This week in English class we started reading a new book called Winesburg, Ohio. It was written by a man named Sherwood Anderson, a man who lived anything but an ordinary life. Anderson lived in many small Ohio towns in his lifetime before getting married and starting up his own very successful mail order business which made him pretty wealthy in early 1900's standards. However, due to a couple significant nervous breakdowns, Anderson completely dropped his current job, family and life altogether to go and become a novelist, much to the chagrin of his wife and children. He wrote Winesburg as a reflection of one of the towns in Ohio he had lived in in the past and created characters to fill the town, all of which had certain ugly truths that they wished not to be so but were. These truths were called Grotesques in literary terms and created depth within each person who called Winesburg home.
The first story in the novel is called "Hands", a story told through the eyes of a young reporter and Winesburg native as he talked with and observed a man named Wing Biddlebaum. Wing had an interesting relationship with the towns people as his best known attribute was his hands, which were known for their incredible speed and precision most notably while berry picking. Wing wasn't always his name however, for before he moved to Winesburg he was known as Adolph and was a school teacher in one of the neighboring towns. Wing was wrongly persecuted by the townspeople for touching and fondling the boys he taught and was promptly run out of town. He changed his name and forsook the hands that he had once held close to him. Wing's grotesque is that, as he does not know exactly why he was run out of town, he believes that him caring for and nurturing young minds was shameful and wrong, and lived his current life so as not to offend anyone else by doing it again. I thought this story was interesting because it actually isn't the first time I've read it and I missed a lot of details the first time around that, when put together, make the story much more engaging and thought provoking than before.
Hey Adam, I like the alliteration in the title. Good summary of Wing's story. Personally I find it interesting that Wing never stops to think about how he was run out of town. Although he is a grown intelligent man, he refuses to see that what happened was not his fault and instead takes the extreme of living in near-seclusion and hiding his hands from the town.
ReplyDeleteI am interested in how Anderson includes grotesques in his stories to refelct ugly truths. Looking for the truths behind the grotesques makes me more engaged in the reading an have a better time reading. Also I liked how you've read the story before, but it became more interesting to you when you analyzed it harder.
ReplyDeleteRereading stories is definitely a way to pick up more from a story, so it is good that you have read it before. It is very sad that Wing feels this way, when essentially it was not his fault that he was run out of town. One of his students was just being weird about his feelings. His frantic hands show his repressed energy being let out in small bursts, rather than having them act how he used to have them act, which he believed got him in trouble.
ReplyDeleteI would agree with Will, that these stories definitely take a reread to completely grasp the meaning of these stories. For at least the first few, I had read them, thinking I had absorbed everything there was to absorb, and was surprised when I came into class and there was still much that I hadn't considered. I too found the stories very interesting, but also very sad, as is the theme of the book it seems.
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