Grief Theme Analysis

The townspeople of Winesburg are plagued by death, tragedy, and failure, all of which lend themselves to the community’s pervasive melancholic atmosphere and sense of hopelessness. Anderson uses Winesburg, Ohio’s extensive cast of characters to explore the toll that loss can take on the human psyche. Whereas some of Winesburg’s inhabitants become passive and stagnate in the wake of grief, others react with resentment, revenge, and escapism. Anderson portrays these varying methods of coping with loss in order to demonstrate the significant psychological impact of trauma and the complexity and fluidity of human emotions.

After losing their respective partners, Doctor Reefy and Alice Hindman are paralyzed by their bereavement. Reefy, whose young wife dies soon after they are married, retreats to a life of solitude in her absence. He is able to find solace and understanding only in the company of Elizabeth Willard, who also dies before they are able to begin a romantic relationship. This debilitating isolation indicates the profound and lasting toll that loss can take on a loved one’s life. Although Alice’s former lover Ned Currie did not die, but rather left of his own volition, she is similarly affected by grief after he abandons her. After Ned leaves Winesburg to pursue a new life in Chicago, Alice remains fixated on him and cannot imagine a future with anyone else. She attempts to “force herself to face the fact that many people must live and die alone,” suggesting that her life is irrevocably damaged by the loss of Ned. The experiences of Reefy and Alice reflect the tendency of grief to persist and damage the lives of those affect long after the person is gone.

Unlike those who process their grief passively, characters like Doctor Parcival and Wash Williams react to the tragedies and failures of their lives outwardly. Parcival and Wash allow bitterness and resentment to overtake them and manifest onto others as they seek revenge on humanity itself for their suffering, suggesting loss’s ability to corrupt and shift the moral fabric of those affected. Before coming to live in Winesburg, Parcival has endured the loss of his father along with a chaotic past rife with mistakes and personal failures. He is embittered to the point that he does not want patients at his medical practice and refuses to help the other doctors in town when a little girl is killed in a buggy accident. Parcival’s negative life experiences have affected him to the point of debasing his worldview wherein he views himself and everyone else as hopeless victims, telling George Willard that “everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.” Wash Williams is another character whose personal loss manifests outwardly in his attitudes and behavior. After the dissolution of his marriage, Wash adopts a misogynistic attitude that escalates from anger at his ex-wife who cheated on him to feeling sickened and even homicidal toward women in general. This resentment reflects the powerful emotional hold that grief can exert over its sufferers and the tendency for people to be embittered by romantic betrayal and marital loss.

Whereas most characters in Winesburg, Ohio are negatively affected by loss, the death of Elizabeth Willard near the end of the novel acts as a positive catalyst effect in her son George’s life. Motivated to create a better life for himself than Elizabeth had, the complex emotions that George feels in the wake of his mother’s death culminate in maturation and self-development that facilitate George’s decision to leave Winesburg. Immediately after Elizabeth passes, George has “but little sense of the meaning of her death” and feels empty and numb in her absence. He soon passes through several different stages of grief and is thrown into a tumult of emotions ranging from nostalgia, to uncertainty of the future, to fear of his own mortality. George’s rapidly shifting reactions to his mother’s death are a testament to the mysterious complexity of grief. The shock of Elizabeth’s death, however, does not debilitate nor embitter George. Rather, it serves as a pivotal moment of closure that allows him to fully dissociate from his childhood as he reaches his eighteenth birthday. Experiencing the loss of his mother creates a sense that “death is calling” and gives George the final push he needs to leave Winesburg and begin his adult life on his own. Through his exploration of these different reactions and coping mechanisms in response to loss, Anderson vividly portrays the long-lasting effects of trauma and the ramifications of allowing negative life events to overtake one’s thoughts and actions. The novel’s conclusion of George leaving Winesburg offers an alternative message of optimistic healing as the young man is able to remain positive in the wake of his mother’s death, ultimately showing the widely variable effects of grief on the human psyche.