On Women And The Growth Of George Willard In Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

Sherwood Anderson is one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. Forty years ago William Faulkner declared that Anderson "was the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on". Anderson's masterpiece is Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of 23 stories published in 1919. Forrest Ingram called it the short story cycle. Anderson describes a picture of a group of grotesques in American's transition from rural to industrial society. The book is also synonymous to many things distinctive of its age: the Freudian consciousness, the alienated people under the shadow of machine age, the reminiscence of the fading pastoral quietude, the sad young man, the actuation to break through the routine, the faith in infinite possibilities.The thesis is a study of Winesburg women grotesques and the growth of George Willard. To be exactly, this thesis is to reveal how George Willard, under the influence of Winesburg women, grows to be a writer and a man who leaves the small isolated Midwest town in the end. Critics tend to conclude that Anderson fails to create his female characters in Winesburg, Ohio mainly because Anderson doesn't give women many options. They are a group of frustrated people and they are always confined by their absoluteness, which leads them to be grotesques. The growth of George as a man and a writer owns a lot to the women in Winesburg. It is due to them that young George breaks away from self-isolation and male centeredness. He departs with the hope of Winesburg women and the dream of agrarian Winesburg indelible in his life, heading for the industrial metropolis, Chicago. Such an ambiguous end symbolizes either the finish point of his adolescence, or the starting point of his early adulthood. The mode of George's life is a spiral elevation from entrance to detachment in contrast with the close circular life style of the Winesburg women. In addition, through the autobiographical and psychological study of the author in this thesis, we come to the understanding that the hero George Willard with all his weaknesses is a complex autobiographical surrogate for Anderson. This point helps us understand both the hero George's growth and his problems he has to overcome during this process.