Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington

First published: 1921

Type of plot:Bildungsroman

Time of work: The post-World War I era

Locale: Indiana

Principal Characters:

• Alice Adams, a young woman in search of a beau and an identity
• Virgil Adams, the father, an older man in ill health
• Walter Adams, the brother with a penchant for gambling
• Mrs. Adams, Virgil’s nagging wife, a social climber
• Mr. Arthur Russell, a wealthy young man in search of a fiancé

The Novel

Alice Adams, the eponymous heroine of Booth Tarkington’s novel, is a character very like other heroes and heroines in literature who test the American myth of success expressed best by the Horatio Alger stories. Like Alger’s “Ragged Dick,” Alice Adams strives to lift herself into another social realm from the one in which she was born. Yet in her desire for a marriage that would satisfy her need for a specifically economic and material freedom, she perhaps reminds readers most of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, who seeks to marry Daisy as a final acquisition marking his success in the world.

As Tarkington’s novel begins, Alice’s family occupies a tenuous position in the mid-level manufacturing class of post-World War I Indiana. Their position affords them a modicum of respect, but they have slowly but surely felt the pinch of declining fortune. They manage to keep a cook, for example, but they can only afford to hire the surly specimens no other, more respectable families will employ.

Intent on improving the family fortunes, Mrs. Adams browbeats her husband Virgil into leaving his position with “Lamb, and Company,” where he is respected for his work ethic, honesty, and loyalty. She insists he leave the “old hole,” as she calls it, to start his own manufacturing company. Virgil’s ethical dilemma revolves around his knowledge of a secret glue formula, the rights to which are owned by Mr. Lamb. Because Lamb has done nothing with the formula for years, Virgil allows himself to be convinced by his wife to steal it, quit his position, and open his own glue factory.

Virgil’s ethical dilemma and subsequent fall parallel his daughter’s attempt to lift herself socially, also through unethical means. Alice’s head is filled with romance, and she begins lying in a futile attempt to deny the grim reality of the family’s declining stature. In this pursuit, she is encouraged by her mother, whose mending of old dresses so they will appear to be new is a benign example of how Alice begins by shading the truth and ends by lying outright. Tarkington masterfully illustrates the process whereby economic emulation gradually becomes pernicious dishonesty. In a famous scene, Alice meets Arthur Russell and tries to impress him by lying that she has been to the tobacconist to procure cigars for her father, who never, she assures him, smokes a pipe; this petty lie grows into a larger claim that her father occupies an almost aristocratic position of wealth and power. The lies grow as Alice and Arthur fall in love, but the lies are ultimately unable to sustain the fiction of an upper-class life she has created.

Three strands of the narrative come together when Mr. Alfred comes to dinner at the Adams home. The behavior of Alice’s family clearly demarcates their social class, undercutting all the things she has said about them to her beau. Moreover, her brother Walter’s embezzlement from the Lamb Company comes to light, even as the glue factory established by Virgil fails. When Arthur leaves the house, Alice knows that she will never see him again.

If the novel is a satire of class preoccupation in a supposedly “classless” country, it is also a Bildungsroman, or novel of growth, that charts the development of Alice’s character from a romantic girl into a realistic woman. Readers see in the various scenes a growing awareness of her position, and likewise the growth of a keen understanding of the unwritten rules governing society. Her lying functions as a critique of a materialist society that judges by perceptions of character, and it also indicates her awareness of how to manipulate society, although temporarily. In the end, however, she realizes that the romantic stories she fabricated were themselves lies, and that in order to survive in post-World War I America, she must have a realistic understanding of her class and position; in short, she must go to work. The novel ends with Alice approaching Frincke’s Business College, a place she had always avoided. Tarkington ends his novel with qualified optimism, and as Alice solemnly climbs the stairs, sunshine streams through an upper window, a symbolic endorsement of her more realistic attitude.

The Characters

Although the book’s focus is on the title character, the other major characters in Alice Adams are also developed and rounded. As individual as his main characters are, Tarkington uses them all to develop his ideas about the dishonesty of a social system based upon appearances and material wealth. Through his main characters, Tarkington includes all social classes, from the lowest to the highest.

At first, Alice Adams strikes the reader as merely an appealing young woman whose main concerns are the related issues of the social life of her peers and the finding of a suitable, financially sound beau. Quickly, however, Tarkington introduces the idea that will govern his novel: the search for identity. After lying to Arthur, Alice stares at herself in her mirror and asks the question, “Who in the world are you?” The book becomes the story of her quest for identity in a society in which identity is largely a construct and extension of material wealth.

Alice’s father, Virgil Adams, enjoys a naturally ethical character. His loyalty to his employer is absolute until Mrs. Adams finally breaks down his objections under the force of larger obligations to his family and its fortune. Virgil works in the “old hole,” and his name suggests Dante Alighieri’s Virgil, who serves as a guide to hell. The allusion refers both to the family’s inexorable downward slide and to Virgil’s failure or sin in ethics and judgment. Only after his fall do the family members—and the readers—realize that Virgil had been correct in his early belief that Mr. Lamb had valued him as an employee; in fact, near the end of the novel, Mr. Lamb reveals that he had retained Virgil as an employee solely because of the latter’s loyalty. This revelation renders Virgil’s subsequent disloyalty to Mr. Lamb all the more tragic.

Walter Adams, Alice’s brother, is the black sheep of the family. Given to gambling, often with money not his own, he mortifies Alice with his low-class associations. In particular, his familiarity with African Americans in a racist society causes Alice pain; rightly or wrongly, Alice knows that the family will be judged as an entirety, not individually. It is largely through Walter’s character that Tarkington extends his satire of American society to include the issue of race. Race, in the novel’s society, functions as wealth does to define one’s class identity.

Tarkington’s depiction of Mrs. Adams is complex. On one hand, she is an unsympathetic character. She is the true cause of Virgil’s downfall and is likewise the ultimate source for the character traits that cause Walter to embezzle and Alice to lie. She nags and browbeats her husband into accepting her view of American society: Material wealth is the final source of social standing and individual identity. At the same time, Tarkington depicts her negative traits as the laudable, positive extension of motherly concern for her children. Readers are ultimately conflicted in their response to Mrs. Adams. While the logic of Tarkington’s novel suggests that Mrs. Adams is correct that “money’s at the bottom of it all,” that idea, so promoted by her, is adopted by each member of the family, to their lasting detriment.

Arthur Russell is a wealthy young man who is intrigued by Alice’s character, and he might have married her in spite of her family’s lower standing. Nevertheless, the chasm between the two families is so great, and so obvious at the dinner party in Alice’s home, that he recoils from the entire family, including Alice. Arthur is embarrassed for her, and though he tries to tell her that he will see her again, it is apparent that even he realizes that the revelation of her lying and of her family’s true station in life will put an end to their relationship.

Critical Context

Booth Tarkington lived to see his work hailed as brilliant and then discarded as second-rate. The apex of his career occurred in the years after the end of World War I; in 1918, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Magnificent Ambersons. He won the honor again in 1921 for Alice Adams. The publication of Alice Adams thus marked the height of Tarkington’s prestige and popularity. Indeed, the novel in some sense resuscitated a waning career, though Tarkington would never again attain either the critical or the popular success of Alice Adams.

Tarkington is viewed today as a minor writer of realistic fiction, as a lesser Sinclair Lewis, to whom he is often compared. If Tarkington’s writing was occasionally held in overly high esteem during his lifetime—there were critics who ranked him above F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway—his reputation today is artificially low. Unlike his contemporaries Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and William Faulkner, Tarkington plowed no new ground and employed no new formal literary devices. However, his achievement has often been overlooked; he perfected the forms established by the early realists William Dean Howells and Henry James, and the gemlike structure of his novels, in which all aspects of plot and characterization work together toward a common end, often appears simple on the surface. Yet like gems held to the light, Tarkington’s novels repay close study, where they flash brilliantly the larger themes he conveys through character, in the perfect blend of ethics and aesthetics.

Bibliography

Fennimore, Keith J. Booth Tarkington. New York: Twayne, 1974. An excellent introduction to the author’s life and work.

Mayberry, Susanah. My Amiable Uncle: Recollections About Booth Tarkington. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1983. An important contribution to Tarkington’s biography.

Sorkin, Adam J. “ She Doesn’t Last, Apparently’: A Reconsideration of Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams.” American Literature 46 (1974): 182-199. A sympathetic and reasoned analysis of Alice Adams. Sorkin argues for greater critical attention to Tarkington generally and to Alice Adams in particular.

Woodress, James. Booth Tarkington, Gentleman from Indiana. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1955. An important biography, this volume offers some analysis of the novels.