Sherwood Anderson: The Artist's Struggle for Self-Respect

Abstract

Sherwood Anderson, although best known for Winesburg, Ohio, a gallery of remarkably sensitive portraits of small-town Americans attempting to adjust to the advent of Industrialism, wrote seven novels and three full-length fictional autobiographies which provide exceptional insight into Anderson's life-long struggle to accept himself as an artist. Every one of the protagonist-artists in these ten works both loves and hates his actual, personal father, and many of them have equally ambivalent feelings about one or more substitute-or surrogate-fathers. Indeed, the persistent recurrence in his writing of unresolved fatherson relationships suggests that Anderson accorded to them a reference they cannot bear alone. These unresolved relationships become, I believe, a dramatic metaphor for the more profound struggle, waged within the artist, between the Collective Father (society's laws, its code, its standards, its truth) and the Spirit Father (the individual's private, independent truth, his personal God). Ultimately the artist's struggle is between self-hatred and self-respect. Critics of Anderson generally have been too quick to content themselves with his description of his father in the three autobiographical works as a ruined dandy or as a lovable improvident. Actually, the relationship is much more complex. Anderson hated his father, for reasons suggested to him largely by the collective truth, by society, by the public Father. He also loved his father, for reasons for the most part suggested by his personal moral authority, his Spirit Father. Above all, Anderson identified with his father, for his father

Abstract

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