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“The Sweetness of the Twisted Apples”: Unity of Vision in Winesburg, Ohio

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Ralph Ciancio
Ralph Ciancio*
Affiliation:
Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York
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Abstract

The prologue to Winesburg, Ohio, in which an old writer attributes their gro-tesqueness to fanaticism, oversimplifies the characters' twisted lives, but it is hardly irrelevant or at variance with the substance of the novel. The grotesques' fanatical quest for the ideal, their unwillingness to relinquish their dreams in face of the facts of experience, is at the core of all the novel's issues—its social, sexual, and mythic content—which form a philosophical whole. Yet Anderson sympathizes with his characters, for their fanaticism derives from the depths of their being and from a valid, human desire for spiritual fulfillment. The prologue also bears vitally upon the resolution of the novel's major theme— George Willard's growth into a writer; it can be said, in fact, that the prologue brings the theme to a close. For, by the end, George has undergone a transformation of character similar to that of Dr. Reefy, whom Anderson identifies with the old writer of the prologue, and thereby comes to share the old writer's vision, which is born of the grotesque but ultimately transcends it. Indeed, symbolically at least, George is the old writer. Winesburg is his story.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 87 , Issue 5 , October 1972 , pp. 994 - 1006
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1972

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References

1 Winesburg, Ohio, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking, 1969), p. 25. Subsequent page references to Winesburg will appear in the text.

2 Sherwood Anderson: His Life and Work (Denver: Univ. of Colorado Press, 1951), pp. 102–03.

3 Sherwood Anderson (New York : William Sloane Associates, 1951), p. 107.

4 Introd. to Winesburg, p. 14.

5 See Edwin Fussell, “Winesburg, Ohio: Art and Isolation,” MFS, 6 (Summer 1960), 106–14.

6 Radical Innocence : Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 50–51.

7 The suggestion that he is a Christ figure is made through the parallel between the design in the Reverend Hartman's window showing a child who looks up with rapt eyes as Christ blesses and pats him on the head (pp. 148, 150) and the scene in which Tom Hard's daughter gives rapt attention to the stranger as he kisses her hand and blesses her humanity (pp. 144–45). For an analysis of Anderson's use of the Christ story, see John J. McAleer, “Christ Symbolism in Winesburg, Ohio,” Discourse, 4 (Summer 1961), 168–81.

8 David D. Anderson, “Sherwood Anderson's Moments of Insight,” in Critical Studies in American Literature: A Collection of Essays, ed. David D. Anderson (Karachi: Univ. of Karachi, 1964), p. 116.

9 See William L. Phillips, “How Sherwood Anderson Wrote Winesburg, Ohio” AL, 13 (March 1951), 21–22. Since here and on occasion below my interpretation of the tales is in part Freudian, I should perhaps state explicitly that I am not of the persuasion that Anderson owed nothing to Freud, even though Frederick Hoffman, in Freudianism and the Literary Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1945), pp. 230–55, has convincingly demonstrated that Anderson did not read Freud and did not consult a dictionary of psychology as he wrote Winesburg. As Hoffman also points out, it seems more than curious that Anderson was reluctant to state positively his independence of Freud, although he was quite willing to admit influences such as Gertrude Stein and George Burrow; and in his Memoirs, ed. Ray Lewis White (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969), in his account of his discussions with Floyd Dell and the “bohemians” he associated with before and during the writing of Winesburg, people through whom he became familiar with Freudian ideas, his final phrase is not easily overlooked: “And now he had begun ‘psyching’ us. Not Floyd alone but others in the group did it. They psyched us. They psyched men passing in the street. It was a time when it was well for a man to be somewhat guarded in the remarks he made, what he did with his hands” (p. 339). My point is that Anderson's partial and secondhand knowledge of Freud probably crept into his shaping of characters whether he would keep it out or not.

10 See George D. Murphy, “The Theme of Sublimation in Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio,” MFS, 13 (Summer 1967), 239.

11 See Glen A. Love, “ Winesburg, Ohio and the Rhetoric of Silence,” AL, 40 (March 1968), 38–57.

12 In Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York: Scribners, 1921), pp. 138–39.

13 In The Portable Sherwood Anderson, ed. Horace Gregory (New York: Viking, 1959), pp. 547. 548; my italics.