So Big

Sobig is the nickname given to Dirk DeJong by his mother. As he grows older, she must remind herself not to refer to his nickname. To everyone else, he is Dirk, but to her, he will always be Sobig. This tension between two names represents a tension between two identities: the identity Dirk chooses for himself, as a wealthy businessman, and the more artistic identity his mother wants for him. After settling down with Pervus and abandoning her own artistic ambitions, Selina decides that she will not limit her son’s ability to chase his dreams. His potential, she believes, is so big, just like his nickname. 

Though Dirk lacks his mother’s artistic sensibilities, he does inherit her desire for independence. After growing up on a poor farm, after seeing his mother struggle to make ends meet, after witnessing the near ruin that threatened the family after his father’s death, he is determined to be a wealthy man. He is imbued with a materialistic sensibility rather than an artistic ambition. Rather than self-expression, he values financial security. This becomes the fundamental difference between Dirk and his mother and defines their narrative divergence. He is willing to sacrifice his artistic expression and his career as an architect to achieve the kind of wealth he always sought as a child. Meanwhile, Selina cannot understand why she has strived so hard to give her son every opportunity that she never had, only to see him squander his opportunities on a career that she does not value. Dirk’s life is spent trying to define his identity against his mother’s expectations.

One of Dirk’s foremost characteristics is that he covets. After his mother is reunited with Julie, alleviating the poverty of the family, Dirk grows up alongside Paula and Eugene. Their wealth and comfort mean that they are never wanting for anything; Dirk envies that kind of wealth while also being ashamed of his own relative poverty. When he goes to university, he is determined to do whatever it takes to fit in, such as abandoning his friendship with Mattie Schwengauer because she does not fit in to the social expectations of his fraternity brothers. Despite his mother’s judgment, he casts Mattie aside to fit in with the Classified students whose friendship he covets. Dirk also covets clothes, cars, apartments, and a kind of wealthy lifestyle that was not available to him in his youth. 

The desire to acquire these possessions turns his career toward banking and bonds. Dirk is extremely successful, aided by Paula’s guiding hand. Yet he never stops coveting. When he has everything, Dirk covets a level of self-actualization that eludes him. The clothes, the cars, the apartment do not make him happy. He covets the self-assuredness of Dallas and Roelf; he envies his mother’s ability to make herself happy. In this sense, Dirk spends his whole life chasing after what other people have instead of reflecting on what would make him truly happy.

At the end of the novel, Dirk has everything he ever wanted. He is closer than ever to Paula, though he has realized he does not love her. He has achieved wealth and status, though the people who occupy his social circles are dull and uninteresting. His Japanese houseman lays out his expensive clothes in such a manner that would dazzle the poor boy he once was. At the same time, the woman he supposedly loves calls him repeatedly on the telephone to attend a high society event. This level of pristine, immaculate luxury is exactly what Dirk always believed he wanted, but having seen Dallas respond so emotionally to Roelf, he is not happy. 

The life that Dirk always wanted surrounds him, but it will never be able to satisfy him. Dirk lies down on the bed, blotting out his success, as he realizes that he does not love anything enough to give his life the purpose and meaning that others possess. The final paragraphs of the book contain Dirk’s first real moment of self-reflection. He can no longer block out his dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the wealthy lifestyle he has always coveted. He can no longer satisfy himself with being Dirk DeJong. At some point, he realizes, his mother’s desires for him may just have made him happy. He is just as much Sobig as he is Dirk, no matter how much he would like to deny it.

In a narrative sense, Paula is a foil to Selina. While Selina bounced around cities with her gambling father, Paula was born into prosperity. For her entire life, she has known nothing but luxury, and she cannot imagine living any other way. In no version of Paula’s life can she imagine herself like Selina, as a farmer’s wife and the widowed mother of a young son. She is direct in this regard: Paula is determined not to sink into poverty, even in the name of love. 

This confounds Dirk, who is exasperated by her blunt declaration that she will marry a rich man who can provide for her. She may love Dirk, but she cannot marry someone who cannot support her in the way she wants. Paula makes the practical decision to marry a much older man, Theodore Storm, then must live with the unsatisfying consequences of her decision, especially as her family’s fortunes almost immediately recover and her financial future was never truly under threat. In this sense, Paula’s decision to marry Storm mirrors Dirk’s decision to abandon architecture. They give up happiness for wealth, leaving them to dwell on their own luxurious misery.

Notably, Paula inherits her grandfather’s business acumen. While August laments his son-in-law and grandson for their lack of business instinct, Paula stands apart from her father and brother. Her problem is that her patriarchal society does not value her contributions. In many ways, Paula mirrors Selina. Both women exist in a society that patronizes and marginalizes them, so they search for ways to challenge this authority and express their ideas. Whether in Chicago high society or the farming community of High Prairie, both women need an opportunity to show that their ideas are just as valid as those of men. Paula chooses Dirk for this purpose. Not only is she emotionally invested in him, but he is a blank slate onto which she can sketch her ideas. The notion of selling bonds to women, for example, is originally Paula’s idea but is conveyed through Dirk. He gets all the money and success, while Paula gets the satisfaction of knowing that she was right. For a woman who no longer needs money, this sense of successfully challenging patriarchal power structures is a victory in and of itself.

Like Dirk, however, Paula is unsatisfied with the trappings of wealth. She gets her big house, her money, her family, and her wealthy husband, but these do not make her happy. Her attempt to live vicariously through Dirk does not achieve what she wants and succeeds only in making them both miserable, as they must spend more time together in a situation that is not sustainable. People gossip, and Dirk gradually falls out of love with Paula, leaving her increasingly desperate for the emotional validation he once offered her. Paula may once have mirrored Selina in her struggles against social discrimination, but she fails to find her own equivalent of Selina’s farm. She is yet to discover what makes her truly happy, especially as she cannot be with Dirk. The two wealthiest characters in the novel become miserable because they deny their true feelings in the name of money.

Pervus is the embodiment of High Prairie masculinity. He is stubborn, set in his ways, and emotionally unavailable. Yet Selina recognizes the hidden tenderness within him. His decision to bid on her food box, even though he is poor, gestures toward his capacity for empathy. His discussions about his dead wife and child reveal the deep well of emotion that lurks behind the tough façade. In this way, Pervus drastically alters the course of Selina’s life. By falling in love with him, she places a hard limit on her ambition. The same rugged man with whom she fell in love also embodies the patronizing disregard for her intelligence endemic to all men around her. In falling in love with Pervus, Selina is forced to fall in love with High Prairie itself, with all its limitations. Through their marriage, High Prairie becomes her home.

Pervus is also notable for his contrast with Roelf. Whereas Roelf is artistic and refuses to be bound by the social expectations of High Prairie, Pervus conforms. Pervus embodies everything that Roelf rejects by running away, which is why Selina’s marriage to Pervus is so incomprehensible to Roelf. Selina is tacitly endorsing the same social limitations Roelf rages against—limitations he believed Selina could not tolerate. In truth, Pervus reveals the nuance and complexity of rural masculinity in High Prairie. It is not wholly bad and not wholly limiting, just different. He is willing to take the lessons and change himself, even if he abandons these lessons as soon as the farming season demands that he return to the fields.

Yet this same masculinity imbues Pervus with a stubborn hubris that proves to be his undoing. He refuses to entertain Selina’s progressive, innovative ideas for the farm. He refuses to allow her to help him. When he sleeps in his cart because he does not want to pay the small fee for a room, he exposes himself to the cold and the rain, contracting a fever. Pervus dies from a fever that might have been preventable, had he enacted the changes suggested to him by his wife. Her eventual success is a repudiation of his stubbornness. Selina understands this, such as when she wonders whether Dirk would ever have graduated had Pervus still been alive. Yet she refuses to think these thoughts, choosing instead to treasure Pervus’s memory and the positive effects he had on her life. Selina refuses to condemn Pervus’s stubborn hubris, even in his death.