论文总字数：27242字

摘 要

《小城畸人》是舍伍德安德森的代表作。舍伍德安德森在此书中描述了独特的文学人物——怪人。此书由25个彼此独立却又互相关联的小故事组成。本课题先介绍了作者的生平以及写作背景，再分析书中塑造出的各种畸人的个性特点以及行为的描述，运用弗洛伊德的精神分析新论探讨其中几个畸人的心理和形成原因，通过畸人的悲剧命运引发小说背后对人性、道德和社会主题的思考，人们也可以此了解并解决自身的心理问题。

关键词： 《小城畸人》； 安德森舍伍德；怪人；个性特点；弗洛伊德

Contents

1. Introduction １

2. Literature Review ２

3. Grotesques’features and behaviors in this Novel ３

3.1. Ugly appearance ３

3.2 Abnormal behaviors ４

3.3 Funny dialogues ４

3.4 Distorted relations ５

4.Causes of Formation ５

4.1 Background of America ５

4.2 Grotesques’ inner world ６

5. From the Perspective of Freud＇s Theory ７

5.1 Theory of personality: Id, Ego and Superego ７

5.2 The interpretation of dreams ８

5.3 The life instinct and death instinct ９

6. Conclusion １１

Works Cited １２

1. Introduction

Sherwood Anderson is one of the most famous novelists in American in 20th century. He was born in a small town in Ohio. And he moved with family to Clyde, Ohio in 1884 and grew up there. That town became the hometown in Anderson"s memory and later also the prototype of Winesburg, Ohio.

The country life in Midwest cultivated his mind, making him have a special liking for life in rural town and an innate hate to industrial cities, which had an important influence on his later literary creation.

To earn money, Anderson did many odd jobs. Through his own efforts, he rose to become a successful businessman, owning and managing a painting factory. Then he moved to Chicago alone when he was 20 years old after his mother died and did a job of advertisement writing. After many setbacks, not satisfied with things as they are, Anderson abandoned his business and family In 1912 and become a writer deciding to devote all his energy into writing.At that time, he moved to Chicago and married many times. His most immortal work is Winesburg, Ohio, which is most respected by others through his career. Throughout the 1920s, he published several novels, books of essays, and a poetry collection and so on.

Anderson has done many different jobs so he could see through life of people at the bottom of society clearly and his rich experience accumulated rich real material for his novels. Most his novels are about the people who live in the town. His writing style is very delicate and he could write deep into the inner world of people and describe their subtle emotional changes for us. It is said that Anderson was influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis. He clings to reveals the human’s psychological state behind the appearance; he exposes the restrained desires and some realistic element. His writing techniques include keen observation of the realism, sober analysis naturalism and concise description of the impressionism and so on. Thus forms his unique writing style.

At that time, the United States is under the background of the Industrialization. With the detestation of the impact of industrial civilization on rural culture, many writers expressed their desire to restore human’s creativity and imagination through the return of the tradition of industrial civilization by depicting the survival status of small towns under the impact of the industrial revolution. Anderson is just a poetic modern novelist longing for the traditional virtues or a romantic person having a master of the modernist novel techniques.

2. Literature Review

Winesburg, Ohio was published in 1919, which is most widely studied among all his works. Critics hold different opinions trying to measure the accomplishment of this novel. At the beginning, some critics generally considered “sex depression” as the theme. Malcolm Cowley remarked his achievement: “Anderson made a great noise when he published Winesburg, Ohio. There are some scolded him, the other ones praised him, yet he managed in that early work. Through his efforts, he became the only storyteller of his generation.” Malcom Cowly considers Anderson to be of realism, meanwhile, Charles Child Walcutt and other professionals conclude Anderson of naturalism. And from the majority of psychoanalysts, Anderson is regarded as “American Freud”. Actually, Anderson’s work is a combination of naturalism, realism, romanticism and modernism. John W. Crowley"s statement is quite precise: “Anderson gave proof of what American fiction can be when an artist with vision and sensibility, with comprehension and the capacity to test reality with imagination, deals with the infinities that lie beneath the commonplace materials of American life.” David D. Anderson pointed out that the theme of Winesburg, Ohio is an exploration of human isolation. Among the Chinese scholars, Wang Ning’s view in Freudianism is that Anderson accepted and absorbed Freudian main ideas which he also applied to his literary writing.

“Anderson had a gambler’s passion for literature; that along with the candor of his fiction, made him a model for younger writers.”(Peter Conn 344) He is most remembered for his extremely influential effect on the next generation of young writers especially in America. Writers he has influenced include William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald et al.

The purpose of this thesis is to discuss the personalities and behaviors of the grotesques in Winesburg, Ohio by analyzing their psychological activities and the reasons of formation from the perspective of Freud’s theories. The main point of this thesis is to reveal the psychological activities and the inner world of grotesques to make people think about the topics of humanity, morality and society through grotesques’ tragic fates.

3. Grotesques’features and behaviors in this Novel

In the 25 independent but interrelated stories of this novel, Anderson created many vivid images. He has selected all kinds of people: doctors, teachers, priests, farmers, housewives, etc. Young reporter George Willard is the main character in this novel. The problems which afflict these individuals exist indiscriminately despite their difference in status, gender or age. Their main activities and experiences constitute the picture of the life of the small town, Winesburg, Ohio.

Although he has focused on the specific portrayals of different characters, this novel has almost covered all the ways to present the grotesques’ image. It mainly reflects in the following aspects:

3.1. Ugly appearance

Anderson depicts a number of grotesques’ monstrous appearances, some exaggerated and abnormal, some theatrical and ridiculous, some so ugly that we feel frightened.

For example, the doctor Reefy was an old man with a big nose, huge hands and white beard; Alice Hindman was tall and slight, “her head was large and overshadowed her body” ; Joe Welling often came into “a strange uncanny physical state in which his eyes roll and his legs and arms jerk”; When describing Wash Williams, the telegraph operator of Winesburg, Anderson first highlights the image of the monkey in the park, “blinking in a corner of his iron cage, a huge, grotesque kind of monkey, a creature with ugly, sagging, hairless skin below his eyes and a bright purple underbody”, William is just like that monkey. “His girth was immense, his neck thin, his legs feeble. He was dirty. Everything about him was unclean.Even the whites of his eyes looked soiled.”…… All these living descriptions make us feel funny. Meanwhile, they make us fear them.

3.2 Abnormal behaviors

The grotesques’ images are also reflected in their exaggerated and abnormal behaviors. Some of these behaviors have become their living habits.

Wing Biddlebaum’s restless hands are “like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird” but after an special event, he is misunderstood by people in the town and he just wants to hide his hands that are on behalf of evil all the time; Doctor Reefy likes continually stuffed scraps of paper into his huge pockets of a linen duster. “the scraps of paper became little hard round balls after some weeks, and he dumped them out upon the floor when the pockets were filled.”

3.3 Funny dialogues

Almost every grotesque is not disposed to express their feelings. They often like talk to their-selves and delude their-selves. Their words are irrational, eccentric and illogical.

Doctor Parcival talked to George about his past experience but he said “Why I want to talk to you of the matter I don"t know. I might keep still and get more credit in your eyes. I have a desire to make you admire me, that"s a fact. I don"t know why. That"s why I talk.” Joe Welling is a blithering man with many strange ideas. He requires and forces others to listen to him, but no one understand what the hell he means. “He appeared to be lost in thought, rolling his eyes about and running a thin nervous hand through his hair. A smile spread over his face and his gold teeth glittered. ‘There wasn"t a cloud in the sky, not one. Come out into the street and you"ll see. There wasn"t a cloud. There isn"t a cloud now. Yes, there was a cloud.’”

Those words are usually out of order and give people a sense of absurdity, but at the same time, we have a sense of disgust and fear.

3.4 Distorted relations

The grotesques are all distorted, and relations between them are distorted too. Those distortions exist in all aspects such as relations in marriage, relation between a teacher and a student and relationship between a mother and her son and so on. All those relations are mysterious and confusing.

4.Causes of Formation

4.1 Background of America

The United States was being flooded by the tide of industrialization and increasingly became into a monopoly capitalist country. It changed people’s habits of life and thinking. Generally, industrialization brought American progress and prosperity. But industrialization is not perfect, reform and development are always accompanied by this or that problem. Anderson was keenly aware of the industrialization’s impact and influence on the town and the township residents in the Midwest of the United States. He reveals all sorts of drawbacks of industrialization in this book.

First, industrialization accelerated the accumulation of material but also added to people’s strong greed and desire of material. The traditional American dream had increasingly become alienated as the pursuit and a crazy desire for money, which had lost the original religious piety and moral color.

Second, automation made manual labor highly mechanized and more and more monotonous, which cut off the communion and relation between people and broke the social traditional order.

Besides, industrialization promoted the prosperity of culture but also led to the emptiness and helplessness of people’s spiritual world. It suppressed new ideas, sexual liberation and personal freedom. Along with the traditional religious spirit and moral ideals were challenged, people’s spiritual world fell into a kind of confusion and emptiness. “Not only the women but also the men in Winesburg were urgently eager for love but did not get any.After all their attempts to find love was repulsed, they were not so far away from becoming grotesques in such a repressive society.”(Xu 41) Each story is a manifestation of these topics, not only the Winesburg people, but the whole American nation is suffering spiritually more than physically.

The winesburg town stands on the edge of a new America, its eighteen hundred residents a collective memorial to the bygone world that preceded the transformations of technology, industry, and urban growth. The town’s absorption into the mechanical, urban civilization of the twentieth century was aptly announced in the wake of history’s most mechanized and destructive war.

In this novel, the traditional marriage concept of loyalty also affected people’s happiness seriously, the story concerning Alice Hindman and rows between Wash Williams and his wife and his mother-in-law. All these story reveals the loneliness, repression and psychological quirks.

Almost everybody was gradually reduced to the real grotesque in that time background.

4.2 Grotesques’ inner world

We just said, industrialization led to the emptiness and helplessness of people’s spiritual world. It suppressed new ideas, sexual liberation and personal freedom. It is the suppression of human desires that makes those town residents that were once honest and kind turn into grotesques. Everyone in this town has a basic desire to be a human being, sexual passion or just a need of love and understanding. They have suppressed love in their heart and they are not able to express normally. At the same time, they also can"t get the love from others. As a worse result, that they can"t be understood by others will exacerbate their isolation and inner repression. So they get lost.

In addition, conflict between truth and falsehood is the most important theme in this novel. As the writer says in the book:“It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.” In this sentence,how can we define the word “truth”? The truths here are created by people theirselves instead of the absolute and real truths. If one are too obstinate to insist on his own “truth”, he will shield others’ truths and the world’s truths out and lose his ability to fit the world eventually. Their old living style and ideal is shattered by reality. At last, loneliness are their helpless fate through their whole life.

5. From the Perspective of Freud＇s Theory

The grotesques are men and women locked into a claustrophobic isolation by some wound that will not be healed or an obsession that topples normal reason. Communication shrinks to the vanishing point; even talk becomes impossible, and touch is dangerous.

It is said that Anderson was influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, so he used the theory in his works,which he denied though. No matter whether it is real or not, we could analyze this novel from the Perspective of Freud’s Theory.

5.1 Theory of personality: Id, Ego and Superego

Freud visually compared the human’s personality structure to the iceberg: what we can see only occupies a small part of the surface, the region of the unconscious is like the iceberg, the vast majority of which is hidden beneath the surface of the water. Id is in the bottom of the personality structure.

In the story The Strength of God, Curtis Hartman was an pastor of Winesburg. He had been in that position for almost ten years. Because of his being quiet and unpretentious, he was liked by the elders of the church and a banker"s wife thought he was scholarly and refined. One day, he saw a woman called Kate Swift smoking a cigarette in her bed and reading book. He saw her bare shoulders and white throat. He thought her behavior is far gone in secret sin and wanted to awaken the woman to save her soul by stretching his sermons to this woman’s ears. But he wanted to look again at the beautiful figure lying in the bed, which filled his head with nonsense and made him lose sleep. Id is the most primitive, impulsive and evil of human nature because the id follows the Pleasure Principle. “The id is not affected by reality, logic or the everyday world, as it operates within the unconscious part of the mind.” (McLeod, S. A., 2016) So the desire of his id to woman’s flesh led his constantly peeping that woman’s figure. But his rational ego which was “modified by the direct influence of the external world” (Freud 25) warned himself to keep evil thoughts out from his mind. He reminded himself that he was God’s son and he must save him from himself. The clash between his id and his ego ( between his sexual desire and his religious principles ) confused his soul and even made him almost insane. Then his superego whose function is “persuading the ego to turn to moralistic goals rather than simply realistic ones” defeated himself. He thought his abnormal action and evil idea were because of the test of God. He considered that woman to be an instrument of God, bearing the message of truth. His superego strive him to perfection in the end.

In conclusion, these three parts of the personality are usually in a balance but once the balance is destroyed, a lot of psychological problems may be brought, even split personality. So we could see in this story, Curtis Hartman has a depressed desire for love and passion which is depressed by religion. But as the initiator of evil breaking Hartman’s inner balance, Kate Swift is also the direct factor that helps Hartman find his inner balance again through constant struggle, which makes the whole story reach a perfect balance too.

5.2 The interpretation of dreams

Freud thought dream is a kind of satisfaction of desire that can not be realized or repressed in reality. Dream is a kind of subconscious activity. Due to the ego defense mechanism repressing our id"s desire, the desire to be repressed in the unconscious activities is not directly expressed in dream but appears in a distorted form.

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