Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Book Reports Love and Death Love and Death Love and death are often associated with each other in artistic depictions of human existence. In movies ‘love’ is sometimes said to be the only thing worth living for. In Christian literature death has been prophesized as the release from this hard world and the gateway to a world of ultimate peace and love. Sherwood Anderson in his book Winesburg, Ohio, changes the expected metaphor or connection between death and love. In both stories Tom Willard plays a minimal part. He does however give an example of the connection between death and love in his own distorted manner. Tom prides himself, falsely, on the notion that he is an important man around town. He has always envisioned himself rising up in the political scene in Winesburg, or even becoming Governor. His wife, Elizabeth Willard is like death to him. In his mind, she looms over his dreams casting a shadow that he blames for his meager existence. In the story mother, he describes her presence to be “ghostly” and when he thinks of her he swears angrily (39). Sometimes when he is out in the street he turns to look behind him suddenly as if her ghost and the “spirit of the hotel” were their casting their shadow on him even in the streets. Tom connects Elizabeth and the hotel to his inability to find success. His life is dominated by the affairs of the shabby hotel. The hotel is a legacy of Elizabeth’s father’s; she walks around in the hotel like it’s her coffin. So for Tom their presence is a reminder of his uneventful life. They are represent the death of his hopes and dreams. He at one point says, “Damn such a life, damn it” (39), in a context that places blame on Elizabeth and the hotel. It is as if with the death of Elizabeth you might see Tom picturing himself selling the hotel, and going to Ohio’s capital to become serious statesman. In Mother, Elizabeth is looking for a different kind of liberation. Elizabeth’s dreams for her own life have long ago died. Yet she clings to life for the sake of one thought. She is trying to ensure that her son (George Willard) does not become a lifeless thing like herself. This is the basis of their relationship, the “bond of sympathy” as the writer puts it, “based on a girlhood dream that had long ago died” (40). Elizabeth has infinite amount of love for her son. Not the kind of love most commonly felt by a mother for her son. The love she has is almost bigger than both of them; she loves what she thinks is possible inside the boy. Elizabeth loves this because is reminiscent of the thing she loved most inside herself. She describes the things inside George as something “that was once a part of herself re-created” (40). Her own death, in event, would be like a peaceful release. She would in effect be let go from the reminder of her own inner failure to the “thing” alive in her (40). What is inside George potentially represents the only thing she ever really loved in her life. The technicality of her own continued existence is the determination to make sure that George does not let this thing die inside himself. Elizabeth’s love for George is only real because she sees that mystical thing inside him. She makes love into a grotesque and selfish wish that is more for herself than her son. This is hinted at when she is pleading with god, she says “I will take any blow that may befall if but this my boy be allowed to express something for the both of us” (40). In the story death Elizabeth finds a complete release. After the almost love affair with Doctor Reefy, Elizabeth is just waiting to die. She seems content with the idea that death is the only thing that will finally give her peace. She has assured herself that her son will go out into the world and live on the thing that she once lived on. Death is so longed for that she makes it into beautiful physical being that will soothingly let her leave this world behind. She wants death so badly that she instinctively thrusts her hand from “under the covers of her bed” (during a bedridden fit of delirium), expecting her hand to slide into the patient palm of her beloved, death. Elizabeth Willard is in love with death. Not like the love she might have found with Doctor Reefy, had she not rejected it. This love is like the end of a lifetime spent yearning for something that only death, not life could give you. Its as if Elizabeth, at the moment of realization that death is her keeper, she morphes the concept death into a him, her awaited beloved. The idea of release from her ghostly, pathetic life is new to her. Death is a young beautiful knight on horseback coming to save the maiden locked in the tower, or in this story hotel. Elizabeth has been saved from her last move to save her son since he was saved already. Now she has no more love in this world, so in death she is waiting for rebirth. At the last moment she remembers a last play she can make for her ambition to see George express something (the money in the floor board). Yet the one mindedness of her wants leaves the deed undone. Elizabeth makes the loss of hopes and dreams her coffin. All the stories in Winesburg, Ohio involving the frustration of lost hopes and dreams don’t end in physical death. In the case of Wing Biddlebaum from the “Hands” story, he loses his ability to do what he was meant to do. Winesburg is not the reason for Wings loss. It was the fault of a narrow minded and judgmental community in which he worked. For Elizabeth, Winesburg is a cage she let herself stay in after her hopes and dreams have been frustrated. For Wing it is the place he runs to in his defeat. Wnesburg turns into a placa where people lament over their past regrets and hide from guilt they have put upon themselves. The town has no real power of repression over the people who reside there. The people within the town defeat themselves, at some point in their life, and then they retreat from the option to leave. I spoke of coffins earlier __ Winesburg is like a great big coffin for people who have given up on their hopes and dreams. But this is not by the design of the town, this occurs in effect from the people in it. They build the coffin up around them, and then turn what’s left of their insides into a grotesque distortion, the leftovers. For many of the characters, the original hope or dream was out of proportion in the first place. Bibliography: Winesburg Ohio by, Sherwood Anderson Word Count: 1170
Copyright © 2005 College Term Papers, INC All Rights Reserved.