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KMID : 0615219830080010155
Journal of Kwangju Health
1983 Volume.8 No. 1 p.155 ~ p.178
The Grotesques of Sherwood Anderson In Winesburg, Ohio
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Abstract
"Life, not death, is the great adventure." So reads the inscription engraved on Sherwood Anderson¢¥s tombstone in southwestern Virginia in accordance with a request he made not long before his death at sixty-four in 1941. At first glance, the buoyancy of the epitaph seems strangely at variance with the facts of his career, For a few triumphant years after the publication of Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Andersen was acclaimed a major figure of modern literature. He was regarded with Theodore Dreiser as a liberator of American letters from the debilitating effects of the genteel tradition.
The major theme of Anderson¢¥s writing is the tragedy of death in life: modern man, lacking personal identity and with his senses anesthetized, has, become a spiritless husk unfitted for love of man and community. This perennial theme is common enough in our time, though it was relatively dormant in the late 1910¢¥s when Andersen first enunciated it. It became his leitmotiv when, in 1912, at the age of thirty-six, he suffered a nervous breakdown and rejected his past. Thereafter he viewed this event as a symbolic rebirth which had purified him of false values and freed him from the confines of deadening institutions.
Winesburg, Ohio is a collection of unified stories about a group of isolated people living in a small American Midwest town at the turn of the century, which is one of the most significant transitional periods in American history. It is a short story, but each chapter does not separate and is connected story by a young news reporter, George Willard. In other words, this is a short story involving 22 stories. Anderson developed every stories which originated in a visionary small town, Winesburg, in American mid-west in 1910¢¥s.
I dealt with the conception of the grotesque in the chapter ¥°.
The conception of the grotesque, 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.
The grotesques are those whose humanity has been outraged and who to survive in Winesburg have had to suppress their wish to love. Williams becomes a misogynist because his mother-in-law, hoping to reconcile him to his faithless wife, thrusts her into his presence naked; Wing Biddlebaum with affection is fatally misunderstood.
Grotesqueness, then, is not merely the shield of deformity; it is also a remnant of misshapen feeling, what Doctor Reefy in "Paper Pills" calls "the sweetness of the twisted apples."
The Chapter ¥² has dealt with the author of the song in praise for grotesque.
Anderson writes about ordinary people doing, ordinary things, yet they are not normal or commonplace in the usual sense, because his concern in this book is not so much the physical appearance of their external world as the psychological reality hidden reality of their lives, had known and lived it. He manages in a remarkable way to capture the essence of American existence in transition during that period, exploring the ultimate problem of human isolation as the major theme.
I examined closely the motivation of the grotesques and classify their types. And then I researched how the writer combined normal human relation which these people wanted and tried to show how George Willard matured gradually. Finally I examined closely how Anderson understood, and how he introduced them to the world through his work.
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