Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio: The Individual in the Village Dr ...

Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio: The Individual in the Village
in a village and who gain strength and comfort from their village
community. Many writers of the post civil war era looked at the villages
as a place where all citizens work in comfort and happiness. Positive
images of the village are found, for example, in the works of Booth
Tarkington among others. For the most part, these writers presented the
village as "a place of idyllic felicities"(Blankenship ٦٥٠). The village is
portrayed that way in other literatures when the circumstances portrayed
are similar to those of Anderson’s Winesburg: pre-industrial stage where
the community of the village acts according to clear patterns of conduct
and the values of its citizens are almost identical. These villages do not
have room for individuals, but rather in their pastoral setting, the
characters resemble each other in deed and thought. But the village is not
presented this way in Anderson's book.
Anderson's characters are obsessed with their own reality. The
positive quality that individualism once carried has become exaggerated,
distorted, and simply grotesque. One of the major influences on the
youths of Anderson's period was Robert Ingersoll's lectures on gods and
on humanity where he declares: "Every human being should take a road
of his own.... Every mind should think, investigate and conclude for
itself"(Gregory ٦). Ingersoll was echoing Emerson who stated in "Self-
Reliance," "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for
you in your private heart is true for all men, --that is genius”( McMichael
٤٩٥). Emerson was making the grand statement of American
individualism that influenced generations of his compatriots. Later in the
essay he says, "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives
at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he
must take himself for better for worse as his portion..."( McMichael ٤٩٦).
He also states, "Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” “No
law can be sacred to me but that of my nature”(McMichael ٤٩٧). It seems
Anderson had these thoughts in mind when he wrote his definition not of
individualism but of the grotesque:
… the moment one of the people took one of the
truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to
live his life by it, he became a grotesques and the
truth he embraced a falsehood. (٥)
٤٦