Sherwood Anderson’s Grotesque Writing In Winesburg,Ohio

Winesburg,Ohio is the most distinguished work of Sherwood Anderson.It is a short-story cycle,consisting of twenty-two stories,which are separate in form but interconnected in content.In Winesburg,Ohio,Sherwood Anderson presents a grotesque landscape of mentally distorted people who go astray and wander about at the turn of the century and a pre-industrial Midwestern town where the old and the new contradict.Based on a relatively systematic review of the historical development of the grotesque,the scholarly consensus on the essence of the grotesque,Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque physicality and the carnival spirit of rebellion of the grotesque theory,this thesis analyzes how Anderson scatters the incongruity of the grotesque over the incomplete individuals and the in-between community,and finally the grotesque individuals and community converge in the art of rebellion and searching.He combines a group of physically and mentally deformed residents of a small town with Winesburg,a provincial Midwestern town on the verge of American industrialization to write about the omnipresent grotesqueness in modern society.Based on the analysis of the incongruous essence of the grotesque,this thesis extends from the individual to the community,analyzing the omnipresent grotesqueness in the industrialization of the United States,namely,the physical incongruity of grotesque individuals and the incongruity of the development of Winesburg and the Midwest as a whole constituted by grotesque community,and exploring the rebellious and becoming power of this incongruity for individuals and community.Chapter One is inspired by Bakhtin’s grotesque aesthetics on the incomplete and fragmented body,focusing on the grotesque incompleteness of the small-town people.They suffer from physical deformities,behavioral oddities and mental instabilities;Chapter Two is dedicated to uncovering the in-betweenness of the grotesque community in thecontext of the early twentieth-century American Midwest town.The state of in-betweenness is in itself a manifestation of the grotesque in the process of the change of times and urbanrural development.On the one hand,Winesburg is caught between the rural crudities and urban civilization,on the other hand,an unbecoming Midwest society is a mixture of the agrarian past and the industrialized present.Both are in a constant conflict between tradition and modernity and embody the grotesque nature of “incongruity”;Chapter Three starts from the power of rebellion and rebirth of the grotesque,analyzing the rebellion of the grotesque individuals against traditional aesthetics and machinemade culture as well as the power of becoming,reasoning about a possible way out of the conflict of spiritual fulfillment and material success for the nation.This thesis concludes by pointing out that first of all,Anderson visualizes the grotesqueness in the townspeople’s incomplete bodies,which assists to rebel against the traditional aesthetics of beauty and the control of the machine-made culture,reflecting profound compassion and humanistic concern for this small group of people.Unlike the orthodox,which pays tribute to the sublimity and completeness,scoffs and spurns the grotesques with an air of disgust,and the machine-made culture,which tends to standardize everyone,Anderson sees another beauty and uniqueness in these twisted apples,and proceeds to make them grotesquely dance;Second,Anderson probes into the grotesqueness in the in-betweenness of the community and finds terms that seem equal to the overlapping experience of townspeople between the narrowness of asmall town and the enormity of a swirling twentieth-century.Anderson expresses his reflection on the inevitable urban-rural disparity caused by the progress of the times.At last,this thesis delves further into the power of becoming of the grotesque individuals and community,both of which are in a permanent rebellion and search for a way out of the grotesqueness.Anderson uses the grotesque to give form to the unspeakable feeling of the incomplete grotesques in a confused society,reasoning about a more reasonable way of human existence.