Grotesques Of Anderson example essay topic

" "What Middletown thinks" or "feels" or "is" " cannot be conversed without a great deal of misrepresentation. "As many qualifications must be noted in speaking of a "typical" Middletown citizen as in speaking of Middletown as a "typical" American inland city" (Lynd, 402). This means that Middletown people are talked about as several "qualifications" which as well turn to be a stereotype of American domestic city. Thus this paper will not try to reflect the stereotype of Middletown, but only bring an imagination of an American writer named Sherwood Anderson to be seen. And in the selected stories from Winesburg, Ohio, this research hopes to find out how Anderson presents his protagonists' grotesqueness -- clinging the certain personal truths until they deformed them-which is caused by "God-infatuation", "inarticulateness", "enveloping personality", "misogyny", and the frustrations of small-town life. Sherwood Anderson, the writer of Winesburg, Ohio, was born on September 13, 1876 in Camden, Ohio, the third child of seven children.

Until eight, the family moved to Clyde, Ohio, a town which later served as the model for Winesburg, in 1884. As to helping the family by being as a paper boy and race-track swipe made him unable to attend school regularly. He joined the Army during the Spanish-American War after the Spanish surrender in 1898, he returned to Chicago writing articles for an advertising periodical in 1900. Married Cornelia Lane on May 16, 1904, later Anderson became an advertising copywriter in Chicago, and went on to manage his own paint factory in Elyria, Ohio.

The climactic turn reached to Anderson in November of 1912, suffered a mental breakdown because of his business and marriage, he walked out of his factory, leaving letter and was discovered four days later, chattering confusingly. Recovering, he moved to Chicago and advertising work again. He divorced from Cornelia, and then married Tennessee Mitchell. He gained a great noise as "an important new voice in American literature" with the emergence of Winesburg, Ohio in 1919.

Divorced from Tennessee in April, he married Elizabeth Pr all in 1924. In 1925, he published Dark Laughter, his only commercially successful novel. Later he bought two local Virginia newspapers after published many literary works. In late 1928, his marriage ended in separation. Afterwards married with Eleanor Copenhaver and published his final collection of fiction, Death in the Woods, emerged in 1933 during the Great Depression and sold poorly.

Anderson died of peritonitis after accidentally swallowing part of a wooden toothpick at a shipboard banquet while on a cruise to South America in 1941. He is buried just outside Marion, with his chosen epitaph engraved upon his gravestone: "Life, not death, is the great adventure" (Ferres, 10-2). The setting for Anderson's several works of fiction are located in Midwest and or at least his characters are Midwestern people. Undoubtedly, the idea of "the revolt from the village" and "the rejection of conventional society" are insinuated. As the reader can see from Anderson's first novel, Windy McPherson's Son.

It narrates the story of Sam McPherson Caxton, Iowa newsboy and son of the town drunk, who makes his fortune in Chicago. In this novel, Anderson uses "his philosophizing and moralizing through the Darwinian world of business" to present a good story of "the rebels against working-class squalor and poverty" (Kazin, 212). One of Anderson's masterpiece collection of short stories, Winesburg, Ohio also attributes to provincial life. It examined the troubled, darker aspects of provincial life. (Draper, 71). Precisely going well "beyond both of those oversimplified extremes to acknowledge both the worth and the tragic limitations of life in the small Midwestern towns", it emphasizes the idea of "all human life by easy geographical extension".

(Burbank, 77). Some of Anderson's later works still talk about Mid westerners. Other literary works like Many Marriage, Dark Laughter, Beyond Desire, and Kit Brandon are scrutinized from the point of view if Anderson's increasing interest in "psychological and moral solutions to the problems of modern urban industrial society". (10). His last novel, Death in the Woods, still deals with "struggling to escape poverty" in American Midwest small-town life. The protagonist is an old woman died alone in the snow after an awful life (14 Sept.

2002). Winesburg, Ohio -part novel and part collection of short stories-is Sherwood Anderson's most famous literature work. Its twenty-four-section interrelated accounts center around the transition of the century, dealing with "alienation and loneliness". It is a vivid depiction of "life in small-town village", "the existence of social norms, constrain the town's inhabitants and public proves a power force in shaping individuals". each completing in itself and each of them contributes to all the others. (12 Sept. 2002).

The major themes of the novel can be deduced into five themes. The first theme is "life in death". Most of the protagonists have something in common in "the history of a failed passion in life, of some kind or another". Many are lonely self-obsessive persons who battle with a burning desire which still burns inside of them.

The moments pictured by the short stories are "usually the moments when the passion tries to resurface" but no more has the "strength". Hence each story reflects concise "glimpses of people failing" (Ibid. ). The second major idea hidden in the novel is "the pastoral". The narrator often makes use a theme of "mock sentimentality toward the old, colloquial farmland that Winesburg represents as small town". Most of the time "a background for examining the break down of the archetypal patterns of human existence: sacrifice, initiation, and rebirth" is provided and repeated (Ibid.

). The next major central idea in the story is "failure of absolute truth". Anderson believes that one should keep separate the worlds of realism and fantasy as he says "there is something very confusing to both readers and writers about the notion of realism in fiction... what never seems to come quite clear is the simple fact that art is art. It is not life". Clearly, he does not believe than an author could not write about both or about the "collision of these worlds". He is afraid that writers will get "stuck on realism or naturalism" and disremember about the significance of "dreams, idealism, surrealism, and fantasy". , like he declares in "The Book of the Grotesque" that "man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts" (23).

Grasping a truth as "absolute" and "try to live by it" (24) drives "the figure into a grotesque and the truth into a lie" (Ibid. ). In addition to this, Anderson declares: " I myself remember with what a shock I heard people say that one of my own books, "Winesburg, Ohio", was an exact picture of Ohio village life. The book was written in the crowed tenement district if Chicago. The hint for almost every character was taken from my fellow-lodgers in a large rooming house, many of whom had never lived in a village. The confusion arises out of the fact that others besides practicing artists have imaginations.

But most people are afraid to trust their imaginations and the artist is not... ". (73). Another important hidden idea is "rebellion against values dominating American culture".

Being "traced" by Anderson, several writers of the next generation, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot for example, make use of a usual them like "sexual, familial, friendship, ritual modes of religion" to inset to "the degeneration of communal bonds between people" It originated after World War I because of a disillusionment toward a modern society which was materialistic and business / industry oriented. The senses of modern men were anesthetized and they lacked personal identity. The isolated human of modernity was unfit for the love of men or community (Ibid. ). The last central idea found in the novel is "Winesburg as a microcosm of the universal". The characters of Winesburg are pushed so hard to deal with "issues and events which people universally" encounter.

Several familiar strings between "man and the self in relation to the world exist which the grotesque figures deal with in a manner to which any reader could relate". Then "Winesburg becomes Any Town, USA and the characters symbolize flaws and struggles in the universal human experience. Winesburg functions synecdochally for the typical human community" (Ibid. ). In addition to this, Anderson also confirms in his Memoirs that. "..

Winesburg of course was no particular town. It was a mythical town. It was people. I had got the characters of the book everywhere about me, in towns in which I had lived, in the army, in factories and offices". (Anderson, 15). It is, notwithstanding, a family history since the town of Winesburg was "based on his memories of Clyde, Ohio, where Anderson had spent most of his boyhood and where his mother had died at the same age as the hero's mother" although some characters are were created while he was in Chicago (Cowley, 83).

The protagonist of the story, George Willard, can be deduced as Anderson himself in his late adolescence, and the other characters were either remembered from Clyde or else, in many cases, suggested by faces glimpsed in the Chicago street and "each face revealed a moment, a mood, or a secret that lay deep in Anderson's life and for which he was finding the right words at last" (Ibid. ). Winesburg, Ohio begins with a sort of prologue, in which an old writer imagines all the people he has known as "grotesques", warped in their pursuits of various truths. In "The Philosopher", Dr. Parcival believes that the town people will hang him for he has refused to go down to see the dead child. He then tells George the idea of the book, "everyone is Christ and will be crucified", he may not have a chance to write. In "Respectability", Wash Williams, an ugly fat telegraph operator, hates the people of Winesburg, especially women.

He tells George the story of his unfaithful wife, taking three lovers while he went to work, so that George will not repeat his footprints. In "The Thinker", the story focuses on Seth Richmond, a quite friend of George Willard, and his family's detail. He goes to see George and finds that even his friend is like other people in the town, talking nonsense. He feels he does not belong to the town. After spending an evening with Helen White, he tells her he plans to leave the town. In "Tandy", the young forgotten daughter of Tom Hard has a significance her father cannot see.

A stranger notices and makes a prophecy concerning her. He tells her that she may be the woman who is has a quality called "Tandy" that is stronger than man or woman. She refuses to be called anything but Tandy Hard after the incident. In "Departure", George Willard, the hero of the book, recollects what he has been through in his boyhood before leaving the town. The neighbors come to say good bye to him, except Helen White who does not catch him up. He takes off letting his life in Winesburg "becomes but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood".

Anderson's style of writing is 'sound and real". He felt that "the novel form does not fit an American writer, that it is a form which had been brought in. what is wanted is a new looseness; and in Winesburg I had made my own form". To illustrate his own form, he describes that his. ".. own vocabulary was small". Because he "had no Latin and no Greek, no French".

And when he "wanted to arrive at anything like delicate shades of meaning in my writing", he "had to do it" with his "own very limited vocabulary". And he ponders whether "in his writing words" he should use words which are not "part of my own everyday speech" or "of my own everyday thought". He answers "No", and further says that "I had long been telling myself. There was the language of the streets, of American towns and cities, the language of the factories and warehouses where I had worked, of laborers' rooming houses, the saloons, the farms". (13-4). Cowley believes that the reason to why Anderson did not change his writing is because other American writers "change for the worse" and Anderson found his own style and later considered that, "perhaps his steadfastness should make us thankful".

Cowley also praises that Anderson had accomplished "a quality of emotional rather than factual truth" and he conserved it "to the end of his career, while doing little to refine, transform, or even understand it", and adds that if Anderson wanted to ameliorate what he wrote, he had to let "the mood that had produced it" sink in, afterwards "write it over from the beginning to end... ". (82). The techniques of composition in Impressionist and post-Impressionist art offered possibilities in form and texture for fiction that were agreeable to his own views of life and art. More specifically, the new art suggested the shaping of a narrative sequence in accordance with the flow of feelings and thoughts, or impressions, of the narrator rather than according to time: according to psychological instead of chronological time. This meant that form would develop in two ways: first, from within the narrative which required that the traditional "plot" sequence of action would be abandoned for a form that moves with the mind and feelings second, because both mind and feelings operate in a continuum of time, following moods, attitudes, or ideas rather than a chronological order, form would grow by means of a series of disconnected images which are thematically and symbolically related and coalescent like the paintings of the French impressionists.

(62) Obviously, such a narrative technique can be precarious, for the mere portrayal of random thoughts and feelings in a narrative or on a canvas is not art, which must have some sort of order, For Anderson, as for James Joyce, the new principle of order or organization was psychological rather than external and linear. The narrative counterpart to the cylinder, sphere, or cone that Cezanne saw within the complicated external disorder of nature was the epiphany, the "showing forth" of the chief significant factors, the inner reality, in the life of a character or in a situation through a symbolic act or utterance. Such is the principle of order that organizes the tales in Winesburg. Anderson moved away from Dreiser's graceless journalistic style and from his brand of stark Naturalism and surface realism in favor of techniques that permitted him to penetrate the external forces of Naturalistic fiction, to bypass the ponderous collection of external social facts, and to get to the feelings and the irrational impulses of his characters, their innermost struggles (Burbank, 62-4). Grotesque The basic contrasts are established in the prologue, "The Book of the", for it sets in traditional prologue fashion the subject and theme of the work. (66).

Life in Winesburg impinges upon Willard in sharp, memorable moments. The structural form of the narrative from prologue to epilogue is psychological and episodic rather than linear; the tales are built about these moments of consciousness or revelation instead of following a simple sequence of time or causality (68). "The style and structural techniques of Impressionism and Symbolism lent themselves admirably to these aims... ".

(64). "The narrative structure thus follows the course of the omniscient author's mind as he explores various times in the past, probes into his characters' minds, relates bits of descriptive detail, and cites scraps of dialogue... ". Anderson avoids the traditional, and often artificial, plot of clear-cut cause and effect actions culminating in a decisive action, and at the same time he gains an almost tragic irony (65). According to New Encyclopaedia Britannica, the term "grotesque" is "felicitous" in a way Anderson could hardly have been aware of for it was first used by Renaissance artists to describe fresco decoration involving "mixed animal, human, and plant forms", being derived from Italian "grotteschi" refering to the decorations found c. 1500 during the excavation of Roman houses such as the Nero's "Golden House".

However, the term "grotesque" in the sense of Sherwood Anderson. The conception of the grotesques, as actually developed in the stories, is not merely that it is an unwilled affliction but also that it is a mark of a once sentient striving (81). In his introductory fantasy, "The Book of the Grotesque", Anderson writes: "It was the truths that made people grotesques... the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became the grotesque and the truth he embraced a falsehood" (24). Howe argues that there is a sense... in which these sentences are at variance with the book's meaning, but they do suggest the significant notion that the grotesques are those who have sought "the truths" that disfigured them. The grotesques are those whose humanity has been outraged and who to survive in Winesburg have had to suppress their wish to love (Ibid. ), while Burbank comments that the grotesques are people whose instinctive desires, aspirations, and deepest emotions have no meaning because they have no "other" who will impose a meaning upon them, thus they are drawn to the receptive.

"These people find their deepest instinctive need for love met by callousness or indifference or misunderstanding, and they become outcasts or spiritual recluses in Winesburg" (72). "In the portrayal of all these defeated people a vision of American small-town life emerges in which we see a society that has no cultural framework from which to draw common experiences; no code of manners by which to initiate, guide, and sustain meaningful relationships among individuals; no art to provide a communion of shared feeling and thought; and no established traditions by which to direct and balance their lives. They live in the midst of cultural failure" (73). By contrast, the grotesques are confined by liberated because for one reason or another they have (willfully or because of circumstances they cannot control) become isolated from others and thus closed off from the range of human experience. (67). The narrator emphasizes in "The Book of the Grotesque" that "the grotesques are not all horrible" (23).

All, however, are characterized by various types of psychic unfulfillment or limitation owing in part of the failure of their environment to provide them with opportunities for a rich variety of experience and in part to their own inability or reluctance to accept or understand the facts of isolation and loneliness (68). To illustrate, Burbank compares "the nature of their psychic unfulfillment is revealed in the tales by epiphanies" to "the action of fountain which, fixed at its base and therefore moving toward nothing" that "suddenly overflows -as the pressure within builds up -and shows what has remained hidden from view, just as a fountain retains the contents that have overflowed and returns them to their source, so the briefly revealed inner lives of the grotesques return unchanged to their imprisonment or defeat. (68-9) The Grotesque of Winesburg "rot because they are unused, their energies deprived of outlet, and their instincts curdled in isolation" (81). Those grotesques who are the most sensitive and articulate find their desires and aspirations thwarted by a repressive conventionalism that "offers little opportunity for fruitful human relationships", for instance, Dr. Parcival, is the socially defeated who has been beaten by "the insensitivity and unresponsiveness of others" (72). In "The Philosopher", Dr. Parcival is apparently grotesque. He is "a large man with a drooping mouth covered by a yellow mustache" with "black" teeth, and his lid of the left eye "twitched" falling down and snapping up like "a window shade" in which someone is "playing with the cord" (49).

He is too much alarmed at something without thinking it carefully and is religious obsession. He tells George to. ".. write the book that I may never get written" in which he will tell all men that "everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified" (56-7). 4. in the darkness or within their rooms, their secret inner lives "shoe forth" in an epiphany, an outburst of emotion, or in a casual, unguarded remark and reveal the full extent of their psychic defeat. As when Dr. Parcival refuses to treat the little girl injured in an accident. But beauty, however distorted, wells up out of the inner lives of these people who are judged queer by the culture that made them grotesque, and even in Dr. Parcival there is a weird, perverted beauty of profound understanding of human situation in his consciousness that emotional laceration is a condition of life.

(74-5) In "Respectability", Wash Williams becomes a misogynist because he is betrayed by his wife. And when he wants to get his wife back what he sees is the disgust of his mother-in-law, hoping to conciliate him to his faithless wife by offering her naked (81). His grotesqueness is supported by the misogyny which he has have been clinging on the rest of his life. And although "here and there", he seems to be instinctively respected when he walk through the streets "such a one had an instinct to pay him homage, to raise his hat or to bow before him" (124), he feels resent because it somehow reminds him about his wife and her mother who "were what is called respectable people" (126).

In "The Thinker", Seth Richmond is a quite man so he feels that others talk nonsense. His grotesqueness is encouraged by his own thought that he is "alone and unloved in the world, unable to recognize the love around him" (114). He does not know how to express his feelings to others, that makes he feels he does not belong to the town regretting that he cannot "laugh boisterously". Comparing to Wash Williams, they are by nature somewhat humble and taciturn and, accordingly, incapable to infringe their alienation. Seth's problem is that "his self-paralyzing habit of analyzing everything" (72-3).

Being abandoned by agnostic-obsessed father who tries to destroy neighbors' belief in God, and worse her mother is dead, Tandy Hard is a fruit of a grotesque. Lynd mentions in his book "The Middletown" that in the Middletown the mother is considered more influential than the father. Dorothy Dix, a Middletown mother, explains "it is much more important for children to have a good mother than it is for them to have a good father, because the mother not only establishes their social position, but because her influence is the prepotent one" (148). Thus Tandy is likely to be another "grotesque". However, Tandy has something special that a stranger from Cleveland sees, so he gives her a good name to remind her to. ".. dare to be strong... venture anything.

Be brave enough to dare to be loved. Be something more than man or woman... ". (145). After that she wants to be calls "Tandy" because it is the first time that there is someone paid attention to her after her mother is dead. In "Departure, George Willard is the only character who is woven through most of the stories.

But he is not a grotesque himself yet because he does not confront with "any deep experience". Working as a newspaper reporter in Winesburg Eagle gives him a chance to be close to townspeople, and this brings the thoughts to the grotesque that George is different from them and is the saviour one way or another. George's adolescent insight to the grotesques can only offer him to "the momentary emotional illumination described in that lovely story" Indeed there is "the unseen barrier to an absolute association" between them. (81). After he has learned about "the conditions of life", he decides to leave the town.

Burbank mentions about the purpose of George's leaving that it is to "avoid becoming grotesque by remaining in the confining atmosphere of Winesburg... he grows toward maturity and ultimately frees himself from Winesburg, while the grotesques do not" (68). And Burbank also adds that George is different from the earlier protagonist, Seth Richmond for instance, who leaves the town only for themselves's ake while George has acquired "an intense love for the people of the town of his birth and youth", so his "departure" is not meant to reject the small-town life for "success" but meant "to broaden the range of his imaginative experience" (69). Bowden gives different comment on George that the connotation of the book is that George is running away "the narrow life and the circumscribing pettiness of the small town... his final decision must be seen against the almost pathetic hope of his mother that he will not let himself be trapped in the stultifying atmosphere of Winesburg as she has been... and the one remaining passion that gave her strength was the hope that George would escape just such a lonely, petty life... Her only final solution was death, the last escape from life. And now George at the end of the book is escaping from Winesburg... ".

(122). Throughout the stories, the reader is encouraged to feel the sense of alienation, loneliness and frustration of the protagonists by Anderson's use of literary technique. The first symbol is the light which is reoccurring symbol very often in the story. In "Respectability", George and Wash talk "on the pile of railroad ties on the summer evening" (124).

In "The Thinker", Seth goes to visit George "on a summer evening... ". (132). And in "Tandy", George, Tom and the strange from Cleveland are together "one evening...

". (144). Several of the characters in Winesburg live in sundown moment: "the moment between darkness and light; the moment between ignorance and enlightenment" (14 Sept. 2002). Howe adds to this that "from Anderson's instinctively right placement of the book's central actions at twilight and night comes some of its frequently noticed aura of "lost ness" -as if the most sustaining and fruitful human activities can no longer be performed in public communion but must be grasped in secret" (80)... in the darkness or within their rooms, their secret inner lives "show forth" in an epiphany, an outburst of emotion, or in a casual, unguarded remark and reveal the full extent of their psychic defeat. (74-5) The second symbol is money which symbolizes the means for "freedom and control" and love (14 Sept.

2002). We can see that Dr. Parcival feels that he is unloved by he mother, so he "always took it straight home" to his mother using it as a tool to call attention from his mother (54). The next symbol is hand which occurs regularly "either in the singular or the plural" and suggests the possible or authentic intercourse of each individual with someone else (293). Tome Willy, the saloon keeper, is a man "with peculiarly marked hands" (49) which sometimes turn to be red when he grows "more and more excited" (50), Wash Williams is the dirty telegraph operator but he pays attention to his hands and there is "something sensitive and shapely in the hand" for he used to be "the best telegraph operator in the state" (121), Helen White puts her hand in Seth Richmond's until Seth "breaks the clasp through overconcern with self" (293), a young stranger from Cleveland expresses his love to Tandy, the little girl whom he thinks might be the girl he has looked for but they live in different time, by kissing Tandy's hands exultantly (145), the epilogue everyone comes to the station platform to shake young George's hand before he leaves the town (245). The town itself is another symbol found in the novel as well which is the cultural failure rises suggested by background images of decay and decomposition. The town is a wasteland ruled by dull, conventional people.

Its religion has deteriorated into an empty moralist; its people have lost their contact with the soil. While Anderson uses his images sparingly, interweaving them subtly with narrative and dialogue, they evoke an atmosphere of desolation which impinges with crushing effect upon the lives of the grotesques; and, as the images recur, they become symbolic of a culture which, as Waldo Frank has said, has reached the final stages of deterioration (73). In conclusion, the meaning of grotesque in the sense of Anderson does not refer to someone who was originally born having two faces or one eyes. He does not have anything to do with the appearance although sometimes he created his characters as ugly.

The grotesques of Anderson are the people who are deformed by their own depressing pasts, which still impress on their minds and drive them to be ugly both superficially and profoundly. Thus to Anderson we all can be the grotesques if we let the past haunt us and let it change the way we used to be. Indeed the grotesques are everywhere, and it can be anyone.

Bibliography

Primary Source Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1992: 21-24/ 49-57/ 121-146/ 224-47.
Secondary Source Bowden, Edwin T. The Common Place and The Grotesque. The Dungeon of the Heart: human Isolation and the American Novel. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1961: 114.
Burbank, Rex. Sherwood Anderson. Boston: T wayne Publishers. A Division of G.K. Hall and Co., 1964: 62-79.
Draper, James P. Sherwood Anderson. World Literature Criticism: A Selection of Major Author from Gale's Literature Criticism Series. Detroit: Gale Research inc., 1992: 71-81.
Ferres, John H. Winesburg, Ohio: Text and Criticism. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1966: 10-2.
Gw in, Robert P. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica. Volume 5.15th ed. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1768: 514. Kazin, Alfred. The New Realism: Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis. On Native Grounds. New York: Renal and Hitchcock, 1942: 212.
Lynd, Robert S. and Lynd Helen merrell. Child-Rearing. Middletown: A Study In American Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1929: 132.
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