Example Of Repression And Desire In Winesburg, Ohio And Billy Budd, Sailor Essay

In many texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, authors wrestled with the issue of desire and repression within the rigid, almost Victorian American social structure. During this time, culture and humanity was changing and evolving in the west, and the turmoil that was occurring in the geopolitical, industrial and social landscape in America was something that authors were trying to understand. Although Melville, author of Billy Budd, Sailor was born before Anderson, they wrote their texts within twenty years of each other. Both texts became indicative of the emerging American style of storytelling and novel writing, and both text shared a number of important thematic ideas.
Billy Budd, Sailor and Winesburg, Ohio deal with a number of interesting and important themes that remain relevant to this day. The most important themes discussed throughout these two texts, however, are the themes of desire and repression. Desire and repression are two sides of the same coin in many ways; without desire, there can be no repression of that desire. Along with the repression-desire dyad comes a number of interesting connotations, as well; the competing ideas of desire and repression are the framework upon which the authors begin to build their texts.
In Wineburg, Ohio, the reader is treated to a number of stories that address the issue of desire and repression. However, there is a triad of stories—“Surrender,” “Terror,” and “A Man of Ideas”—which brings forth the idea of repression and desire most clearly. In “Surrender,” the author speaks about Louise Bentley, who is portrayed as an overly emotional woman, who often dreams of a life that is far better than the one she currently has (Anderson, 1960).
She is innocent but has strong desires, and wants to experience love more than anything else in the world; to experience this feeling, she leaves the safety of her family farm, and is seduced by a man (Anderson, 1960). The title of this particular section is prophetic; Louise surrenders to the seduction, and becomes the unhappy wife of John Hardy.
Louise’s desire—her desire to find love, and her desire to do so at any cost—is indicative of Anderson’s attitude towards women and their desires. Louise is repeatedly described as being overly emotional, and she acts upon whims that seem to come from nowhere. She cannot seem to make good decisions about the future of her life, and she does not even seem able to love her child once she is the wife of a man (Anderson, 1960). She is painfully unhappy in each of the situations that she finds herself in, even though she gets what she wants throughout the entire story. It seems that her repressive upbringing did little to curb her desires; instead, they made her desires so intense that she is unable to control them throughout the text (Anderson, 1960).
The next important issue that is brought up in this triad of stories is raised in the story “Terror.” “Terror” explores a man’s desire for God; the vast majority of the story takes place in the form of a Christian allegory, with the characters intermittently playing out the parts of Abraham, David, and Goliath. However, at the end of the story, the patriarch is attacked by his own son with a stone (Anderson, 1960).
The old man is so hungry for the approval of God that he is incapable of appreciating his children or his family. This is, essentially, Anderson’s (1960) theory on repression and desire; when repression and desire are not in balance, people are incapable of making good decisions. When an individual is too repressed—whether by religion or family—the fire of desire begins to burn out of control until they begin to act in ways that are both inappropriate and unpredictable (Anderson, 1960).
In “Departure,” another of the stories in Winesburg, Ohio, a young man named George goes on a quest to discover his own sexuality. George is a character that occurs in a number of stories, and Anderson (1960) begins to equate the character’s sexual desire with the character’s maturation as a man. Alternatively, the women that George meets, like Kate Swift, are portrayed as losing their minds and their path when they give into their sexual desires (Anderson, 1960). George’s story comes to its conclusion in “Sophistication,” where he and his future wife Helen exist together in the same spiritual space. It is this shared spiritual space that makes their sexual desire a positive quality for both of the characters (Anderson, 1960).
Desire also makes the characters in Billy Budd, Sailor blind to the many truths that surround them. Billy, the titular character, is blind to the character flaws in Claggart, because he wants so badly to see the best in the old man (Melville and Busch, 1996). Billy is innocent, and his only desires are to see good and to do good; other people in the novel take advantage of these desires, and turn them into something that can be manipulated (Bryant, 2009). Billy eventually pays for his desire to see the best in people with his life, and none of the other characters within the text are able to see this until it is too late to save Billy from certain death (Melville and Busch, 1996).
Captain Vere is a very interesting character, because he seems to represent Melville’s personification of the battle between repression and desire. Vere has a very keen understanding of both Billy and Claggart, and does not trust Claggart in the slightest (Melville and Busch, 1996). However, when Billy commits his act of mutiny against Claggart, Vere feels duty-bound to punish him, because the rules state that he must (Melville and Busch, 1996). Vere’s adherence to the rules, regardless of his desires to follow them represent what happens when the repression of one’s inner self overpowers the inner self’s desire to do the right thing in a situation, even if the “correct” thing to do is something that is outside the letter of the law (Melville and Busch, 1996).
Women are largely absent in both Anderson (1960) and Melville’s (1986) works. Both authors are very concerned with the relationships that men have with one another. One of the reasons that this is the case is because during this time, women were largely seen as lesser beings; they were not as complex nor as important as men, and both of these works were probably intended for male audiences. The women that do appear in Anderson’s (1960) work are driven entirely by emotion and their emotional desires, and have no ability to act in any kind of logical manner (Anderson, 1960).
Women like Louise in Anderson’s (1960) text are tools that are used to move the plot forward. Because neither of these men likely saw women as particularly interesting or important on a daily basis, it seems unlikely that they would be concerned with writing women as anything but plot tools and objects for the movement of action; this becomes apparent the more Anderson (1960) introduces women into his text. Women also serve as a cautionary tale for Anderson (1960), as though he uses them to demonstrate to his male characters what happens when emotion and desire are not properly controlled (Anderson, 1960).
Alternatively, Melville (1986) never even introduces any female characters; his text is entirely concerned with the relationships that men have with each other (Melville and Busch, 1986). Melville’s engagement with male relationships takes on an almost homoerotic approach to the male relationship. Billy’s relationship with all the other men aboard the ship is not entirely what could be described as platonic (Milder, 1989). Male relationships in both texts are considered more important and more impactful than the relationships between men and women; for the most part, the heterosexual relationships that are shown throughout the texts are both vague and flat, whereas the male relationships are shown to be vibrant and complex.
Although there are a plethora of details that are contained in both Billy Budd, Sailor and Winesburg, Ohio that deal with many different thematic issues, one of the primary issues that is discussed throughout both texts is the importance of balance between desire and repression. Although desires cannot always be indulged, when they are repressed for too long, they become problematic for the individual. People who are too keen to repress their desires may find that those very same desires are expressed in odd or unusual ways. Religion has an interesting way of intersecting with desire and repression.

References

Anderson, S. (1960). Winesburg, Ohio. New York: Viking Press.
Bryant, J. (2009). Melville Cosmopolite: The Future of the Melville Text. Leviathan, 11(1), 119-132. doi:10.1111/j.1750-1849.2009.01265.x
Melville, H., & Busch, F. (1986). Billy Budd, sailor and other stories. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin Books.
Milder, R. (1989). Critical essays on Melville's Billy Budd, sailor. Boston: G.K. Hall.