A Psychoanalytic Study On Winesburg, Ohio

Sherwood Anderson is a well-known American writer in the early of 20^th century. He holds a very special position in American literary history. Ernest Hemingway and Penelope Fitsgerald are greatly influenced by him. Malcolm Cowley pointed that Sherwood Anderson was the only story teller of his generation and who left his mark on the style and vision of the generation that followed. Sherwood Anderson had one of his masterpieces Winesburg, Ohio published in 1919. It consists of twenty-five separate ones including an openings sketch. Anderson documents America's transition from a rural to an industrial society. And he is very sensitive in his fiction to the restlessness of the individual and to the movements of peoples' within the ever-changing fabric of society. Winesburg, Ohio is like no other work of modern American literature. It does not yield to any effort to classify it, but is instead a semi-poetic study of loneliness, of the grotesqueries of lonely spirits seen in a half light. These are symptoms of a desperate sense of loss and of an equally desperate and forceful desire to regain human love and contact.Anderson is called the "American Freudian". In Winesburg, Ohio, almost every story is endless quest of human being's inner world. Anderson portrays all kinds of instinct and desire of his characters lively, digging in the deep inside of human beings. That's why people call him soul singer.In this thesis, the author tries to study on Winesburg, Ohio by psychological theory of Freud: using the unconscious theory to interpret the relationship between Anderson's personal experience and his female character creation, and studying on the repression of few impressive characters by the personality structure theory, making symbol interpretation by psychoanalytic literary criticism. By this means, the author would like to get a deeper interpretation and the profound connotation of the stories.