Things Fall Apart: Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, a World in Transition

Abstract

The space of the living dead, the zone of paralysis of the mind and spirit, is, in Sherwood Anderson’s vision, Winesburg, Ohio, the habitat of the grotesques. The small town Winesburg, Ohio emblematizes the deliquescence of a world in a state of transition. Its ties with the past have been severed under the impact of the machine age, but newer possibilities that the death of the old allows are yet to be discovered. Anderson chronicles the sexual and social isolation, vocational failure, and unfulfilled longing of individuals whom the changed socioeconomic milieu has made conscious of the futility and absurdity of the human existence, but who have not explored the possibilities that the changed world has to offer. His view of small town America in a period of transition is one of unsettlement, stagnation, and estrangement. His men and women, like Albert Camus’s absurd hero Sisyphus, are conscious of the fragility and futility of life; but unlike Sisyphus, they fail to realize that the triumph of human life is in the zeal to struggle. They are thus failed grotesques, who, like T S Eliot’s Hollow Men, are beings of nothingness, 'shape without form, shade without color / paralyzed force, gesture without motion.