The Obscure Disease of the Fireless Figure: The Pathologizing of Elizabeth Willard’s Womanhood in Winesburg, Ohio Melissa Needlman College

Sherwood Anderson sets up the premise of Winesburg, Ohio, a novel of interlocking vignettes about citizens of an archetypal small American town, with a short literary sketch about an old, male writer. This sketch’s omniscient narrator describes a vision that the writer experiences of a “procession of grotesques” (5 Anderson). This vision galvanizes the anonymous writer to write “The Book of the Grotesque,” which essentially comprises the body text of Winesburg, Ohio. When describing the writer’s vision, Anderson evades isolating the “grotesque” humans to describe them in more detailed terms with the exception of one woman “all drawn out of shape, [who] hurt the old man by her grotesqueness” (5). Though this woman’s identity remains anonymous, her physical description matches Anderson’s depiction of the character Elizabeth Willard’s “tall, gaunt” figure that “had begun to droop and to drag itself listlessly about” (206). By remarking that the woman’s grotesqueness “hurt the old man,” Anderson sets up a pattern within the novel of male repudiation of the female “grotesque,” a being made perverse not only because of her “grotesque” qualities, but also because of her fundamental deviation from male conceptions of the ideal of...