The Woman in the Man: Male Modernism and Cross-Gender Identification in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

This article argues that in Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson depicts a style of artistic masculinity that challenges the dominant gender norms in the early twentieth century, those that shaped literary modernism in the United States and the aesthetic criteria by which Anderson's late critics judged the merit of his work. The author claims that Anderson conceptualizes this form of masculinity as enabled by an identificatory connection to women that anticipates contemporary feminist psychoanalytic models of inter-subjectivity and that refuses the misogyny and homophobia that frequently surfaces in portrayals of non-normative masculinity by canonical modernists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner.