During the recent Lit Circles we had in class, my group and
I were in charge of discussing the short story "Adventure" in Winesburg, Ohio. Here are just a few
more things I noticed in the story, but didn't get to talk about:
Adventure.
Because the title of the story is "Adventure", it
calls back to mind George Willard's "adventure" that he has in the
story "Nobody Knows", where he impulsively acts to find Louise
Trunnion. Furthermore, after finishing the book, George's following decision
"to meet the adventure of life" is present in "Departure".
Thinking of these two adventures, it is noticeable that Alice's adventure
follows the same kind of trend: a small event occurs with or around the
character, but the impact of the event is huge and significant. As seen at the
end of the chapter with Alice’s heavy scene in the rain, this is held true.
Darkness.
Darkness is a strong
motif in "Adventure". On every page of the story, darkness has either
a direct mention or is implied through connotations (e.g. “evening”, etc.).
When reading the story, I picked up how darkness seemed to follow Alice throughout
her life. From the time when she was young and dating Ned Currie—with the words
“evening” and “under the trees” giving off a shadowy feeling to their
relationship with their union “in the moonlight”—to her older self, almost a
decade later—with her head that was so large it “overshadowed her body” and walking back home with Will Hurley at
night, wanting to invite him “to sit with her in the darkness on the porch
before the house”—darkness had always surrounded Alice Hindman. Not until after
her 27th birthday does she finally acknowledge the darkness. Alice
interacts with it “with staring eyes” and “her imagination, like a child
awakened from long sleep” plays about in it. It is not until she feels “deep
within her [the] something that would not be cheated by phantasies and that
demanded some definite answer from life” that she truly begins her “adventure”,
which also takes place during the night under a cloudy, raining sky. Perhaps
this is saying that not until Alice actually goes to “the dark side” is able to
see the truth of things—and for her, this truth is “the fact that many people
must live and die alone, even in Winesburg”.
Ned Currie
To Alice, Ned Currie is the representative entity of love
and emotions, the one who—in her mind, at least—takes away “all of her natural
difference and reserve” and awakens the “continual ferment” and “passionate
restlessness” within Alice that tortures her later after his departure. To the
reader, Ned is an indecisive bum who takes away this once sweet and “pretty”
girl’s virginity (with her supposed consent, but still) and then abandons her, confused and
infatuated. I think the latter is the true character of Ned, and luckily Alice
is able to see this herself by the end of the story when she matures and “she
no longer depended on him”. Ned is not only an unsavory guy because he abandons
Alice, but also because he promises to come back and doesn't With some close
reading, we see that he was probably lying about coming back in the first place.
We read how after Ned was not successful in Cleveland, he travels west to Chicago in hope of better luck.
According to Thomas Foster in his novel How
To Read Literature Like a Professor, when a character goes west, it is usually
to find a fortune or new life, head out on a frontier, take advantage of new
opportunities, or the character is
headed for destruction. We read later
that Ned is in fact “caught up by the life of the city [where] he began to make
friends and found new interests in life”, and he ends up forgetting about Alice
back in Winesburg. The reader doesn't know if Ned’s life in Chicago was full of
glamorous opportunities or if he was headed towards his own demise, but because
he decided to travel west, figuratively, the reader can be certain that he wasn't going to come back after all. Ned is a bum.
Bible and Ned &
Alice’s relationship
After the two lovers form their union in the field before
Ned leaves, he tells Alice, “Now we will have to stick to each other, whatever happens we will have to do that”. Whether
Ned was aware of it when he said it or not, he and Alice were binding on a much
deeper level. In the Bible, when one man and woman come together sexually, they
are considered afterwards to be of the same “flesh”. So, after their union, Ned
and Alice are “sticking” to each other in more ways than one—on a figurative
level, they are now of the same whole body.
Of course, this makes it much easier to see how Ned and Alice’s
relationship is parasitic. Being “of the same flesh”, after Ned’s departure,
Alice becomes the host while Ned is the parasite. Even in his absence, Ned sucks
away any chance of Alice having a regular life without him—he confused and delighted
her just enough to keep her fixated on him while he is away from her out west.
With her fixation, Alice allows the “fear of age and ineffectuality” to take possession of her, and her youth is
spoiled by her sickness, her loyalty to Ned. It is not until Alice is finally
maturing that she tries to heal herself, first religiously-speaking by becoming
a member of a church, but also mentally-speaking, when she “was trying feebly”—suggesting she had been
previously weakened in the parasitic relationship—“at first, but with growing
determination, to get a new hold upon life”. Fortunately, Alice is able to wash
away her loyalty to Ned, and with it her wild and passionate temperament (her fever, in a sense), in the rainstorm in
the end of the story, where she is cleansed, with the implication of baptism.