Every suggestion Carol made was met with the comfortable conservatism of people who had built their identities on things remaining exactly the same, whether in architecture, social life, or conversation.
2Reading· 오늘의 본문
We · Yevgeny Zamyatin · 1924
Carol Kennicott arrived in Gopher Prairie full of dreams. She saw a town that was sleepy and plain, and she wanted to wake it up with beauty and new ideas. She suggested a new, modern library building and tried to start a theatre group. But every time she spoke, she hit a wall. The wall was made of comfortable smiles and quiet 'no's. The townspeople, whose lives were built on the familiar rhythms of Main Street, saw her ideas as an attack on their world. They resisted not out of malice, but from a deep fear that change would erase the only identity they knew.
B2 · 128 wordsavg 25.6 w/s
In Sinclair Lewis's *Main Street*, Carol Kennicott's crusade for progress is systematically dismantled by Gopher Prairie's collective inertia. Her attempts to introduce change—whether in civic architecture, cultural pursuits, or social discourse—are not merely rejected but absorbed by a pervasive, comfortable conservatism. This resistance forms the novel's central conflict: the individual's modernist impulse against the community's entrenched traditionalism. The townspeople's identities are inextricably linked to a static environment; any alteration is perceived as a fundamental threat to their self-conception. Thus, their opposition is a defense mechanism, a wall erected not against Carol personally, but against the unsettling notion that their world, which they believe to be complete, might require improvement. What makes Main Street endure as a work of literature is precisely this refusal to offer easy consolation — it demands that readers sit with the discomfort of a world that does not resolve neatly, and find their own position within it.
C1 · 170 wordsavg 34.0 w/s
3Vocabulary· 핵심 어휘 & 연습
conservatism
보수주의
The town's comfortable conservatism rejected Carol's plans for a new theater.
architecture
건축
She wanted to change the dull architecture of Main Street.
identities
정체성
Their identities were built on things remaining the same.
suggestion
제안
Every suggestion she made was met with resistance.
conversation
대화
Even casual conversation followed old, unchanging patterns.
Activity 1 · 빈칸 채우기5 questions
1. Every hour of D-503's life was carefully ____ by the Table of Hours.
2. The ____ of privacy did not exist in the One State.
3. Individual names were ____ and replaced with numbers.
4. The glass walls guaranteed there was no ____ for citizens.
5. The State was ____ declared to represent perfect happiness.