Truth and the Urban World in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio exhibits a pattern in which withdrawal and return from the urban world into a ‘green’ or natural world occurs. While withdrawn into nature characters commonly undergo a period of contemplation, followed by a return to the city. Repeatedly the characters of Winesburg, Ohio play out this scenario of withdrawal and return. This forges a convention that Anderson uses in conjunction with the narration to address the discontent of the individual in the modern world. Anderson succeeds by allowing his characters understanding of the world while in nature. Thus characters then misconstrue the understanding that they gained in nature when they return to the urban world.
Throughout the collection of stories Anderson’s narrator makes subtle reference to a disdain for modern trappings. In the opening paragraph of “Hands” this narrator shows us, “the public highway along which went a wagon filled with berry pickers returning from the fields. The berry pickers, youths and maidens, laughed and shouted boisterously” (27). In this image we see the modern highway transversed by a wagon, which acts as a symbol of an older, fading world. The young people in this wagon appear happy and jovial after a day of picking berries. This conjures an image that suggests the simple joy of man in nature.
In “Paper Pills” an image of apples that “have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities where they will be eaten in apartments that are filled with books, magazines, furniture, and people” (36), evokes a sense of compartmentalization and claustrophobia associated with city life. The apples get “packed” into barrels that seem not unlike ...
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...e image of him walking through nature, into the wildness of the American west leaves the impression that David forsakes the urban world.
Anderson addresses the bleak disillusionment of the machine age in Winesburg, Ohio through his crafting of a narrator whose view of the modern world works in subtle conjunction with narrative convention. Anderson’s manipulation of his characters works as a discourse by which he propagates the idea that the modern world, in all its overwhelming complexities, must not overshadow the natural world that we come from. Anderson does not suggest that humankind give up modern life completely, and flee into the woods forever. However, his text does propose that we not lose the natural side of ourselves while living in this modern world.
Bibliography:
Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. New York: Penguin, 1992.
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