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Plump, matronly Myra Babbitt has been married to George Babbitt for twenty-three years. She is no more a traditional heroine than her husband is a traditional hero. No better educated than Babbitt, she\'s both a victim of and a willing participant in Zenith\'s demands for conformity. Her main worries seem to revolve around social status. She wants to give successful dinner parties; she longs to be invited to the home of the wealthy Charles McKelveys.
The Babbitt marriage is a good one by Zenith standards, but as Lewis paints it, it\'s completely devoid of passion or romance. Babbitt feels trapped by his wife\'s dullness and turns first to dreaming of the fairy girl of his youth and then to pursuing Mrs. Tanis Judique.
Yet Mrs. Babbitt isn\'t an unsympathetic character. She is kind. And she deserves credit for having spent twenty years listening to Babbitt\'s irritable complaints. She can\'t understand his desire to rebel, but she too sees dimly that her life might have been better.
At the end of the book Mrs. Babbitt suffers an attack of appendicitis that brings the couple together. You may still be having mixed feelings about her. On the one hand, she\'s one of the forces making Babbitt abandon his rebellion and return to safe, conformist Zenith life. On the other hand, she\'s been a victim of that conformist life as well. When in the ambulance she suggests it might be better if she did die because no one loves her, you may see, as Babbitt sees, that she hasn\'t had an easy time of it in Zenith either.
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