Anderson's Expressionist Art In Winesburg, Ohio

Winesburg, Ohio is one of Anderson's best fiction with an expression of the"wasteland"theme. It portrays a group of"grotesque"characters who are frustrated, lonely, passive, aggressive or self-destructive. The citizens of Winesburg are the living dead, who are essentially the victims of limited, life-denying truths. This paper will try to analyze Anderson's collections of short stories Winesburg ,Ohio in which the principles of expressionism reveals, including the grotesques such as Elizabeth Willard in the third story"Mother", Dr. Reefy in the story"Paper Pills"and many other characters. Anderson utilizes many expressionist narrative techniques to unfold the secret mind of all kinds of grotesques. The use of epiphany or a Moment of Insight makes Winesburg, Ohio a masterpiece. By means of distortion and repetition, Anderson is able to reveal something about the hidden inner world of the characters and about the nature of society.The paper includes four parts: Chapter One is introduction, which introduces what is expressionism and tries to find the link between Anderson and expressionism. This part will give you a brief account of Anderson's life related to his association with expressionist painters who exert great impact on him. Chapter Two is a detailed textual analysis of distorted characters in Winesburg, Ohio, using the principles of expressionism with the focus on the plotless structure, analyzing the reason why Anderson adopts this kind of structure and how this structure performs to express the disorder of life, and other expressionist principles such as creation of mirages, repetition of images and construction of symbolism. Anderson demonstrates his masterful skill in using these techniques to present the inner life of the grotesques more deeply and thus reveal the themes more efficiently. Chapter Three analyzes the use of epiphany (as Joyce called it) or a Moment of Insight (as David D. Anderson called it). The quality of a sudden insight, a revelation, and an"outbreak"is what is most indelible in the Winesburg stories. It is found that Anderson is not trying to represent the immediate surface of human experience; he is rather drawing the abstract and deliberately distorted paradigm of an extreme situation. Chapter Four is the conclusion. Anderson doesn't care about the surface of things; his major concerns are the essence of things and the value of the life. Delineating this group of grotesques renders Anderson's motive behind the Winesburg stories:"express something"for his characters, to break down barriers, releasing them from their frustration and loneliness and seek for the salvation of soul. This is important because it suggests the formal approach Anderson took to his writing, an approach best described by the term"expressionism."...