Grotesques In The Machine Age

Winesburg, Ohio is Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece and also one of the important books in American literature. There are twenty five short stories in the book to portray twenty three grotesques who had great passion for love and understanding but were destroyed in the machine age. This paper manages to analyze the characters with Freud's theory of three levels of personalities, pan sex and sublimation to detect the characters'psycho world.The first chapter deals with the interpretation of characters with the theory of personalities, i.e. id, superego and ego. By analyzing the reflection of id, superego and ego in characters we can get a clear understanding of their grotesque behavior and the direct reasons for their being grotesques: they totally lost themselves in the transitional society moving from agriculture to industry in which social morality and principle changed dramatically.Another far reaching theory of Freud is his pan sex theory. Freud concludes that people's unconsciousness is dominated by sexual instinct which is the most powerful energy in human, and Freud names it"libido". Sexual instinct is divided into two levels: sex and love instinct. If they are suppressed, and have no way to release, people will develop into grotesques.Freud's psychoanalysis is also applied to literature analysis. A writer shifts his own desire into the characters and sublimates it into literary works. So by analyzing the writer's own experience and desire, a better understanding of his works can be achieved. Sherwood Anderson experienced the transitional society from agriculture to industry, so in his Winesburg, Ohio he expressed his disapproval of the society, his nostalgia of close relationship among people in agricultural society and his sympathy towards grotesques in the industrial society.Through profound analysis of the connection between the odd behavior and times, we could find the reason for modern people who suffer from agony of loneliness. In this paper, the author will also reveal the inner world of the grotesques and discuss the unbalanced relationship between id, superego and ego, which contain some realistic significance for modern people and their balancing of the three levels of the personality.