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This chapter explores industrialization as an etiology of sexuality, charting how the compartmentalization of sexuality develops around sexual object choice. Taking a hint from scholars like John D’Emilio and Henry Abelove who understand economic forces to have an enormous impact on sexual life, this chapter examines industrialization’s transformation not just of the ways that we produce objects, but also how industrialization is imagined to invent sexual objects. More specifically, this chapter considers how Fordism was understood by Antonio Gramsci and Sherwood Anderson to standardize sexual object choice in order to create the hegemonic system of sexual orientation dominant in America and much of Europe. This chapter attends to the ways in which Anderson’s text Winesburg, Ohio (1919) both locates consumer and sexual objects at the center of modern fields of desire and imagines the inhabitants of the small Ohio town to enact nonindustrialized and nonstandardized sexual pleasures.

Chapter 3 examines Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a text that was written when managerial capitalism was in full emergence, and when the literary influence of the American sentimental novel seemed to be in full decline. In Winesburg, Ohio, what seems to be at first a full repudiation of the sentimental tradition becomes an appropriation of sentimental form. Even in a society where bodies appear to be isolated beyond resolve, the sentimental touch remains the only successful mode of communication. Anderson's deployment of the sentimental touch shows us that American modernism—despite its aspirations—is not a full rupture from the past. Indeed, the persistence of the sentimental trope in an unsentimental world signals the ossification of literary structure alongside the hardening of bureaucratic frameworks. The chapter argues that Anderson's use of an atavistic trope marks his vexed relationship with the pressures of managerialism.

This chapter examines the attitudes displayed and the choices made by George Willard, the protagonist in Sherwood Anderson's 1919 book Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life, as a reflection of the “generation gap” between the Progressive generation and the Gilded Age generation. It first analyzes the character of George Willard and places the town of Winesburg in context before turning to Anderson's depiction of the challenges inherent in the historical progression of a family economy model to one of sheltered childhood. It also explains how George Willard's story foregrounds the significance of adaptation to an evolving idea of childhood in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.