h 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 ...
