On The Anomie Behavior Of The Characters In The Township

Sherwood Anderson is a world-famous American writer. "Winesburg, Ohio" novel made him famous, and thus laid the status of its classical writers. Over the past century, many scholars from different angles study on Anderson and Winesburg, Ohio,Some of them focus on the root of the formation of grotesques characters in the novel.On this issue, some scholars use Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. They believe that the root of formatting grotesques character is their own psychological barriers, they don’t want to communicate with the outside world. In contrast, this paper uses "anomie theory" from the theory of sociology, the grotesque behavior of characters in the novel is deemed incompatible with the traditional of ethics, which is the so-called anomie behavior. From the point of view of psychology, anomie behavior is a kind of mental illness. In fact, leading to anomie behavior is more of a character and the imbalance of social relations, thus more suitable for anomie behavior theory to analyze. Anomie theory emphasizes the anomie behavior mostly appeared in the period of social transformation. And Anderson himself and the characters in his works in United States is also in the period of social transformation that from agricultural country to industrial countries. The society has become increasingly commercialized,money become omnipotent. During this period, the confusion of people’s values became one of the concerns of the novelists at that time. As a representative writer of this period, Anderson depicted the real situation of residents in the Midwest town through his work. By writing abnormal characters, author artistically expressed his desire that people eager to get rid of this situation.This article is based on Anderson’s masterpiece "Winesburg, Ohio" by using anomie theory in sociology theory and three forms about the relationship between anomie behavior and social as the framework to analyze the feature of anomie behavior characters and the mode to get rid of anomie behavior, and combine with the background of the social transformation period to seek for the root of the formation of anomie behavior of character-the confusion of people’s value.