11744. However, Lewis does not seem to have had such an intention at first; once again, half the novel is concerned with one theme and half with a related but different one. Infuriating and erratic, but brilliantly creative, the Canadian-born British artist and writer Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was an always, Elman, Ziggy (originally, Finkelman, Harry), Elman, Mischa (actually, Mikhail Saulovich), Elmira Business Institute: Narrative Description, https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/elmer-gantry, Lewis, Sinclair (7 February 1885 - 10 January 1951). Playing the title character, Lancaster won his first and only Oscar, for Best Actor. It also underscores what Lewis saw as one of the greatest dangers in American societythe tendency toward excess not only in religion but also in production, consumption, patriotism, and the proliferation of institutions . One such incident (chapter 2, section 3) is when the pious but not very bright Eddie Fislinger is outwitted by Jim Leffertss atheist father for the amusement of Jim and Elmer. It is Elmers Napoleonic ambition to combine all such organizations to the greater glory of himself: He would combine in one association all the moral organizations in Americaperhaps, later, in the entire world. Before long, he marries Cleo Benham, the choir director, but finds her an unenthusiastic lover. But throughout his career he wonders whether there is any value in his work. That night he has doubts, but he is persuaded to speak the following night at the Y.M.C.A. In 1926, Lewis refused the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith, because he believed it would compromise his artistic independence. Originally a London soul band called Five Proud Walkers, they threw their lot in with They make enough money to build a temple, and Sister Sharon falls for Elmer. Movies Podcasts Reviews Podcasts Reviews One famous evangelist was Gipsy Smith (18601947), an Englishman who made twenty-six trips to the United States. In Bible stories, in the words of the great hymns, in the anecdotes which the various preachers, quoted, he had his only knowledge of literature. Lewis exercises his bitterness against the failures of the church by making the church itself accountable for Elmers being no better educated. Gantry is bored by school, but Shallard is drawn to a professor who eventually confesses his atheism to Shallard. date the date you are citing the material. Those who believe in the doctrines of the church are presented as fools or morons, and are easy targets for malicious fun. Sign In There is a great deal of fantasy in the novel, but it is weird and crude and goes badly with the realism. Reverend Dr. Willoughby Quarles is president of Terwillinger College. Throughout the novel, clergymen and the church are presented in an extremely unflattering light. During the opening service, with a crowd of more than four thousand, fire breaks out. Nellie Benton is Jim Lefferts girlfriend when he is a student. Religion is an aspect of culture that permeates all societies, and much of history is defined by religions in power at the time. He could hear her wailing, Dont be afraid! It is clear that the revivals rely on the approval and demand of the public and that the revivals certainly could not survive without the support of a large number of congregants; however, there are several points in the film in which it appears the congregants are being taken advantage of by town and religious leaders. The book was banned in Boston and other cities and denounced from pulpits across the United States. He is a social climber and a publicity seeker. At Sparta, Elmer gains statewide fame for his sensational sermons denouncing drinking and other sins. Within the Protestant church, a battle rages between the traditionalists, or fundamentalists, who believe in the literal truth of the Bible, and the liberals, who believe that some parts of the Bible may be understood in a symbolic sense. Im a very ignorant young woman with a lot of misdirected energy and some tiny idealism, she explains to Elmer. TAKE NOTE: The films opening title sequence includes this advice: Due to the highly controversial nature of this film, we strongly urge you to prevent impressionable children from seeing it!, You can read the full Sinclair Lewis novel Elmer Gantry online at Project Gutenberg Australia, here:http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300851h.html, You might want to watch some Patti Pagemaybe Whatever Lola Wants, here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSsH_i6xpf8. The college president declares that he is a born preacher, and everyone urges him to become a minister. ", Jesus was a simple virtuous teacher, . MAJOR WORKS: Protestant fundamentalism was in part a reaction in the early twentieth century to the development of the higher criticism in Biblical scholarship. She is volatile, self-dramatizing, self-deceiving, self-promoting, cunning, playful, cynical, ambitious, and ruthlessa Cleopatra of the revivalist circuit. Later Frank is thrown from the church and he ventures forth as a worker in a charity organization. However, the date of retrieval is often important. When he at last finds the courage, now that he is out of the church, to speak his mind, he is viciously attacked and blinded by fundamentalist fanatics. A Century of Burt Lancaster series: http://take-up.org/series/94, The Trylon Microcinema is located at 3258 Minnehaha Ave. S.Minneapolis, MN 55406424-5468, Trylon Discount cards$25 for 5 tickets, cards can be redeemed for 1 or 2 seats at a time (on the day of show). He uses the church to further his own ambitions for power and fame. you have to deal with a lot of these two-by-four hick preachers with churches about the size of woodsheds and getting maybe eleven hundred a year, and yet they think they have the right to make suggestions! The clash between fundamentalists and liberals comes to a dramatic and violent climax in the final incident involving Shallard. He spends a year there, and three years in Vulcan, where Cleo gives birth to two children. It may be that the essential lesson which Lewiss experience of America taught him was that the barriers to education, self-discovery, and fulfillment were formidably guarded by exploiters and cranks: thus his anger; thus his satire. He wonders whether he might have become a great chemist, which would surely have been better (and more profitable) than year after year again of standing in the pulpit and knowing your congregation dont remember what youve said seven minutes after youve said it. From discontented dean, who never appears again, the narrative moves immediately to the aged parents of the deans wife. Of course, turmoil closes in on them as their inherent instincts of love overpower their adherence to the Christian principles they attempt to profess. The footballer wins by flattering Elmer, insulting Elmers courage, and challenging Elmer to a fight over The Lord. Elmer at first returns her affection, and they get married. He is so good that it is hard to tell the difference whether he's sincere or lying. Elmer Gantry is not, however, a movie about making good choices. After North invites him to lecture for Napap, Elmer is filled with ambition to combine all the moral organizations in America, with himself as the leader. He preaches at the service that gets Elmer converted. He is a worldly man and gives Elmer some shrewd advice about how to build up the church. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were many evangelists, like Elmer and Sharon Falconer in the novel, who traveled around the country conducting revival campaigns for large audiences. Which man seems to have the more vitality? Even Gantry wouldnt have been such a bad fellow if hed been, say, a salesman. Only a very curious moral outlook could have permitted the creator of such a monster as Elmer Gantry to say that his characters lack of a sense of decency would not have been objectionable if he had changed his profession . The Faithful Dog who saved his master during a terrific conflagration . (Later Elmer runs from a conflagration, saving no one but himself. His decision to enter the ministry is dishonest and contrary to his own nature, and it costs him the respect and friendship of his agnostic college roommate, Jim Lefferts. Elmer is forced to agree, but promises himself he will find a way out of the engagement. This site -- maintained by the faculty but also involving our students, our alumni, and the graduate teaching assistants who help us in our classes -- discusses the relevance of the study of religion, in particular, and the liberal arts, in general, for understanding both the past and present, by seeing religion as but one element of wider cultural practices. But not long after that he lost his faith in God altogether and became an atheist. In a very Elmer Gantry moment, starting at 2:54, after singing the Lord gave us two good hands, brothers and sisters, one for the givin and one for the takin, A satire can be aimed at an individual or a group. He fell in love with Sharon when he first met her, and is devoted to her. The consulting analyst's duties generally include planning studies and analyses of the business problems or issues, the consultants have been asked to help resolve. Everything conspires to overwhelm him and break down his defenses; he does not really have a chance. Encyclopedia.com. Lulu becomes devoted to Elmer but he gets bored with her. He is encouraged to stay in the church by the Reverend Andrew Pengilly, and he ends up as a minister of a Congregational church in Zenith. J. E. North is the executive secretary of the National Association for the Purification of Art and the Press (Napap). Elmer starts his career as a Baptist and then joins up with a charismatic but equally unprincipled female revivalist preacher. At times he is almost satanic, a compendium of all the vices; they are too many and too flagrant for him to be real. As Lewis so devastatingly wrote, Elmer got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason. The implication is that those three qualities were not present in the Baptist church of Paris, Kansas. They had a son, Michael, in 1930, the same year that Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. | With Jim (who is more skeptical and quick-witted than Gantry) home sick in bed, Gantry attends the meeting with his mother and is converted. I'm talkin' about divine love - not carnal love. He ends up as a minister in the Episcopal church. Sin, Sin. Web1. I have told you a mystery. She is the supreme fantasist. Gantry becomes her lover, but loses both her and his position when she is killed in a fire at her new tabernacle. Burt Lancaster's Oscar Winning performance in the title role was well-worth the accolades. As Elmer (Burt Lancaster) is a saleman with a powerfully persusive tongue who joins up Sister Sharon Falconer (glamorous Jean Simmons) along with her colleagues , Sister Rachel (Patti Page) , William L. Morgan (Dean Jagger) touring grass-roots evengelist circus during the depressed twenties . We are all bored by tired old men explaining the Bible through their noses! Here, they are the sinister forces of righteousness. It is not merely a case of the good priest versus the bad priest. Binch is a dreadful character who leers at Sharon and has an excessive interest in church fundraising. Light, Martin, The Quixotic Vision of Sinclair Lewis, Purdue University Press, 1975, pp. You could even argue that Gantry is performing a kind of public service, meeting a need with maximum opportunism but without malice. . She cries out, Oh, dont! . Yet at the fire, it is Sharon who is heroic. Over the next few years, he is appointed to larger and larger parishes, eventually to a church in Zenith. This is indeed what happened to Dr. Bruno Zechlin, one of the faculty at Mizpah, who lost his fundamentalist faith even before he received his theological doctorate. You're all doomed to perdition. 99107. It seemed that perhaps the world had taken a step away from irrational belief. He goes to live with his niece and dies within two years. On his return, Elmer meets J. In the novel, when Elmer takes up his first appointment in a small-town Methodist church, one of the first questions the fundamentalist trustees asks him is, Do any monkeying with this higher criticism? Against the tide of modernist thought that included science and secularism, fundamentalists insisted on the truth of their core doctrines, including the virgin birth, the physical resurrection of Jesus, the atonement, the infallibility of the Scriptures, and the second coming of Christ. What are his leading characteristics? Elmer thinks he is fat and pompous, but respects him nonetheless. Now in college, Gantry and his roommate, Jim Lefferts, spend much of their time drinking and chasing women, but their primary amusement comes from ridiculing their classmates incessant religious proselytizing. There are several other minor characters who are introduced with no apparent purpose other than to serve as victims of the authors anti-religious inclination. One cleric suggested that Lewis should be imprisoned for five years, and there were also threats of physical violence against the author. Elmer Gantry is a picaresque novel. Lewis said, flatly enough, that religion in the United States has become stifling; that, like the pioneer economy and the pioneer mentality of which it is a manifestation, it has become a threat instead of a benefit. Gantry, why dont you believe in God?. Kraus used []. Grebstein, Sheldon Norman, Sinclair Lewis, Twayne United States Authors Series, No. Based on the evidence in the novel, there is some truth in this comment. 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