THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE
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faithless wife, thrusts her into his presence naked; Wings Biddlebaum
becomes a recluse because his wish to blend learning with affection
is fatally misunderstood. Grotesqueness, then, is not merely the shield
of deformity; it is also a remnant of misshapen feeling, what Dr.
Reefy in "Paper Pills" calls "the sweetness of the twisted apples."
Winesburg
may thus be read as a fable of American estrange–
ment, its theme the loss of love. The book's major characters are
alienated from the basic sources of emotional sustenance-from the
nature in which they live but to which they can no longer have an
active relationship; from the fertility of the farms that flank them
but no longer fulfill their need for creativity; from the community
which, at least by the claim of the American mythos, once bound men
together in fraternity but is now merely an institution external to
their lives; from the work which once evoked and fulfilled their sense
of craft but is now a mere burden; and most catastrophic of all,
from each other, the very extremity of their need for love having
itself become a barrier to its realization.
The grotesques rot because they are unused, their energies de–
prived of outlet and their instincts curdled in isolation.
As
WaIdo
Frank has noticed in his fine study of
Winesburg,
the first three
stories in the book suggest this view in a complete theme-statement.
The story, "Hands," through several symbolic referents, depicts the
loss of creativity in the use of the human body. The second story,
"Paper Pills," directly pictures the progressive ineffectuality of hu–
man thought, pocketed in paper pellets that no one reads. And the
third story, "Mother," relates these two themes to a larger variant:
the inability of Elizabeth Willard,
Winesburg's
mother-figure, to
communicate her love to her son. "The form of the mother, frustrate,
lonely, at last desperate," Frank writes, "pervades the variations that
make the rest of the book: a continuity of variation swelling, swirling
into the corners and crannies of the village life; and at last closing
in the mother's death, in the loss forever of the $800 which Elizabeth
Willard had kept for twenty years to give her son his start away from
Winesburg, and in the son's wistful departure." In the rupture of
family love and the consequent loss of George Willard's heritage,
the theme-statement of the book is completed.
The book's central strand of action, discernible in about half
the stories, is the effort of the grotesques to establish intimate rela-
