In terms of character struggles in Winesburg, Ohio, loneliness is the major factor in the unhappiness of the town's inhabitants. All of the characters that are presented express some feelings of alienation in their individual relationships, as well as a disconnect from the world around them.
This is particularly evident in the depiction of the Willard family. There is a decay happening among both Tom and Elizabeth Willard who appear to be defeated by the lack of communication and lack of happiness in their marriage. They have become cynical of others and their placement in society. At this point it appears that the parents are in an attempt to live vicariously through their son to ease the loneliness and unhappiness that they feel in their own lives.
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One of the most striking elements about Anderson’s characters is the sense of isolation. One might assume that given their presence in a “close” (or, perhaps, “closed”) community they might feel less isolation. There is a shared lack of satisfaction with their station in life, the seeming inability to escape their own thoughts or their present situation and a longing for something that may never come. There is no solution to their problems and the stories hang, essentially, unresolved.
ReplyDeleteAnderson’s use of “implied” resolutions relies on the reader to finish the story for themselves. Like other modernist writers and artists, Anderson works on the basis that the work is perhaps finished but incomplete. It can only be completed with an audience to interact with it. The audience, not the artist, has the ability to not only give the piece meaning but also to give it life. Modernist stories most often lack epilogues that explain outcomes to the reader. The young woman who has traveled to the city and moved outside of her social class will inevitably become a prostitute and die in a ramshackle boarding house; whereas the Victorian novelist had to explain this to us, the modernist writer will rely on the reader to know what is likely to happen-she may not die but will certainly not return to the place she has fallen from. Perhaps that is the greater punishment than death and perhaps we should meditate more deeply upon the unfairness of the society that attempts to keep her “caged.”
Anderson, like other modernists, offers us a divergence from tradition (as mentioned in the above example) but he doesn’t abandon it. We can see myths and legends in modernist works (Anderson borrows the story of David and Goliath) and this too requires that the audience has the experience and the intellect to recognize those elements of the story for themselves.
Here, the connection between the avant garde and modernism becomes more tightly bound: the departure from the explicit to the implicit and the recognition that one’s thoughts do not always work in concert with their actions are but two of the most important elements of modernist literature and certainly elements evident in Anderson’s stories.