Imprisoned Soul

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) is the first American writer to be honored the Nobel Prize for literature, and one of the most greatest American authors in the 20th century. The novel Babbitt (1922) is a reflection of the life of city businessmen in the flowering of American business culture. It not only creates a typical image of the businessman Babbitt, but also manifests graphically every aspect of American commercial culture in thel920s.The word Babbitt originates from the novel's character, has entered the English vocabulary and become a synonym to American middle class, who do not have at least a little personality and characteristic. They live in inner emptiness, deceive themselves as well as others, but pretend to be complacent. This thesis tries to analyze the personality of the characters under the influence of cultural commercialization, standardization, ruling ideology and psychological control from the perspectives of Frankfurt School's theory of mass culture. Based on the facts that mass culture has not only lost its artistic feature and become naked goods, but also proclaims the ideology of the ruling class, the thesis focuses on mass culture's controlling of characters'thought and emotion through commercialization, repression and erasion of characters'individuality and esthetic sentiment, ideological suppression by means of deceit to remove characters'rebellious character, and psychological control of characters, and further exposes that mass culture leads to the loss of individual personality eventually.