Enoch Anderson

During the past couple weeks in class, we have been reading and analyzing the book, Winesburg Ohio by Sherwood Anderson.  Within this book, Anderson uses many stories to describe the feelings and thoughts of characters that are ugly in a way that represents society's ugliness.  A few days ago, we were assigned to read the chapter, "Loneliness," in which Enoch Robinson, the main character of the chapter, describes the story of his life, which results in complete isolation and loneliness.  As a young man, Enoch leaves Winesburg for New York City, where he studies to become and painter and joins a circle of artists.  However, he can not tolerate people and decides it is better to just interact with imaginary people, who always agree with him and never threaten his self-image.  Enoch ends up marrying a woman, and has two children, but he faces the same problem with his family as with the circle of artists, and ends up leaving them to live in his old apartment, where he generates more imaginary friends.  Again, Enoch meets a woman in his apartment and she comes over to visit him.  After telling her about the people who live in the room with him, and she seems to understand, however when she leaves, the imaginary people follow her out the door and never return.  Enoch Robinson then moves to Winesburg and has been alone ever since.

This story is very interesting to me because Enoch Robinson seems to parallel Sherwood Anderson, the author of the novel.  The most obvious similarity between Robinson and Anderson is that they both left their wives and children so that they could play with the ideas in their heads.  I find it shocking that Anderson would include a grotesque that walks away from his wife and kids, as those details must have been extremely painful to include into one of his greatest works.  As someone who does not have a degree in psycology, I cannot fully explain why Anderson would include such a detail, but I know it can explain a lot about his personality.  One possibility that I found interesting was that Anderson included the story of Enoch Robinson as a defense mechanism to cope with the fact that he actually left his family behind.  Another idea that is interesting is that Anderson could be explaining why he left his family.  In the story, Enoch is described as a "boy-man" because children are more sensitive and imaginative than adults.  The woman who drove Enoch back to Winesburg is described as being very grown up,the personification of adulthoood, and took all of his imaginary friends away.  By implying that regression can improve imagination, Anderson could be justifying the abandonment of his family because it would have improved his imagination.