The American Midwestern Identity in Literature

Introduction

An understanding of the midwestern identity as it is expressed in the literature of the region first requires a working definition of the region itself. Most often the Midwest is simply defined as twelve states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. The Midwest also is often referred to as the heartland, but what area is meant by this name is subject to interpretation. Some scholars include portions of other states, including eastern Colorado or eastern Montana. Others include all of West Virginia and Oklahoma, while still others limit the Midwest to a far smaller area that includes only wheat states or corn states. Many critics use geographical rather than state boundaries to define the Midwest. A western boundary commonly used to define the Midwest is the Missouri River. Some argue for a southern boundary that divides corn and cotton country. No matter which definition one chooses to accept, however, the Midwest encompasses topographical variety and human diversity, and although the region includes many metropolitan areas, it has been the literature of the rural experience that has gained acceptance as the writing that most appropriately characterizes life in the Midwest.

The central characteristic that defines a work as midwestern, aside from the setting, is an illustration of the relationships between the land and people and the changes that have occurred in those relationships since European settlement. More specifically, these relationships are seen in two key themes: farm life and small-town life.

Farm Life

The family farm was the dominant cultural enterprise in the Midwest until the later decades of the twentieth century, when large agribusiness corporations turned farming from a social foundation into a cog in the corporate machine. This dramatic change, driven by economics and technology, is not remarkable in the history of midwestern farming. Change has been the one consistent fact of farm life in the Midwest.

Farm fiction began with Hamlin Garland’s Main-Travelled Roads (1891). Garland wanted to tell the truth about farming, and to Garland that truth meant avoiding the romanticized vision of farming as a happy pastoral existence lived in harmony with nature. Opposite Garland are perhaps two of the most beautiful novels ever written about farming, Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918). In both, Cather depicts strong female protagonists who struggle with the Nebraska prairie sod until it gives in to their will and produces food. Cather’s ability to capture the beauty of life on the prairie and its extraordinary effects on her characters is rivaled by few. Herbert Quick’s Vandemark’s Folly (1922), while suffering from a melodramatic plot, compares with Cather’s work in its ability to describe the native Iowa prairie in several inspiring passages. In Cather’s and Quick’s novels a key theme is the immigrant experience, and this is also true in Ole Rölvaag’s Giants in the Earth (1924–25), which is considered by some to be the best farm novel ever written. Rölvaag’s central couple, Per and Beret Hansa, find that the founding of a farm in America is as much a question of learning to farm as it is learning to become or not to become like other Americans. Per and Beret find they must decide what to keep of their Norwegian roots.

Unlike Rölvaag’s serious and tragic Giants in the Earth, Phil Stong’s State Fair (1932) is a more lighthearted look at midwestern farm life. State Fair describes a family’s trip to the fair with their prize hog as a decent, clean, and enjoyable experience. Stong’s view, however, is in the minority. Like Garland before him, Herbert Krause, in his long novel The Thresher (1946), presents a view of farm life as brutal and tough, compounded by the rigors of the German Lutheran ancestry of his characters. Another of the most significant of farm novelists is Frederick Manfred. His two early novels, The Golden Bowl (1944) and This Is the Year (1947), began the farming and family themes set in Siouxland (a word of his own coinage that names the area where Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Nebraska meet) that he would continue to write about for decades. His later works included Eden Prairie (1968), Green Earth (1977), and Of Lizards and Angels (1992). In all his farm novels Manfred attempts to detail the struggles of immigrant farmers in a rambling lyrical style that earned him wide praise and recognition. Lois Phillips Hudson’s The Bones of Plenty (1962) is perhaps the least appreciated of quality farm fiction. Set in a fifteen-month period during the 1930s, the novel is extraordinary in its ability to dramatize the complicated web of economic and social forces facing a North Dakota family.

After the 1960s, the production of farm novels dropped off considerably, but the crisis in farming of the 1970s and 1980s, in which agribusiness took control of farming, seemed to spur a new generation of farm novels with some provocative new themes. Douglas Unger’s Leaving the Land (1984) is a two-part novel that dramatizes the life of a South Dakota farmer’s daughter whose freedom and growth as a girl are countered by her disillusionment in later years. Wendell Berry’s Remembering (1988) is a nostalgic look back to the years of the small family farm in an age of industrial farming that destroys families and land. Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991) is a startling account of the darker side of an Iowa family farm. Told from the point of view of a farmer’s daughter, this novel is unique in its challenge to the family structure that underlies family farming in the Midwest. Don Kurtz’s South of the Big Four (1995) is an account of a son’s return home to the family farm and of his process of accepting what he finds there.

Small-town Life

Along with farm life, an essential part of the midwestern cultural identity is found in the small town. The myths about farms are rivaled by those about small towns. The small town was to be the ideal democratic community—safe, decent, and educated—which would serve the farmers with goods, services, and culture. It is no surprise then, that the success of the novels of the small town lay in their ability to expose these false assumptions. It is telling that the first American to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature was Sinclair Lewis, who made a stronger case against the small town than nearly any other writer.

Edgar Watson Howe’s The Story of a Country Town (1883) is the first significant novel to attack the sentimental portraits of small towns. Life in Howe’s town, Twin Mounds, is characterized by monotonous trivial activities that are made bearable only by mean gossip. Creativity and happiness are stifled by a constricting puritanical code that Howe felt to be the central damaging force in midwestern life. The poetry of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology (1915) was very similar to Howe’s fiction. Masters’ 242 residents of Spoon River speak from their graves of loneliness, isolation, and spiritual longing. Although many of Zona Gale’s eighty-three stories celebrate life in the small town, and although her Friendship Village is the locale of many happy and loving folks, she eventually turned more toward a rejection of the small-town point of view, and in her novel Birth (1918) her picture of the town of Boarger is bleak and repulsive. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street (1920) are two of the most significant novels of midwestern small-town life. Anderson’s stories are linked by the narrator, George Willard, whose knowledge and insight gained from his honest interactions with the townspeople leave him no alternative but to get on a train for the city and leave Winesburg. It is a beautiful and tragic book filled with stunted, frustrated lives of sadness and loss. Lewis, in turn, is devastating in his portrayal of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Unlike Anderson, he shows no beauty in the small town’s sadness, and one has few feelings of loss for his characters.

Larry Woiwode’s Beyond the Bedroom Wall: A Family Album (1975) is an enormous family chronicle that covers several small towns in North Dakota and in Illinois. The opening chapter describes the narrator’s dream of his boyhood main street of Hyatt, North Dakota, a dream that the narrator cannot escape or completely understand until years later. This novel, more effectively perhaps than any other, dramatizes the positive and the negative realities of living in a small town and their impact on the emotional lives of the characters. Completely different in approach but equal in its balance of positive and negative qualities is Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days (1985). Keillor’s novel sold very well because of his high profile as a radio performer, and the book is a series of interwoven tales that have been read—over the last twenty years, in different forms—on his radio show, A Prairie Home Companion. Keillor’s view of the small town is satiric and nostalgic, often at the same time. Some critics who do not approve of his popularity call his work kitsch, but others find his work an essentially ambiguous and subtly thoughtful portrayal of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota.

Marilynne Robinson's critically acclaimed Gilead trilogy (2004–14), which is set in the small, fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, has been considered to be a reflection on the potential for progressivism and the trappings of complacency in the small towns of the Midwest region. The novels foster this theme by following several generations of a family from the years of the Civil War through the 1950s and the beginnings of the civil rights movement.

Nonfiction

In the later decades of the twentieth century the genre of personal nonfiction has blossomed in midwestern letters, and, as in the literary works, the most characteristic of these nonfictional accounts describe the relationships between people and the land. Curtis Harnack’s We Have All Gone Away (1973) and Douglas Bauer’s Prairie City, Iowa (1979) are stories about childhoods spent on the farm and the impact of such a background on adult life. Unlike most writers of such stories, Harnack and Bauer manage to avoid the typical sentimentalized nostalgia associated with describing a childhood growing up on the farm. Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Making Hay (1986) takes the single farm practice of raising alfalfa and describes the roles of three communities in the production of this crop. Linda Hasselstrom’s Windbreak (1987) is the journal of a year in the life of a South Dakota rancher. Her keen observations of the competing responsibilities of raising cattle and writing cut to the heart of the midwestern character. William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth (a deep map) (1991) attempts to understand a place first by looking with exhaustive detail at the landscape and history, and then by seeing more deeply into the spiritual aspects of place. Sarah Smarsh, a native of Kansas who grew up on a wheat farm, eluminates America's class divide by focusing on the contrast between country freedom and poverty in the Midwest in Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (2018).

Bibliography

Churchwell, Sarah. "Marilynne Robinson's Lila—A Great Achievement in US Fiction." Review of Lila, by Marilynne Robinson. The Guardian, 7 Nov. 2014, www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/07/marilynne-robinson-lila-great-achievement-contemporary-us-fiction-gilead. Accessed 27 Aug. 2019.

Crow, Charles L., editor. A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America. Blackwell, 2003. This volume appraises regional literature in America from New England to the Pacific Northwest. The accomplishments and careers of regionalist geniuses such as Willa Cather, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain are also surveyed in this volume.

Mari, Francesca. "She Grew Up Poor on a Kansas Farm. Her Memoir Is an Attempt to Understand Why." Review of Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, by Sarah Smarsh. The New York Times, 10 Sept. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/books/review/sarah-smarsh-heartland.html. Accessed 27 Aug. 2019.

Martone, Michael, editor. A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest. University of Iowa Press, 1988. Eight essays that attempt to define the Midwest in all its contradictions. Includes photographs by David Plowden.

Nemanic, Gerald, editor. A Bibliographical Guide to Midwestern Literature. U of Iowa P, 1981. Provides dozens of subject bibliographies and more than one hundred author introductions and bibliographies.

Shortridge, James R. The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture. UP of Kansas, 1989. Investigates the subjective aspects of place, including the contradictory images, the origins of the name, and the Middle West as metaphor.

Stryk, Lucien, editor. Heartland: Poets of the Midwest. Northern Illinois UP, 1967. An anthology of some thirty contemporary midwestern poets linked by themes common to the region’s writing.

Stryk, Lucien, editor. Heartland II: Poets of the Midwest. Northern Illinois UP, 1975. A second volume containing more than twice the number of contributors.

Vinz, Mark, and Thom Tammaro, editors. Imagining Home: Writing from the Midwest. U of Minnesota P, 1995. A collection of essays by upper midwestern writers that attempt to describe the influence of place on their work.

Vinz, Mark, and Thom Tammaro, editors. Inheriting the Land: Contemporary Voices from the Midwest. U of Minnesota P, 1993. An anthology of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction organized around characteristic themes of midwestern life: climate, the presence of the past, town and country, and gains and losses.

Weber, Ronald. The Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing. Indiana UP, 1992. Describes the achievement of midwestern literature from the late nineteenth century into the 1920s.