Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio tells of the townfolk of Winesburg, their eccentricities, their frustrations and their desires. All of them share their stories and interact with George Willard, a young reporter for the local newspaper, who acts as a sort of guiding beacon in their lives. Each of the chapters introduces a new character, linked with the others only by their friendship with George Willard, their hometown and their inherent and desperate loneliness; in this way it reminded me of Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Willard acts as a symbol of hope for the possibility of escape from the stifling conditions of Winesburg which have crippled, it seems, a large majority of the townsfolk.
Rather than a sprawling narrative tracing entire lives, instead Anderson chooses the moments in life that make them simultaneously unique and alike: a young mother who neglected her own dreams listens to her son express his own desire for adventure and escape, a minister watches the bare shoulders of a woman from the window of his study, a woman is abandoned by her young lover. There seems to be a distinct schism between who these people are now and who they were in the past, and they attempt to understand what happened to them in the in-between time. Yes, it is the loss of a type of innocence, but it is not quite as explicit or simple as that. It is more than the gap between childhood and adulthood, more of a certain level of consciousness – an awareness and frustration of the limits of experience.
“There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backwards view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. […] With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another. If he prefers that the other be a woman, that is because he believes that a woman will be gentle, that she will understand. He wants, most of all, understanding.”
Denying the idea of an idyllic pastoral small-town America, Anderson creates Winesburg as a microcosmic textured map of the complexity of human desperation. These inarticulate, lonely characters have lives and moments that are heartbreakingly real, their secret thoughts and wishes are artfully expressed through Anderson’s haunting prose, giving voice, and hope, to the voiceless.
(Winesburg, Ohio is also available online to read through Project Gutenberg.)
