Main currents in American thought

I. Friendship Village romance. The Loves of Pelleas and Etarre (1907). Everyone is helpful, everyone loves, or wants to, or is unhappy for lack of it. Friendship Village (1908). A world where there is no sorrow, or sickness, and where brotherly love rules. Of the “folksy” school.

II. The shift to realism. Miss Lulu Bett (1920). A homely village tragedy of the repressed soul that rebels under the irritation of domestic pin-pricks. Plebeian characters, thin, cheap, tiresome; set in a shoddy world and rubbing each other’s nerves. Deacon Dwight a sadist; Miss Lulu a grotesque. Treated from the outside in contrast with Sherwood Anderson’s method. Faint Perfume (1923). A glorification of martyrdom. The conviction that life is hard, and the excellence of the economy of pain. A partial return to the Friendship Village note, but like Miss Lulu Bett in the picture of a self-worshiping family.⁠[27]