Analyzing Adventure from Winesburg, Ohio

        The story Adventure in Winesburg, Ohio is an evaluation on how people cope with reality. The story is about Alice Hindman, a 27 year old drug store clerk who still lives her mother. When she was 16 she was the lover of a young man named Ned Currie, who leaves for a job in Cleveland and never returns to Winesburg. The night before he leaves Ned makes Alice his "lover" in a field, and from that night on, for ten years Alice stays faithful to him. Now ten years older Alice still can't imagine marrying anyone else. Still she feels a desperate urge to feel loved, so one when she comes home from work on a rainy night and while getting undressed a strange urge comes over her and she runs out into the rain, naked, and accosts an old man who is passing on the sidewalk. Suddenly she is ashamed and runs back inside and and accepts "bravely the fact that many people must live and die alone." In the chapter Adventure in Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson characterizes Alice as an isolated woman to portray the lonely, frustrated people not just in Winesburg but throughout the world.

            Throughout the book Winesburg, Ohio Anderson the unhappiness of women, married and unmarried, is a reoccurring theme within the novel, but unlike the other women Alice’s unhappiness stems from her solitude. Many of the elements contribute to the readers idea of her isolation: her widowed mother remarried, her employer being a reserved old man, the drugstore clerk who walks her home never stays and sits on her porch as she wishes, and the old man who she confronts naked it half deaf. The old man in the street being half deaf represents her frustration and lack of support, she cries for help but he can’t hear it and doesn’t respond. Alice is limited by life denying truths and guilty of allowing them to run her life.  Alice's blindness to the changing social customs limits her capacity to progress forward in life. She becomes consumed by the idea of herself and her memories. Alice is also a contributor to her own isolation because she is consumed by her image and never pulls away and creates something new for herself.

            The extremity of Alice’s emotions leads to her downfall, her tendency to limit her own abilities by her fixed habits and unmovable convictions also isolates Alice from her community. Symbolic of her self consumption, as she ages her head grows too big for her body. She denies herself the reality of life by thinning her experience to a dream world. She refuses to meld the dream world with the real world which takes the value away from experiencing life beyond her time with Ned. Alice has one vision of love and refuses to let it go. Anderson is trying to exemplify Alice’s extremity to show that all humans want to love and be in love. The challenge though, shown in Adventure, is differentiating the difference between lust and love.