Connections between Winesburg, Ohio and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

After reading and discussing the two works in class, I realized there were a few connections between Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, which is only fitting due to the fact that Eliot is one of Anderson’s modernist contemporaries.

The first connection is a similarity—structurally, both works are set up in divided sections that each highlight a unique idea or theme. Furthermore, with each work, a story is being communicated between a speaker and a listener. In Winesburg, Ohio, George Williard is the overall listener of all the town’s stories. In “Prufrock”, the beginning part of the poem from the Inferno suggests that the following poem is a retelling of a story to some unknown listener. On a technical level, every story requires some sort of audience to make it known, but the fact that both of these works have established that there is definitely a listener imbibing it all proposes that the ideas in these stories are worth taking note of.

One of those ideas is the motif of the lack of communication. Both Prufrock and the grotesque characters in Winesburg unmistakably struggle with communicating with others—Prufrock with his irresolution in deciding whether to travel up the stairs and actually talk to his ‘love’, and grotesques like Wing Biddlebaum and Enoch Robinson with the inability to convey their messages as desired. In my Winesburg, Ohio analysis paper, I suggested Anderson expressed in his novel that an open exchange was a necessity in order for a working communication to ensue. This idea can also be said to be present in “Prufrock”—Prufrock never really establishes a communication since it seems that he never does begin to talk to his ‘love’ before the poem ends.

Isolation is another connection between both of these works. All of the grotesque characters in Winesburg, Ohio seem to have a sort of seclusion, so in a way, Prufrock is also grotesque because he also feels alone and has trouble in societal settings like many of the people in Winesburg do.

Both stories also discuss age, and what it means to be young and old. However, Winesburg, Ohio and “Prufrock” (and by extension, Anderson and Eliot) seem to differ in their opinions over this. While Winesburg, Ohio is a coming-of-age story for George Williard and seems to associate youth with frivolity and naiveté and maturity with sophistication and wisdom, “Prufrock” seems to look fondly on youth because someone who is younger has more “time yet for a hundred indecisions,/ And for a hundred visions and revisions” than someone who is older. Prufrock wants to keep his youth despite knowing it is impossible while George Williard’s maturity is celebrated throughout the town.