"The book is, of course, in no sense a burlesque, but it is an effort to treat the lives of simply ordinary people in an American middle western town with sympathy and understanding... These people are all like Wing Biddlebaum, people who had not succeeded in life, but decent people nevertheless."(22)
Sherwood Anderson, 1932
Winesburg,
Ohio is the title and the setting for Sherwood Anderson’s book.
The book has a unique setup where the story centers around a number of themes,
but lacks a general plot. The characters in the book are vivid, rich individuals
who are all linked together through their unsatisfied lives in Winesburg.
The characters' untraditional connections to each other are what make this
book so interesting. Every single one of the characters seems
to have gone through a very hard time in their lives and just about all of
those characters attribute their failures to living in this small town. Throughout
the novel, there are references to the city and its life style which hint
to the notion that the city is where everything happens and there are more
opportunities and people's lives are generally better. A lot of these characters
stress that if they were to leave to the city, their dreams and lives would
not be failures as they are now in small town Winesburg.
The
setting of the story is very similar to that of Anderson’s hometown
of Clyde,
Ohio because many of the stories that are in the book are taken from Anderson's
childhood memories from that town. Although Anderson has said that he liked
growing up in Clyde, Sherwood felt that living in the town made him feel isolated.
Peope were not going anywhere, just living their lives day after day in the
same routine. He grew up around a sense of hopelessness, that what is, just
is. (23)
Not only were many of the settings the taken from Clyde, but so were the characters. Although, most of the characters were created to represent a certain type of person rather than a particular person. Anderson shows charcters that have lost their loves, failed in life, the hopelessly lost, and even the oversexed youth.
A
key aspect to the novel is how Anderson is able to revela the secrets of a
small town, by presenting the reality of nothing being what it seems to be.
That is one of the most interesting aspects of living in a small town. When
the reader listens to the details of the setting and the true beauty of this
town, it would be imaged that the townspeople live happily in such serenity.
The country life is supposed to be this simple small town life where everyone
knows their neighbor and they 
have
town picnics together. But instead, this place seems to make the people go
crazy. Throughout the book, there is this longing for something better and
richer than what the characters have in the town that they live in. They all
see themselves stuck in a hole with nowhere to go. Anderson does a really
good job of looking deeper into the lives of these small town folk and examining
how desperate their lives really are in this town. Reverend Hartman is a good
example of this. When people think of a Reverend, it is common to think that
this man of God is at peace with himself and has a very happy stable family
life. This is certainly what the town’s people think of Reverend. But
in reality, Hartman is going through what appears to be a mid-life crisis
and peeps on the schoolteacher that lives across the bell tower. This behavior
is certainly not what the reader would expect from a man of the cloak.
Another
interesting aspect that Anderson adds to the book is the common assumption
that the grass is always greener on the other side. Almost all the characters
believe that none of the terrible stuff happens in the city and the city is
this wonderful place to be. But that is certainly not true at all. All the
failures that occur in this town could have happened in the city as well.
It seems to be easier for every character to blame the town, rather than themselves
for their failures.
As
the book journeys through the secret lives of the towns people, it is very
interesting to see how George Willard is the only character that seems to
be untouched by the town’s curse. It has been said that Anderson wrote
George in the image of himself as a young boy. (25)George
is still relatively young compared to the rest of the characters and seems
to be the only one who is capable of leaving Winesburg, which is what Anderson
does in real life. It appears that his admired career aspirations are what
will lead him out to the city. Another interesting aspect of his character
is that he is to be linked to almost all the characters in the book. It looks
like the town’s people have a high regard for him perhaps because like
his mother, they can see him succeeding in things that they were unable to
accomplish in this town. George seems to be the sounding board for lost hope
and dreams that the townspeople had in life. It seems as though the characters
want George to go to the city and make their dreams happen for them. But George
is also not what he seems, who would think that a young, handsome, admiral
man like himself would sleep with the town whore. But this is another interesting
connection that the character George has with Sherwood Anderson. Anderson
had four wives and was never faithful to any of them. The book was quite controversial
even though it was simply Anderson's personal reality of what life was like
in small town middle America. But perhaps that was all it took; simply the
reality of his words were what shook up small towns everywhere.