Analysis Of Elizabeth Willard's 'Grotesque'

Different from other mothers, Elizabeth Willard is obsessed with her secretive adventure—“kneeling upon the floor and listening for some sound” (Anderson, 1919) from her son George Willard’s room, but when sitting with him alone she often falls into an “awkward” reticence (Anderson, 1919). Moreover, far from an ordinary wife, she even plans to kill her husband Tom Willard, since he is in abnormal pursuit of “business success” (Anderson, 1919). Based on these peculiar behaviors, Elizabeth is often considered as a “grotesque” by both the people in the town and literary critics. Critics, like Regis Michaud, endeavor to explain Elizabeth’s grotesque psyche with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical terms including “fear of intimacy”, “the Oedipus complex”,
According to Marxism, “Commodification is the act of relating objects or persons in terms of their exchange value or sign-exchange value” (Tyson, 2006). Influenced by commodification, human interpersonal relationship rests more on people’s usefulness, rather than their natural emotions. For example, “Between Elizabeth and her one son George there was a deep unexpressed bond of sympathy, based on a girlhood dream that had long ago died” (Anderson, 1919). It reveals that Elizabeth’s intent of developing closeness with George is not out of her spontaneous sentiment, but because she wishes he could realize her dream. By contrast, when she suspects that Tom may persuade George to pursue something else, she says “I will act. There is something threatening my boy and I will ward it off” (Anderson, 1919). In this situation, she is afraid that Tom threats George’s dream, or her dream, which means Tom is useless to her, so she plans to kill him. Therefore, Elizabeth is not a grotesque by nature, but a tragedy pushed by the capitalist ideology of