Death

Elizabeth is a grotesque for a number of reasons, but mostly because of her failure of placing absolute faith in love. Throughout the book, Elizabeth is constantly searching for “true love,” which Dr. Reefy believes is wrong. He advises her by saying, “You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips in flamed and made tender by kisses.” However, through love Elizabeth is constantly looking for release, which is illustrated when Elizabeth nearly kills her horse as she, “wanted to run away from everything.” Thus, Elizabeth searches for love because she wants to find freedom through her lovers, Dr. Reefy and death. The eight hundred dollars is also symbolic of another aspect of grotesqueness. Although the father contends on his death bed, “even now I owe money to the bank,” he still manages to save eight hundred dollars for his daughter back in the early 1900s, which is a significant sum of money. Yet, Elizabeth’s father also sees right through the failure of Elizabeth’s marriage—“Don’t marry Tom Willard or anyone else here in Winesburg. There is eight hundred dollars in a tin box. Take it and go away.” Yet, Elizabeth does not follow her father’s commands, but does keep her promise to never tell Tom about the box. Still the box remains hidden following her death because Elizabeth was unable to reveal its hidden location to George. The box therefore symbolizes Elizabeth’s grotesque life on Earth. Even though her father suggests that the box could help her escape as an open door, it remains hidden and concealed, forgotten. Therefore, the door was never opened, the release never occurred until death itself happened which suggests that grotesqueness is something that can’t be escaped. The worn out steps also symbolize grotesqueness. At the beginning of “Death”, there is an ominous tone generated simply from the title that foreshadows there will be isolation and misery. The description of the environment, “Dr. Reefy’s office was but dimly lighted. At the head of the stairway hung a lamp with a dirty chimney that was fastened by a bracket to the wall. The lamp had a tin reflector, brown with rust and covered with dust,” emphasizes the isolation and emptiness because of the absence of any new furniture; everything is depicted as old and obsolete. Moreover, another significance of the beginning setting concerns the worn out steps. These steps are also symbolic of the lives of the grotesque, including those of Dr. Reefy’s and Elizabeth’s. The worn out steps represent Elizabeth’s erosion of her figure, “already the woman’s naturally tall figure had begun to droop and to drag itself listless about.” Moreover, the stairs also represent the restricted, narrow lives of both figures in addition to the routinized patterns they live their lives by.