home place, and in his understanding of his own position (the writer's) in the society of his region and of the nation. In sequence, I discuss literature about the farm, the village, and the city of Chicago and, in so doing, follow the backtrail of an historic counter-migration through the Middle West at the turn of the century. This sequence also figures thematically in the writer's description of the rapid shift in midwestern economic and social centers of power at about the same time. And it further maps a familiar itinerary for the midwestern writer whose journey eastward often took him finally to New York and Paris--out of the literal Middle West, but never far from its metaphysical landscapes. In his critique of the Middle West, the writer finds the region to be obsessed with pragmatism and materialism. In his fiction, sexual divisions of assignment and allegiance symbolize cultural deficiencies that derive, therefore, from ignorance and willful neglect of the inner life. Frontier travail first enforced regimens inimical to music, community, and romantic love. Later, unvarnished philistinism and a virulent strain of puritanical dogma perverted and destroyed village lives worth living elsewhere. Finally, in the city, ice palaces thrust upward old and new notions of material progress and culturally defined assertions of the predominant (though hardly the victorious) regional zeitgeist. So defined, the Middle West makes expatriates of its writers who find its milieu indifferent or hostile to their sensibilities and art. But flight from the region only commences the writer's litigation between eastern and midwestern values and allegiances, and it further exacerbates his sense of homelessness and inadequacy, producing what has been widely recognized as the midwestern writer's deference to (alternating with defiance of) Boston and New York. The midwestern writer's ambivalence and uncertainty about himself and the Middle West, then, derive from the nature of his regional inheritance, from his appraisal of regional deficiencies that mark him as an outcast, from his and his region's understanding of the writer's place in the Middle West (nowhere), and from his sense of displacement at home and away from home.