In "The Book of the Grotesque," Anderson uses a metaphor to describe the writer’s inner life and the creative process of writing as a sort of pregnancy:
Perfectly still he lay and his body was old... but something inside him was altogether young. He was like a pregnant woman, only that the thing inside him was not a baby but a youth. No, it wasn’t a youth, it was a woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight. It is absurd, you see, to try to tell what was inside the old writer as he lay on his high bed.... The thing to get at is what the writer, or the young thing within the writer, was thinking about.
In this passage, Anderson uses the metaphoric language of pregnancy to characterize the nature of the writer’s inner youthfulness. Despite his aged exterior, the writer has within him someone quite like Joan of Arc: a young woman in armor waiting to burst out of him. The idea of pregnancy as a metaphor for the generative power of literary or artistic creation is an ancient one—as old as literature and art itself.
Throughout Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson employs passages like this, rife with rich literary devices, to emphasize the difference between external appearances and internal realities. In this case, the writer’s creative drive gives him a vivacity that belies his age and calls into question one of the major themes of Anderson’s collection: must we cast our youth aside to enter adulthood, or can we carry our youth along with us on the journey of life?
In “The Philosopher,” Anderson recounts the story of Doctor Parcival, another one of Winesburg’s medical doctors. Parcival happens to hide behind his faith as an excuse for inaction. He also sees himself as a potential mentor for George Willard, and one day Parcival—thinking that he might be hanged soon by the town for his refusal to help a girl injured in a buggy accident—confronts George with a warning and a slice of his ideology. He uses a charged metaphor to explain his understanding of his Christian “faith”:
If something happens perhaps you will be able to write the book that I may never get written. The idea is very simple, so simple that if you are not careful you will forget it. It is this—that everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified. That’s what I want to say. Don’t you forget that. Whatever happens, don’t you dare let yourself forget.
Everyone, Parcival insists, "is Christ." This is a standard biblical metaphor to say that all people face the same adversity and oppression that Jesus himself faced. Of course, Parcival manipulates it to become an excuse for not helping a little girl who has been mortally wounded in a buggy accident in town, because he finds himself to also be a victim. Ironically, despite being a doctor, he is so self-involved that he puts his own suffering before all others. Anderson explores different manifestations of Christianity and faith as they spring up in the various characters interspersed through the stories of Winesburg, Ohio, and in the case of Parcival, faith emerges not as a possible source of virtue and purpose but as a cause of terrible indifference.
In “Surrender,” the third chapter of the “Godliness” story, Anderson tells the story of Louise, the daughter Jesse Bentley desperately hoped would be a son. Neglected by her father and disliked by his friends, Louise tries to make a friend of her own in John Hardy—the brother of two girls who have been bullying her.
As Louise contemplates befriending John, she reflects on the alienation she herself has felt from the rest of the world. In metaphorical language, she casts this alienation in the terms of a physical wall:
The mind of the country girl became filled with the idea of drawing close to the young man. She thought that in him might be found the quality she had all her life been seeking in people. It seemed to her that between herself and all the other people in the world, a wall had been built up and that she was living just on the edge of some warm inner circle of life that must be quite open and understandable to others.
Until meeting John, Louise cannot comprehend the "warmth of life" that others must feel—she believes that she is trapped by some wall on the cold outer periphery of this "inner circle." Everyone in Winesburg, Ohio is somehow alienated from those around them, and this is one more example.
There's no shortage of sex in Winesburg, Ohio, given that Anderson is intent on exploring the dynamics that make, change, and end relationships between the residents of Winesburg. Throughout his stories, particularly where the coming-of-age of George Willard and his peers is concerned, sex emerges as a main cause of emotional growth on the rocky path toward adulthood. In “Adventure,” Anderson tells the story of the relationship between Ned Currie and Alice Hindeman.
Alice was then a very pretty girl and Ned Currie took her into his arms and kissed her. He became excited and said things he did not intend to say and Alice, betrayed by her desire to have something beautiful come into her rather narrow life, also grew excited. She also talked. The outer crust of her life, all of her natural diffidence and reserve, was torn away and she gave herself over to the emotions of love.
In this passage, passion becomes a way for Alice to find feeling again. Anderson compares this passion in metaphorical language to the stripping of an "outer crust," implying that what happens between Ned and Alice breaks down the various barriers—like Alice's "diffidence and reserve"—that would normally keep Alice from embracing this kind of physical intimacy. Although Ned will eventually betray Alice's trust and forget their bond after moving to Chicago, Alice's physical and psychological transformation in this passage is nonetheless a vital feature of her coming of age.
In “An Awakening,” Anderson depicts George’s gradual “awakening” into adulthood. George has newfound inspiration to learn the ways of the world, and Anderson uses a simile to characterize the way that George hopes to learn about law in order to gain the agency he so desperately desires:
The law begins with little things and spreads out until it covers everything. In every little thing there must be order, in the place where men work, in their clothes, in their thoughts. I myself must be orderly. I must learn that law. I must get myself into touch with something orderly and big that swings through the night like a star. In my little way I must begin to learn something, to give and swing and work with life, with the law.
As George searches for meaning, the law—something "orderly and big"—shows him one possible source of purpose. In his simile, Anderson compares the law in all its allure to a bright shining star. Like the North Star itself, the law promises to give George a direction. Then, Anderson changes tact on his device and adopts the metaphorical language of smithing: he expresses his newfound desire to "give and swing and work with life" like some metal or material in a foundry, using the law as his tool.
In “Drink,” Tom Foster falls hopelessly in (unrequited) love with Helen White. Inhabiting Tom’s youthful passion, Anderson shows the reader how Tom wrestles through a series of metaphors as he attempts to make sense of Helen’s power:
Tom left his room on Duane Street just as the young night began to make itself felt. First he walked through the streets, going softly and quietly along, thinking thoughts that he tried to put into words. He said that Helen White was a flame dancing in the air and that he was a little tree without leaves standing out sharply against the sky. Then he said that she was a wind, a strong terrible wind, coming out of the darkness of a stormy sea and that he was a boat left on the shore of the sea by a fisherman.
Tom conveys his sense of helplessness by ascribing Helen a series of unpredictable forces of nature: a spark of flame in the air that threatens Tom’s fragile, flammable “tree”, and the raging wind from a storm that buffets Tom’s beached “boat.” The fickle nature of these comparisons reflects the push-pull attitude toward passion and love felt by many characters throughout Anderson’s stories: for the people of Winesburg, Ohio, young and old alike, who struggle to make sense of the emotional complexity of adulthood, passion is something that seizes them, not the other way around. It would seem that they have very little say in the matter.
The tragedy of Elizabeth's life comes to a close in "Death," when the reader sees firsthand the connection between Elizabeth and Doctor Reefy and their experience with loss: both characters have lived their lives in close proximity to death, Elizabeth because of her chronic illness and the doctor because of the loss of his wife. In the following passage, Anderson personifies Death as a character in its own right:
Elizabeth had put it there a week after her marriage, breaking the plaster away with a stick. Then she got one of the workmen her husband was at that time employing about the hotel to mend the wall. “I jammed the corner of the bed against it,” she had explained to her husband, unable at the moment to give up her dream of release, the release that after all came to her but twice in her life, in the moments when her lovers Death and Doctor Reefy held her in their arms.
By this beautiful characterization, death becomes not just a companion to Elizabeth but a lover, capable of the very same satisfaction that she was able to find from Doctor Reefy’s love. This is a bleak but important section of the story collection, in which Anderson invites the reader to consider death as a possible source of contentment. Passages like this serve to develop Anderson’s thematic exploration of fate and meaning in Winesburg, Ohio and place Anderson’s work neatly in the canon of literature that emerged in the aftermath of the First World War and its terrible destruction. This literature sought to understand the possible meaning—or even generative power—of death and to make sense of the brutality of human suffering.
Throughout Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson returns repeatedly to the metaphor of a "door opening" to represent coming of age, as in "Sophistication":
Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness.
In this passage, Anderson describes how a young boy finds himself connected to a lineage of men who have themselves come of age and eventually disappeared. The military connotations of this "procession" are unmistakable—Anderson writes, after all, in the aftermath of World War I, when countless processions of men walked straight to their annihilation. George is coming of age in a world that has been forced to face, like never before, just how close humanity lives to the void of nothingness that exists before birth and after death.
At the end of “Departure,” the final story in Winesburg, Ohio, George Willard has come of age and has the endless opportunities of adulthood laid out in front of him. Things look good, in no small part because he is able to escape Winesburg and the cyclical patterns of mutual alienation and self-destruction that have dogged its residents apparently for centuries. Anderson leaves the reader with one last metaphor to emphasize the raw potential of George’s future:
The young man’s mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly sharp. With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time and when 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.
Although Winesburg has been all-consuming in its perplexing paradoxes and depressive atmosphere for the better part of every story that Anderson tells, by the end of his collection the town is little more than the context upon which George will be able to build the rest of his life. With the metaphor that compares Winesburg to the background of a landscape painting, Anderson ends his collection on a decidedly optimistic note. The real painting—the real beauty—is yet to come.
