Wing Biddlebaum

In class we went over some questions about Wing Biddlebaum that I was meaning to bring up during our Socratic Seminar, however I never had the chance (admittedly partially because of my fear to speak in public), and so I would like to discuss my thoughts on Wing here.

First of all, do I believe that Wing was a homosexual?  Well, I'm somewhat conflicted as far as that goes.  I found it extremely interesting that Wing had tried through his gestures to impart the dream into his students (and George Willard) and that the child that accused Wing of molesting him came upon this idea at night in a dream.  The result of his teaching was that, "Under the caress of his hands doubt and disbelief went out of the minds of the boys and they began also to dream."  A chance occurrence?  I think not.  While I certainly do not believe that Biddlebaum actually molested that young boy, or had any intention of doing so, I believe that something of himself was imparted with his touch along with what he was trying to teach his students.  However inadvertent in may have been, I believe that Wing's touch revealed his homosexuality to his students in such a subtle way that it would only manifest in their dreams.

I am reasonably sure that Wing, or Adolph Myers as he was known is not a molester, as the book rather explicitly says that the boy made it up:  "A half-witted boy of the school became enamored of the young master. In his bed at night he imagined unspeakable things and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts."  He made up his story, and the only relevant things from his fiction are the time and place of his imaginings.  

Wing is also out first look into grotesques, and he embodies many of the traits that we have come to expect in the others of the novel. He is an outcast from the rest of the town, and is very isolated/lonely, with George Willard being the only character that speaks to him on a regular basis.  Additionally, Anderson often has his grotesques lack a fundamental ability to communicate and interact with others, which is obviously one of the factors in their loneliness.  But ironically, Wing once had the ability to interact with others and express ideas well, but he voluntarily gave that up along with the use of his hands because he believed that it led to the accusations of molestation against him.  Wing's truth is a rather obvious one, his obsession with his hands, and it is by his fervent belief that his expressive hands are the cause of all his suffering, and as a result he hides their use, and when he does use them, refrains from using them expressively and to communicate, as he had, but instead he "closed his fists and beat with them upon a table or on the walls of his house."  It is also this "truth" that sets the stage for the rest of the grotesques presented in the novel, and it is against Wing that we are initially forced to make comparisons.

Grotesque-ness

First of all, in a somewhat unrelated note, I have yet to be entirely convinced that "grotesqueness" is indeed a word, it just sounds awkward to me.  But, the truth will not be denied, it is actually a word, coming from "grotesque," which comes form the same Latin word that led us to grotto, and all of which come indirectly from the Greek krypte, which means a crypt or vault, or, more interestingly from the Latin crypta, a verb meaning to encrypt.  Of course a more modern dictionary would tell us that grotesque means "odd or unnatural in shape, appearance, or character; fantastically ugly or absurd; bizarre." (dictionary.com).

     Why would this be relevant? one may ask, and I believe that it is because, whether or not Sherwood Anderson was actually aware of the Greek roots of the the word he so vividly epitomized, the characters represent this meaning. Given that the word means to encrypt, or to hide or deceive, I believe it is even more applicable to Sherwood Anderson's characters than one would initially believe, based on the more modern definition. Anderson's characters are not overtly grotesque or bizarre, but their identity is often based on some type of shady past, which they attempt to hide or obfuscate (such as Wing running away from his past as a schoolteacher, or Dr Parcival who tells vague stories about his past that are likely lies). But even more they attempt to hide their grotesqueness, which often contributes to it even more. All people would like to hide that which they are ashamed of, and often rightfully so, but the grotesques of Sherwood's novel often do so in a way that leads to their further descent into grotesqueness through their attempts to hide both what they are ashamed of about themselves, and to hide from what they are afraid of. In “Tandy,” the main character tries to hide her true self behind the fictitious persona of Tandy, a person who is entirely based off of the ramblings of a drunk as the ideal woman, and by attempting to replicate this raving ideal, she becomes a grotesque. And so Tandy hides her true self in addition to creating a new identity. Enoch Robinson, creates a group of imaginary friends because he is unable to tolerate the young artist friends he had begun to pick up and go out with in New York because of a childlike ego and self-centeredness. His imaginary friends always agree with him and never threaten his image of himself, and, again going back to the roots of the word grotesque, he hides himself away. Enoch Robinson does not try to change or mold others to a standard more acceptable to himself, but hides himself away from the world completely, by isolating himself in his apartment, and isolating oneself from the world is a trait that can be seen in almost all of the characters, including Wing Biddlebaum, who lived on the outskirts of town as a berry picker, and Elizabeth Willard, who remains inside all of the time she was not with Doctor Reefy.

Pathedy of Manners

      “Pathedy of Manners” by Ellen Kay attempts to represent the life of a woman who was privileged, intelligent and well-educated as inherently worthless after she accumulates some age. The woman spoken of was known for her beauty and was very popular with the opposite sex. The woman traveled extensively and new much about art; she scorned Richard Wagner, likely because many considered his antisemitism to be detrimental to his reputation, even though he was a notable composer of operas. She also praises the dancing girls of Degas, who was known for being one of the founders of Impressionism, a man whose work can be considered to be supportive of womens' rights in a time where such thinking was frowned upon. Because Degas painted working women (even his dancers were portrayed as either in rehearsal or backstage, making it seem like they were working professionals), it can be inferred that the woman spoken of is supportive of womens' rights, making her more of a radical intellectual, especially considering the time period (the poem was published in 1931), where few women received college degrees at all. The mystique of the woman is increased by the third stanza, she is said to have gone to Europe and done interesting and high-society things, she rejects the advances of a marquis, and by having her learn to distinguish real Wedgwood (a luxury pottery manufacturer based in England, a company that is now known as Waterford Wedgwood, the well-known crystal maker) from fake reveals the high class lifestyle she must have been living. The woman then goes on to make an ideal marriage with an intelligent young man who is equal in status to herself, which is shown by the authenticity of his pearl cufflinks. They then go on to purchase an ideal house, however they have lonely children. One must wonder, if the marriage and the house are ideal, then for what reason would the child be lonely, and the only reason would be that the children are not ideal.

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      Then the fifth stanza comes around, and this is where the poem makes a major turn. The narrator injects herself into the story, saying, “I saw her yesterday at forty-three.” Suddenly the whole meaning of the poem is flipped on its head, the narrator, who the reader initially assumes is omniscient, has in fact only seen the woman in question twice, once, when she was twenty, and then again twenty-three later, only learning as an outsider the details of her life. When the narrator sees the woman again, she has lost her husband and attempts to present the woman as pathetic and broken, with a wasted life and no friends (the woman has one hundred callers, but apparently none of them are friends. But because this is a textbook unreliable narrator, a narrator whose entire perspective is based upon two very separate incidents, it seems that the narrator is merely seeming to slight the woman because of, what I'm assuming is class bias and jealousy towards the woman because of her privileged backgrounds.   

George Willard

     George Willard is a very fascinating character in Winesburg, Ohio.  Anderson uses George to do a large number of things in this story, first, in a sense; George's involvement makes the story into a Bildungsroman, a story about the development/maturation of a character.  George seems to defy what many of the themes that the rest of the novel attempts to portray, in a novel about the creation and existence of grotesques, he remains unharmed.  Also, Anderson introduces speculation that George is the writer at the beginning of the novel.

     George develops a burgeoning ability to dream, an ability that he apparently lacks in the beginning of the novel, according to Wing.  Wing tells George that he must learn to dream, a skill, which, by the end of the novel he appears to have gained.  At the end of "Departure" he is thinking not of serious things that relate to his future, but of little things, dreams.  George also experiences the typical adolescent feelings.  He is eager for sex, but, after actually experiencing it with Louise Trunnion, George feels both pride and guilt, separating the act from the person he did it with.  But as time goes on and his mother dies, George matures, which can be seen especially in "Sophistication."  In "Sophistication" George finally makes it into adulthood, not through any particular action or rite of passage, but through the realization that he is isolated and he "sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village."  He comes to adulthood by realizing certain things about society that everyone must at some point come to understand, and come to reflect on their life. 

     George is not only surrounded by grotesques in Winesburg, he is often their sole connection to other people, and is one of the few things outside of common themes and location that link the separate stories in the novel together, and actually make it, well, a novel.  He appears in almost every story, “Tandy” being an obvious exception, among others.  Oftentimes, George is the only character that others will speak to.  Wing Biddlebaum, for example refrains from speaking to most anyone, but feels a sense of release when he speaks to George.  George causes other characters to reveal what it is exactly that makes them grotesque, whereas without his involvement they would have remained hidden, or at least not explicitly shown. 

     Anderson allows for speculation in who exactly the old writer at the beginning of the novel really is by leaving him nameless.  While reading the book, I went back and forth, but my opinion at the end is that George really is the writer.  Like the writer, George is not a grotesque, one of the extremely few examples of such in the book, and while the young George does this through childhood and learning to dream, the old man does so through a young thing inside of him, both doing so through youth.  Also, George is the connection between all the characters, and he seems well poised to be able to write about them convincingly.  George is repeatedly shown to get information from people that they wouldn’t normally give out, and to talk to people that don’t normally talk.  He becomes capable of dreaming.  By “Sophistication,” George begins “to think of people in the town where he had lived with something like reverence.”  He starts to appreciate their grotesqueness.