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Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio
 Dialogue

Executive Series Editor

Henry Veggian (unc Chapel Hill)

Editorial Board

Manisha Basu (University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana)

Jennifer Keating-Miller (Carnegie Mellon University)
Jason Stevens (University of Maryland, Baltimore)
Richard Purcell (Carnegie Mellon University)
Thomas Reinert (unc Chapel Hill)

Founding Editor

Michael J. Meyer† (DePaul University, Chicago)

VOLUME 20

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/dial

Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg, Ohio

Edited by

Precious McKenzie

LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: “Clyde, Ohio Main Street from Winter 1911”. Photographer unknown. Reproduced with
kind permission of The Clyde Heritage League Trustees.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015958419

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering
Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more
information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface.

issn 1574-9630
isbn 978-90-04-31100-8 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-31101-5 (e-book)

Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes and De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and
Hotei Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without prior written permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided
that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite
910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa.
Fees are subject to change.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction
Precious McKenzie ix
Small Town to City and Back Again: The Re-figuring and Loss of
the American Dream in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio
Josephene Kealey 1
Winesburg, Elsewhere: George Willard and the Literary
Formalization of Obsession in Small-Town America and Abroad
Daniel Davis Wood 23
Failed Adventures and Imagined Communities in Sherwood
Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio
David T. Humphries 51
Speaking of Manhood in Winesburg, Ohio
William M. Etter 77
Sherwood Anderson’s Legacy to Contemporary American Writing
Rachel Luria 107
Sherwood Anderson and the Contemporary Short-Story Cycle
Jennifer J. Smith 121
Publishing Sherwood Anderson’s “Group of Tales”: The Textual
Presentations of the Winesburg Stories and the Modernist Legacy
of Winesburg, Ohio
Matthew James Vechinski 145
“Crude and Broken Forms” in America: Avant-Garde and
Modernist Affinities in Winesburg, Ohio
Stamatina Dimakopoulou 175
About the Authors 201
Index 205
 Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the Series Editor of the Rodopi Dialogue Series, Henry
Veggian, and the late Michael J. Meyer, for the opportunity to serve as the
editor for this collection. Their guidance and insight made this process
enjoyable. Special thanks to Esther Roth and Masja Horn for keeping this
project on track after Michael J. Meyer’s passing. I am grateful to have had
the privilege to work with such talented contributors. It was a pleasure to
be part of such an amazing team of scholars. Thank you.

Precious McKenzie, Rocky Mountain College

 Introduction
Revisiting Winesburg

Precious McKenzie

Sherwood Anderson published Winesburg, Ohio in 1919. Winesburg

explores the angst and oppression of living in small town middle America.
Critics in turn have read Anderson as an American mystic, a romantic, a
folklorist. Stylistically, some compare him to D.H. Lawrence or Walt
Whitman. Herbert Gold wrote that Anderson was a “romantic
sentimentalist” who represented “the dreamy, sad, romantic within each
of us, evoking with nostalgia and grief the bitter moments of recognition
which have formed him—formed all of us in our lonely America” (551).
This collection of essays revisits Winesburg, Ohio. The authors reframe
Anderson’s work in the context of home/place/community, gender and
masculinity studies, comparative approaches, and the modern short story
cycle. Their fresh readings of an American classic may help inspire college
students to think deeply about their positions in the world and what it
means to be part of a community and about Anderson’s role as a
Modernist writer.
Making the leap into contemporary texts, Rachel Luria reads the comic
Ice Haven through an Andersonian lens. Although different in form and
written decades apart, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Daniel
Clowes’s Ice Haven speak to each other across the divide and engage in a
complicated and complicating debate about the nature of American
identity and human frailty. Set in American small towns, the narratives
spinning out from one central character—in both cases, the towns’
aspiring writers—the stories bear striking resemblances, although offer
different conclusions. Both use grotesque characters to magnify and
examine the conflict between sexual desire and emotional intimacy and
both show how small-town American culture can either aid in or thwart
connection. In Anderson’s work, the writer is the only one who can
escape, the one who can make sense of the story, and bring order to the
chaos of daily life. For Clowes, the writer also holds the key to life’s
x Precious McKenzie

mysteries but he is a criminal, a pathetic and delusional misanthrope with

no gift for insight. Luria’s chapter explores the intersections between
Winesburg, Ohio and Ice Haven and their use of the grotesque to comment
on sex, desire, and the possibility of real human connection.
David T. Humphries, in “Gender Fantasies and Imagined Communities
in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio,” argues Sherwood Anderson’s
depiction of gender roles is crucial to understanding the conception of
national community that emerges in the text. Readings of Winesburg
often suggest that George Willard, as an aspiring writer, imaginatively
connects the separate lives of Winesburg’s inhabitants, and in doing so,
renews a sense of community for a small town overwhelmed by
modernization. The problem here is the idea of renewal, for there is
almost no evidence that any such community ever existed in Winesburg.
Humphries argues that this lack of community is related to the lack of any
meaningful relationship between men and women and that an authentic
community can exist only when the limits of gender roles and language
are recognized. This is what George does—not so much as an aspiring
writer, but as a working reporter for the Winesburg Eagle. As reporter, he
comes to recognize these limits in himself as he observes his subjects’
lives; as a representative of the mass media, he suggests that new
possibilities for imagining communities can actually result from the forces
of modernization.
Humphries’ reading is informed by Slavoj Zizek and the connections
he makes in The Plague of Fantasies (1997) between gender relations and
narrative structures. Zizek claims there is “no universal formula or matrix
guaranteeing a harmonious sexual relationship between the genders;
because of the lack of this universal formula, every subject has to invent a
fantasy of his or her own” (7). Many of the chapters in Winesburg
foreground this process: characters find that collective, heterosexual
norms fail to create meaningful relationships, but they are unable to
describe this impasse even to themselves and remained trapped in private
fantasies. As Zizek notes, the typical narrative structure of the novel
validates such fantasies by tracing the course of a single life to a final
point of closure. The novel thus creates meaning retrospectively,
dispersing historical social tensions and paradoxically creating the sense
that some essential social quality—like a meaningful sense of
 Introduction xi

community—has been lost, when in reality its key terms are just
emerging.
Humphries then turns to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities
(1991) to consider how George represents the means for imagining
Winesburg as part of a larger, national community. In his reading of the
Indonesian novel Semarang Hitam (1924), Benedict Anderson describes
how a representative “young man” represents “an embryonic Indonesian
‘imagined’ community” and adds, “It is fitting that in Semarang Hitam a
newspaper appears embedded in fiction, for if we now turn to the
newspaper as a cultural product, we will be struck by its profound
fictiveness” (32-33). As George explores the limits of gender relations and
language, he serves as such a representative “young man” and reveals the
threshold at which the fictiveness of the newspaper becomes the reality of
an “imagined community.”
Josephene Kealey’s chapter, “Small Town to City and Back Again: The
Re-figuring and Loss of the American Dream in Sherwood
Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio,” delves into an examination of disintegrative
forces. As Glen A. Love writes in his introduction to the 2008 Oxford
edition of Winesburg, Ohio, “Balanced against [the] green world [of
Winesburg’s setting] are threatening, disintegrative forces. Implicitly,
there is the city, which stands on the horizon of Winesburg’s scenes and
events, and sometimes intrudes in episodes of the characters’ lives” (xiii).
Love echoes the general critical reading of the setting as the source “of the
book’s evocation of lost worth” (Love xiii). Yet placing such a binary
between small town and city simplifies Anderson’s representation of the
relationship between the two places. Further, despite five decades of
renewed interest in Winesburg, the cycle’s metropolitan element has been
largely neglected, treated mostly as a background to Anderson’s small
town. What Kealey contributes to Winesburg criticism is a study of how
the Adamic myth, incorporated into Anderson’s understanding of the
American Dream, informs the author’s representation of the relationship
between the city and small town.
Winesburg’s characters move either to the city or back to the small
town. This seemingly simple observation is significant for, in representing
the two major lines of movement in the book as such, Anderson points up
a larger, socio-cultural narrative of contemporary America: R.W.B. Lewis’s
myth of “the American as Adam.” Taken into the nineteenth century, this
xii Precious McKenzie

myth undergoes a transformation with the development of the

industrialized city. When we conceive of the myth of the American Adam
together with the technological revolution, the industrial city takes on
metaphoric proportions. It is the new place to which the American must
travel if he is to continue re-making himself. At least, such is the
presumed case for Winesburg’s characters.
Indeed, references to the city by Anderson’s townees suggest that the
metropolis promises freedom of self-expression. The reverse suggestion,
then, implies that small-town life crushes the self beneath socio-moral
conventions. Consequently, scholarship has thoroughly explained how
the book’s grotesques are variously inhibited from communicating their
thoughts, desires, and the meaningfulness of their lives. Thus, as it has
been routinely argued, Winesburg’s inhabitants—in particular George
Willard—must leave the small town behind as part of an unwanted past
for whatever newness the city (the future) might hold.
However, the promises which the townees imagine the city makes are
ultimately falsified, not in the sense that the city is shown to be a place of
illusions, but that it is the notion of the city as the locale of positive
progression that is proven illusory. Thus, hopeful metropolitan
expectations are infused with a reversal of the American Dream: the
failure of the Dream results in a return to the small town and an
imaginative transmutation of it into the place of national Edenic, virtuous
origins. The small town rejected and now returned to, in Anderson’s cycle,
becomes a grotesque place, the epitome of the American Dream
perverted. Thus, while the cycle reveals the internal problems of
Winesburg, it also illustrates deep confusion in the nineteenth-century
American psyche regarding the Adamic myth as it was transformed in
relation to America’s new cities.
William M. Etter reconsiders desire and manhood in Sherwood
Anderson. Etter’s chapter, “Speaking of Manhood in Winesburg Ohio,”
revisits “Manhood,” the concluding word of Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg, Ohio, as it has long been recognized as a central concern of the
text. Criticism on this subject often concludes that Anderson develops a
sensitive, artistic version of “manhood” to serve as an alternative to
traditional understandings of gender roles in his time. Thomas Yingling
(1990) and much more recently Judith P. Saunders (2007) have both
discussed “The Untold Lie” as a confrontation of the characters with
 Introduction xiii

traditional gender ideologies, with the former contending that “masculine

social and sexual privilege” dominates the characters’ psyches as they
struggle within their current economic status and the latter observing that
the story is Anderson’s exploration of “evolved tendencies” of “male
psychology” and “misogyny” which “carves a space in which rebellion
against” these elements can be considered. Such readings often follow the
interpretive track reflected in the most recent complete biography of
Anderson—Kim Townsend’s 1987 book; Townsend sees many male
characters in Anderson’s fiction as “fulfilled” when their lives are lived
“not as a simple sexual male, not as a master of machines...but by being
creative, in thought and with words.” In doing so, Townsend contends,
Anderson believes males can “becom[e] something more than what the
culture says is manly.” In a sense, Anderson’s vision of genuine “manhood”
in opposition to the ideologies of his day may be discerned in his focus on
the discursive expressions of his male characters.
We might, however, also consider Anderson’s constructions of
“manhood” in Winesburg, Ohio not as alternatives to dominant visions of
men prevalent in his time but as fully within and reinforcing this
patriarchal social order. To consider Anderson’s work in this light, Etter
examines Winesburg, Ohio through the lens of Michel Foucault’s History of
Sexuality. Foucault’s claim that a central element of the modernity is the
imperative to transform desire “into discourse” applies particularly well to
those stories in Winesburg, Ohio concerning male characters and their
experiences of the social ideologies of “manhood” within which they live.
According to Foucault, because of this imperative to speak of one’s
desires, “autobiographical narratives” become important in our modern
West not as a matter of the individual simply saying “what was done…and
how it was done; but of reconstructing, in and around the act, the
thoughts that recapitulated it, the obsessions that accompanied it” (63).
Many of the stories in Winesburg, Ohio that narrate the manhood of
individuals are essentially “confessions,” either to the reader (as in the
case of stories like “Hands”) or to another character (like “Paper Pills” and
“The Strength of God”). Moreover, George Willard and the third-person
narrator of the text are also enmeshed in these discursive dynamics for, as
Foucault claims, the apparent repression of sexuality in the modern world
in fact creates “an incitement to discourse” by presenting sexuality as
“something akin to a secret whose discovery is imperative.” In many
xiv Precious McKenzie

crucial instances, Anderson makes the revelation of a male character’s

“secret” desires (even if only to George or the reader) the core event of the
narrative. Winesburg, Ohio constitutes, therefore, a complex
reinforcement, rather than an undermining, of modern “manhood.”
Jennifer J. Smith’s chapter, “Sherwood Anderson and the
Contemporary Short-Story Cycle,” moves away from masculinity studies
and evaluates the contemporary short story cycle. Smith maintains
Anderson’s volume of short stories depicting the submerged lives of a
small town opened up new vistas in terms of setting, subject, and style for
many writers. The inspiration of Winesburg as text and Anderson as
mentor on major figures in U.S. literature, including Ernest Hemingway,
William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, John Steinbeck, has been well
documented. Building on correspondence, essays, and public statements,
criticism has thoroughly attended to the many multiple manifestations of
Anderson’s influence on U.S. modernism. Less well understood is the
extent to which Anderson shapes more contemporary fiction. Smith
draws on authors who explicitly cite the influence of Anderson on their
work. Through close readings of their common formal and thematic
concerns, Smith constructs a lineage of short-story cycles that descends
from Anderson. Progeny of this lineage include Ray Bradbury’s The
Martian Chronicles (1950), Russell Banks’s Trailerpark (1981), Cathy Day’s
The Circus in Winter (2004), and Rebecca Barry’s Later, at the Bar (2007).
This chapter focuses on two powerful and pervasive manifestations of
Anderson’s influence on these cycles.
First, the imprint of Winesburg is evident in the formal organization of
these later volumes as cycles of stories linked by a common setting. Plot is
subordinate to character, mood, and setting within the genre. Winesburg’s
descendants continue to treat the particularities and depths of lives lived
in marginalized spaces— from Martian villages to an Ohio trailer park to
Hoosier circus grounds to a dive bar in the sticks of New York. In all of
these works, there persists a treatment of a certain economic underbelly
that is particular to these localities. The treatment of such spaces extends
a tradition of literature grounded in locality that has been essential to the
critical narratives of both a national literature and modernism.
Smith demonstrates how Winesburg cast “the revolution of
modernity,” as Anderson himself phrased it, in terms of a mode of literary
expression invested in both realism and the newest avant-garde practices.
 Introduction xv

The short-story cycles by Bradbury, Banks, Day, and Barry extend the
limits of realism and experimentation further as they engage with the
conventions of science fiction, myth, and postmodernism. The volumes’
increased self-consciousness throws into stark relief the simultaneous
ubiquity of realism in these later cycles. As they present latter-day
Winesburgs, these cycles also challenge the very parameters and meaning
of modernism. The commonality of form, setting, and subject among
these works, as well as the authors’ explicit acknowledgements of
Winesburg as forbearer, ultimately position Winesburg as a pioneer in
exploring the malleability of both genre and literary style. With its stylistic
blend of social realism and psychological realism, Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg, Ohio sketches a picture of small-town America from a vantage
point that alternates between the all-encompassing and the radically
individualized. Now tracing the connections between the various
townsfolk, now teasing out the complications of a single life, Anderson
moves from subject to subject—slipping across boundaries both domestic
and societal—in order to detail the anxieties, pleasures, secrets, and
yearnings of the people of Winesburg and to carefully expose the
unconscious and unspoken substance of their everyday lives. Daniel
Wood’s chapter, “Winesburg, Elsewhere: George Willard and the Literary
Formalization of Obsession in Small-Town America and Abroad,” sees the
result that Anderson has long been accorded a firm and identifiable place
in the pantheon of American writers alongside those who pursued similar
interests via similar literary means: as successor to Twain, James, and
Jewett, and as predecessor to Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck—and,
more recently, Annie Proulx, Louise Erdrich, and Marilynne Robinson.
For the present Dialogue volume on Winesburg, however, Wood
advances an alternative approach to the text that would situate it in a very
different literary tradition and thus locate Anderson himself amidst a very
different line of descendants and antecedents. This would involve
focusing not only on the constituent stories of Winesburg but also,
crucially, on the spaces between each story and the next. To date, the
stories themselves have largely been read as either autonomous or
cumulative in nature—as free-standing and self-contained extracts from a
larger text, or else as a series of discrete episodes whose gradual
progression allows the text as a whole to accumulate a broader meaning.
Departing from both such approaches to Winesburg, Wood considers the
xvi Precious McKenzie

significance of the movement from story to story as much as the stories

themselves: the moments at which—and the reasons for which—the
narrator relinquishes his otherwise intense interest in one particular
character and shifts his attention to another. A focus on such moments
would reconceptualize the stories as neither autonomous nor cumulative
so much as obsessively reiterative: each story emerges from the narrator’s
efforts to develop an intimacy with a particular character but ends when
that intimacy becomes too overwhelming to sustain, leaving him all but
compelled to retreat to a different character with whom he enters a fresh
cycle of intimacy and retreat—inevitably, repeatedly, and therefore
obsessively. From this perspective, emphasizing Anderson’s means of
selecting his subjects as well as his means of exploring them, Winesburg
essentially stands as the unlikely descendent of Poe’s tales of paranoia and
madness and of Kafka’s accounts of bewildered oppression, both of which
likewise consist of a fragmented cycle of intimacy, retreat, and intimacy
elsewhere; and, as such, it may well also stand as the progenitor of a global
tradition of equally obsessive, fragmented, and cyclical explorations of
small-town existence, ranging from Midwestern America to locales as far-
flung as suburban Dublin (Maeve Brennan), rural Ontario (Alice Munro),
and coastal Australia (Tim Winton).
Matthew James Vechinski’s chapter, “Publishing Sherwood Anderson’s
“Group of Tales”: The Textual Presentations of the Winesburg Stories and
the Modernist Legacy of Winesburg, Ohio,” focuses on the subtitle of
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small
Town Life. Vechinski takes this subtitle seriously as, he maintains, it
accurately describes its form as a book: a series of freestanding episodes
that share the same characters and situations and implies a continuous
narrative. Kim Townsend’s study of Anderson’s work notes Anderson’s
proprietary attitude to the book form that Winesburg, Ohio exemplifies
and perhaps inaugurates, quoting him as saying, “It is a form in which I
feel at ease. I invented it. It was mine.” Townsend then considers possible
sources of inspiration (Dubliners, Spoon River Anthology) and whether or
not Anderson would have been aware of these titles at the time he wrote
his book. Anderson’s, and Townsend’s, anxieties of influence color their
artistic and scholarly investments in the newness of Winesburg, Ohio.
Vechinski considers the book’s place in the canon differently: he
investigates how the book form of Winesburg, Ohio represents a distinctly
 Introduction xvii

modernist revision of the episodic novel, which places Anderson’s book in

the company of works like Joyce’s Ulysses. He argues that perhaps the
strongest case for considering Anderson a modernist concerns his
approach to publication and his ability to gesture to accepted narrative
conventions as he develops his signature style. Anderson first published
episodes in periodicals as stories that could stand alone and showcase his
aesthetic and his modern sensibility. Grouping together the Winesburg
stories provides an accessible unity of place, time, and action, the
background against which Anderson experiments with psychological
character studies.
Yet Vechinski’s goal is not merely to illustrate how Winesburg, Ohio
follows this modernist trend. He argues the “group of tales” was for
Anderson a flexible unity that allowed for him to adapt the book as a play
a decade later. This differs from the widely held modernist supposition
that, while authors may publish in periodicals representative, self-
contained excerpts of longer works, adaptations would violate literary
works’ original forms. Anderson’s own dramatic version of Winesburg,
Ohio which he perceived as parallel to the prose version rather than a
derivation from it, required that he identify and privilege a central theme,
the trials and growth of character George Willard. Vechinski considers
how Winesburg, Ohio the book, in comparison, relies on the frame
established in the opening chapter “The Book of the Grotesque” and
explores how it serves as an artistic statement and introduction while still
appearing and functioning as a Winesburg story. Although Anderson’s play
lacks the literary style and psychological impact of the book, his welcome
of adaptation as part and parcel of the episodic novel aligns him with
1930s writers breaking from modernist expectations of strict formal unity.
Stamatina Dimakopoulou’s chapter, “Crude and Broken Forms’ in
America: Avant-Garde and Modernist Affinities in Winesburg, Ohio,” looks
closely at the formative years of the elaboration of Winesburg, Ohio as
those were marked by Anderson’s involvement in the contexts of the
reception of modernism and the continental avant-gardes in America.
This chapter re-turns to Anderson’s foundational text and reconsiders
how Sherwood Anderson incorporated his changing perspectives on the
continental avant-gardes in the tales that went into Winesburg, Ohio.
In ‘The New Note’ that appeared in the second issue of the Little Review
(April 1914), Sherwood Anderson embraced Margaret Anderson’s claims
xviii Precious McKenzie

about the convergence between social, political, and aesthetic radicalism;

he eagerly anticipated the emergence of new voices who would ‘speak out
of the body and soul of youth’ and ‘[reinject]’ ‘truth and honesty’ into the
‘craft’ of writing. Yet his perspectives were bound to shift, and on
returning to America from Paris in early 1922, Anderson felt compelled to
revisit his earlier notion about the ‘new spirit’ of the avant-garde.
Dimakopoulou explores how Anderson’s twofold perspective on the
avant-garde informed his re-imaginings of the lives that populate
Winesburg, Ohio. In fact, Anderson’s complex perspective on America
bears significant affinities with William Carlos Williams’s Prologue and
Improvisations, serialised in the Little Review throughout 1917 and 1918.
Reminiscent of Williams’s early experiments in radicalizing the American
grain and resonant with Williams’s concerns about the social uses of the
cultural texts and radical forms of the continental avant-gardes,
Winesburg, Ohio bears a similar sense of a cultural and social urgency:
Anderson employs avant-garde tactics in order to approach facts and
fictions of an un-modern, halted even, social reality. The effect of collage;
a dissociative and disjunctive approach; the self-conscious moments
within the narrative; the distorting, cubist even, perspective that informs
the narrator’s intense observation, radicalize the cultural work that
American fiction was expected to perform.
Anticipating equally Hemingway’s In Our Time and Hopper’s scenes
from the Depression, Winesburg, Ohio articulates American inflections of
the distinctly modernist themes of desolation, frustration and isolation,
and at the same time translates the destructive and negating ethos of the
continental avant-gardes into a compassionate and disenganged
American narrative. The fictional lives of Sandburg’s characters are
refracted not only through the author’s own skepticism with respect to
American collective ideals, old and new, but also through skepticism
towards an affirmative attitude towards aesthetic radicalism and social
progress. Anticipating his subsequent disillusion with Paris, the decline of
Winesburg, Ohio, and the dislocated aborted lives that Anderson
grotesquely (re)-imagines can be set in resonance with the alienation and
violence that Wyndham Lewis expresses in the Imaginary Letters
serialized in the Little Review, just as they seem to be contained in Else
von Freytag Loringhoven’s indictment of William Carlos Williams.
 Introduction xix

Against a mainstream view of a progressive affirmative modernity in

America, a vision shared by the radical left too, Anderson mobilized the
ethos of the avant-garde in order to defamiliarize distinctly American
illusions and delusions. Sandburg’s American classic does not merely
bend the tradition of American realism and the formal experiments of the
avant-garde, but also merits to be re-framed in its avant-garde and
transantlantic lineages: voicing and expressing the inarticulateness and
the formlessness that William Carlos Williams was to return to in Spring
and All, Sandburg’s text is informed by the dual contact with Europe and
America. After all, Anderson uncannily encountered in Paris, the
grotesque alienation that he had evoked in Winesburg, Ohio: the ‘kind of
death’ in the ‘air of present day France’ and the disillusion before aborted
growth and failed hopes were reminiscent of America’s own loss of
direction, when ‘the old belief in material progress is lost and nothing new
has yet been found.’
Let us hope that something new has indeed been found. May this
volume in the Dialogue series inspire you to revisit Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg, Ohio. I hope it sparks fresh ways in which to share Anderson’s
writings with generations to come.

WORKS CITED

Anderson, Sherwood. “The New Note.” Little Review no. 1 (March 1914): 23.
Print.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. New York: Verso, 1991. Print.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction.
Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.
Gold, Herbert. “The Purity and Cunning of Sherwood Anderson,” The
Hudson Review 1.4 (Winter 1957-1958): 551. Print.
Love, Glen A. “Introduction.” Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. Ed.
Glen A. Love. London: Oxford University Press, 2008. vii-xxx. Print.
Saunders, Judith P. “Male Reproductive Strategies in Sherwood
Anderson’s ‘The Untold Lie.’” Philosophy and Literature 31.2 (Oct. 2007):
311-322. Print.
xx Precious McKenzie

Townsend, Kim. Sherwood Anderson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Print.
Trilling, Lionel. “Sherwood Anderson.” The Kenyon Review 3.3 (Summer
1941): 296-297. Print.
Yingling, Thomas. “Winesburg, Ohio and the End of Collective Experience.”
New Essays on Winesburg, Ohio. Ed. John W. Crowley. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1990: 99-128. Print.
Zizek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997. Print.
 Small Town to City and Back Again: The Re-figuring and Loss of
the American Dream in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio

Josephene Kealey

Chapter One, “Small Town to City and Back Again: The Re-figuring and Loss of
the American Dream in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio,” explores the
intersection of geographic and social movement as it is represented by how
Winesburg’s characters move either to the city or back to the small town.
Anderson uses these two major lines of movement in the book to indicate a
socio-cultural narrative of contemporary America: that of what R.B. Lewis called
the myth of “the American as Adam,” a myth that the following essay contends
was transformed by the literal, and metaphoric, development of the
industrialized city. Furthermore, the essay argues that the promises which the
town-folk imagine the city makes are ultimately falsified, not in the sense that the
city is itself shown to be a place of illusions, but that it is the notion of the city as
the metaphoric locale of positive progression that is proven illusory. By tracing
this critique of the notion of urbanism in Anderson’s stories, the essay argues that
the failure of the (metropolitan) Dream results in a return to the small town and
an imaginative transmutation of the latter into the place of national Edenic,
virtuous origins. The small town once rejected and now returned to, in
Anderson’s cycle, becomes a grotesque place, the epitome of the American
Dream perverted.

Scholarship since 1960 on Sherwood Anderson’s best-known work,

Winesburg, Ohio (1919), has rejuvenated the book by analyzing it as more
than ‘merely’ an example of early twentieth-century American “revolt
from the village” literature.1 As Glen A. Love states in his introduction to
the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Winesburg (2008), “today it seems
apparent that Anderson turned back to the cornfields and the village of
his youth because they represented the sort of ordered, natural world
where love and communication were possible” (xii). Hence, not hateful of
the small town but rather regretful of the negative consequences of
2 Josephene Kealey

industrialization, Anderson’s works—Winesburg and subsequent titles—

“trace the confusion and vulgarity of his age to the displacement of the
agrarian base of American society” (Spencer 7). For Anderson, the small
town was “the clearest repository of archetypal emotions and situations”
(Spencer 10) because it lay between the country—the ‘soil’ or foundation
of American virtue and ideals—and the city, “which breeds ideas” (10). As
Clarence Lindsay states, for Anderson, “the small town, home, is where
[the] essential American drama of identity is most intensely felt” (83).
But not only in the small town. David D. Anderson has explored how
the drama of identity is also at work in Anderson’s urban fiction. His
observations cohere with Spencer’s earlier assessment that although the
author was never an urban writer or sociologist (but rather a general
“mythopoeist” [2]), “[t]he consequent dehumanization of the old
communities could be seen in both city and village” of Anderson’s
writings (8). It is appropriate then, as Irving Howe had already observed in
1951, that the cities mentioned in Winesburg, Ohio (Cleveland, New York,
Chicago, Cincinnati, Dayton) have problems that are as complicated and
disturbing as those found in small town Winesburg (97). Therefore,
understanding that Anderson’s larger and more central concern is the loss
of the “older American values” (Spencer 5), it would be simplistic to
evaluate the author’s representation of the city in the manner that Love
does in his “Introduction:” “Balanced against [the] green world [of
Winesburg’s setting] are threatening, disintegrative forces. Implicitly,
there is the city, which stands on the horizon of Winesburg’s scenes and
events, and sometimes intrudes in episodes of the characters’ lives” (xiii).
As stated, Love echoes general critical reading of the country setting as
the source “of the book’s evocation of lost worth;” yet, drawing such a
strict distinction between small town and city oversimplifies Anderson’s
representations.
The metropolitan element in the cycle has not been given
comprehensive attention, despite five decades of renewed interest in
Winesburg. That is, the cities have been consistently treated only as a
background. Kenny J. Williams puts it more bluntly: “Because it is so often
associated with the nation’s fading small towns, Winesburg, Ohio’s display
of urban elements has been overlooked and totally neglected” (183). Even
Williams’s analysis of the cities in Winesburg is somewhat short (182-190).
Furthermore, his conclusion regarding metropolitan representation in the
 Small Town to City and Back Again 3

cycle perhaps lacks nuance (echoing, as it does, Howe’s earlier

observation): Life in the city as well as in the small town is oppressive
(189).
In his cataloguing of characters’s attitudes towards the city and the
small town in Winesburg, however, Williams reveals a most enlightening
aspect of Anderson’s book: “Those in the village want to go to the city.
Many of those in the city want to get back to Winesburg. And, happiness
eludes them all” (184). Here Williams draws out what might be obvious
but easily missed: the desire of small-town inhabitants to move to the city
and the desire of city dwellers to return to the small town.2 The mobile
characters in Winesburg either go to the city or go back to the small town.
As simple as this observation might be, the two major lines of movement
described as such register as signifiers of larger socio-cultural narratives
within which Anderson’s contemporary Americans were participating. It
is my assertion that these two narratives are themselves parts of an even
greater over-arching plot, that of the myth of “the American as Adam”
(Lewis 5).
In The American Adam, R. W. B. Lewis discusses the dialogue
conducted in American letters, between 1820 and 1860, about “a native
American mythology” (1). This myth, Lewis clarifies,

saw life and history as just beginning. It described the world as

starting up again under fresh initiative, in a divinely granted
second chance for the human race, after the first chance had
been so disastrously fumbled in the darkening Old World. [...]
America, it was said insistently from the 1820’s onward, was
not the end-product of a long historical process [...]; it was
something entirely new. (5)

Lewis then explains what sort of individual was the newly conceived
species of American Man:

The new habits to be engendered on the new American scene

were suggested by the image of a radically new personality, the
hero of the new adventure: an individual emancipated from
history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by
the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing
alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever
4 Josephene Kealey

awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent
resources. It was not surprising, in a Bible-reading generation,
that the new hero (in praise or disapproval) was most easily
identified with Adam before the Fall. (5)

Coupled with the development of the industrialized city at the turn of the
nineteenth century, the American myth undergoes significant
transformation. In Machine and Metaphor, Jennifer Carol Cook explains
that the “tremendous technological innovation” (1) of the late nineteenth
century “had profound ramifications for social life in America” (2). She
refers to various contemporaries of the age who were concerned
especially with how language was affected by new communication
technologies:

Along with his fellow communitarians, who emphasized the

power of communication to unite peoples, John Dewey saw
in the new technology the potential to ‘break down the
barriers of ignorance,’ to ‘make the nation a neighborhood’
(qtd. in Quandt 26, 30) by encouraging mutual sympathy
that, for the first time in history, could transcend the
boundaries of space, time, and locale. Sociologist Charles
Horton Cooley concurred, believing that the increased
circulation of language would essentially replicate familial
bonds on a much grander scale. And William Allen White
espoused the belief that ‘the people, through the telegrahp
[sic], the telephone and the rural free delivery...and all sorts
of organs of communication and understanding, are getting
ready for another step in evolution’. (qtd. in Quandt 72)

When we contextualize the American Adam myth with the

technological / industrial revolution, the city takes on metaphoric
proportions. It is the new place (from rural America) to which the
American must travel if he is to continue re-making himself. The
metropolis for the American Adam is the new point of direction, offers yet
unknown experiences, and provides the opportunity to shed old (small-
town) skin for new (urban) clothes. At least, such is the presumed case for
Anderson’s small-town characters in Winesburg. References to the city by
the small-town inhabitants suggest that the metropolis holds for them
particular promises of rejuvenating change, and most importantly, of full
 Small Town to City and Back Again 5

and free self-expression. They go there “to meet the adventure of life”
(Winesburg 138).
Reading mythology into Anderson’s work is not new, but neither is it
common in criticism.3 What I hope to contribute to this only partially
explored area of Anderson criticism is a focused study of how the Adamic
myth, incorporated into Anderson’s idea of the American Dream, informs
the author’s representation of the relationship between the city and small
town in Winesburg. I argue that the small-town characters demonstrate
hopeful expectations of the city which are infused with the transformed
American Dream of personal renewal from the gains of technological /
industrial development. However, the promises that the small-town
inhabitants imagine that the city makes are presented as false, not in the
sense that the city is a place of illusions, but that the notion of the city as a
place of greater promise is illusory. As for city folk for whom the dream
has already failed, they move to Winesburg in a reverse direction, thereby
effecting an imaginative transmutation of the small town into the place of
national Edenic, virtuous origins. Rejected and now returned to, the small
town in Anderson’s cycle becomes a depot for losers who have
experienced the corruption of the American Dream. While the cycle as a
whole reveals the internal problems of Winesburg, it also illustrates deep
confusion in the American psyche, as Anderson presents it, regarding the
Adamic myth as it was transformed in relation to the nation’s new cities.
In the three Winesburg stories that involve characters leaving the small
town (besides the final story “Departure”) —“The Thinker,” “Queer,” and
“Loneliness”—the narrative is significantly informed by the direction in
which these wanderers look. The characters’ plans to leave Winesburg are
manifold in meaning: They involve a rejection of the small town,
instigated by anger and resentment, as well as a pledge of revenge against
those who have hurt the characters at home. These characters ostensibly
suggest that, in the small town, the self is crushed beneath social and
moral conventions that disallow individual expression outside the
conventions. Indeed, Winesburg scholarship has thoroughly explained
how the book’s grotesques are self- and externally inhibited from
communicating their thoughts, desires, and the meaningfulness of their
lives (for example, see Howe, Spencer, Cook, and Robert Dunne). It is as if
Winesburg’s inhabitants must leave behind the small town as part of an
unwanted past for whatever newness the city, and the future, might hold.
6 Josephene Kealey

For these small-town folk—Seth Richmond of “The Thinker,” Elmer

Cowley of “Queer,” and Enoch Robinson of “Loneliness”—the city (for
indeed that is where they inevitably travel) represents the means to find
superiority over other fellow small-town inhabitants; it is the place where
the self not only can be renewed but improved, made greater than those
back home. ‘Home’ as identified in Winesburg certainly no longer
possesses positive connotations of national roots originating in rural
places. It is these assumptions involving the mythic narrative, which the
characters feel they have embarked upon, that are of critical concern in
Winesburg.
In “The Thinker,” Seth Richmond determines to “‘get out of here [...].
I’m going to some city and go to work’” (74). Frustrated with small-town
life as he sees it lived out by its inhabitants, he feels that he does not
belong in Winesburg—“‘It’s different with me’” (74)—and discerns for
himself that he has to “‘strike out. I’ve got to get to work. It’s what I am
good for’” (76). For Seth, leaving Winesburg is critical to leading a life that
is more special than the seemingly petty lives of the other Winesburg
inhabitants. Moreover, Seth’s taciturn and reticent life in Winesburg is
perceived, by the small-town people initially and then by Seth himself
(despite his self-knowledge to the contrary), as the quiet before an
eruption of some sort, a waiting period before productivity:

In Winesburg, Seth Richmond was called the ‘deep one.’ [...] ‘He’ll
break out some of these days. You wait and see.’ The talk of the
town and the respect with which the men and boys instinctively
greeted him, as all men greet silent people, had affected Seth
Richmond’s outlook on life and on himself. (72)

These Winesburg folk perceive their place as limited in its ability to

nurture the mind and soul, and thus merely a stepping stone to growth
and maturity in the city. Their perception involves a belief that elevated
industriousness and productivity, possible only in the city, must follow
from these years of great mental activity in which Seth is supposed to be
engaged. He appears to be a promising model of the American Adam
upon whom Winesburg’s inhabitants write the story of the American
Dream.
However, Seth’s awakening to a desire to leave Winesburg is spurred
by the town’s own constant gazing towards the metropolis:
 Small Town to City and Back Again 7

He, like most boys, was deeper than boys are given credit for, but
he was not what the men of the town, and even his mother,
thought him to be. No great underlying purpose lay back of his
habitual silence, and he had no definite plan for his life. [...] He
wasn’t particularly interested in what was going on, and
sometimes wondered if he would ever be particularly interested
in anything. (72)

His decision to “strike out,” which he imagines can only mean moving to
“some city,” is in keeping with the mythic narrative of the city. Moreover,
besides being influenced by the talk of a town he despises, Seth’s plans are
vague: “‘I’ll do something, get into some kind of work where talk don’t
count. Maybe I’ll just be a mechanic in a shop. I don’t know. I guess I don’t
care much. I just want to work and keep quiet. That’s all I’ve got in my
mind’” (77). His dream of what will constitute a good life in the city is
therefore not much different from the life he presently lives in the small
town. It ultimately involves leading a similar life but in an urban milieu, as
if there the quality and meaningfulness of his life will magically be
different. Apparently, merely going to the city—and note that Seth can
only picture productivity in a mechanic’s shop as an example of living the
American Dream—is thought to entail positive change, regardless of the
individual and of what he plans to do there.
In “‘Queer,’” Elmer Cowley suffers local mockery because he is from a
socially awkward family. As with Seth Richmond, Elmer believes he is
meant for a more significant life:

‘With me it’s different. Look how it has always been with me.
Father is queer and mother was queer, too. [...] Father doesn’t
know and when mother was alive she didn’t know either. Mabel
[my sister] is different. She knows but she won’t say anything. I
will, though. I’m not going to be stared at any longer. [...] I know
too well. I can’t stand it. [...] I’m not made to stand it.’ (109)

Dissimilar to Seth’s attitude to Winesburg (whose own declaration “‘It’s

different with me’” [74] asserts his sense of confident exclusivity), Elmer
desires inclusion and believes in its possibility only in a metropolitan
setting. His vaguely stated difference being sorely stressed in Winesburg,
he is convinced that moving to the city would “put an end to all of his
8 Josephene Kealey

unhappiness” (111): There, “‘I’ll be like other people’” (107). He envisions he

will find satisfaction in an anonymity he can only find in a large city; in
Cleveland, he “would be indistinguishable. Then he could talk and laugh.
He would no longer be queer and would make friends. Life would begin to
have warmth and meaning for him as it had for others” (111).
However, as with Seth’s future plans, Elmer’s understanding of the city
is ambiguous. Either those in the city will treat him normally, or else his
oddity will not be noticed. In either case, the city clearly stands apart from
the small town as permitting individual freedom from family inheritance
and reputation. Furthermore, before he leaves the small town, Elmer
wishes to make a stand against Winesburg for its cruelty towards him and
his family. In effect, he physically attacks the innocent George Willard
(the cycle’s main protagonist) who, for Elmer, represents the town:

The reporter had merely come [...] to stand for something in

[Elmer’s] mind. He thought [George] [...] must be thinking of him
and perhaps laughing at him. George Willard, he felt, belonged to
the town, typified the town, represented in his person the spirit of
the town. (107)

Elmer’s final words seem heroic and self-satisfying; for, he feels he has
conquered Winesburg. But as a first and parting act of revenge against the
small town, Elmer’s violence against George is pathetic:

Like one struggling for release from hands that held him he struck
out, hitting George Willard blow after blow on the breast, the
neck, the mouth. The young reporter rolled over on the platform
half unconscious, stunned by the terrific force of the blows.
Springing aboard the passing train and running over the tops of
cars, Elmer sprang down to a flat car and lying on his face looked
back, trying to see the fallen man in the darkness. Pride surged up
in him. ‘I showed him,’ he cried. ‘I guess I showed him. I ain’t so
queer. I guess I showed him I ain’t so queer.’ (111-112)

Elmer’s aggression is petty and ineffective because it changes nothing

about how others have treated him. That he sneaks onto his train at
midnight, riding illegally on a flatbed, also demonstrates that his leave-
taking is actually a running-away and not the brave exit he imagines he
 Small Town to City and Back Again 9

has executed. The story thus concludes on a discomforting note. How

much success Elmer will find in Cleveland can be doubted if only based
on the crudity of his revenge for a lifetime of ostracization. There has been
no internal transformation, and Elmer’s dependence on the dream of the
city to alter his life’s situation seems destined to turn dream into self-
delusion.
In “Loneliness,” the main character is the only one in Winesburg whom
we actually follow from the small town to a city. A silent, reticent
individual, Enoch Robinson moves to New York City (for fifteen years
from the age of twenty-one)4 expecting to realize the ability to express
himself without inhibition, artistically at first, but then generally towards
his friends and acquaintances. His first comments about his life in the city
reflect his overall desires in relation to the place: “‘I’m getting to be of
some moment, a real part of things, of the state and the city and all that’,
he told himself with an amusing miniature air of dignity” (156).
However, as the narrator informs us, Enoch’s attempts at being
successful in the city—including becoming an artist, then a dutiful and
properly opinionated citizen, then a respectable husband—all fail
because each state does not give him a strong enough sense of being in
command of his situation and of other people:

The mild, blue-eyed Ohio boy was a complete egotist, as all

children are egotists. He did not want [real] friends for the quite
simple reason that no child wants friends. He wanted most of all
the people of his own mind, people with whom he could really
talk, people he could harangue and scold by the hour, servants,
you see, to his fancy. (94)

The success story that Enoch expects for himself in New York is then
perverted into a tale of a half-mad man who envisions his life in the city as
an opportunity to be “a kind of tiny blue-eyed king [...] in a six-dollar
room facing Washington Square in the city of New York” (94).
Consequently, he retreats psychologically back into the former reticence
of his Winesburg life, imagining people of his liking: “And so Enoch
Robinson stayed in the New York room among the people of his fancy,
playing with them, talking to them, happy as a child is happy. [...] With an
absurd air of importance he talked aloud, giving instructions, making
comments on life” (95).
10 Josephene Kealey

Ultimately, he returns to his small-town home when his play at life is

brought to an end by a woman who exposes to him the lie of his fantasies:
Enoch is “[driven] out of the city to live out his life alone and defeated in
Winesburg” (96). The woman is in fact one of Enoch’s own imagining, a
hidden figure in his paintings of Winesburg (93). Somehow, as an
imaginative figure who visits him in his apartment, she threatens his
fantasy of confidence and success, chasing him, as it were, back into his
small-town childishness:

‘I didn’t want to let her come in when she knocked at the door but
I couldn’t sit still. [...] She was so grown up, you see. She was a
woman. I thought she would be bigger than I was there in that
room. [...] One night something happened. I became mad to make
her understand me and to know what a big thing I was in that
room. I wanted her to see how important I was. I told her over
and over. When she tried to go away, I ran and locked the door. I
followed her about. I talk and talked and then all of a sudden
things went to smash. A look came into her eyes and I knew she
did understand. Maybe she had understood all the time. I was
furious. I couldn’t stand it. I wanted her to understand but, don’t
you see, I couldn’t let her understand. I felt that then she would
know everything, that I would be submerged, drowned out, you
see.’ (97-98)

In the end, as Enoch explains, the woman leaves his apartment but takes
with her “‘all the life there had been in the room. She took all of my people
away’” (98). Evident in Enoch’s description of his conflicted frustration
towards the woman is tension between the fantasy life he leads and his
realization of that fantasy, of some pull back to Winesburg, which he
clearly resents and tries to resist. The story leaves us with a broken old
man: “‘I’m alone, all alone here,’ said the voice. ‘It was warm and friendly
in my room but now I’m all alone’” (98). Enoch’s life concludes with
disillusionment and self-pity. The city fails to bless him with the
fulfillment of his dreams, but his expectation of the city to provide him
with special status that others would celebrate proves possible only in
fantasy.
The vision of the small town as an end-point is part of Enoch
Robinson’s story since he returns to Winesburg permanently after his city
plan fails. The concept of the small town as an end-point is presented as
 Small Town to City and Back Again 11

such again and more strongly in the stories of original city folk who move
to Winesburg when their city lives fail. The cycle’s depiction of ‘losers’
moving to Winesburg is informed by perversion of the American Dream
as Anderson presents it. Spencer reads into a comment Anderson makes
in his Memoirs:

In a disconsolate mood of acceptance Anderson conceded [...]

that ‘it may just be that America had promised men too much,
that it had always promised men too much.’ In effect he was
conceding the subversion of a major myth—one fused by his own
experience from the old dream of the garden, Jeffersonian
agrarianism, Transcendentalism, the repudiation of Puritanism,
and the pastoral abundance of the West. (“Sherwood Anderson:
American Mythopoeist” 8)

If America promised too much, then it failed to uphold the Dream carried
from small-town origins to the future in the big city. The displacement of
(Anderson’s definition of) American identity effects an abandonment of
the original precepts of the American Dream and creates wandering and
lost souls out of desiring American Adams. The ultimate corruption of the
Dream is in the return to the small town as a place of original safety.
In the following stories, the vision of Winesburg as a place to which
city folk go ‘back’ is a dark one; for, the vision projects the small town as
an originating place to which one must never return. In light of the myth
of the American Adam, once the city is approached, even if only
imaginatively, the ‘return’ to a place like Winesburg is regressive, a sign of
despair over ever attaining the American Dream. In “The Philosopher,”
“Respectability,” “Tandy,” and “Drink,” moving to Winesburg marks
personal failure in the city, and thus failure to be the new American
Adam. The small town is represented as the resting spot for losers.
In “The Philosopher,” Doctor Parcival moves from Chicago to
Winesburg to hide from a murder he committed. His failure in the city
and the refuge he seeks in the small town suggest a number of ideas
pertaining to Anderson’s interpretation of the American Dream and what
has happened to it. Parcival’s corrupt city life is no surprise to the reader
whose exposure to “the city” throughout Winesburg is habitually negative:
lost hopes, corrupt dreams, and continuing disillusionment. The doctor’s
retreat to Winesburg indicates his attitude towards the idea of the small
12 Josephene Kealey

town as a place in which to hide from a life lived elsewhere. In moving to

the small town, Parcival hopes to efface his identity, thereby re-figuring
the city from a symbolic embodiment of the future to a discardable and
detestable (and, hopefully, irretrievable) past. Moreover, and ironically,
the doctor expects anonymity in Winesburg now that his identity in the
city has been publically exposed (due to his crime). He thus conceives of
the small town as disconnected from the city.
Reshaping of small town / city mythologies based on the experience of
failure of the American Dream causes intense paranoia in Parcival, so
much so that his very body betrays him: “The lid of the left eye twitched; it
fell down and snapped up; it was exactly as though the lid of the eye were
a window shade and someone stood inside the doctor’s head playing with
the cord” (22). The doctor’s sense of self also suffers disruption as he
struggles to save face in the knowledge of his corruption. In addition,
Parcival is distracted by his desire to be considered special and important
in Winesburg. Taking George Willard as his audience, he mixes true
stories of himself with falsehood in an effort to create a superior self-
image—“The tales that Doctor Parcival told George Willard began
nowhere and ended nowhere. Sometimes the boy thought they must all
be inventions, a pack of lies. And then again he was convinced that they
contained the very essence of truth” (23)—confessing he wants to “get
more credit” in George’s estimation of him: “I have a desire to make you
admire me, that’s a fact” (23). His concern with public recognition is a
mirror-image of the concerns of city-going characters Seth Richmond,
Elmer Cowley, and Enoch Robinson, who foresee metropolitan life as a
means to self-enhancement (and even exposure). Having failed in the city,
Parcival does not want to be known as a loser backtracking, as it were, to
Winesburg. He is desperate to appear as the independent self-maker that
the American Dream demands of its adventurers. But, according to the
mythology, he is in a place from which one ought to begin rather than
conclude that adventure.
In “Respectability,” Wash Williams leaves Columbus, Ohio, for
Winesburg after he discovers his wife’s adultery and is repulsed by his
mother-in-law’s crude attempt at reconciling them. She places her
daughter naked before the estranged husband in order to tempt him back
into his marriage, an event which might reference Eve as temptress whose
nakedness, once a sign of innocence, has been corrupted into a display of
 Small Town to City and Back Again 13

sexual cynicism and exploitation. Williams, a potential Adam figure

according to the American Dream theme that is drawn though Winesburg,
abandons Eden and Eve all at once (67-68). Williams, thereafter, becomes
a hardened misogynist, not only hating women but also deriding men for
loving women (65). As it is with Doctor Parcival, Wash’s personal
wretchedness is entrenched and worsened in Winesburg, which he
detests as a retrograde place (surely reflecting his own condition). Once
“the best telegraph operator in the state” (64-65), he becomes “the ugliest
thing” in Winesburg: obese, dirty, and hateful (64). As a man who had
been ‘there’ and is now ‘back,’ Wash’s move to a small town is certainly no
therapeutic retreat; it is indeed spiritually fatal. Again, Winesburg, in this
story as in “The Philosopher,” is represented as a depot for despairing
characters.
Furthermore, despite his general contempt for everyone, Wash is
admired by men of the small town for what they consider to be his
“courage” to “hate life, and [hate] it whole-heartedly, with the abandon of
a poet” (65):

Here and there a man respected the operator. Instinctively the

man felt in him a glowing resentment of something he had not
the courage to resent. When Wash walked through the streets
such a one had an instinct to pay him homage, to raise his hat or
to bow before him. 5

Winesburg’s admiration for Wash’s gross hatred also suggests a distortion

of the myth of the American Adam. Wash’s “courage” to hate other people
is misunderstood as an example of an individual who has shaken off the
bonds of the past and become a superior being, more and better than his
forefathers. Of course, Wash’s misanthropy is in fact a personal
degradation, but the form of hero-worship he (perhaps) enjoys presents a
darkened vision of the American Dream—a dream gone wrong but still
believed in.
In “Tandy” and “Drink,” the city-folk protagonists envision the small
town in a more positive light. Their returns to Winesburg are personally
untainted with the hostility and aggression that we find in the stories of
Doctor Parcival and Wash Williams; instead they hope to salvage the
American Dream for themselves by re-living small-town life. But, because
their returns are nevertheless premised on the reverted mythic narrative
14 Josephene Kealey

of the small town, thus figuring the place as one for renewed beginnings,
their journeys to Winesburg are presented as inevitably fruitless. Having
discovered that the city is not, after all, the place of personal success and
improvement, they re-envision the small town as Eden before the Fall,
that is, before the corruption of the city. As turn-of-the-century characters
who have witnessed and experienced the industrial and technological
revolution that was supposed to speed up American Man’s evolution, the
re-figuring of the small town reveals their sense of confusion and
hopelessness about the American Dream in general.
In “Drink,” a grandmother returns with her grandson to Winesburg, her
hometown, in order to escape poverty in Cincinnati. Widowed and having
lost her children (her son-in-law died in a police-shooting during a strike
and her daughter died shortly thereafter), the grandmother “became a half
worn-out old woman worker” spending the last five years of her city life as
an office cleaner and a restaurant dish-washer (116). It is made implicit
that the grandmother’s return to the town of her childhood has been a
desire and plan of hers of some time, at least since the change in her
fortunes took a turn for the worse: “The old woman came back to
Winesburg as soon as she got the chance” (117). Since the grandmother
grew up in Winesburg, the phrase “came back” is appropriate; but the
term of return, echoed through the cycle, nevertheless carries with it a
sense of retreat.
It is also poignantly ironic that the woman’s opportunity to leave the
city comes from her finding a lost wallet:

One evening as she was coming home from work she found a
pocket-book containing thirty-seven dollars, and that opened the
way. [...] She insisted on leaving Cincinnati that night, saying that
if they stayed until morning the owner of the money would be
sure to find them out and make trouble. (117)

Her chance to leave the city is provided in the form of a kind of theft, thus
based on the misfortune of another in a place that is supposed to be full of
promise, but where such things as loss and theft often occur and are not
rectified. The grandmother might understand her find as her good
fortune, but it is certainly a perverted form of the good fortune she had
earlier understood and enjoyed as a city-dweller: “What a life the old
woman led since she went away from the frontier settlement and what a
 Small Town to City and Back Again 15

strong, capable little old thing she was! She had been in Kansas, in
Canada, and in New York City, traveling about with her husband, a
mechanic, before he died” (116). The best the city offers her, in the end, is
opportunistic use of another’s misfortune to get out of the city.
On the train home, the grandmother excitedly shares childhood
memories of Winesburg with her grandson. She tells “tales of
Winesburg”—“of how he would enjoy his life working in the fields and
shooting wild things in the woods there” (117)—certainly in a vein of
nostalgia in which she has placed all of her hopes for herself and for her
grandson’s future. In arousing girlhood memories of a happier and more
robust time, she certainly means to instill not only confidence but similar
desire in her grandson, who was born in the city, for supposed small-town
naturalness and well-being. In ignorance, of course, of the dissipation of
Winesburg (and of ‘the small town’ in general), both in fact and in cultural
imagination, the grandmother yet believes in the ‘returnability’ of her
Winesburg.
As we might expect, her expectations of her hometown are
immediately and sharply undercut when she and her grandson finally
arrive there: “[I]n the morning when the train came to Winesburg [she]
did not want to get off. ‘It isn’t what I thought. It may be hard for you
here,’ she said, and then the train went on its way and the two stood
confused, not knowing where to turn [...]” (117). The narrator does not
explain what exactly the grandmother sees (or does not see) at the
Winesburg train station that changes her hopefulness so abruptly, but
whatever it is, it is obviously not welcoming or promising, based on her
feeling disoriented at home. The narrator preempts the grandmother’s
disappointment with foreknowledge of what she is to see: “She could not
believe that the tiny village of fifty years before had grown into a thriving
town in her absence,” so it is likely that the small town, even visually, is no
longer the place of her (hopeful) memories (117). As a “thriving town,”
perhaps it too closely resembles the city they left behind.
More painfully, coincident with the grandmother’s disappointment is
the lack of improvement in her life back in Winesburg. While she
continues her work as a cleaner as in the city, she does not connect with
any other family (they have either died or gone), and remains friendless
(117). Obviously, especially for the grandmother, a remarkable difference
was expected back home, an expectation that points up how radically she
16 Josephene Kealey

had altered her conceptions of city and small town: The place left behind
was to be the saving grace for those who have come to understand that
the promises of the city are impermanent and illusory. She is confronted
with the realization that both home and the American Dream are
nowhere to be found.
In “Tandy,” an unnamed alcoholic from Cleveland sojourns in
Winesburg in the hope that the place will cure him of his habit: “[He]
thought that by escaping from his city associates and living in a rural
community he would have a better chance in the struggle with the
appetite that was destroying him” (78). Yet, Winesburg prohibits his
recovery from alcoholism: “His sojourn in Winesburg was not a success.
The dullness of the passing hours led to his drinking harder than ever”
(78). These lines speak directly to the small-town myth constructed in
response to the failure of the metropolitan mythic narrative. The stranger,
as a believer in the American Adam story, is thus, much like the
grandmother of “Drink,” a product of the myth-making and a
representative of someone whom the myths did not satisfy.
The stranger also participates in the construction and enhancement of
the reverted mythologies when he analyses his particular situation as one
in search of success (vaguely described):

I ran away to the country to be cured, but I am not cured. There is

a reason. [...] Drink is not the only thing to which I am addicted
[...]. There is something else. I am a lover and have not found my
thing to love. That is a big point if you know enough to realize
what I mean. It makes my destruction inevitable, you see. [...] I
have not lost faith. I proclaim that. I have only been brought to
the place where I know my faith will not be realized [...]. There is
a woman coming [...]. I have missed her, you see. She did not
come in my time. (78-79)

The stranger displaces the fulfillment that has eluded him in Cleveland
and in Winesburg onto a future vision of “a woman coming.” But the
vision, as he himself claims, will elude him his whole life because he has
already “missed her,”6 likely because the American Dream had already
been altered beyond recognition. The stranger’s sojourn in Winesburg
points him towards death; for, it is in the small town that he realizes he
will never find the personal satisfaction he is seeking, especially since he
 Small Town to City and Back Again 17

found failure in the city first, then failure in the small town, his last hope.
In Winesburg, those who dejectedly go out of the city and return to the
small town, whether with hope or out of despair, have fallen out of the
story of the American Dream, whose plot has been lost, and are therefore
themselves lost.
In the final story of Winesburg, “Departure,” the main protagonist of
the cycle, George Willard, leaves Winesburg by train for city life.
Throughout the cycle, Winesburg locals turn to George to share with him
their secret desires, and they hope for George that he might succeed
where they have failed. They encourage him to leave Winesburg as they
believe that he is special, that he has gifts and abilities he will only waste
(or will himself waste away) in the small town. If he stays, they warn him
(sometimes with conflicting messages), he will turn out as badly as the
rest of them: “‘You must try to forget all you have learned,’ said the old
man. ‘You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your
ears to the roaring of the voices’” (11); “‘You may end by becoming just
such another fool. I want to warn you and keep on warning you. That’s
why I seek you out’” (25); “‘What happened to me may next happen to
you. I want to put you on your guard. Already you may be having dreams
in your head [about marrying and living in Winesburg]. I want to destroy
them’” (67). Thus, George seems to be Winesburg’s and Winesburg’s real
hope for success where so many others have failed, for the dream of the
American Adam to be realized finally and truly.7
Yet, the narrative of George’s journey out of the small town to some
city is full of ambiguities and qualifications: “[W]hen he aroused himself
and again looked out of the car window the town of Winesburg had
disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to
paint the dreams of his manhood” (138). Cook summarizes a dominant
critical perspective on “Departure:” “Some critics have read this tale as a
rather unproblematic and paradigmatic coming of age scene, but there is
certainly nothing blithely hopeful in Anderson’s representation. The
possibility that George Willard will become a key component of the
iterative machine himself is very real” (120). We also do not know if
George sheds his small town or is its heir, if indeed he should leave it
behind because of the stories he has heard or if, with the wisdom of those
he leaves behind, he can at last succeed where they had failed. For,
Winesburg becomes “but a background” to his future, which suggests
18 Josephene Kealey

(especially in the “but”) that its influence on George’s future will be

negligible. Moreover, it is arguable, too, that this might be a positive
diminishing of a small town that stunts the soul. Ultimately, there is
nothing substantially offered in the lines describing George’s departure
that might dispel (possible) readerly worry about his successful future.
The train conductor, as the narrator makes it a point to say, “had seen a
thousand George Willards go out of their towns to the city. It was a
commonplace enough incident with him” (137).
Although George leaves prompted by the private wisdoms of those
who have failed as well as with communal encouragement and approval
(an entourage of the small town gathers at the train station to see him off
[137]), the advice he is given is negative, warnings against themselves and
the choices they made. Arguably, disconnection, or lostness, is a recurring
condition in Winesburg, an extension of this myth of the American
Adam.8 As Lewis explains, the myth presents a “Case against the Past” (the
title to Lewis’s first chapter) (13). For Anderson’s contemporaries,
rejection of the Old World meant “escape from every existing mode of
organizing and explaining experience, in order to confront life in entirely
original terms” (14). The rejection undermines the concept of inheritance,
privileges the activities of new generations over the traditions of elders,
and advocates constant renewal of anything institutional. Thus, the myth
of the American Adam continues.
The act of moving to the city is conceived of as an original, linear
movement towards something new, towards the future. As for the small
town in Anderson’s work, it is figured as a discarded (discardable) past.
The representation of how Anderson’s characters leave Winesburg does
not even allow for the suggestion that Winesburg, as home, constitutes a
character’s roots through which he thrives in the city. The rejection is
adamant: The small town inhabitants feel the urge to break from their
town. As a result, the up-rooting of the past produces and reinforces that
feeling of disconnection that abounds in Winesburg. Even for those whose
understanding of the American Dream has been perverted (i.e. they
return to the small town), the nomadism that the American Adam myth
encourages is as much spiritual as it is physical. Although Winesburg
certainly depicts a suffocating Midwestern small town from which its
locals (seemingly) flee with good reason, the book’s individual
metropolitan failures and unsuccessful returns point to a greater problem,
 Small Town to City and Back Again 19

and more central concern, with the larger world depicted in Winesburg—
that of disconnection in the American psyche. The cycle probes the
detrimental rupture between past and future, the old and the young, as a
critical problem of Anderson’s contemporary America, and thus deserves
to be read as a conservative, humanistic study of something that has been
lost, nationally, and needs to be rediscovered.

WORKS CITED

Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. 1919. Ed. Glen A. Love. London:

Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.
Anderson, David D. “Anderson and Myth.” Sherwood Anderson:
Dimensions of His Literary Art. A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. David
D. Anderson. Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1976. 118-141.
Print.
–––– . “Wanderers and Sojourners: Sherwood Anderson and the People of
Winesburg.” Midamerica 22 (1995): 89-96. Print.
Cook, Jennifer Carol. Machine and Metaphor: The Ethics of Language in
American Realism. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.
Dunne, Robert. A New Book of the Grotesques: Contemporary Approaches to
Sherwood Anderson’s Early Fiction. Kent, Ohio, and London: Kent State
University Press, 2005. Print.
Howe, Irving. Sherwood Anderson. New York: William Sloane Associates,
1951. Print.
Lindsay, Clarence. “‘I Belong in Little Towns:’ Sherwood Anderson’s Small
Town Post-Modernism.” Midamerica 26 (1999): 77-104. Print.
Lewis, R.W.B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in
the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955.
Print.
Love, Glen A. Introduction. Winesburg, Ohio. By Sherwood Anderson. Ed.
Glen A. Love. London: Oxford University Press, 2008. vii-xxx. Print.
Rigsbee, Sally Adair. “The Feminine in Winesburg, Ohio.” Studies in
American Fiction 9 (Fall 1981): 233-244. Print.
Smith, Page. As a City Upon a Hill: The Town in American History. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966. Print.
20 Josephene Kealey

Spencer, Benjamin T. “Sherwood Anderson: American Mythopoeist.”

American Literature 41.1 (March 1969): 1-18. Print.
Tilley, Abigail. “Winesburg, Ohio: Beyond the Revolt from the Village.”
Midwestern Miscellany 31 (Fall 2003): 44-52. Print.
Williams, Kenny J. A Storyteller and a City: Sherwood Anderson’s Chicago.
DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1988. Print.

NOTES

1. Abigail Tilley provides a very useful questioning of the entire theme of the
“revolt from the village,” as originally proposed by Carl Van Doren’s 1922 book,
American Contemporary Novelists 1900-1920, as at all a viable theory for the
literature that was thought to be such: “While my initial objective was to
determine the validity of Anderson’s involvement in the ‘revolt,’ I began to
formulate doubts as to whether this revolt actually took place. If the critics
resolutely continued to wave the banner of the ‘revolt,’ they apparently did so at
the expense of the voiced intentions of the authors” (48). She argues, “[t]hough
Anderson uses the small town of Winesburg to serve as the backdrop of his
stories, the town remains a mere platform from which Anderson felt best
qualified to stage his examples of American life [...]. The ‘revolt’ position confuses
Anderson’s familiarity with small-town life with a rejection of it” (50).
2. D. Anderson similarly describes the cycle’s characters as (predominantly)
either wanderers or sojourners. He categorizes the wanderers as “those who still
harbor some vestige of hope—of escape, of life, of possible ultimate fulfillment”
and the sojourners as “those who for some reason [...] have come to the end of a
line that stretches far behind them in time, in space, or in psychological torment”
(“Wanderers and Sojourners” 92). He principally explores the emotional and
psychological transience of Winesburg’s folk: “[E]ach, in turn, becomes a
wanderer who seeks fulfillment in escape, in perpetual movement as much away
from something or somewhere as it is to something or somewhere else, or a
sojourner who, almost inevitably for worse, finds his or her destiny in the town,
itself a fate that precludes both escape and fulfillment. And those who apparently
escape are often as imprisoned by the fact of their flight as are those who remain
in the town” (93).
3. Two major (and main) examples are Spencer’s comprehensive essay that
reveals Anderson’s “mythopoeic imagination” (14) and D. Anderson’s “Anderson
and Myth” that discusses how the author’s creation of “the myth of escape and
 Small Town to City and Back Again 21

fulfillment” “dominated much of [Anderson’s] work over nearly all of his literary
career” (122).
4. Winesburg 151.
5. See Winesburg, 65. Doctor Parcival makes the same connection between hatred
for others and superiority: “‘I want to fill you with hatred and contempt [he says
to George Willard] so that you will be a superior being’” (25).
6. We are reminded of Enoch Robinson’s mysterious woman in “Loneliness.”
7. In As A City Upon A Hill: The Town in American History, historian Page Smith
outlines the development of “the idyllic picture of town and boy” in American
mythology: “It remains one constant thread through many changing visions [of
the small town]. [...] [T]he effect of the small town on the small boy is,
presumably, of some significance in the development of ‘the American character’”
(213-214).
8. “From Anderson’s instinctively right placement of the book’s central actions at
twilight and night comes some of its frequently noticed aura of ‘lostness’—as if
the most sustaining and fruitful human activities can no longer be performed in
public communion but must be grasped in secret” (Howe 98).
 Winesburg, Elsewhere: George Willard and the Literary
Formalization of Obsession in Small-Town America and Abroad

Daniel Davis Wood

Chapter Two, “Winesburg, Elsewhere: George Willard and the Literary

Formalization of Obsession in Small-Town America and Abroad,” considers the
significance of the movement from story to story in Anderson’s fiction and finds
that the stories are obsessively reiterative: each story emerges from the narrator’s
efforts to develop an intimacy with a particular character but ends when that
intimacy becomes too overwhelming to sustain, leaving him all but compelled to
retreat to a different character with whom he enters a fresh cycle of intimacy and
retreat—inevitably, repeatedly, and therefore obsessively. From this reading of
the work as a reiterative text, the essay discusses how Winesburg essentially
stands as the unlikely descendent of Poe’s tales of paranoia and madness and of
Kafka’s accounts of bewildered oppression, both of which likewise consist of a
fragmented cycle of intimacy, intimacy and retreat elsewhere; and, as such, it
may well also stand as the progenitor of a global tradition of equally obsessive,
fragmented, and cyclical explorations of small-town existence, ranging from
Midwestern America to locales like suburban Dublin, rural Ontario, and coastal
Australia.

By now, the names have been invoked so frequently as to seem almost

fixed in place. Among those who produced work that paved the way for
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio: Walt Whitman, Mark Twain,
William Dean Howells, Henry James, Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane,
Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, and Gertrude Stein (Jacobson 55;
Papinchak 3; Phillips 52; Stouck 150; White 10). Among those whose work
has since contributed to and burnished the quality of the literary tradition
now exemplified by Winesburg: “Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner,
Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, William Saroyan,
Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Anne
Porter” (White 10), not to mention J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth, John Updike,
24 Daniel Davis Wood

Shirley Jackson, Bernard Malamud, John Barth, Donald Barthelme,

Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Alice Adams, Robert
Coover, and Joyce Carol Oates (Papinchak ix). In short, almost anyone
who ever assembled a naturalistic depiction of small-town life and its
attendant anxieties is either credited for having influenced Winesburg if
they published before it appeared or otherwise held in debt to Winesburg
if they published in its wake.
Of course, to locate Winesburg at the forefront of American literary
naturalism is an inclination so justifiable that it would be foolish to
contest it, and so I want to be clear up-front that I intend to do no such
thing. Rather, I intend to argue that while Winesburg justifiably belongs to
the small-town naturalist tradition, it belongs equally, albeit less
recognizably, to an alternative and quite different tradition: not instead of
small-town naturalism, but in addition to it. However, I see Winesburg as
part of this tradition less by virtue of authorial intention or the exertion of
influence upon subsequent texts than by the presuppositions about its
literary heritage that are customarily brought to it. In other words, my
sense is that when we as readers locate Winesburg within the naturalist
tradition on the basis of its style and its choice of subject, we approach the
text in a way that circumscribes our reading of it. We assume a position
from which our attention is inevitably drawn to those textual features that
either justify or challenge (but in any case underscore) its placement
within that tradition, and so we occlude—and indeed divert our attention
from—an entirely different set of textual features whose foregrounding
would locate Winesburg elsewhere. Think of it as peering through a sort of
critical kaleidoscope. At present, the kaleidoscopic focus is set to direct
our attention to the naturalism of Winesburg so that the text at the
kaleidoscopic center is surrounded by a dazzling array of literary kin. But
if an adjustment to the focus were to instead direct our attention to
something other than the naturalism of Winesburg, the shapes
surrounding the text would shift aside and splinter apart and a different
set of kinships would coalesce around it.
In this essay, I want to adjust the focus to see what those kinships
might be. Looking beyond the naturalism of Winesburg, I begin by
probing one of its most remarked-upon but under-examined textual
features: its form. Calling its form into question, I attempt to determine its
formal particularities in order to advance a reading of the text that
 Winesburg, Elsewhere 25

acknowledges the nuances of the way in which it has been pieced

together. In doing so, I suggest that there is in Winesburg a character
residing at a textual level above all other characters, located in an
interstice beneath Sherwood Anderson as author of the text and yet
hovering godlike over the denizens of Winesburg; and I argue that to read
Winesburg in accordance with the form it ascribes itself is effectively to
read it as a piecemeal disclosure of the nature of this character. At first
glance, one might simply refer to this character as the narrator, since it
repeatedly uses the personal pronoun as it pieces together the Winesburg
stories; and, on that note, Marcia Jacobson has undertaken a robust
analysis of the sentiments and personal values underlying its first-person
disclosures (58-62). On closer inspection, though, this character can be
seen to not only narrate the stories but also to select the subject of each
story and to sequentialize the stories in a way that controls the shift from
subject to subject and thus the shift in textual focalization; and, for that
reason, I refer to this character as the ‘focalizing consciousness’ of
Winesburg. As patterns and trends emerge via the selection of subjects
and the sequentialization of stories, Winesburg carries the quiet
suggestion that the consciousness responsible for the assemblage of the
text possesses a discernible interest in certain subjects, a very particular
disposition towards them, and thus a distinct personality whose nature
lies at the heart of this study.
How, then, to recognize the concerns, the disposition, and finally the
personality of the focalizing consciousness? My strategy entails a three-
stage advance. First, I point to the observable presence of the focalizing
consciousness within the text. Second, I detail several of its characteristic
qualities by turning to those moments in which its presence is most
clearly perceptible. Finally, I examine George Willard as a figure of special
interest for the focalizing consciousness who, more than any other
character, entices it to reveal its characteristic qualities and thus to
disclose its personality—even when other characters become the
momentary focus of its attention. This examination involves a reading of
Winesburg that traces the disclosure of the personality of the focalizing
consciousness via its oscillation between George and other characters;
and, insofar as literary texts written subsequent to Winesburg likewise
disclose the personality of a similar focalizing consciousness, this reading
provides grounds for locating Winesburg in a literary tradition distinct
26 Daniel Davis Wood

from small-town naturalism. That tradition is one in which the primary

force propelling a narrative is the interplay between its prose and its form,
meaning that we can locate Winesburg elsewhere on the literary
landscape by first asking what sort of text, in a formal sense, it purports to
be and actually is.
Much ink has been spilled in the effort to determine the form of
Winesburg, Ohio. “In structure,” as Malcolm Cowley wrote, “the book lies
midway between the novel proper and the mere collection of stories” (57),
and critics have tended to divide amongst themselves and approach the
text as either a novel or a story collection. Each approach is
understandable, but each is also beset by its own particular problems.
While Winesburg itself consists of twenty-five individual stories set in and
around the eponymous Ohio town, seventeen of those stories concern the
young newspaper reporter George Willard and thus weave together a
larger narrative from a number of freestanding sketches. Are we therefore
to privilege the autonomous variety of the sketches over the aggregate
integrity of the larger narrative or are we to do the opposite? No
consensus yet exists. Ray Lewis White, for instance, describes Winesburg
as a text comprised largely of “separable” stories: stories which may or
may not feature George Willard, but in which, for the most part, George
“is of no importance” to the narrative even when he does appear (86, 88).
In contrast, Robert Papinchak describes Winesburg as having historically
been understood as “a bildungsroman about George Willard... to whom
most of the [other] characters... bring their stories” (20) and therefore as
“a kind of novel” (106). The implication of the first view of Winesburg is
that its constituent stories can be rearranged and read in any sequence
because they are united by narrative location rather than causation.
Conversely, the implication of the second view is that the stories must be
read in their original sequence because only then can readers discern the
causal structure (however faint) of the bildungsroman of George Willard.
The problem with the first view is that the final stories in Winesburg
coincide exactly with the conclusion of George’s narrative, so that his
desire to leave the town is satisfied and his story is resolved at the very
end of the text. The problem with the second view is that several stories
do indeed seem separable, so that George’s bildungsroman contains an
abundance of apparently pointless digressions superfluous to the overall
narrative. As such, Malcolm Cowley’s positioning of Winesburg “midway”
 Winesburg, Elsewhere 27

between a novel and a collection of stories is accurate in the most literal

sense of the word “midway.” Whether we approach Winesburg as a novel
or as a story collection, we cannot read it as either one to the outright
exclusion of the other.
If that is the case, how can we determine its form at all? As it happens,
this question is easier to answer than the existing critical contention
would have us believe because the text itself explicitly identifies its own
form before it even opens the first of its twenty-five stories. Right there on
the title page, beneath the words Winesburg, Ohio, appears the subtitle: “A
GROUP OF TALES OF OHIO SMALL TOWN LIFE.” With those words, the text
characterizes itself as something quite distinct from a novel but, at the
same time, something other than a “mere collection of stories.” On the
one hand, that very specific word “group” implies that the various stories
in Winesburg possess a certain substantive kinship that would be
necessarily lacking in a gathering or an assortment of tales. On the other
hand, that word also implies that the kinship shared by those stories is
still too weak or too speculative for them to qualify, in totality, either as a
collection offering considered variations on a common theme or as a
series whose discrete parts episodically assemble a much more expansive
and cohesive narrative. The phrase “a group of tales” suggests that the
Winesburg stories ought to be understood as something like distinct
members of a diverse society, such that, despite their differences, each
one is inextricably yoked to all of the others by virtue of some manifest—
if not immediately apparent—commonality. More importantly, the
selection of that word as a determination of the form of Winesburg and
the actual application of that word to the completed volume together
imply the presence of the focalizing consciousness that I have suggested
infuses the text.1 By focalizing consciousness, I mean a consciousness that
has taken a holistic view of the Winesburg stories, recognized their
commonality, and labelled them a “group” in a way that calls attention
simultaneously to the commonality of the stories themselves and to the
implicit presence of the consciousness that has recognized it. Being so
openly identified as a “group of tales,” Winesburg immediately throws
light on the consciousness by whose determination its various tales have
been seen as belonging to, and placed in, a “group”—and so the text itself
suggests that if the tales are approached in the aggregate and read in their
28 Daniel Davis Wood

original sequence, they will incrementally and inferentially disclose

certain aspects of the otherwise obscured character of that consciousness.
Perhaps it seems unduly esoteric to approach Winesburg with an eye
towards this character. In fact, though, such an approach has haunted the
scholarly criticism of Winesburg for nearly as long as that criticism has
been produced, lingering on the critical horizon as a site of unrealized
potential ever since its contours were first sketched out in 1951 when
Irving Howe published his reading of the Sherwood Anderson oeuvre
including a reading of Anderson’s first-person stories:

[T]he complexity [of Anderson’s stories] is enforced by an

interaction of the four levels of movement in his stories: the events
themselves; the feelings of the boy involved in them; the memory
of the adult who weighs his involvement in the light of
accumulated experience; and the final increment of meaning
suggested by the story but beyond the conscious recognition of its
narrator. The true action of these stories is thus... not the perceived
object but the perceiving subject. ... [T]heir purpose is not to record a
resolution of conflict but to refract an enlargement of consciousness.
(152-3, my italics)

Admittedly, Howe wrote those words with reference only to the first-
person narrators of Anderson’s “oral” stories (150) rather than the oblique
entity behind the superficially third-person narratives of Winesburg, Ohio.
Nevertheless, insofar as the presence of such an entity behind Winesburg
is implicit in the designation of the text as a “group of tales,” I think we
can justifiably read this text much as Howe read the ‘oral’ stories and
thereby derive from it something quite different to what we derive from
reading it as either a novel or a story collection. Moreover, there is a
precedent for such a reading in Forrest Ingram’s attempt, in 1971, to draw
out the focalizing consciousness of Winesburg. “One need not read far into
the Winesburg tales,” wrote Ingram, “to discover that a single narrator is
relating all the stories [and] operates at the heart of each of the stories”
(155). He called this narrator “a persona who is yet the implied author”
(155), and who becomes “the chief source of unity” in the text “by
controlling [its] feeling and form” (165), such that this persona “may, for
heuristic reasons, be the most important of [the] fictively realized
characters” in Winesburg (156). Unfortunately, though, Ingram did not
hold true to this last assertion or to Irving Howe’s call for a focus on “the
 Winesburg, Elsewhere 29

perceiving subject” of Anderson’s stories. Throughout his reading of

Winesburg (143-203), Ingram diverts his attention from this “most
important” character to the other characters, observing only the ways in
which the focalizing consciousness communicates something about each
of them rather than the ways in which it discloses something of itself in
the process. I hope here to walk a middle path between Howe and Ingram,
building on Ingram’s assured identification of the focalizing
consciousness of Winesburg while reading Winesburg as a text largely
about the focalizing consciousness as Howe’s “perceiving subject.”
While it may not narrate the Winesburg stories in the first-person voice
as consistently as Anderson’s other first-person narrators, the focalizing
consciousness does reveal itself almost as fully, if more subtly, in other
ways. By selecting a subject, then drifting towards another subject, then
returning to an earlier subject, then sequentializing the drift from subject
to subject in a particular way, it reveals the subjects that most fascinate it
as well as revealing its attitudes towards those subjects, and thus allows a
glimpse of its personality. As readers, of course, we tend to direct our
attention to whatever attracts the attention of the focalizing
consciousness at any given moment—we look towards the subject of its
narratorial focalization (Gennette 185-205)—and so we effectively render
transparent the focalizing consciousness itself. But if we take a step back
to observe the focalizing consciousness as it finds its attention attracted
to certain subjects and then drifting on to others, and if we identify
behavioral patterns in the drift from subject to subject, then we can
discern something about the personality that permeates the entirety of
Winesburg.
Working towards such a reading, what can we discern up-front about
the nature of the focalizing consciousness? Although, as above, its nature
is disclosed incrementally and obliquely rather than immediately and
overtly, the occasional use of the first-person voice does very directly
reveal aspects of its nature.2 Clearly, for instance, it possesses both self-
awareness and social awareness to an extent approaching omniscience. It
repeatedly refers to itself as “I” and several times (but less frequently)
refers to its audience as “you,” indicating that it understands itself to be an
intelligent consciousness in the presence of another intelligent
consciousness (Ingram 158-9). However, in “Respectability,” the thirteenth
story in Winesburg, Ohio, it also indicates that its omniscience is not quite
30 Daniel Davis Wood

absolute when it attempts to reveal the history of the outcast Wash

Williams before pausing and admitting: “I go too fast” (64), suggesting that
it is not entirely aware of the intellectual capabilities of its audience and
that it must modulate its narration accordingly. As Wallace Stegner noted,
the omniscience of the focalizing consciousness is strictly circumscribed
by text, allowing the focalizing consciousness to access the entire personal
history of each character in Winesburg but little else beyond that (142-3);
and, on the basis of a remark made in the seventeenth story, “The
Teacher,” I would add that this strictly intratextual omniscience is
demonstrably panoptical in nature, allowing the focalizing consciousness
to penetrate the innermost thoughts of a given character just as easily as it
can survey every denizen of Winesburg at a glance: “Then [George
Willard] slept,” it says, “and in all Winesburg he was the last soul on that
winter night to go to sleep” (91). Still, while the focalizing consciousness
reveals aspects of its nature in passages such as these, at no stage does it
disclose the nuances of its personality in anything like the level of detail it
devotes to the other characters. Instead, as Forrest Ingram writes, it
“usually calls attention to [it]self only as... controller of the material of
[its] fancy, and not as a participant” (155), so that, as above, its personality
trickles down indirectly from those moments in which it noticeably gives
form to the text as a whole via its selection and sequentialization of
subjects and yet says nothing explicit about itself.
Obviously, since the young reporter George Willard appears in a
greater number of stories than any other character in Winesburg, he is the
subject that receives the greatest and most sustained attention from the
focalizing consciousness. Our best hope for discerning the personality of
the focalizing consciousness therefore involves examining its approach to
George—not just the favoritism it shows him, but, more particularly, the
dissonance between that favoritism and the fragmentation of his
narrative. It is certainly the case, as Judy Jo Small suggests, that “[t]he
fragmented form of the various tales” is crucial to any understanding of
the ways in which “their incomplete truths reflect a complex vision of a
town (and a nation) and of perennial human problems” (19). But, on
another level, the fragmented form of Winesburg also speaks volumes
about the entity by whose hand the text has become fragmented; and
since that entity is largely preoccupied with George Willard, the moments
at which it fails to sustain its preoccupation and the moments at which it
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Pataljoonan kuntoonpanemiseen kului ainakin viikonpäivät. Jälleen
pidettiin tarkastuksia. Kaikki huono ja kulunut hyljättiin ja joka mies
sai uudet vihreät puvut ja kunnon varustukset. Saksalaiset eivät
tahtoneet lähettää ryysyistä joukkoa Suomeen. Tällä välin saapui
Suomesta maan laillisen hallituksen kuriiri ja kaksi höyrylaivaa
pataljoonaa hakemaan. Eräänä aamuna astui komppanian
huoneistoon pari vakavaa suomalaista merikarhua puhelemaan
kotimaan kuulumisia ja he lienevät harvoin läpäisseet sellaista
tutkintoa, mihin he nyt antautuivat. Toinen heistä, eräs etelä-
Suomen talonomistaja oli ennen sotaa pari viikkoa kitunut Turussa
punaisten vankina, saanut selkäänsä ja potkuja, niin että sai niitä
potea useita viikkoja. Vallankaappauksesta kuultuaan hän heti alkoi
hommata pataljoonaa kotiin. Punaisista hän lausui mielipiteenään,
että entiset rauhalliset ihmiset ja tuttavatkin oli vallannut sellainen
kiihko, että he tuntuivat yht'äkkiä muuttuneen mielipuoliksi. Mitä he
oikein vaativat ja tahtoivat, siitä harva oli selvillä. Venäläiset sotilaat
kulkivat konekivääreillä varustetuissa autoissa pitkin maaseutua
pannen toimeen kotitarkastuksia, eikä koko Suomessa ollut
minkäänlaista hengen eikä omaisuuden turvaa.

Muutaman päivän kuluttua suomalaiset höyrylaivat Arcturus ja

jokin pikku rähjä Castor, tai mikä lienee nimeltään ollut, saapuivat
Libaun satamaan ja jääkärit tuumailivat, että jo viimeinkin taisi tulla
lähtö. Sitä oli toivottu, jopa valmisteltu niin monet monituiset kerrat,
että lopulta koko asia tuntui mahdottomalta. Jos kuka jääkäreille
kuukausi sitten olisi puhunut Suomeen lähdöstä, olisi hän saanut
vastaukseksi:

— Ä-ä-älä nyt viitsi ruveta visertelemään.

 Mutta nyt ukot omin silmin näkivät Suomesta tulleet laivat ja
niiden miehistö puhui "selevee Suomea". Ei ollut enää
epäilemistäkään. Jääkärit tunkeilivat laivamiesten ympärille kysellen
ja udellen.

— No mitäs sieltä Suomesta oikein kuuluu?

— Minkälaisia ne punaiset ovat tappelemaan?

— Ei suinkaan niillä järjestyksestä ja komennosta ole paljon

tietoa?

Laivamiehet vakuuttelivat, ettei punaisilla ole ei johtoa ei

järjestystä, mutta yhtä hyvin valkoiset tarvitsevat kokeneita johtajia
ja nyt he ovat lähetetyt juuri sitä varten jääkäreitä hakemaan.

Ja meidän pojat ne röyhistelivät rintaansa, hymyillen itsetietoisina

muka suuristakin johtajantaidoistaan ja salaisuuksistaan.

— Niin, onhan sitä meitä täällä opetettu — — — on kouluutettu ja

komenneltu ja — — — rihm! — rintamalla sitä kans' käytiin.

— No minkälainen se ryssä oli siellä Saksan rintamalla? kyselevät

laivamiehet vuorostaan.

— Hjaa ryssä! Niitä oli monenlaisia. Oli lalluja ja oli sisukkaita.

Kneis'in rontilla ne ampu romvoieria että kehkesirrit hyppeli
unterstantissa ja törkymyysi valu ritsiltä pitkin permantoa. Muistatko
Viki?

— Ka, miksen muista! vakuutteli Viki ja laivamiehet ihmettelivät

jääkärikielen uusia kulttuurisanoja ajatellen, että kyllä noilla on
sotaoppi päässä.
 — Saa ne pojat nyt Suomessa lyödä rihviä, jahka päästään
Pohjanmaalle.

—-Ja tisipliini tehdään luja heti alussa.

— Kas se on semmonen paikka, he selittelivät laivamiehille, että

ilman tisipliiniä ei sotajoukolla tee kerrassaan mitään, on se nähty jo
monta kertaa.

— Mikäs se tisipliini oikein on? yritti jokin lämmittäjä kysellä.

— Jaa tisipliinikö? Se on — niin, sitä ei oikein osaa näin

oppimattomille selittää, se täytyy kasvatuksen ja harjoituksen kautta
saada sotamiehiin.

— Kai sitä jo lähtee mielellään Suomeen, kun on näin kauan ollut

poissa? kysytään.

— Raskiipa tämän jättää tämän Libaun.

— Jo veikkonen sitä päivää on odotettu, odotettu niin kauan, ettei

tahdo jaksaa enää todeksi uskoa.

Pojille teki hyvää heille osoitettu luottamus ja aivan kuin yhdellä

iskulla miehet muuttuivat. Heihin tuli hehkuva into ja reippaus, jonka
kaltaista pataljoonassa ei ennen oltu nähty. Heidän katseensa olivat
tuimat kuin ukkospilvi ja heissä saattoi havaita sellaisen
päättäväisyyden ja tarmon, että todella uskoi heidän taas kykenevän
mihin tahansa. Hermostuneina he kävelivät edestakaisin odotellen
lähtöä ja pitkästyen sen valmistuksia.

Vielä kerran suomalainen jääkäripataljoona kokoontui paraatiin.

Pataljoonan päällikkö hauptmanni Ausfeld julisti 27:nnen
Preussilaisen Jääkäripataljoonan hajoitetuksi ja luovutti sen Suomen
lailliselle hallitukselle. Hallitus oli pataljoonan komentajaksi
määrännyt eversti Thesleff’in, joka oli saapunut tilaisuuteen
ottamaan vastaan suomalaisen jääkärijoukon.

LIPPUVALA

Libaun kadut ovat himmeästi valaistut. Talvi-illan tuulet puhaltavat

mereltä kylminä viimoina kaikista kadunkulmauksista. Harvat kulkijat
pysähtyvät katsomaan marssivia komppanioja. Aseettomina,
juhlapuvuissaan, kypärät päässä suomalaiset jääkärit marssivat
hiljaa, rauhallisesti Libaun korkeaa luteerilaista kirkkoa kohti Grosse
Strassen varrella.

Kirkko on valaistu kirkkaasti kuin jouluaamuna. Äänettöminä

miehet istuvat penkeillä, koko pataljoona viimeistä miestä myöten
kokoontuneena. Pataljoona on vannomassa lippuvalaa ennen
Suomeen lähtöä. Urut hymisevät, vienot hymnin säveleet kiirivät
pitkin kirkon korkeita holveja. Saarnatuoliin astuu jääkäripataljoonan
pappi puhuen lippuvalan merkityksestä.

Lippuvala on juhlallinen lupaus, minkä sotilaat kutsuen Jumalan

todistajakseen tekevät ennen lähtöään taisteluun. He lupaavat pysyä
uskollisina maansa lailliselle hallitukselle ja puolustaa isänmaataan
henkeen ja vereen asti. Kun tämä uskollisuuden vala muinoin tehtiin
maan herralle, oli tapana, että sotilaat lupauksensa vahvistukseksi
puristivat maan herran kättä. Nyt asettavat sotilaat kätensä lipun
ympärille merkiksi lupauksestaan olla tälle isänmaansa symboolille
uskollisia, puolustaa sitä hädässä ja taisteluissa. Jos he kaatuvat
lippunsa juurelle, silloin he ovat kuolleet kunniansa ja isänmaansa,
oman kansansa onnen ja tulevaisuuden puolesta.

Lippuvalaa tekemään kutsutaan valitut henkilöt sotilasjoukosta. He

tekevät sen komppanian tai pataljoonan puolesta, joka ympärillä
seisten toistaa valan, luvaten siten yksi kaikkien ja kaikki yhden
puolesta taistella ja kestää vaarat ja voitot yhdessä tovereina.

Jääkärit vannoivat valan jääkäripataljoonamme valkean, kauniin

lipun juurella. Varmastikin on tämä hetki kautta elämän pysyvä
läsnäolijain mielessä. Kaukana synnyinmaastaan, merien, maiden
takana, seisoi suomalainen jääkäri joukko puhtaan lippunsa juurella
valmistautuen lähtemään valloittamaan suurta maata, —
vapauttamaan isänmaataan vieraan satavuotisesta ikeestä.
Kaikuvalla äänellä, rinnat hehkuen uutta, ennen aavistamatonta
intoa, nuo nuoret jääkärit lausuivat uskollisuudenvalansa Suomen
lailliselle hallitukselle. Monen silmässä kiilsi kyynel, ja ennen
kuulumattomalla voimalla kajahti lippuvalan jälkeen isänmaan virsi:

"Oi Herra siunaa Suomen kansa!"

Valot välkkyivät Libaun korkeassa, avarassa temppelissä. Kaukana

Itämeren tuolla puolen, Pohjan talvisen tähtitaivaan alla vuoti
vertaan kärsinyt kotimaa. Mutta jääkärien mielet paloivat kaipuusta
ja halusta päästä pian sen taisteluihin antamaan uhrinsa oman
maansa vapaudelle.

Tuo vihreä jääkäripataljoona ei ollutkaan enää maanpakolaisparvi.

Kotimaa oli kutsunut sen avukseen, lähettänyt sanansaattajansa
hakemaan poikiaan vapaustaisteluunsa ja Libaun luteerilaisen kirkon
holvit kaikuivat vielä jääkärien lippuvalasta taistella henkeen ja
vereen Suomen vapauden puolesta.
LÄHTÖ LIBAUSTA.

Joukko puettiin matkaa varten siviilipukuihin. Siinä ei mittailtu, ei

soviteltu. Oli takki suuri tai pieni. — Se sopii! tuumaili aliupseeri ja
jos kuka yritti valitella puvun huonoutta tai sopimattomuutta,
lohdutti hän meitä:

— Ei teitä ole tarkoitus pukea espiskeikareiksi, te lähdette

taisteluun.

Yöllä helmikuun 16 päivää vasten kokoontui komppania viimeisen

kerran asuntoaulaansa. Siinä oli taas pitkä rivi sivilistejä mitä
erikuosisimmissa puvuissa. Joka miehellä oli matkalaukku tai nyytti
kädessä. Saksalaiset aliupseerit jättivät kaihomielisinä jäähyväiset.
Katseltiin tuttua Baierin kasarmia. Siinä se seisoi jykevänä, autiona,
kätkien suojiinsa monta huokausta, kaikki ne kaipuun tunteet, jotka
nyt olivat täyttymässä. Ja miehissä vallitsi niin rajaton riemu, että se
tuskin voi hillitä sitä ilmoille puhkeamasta. Ulkona talvituulet
kohisivat ja vinkuivat, helisivät ja soittelivat huimia, vallattomia
taistelulaulujaan.

— Valmiit! Ryhmäkaarto oikeaan, tahdissa — — — mars! Eteen-

päin!

"Hurraa nyt komppania kotiamme kohti

Suomemme suloisille saloille!
————————
Ei löydy maata sen armaampaa!"

Lähtöaamu valkeni kylmänä ja tuulisena. Miehet värisivät

laivankannella odotellessaan ohuissa siviilipuvuissaan. Libau heräsi
tavalliseen työhönsä ja askareisiinsa ikäänkuin mitään erikoista ei
olisikaan tapahtunut. Mitäpä sen asukkaat välittivät jonkin
jääkäripataljoonan lähdöstä. He olivat nähneet sellaisia monia sekä
tulevan että menevän. Satamassa alkoi päivän työ. Juna tuli
puhkuen laivarantaan, nosto- ja lastauskojeet alkoivat rämistä.
Venäläisiä vankeja marssi tavaramakasiineihin työhön.

Kello 11 seuduilla pataljoonamme saksalaiset upseerit saapuivat

laivalle jättääkseen jäähyväiset. Ennen lähtöä oli pataljoonassa joka
mies korotettu, oli leivottu upseereja jos minkin arvoisia, että
koskaan ei saattanut tietää, miten suuren herran kanssa oli kunnia
keskustella.

Useita puheita pidettiin sekä saksalaisten että suomalaisten

taholta. Kaikille oli yhteistä mielikarvaus siitä, etteivät vanhat tutut
upseerimme saaneet lähteä mukaan. Saksa ja Venäjä näet taas
hieroivat rauhaa ja aselevon aikana saksalaiset eivät saaneet edes
lupaa Suomeen lähtöön. Ero tuntui sangen katkeralta. Olivathan
meikäläiset vielä tottumattomia suuripiirteiseen sotatoimintaan.
Suomessa olisi nyt juuri tarvittu noiden kokeneiden
ammattisotilasten kykyä ja taitoa. Puhuttiin Suomen tulevaisuudesta,
Saksan ja Suomen soturiliitosta ja yhteisistä kestetyistä vaaroista ja
taisteluista.

Laulut kajahtivat puheiden lomassa, "Die Wacht am Rein",

"Maamme" ja monet muut vuoroin kummallakin kielellä. Nyt eron
hetkellä jääkärit huomasivat, miten syvät siteet yhdistivät heitä
jaloon Saksan kansaan, joka jo oli tehnyt ja vielä tuli tekemään
maallemme niin monta todellista ystävän palvelusta. Saksan voittoisa
armeija oli kukistanut tsaarivallan Venäjällä, sen iskut olivat tehneet
vallankumouksen mahdolliseksi. Puhukoot ympärysvallat pienten
kansojen oikeuksista miten kauniita sanoja tahansa, missä maailman
kolkassa he voivat toistaiseksi näyttää edes yhden sorron ikeestä
vapauttamansa kansan? Saksa taas oli jo ennen meitä vapauttanut
koko itä-Europan tsaarivallan ikeestä, luonut itsenäisen Puolan ja
Ukrainan. Olkoon, että se on tarkoittanut nuo valtiot itselleen
suojamuuriksi Venäjää vastaan, joka tapauksessa ne
maailmansodassa Saksan aseitten avulla ovat saaneet vapautensa ja
itsenäisyytensä. Kaukana siitä, että silmittömästi, sokeasti olisimme
ihannoineet kaikkea saksalaista. Näihin suurtekoihin me suomalaiset
kiinnitimme toiveemme, ja niin kauan kuin ne teot
himmentymättöminä säilyvät historiassa, niin kauan me pienen
poljetun kansan pojat emme voi olla ihailematta sitä kansaa, joka
rehellisesti täytti lupauksensa ei ainoastaan meitä, vaan monta
muuta yhtä raskaan ikeen alla huokaavaa kansakuntaa kohtaan!

Laiva irtautuu satamasta. Rannalla seisoo parvi, 27:nnen

Jääkäripataljoonan upseerit kunniaa tehden. Kajahtaa voimakas
hurraa jälkeen jäävien ja koko Saksan voitokkaan armeijan
kunniaksi.

Arcturus lipuu aallolta aallolle kohti aukeaa Itämerta. Libau jää

kauas. Silloin pieni nopea alus kiitää rinnallemme. Jälelle jääneet
upseerit olivat rynnäköllä vallanneet pienen rannikkolaivan ja
seurasivat matkuettamme ulos aavalle asti. Vihdoin tuo pikku alus ei
kyennyt enää kilpailemaan uhkean Itämeren laivamme rinnalla. Se
kääntyi takaisin viime jäähyväiset jätettyään. Suomalainen
pataljoona kiiti eteenpäin pohjoista kohti. Aavalla merellä nostettiin
Suomen lippu laivan perään. Se hulmusi ja lepatti ylpeänä, vapaana,
satojen riemusta loistavien katseitten ihailemana.
KOTIMATKA.

Arcturus kyntää Itämeren aaltoja. Vesi solisee, läiskyy suurina

suolaisina pisaroina laivan kannelle. Pohjatuuli peuhaa ja pelmuaa
touveissa, myllertää meressä, räiskii ja pärskii kuin mikäkin ilakoiva
merielävä.

Laivan keula ja kannet vilisevät miehiä. Etukannella katselija vasta

oikein nauttii nähdessään, miten keula puskee tumman, vellovan
aallokon pintaan ja syöksyy sähisten ja kohisten eteenpäin. Vesi
yrittää vastustella, aallot lyövät koko kyljellään voimakkaasti vastaan,
käännähtävät siinä selkäpuolelleen, paremmin oikein hartiain-
voimalla laivan runkoa puskaistakseen, mutta niiden
voimanponnistukset ovat turhat. Minkäpä sille tekee
väkevämmälleen ja terävämmälleen muuta kuin katkeaa ja
murskautuu, ja Arcturus ihan kuin leikillään siinä kikkaa katkaisee
aallon toisensa jälkeen ja lipuu paksua savua piipuistaan pursuttaen
yhä avarammille ulapoille Suomen lippu mastossaan hulmuamassa.

Taivas on pilvessä, Itämeri pauhaa synkkänä, mustana, väliin

vaahdosta valkeana. Sen katselijoilla posket ja otsa polttavat kuin
kuumeessa. Suonen lyönti tuntuu ohimoissa. Tuo kylmä talvinen tuuli
tekee sanomattoman hyvää. On nautinto antaa sen viilentää koko
kasvoja sulkea silmänsä ja tuntea kiitävänsä hyvää vauhtia pohjoista
kohti.

Kaukana aallokko pärskyy ja roiskuu suurina, valkeina vaahdon

peittäminä vuorina. Vasemmalla näkyvät Saksan rannikon kalliot ja
laaksomaat. Koko valoisan ajan päivästä kuljemme rannikon
suojassa. Sitten yöllä yht'äkkiä kaikki valot sammutetaan ja pimeä
laiva syöksyy suurimmalla vauhdillaan puhkuen ja sähisten synkän
Itämeren yli suoraan Ruotsin rannikkoa kohti.

Aamun sarastaessa on uusia saaria ja rannikko taas näkyvissä,

Ruotsin ranta. Arcturus on ankkurissa peilityynessä lahden
poukamassa. Olemme onnellisesti päässeet Itämeren yli. Saksalaiset
lentäjät olivat kertoneet venäläisten torpeedoveneitten ja parin
risteilijän lähteneen merelle ajamaan takaa meikäläisiä. Nyt olimme
jo saavuttamattomissa.

— Mutta miksi tässä odotellaan? kyselevät jääkärit

kärsimättöminä.
— Eikö sitä paineta taas eteenpäin: Pohjalaiset ne ottavat kohta
Tampereen ilman meitä.

— Helsingin ottavat ja kuka sinne sitte enää kehtaa mennä.

Päivämies koettaa rauhoitella: — Älkää hätiköikö, jaksetaan kai

sitä toistakin laivaa odotella!

— Ka mitä toista laivaa?

— Castoria, tykistön laivaa!

Nyt muistavat miehet, että eskaaderiimme tosiaankin kuului

toinenkin, mitätön, pieni alus, johon tykistö oli sijoitettu. Sitäkös
alettiin nyt naljailla.

— Mokomakin kanuunavene! Olisi heitetty sille köydenpätkä ennen

merelle lähtöä, niin olisimme jo molemmat täällä.

— Vielä sitä sammakkoa ruvetaan tässä perässä laahaamaan.

 — Onko siinä ropelliakaan. Taitaa liikkua tuulen voimalla.

— Ja mihinkä se silloin pääsee tällä vastatuulella. Takaisin se on

seilannut Libauhun.

— Vai että "Castori" piti panna tuolle nimeksi.

— Mokomallekin rääppänälle!

Puolen päivän aikaan vasta Castorin savu alkaa näkyä

taivaanrannalla. Merenkäynti on ankara. Tuo pieni laivanpahanen
keikkuu ja tanssii aallokossa, väliin katoaa syvyyteen niin että
piipuista tupruava savu vain sen paikan ilmaisee, väliin taas
heilahtaa maan ja taivaan välillä, että päätä huimaa sitä katsellessa.
Viimeiset voimansa ponnistettuaan se pihisten ja ähkyen saapuu
Arcturuksen rinnalle huohotellen matkan vaivoista. Suurin osa
miehistöä on merikipeänä.

Päivät jatkavat taas matkaa yhdessä. Ruotsin rannikon

päivänpaisteiset viirut lännessä näyttävät lipuvan ohi pitkänä,
loppumattomana aallonharjana.

Tukholman leveysasteen pohjoispuolella alkaa ilmestyä jääsohjoa.

Pohjoisempana se yhä laajenee velloviksi kentiksi ja niiden takana
läikkyvät jäälautat säihkyvän kirkkaina. Arcturuksen työ alkaa käydä
yhä raskaammaksi. Kohta on edessä luja, hellittämätön,
silmänkantamattomiin ulottuva jääkenttä. Arcturus puskee uljaasti
sen sisään halkoen leveän vanan. Castor pysyttelee nyt hartaasti
perässä, laivan kylki jytisee, jääkenttä halkeilee kumahdellen.
Rouskuen ja sähisten jää keulassa murtuu. Mutta tuo kiinteä kenttä
käy yhä lujemmaksi ja taipumattomammaksi, laiva tutisee, saa yhä
ankarampia tölmäyksiä. Sakeana pursuaa savupatsas taivaalle
piipuista ja koneet jyskyttävät raskaasti, epätoivoisesti. Vihdoin
Arcturus pysähtyy. Sen voimat ovat uupuneet. Kärsimättöminä
kulkevat jääkärit jäätiköllä.

Sampoa odotetaan päivä jopa toinenkin. Sen seikkailut ovat

kaikkien huulilla. Missä kummassa se nyt viipyy?

Sitten vihdoin illan hämärtäessä näkyy kaukana savua.

Sampo näkyy! Kaikki miehet kapuavat kannelle. Ankara on työ

murtajallekin. Sen laaja runko hiljalleen kuitenkin kasvaa jäätiköstä.
Uljaasti se painaa röykkiöt allensa, sen laidoissa pursuu ja vaahtoo
sininen aallokko.

Eläköön-huudoilla Arcturuksen miehistö tervehtii saapunutta

pelastajaa.

Laivue alkaa taas pyrkiä pohjoista kohti. Castor on jätetty

lepäämään. Sen miehistö muutettiin Sampoon. Pakkanen kiihtyy.
Sammon äsken avaama uoma on jäätynyt uudelleen. Yötä päivää
koneet ryskävät, laivan kyljet vinkuvat ja voihkivat, mutta eteenpäin
on päästävä hinnalla millä tahansa.

Vihdoin monen päivän matkan perästä itäiseltä taivaanrannalta

kohoaa pieni nyppylä yli jäätikön. Kannet ja laivan keula ovat
mustanaan miestä. Kiikarit kulkevat kädestä käteen. Ensimäinen
majakka Suomen rannalla on näkyvissä. Yht'äkkiä alkaa sydän sykkiä
niin rajusti kuin se tahtoisi repäistä rinnan. Kasvot sävähtävät
tulipunaisiksi. Sanomaton, kuvaamaton lämpö, huumaava riemun ja
onnen tunne täyttää koko olemuksen. Kyyneleet, joiden lähteittenkin
jo luultiin iäksi kuivuneen, ovat väkisin kihota silmäkulmaan.
 Tuolla vasemmalla kirkastuu pilvien keskeltä ensimäinen saari,
oikealta toinen. Suomen ranta on näkyvissä. Lähemmäs tultaessa
näkyvät nuo tutut ruskeat kalliot ja harvat havumetsät. Itämyrsky
pauhaa, vinkuu ja puhaltaa, jääkentät kimaltavat päivän säteissä.
Kaikkialla touveissa, mastoissa, merellä ja saarilla, soi ja heläjää kuin
ennenkuulumaton musiikki. Suomen metsien humina kuuluu
kaukaisena valtavana tervehdyshymninä ja hivelee rintaa. Kylmä
tuuli viilentää kuumeisia hehkuvia poskia ja otsaa.

Kaikki miehet ovat kannella. Päiväkauden he seisovat siinä

sanattomina, liikkumattomina, katsellen ahmien kauan kaivattuja
Suomen rantoja, hengittäen sen tuulia, havumetsien tuoksua. "Yö on
iäks' mennyt pois!" Vihdoin saapuvat ensimäiset ihmiset, suomalaiset
pojat ja tytöt mikä suksilla mikä jalan. Tulee miehiä valkeat nauhat
käsivarressa — suojeluskuntalaisia. Laivan ympärille kertyy parvi
väkeä. Eläköön-huudoilla he tervehtivät jääkäreitä. Parvi kasvaa.
Saattajat juoksevat laivan perässä kilometrejä. Toiset jäävät
uupuneina jälkeen, mutta saarilta ja mantereelta saapuu yhä uusia
joukkoja liput mukanaan. Arcturuskin liputtaa, mastosta mastoon
liput liehuvat, vimppelit välkkyvät ja ilakoivat. Tämähän on
riemusaattoa.

Eräs äiti huomaa laivan kannella poikansa, ojentaa kätensä ja

painaa sitten huivin silmilleen. Poika tempaa valokuvansa,
taskukirjansa, ja heittää kaikki jäälle äitinsä jalkojen juureen.

Vaasan satama kohoaa uljaana, kevättalven laskevan auringon

valaisemana. Sankat väkijoukot täyttävät laivasillan. Laulu kajahtaa,
liinat liehuvat. Pataljoona marssii illan hämärtäessä kaupunkiin
sankkojen tervehtivien väkijoukkojen ohi.
 Pohjanmaalla ovat talonpojat alkaneet vapaustaistelun. Niin
voimakasta
valveutuneen kansan nousua ei Suomi ole milloinkaan ennen nähnyt.
Rintama on keski-Suomessa. Valkoisen armeijan tykit jylisevät
Tampereella.

Ja Suomen jääkärit ovat kotimaan kamaralla.

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