Winesburg, Ohio: Metaphors 9 key examples

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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