So Big: Analysis of Major Characters

Author: Edna Ferber

First published: 1924

Genre: Novel

Locale: Illinois

Plot: Social realism

Time: Early twentieth century

Selina Peake DeJong, a female schoolteacher turned truck farmer outside Chicago. To support herself after her gambler father is murdered, nineteen-year-old Selina accepts a teaching job in the Dutch community of High Prairie. Her exclamation that the fields of cabbages are beautiful elicits guffaws from the pragmatic, work-worn Dutch, but her ability to seek and find beauty in the most unlikely of circumstances pervades her entire life, bringing zest and adventure to her and success to the dilapidated farm she inherits from her husband. Becoming physically scarred by the backbreaking farm work does not eradicate Selina's fun-loving spirit, indomitable courage, and shrewd ability to judge character and values. Even as an old woman, her son Dirk's secretary claims, she has an air about her that is better than style. Although she loves Dirk above all else, she considers herself a failure because he has compromised his desire to become an architect for more immediate financial success as a banker. She is not despondent over the partial blame she accepts for her son's choices. She receives joy from life on the farm itself and from the work of a former student, Roelf Pool, an artist and son of the first family with whom she lived. She experiences life as “velvet,” the legacy her father gave her by encouraging her to live life richly whether it brought good or bad.

Dirk “So Big” DeJong, nicknamed as a baby, the son of Pervus and Selina DeJong. He is intelligent, charming, and appreciative of those around him. Unlike his mother, however, whose character never wavers, Dirk makes choices within relatively easy circumstances that determine who he will become. He leaves the new university in Chicago, where he had given up a natural friendship with a farm girl for fraternity life, to study architecture at Cornell because he despises the buildings the newly moneyed were able to build. When he cannot make a living at his new trade shortly before World War I, he turns to selling bonds and adopts the lifestyle of the rich, which he had formerly questioned. Later, unable to give up his habits, he will not return to architecture. It is then that his mother can argue that he has sold the love of beauty that he had inherited from her for a mess of pottage-success measured only by money. He must also settle for a liaison with the fabulously wealthy married daughter of his mother's old friend instead of the love he would have preferred, that of Dallas O'Mara, an artist who is much like his mother. His choices stunt his life to only “so big.”

Pervus DeJong, a kindly but ineffective Dutch farmer who marries Selina. He buys the beautifully arranged but scanty boxed supper that Selina prepared for an auction, paying an exorbitant ten dollars he cannot afford. Pervus then asks Selina to teach him to read and figure. His is the least successful farm in the community, but even so Selina falls in love with the gentle giant. He refuses to initiate any of the farming changes she suggests, however, and in his own stubborn way persists in doing things as they had always been done, hastening his death from pneumonia.

Paula Arnold Storm, the granddaughter of a meatpacking magnate, August Hemple; daughter of Selina's schoolfriend, Julie; and wife of a Chicago businessman far older than she. She also is in love with Dirk. Paula knows Dirk from their teenage days, but when it looks like he will only be a struggling architect, unable to give her the lifestyle she craves, she marries an extremely wealthy man instead. Later, she controls Dirk's financial career by possessive manipulation. She is a slim, dark, vivacious, slinky socialite. Her unhappiness is betrayed by her hot, nervous, twisty hands. She is a natural contrast both to Selina and to Dallas O'Mara, the artist with whom Dirk falls in love to no avail.