The space of the living dead, the zone of paralysis of the mind and spirit, is, in Sherwood Anderson’s vision, Winesburg, Ohio, the habitat of the grotesques. The small town Winesburg, Ohio emblematizes the deliquescence of a world in a state of transition. Its ties with the past have been severed under the impact of the machine age, but newer possibilities that the death of the old allows are yet to be discovered. Anderson chronicles the sexual and social isolation, vocational failure, and unfulfilled longing of individuals whom the changed socioeconomic milieu has made conscious of the futility and absurdity of the human existence, but who have not explored the possibilities that the changed world has to offer. His view of small town America in a period of transition is one of unsettlement, stagnation, and estrangement. His men and women, like Albert Camus’s absurd hero Sisyphus, are conscious of the fragility and futility of life; but unlike Sisyphus, they fail to realize that the triumph of human life is in the zeal to struggle. They are thus failed grotesques, who, like T S Eliot’s Hollow Men, are beings of nothingness, “shape without form, shade without color / paralyzed force, gesture without motion.”

This is the dead land
This is the cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star
–T S Eliot in “The Hollow Men”

This space of the living dead, the zone of paralysis of the mind and spirit, which Eliot1 projects as the “dead land” of the Hollow Men, is, in Sherwood Anderson’s vision, Winesburg, Ohio, the habitat of the grotesques.

The small town Winesburg, Ohio emblematizes the deliquescence of a world in a state of transition. Its ties with the past have been severed under the impact of the machine age. All that was solid, beliefs and institutions that formed the basis of human life, have melted into the air, but newer possibilities that the death of the old allows are yet to be discovered. As Frank (1996, 349) remarks, “Winesburg’s men and women are old souls, inheritors of a great Christian culture who have been abandoned and doomed to a progressive emptiness by the invasion of the unmastered Machine.” Anderson chronicles the sexual and social isolation, vocational failure, wishful thinking, and unfulfilled longing of individuals whom the changed socioeconomic milieu has made conscious of the futility and absurdity of human existence, but who have not explored the possibilities that the changed world has to offer.

The action of Winesburg, Ohio seems to take place in late 1890, that is, as Yingling (1990, 108) points out, “at the threshold of a century that had brought the changes of modern industrial alienation to even the rural hamlets of the mid-west.” In Poor White, published a year after Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson (1949, 171) laments, almost in the fashion of Yeats (1980) in “The Second Coming,” the birth of a new force, the machine, and the falling apart of the old order.
He writes:

A new force that was being born into American life and into life everywhere all over the world was feeding on the old dying individualistic life. . . . Railroads had already been pushed out across the plains; great coal fields from which was to be taken food to warm the blood in the body of the giant were being opened up; iron fields were being discovered; the roar and clatter of the breathing of the terrible new thing, half hideous, half beautiful in its possibilities, that was for so long to drown the voices and confuse the thinking of men, was heard not only in the towns but even in lonely farm houses, where its willing servants, the newspapers and magazines, had begun to circulate in ever increasing numbers.
The landscape of modern experience was indeed a dynamic new landscape of steam engines, automatic factories, railroads, vast industrial zones, teeming factories that had grown overnight, daily newspapers, telegraphs, telephones, and other mass media. It fostered increasingly strong nation states, multinational aggressions of capital, and an expanding and seemingly all embracing world market. The modern age was simultaneously capable of unprecedented growth and appalling waste and devastation. In other words, it was capable of everything except solidity and stability. The period was characterized by a shared sense of loss, alienation, and exile. Darwinism and other scientific and philosophical schools of thought were fast destroying the sense of religious community that had regulated human life for so long. Until the early nineteenth century, the idea of a benevolent god had provided a powerful source of meaning to the everyday life of the human race. Man was believed to have been created in the image of god and was thought to occupy a space in the natural hierarchy below the angels and above the beasts. This faith pervaded the culture of the time and gave meaning and purpose to human life.2
From the second half of the nineteenth century, however, there was a sharp decline in Christian faith. Mechanized and impersonalized wars on a global scale, economic depression, and brutal totalitarian regimes questioned the ability of the traditional system of religion and morality to provide a meaning to human life. Nietzsche3 suggested the collapse of the accepted standards of morality and purpose by prophesizing the “death of God.” In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he declared:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives.

American Literature Journal, Amor in Pound, Classical European Literature, Homosexuality, Diastasis, Olga-Circe-Artemis, Heterosexual Love, Homosexual Love.