英文小說(Fiction in English)

Introduction to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

Grotesque in Literature and Arts
Overview of Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio
"The Book of the Grotesque"
"Hands"
"Paper Pills"
"Mother"
Web Resources on Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio
Web Resources on the Grotesque

Grotesque in Literature and Arts

The aesthetic of the grotesque: compared with "the picturesque," "hybridity," "the beautiful," "the sublime"
Predecessors of literary grotesque:
Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Poe, "Premature Burial"
Gogol, "The Nose"
Kafka, "The Penal Colony," "Metamorphosis"
Hasek, The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War
The Grotesque in Painting:
1. Medieval sculptural decoration and gargoyle
2. Mannerism: Arcimboldo
3. Renaissance in the North: Bosch, Bruegel
4. Romanticism: Piranesi, Gericault, Goya,
5. Expressionism: Munch, Beckmann, Ensor, Schille, Kokoschka, Gross, Dix

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Overview of Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

Major themes in this story cycle:
1. The grotesque: Perversion through persistence in a "truth" (Moment of clarity)
2. The young thing inside (the woman inside): life force, passion in life, the anima (the feminine qualities in a male)

Underneath the story cycle, there is a coherent motif of the devaluation of the feminine. Such a devaluation of the anima or the feminine partly causes the grotesqueness for the male "grotesques" (eg. "Hands," "Respectability") and partly issues trouble and hindrances for the female protagonists who dare to love and to be loves (eg. "Paper Pills," "Mother," "Adventure").
Recognition of the anima is a shared quality for the more positive characters in the story cycle, such as Doctor Reefy in "Paper Pills" and "Death," Seth Richmond in "The Thinker," and George Willard. The growth of George's integrity and his art of writing are witnessed through his gradual understanding and appreciation of the feminine.
Read stories about George's progress in love: "Nobody Knows"--> "The Thinker," --> "An Awakening" --> "Sophistication."
Read stories concerning George's progress in his writing: "Mother" --> "The Thinker" --> "The Teacher" --> "Departure"

3. Failure of personal wish-fulfillment
4. Dissolution of community value: discontent of "small town"
5. Alienation: the dissolution of connection (sexual, religious, familial, friendship)
6. Contrast of values: "the anima" vs. "the animus," dream vs. reality, the pastoral vs. the industrial

To read the story cycle as a bildungsroman or kunstlerroman about George Willard, we can see the intertwining influence of the anima and the animus on him.

7. Contrast of meanings: surface vs. depth

In these stories, Anderson shared with the expressionist artists' and writers' interest to "express" the invisible under the surface of the visible by distorting or defamiliarizing the everyday event or the normal people.

Questions to think about:
1. What are the reasons why Anderson should depict only the dark sides of the small town?
2. What is grotesque? What makes the characters in the stories become grotesques? Is it because the author himself is obsessed with a perverse perception of the people in small town?
3. Is the narrator's (author's) attitude toward the grotesques sympathetic or critical?
4. What is the status of a journalist in the modern city? Will he (she) be different in a small town?
5. As you read along the story cycle, notice what George means to the main character in each story (the grotesque) and what they mean to George. Can we read the story cycle as a kunstlerroman (novel about the growth of an artist from childhood to maturity)? Or as a bildungsroman (novel about the maturing of a young character)? Can we say that, for George, to understand the others (the grotesques) in depth is to understand his integrity more thoroughly?
6. Does the author uphold or rebel against a community value?

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"The Book of the Grotesque"

As the prologue of the story cycle, "The Book of the Grotesque," sets the major themes and tone of the story cycle.

Who is the narrator? What is the relation among the narrator, the writer, and the carpenter in this story?
What do the window and the bed symbolize? (5)
Explain why the author use biblical tone (or parody of John 1) in defining the grotesque?
What is the writer's theory of the grotesque? Do you agree with the hypothesis that "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 become a grotesque and the truth he embraced become a falsehood" (7)? Think of the examples of Sister Teresa and Reverend Cheng Yen.
What is the "young thing inside"? (5, 7) Why the young thing inside the old man (writer) could save him from becoming a grotesque?

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"Hands"--concerning Wing Biddlebaum

What is the significance of the location of Wing Biddlebaum's house (the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio)? (9) How would you describe his status in the town?
Explain what is "synecdoche"? In what sense is W.B's "hands" a synecdoche of his life style? and the story of his hands a synecdoche of the story of discrimination?
What is wrong with W.B.? What causes his trouble? His hands? His thought? or other reasons?
Who is Adolph Meyers? Why does he change his name? (12)
What's Biddlebaum's grotesque thought?

See images of lynching in "Without Sanctuary" (Photography and Postcard of Lynching in America)

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"Paper Pills"--concerning Doctor Reefy

Explain the symbolic meaning of "paper pills."
Explain the symbolic meaning of "twisted apple" (14).
Why Anderson does not show any example of the content of the "paper pill"?

"Mother"--concerning Elizabeth Willard

Examine the contrast of values exemplified in George's mother (Elizabeth Willard: the young thing, dream, imaginative creativity) and father (Tom Willard: practical affair, politic). How does George response to these two role models?
What is the "grotesqueness" in Elizabeth and in Tom?
Analyze Elizabeth's use of analogy. Why the contest between the bearded man and the cat seems to Elizabeth "a rehearsal of her own life, terrible in its vividness" (17)? Why does she identify her psychological state with the condition of the hotel, New Willard House--"The hotel was continually losing patronage because of its shabbiness and she thought of herself as also shabby" (18)?
Compare the female protagonist in Joyce's "Eveline" and Anderson's "Mother." Both protagonists suffer from the conflict between their dream and cold reality. What force draws them back from fulfilling their dream?