by Martha Bayne
What does it do to people to see themselves as normal? On the one hand, one might adopt a posture of vigilant defense, both internal and external, against anything that might detract from such a fully, finally achieved humanness. On the other hand, a person might feel intense alienation and disgust, which one might project inward—What is wrong with me?—or outward, in a kind of bomb-the-suburbs reflex. A third possibility—a simple, contented being normal—arises often in our culture’s fictions about the Midwest, both the stupid versions (the contented families of old sitcoms) and the more sophisticated ones (Fargo’s Marge Gunderson, that living argument for the value of banal goodness). I have yet to meet any real people who manage it. A species is a bounded set of variations on a template, not an achieved state of being.
I took the first option. As a child, I accepted without thinking that my small town, a city of 9,383 people, contained within it every possible human type; if I could not fit in here, I would not fit in anywhere. (“Fitting in” I defined as being occupied on Friday nights and, sooner or later, kissing a girl.) Every week that passed in which I did not meet these criteria—which was most of them—became a prophecy. Every perception, every idea, every opinion that I could not make immediately legible to my peers became proof of an almost metaphysical estrangement, an oceanic differentness that could not be changed and could not be borne. I would obsessively examine tiny failures of communication for days, always blaming myself. It never occurred to me that this problem might be accidental or temporary. I knew that cities existed, but they were all surely just Michigan farm towns joined together n number of times, depending on population. Owing to a basically phlegmatic temperament, and the fear of hurting my parents, I made it to college without committing suicide; there, the thing solved itself. But I worry what would have happened—what does often happen—to the kid like me, but with worse test scores, bad parents, an unlocked gun cabinet.
But I also worry about the people who can pass as Midwestern-normal. At its least toxic, this can lead to a kind of self-contempt: the nice, intelligent young women in my classes at the University of Michigan who describe themselves and their friends, with flat malice, as “basic bitches.” In artists, it can lead to self-destructive behavior, to the pursuit of danger in the belief that one’s actual experiences have furnished nothing in the way of material. It also leads us to one of the other great stereotypes of Midwesterners, one that I think has a little more truth to it than the nonsense about hard work and humility: We are repressed. Any emotion spiky or passionate enough to disrupt the smooth surface of normality must be shunted away. Garrison Keillor, and in some ways David Letterman, made careers from talking about this repression in a comic mode that both embodies it and transmutes it into art. The Minnesota writer Carol Bly finds it less amusing:
[In the Midwest] there is a restraint against feeling in general. There is a restraint against enthusiasm (“real nice” is the adjective—not “marvelous”); there is restraint in grief (“real sober” instead of “heartbroken”); and always, always, restraint in showing your feelings, lest someone be drawn closer to you.… When someone has stolen all four wheels off your car you say, “Oh, when I saw that car, with the wheels stripped off like that, I just thought ohhhhhhhh.”29
Critiques of emotional repression always risk imposing a single model for the Healthy Expression of the Emotions on a healthy range of variations. But anyone who has lived in the Midwest will recognize the mode Bly describes, and if you’ve lived there long enough, you’ll have seen some of the consequences she describes:
You repress your innate right to evaluate events and people, but…energy comes from making your own evaluations and then acting on them, so…therefore your natural energy must be replaced by indifferent violence.30
Donald Trump won the Midwestern states in part because he bothered to contest them at all, while his opponent did not. But we cannot forget the way he contested them: raucous rallies that promised, and in some views incited, random violence against a laundry list of enemies. Since his victory, the Three Percent Militia has become a recurring, and unwelcome, character in Michigan politics.
A regional identity built on its own denial, on the idea of an unqualified normality: This sounds, of course, like whiteness—a racial identity that consists only of the absence of certain kinds of oppression. (White people can, of course, be economically oppressed, though if the oppression goes on in one place long enough they tend to lose some of their whiteness, to be racialized as that Snopes branch of the human family, the white trash.) And here we hit upon the last major stereotype of the Midwest, its snowy-whiteness.
If the South depends on having black people to kick around, Midwestern whites often see people of color as ever new and out of place, decades after the Great Migration. The thinking goes like this: America is an experiment, carried out in its purest form here in the Midwest; people of color threaten the cohesion on which the whole experiment may depend. Thus, while Southern history yields story after story of the most savage, intimate racist violence—of men castrated and barbecued before smiling crowds, dressed as for a picnic—Midwestern history is a study in racial quarantine.31 Midwestern cities often dominate in rankings of the country’s most segregated. And though the region has seen its share of Klan activity and outright lynchings—I write this days after the acquittal of the St. Anthony, Minnesota, police officer who killed Philando Castile—the Midwest’s racism most frequently appears in the history books in the form of riots: Detroit, 1943; Cleveland, 1966; Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and Detroit again, 1967; Chicago, Cincinnati again, and Kansas City, 1968; Detroit again, 1975; Cincinnati again, 2001; Ferguson, 2014; Milwaukee again, 2016. A riot is, among other things, a refusal to be quarantined. And the Midwest quarantines its nonwhite immigrants, too—the people from Mexico and further south, from the hills of Laos or the highlands of Somalia, and from the Middle East, who commute from their heavily segregated neighborhoods to harvest the grain, empty the bedpans, and drive the snowplows. This is not to mention the people whose forced removal or confinement gave rise to the notion of the Midwest as an empty canvas in the first place. The twentieth-century history of racism in the Midwest is, on the whole, both a terrible betrayal of the abolitionist impulse that led to the settlement of so much of the region and a fulfillment of the violence inherent in the idea of “settling” what was already occupied.
Our bland, featureless Midwest—on some level, it is a fantasy. The easiest, most tempting tack for a cultural critic to take with fantasies is to condemn them. Given what ideas of normalness, in particular, have done to this country, to its nonwhite, nonstraight, non–middle-class, nonmale—and also to those who are all of those things, and are driven slightly or fully crazy by the effort to live up to the norm that is their birthright—it is tempting simply to try to fumigate the myth away.
Tempting, but probably not possible. As the English moral philosopher Mary Midgley argues, myths are “organic parts of our lives, cognitive and emotional habits, structures that shape our thinking.”32 Since thinking cannot be structureless, a frontal attack on one myth usually leaves us in a state of uncritical, unnamed acceptance of a new one. Self-conscious attempts to create new myths, meanwhile, are like constructed languages; they never quite lose their plastic smell. We should ask instead whether our story of the Midwest—this undifferentiated human place—contains any lovelier, more useful, or more radical possibilities. At the very least, we should try to name what there is in us for it to appeal to.
Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead trilogy has been read so often as to be reduced to a gingham study in Americana, and Robinson, a complex and in some ways cranky thinker, to “an Iowa abbess delivering profundities in humble dress.”33 This is a strange way to think about the story of a man dying before his son’s tenth birthday; of an emotionally distant drifter who fails at prostitution and eventually marries a pastor; of an Eisenhower Republican family that loses its chance at partial redemption because the kindly dad is a ra
cist. If conflating Marilynne Robinson with Jan Karon gets more people to buy Robinson’s books, I suppose I can’t object too strenuously, but it may lead some readers to miss the strangeness of passages such as this one in Home (2008):
In college all of them had studied the putative effects of deracination, which were angst and anomie, those dull horrors of the modern world. They had been examined on the subject, had rehearsed bleak and portentous philosophies in term papers, and they had done it with the earnest suspension of doubt that afflicts the highly educable. And then their return to the pays natal, where the same old willows swept the same ragged lawns, where the same old prairie arose and bloomed as negligence permitted. Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile? Oh, to be passing anonymously through an impersonal landscape! Oh, not to know every stump and stone, not to remember how the fields of Queen Anne’s lace figured in the childish happiness they had offered to their father’s hopes, God bless him.… Strangers in some vast, cold city might notice the grief in her eyes, even remember it for an hour or two as they would a painting or a photograph, but they would not violate her anonymity.34
This passage offers a stunning inversion of the trope of featurelessness. While acknowledging that the place (in this case Gilead, Iowa) has a history (“the childish happiness they had offered to their father’s hopes”), Glory Boughton, the narrator, longs for the “anonymity” and “impersonal landscape” of a “vast, cold city” (Chicago, Minneapolis, Milwaukee). She longs for “deracination,” for the sense of being an anyone moving through an anyplace. Why should a person long for this? Anonymity is usually felt as a burden, and the sense that one is a mere “basic person” can imprison as much as it liberates.
Yet the passage resonates, because we humans need to feel that we are more than our communities, more than our histories, more even than ourselves. We need to feel this because it is true. The cultural conservative ideal, with its deeply rooted communities—an idea that finds a strange echo in the less nuanced kinds of identity politics—is a reduction as dangerous to human flourishing and self-understanding as is the reduction of the mind to the brain or the soul to the body. The “deeply rooted community” is, in reality, at least as often as not, a cesspit of nasty gossips, an echo chamber in which minor misunderstandings amplify until they prevent people from seeing each other accurately, or at all. As for the identities that drive so much of our politics, they are a necessary part of the naming and dismantling of specific kinds of oppression—but we’ve all met people for whom they become a cul-de-sac, people who ration their sympathy into smaller and smaller tranches of shared similarity until they begin to resemble crabbed white men. Moral imaginations, like economies, tend to shrink under an austerity regime.
Every human is a vast set of unexpressed possibilities. And I never feel this to be truer than when I drive through the Midwest, looking at all the towns that could, on paper, have been my town, all the lives that, on paper, could have been my life. The factories are shuttered, the climate is changing, the towns are dying. My freedom so to drive is afforded, in part, by my whiteness. I know all this, and when I drive, now, and look at those towns, those lives, I try to maintain a kind of double consciousness, or double vision—the Midwest as an America not yet achieved; the Midwest as an America soaked in the same old American sins. But I cannot convince myself that the promise the place still seems to hold, the promise of flatness, of the freedom of anonymity, of being anywhere and nowhere at once, is a lie all the way through. Instead, I find myself daydreaming—there is no sky so conducive to daydreaming—of a Midwest that makes, and keeps, these promises to everybody.
And then I arrive at the house that, out of all these little houses, by some inconceivable coincidence, happens to be mine. I park the car. I check the mail. I pet the cat. I ready myself for bed. I can’t stay up too late. Between the Midwest that exists and the other Midwest, the utopic no-place that I dream of, is hard work enough for a life.
1. Glenway Wescott, Good-Bye, Wisconsin (New York, NY: Harper, 1928), 39. Quoted in Richard Nelson Current, Wisconsin: A History (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 161.
2. See C. K. Hyde, Arsenal of Democracy: The American Automobile Industry in World War II (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2013).
3. Edward Watts, An American Colony: Regionalism and the Roots of Midwestern Culture (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001), xii. See also Watts’s “The Midwest as a Colony: Transnational Regionalism,” in Regionalism and the Humanities, ed. Timothy Mahoney and Wendy J. Katz (Omaha, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009) 166–89.
4. Willa Cather, My Ántonia (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), 5. First published 1918.
5. Ibid, 1.
6. Alec McGillis, “The Rust-Belt Theory of Low-Cost Culture,” Slate, January 1, 2015, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/01/cheap_high_culture_
in_baltimore_buffalo_detroit_and_other_midsize_cities.html.
7. Neal Stephenson, “Everything and More Foreword,” in Some Remarks (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2012), 273.
8. See Thomas Wetzel, “A Graveyard of the Midwest,” MidAmerica 26 (1999): 10–24.
9. Meridel LeSueur, Ripening: Selected Work, 1927–1980 (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982), 36.
10. Katy Rossing, “Smothered: American Nostalgia and the Small Wisconsin Town,” Hypocrite Reader, January 2012, http://hypocritereader.com/12/smothered-american-nostalgia.
11. This supposed pejorative appears to have been popularized by Midwesterners reacting defensively to the region’s supposed unpopularity in the coastal mind. See Gabe Bullard, “The Surprising Origin of the Phrase ‘Flyover Country,’” National Geographic, March 14, 2016, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/03/160314-flyover-country-origin-language-midwest.
12. For two examples, see Matthew Wolfson, “The Midwest Is Not Flyover Country,” The New Republic, March 22, 2014, https://newrepublic.com/article/117113/midwest-not-flyover-country-its-not-heartland-either, and Michael Dirda’s review of Jon Lauck’s The Lost Region, Washington Post, February 4, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-lost-region-toward-a-revival-of-midwestern-history-by-jon-k-lauck/2014/02/05/55e90e08-8a90-11e3-833c-33098f9e5267_story.html?utm_term=.62c430eef907. Alternatively, one might simply Google the phrase “Not just flyover country.”
13. Eric Schulzke, “The One County That Tipped Michigan to Trump,” Deseret News, November 16, 2016, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865667328/The-one-county-that-tipped-Michigan-to-Trump-and-why-ignoring-it-is-not-an-option.html.
14. See Anne Trubek, “The Media Didn’t Forget the Rust Belt—You Did,” Refinery29, November 17, 2016, http://www.refinery29.com/2016/11/130147/rust-belt-trump-voters-election-media-issues.
15. Andrew R.L. Cayton, “The Anti-Region,” in Cayton and Susan E. Gray, The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 148.
16. Abraham Lincoln, “Second Annual Message to Congress,” in Lincoln: Political Writings and Speeches, ed. Terence Ball (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 157. >
17. Ibid., 149, 150.
18. Kenzie Bryant, “Prince Had No Time for Matt Damon’s Small Talk,” Vanity Fair, July 18, 2016, http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2016/07/matt-damon-prince-small-talk.
19. Lincoln’s delimitation of a “great interior region”—“bounded east by the Alleghenies, north by the British dominions, west by the Rocky Mountains, and south by the line along which the culture of corn and cotton meets”—doesn’t exactly conform to the U.S. Census Bureau’s definition of the Midwest, nor to any of a half-dozen other common definitions. (Source for additional quote is Lincoln, “Second Annual Message,” 157.) Referring to the West, which at that time included Michigan, the nineteenth-century novelist Caroline Kirkland wrote, “How much does that expression mean to include? I never have been able to discover its limits.” Me neither. (Kirkland is qu
oted in Edwin S. Fussell, Frontier in American Literature [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954], 3.)
20. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, NY: Holt, 1950), 154. First published 1920.
21. Ibid., 155.
22. Quoted in Ronald Weber, The Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 7.
23. James Shortridge, The Middle West (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1989), 33.
24. Susan E. Gray, “Stories Written in the Blood: Race and Midwestern History,” in Cayton and Gray, The American Midwest, 127.
25. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), 7–8. First published 1929. The identification of Middletown and Muncie is attested in a number of places; see the chapter on Middletown in Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
26. See Edward McClelland’s delightful How to Speak Midwestern (Cleveland, OH: Belt Publishing, 2016), 9–10.
27. Wolfson, “The Midwest Is Not Flyover Country.”
28. Nicole Etcheson, “Barbecued Kentuckians and Six-Foot Texas Rangers: The Construction of Midwestern Identity,” in Gray and Cayton, The American Midwest, 78.
29. Carol Bly, “From the Lost Swede Towns,” in Letters from the Country (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1981), 4.
30. Ibid., 5–6.
31. I mean this more or less literally. The book exists; see Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
32. Mary Midgley, Myths We Live By (London, England: Routledge Classics, 214), 7.
33. Mark Athitakis, The (New) Midwest (Cleveland, OH: Belt Publishing, 2017), 9.
34. Marilynne Robinson, Home (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 282.