Abstract
People often perceive urban and rural areas as fundamentally different from each other, but are these two types of places actually so different? How does American literature portray the country and the city? The supposed urban-rural divide manifests itself as a recurring theme throughout American literature. The following four writers exhibit a fervent interest in this subject throughout their bodies of work: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Sinclair Lewis. This dissertation examines how these writers portray urban and rural areas in their fiction. I argue that all four of these writers illustrate the concept that the country and the city have more in common with each other than one might suppose.
In this dissertation, I assert that these four writers—Freeman, Wharton, Cather, and Lewis—destabilize the conventional perceptions of their respective places by highlighting the fact that these places contain much diversity. Freeman’s New England villages, Wharton’s New York City, Cather’s rural Nebraska, and Lewis’s numerous places (including Minnesota) share an essential similarity: they are not monoliths, but rather, they are diverse places inhabited by people with a wide range of values, worldviews, beliefs, and social attitudes.
This dissertation has relevance beyond the realm of literary studies. This treatise discusses the urban-rural divide and how Americans perceive other parts of the nation. When one peruses an electoral map of the United States, it might be tempting to assume that city dwellers vote one way and that residents of the country vote a different way. However, one should keep in mind something that Freeman, Wharton, Cather, and Lewis understood with astute perception: no region is a monolith containing people who think in lockstep with each other. The country and the city both feature people with a wide variety of outlooks, worldviews, and attitudes. This ideological diversity constitutes an essential component of the American tapestry.