More on "Adventure"

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 27^th 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.