So Big: Edna Ferber’s American Dream feels a bit more like a nightmare than a tragedy.

 So Big, Edna Ferber, Pulitzer, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Chicago, History

So Big is the 1924 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by one of the most successful authors of the first part of the twentieth century, but both it and she appear to be on the brink of being forgotten.  I get and understand this.  My reaction to this book was, at first, strongly dismissive.  Edna Ferber’s true love was drama.  She wanted to write for stage – and Giant – another of her works, was turned into a screen classic starring James Dean.  But I dismissed this book as being two dimensional – the characters seem constructed from the outside in rather than the other way around.  I wished it were a play so the actors could blur the fine lines that her character articulation created.

Despite my critical eye and ear, this book is an easy read.  It is visually stimulating and it tracks not just the development of its heroes, but also one of my favorite cities, Chicago, from the late 1880s through the early 1920s.  Even though I didn’t trust my narrator, I found myself enthralled, almost against my will, by the unfolding story of this neat and tidy family who experience both the poorest and richest ends of the economic spectrum as this city was gaining its broad shoulders.

By the way, this post contains multiple spoilers.  The author includes many spoilers in her story.  She begins the book very near the end – she promises that things will turn out well – but it is the process of getting from here to there that she wants to interest you in.  So, she is not so much spoiling as teasing.  She is also promising a happy ending.  I will include the ending in this post so that you can judge with me whether it is happy or not…

Selina DeJong (nee Peake), the stalwart star of the early part of this novel, seems to be spun from spunk and resilience in the face of adversity.  She embodies the kinds of virtues that the Boy and Girl Scouts would have us aspire to.  My reaction to this was not just dismissive – it was more visceral and profound than that.  Edna Ferber seemed to have created the kind of character that my Mom would have had me be and, to be fair, the kind of character that she strove to be.  And this raised my hackles because I have both desired to be and become that person, and have desired to be and become someone entirely different – my own person; whatever that might be.

So, I listened to a podcast on Machiavelli this week and the author made the claim that Machiavelli is responsible for the modern world.  Machiavelli lived in Florence, Italy, and he, like seemingly everyone else in Florence, the cradle of the renaissance, worked for the Medici family.  And Machiavelli’s writing did something the Greeks and the Romans, but also the religious writers rarely did.  He wrote not about how people should be, but about how they actually were.

Writing about things as they are, the podcast author maintained, led directly into the scientific writings of Galileo, Bacon, Descartes and thus Newton.  Unlike Aristotle, whose science was based on how nature should work (Nature abhors a vacuum; therefore, a football is propelled by the prevention of a vacuum forming behind it in flight), these men based their science on what they actually saw in the world (a body in motion tends to stay in motion).

Similarly, in writing about politics, Machiavelli wrote, in the Prince, about what he observed the Medici to be doing – not what they said they were doing.  They were corrupt rulers who created a space for a morally and spiritually free society to flourish.  So, where the ancients were writing morality plays about what heroes like Achilles, Odysseus, and Oedipus were doing as positive and negative models of how we should and should not act, Machiavelli was writing about how people did act, and this opened the door to Hobbes, but then Locke to write about the state of nature and man as a creature of nature (yes, Darwin would be one of Machiavelli’s intellectual offspring).

Thomas Jefferson, in writing our declaration, managed to create a mish-mash out of the reality-based grievances he articulated and the aspirational moral goals that still haunt us – particularly as he applied them only to land owning white men.  And Ferber is writing in and against that tradition, as a highly accomplished woman in a country that is just granting women the right to vote and that still holds onto the rights and ideals of white men.

So, her hero, this Selina DeJong, carries a lot of freight.  She needs to lead us into a modern world that includes women and that is open to the world.  But Ferber uses the means - the rhetoric - of the ancients.  She creates Selina as a moral model; an almost inhuman or even godlike version of a woman.  She embraces and uses traditional male virtues, but she articulates them in a profoundly feminine way.  I suppose it makes sense that I objected to her; my Mother confided in me once that she wanted me to become the kind of man that my father was not, and I think she meant by this that she wanted to inculcate me with feminine virtues.  I think Ferber wants us to do the same for society, and I rebel against this, while recognizing its value.

So, Selina, when her father dies, leaving her nothing but a good private school education at the tender age of 19, sets out to teach the South Chicago Dutch truck farmer’s kids.  As the spunky and resilient kid that she is, she experiences the cabbages growing in their rows as beautiful, something the farmers and their wives never considered as possible – they are a commodity and a job, not aesthetic objects.  She not only survives, but somehow manages to embrace cold, hard work filled living conditions as a boarder and teacher – and she, somewhat surprisingly, to her and to us, falls deeply, passionately, and very sensuously in lust and in love with a hardworking, but pretty dimwitted Dutch farmer who bids for her box lunch at a church fund raiser despite the wealthiest widow in town clearly wanting him to bid for hers.

The newly married couple work his lowly farm – the poorest of the farms in the area – and she proposes improvements which he rejects, and they have a child.  This child, Dirk, becomes known as So Big because of his response to the question, “How big are you?” by spreading his arms wide and saying, “So Big!”.  When her husband dies, spunky Selina packs So Big into the wagon and drives the team to market, something that the other farmers clarify is never done by a woman.

When Selina arrives at the market, bringing her washed, sorted and well-presented materials to compete with the others, she arrives on the worst day of the year, the Jewish holiday, and many of the buyers are in temple, so she tries to sell her wares door to door and, just when she is about to give up, she stumbles upon the home of one of her old private school mates, the daughter of one the Chicago butchers who has turned himself into an Oscar Mayer figure with the wealth to go with it. 

When the Oscar Mayer figure offers to gift her money, she virtuously refuses, accepting a loan that she then pays back, against his protests, with interest – we might be thinking that this is a Horatio Alger story about Selina – but her whole reason to become wealthy, which she does become, is not for the selfish consumeristically focused reasons, but to raise and support So Big. 

So Big goes off to the University of Chicago – then to Cornell for architecture once he finds his calling.  He comes back to practice his craft, but gets stuck doing draftsman work for a big firm.  He falls in love with but can’t marry the girl of his dreams – the daughter of his Mom’s rich girlfriend from school.  This girl marries into truly extravagant wealth and but manages to stay connected to, and, we sense, in love with So Big.  She expresses her love by steering So Big towards making more money as a bond salesman than he ever could have as an architect.

As he develops, So Big repeatedly moves away from his mother’s wishes for him.  He becomes, instead of the artist she envisioned him to be – the architect that there is evidence he has passion to be - a man about town, someone who listens and observes and moves quickly up the developing ranks of the elite in the city.  This process begins early, when he goes off to the University of Chicago and befriends then abandons a woman much like his mother, and one whom his mother likes.  He shuns her as part of being seduced into become a fraternity boy.  But the challenging part of all this is that he is both leaving his roots and what his mother would have him do, but he is also moving into a life that better suits the aptitudes and virtues that he develops in this new world.  He seems to become the best possible version of himself in the context of this apparently nurturing and supportive, if judgmental, world.

(After writing this post, I had a long conversation with my mother about her parents - both graduates of the University of Chicago later in the twenties.  Her mother was born into the class that was being groomed there, her father came from more humble origins and, though he successfully went into the insurance business in Chicago, my mother reports that he never felt himself to be a member of the ruling class; he always felt like an outsider.)

Despite becoming the best version of himself, in the concluding chapters, So Big comes to realize that his mother’s vision and way of living is far superior, even though he looks down on her.  He ends up desiring a woman who is a self-sufficient commercial artist who embodies all that he could (not) have become and this woman won’t have him because he has not become the artist that he could have and because he does not embrace the world as broadly she would have a desirable person do.  Instead, this commercial artistic woman feels a kinship with his mother, and with one of Selina's students from long ago that Selina helped to emancipate from the small farming community with its narrow views. 

So Big now experiences himself as small.  When his mother asks him how big he is, he responds by holding his thumb and finger a half inch away from each other and says, "So big."  He begins to disdain both himself and the woman he has adored and who has helped him become this best version of himself, the version of himself that not long before he wished his mother would have seen and appreciated, but now realizes would not measure up to what she expects of him.  He sees that the student from long ago who has gone off to Paris and become an artist is her true son.  This realization guts him and the curtain, as it were, falls.

This is, in other words, an odd tragedy.  It is not by trying to avoid his fate, but by embracing it – by being true to himself or at least significant and important parts of himself, that So Big ends up betraying himself.  The Pulitzer Prize in literature is awarded to the book by an American author that best exemplifies American life.  On some level, awarding that prize to this book underscores the American dilemma.  We, like So Big, want to become ourselves, but in our pursuit of happiness, we get distracted by the wealth that we acquire on the way.  Or do we?  Is it that what we are good at is making money?  Are we essentially commercial, without the art?  Are we, at heart, needy, greedy people who want something until we can have it and then we decide that we want something else?  Are we boats with very shallow keels?

Edna Ferber was encouraging us to travel into deeper waters, but the vessels she gave us – both Selina and So Big – did not have the kind of deep keels that would allow them, together, to traverse those waters.  So Big did not have the wherewithal to be who he was on his own.  He needed to be coaxed into becoming himself, and once there, he was unhappy with what it brought him.  We could view this as a Machiavellian (meaning clear-eyed) vision of the American soul.  William A. White, who championed this book to its Pulitzer Prize, might have supported this position.  I fear, though, that it both recognizes and underestimates us.  The book repeatedly praises the first generation – the Oscar Mayer character is stronger than his son, Selina is stronger than hers, and in each case, the child is seduced by money into becoming, as almost every member of the most selective eating club in Chicago is observed to be by So Big when he joins it, bloated.    

We, as Americans, might aspire to be like the rich English who engage in highly stylized and clearly classist traditions like fox hunting.  When the North Side Rich Chicagoans import a bedraggled fox to chase, it underscores that we have not developed this tradition, as the British did, to address a domestic problem (too many foxes) and then turned it into something that is our own – but we are more like the Romans, appropriating Greek art forms.  Ferber seems to be asking whether we can be artists or if we simply copy from others.  

Edna can remonstrate us to become artists – to be become open to the world, embracing and enjoying diversity, but she is preaching to and holding a mirror up to people who are isolated in the middle of a big country and are more concerned with survival than with aesthetics.  As a nation of immigrants, we are here because there was something intolerable where we came from, but when we arrive, we simply want to be insulated from all that was intolerable, but we don’t trust ourselves to build social institutions that would do that, and, Ferber suggests, we are, with rare exceptions, not sturdy enough to accomplish this on our own.

Despite Ferber’s clear-eyed, Machiavellian vision, she can’t resist some old-fashioned hero worship as a means of keeping a dream alive. Unfortunately, the kind of brow-beating and template based creations of heroes may be as prone to failure as so many other American institutions – Hollywood, with whom Ferber had a long relationship – comes to mind.  Perhaps art emerges from within – and trying to impose it from without – whether as a parent or an author, is, as this book suggests, doomed to failure.  We may recognize it, but we, apparently, cannot create it.  Perhaps we can, in our best moments, not snuff it out, but instead stay out of its way.

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