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Narrative Forms in Winesburg, Ohio

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

James M. Mellard
James M. Mellard*
Affiliation:
Northern Illinois University, DeKalb
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Abstract

Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, has not one, but four different narrative forms. The symbolic stories, “The Book of the Grotesque,” “Hands,” “Paper Pills,” “Tandy,” and “Drink,” emphasize the symbols suggested by their titles, lead readers toward crucial thematic epiphanies, and develop several of Anderson's affirmative values. In contrast, the stories of incident, “Nobody Knows,” “Adventure,” “An Awakening,” “The Untold Lie,” and “Departure,” are virtually without symbolism, but have nearly mythically simple narratives in which characters come to some momentary understanding of self, society, or life in general. The thematic stories, “Godliness,” “Respectability,” “The Strength of God,” “Loneliness,” “Death,” and “Sophistication,” subordinate character, event, and symbol to the exposition of the “truth,” quality, or state of being signaled in the titles. The emblematic stories, “Mother,” “The Philosopher,” “A Man of Ideas,” “The Thinker,” “The Teacher,” and “ 'Queer',” focus narrowly on character types, as events, actions, and attitudes, past and present, explain them and emphasize their typical behavior patterns; they usually end with these characters seeking release from their frustrations through violence or flight. The uniformity of each narrative form, focusing as it does on one dominant element, probably lies in the lyrical impressionism of Anderson's method of composition.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 83 , Issue 5 , October 1968 , pp. 1304 - 1312
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968

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References

1. Though he does not use a “model,” Waldo Frank, in “Winesburg, Ohio, after Twenty Years,” Story, xix (Sept.-Oct. 1941), 29–33, probably began the idea of a single form with his contention that “the ‘Winesburg’ design is quite uniform: a theme-statement of a character with his mood, followed by a recounting of actions that are merely variations on the theme… . The theme of the tales taken as a whole follows the same pattern as the individual ‘chapters’—although less precisely” (p. 30). Since Frank, critics have tended to extrapolate a form for the whole from a single episode. For example, Irving Howe, in Sherwood Anderson (New York, 1951), has written: “From the story ‘”Queer“,’ it is possible to abstract the choreography of Winesburg” (p. 105). Other critics have chosen other stories: choosing “Hands” are William L. Phillips, “How Sherwood Anderson Wrote Winesburg, Ohio,” AL, xxiii (March 1951), 7–30, and Rex Burbank, Sherwood Anderson (New York, 1964), 61–77; choosing “The Untold Lie” are Jarvis Thurston, “Anderson and Winesburg: Mysticism and Craft,” Accent, xvi (Spring 1956), 107–128, and Malcolm Cowley, “Introduction” to the Compass edition of Winesburg, Ohio (New York, 1960), pp. 1–15. (All quotations from Winesburg, Ohio, are taken from Cowley's edition and page references are given in parentheses in the text of the article.)

2. Roger Asselineau, perhaps because he echoes almost all of the major critics, seems to point to at least three of the four narrative forms. He says of the episodes: “Each of them follows a parabola, describes the rise and fall of some lyrical excitement in the soul of one of the grotesques, generally in the presence of George Willard. Each of them, too, has a unity of its own, since it is devoted to one particular character and one particular ‘truth’ … each tale is built round one symbolic image.” American Literary Masters, II (New York, 1965), p. 762. Where Asselineau finds all these elements in every story, I find that one usually provides a sufficient narrative focus for Anderson in each.

3. James Schevill, Sherwood Anderson: His Life and Work (Denver, 1951), p. 101 n.

4. See Burbank's book for a fine discussion of the technique and form of the epiphany in Anderson's work.

5. See Epifanio San Juan, Jr., “Vision and Reality: A Reconsideration of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio,” AL, xxxv (May 1963), 140–141, for a corollary discussion of Tom Foster's role.

6. See Phillips' article.

7. Irving Howe (Sherwood Anderson, p. 107) says that “the one conspicuous disharmony in the book is that the introductory ‘Book of the Grotesque’ suggests that the grotesques are victims of their wilful fanaticism, while in the stories themselves grotesqueness is the result of an essentially valid resistance to forces external to its victims.” These heavily thematic stories would appear to compromise Howe's dictum.

8. Sherwood, Anderson, p. 107.