[In the following essay, Bidney examines Anderson's retelling of the supernatural poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.]

The poet-philosopher Joe Welling, solipsistic yet inspired, and the monstrously ugly yet mysteriously attractive Wash Williams, courtly lover turned morose misogynist, are two of the most profoundly conceived visionary grotesques in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. They are almost antitypes of human nature: Joe, shielded in his private world of enthusiastic self-absorption from all disappointment or dismay; Wash, so vulnerable in his self-abasingly idealistic wife-worship that a sudden revelation of the facts of life induces a lifelong trauma. At a deeper level the antithesis between self-absorption and self-abasement is greatly qualified: Joe and Wash turn out to be alike in surprising ways. The two men are both inspired seers, for even Wash's love-turned-hate still invests him at moments with visionary power, though he and Joe are equally comic-grotesque in the fanaticism of their fixations. Deep down, Wash is irremovably attached to his tarnished ideal, and Joe is transfigured by his love for making discoveries about every detail in the surrounding world (though he can't get over the fact that they are his discoveries). So “Respectability,” the story of Wash, and “A Man of Ideas,” the tale of Joe, both turn out to be epiphanies of distorted love. But they have far more in common than this.

Taken together, the two stories constitute a richly detailed refashioning of Coleridge's great trilogy of “supernatural” poems.¹ In “A Man of Ideas” Anderson re-envisions “Kubla Khan”; in “Respectability” he recreates “Christabel”; and both stories rework imagery and episodes from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Anderson's rethinkings or reimaginings are surprisingly specific and comprehensive, forming a carefully woven texture of borrowed and analogous images, close paraphrases of Coleridgean wordings, and outright quotations of phrases and epithets. One does not ordinarily expect this sort of thing from Anderson, whose relaxed approach and ambling stylistic gait in Winesburg do not alert the reader in any obvious way to complex allusive patterns. But the element of surprise in Anderson's allusive strategy increases the power that these tales possess to release their meanings through a series of delayed-reaction effects. Wash and Welling (their names allied by the theme of water—an initial hint at some of the “Ancient Mariner” parallels we will look at later) are intensely alive in their own right, psychological portraits attesting to Anderson's originality and boldness of conception. Yet as meditations on three of Coleridge's profoundest lyrics, they gain still further depth by acquiring greater psychological complexity and fuller mythic resonance.

Before beginning the analysis of Coleridgean image- and motif-patterns in the two stories, it may be useful to suggest a possible motive for Anderson's decision to single out the tales of Joe Welling and Wash Williams for such unusual allusive texturing (no other stories in Winesburg receive anything like a comparable treatment). Names may provide a clue. It is probably no accident that the novel's central questing protagonist, the aspiring writer George Willard, has a surname that not only resembles those of the grotesque imaginers Welling and Williams, but is situated alphabetically between them. Willard's eventual development is but vaguely adumbrated in Winesburg, but Anderson may be offering both his hero and his readers a context of paired symbolic indicators. If all goes well, Anderson hints, Willard may some day be situated in fact where his name appears to place him symbolically: somewhere between the self-absorbed inspiration of Joe Welling, reminiscent of the “Kubla Khan” visionary, and the self-transcending poetic idealism (so tragic when disabused) of innocent, Christabel-like Wash Williams. Situated at the midpoint, Willard may avoid the hazards of the two extremes.²

That both Welling and Williams are deeply troubled seers is indicated by the oddly but revealingly symbiotic way in which their stories interrelate through shared reworkings of Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the story of still another darkly ambivalent visionary, prophet and outcast, grotesquely punished and yet exalted by the inseparability of love and torment. Willard, even if he avoids the extremes of Welling and Williams, may not avoid the existential problems they share—these problems are perhaps our common lot. But however that may be, the central position symbolically hinted by his name may help us relate Willard, the central Andersonian portrait of the very young artist, to mainstream Romantic visionary tradition. For I do not think one can find anywhere a more ingenious re-creation of Coleridge's “supernatural” trilogy than Anderson offers in his neo-Romantic psychological portraits of Welling and Williams.

Ambitious and intelligent, Joe resembles the poet-persona of “Kubla Khan” in the inclusiveness of his many-sided vision, even if at times he unwittingly parodies the Coleridgean seer in the unabashed boastfulness of his self-dramatization as wonder-worker. In the Coleridge lyric, it is impossible to distinguish the visionary marvel created by Kubla Khan, the “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” (l. 36), from the vision of the poet-persona who narrates the lyric, and who claims he himself can “build,” or rebuild, “that dome in air” (l. 46) with some help from an Abyssinian muse. Kubla Khan becomes blended with his modern recreator, as the dream-filled skull of the poet-persona becomes the new pleasure-dome. We shall see that Joe Welling internalizes the visionary landscape of “Kubla Khan” as thoroughly as the Coleridgean persona had done.

As Coleridge's seer-persona blends with the dome-building Kubla Khan in the final lines of the lyric, he presents a self-portrait that is strongly echoed in Anderson's presentation of Joe. The shaman-like prophet is possessed:

I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

(ll. 46-54)

As the shaman's frenzy arouses fear, so too the citizens of Winesburg watch Joe, the visionary eccentric, “with eyes in which lurked amusement tempered by alarm. They were waiting for him to break forth, preparing to flee” (WO 104). The amusement can only “lurk,” cannot become fully manifest, for the “alarm” keeps it in check. Joe's “seizures” are “overwhelming” and “could not be laughed away” (104). Like Coleridge's shaman, Joe is overcome by uncontrollable powers as if in an epileptoid attack. “He was beset by ideas and in the throes of one of his ideas was uncontrollable”; he “was like a man who is subject to fits, one who walks among his fellow men inspiring fear because a fit may come upon him suddenly and blow him away into a strange uncanny physical state in which his eyes roll and his legs and arms jerk” (103). The Coleridgean “Beware! Beware!” motif is underlined: Joe is possessed. “Uncanny” is the best characterization of Joe's fear-inspiring “fits,” as of the Coleridgean shaman's visionary possession.

The “flashing eyes” motif is equally pronounced in the portrayal of Joe, whose “eyes began to glisten” when he started telling George Willard, the young newspaperman, what a “marvel” Joe himself would be as a newspaper reporter (the “sunny pleasure-dome,” too, was a “miracle,” as Coleridge tells us [l. 35]). Even when the light in Joe's eyes becomes less bright, it remains visionary: “With a strange absorbed light in his eyes he pounced upon Ed Thomas” (104). At other times, the motif of a flashing gleam is transferred half-humorously to Joe's teeth: “The edges of his teeth that were tipped with gold glistened in the light” (103) as Joe pounces on another bystander; as he speaks to George of his latest marvel of insight, “A smile spread over [Joe's] face and his gold teeth glittered” (106). Joe even manages to allude glancingly to Coleridge's “dome in air” when he tells George, “I just snatched that idea out of the air” (106).

What sort of ideas or visionary insights does Joe snatch from the air? Very much the sort that the Coleridgean seer embodies in his air-built “sunny” dome with “caves of ice”: ideas of opposites or contrasts, which in combination add up to an inclusive world-view. The central symbol in the Coleridge poem is the river that runs through the lyric landscape. Called Alph by Coleridge to recall alpha, the letter of beginnings, it meanders and descends “Through caverns” (l. 4) till it reaches the “lifeless ocean” (l. 28), the ocean of endings. It sums life up from beginning to end. Or, since it is a “sacred river” (l. 5) and since God himself is described as “Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end” (Rev. 21:6)—God adds, “I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely”—we may see the river as including all the life of man, as conceived in religious tradition, from genesis to apocalypse. In “A Man of Ideas” Joe Welling offers three visionary insights, corresponding respectively to the three stages of the Coleridgean river's course: the alpha of beginnings, the meanderings and cavern-descent of midlife and aging, and the apocalypse of endings, the lifeless ocean.³

Altering Coleridge's order, Anderson has placed Joe's genesis-vision last, but let us begin with it, so as to conform to the mythic pattern's own inherent logic. Anderson's story ends with a monologue, delivered by Joe to his startled future in-laws, Tom and Edward King, in which a hypothetical new creation, a marvellous imaginary genesis, is sketched out. Joe speculates that if all the world's vegetables and crops were “by some miracle swept away,”⁴ a new genesis or quasi-magical regeneration of the vegetable world could nevertheless come to pass:

Now here we are, you see, in this county. There is a high fence built all around us. We'll suppose that. No one can get over the fence and all the fruits of the earth are destroyed, nothing left but these wild things, these grasses. Would we be done for? … More than one fat stomach would cave in. But they couldn't down us. I should say not.

(110)

Of course we wouldn't be defeated, for we are in Joe's miracle-place, in his personal visionary territory. The “high fence” recalls the “walls and towers” that “girdled round” the Kubla Khan garden, and the fenced-in area of Joe's creative vision will likewise prove extremely “fertile ground” (“Kubla Khan” ll. 6-7). Joe explains: “We'd begin, you see, to breed up new vegetables and fruits,” simply using the surviving wild grasses in the fenced-in area as our evolutionary starting-point, and “soon we'd regain all we had lost,” even if the “new things” wouldn't be “the same as the old” (111). “There would be a new vegetable kingdom you see” (111). Like Kubla Khan, Joe becomes a visionary monarch or emperor, creator of a “kingdom.”

As metaphorical kingdom-maker, Joe is imperial, but he is still more than this: he is an Eden-maker. One plant species particularly absorbs Joe's attention and excites his wonder: “‘Take milkweed now,’ he cried. ‘A lot might be done with milkweed, eh? It's almost unbelievable. I want you to think about it’” (111). It is not clear at first what makes milkweed such a marvel, but the secret lies in Coleridge's lines in “Kubla Khan”: “For he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise” (ll. 53-54). Milkweed is metaphorically milk of paradise, for by its means we may accomplish a new genesis, which means a new Eden. (The fenced-in, or walled-in, area where the new genesis is imagined to take place is appropriate to the edenic typology: a hortus conclusus.) Joe is dreaming of a new plant kingdom, so the milk of paradise is suitably metamorphosed into milkweed (honey-dew, conveniently, also has a secondary meaning relating to the regenerate vegetable world of Joe's vision: it is a kind of melon). Milkweed, an image felt as “almost unbelievable” in its potential for evolving meaning, ends Joe's story on the same note of awestruck wonder as Coleridge's poem.

Next we come to the downward course of Coleridge's visionary river, which has its wonder-inducing counterpart in bright-eyed Joe's first child-like monologue, this time delivered to helpless Ed Thomas in the Winesburg drugstore. Like the genesis vision of a plant kingdom springing forth from edenic grasses or paradisal milkweed, this too is a victory of unschooled visionary science. Joe's account of the discovery begins in wonder and leads to a deeper wonder. Joe says he could “hardly believe” his “own eyes” when he first noticed that, even though there hadn't been any rain in Winesburg for ten days, the water in Wine Creek had risen to within eleven and a half inches of the flooring of Trunion Bridge: “Thoughts rushed through my head. I thought of subterranean passages and springs. Down under the ground went my mind, delving about” (105). Or, as Coleridge puts it, “… Alph, the sacred river ran / Through caverns measureless to man” (ll. 3-4); and again, “Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, / Then reached the caverns measureless to man” (ll. 26-27). There was still no cloud in the sky, or rather only the tiniest of clouds (“no bigger than a man's hand” [105]), so Joe's thoughts had to be directed below (though he finally realized it must have rained over in Medina County). Exploring imagined underground caverns within the local landscape, Joe had blended his ranging, meandering mind with the descending, now subterranean river. “Thoughts rushed” through his head like a rushing river; then “Down under the ground went” his riverlike “mind, delving about” the hidden caverns of a geographic landscape now hardly separable from his mental topography. The Coleridgean allusion helps us see Joe, like the Kubla Khan visionary, as a seeker of the mind's subterranean passages.

Joe's third vision is, appropriately, apocalyptic, a vision of endings: “The world is on fire” (106). Of course, Heraclitus used this same insight to express the interdependence of birth and death, coming into being and passing away, as mutually counterbalancing processes sustaining the cosmos. Joe, however, stresses only one side of the Heraclitean fire philosophy—fire as death or, as Joe calls it, “decay”: “Decay you see is always going on. It don't stop” (106). This is the omega of Joe's alpha, the “lifeless ocean” (1. 28)—death, the terminus of decay, and the beginning of yet more decay—toward which the Coleridgean river leads, the termination of the life-vision. But Joe, like the Coleridgean poet-persona, is a seer, and even this vision of all-consuming fire (which, if it were only “decay,” would leave the earth “lifeless” indeed) is experienced not as desolation but as apocalypse or revelation (however tinged with the comic-grotesque). Joe claims that if he ran such apocalyptic visions as headlines in the local newspaper, “I'd be a marvel. Everybody knows that” (107). If Kubla Khan's sunny pleasure-dome is a “miracle of rare device,” Joe's vision of cosmic fire, like Joe himself, is (in its childlike way) assuredly a “marvel”—one need only recall the cosmic, world-consuming fires in Revelation.

Since Joe experiences, after his own fashion, the three major moments of the “Kubla Khan” river vision (genesis, visionary descent, and apocalypse), Anderson appropriately describes Joe's visionary speech in river-like or water-like terms. “Words rolled and tumbled from his mouth” (103); “His personality … overrode the man to whom he talked, swept him away, swept all away” (104); “Joe Welling was carrying the two men in the room off their feet with a tidal wave of words” (110). The mention of rising water in Wine Creek also hints at a water-into-wine context of miraculous doings. And the wine motif is introduced early in the story, whose second sentence reads: “The house in which [Joe and his mother] lived stood in a little grove of trees, beyond where the main street of Winesburg crossed Wine Creek” (103), the creek that gives Winesburg its name. The wine motif is strongly implied in “Kubla Khan,” too, for the Coleridgean shaman—frenzied, possessed, ecstatic and dangerous—is readily identifiable as a Dionysian or Bacchic seer, a devotee of the wine god: one may think of the “Bacchic maidens” in Plato's Ion, who are said to “draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind” (Abrams 355, n. 9). If Wine Creek was indeed intended to refer to the maenad-like or Bacchic visionary transport of Joe Welling the Coleridgean river-seer, Anderson may want us to see Joe as the archetypic Winesburg citizen, epitome of all the town's solitary dreamers.

It certainly bears re-emphasizing that Joe is no mere copy or uncritical re-envisioning of Coleridge's poet-persona, but a highly original Andersonian meditation on that persona. In part, Joe Welling is a semi-parodic, comic or tragicomic grotesque. This guiding idea can lead us to some observations about Anderson's telling divergences or deviations from the Coleridge prototype. For instance, even though the name “Welling” suggests the “mighty fountain” (l. 19) welling up from the “chasm” (l. 17) as the river Alph wends its way through the landscape of “Kubla Khan,” Joe is also explicitly compared to a volcano, “a tiny little volcano that lies silent for days and then suddenly spouts fire” (103). True, the Coleridgean fountain is itself quite volcano-like, eruptive: amid its “swift, half-intermitted burst / Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, / Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail” (ll. 20-22). One thinks of the Grim Reaper; Coleridge's vision, with its goal of inclusiveness as well as intensity, is replete with imagery of destruction as well as creation. But when we learn that Joe's mother was a “grey, silent woman with a peculiar ashy complexion” (103), it's hard to avoid concluding that she got that way from living with a grotesquely monomaniacal verbal volcano. Joe's fiancée, too, though “tall and pale,” has “dark rings under her eyes” (108), and it's equally easy to see these dark circles as a parodic allusion to Coleridge's verse “Weave a circle round him thrice” (l. 51). The circles under poor Sarah's eyes are always close to the image of the tirelessly voluble Joe, an image that will be continually reflected in those eyes as long as Sarah doesn't close them with holy dread, or weary satiety.

Though her doubly regal name (“Sarah” is usually translated “princess”) suggests that Sarah King would be a suitable mate for the imperial, khanlike Joe, as his fiancée she will be so bedevilled by his incessant self-promotion that we are equally entitled to wonder: could Sarah be the unfortunate Coleridgean “woman wailing for her demon lover” (l. 16)? Anderson playfully encourages us to pose such questions when he slyly notes that Joe's “passionate eager protestations of love” were “heard coming out of the darkness by the cemetery wall, or up from the deep shadows of the trees …” (108-09; emphasis added). Anderson never forces points like these; Sarah just happens to live near the cemetery, so Joe has to go near there when he takes her for a walk. But the voice heard coming up from the cemetery wall and from the deep shadows clearly suggests that Joe is as much comic-grotesque chthonic demon lover as khan-like maker of visionary decrees. Sarah, for her part, tall and pale and lean and sad, is not exactly Coleridge's muse-like Abyssinian maid, but she may well spend more time than she likes in the abyss of Joe's absorbing or devouring self-preoccupation.

For the “holy dread” that this fascinating seer inspires is twofold. It can arise from deep empathy, as when George Willard finds himself “Shaking with fright and anxiety” as he waits to see whether Joe will be able to confront the menacing-looking Tom and Edward King without suffering grievous bodily harm. Joe is fearless, and his unworldliness combined with physical vulnerability arouses in George a response compounded of amusement and terror—a “terror that made his body shake” from empathetic identification (109). Yet there is also the kind of terror that strikes the baseball players who fall victim to Joe's series-winning but alarming enchantments as spellbinding coach: “The players of the opposing team … watched and then, as though to break a spell that hung over them, they began hurling the ball wildly about,” while Joe's players scamper home to the accompaniment of “fierce animal-like cries” from their coach (107). Joe hypnotizes everybody with his incessant shouts of “Watch me! In me you see all the movements of the game!” Alarmingly, he seeks total control. “He is a wonder,” everyone agrees (107), accepting Joe's own self-estimation as “marvel.” A wonder, but a holy terror.

That is why any visionary monologue from Joe may well leave its hearer “A sadder and a wiser man” or woman (Rime, l. 624). Like that of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Joe's narrative compulsion both charms and repels his captive audience: “Pouncing upon a bystander he began to talk. For the bystander there was no escape. The excited man breathed into his face, peered into his eyes, pounded upon his chest with a shaking forefinger, demanded, compelled attention” (103). Compare Coleridge:

He holds him with his skinny hand,
“There was a ship,” quoth he.
“Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!”
Eftsoons his hand dropped he.
He holds him with his glittering eye—

(ll. 9-13)

The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.

(ll. 17-20)

We have mentioned the transfixing stare and glistening eyes of Joe in connection with the “flashing eyes” of the “Kubla Khan” visionary, but the “glittering eye” of the Mariner is equally apposite. Joe's compulsion to narrate is not impelled by guilt like the Mariner's; rather, his never-expiated (because never recognized) flaw is self-absorption.

Joe's implicit evangel—his message concerning the miraculousness of simple things about us—is not far removed from the Ancient Mariner's injunction to love well “All things both great and small” (l. 615). Yet, like the glassy-eyed Mariner, Joe tells his tale in a kind of seizure or fit; he talks at his targeted listeners rather than to them. Each seer's spoken message, being inseparable from the message conveyed by his behavior, is both enlightening and sobering, joyful and frighteningly melancholy. The symbolically two-sided miracles experienced by the Mariner are perhaps typified by a single revealing example: at one point in his tale, rain is described as pouring down from “one black cloud,” the single solitary cloud in the sky, hardly enough (one would think) to produce the wide “river” of “lightning” that issues from it (ll. 320, 325-26). A similar cloud shadows Joe's narrative. Telling of his attempts to discover why the water was so high in Wine Creek though it hadn't rained in town for ten days, Joe says he surveyed the almost empty sky till he finally found a single solitary cloud, “a cloud in the west down near the horizon, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand” (105). The illuminations conveyed by Joe and his Coleridgean tale-telling prototype, the Ancient Mariner, are never free, even at their brightest, from the shadow of a darkening cloud. Neither man can escape the specter of self-preoccupation. From this point of view, Joe's beleaguered fiancée, Sarah King, is typologically more Wedding-Guest (captive audience) than prospective bride.

If Joe Welling is a self-confident, many-sided “man of ideas” (a phrase that also happens to epitomize neatly the intellectual range and diversity of the polymathic S. T. Coleridge), Wash Williams is an extremely vulnerable, shame-plagued man obsessed with a single idea: his traumatically violated “respectability” (Coleridge's own addiction-induced problems with shame and dubious respectability may come to mind here as well). Wash's obscure sense of sinfulness allies his personal nightmare with that of the guilt-ridden Mariner, but since Wash has thoroughly repressed his guilt, projecting it outward as hate, we had best postpone the Mariner parallels for a little while. Wash quite simply hates women—all women—and the ineradicable trauma that gives rise to his murderous loathing of half the human race has its typological roots in Coleridge's “Christabel.”

Four motifs link Wash's experience to that of Christabel. Originally, Wash is innocent, virginal, worshipful. He undergoes a sexual trauma. The exhibition of female nakedness that brings on the shock becomes allied in his mind with the source of all evils. But finally, and paradoxically, he cannot help resembling, in the most blatant and dramatic way, the very being he both fears and hates. That is because Wash's story, like that of Christabel, is a tale of unavowed love, love of a kind so distorted through suppression and denial that the force which generates it is manifested as something demoniacally threatening and foul. If Joe Welling's capacity for love was crippled by hypertrophy of the ego, Wash Williams' love is distorted through his extreme vulnerability to terrifying internal rebellions against the fragile structure of his idealism. For, as Coleridge sums it up in “Christabel,” “to be wroth with one we love / Doth work like madness in the brain” (ll. 412-413).

The virginal “maiden” (l. 388) Christabel is as “lovely” (l. 23) as she is pious, “Like a youthful hermitess, / Beauteous in a wilderness, / Who, praying always, prays in sleep” (ll. 320-322), and the baleful Geraldine, who will administer such an irreparable shock to her innocence, is likewise “Beautiful exceedingly!” (l. 68). So too Wash, when young, was “a comely youth,” who with “a kind of religious fervor” had been careful to “remain virginal until after his marriage” to a similarly attractive woman, “tall and slender” with “blue eyes and yellow hair” (123, 125). Wash was the most worshipful of courtly lovers to his young wife: he “kissed her shoes and the ankles above her shoes” (126). Christabel doesn't grovel before Geraldine's feet in this way; after all, Geraldine is simply a mysteriously abandoned lady whom Christabel has happened to meet at midnight in a forest where she has gone to pray for her distant lover. Yet Coleridge's imagery, too, focuses on a foot fixation: Geraldine's “blue-veined feet unsandaled were” (l. 63); Christabel's bedroom lamp is “fastened to an angel's feet” (l. 183); after the seduction, the blood “Comes back and tingles in her feet” (l. 325). In any event, Wash and Christabel are total innocents; neither knows anything of physical love. Wash doesn't understand why his wife has acquired three other lovers even though he worships her so unreservedly. And Christabel suspects no possible evils when she urges lonely Geraldine to come home with her and “share your couch with me” (l. 122).

There is also a “couch in the room” (WO 126) of Wash's mother-in-law's house, where Wash has been summoned for a dramatic display presentation: Wash's mother-in-law wants to have her daughter march into the room naked and to observe how Wash will react. Of course, Wash suspects nothing; he has simply responded to his mother-in-law's invitation (even though he had dismissed his wife earlier for her accumulated infidelities) because he wants his wife back. “I hated the men I thought had wronged her,” he says (127), just as Christabel guilelessly and sympathetically accepts Geraldine's story about being helplessly abducted by “five warriors” (l. 81). When Wash begins to tell George about the shock Wash is about to receive, Wash's “voice became soft and low” (127). In strikingly similar fashion, when Christabel is walking in the woods toward the place where Geraldine will be, “The sighs she heaved were soft and low” (l. 32). Both Coleridge and Anderson deftly use the phrase “soft and low” to help build up a mood of suspense before the shocking event to ensue.

It is the same shocking event in both cases: a revelation of nakedness to unexpecting eyes. Wash hears his wife's mother outside the door, “taking the girl's clothes off”; then she pushes his naked wife through the door and stands “in the hallway waiting, hoping we would—well, you see—waiting” (127). Wash is so horrified that although he doesn't succeed in murdering his mother-in-law on the spot, he does hit her with a chair (rescued by the neighbors, she dies of fever a month later). As for Christabel, when Geraldine drops her silken robe, the revelation is literally unspeakable: “Behold! her bosom and half her side— / A sight to dream of, not to tell! / O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!” (ll. 252-54). Christabel provides no model for Wash's violent response; she conforms to the myth of passive womanhood and has no defense against Geraldine's demoniacal seduction. But there is a parallel in the two protagonists' repression: Christabel is cursed by being made permanently unable to speak of the evil that has happened to her, and Wash, too, nurses his shock and dismay mostly in silence, consistently shunning contact with all other human beings (until at long last he feels able to tell his story to George).

Though in one respect, Wash's trauma is a comic-grotesque version of Christabel's (nothing worse has been inflicted on Wash than a view of the nakedness of his own lawfully wedded wife), his fate is tragic, too. The psychological damage Wash undergoes is immense because he feels he has lost his “respectability.” He was made to learn too much too fast. He can never forgive the grossness of his mother-in-law's pedagogic technique, for it has summoned up within him the sexual awareness that his idealistic mentality had so powerfully repressed for so long. He feels defiled, shamed—but of course he wants to repress that feeling, too. So he defensively projects the feeling of pollution and shame onto his mother-in-law, his wife, all women. He is not dirty; they are.

So Wash is now convinced that women are evil: “‘Bitches,’ he called them” (122). Men he simply pities because they are controlled by these self-same “bitches”: “‘Does not every man let his life be managed for him by some bitch or other?’ he asked” (122). The “bitch” motif is repeatedly sounded in “Christabel,” too:

And what can ail the mastiff bitch?
Never till now she uttered yell
Beneath the eye of Christabel.
Perhaps it is the owlet's scritch:
For what can ail the mastiff bitch?

(ll. 149-153)

Anderson's coarse allusive humor accentuates the comic-grotesque mood of Wash's tale.⁵ But surely there is enough, too, of Coleridgean “sorrow and shame,” “rage and pain” (ll. 674, 676). Wash, in hating what he loves, has come to hate not only women but “life, and he hated it whole-heartedly, with the abandon of a poet” (122). (In view of the “Christabel” parallels that we have seen and the “Ancient Mariner” parallels that we have yet to look at, the word “poet” is doubly apropos.) When Bracy the bard has a dream revealing the evil potential of Geraldine, he laments to Christabel's father, “This dream it would not pass away— / It seems to live upon my eye!” (ll. 558-59). Trying to rid himself of analogous visions of traumatic horror, Wash says to George, “Already you may be having dreams in your head. I want to destroy them” (125). Good dreams may lead to bad ones; better not to dream. But Wash is enough of a poet to know that this is impossible.

In fact, it is impossible for Wash to stop loving what he hates: he deeply loved his wife after his courtly, idealistic fashion (“I ached to forgive and forget” [127]), and he can never banish either her image or the unconscious feelings of love it arouses in him still, despite his consciously willed loathing. He calls his wife “a foul thing come out of a woman more foul” (124), but in his own appearance he expresses—in fact, he physically embodies—the foulness he professes to despise: “He was dirty. Everything about him was unclean. Even the whites of his eyes looked soiled” (121). Wash calls women “creeping, crawling, squirming things,” but he himself admits to George that he “crawled along the black ground” to his wife's “feet and groveled before her” (124, 126). That is to say, in his descriptive language Wash cannot help but unwittingly compare women with himself, drawing an unconscious likeness and thereby expressing an unconscious attraction. Again, the prototype for Wash's unconscious attraction to what he consciously rejects may be found in Christabel's behavior toward Geraldine. When Geraldine's eyes suddenly shrink up and turn serpent-like, Christabel “passively did imitate / That look of dull and treacherous hate” (ll. 605-06). How could such a look of hate appear in “eyes so innocent and blue” (l. 612) as those of the loving and lovely Christabel? Coleridge's explanation is plain and penetrating: he calls such unwilling imitation “forced unconscious sympathy” (l. 609). It is unconscious love (unwilling imitation, the sincerest form of unconscious flattery), love of what is consciously rejected and denied.

The two themes of supposed female foulness and of “creeping, crawling, squirming things” lead us, finally, to the parallels between “Respectability” and Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” parallels quite as striking as those with “Christabel.” But here again, as in the case of “A Man of Ideas,” the contrast with Coleridge's Mariner is fully as important as the comparison. Joe Welling, we recall, shares the Mariner's compulsion to narrate, his obsession with cornering a captive audience, but lacks any trace of the Mariner's obsessive guilt, his never-satisfied need for expiation. Wash Williams, on the other hand, is even more guilt-ridden than the Mariner: in his obsession with a nightmarish female apparition of foulness and horror (a theme as basic to “Ancient Mariner” as to “Christabel”), he effectively incorporates the Coleridgean theme of dread. But in his great distaste for vermiform crawling creatures, he still embodies a state of mind that the Mariner, to his credit, brilliantly transcends. While the Mariner achieves at least a momentary redemption by blessing the sea-snakes, Wash Williams never comes to satisfactory terms with the earthworms.

Let us look more closely, in turn, at the two Mariner-motifs that preoccupy Wash: female foulness and crawling creatures. When George innocently asks Wash if his wife is perhaps no longer living, Wash replies,

She is dead as all women are dead. She is a living-dead thing, walking in the sight of men and making the earth foul by her presence. … My wife, she is dead; yes, surely, I will tell you, all women are dead, my mother, your mother,⁶ that tall dark woman who works in the millinery store and with whom I saw you walking about yesterday—all of them, they are all dead.

(124)

Wash's envenomed portrait of archetypic woman as a living-dead thing whose presence is a contamination mirrors Coleridge's famous presentation of the leprous-looking woman Life-in-Death, who wins the soul of the Ancient Mariner:

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was white as leprosy,
The Night-mare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.

(ll. 190-94)

Her “looks were free”—even this hint at wantonness may be easily related to Wash's disgust at the coarse display that has demolished his respectability. To Wash, his wife is a living-dead thing, someone who has made his life a life-in-death, as the leprous-looking woman has made the Mariner's. (Interestingly, in view of the Wash's trauma over nakedness, the next line in the Coleridge poem is “The naked hulk alongside came” [l. 195].) Or we may say that Wash's wife, though alive, is pictured as dead in his vengeful wish-fantasies, for he says, “Why I don't kill every woman I see I don't know” (124).

The connecting link between the themes of female fatality and crawling creatures in Wash's free association misogynist harangue is the specific idea of rottenness, also derived from Coleridge's “Ancient Mariner.” Continuing his diatribe about women, Wash adds, “I tell you there is something rotten about them. I was married, sure. My wife was dead before she married me, she was a foul thing come out of a woman more foul” (124). Coleridge writes:

The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

(ll. 123-26)

The theme of women's rottenness (the rotten deep related to the leprous-looking woman) merges in Wash's vision, too, with repellent “things” that “crawl”: “I would like to see men a little begin to understand women. They are sent to prevent men making the world worth while. It is a trick in Nature. Ugh! They are creeping, crawling, squirming things, they with their soft hands and their blue eyes. The sight of a woman sickens me” (124). The Mariner's and Wash's nightmares each exhibit a double disgust: with a repellent female and with repulsive things that crawl.

What is the connection between these two motifs in psychological terms? Since serpentine or worm-like creatures, things that squirm and creep and crawl and feel soft or slimy, are not female symbols but quite evidently phallic emblems, what is the connection between this emphatic disgust at male sexuality and the equally obvious odium directed at a fatal female? The combination, for both Wash and the Mariner, would seem to indicate a repudiation of sexuality as a whole. But the Mariner impressively recovers from this. In one of the most dramatic visionary conversions of Romantic literature, he learns to bless the water-snakes; they are transfigured for him, and his albatross/cross, his burden of guilt, drops away. For Wash, no such deliverance is available. He even fantasizes about killing women, as the Mariner killed the albatross (and, indirectly, the two hundred crewmen). We might say that Wash's equivalent of the Mariner's albatross (a white bird, an emblem of innocence and purity) is Wash's now-dead ideal of women's purity, but Wash can't bring himself to admit that he had anything at all to do with “killing” it.

The reason for Wash's refusal to implicate himself is that Wash cannot separate the phallic worm-image from his trauma over the “rotten” female. For it is Wash's trauma-inducing wife who first tried to give him some lessons about the facts of life, and she also played flirtatious games with the metaphors of worms and seeds. As Wash worked in the garden, his wife “ran about laughing and pretending to be afraid of the worms”; then when planting time came, Wash tells George, “she handed me the seeds that I might thrust them into the warm, soft ground” (126). Wash never quite gets the point of this metaphoric sexual instruction, except on the unconscious level. He senses that his hands, which planted the seeds, are somehow connected with the traumatic sexual awakening occasioned later by his wife's sudden display of her nakedness, and that is why even now Wash takes “care of his hands” (121), the one part of his body that he wants to keep symbolically clean. (He also uses his hands to do telegraph work, a cerebral occupation, suggesting careful, conscious control.) But the sexuality he has rejected expresses itself in the rest of his body: he calls women foul and rotten, yet in keeping the rest of his body bad-smelling and dirty, he symbolically shows an unconscious affirmation of likeness, of attraction, to the women he supposedly rejects. Clean hands vs. dirty body, clean and lofty idealism vs. hidden or repressed (“dirty,” “rotten”) wishes—Wash is locked into a never-resolvable conflict, a nightmare worse than the Mariner's, a nightmare more like that of the spellbound Christabel, also enchained by a love she cannot admit or confess to herself.

Water, a symbol of the unconscious mind that controls the ungovernable behavior of the symbolically named Wash and Welling, unites them with each other and with Coleridgean Mariner-thematics as well. Like the Ancient Mariner, both Wash and Welling convey and embody visions of deeply problematic or troubled love. Wash's visionary fervor is not so different from Welling's: both are problematic poets. (We recall that “There was something almost beautiful” in Wash's voice as he told his “story of hate”—he had become “a poet”; “Hatred had raised him to that elevation” [125].) Wash's story of traumatic disillusionment is a tale of hate, but it hides an unavowed love, an unconfessed attraction to sexuality, to the women he maligns. At the deepest level, Wash still aches to forgive and forget. His hate hides love. Joe is also an embodied conflict or contrast: his insight conceals his blindness. Joe's loving visionary absorption in daily epiphanies makes him resemble a force of nature, oblivious to the individual personalities of his captive auditors, whom he lectures and hypnotizes into silence. In creating these profoundly moving, impressively complex psychological portraits, Anderson has proved himself no mere copyist of Coleridge, but one of the strongest remakers of that poet's rewarding, troubling legacy.

Notes

1. I find in the critical literature no detailed analyses of these two stories, nor any attempt to look at them from a Coleridgean perspective. Goebel (148, 151) mentions Coleridge, but only with reference to Anderson's supposed kinship to Emerson. Pickering (37-38) compares Anderson's Enoch Robinson to Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, but misreads Coleridge; Pickering sees the Mariner's blessing the water-snakes as a loss rather than a gain in creative power. My earlier article on Anderson contains two brief footnotes on Coleridge (Bidney 271, n.7; 272, n.9).

2. This ties in well with the approach to Willard's development that we find in Shilstone's essay (passim).

3. Compare Knight (97): names in “Kubla Khan” are “so lettered as to suggest first and last things: Xanadu, Kubla Khan, Alph, Abyssinian, Abora. ‘A’ is emphatic; Xanadu, which starts the poem, is enclosed in letters that might well be called eschatological; while Kubla Khan himself sits alphabetically central with his alliterating k's. Wordsworth's line of first, and last, and midst, and without end, occurring in a mountain-passage (The Prelude, VI.640), of somewhat similar scope, may be compared.”

4. It's odd that Joe calls it a miracle instead of a disaster. But “miracle” certainly underlines the Coleridgean motif, “miracle of rare device” (“Kubla Khan” l. 35). And the word also expresses Joe's sense of the primacy of his own miraculous state of visionary transport over any mere material event in the external world.

5. In view of Faulkner's well-known admiration for Anderson, we may perhaps speculate that Eupheus Hines, in Light in August (e.g., 141), borrows some vocabulary (“womansinning and bitchery”) from Wash. In other respects, the two characters differ greatly, but they are alike in that each is his own worst enemy.

6. Wash's emphasis on mothers in this context of accusation recalls Schapiro's analysis (61-92) of “Christabel” as embodying regressive narcissistic conflicts between “good” and “bad” mother-images. Beres (passim) applies similar categories (derived from Melanie Klein and others) to the study of Coleridge's “Ancient Mariner.”

Works Cited

Abrams, M. H., et al., ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 5th ed. 2 vols. New York: Norton, 1962. Vol. 2.

Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. New York: Viking, 1958 (orig. pub. W. B. Huebsch, 1919).

Beres, David. “A Dream, a Vision, and a Poem: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Origins of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 32 (1951): 97-116.

Bidney, Martin. “Anderson and the Androgyne: ‘Something More Than Man or Woman.’” Studies in Short Fiction 25 (1988): 261-273.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Complete Poetical Works. Ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1912. Vol. 1.

Faulkner, William. Light in August. Ed. Noel Polk. New York: Random House, 1987.

Goebel, Walter. Sherwood Anderson: Aesthetizismus als Kulturphilosophie. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitaetsverlag, 1982.

Knight, G[eorge] Wilson. The Starlit Dome. London: Methuen, 1941.

Pickering, Samuel. “Winesburg, Ohio: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Southern Quarterly 16 (1977): 27-38.

Schapiro, Barbara. The Romantic Mother: Narcissistic Patterns in Romantic Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983.

Shilstone, Frederick W. “Egotism, Sympathy, and George Willard's Development as Poet in Winesburg, Ohio.” West Virginia University Philological Papers 28 (1982): 105-113.