Death

So, Winesburg, Ohio is full of stories that somehow intertwine into one another and lead to the book as a whole having a deeper mean than before. The seminars that were performed by the lit circles in class this week helped in explaining how specific stories had more substance to them when looked at/studied closely; "Death" was the story that my lit circle looked at, and after looking at articles, hearing what my other group members had to say, and simply rereading the chapter as a whole, my outlook on what that specific chapter brings to the novel changed completely. When I first read "Death", nothing about it really caught my eye. The protagonist’s mother dies, and he's left alone to decide whether or not he should venture off into the world alone, thus, leaving Winesburg behind. Pretty straight forward if you think about it, right? Wrong. Like so wrong. It's funny how going back and rereading the chapter, with specific questions in mind, opened up my perspective on the writing and led to fresh, internal conclusions being drawn about what the chapter actually symbolized. "Death" relates to the idea of one having a "truth" in life by showing how one's "truth" can in fact be, well, death. Elizabeth Willard is a character within Winesburg who has lived a long, miserable, loveless life; "she thought marriage would change the face of life" (Anderson 228), thus, what started her chain of miserable life events back in her youth. Elizabeth longed for adventure, but more than anything she longed for love. Her lack of communication with her father throughout her days of girlhood played a role in what drove her into so desperately desiring having a man that she could call her "own". Elizabeth deciding to marry Tom Willard just for the sake of marrying someone, instead of acquiring patience and waiting until someone she shared a true connection with to come along, is what morphed her "truth" into becoming not love, but death. Death soon becomes something that Elizabeth longs for; she craves it, hungers after it, almost in a lustful manner. She soon begins to claim death itself as her lover and speaks towards death in a way full of passion. “…she put out her hand, thrusting it from under the covers of her bed, and she thought that death like a living thing put out his hand to her” (Anderson 232); Elizabeth once grabbed for a hand in the darkness in the hopes of finding love, however, as the misery of life began to beat her internal state down, she began to grab for a new lover instead. Elizabeth greets death almost as if he is a long lost friend she has been waiting to see; the harsh realities that came along with her marrying a man for the wrong reasons soon began to haunt her in a somewhat ghostly way, and changed her “truth” in life to some would see as the worst. However, I found her new profound “truth” in death being as a positive thing. Elizabeth Willard’s personal knowing that the life she was living was offering her nothing to cherish or hold on to is what led to her experiencing an internal shift and coming to terms with the fact that death was a truth she could part ways with without regret. Death was the lover that released her from her suffering, and its impact on not only her life but also the life of her son is exactly what helped George Willard himself find his way in the end. Elizabeth Willard’s connection with death shows how everyone’s personal “truth” in life may not always be something that is expected of them, yet, in the end can provide them with the calming state of mind that they had once hungered for after all. Ya feel me?