The case of Carol Kennicott recalls to mind that of Emma Bovary in Flaubert’s novel, but there is a difference due to the fact that Carol was born in America. Carol’s life is much less gloomy than Emma’s. Doctor Kennicott is a better and more interesting man than Emma’s husband. Gopher Prairie, in spite of all its shortcomings, is a more cheerful place to live in than Mme. Bovary’s Normandy village. Who knows whether Emma, had she migrated to the United States, would not have ended by getting reconciled to a world where the thrills of the movies, the automobile and the radio would have cured her of her blues? As a member of a women’s club, and a social worker, she might have taken a new interest in existence. Carol and Emma were, in many respects, twin sisters. Both liked to read fiction and to mistake what they read for reality. Both were married to commonplace and unromantic country doctors. Both liked to build castles in Spain. Both shocked the world around them by their adventures and escapades. As an artist, it is true, Lewis does not come up to Flaubert’s level. Flaubert’s style is plastic, something for the eye, as well as for the ear, to enjoy. Lewis is almost exclusively oral, but he excels Flaubert in making things and people move, breathe and speak in a lifelike way. There is, according to the novelist, a double legend concerning the American small town. The first is sentimental. According to it: The American village remains the sure abode of friendship, honesty, and clean, sweet, marriageable girls. Therefore all men who succeed in painting in Paris or in finance in New York at last become weary of smart women, return to their native town, assert that cities are vicious, marry their childhood sweethearts and, presumably, joyously abide in those towns until death.[31] Then there is the “roughing it” legend: The other tradition is that the significant features of all villages are whiskers, iron dogs upon lawns, gold bricks, checkers, jars of gilded cat-tails, and shrewd comic old men who are known as “hicks” and who ejaculate “Waal, I swan.” This altogether admirable tradition rules the vaudeville stage, factious illustrators, and syndicate newspaper humor, but out of actual life it passed forty years ago. Carol’s small town thinks not in horse-swapping but in cheap motor cars, telephones, ready-made clothes, silos, alfalfa, kodaks, phonographs, leather-upholstered Morris chairs, bridge prizes, oil-stocks, motion-pictures, land-deals, unread sets of Mark Twain, and a chaste version of national politics.[32] In such a town, we are told, for every two contented people there are hundreds, especially among the young, who are not. That is why the intelligent and the well-to-do travel and leave for the big cities from which they hope never to return. Even in the West the elder people emigrate. They go to California to die.