So Big

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1924

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-12

Chapters 13-16

Chapters 17-21

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Themes

The Relationship Between Autonomy and Happiness

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and gender discrimination.

As a child, Selina is greatly influenced by her father. He is a professional gambler, a man whose fortune depends on a large element of luck. Rather than cursing his luck, however, he teaches his daughter to pursue her passions. Selina is taught that life is an adventure, and she spends a large part of her life figuring out what this means. To the very young Selina, her father’s free-spirited nature is synonymous with happiness and contrasts sharply with the fusty, depressing lives of her aunts. Selina loathes the short time she spends with her aunts, and she is desperate to return to her more adventurous father. Selina believes that in her happiest future, she will be a novelist who travels the world and meets extraordinary people. As she grows older, however, and as she deals with her father’s death, she must reappraise this plan. She becomes a schoolteacher and, quite unexpectedly, she completely changes her plans when she falls in love with Pervus. The marriage makes Selina happy, even though her new future is very different from the one she imagined. Selina reflects on how to be happy in her new life in the rural community. As well as investing herself in her son, Dirk, and living vicariously through him, she will find a means of self-expression by challenging expectations and running the farm in her own way. The farm becomes her artistic endeavor, a living biography of Selina’s attempts to manifest a happy life.

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As the novel follows Selina’s life, and then Dirk’s, a shared characteristic emerges between radically different people. Characters like Selina, Roelf, August Hempel, and Dallas share a self-awareness that is lacking in others. They have (or they reach) an honest appraisal of what makes them happy, then they pursue this relentlessly. Roelf refuses to be cowed by his conservative father, for example, and runs away to Paris to study art. Selina works tirelessly on the farm, cultivating happiness by challenging expectations. August endures lean periods in his business and disappointing heirs, maintaining his working-class perspective in spite of his massive wealth. Dallas appears at the end of the novel, someone who is still in the middle of her journey but who is very aware of what will be demanded of her if she is to reach the autonomy and fulfillment she sees in the people she admires, such as Selina and Roelf. She is paid well for her drawings, but this is not her passion. Instead, her commercial work is simply a means by which she will pursue her actual passions. She makes sacrifices, she toils, and she refuses to give up, just as Selina did on the farm. The characters who have the greatest self-awareness are those who choose to be happy by pursuing their passions.

At the midpoint of the novel, the narrative switches focus from Selina to Dirk. Selina’s son lacks the capacity for self-reflection that allowed his mother to pursue self-actualization. He never reflects on what he actually wants; he merely covets other people’s wealth. To achieve this, he conforms to the social expectations of those around him even as he reckons with a rising dissatisfaction. When he visits the luxurious houses of his new friends, for example, they feel empty. When he meets the Chicago elite, they do not interest him. Dirk succeeds in deluding himself into believing that he only needs money to be happy. This is partly due to his experience growing up on a struggling farm, but also a rejection of what he perceives to be his mother’s overbearing sincerity. She is naive, he believes, as she rejects his materialistic form of living. Dirk inverts his mother’s formula for a happy life, and his travails are juxtaposed against those who put happiness over money. Between Dallas and Selina, he comes to realize his mistake. By the end of the novel, Dirk is trapped in a gilded cage, having forsaken his passion in the name of wealth and status. His materialism is a dead end, though it is one he has chosen. In contrast to Dirk, his mother’s decisions and determination seem to be the real key to happiness.

The Importance of Self-Expression

During Selina’s formative years, she falls in love with the arts as a mode of self-expression. Because of her early interest in the theater, she witnesses a world in which emotional expression is the paramount value. This formative experience leads her to dream of becoming a novelist—a vocation in which self-expression would be at the core of her work. When she moves to the small farming town of High Prairie, she initially sees the move as a temporary stopover on her way to a career as a teacher in the city. Her love for Pervus DeJong changes her plans, and for a time, her pursuit of self-expression appears to be at an end.

When she meets Roelf, the sensitive, artistic son of local farmer Klaas Pool, she finds a kindred spirit and an avatar of her own frustrated dreams. Like her, Roelf values self-expression above all; unlike her, he is still young enough to escape the stifling expectations of High Prairie and become what Selina herself has always wished to become—an artist. The tension that arises between Roelf and Pervus signifies more than romantic jealousy: Just as Roelf is set to escape High Prairie, Selina is tethering herself to it.

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Though her marriage to Pervus—with all the pressures that come with being a farmer’s wife—means the end of her dream of becoming a novelist, Selina does eventually find a mode of self-expression that fits her circumstances. The patriarchal structure of life in High Prairie is so entrenched that her husband has to die to make this self-expression possible. While Pervus is alive, Selina studies novel methods of agriculture and makes endless proposals to increase the farm’s efficiency, but Pervus—dedicated to tradition and convinced that a woman cannot have ideas worth listening to—dismisses them all. After his death—and with a lucky infusion of cash from a wealthy friend—Selina finds herself with the means and authority to realize her vision. Over time, she turns the farm into a living expression of her ideas, her ambition, and her self-made identity.

Despite this success, Selina does not cease dreaming of a purer form of self-expression in the life of the artist. With Roelf now living in Europe, she transfers the role of avatar to her son, Dirk. She succeeds in giving Dirk the practical freedom—and economic privilege—to do whatever he likes with his life. Having grown up in proximity to far wealthier people, however, Dirk wants only to be wealthy. He dedicates his life to making as much money as possible, but he feels a need to perform the life of the child his mother wanted to have. Selina wanted him to pursue artistic ambitions and to be true to himself and his passions, yet he is scared to tell her that his only real passion is making money.

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Dirk becomes trapped in this performance, allowing his mother to believe that he will one day return to architecture while also assuring himself that he is only making money to support his mother. Dirk needs Selina to believe this performance, just as he needs to believe his own delusion. Even as he spends more time among the wealthy and finds their lives to be ultimately disappointing, he is unwilling to change course. He does not reconsider his priorities until he falls in love with Dallas O’Mara—a woman whose absolute dedication to self-expression offers a model of what his mother might have been if circumstances had not constrained her. She recognizes the performative happiness of the rich and powerful of Chicago, and her lack of interest in that elite world forces Dirk to see the emptiness of his own luxurious life. Dallas’s happiness and freedom show Dirk what he has missed by dedicating his life to social status instead of self-expression.

Fighting Against Social Expectations

Selina’s life is shaped by social expectations, particularly those concerning her gender. When she is young, she prefers to spend time with her father. Other people are shocked by this, believing that she should be raised by women. In the United States in the late 19th century, women are marginalized and patronized. This occurs in urban environments, such as when Selina lives in Chicago with her father, and in rural environments, such as when Selina moves to High Prairie. As an educated schoolteacher, Selina is expected to educate the next generation in the community, yet she is continually ignored, rejected, marginalized, or patronized by the local men.

Even the local women have internalized the social expectations surrounding women, so that women like Maartje Pool are shocked by Selina’s forthrightness. Maartje, in particular, will only confess to her rebellious thoughts in private. At all other times, she conforms to the expectations of a farmer’s wife. These expectations often involve thankless, arduous work, including maintaining the house and raising children. When Selina challenges expectations, she is treated as a humorous distraction or a dangerous radical influence. Even the man she marries, Pervus, treats his wife in a patronizing manner. Selina has ideas for how to make the farm more profitable, but Pervus would rather continue to suffer through poverty and toil than entertain ideas from an educated woman. Later in life, Selina is gratified by her success because it is a repudiation of the gender expectations that have been directed at her for her entire life. She is pleased to be more successful than the male farmers.

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Gender expectations are not limited to rural environments. Though the people of Chicago consider themselves to be more modern than their rural counterparts, they are beholden to the same regressive social forces. Paula Hempel is the most explicit example of this. Her grandfather, August, made millions in the meatpacking business. His good business sense and insight allowed him to succeed while others failed. August himself admits that his son-in-law and his grandson are not particularly impressive in a business sense, but they are fated to inherit the business in the future. Paula shows herself to be a much more insightful and capable person. She innovates and invents, coming up with new and profitable business ideas. Her idea to sell bonds to women, for example, is essentially the making of Dirk’s business idea. Since Paula is a woman, however, she will never receive the credit she deserves. She is her grandfather’s true heir, the only one in the family with the wherewithal to nurture and grow the business, but she is cast aside due to her gender. She is expected to raise children, rather than raise a fortune. As such, the family business is doomed to be led by unimpressive men while Paula must work behind the scenes to convince these same men that her own ideas are theirs.

Class expectations play as big a role as gender expectations in the society depicted in So Big. As a schoolgirl, Selina experiences class prejudice when her friends’ parents do not want to associate with her because they look down on her father and his profession. Selina nearly loses Julie from her life because Julie’s mother resents Selina’s working-class background. Dirk experiences similar discrimination. At university, the distinction between the Classifieds and the Unclassifieds is a proxy for social class distinctions that remain unspoken. If Dirk wants to enter the social elite, he is told, then he must cast aside his Unclassified friends. He is expected to conform to the rigid class hierarchies of the age, limiting access for working-class people who do not conform to the expectations of material wealth. Dirk distinguishes himself from his mother by accepting these conditions. While Selina delighted in pushing back against social expectations, Dirk does whatever it takes to conform.