Sexuality in Winesburg, Ohio

Have posted recently on the pervasive loneliness in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, which I'm reading in the Library of America Collected Stories edition - which meets the usual high standards for fine editing and presentation that has marked LoA for 25 years or so. One of the stories in Winesburg, in fact, is title Loneliness; any one of them could be. But another element throughout the stories, not as apparent to a contemporary reader, perhaps, is the sexuality. These stories by today's standard, of course, are pretty tepid, but by the standards of the 1920s, popular magazine fiction, they are downright "steamy," or at least very frank about sexual drives. In fact, sexual frustration and inhibition lies at the heart of the loneliness in almost every one of the stories. Not in particular the pair of stories about the Presbyterian minister married to a wealthy but frigid, very upright woman (daughter of a Cleveland underwear manufacturer, hm); from his study he begins to peer at a woman in the house across the way, as she lies on her bed and reads - he fantasizes about her bare neck and shoulders (as I said, very tepid by today's standards) and eventually her fantasies overwhelm him - it's hard to figure out exactly what he does, but among other things he punches through the stained-glass window that partially obstructs his view of her; in a companion story, the woman comes on to her former student (she's a high-school teacher), George Willard, the reporter and central character in these stories. He rebuffs her, but then lies in bed holding his pillow and thinking about her - or about someone. Almost all of the stories - of eccentrics, loners, alcoholics, killers - involve repressed sexual urges. Anderson takes on this theme much more directly than other writers of his time, and I imagine he faced a lot of criticism and some difficulties in publishing in the magazines of the day - in that he wrote about unwed mothers, prostitutes, domestic violence, obsession, fetishes - not topics for Ladies Home Journal or Saturday Evening Post. He created a vision of a small Midwestern town that upended all of the sentimentality and romanticism of popular convention and expectation, and even compared with other great writers of his era who wrote about the Midwest - Cather, an obvious point of comparison - his vision, though simpler and a bit crude, is more steeped in sexuality and much darker. It's obvious why a pervasive theme in Winesburg is the drive to "get out of town" and it's obvious why Anderson did so. You have to leave town to tell this story, and you can't go home again.