123
Stein, Gender, Isolation, and Industrialism:
New Readings of Winesburg, Ohio
Written 1992-1996 by Duane Simolke, Ph.D.
Copyright 1996 Duane Simolke, Ph.D.
Smashwords Edition, Published by Smashwords, 2009.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes:
This free ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Please do not sell it or alter it. If you would like to share this book with other people, please ask them to download it at the place where you downloaded it. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.
The paperback edition of this book is available via many online bookstores, at the suggested retail price of just $8.95.
Dr. Simolke wrote this book as his doctoral dissertation and wishes to thank his dissertation committee: Dr. Bryce Conrad (dissertation chair), Dr. Jill Patterson, and Dr. Douglas Crowell. Find more Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein resources at DuaneSimolke.Com.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CH. I INTRODUCTION
CH. II ANDERSON AND STEIN: SYMBIOSIS
CH. III TEACHERS GROPING IN THE DARK
CH. IV MEN AND WOMEN
CH. V “MORE THAN MAN OR WOMAN”
CH. VI INDUSTRIALISM: THE MACHINE IN THE BERRY FIELD
CH. VII CONCLUSION: CLOSING THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Any biographical details of Sherwood Anderson’s life will prove tricky. Sounding a bit too much like Huck Finn, he always took great joy in re-creating himself and everyone around him, then bragging about the distortion. Anyone who reads his letters, diaries, and supposed autobiographies will find constant contradictions, all further contradicted by what his acquaintances say about him.
However, relying on Anderson scholars like David D. Anderson, Cleveland Chase, and Irving Howe, we can find agreement on some basic facts. In Camden, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson was born September 13, 1876, to Irwin and Emma Anderson, who already had a son and a daughter. Three more sons came after Sherwood. Irwin drank heavily, and though he charmed everyone with his story-telling, he often failed to maintain a stable home for his family. Emma kept the family together and inspired her children to, in Sherwood’s words, “see beneath the surface of life.”
In 1884, after moving around between Ohio towns, the family settled in Clyde, Ohio, which became the model for Winesburg. As he grew toward manhood, Anderson’s penchant for money-making earned him the nickname “Jobby.” As I will explain in Chapter VI, Clyde became increasingly industrialized over the next few years. In 1895, at age 19, Anderson enlisted in the Ohio National Guard, shortly before his mother’s death. Four years later, he enrolled in Ohio’s Wittenberg Academy. After graduating in 1900, he moved to Chicago, where he would write and sell advertising copy.
The first of his four marriages occurred in 1904; his first wife, Cornelia Lane, would give him all three of his children, and the family would frequently move around. In 1907, he became president of a paint factory in Elyria, Ohio. In 1912, he suffered a nervous breakdown, which he later characterized as a mere fluke used to help him escape the paint factory and begin writing full time. He moved back to Chicago the following year, where he wrote fiction prolifically while also working for an advertising agency. Over the next several years, he became known as part of the Chicago literary renaissance and an avid socialite.
In 1915, Anderson divorced Cornelia, leaving her with the children, and began dating artist Tennessee Mitchell, the former mistress of poet Edgar Lee Masters. Spoon River Anthology, the only successful book Masters would ever write, emerged that year. Perhaps not coincidentally, Anderson began writing character sketches set in a fictional small town, this one called “Winesburg.” Anderson would, varyingly, claim to have not read Spoon River when he wrote Winesburg or to have read it in a single night and loved it. As John H. and Margaret Wrenn explain in their essay “‘T.M.’: The Forgotten Muse of Sherwood Anderson and Edgar Lee Masters,” if Anderson avoided the influence of Masters from his fellow socialites, he could not have avoided it from Mitchell. Still, he often maligned the book, perhaps to escape the anxiety of influence. Of course, one cannot help but recognize the simple fact that jealousy probably added to that anxiety of influence, considering that Anderson found himself compared to Mitchell’s former lover.
Anderson and Mitchell married in 1916, the same year of Anderson’s first novel publication, Windy McPherson’s Son. His first two novels, Talbot Whittingham and Mary Cochran, never saw publication in their entirety. Besides his essays, plays, short stories, poems, and pseudo-autobiographies, he also completed several other novels over the years: Marching Men (1917), Poor White (1921), Many Marriages (1923), Dark Laughter (1924), Kit Brandon (1936). Still, his reputation mostly rests on Winesburg, Ohio, the subject of this dissertation. In 1919, after most of the stories had appeared separately in various little magazines, Anderson released the story cycle Winesburg, Ohio, creating a frenzy of critical applause and moral outrage, but I will return to that shortly.
In 1922, Anderson left Chicago, the advertising agency, and Tennessee Mitchell, then met Elizabeth Prall in New York. They married soon afterwards. In 1927, Anderson bought two newspapers; never financially secure as a writer, he often but begrudgingly relied on lectures, newspapers, and other sources of income throughout his life.
In 1929, he separated from Elizabeth. The following year, he met activist Eleanor Copenhaver and helped her champion mistreated mill workers. In 1933, he married Eleanor; he remained intensely in love with her the rest of his life. In his diary and letters, he refers to her as “E” and complains about missing her whenever they part for the slightest amount of time. In 1941, while involved in social activism in South America, Anderson died of peritonitis, survived by Eleanor and the children of his first marriage.
Besides Eleanor, his closest friends included the novelist Theodore Dreiser, whom he idolized, as well as the editors he began corresponding with while trying to get the Winesburg stories published in magazines: Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and especially Paul Rosenfeld. Along with his noteworthiness as the first person to receive the prestigious Dial award, and his many accomplishments as a writer, Anderson also holds the honor of playing an early role in the careers of many upcoming writers, including William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Sadly, both of those novelists ended their friendship with Anderson by satirizing him in books released in 1926: Faulkner’s Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles and Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring. However, most biographies of Faulkner and Hemingway will give details about their relationship with Anderson; I want to focus more on a few of the literary and cultural influences that informed Anderson’s writing of Winesburg, Ohio, while also providing close readings of that book.
As for his political and religious views, Anderson considered himself a liberal Democrat, and he treasured the poetic language of the King James Bible; however, he never liked anyone to identify him with organized religion or any trendy political movements. No doubt, many of his readers take offense at what he wrote within one of his diary entries, but no statement could clarify his world view more succinctly: “Christianity is like communism, it would be all right but for the Christians” (336). In other words, he cared about the individuals that religious, political, and other movements wanted to help, but he found himself at odds with the individuals within the movements themselves. He cared about the condition of women, but never saw himself as a feminist. He took interest in workers, but examined then rejected communism. He wrote about sex as a prime mover, but discouraged critics from placing him within the Freudian school--or any other school, for that matter. He liked for critics to relate him to particular writers, but not to place him or his work into neat little categories.
While avoiding categorization, we can place Anderson with dozens of writers and within dozens of movements, but that would take dozens of volumes. For my dissertation, I decided to focus on his greatest book and some of the traditions in which we can place it. In the chapters ahead, I will offer various readings of Winesburg, Ohio, as a work of great social and literary worth, examining Anderson’s fascination with gender roles, sexual frustration, isolation, and the threat of mechanization. As Gertrude Stein seems to affect him more than any other writer—and he her—I devote the following chapter to that relationship.
CHAPTER II
ANDERSON AND STEIN: SYMBIOSIS
As I begin to reevaluate the place of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio in the development of American fiction, I first want to look at Anderson’s symbiotic relationship with Gertrude Stein, a relationship most Stein devotees will know about through her The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein pretends to write as her lover, Alice. Anyone interested in Stein or Anderson should also read Sherwood Anderson/Gertrude Stein, edited by Ray Lewis White. This book features chronological excerpts from their letters to each other and from their published comments about each other.
Anderson apparently came to love Stein through some of her portraits and through her 1909 book Three Lives. Stein generated considerable controversy with Lives, a controversy she would sustain with her subsequent works. In writing about the critical reactions to her prose, she sounds as frustrated as Anderson often felt, and much of what she says about her frustration could apply to Anderson, who appears prominently and constantly in literary anthologies and literary history books, yet continues to receive the label “marginal.” Stein says the newspapers claim “that my writing is appalling but they always quote it and what is more, they quote it correctly, and those they say they admire they do not quote” (Alice 70). The newspapers, however, reflected the general public, who found Stein’s work fascinating and repulsive.
Unlike the response to Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, which appeared a decade after Three Lives, critical objections to Stein’s work focused on its form rather than its content. Stein experimented radically with syntax, punctuation, and narrative form. In “The Work of Gertrude Stein” (1922), Anderson says he learned about her 1914 book Tender Buttons through his brother, and he shared his brother’s enthusiasm for Stein’s experimentation with words, her emphasizing of each word’s importance (White 14). Before beginning my studies of Winesburg, I want to look at Stein and at the relationship between Stein and Anderson, a relationship that helped define the face of American literature in the twentieth century. It began when Anderson introduced himself to Sylvia Beach, a bookstore owner in Paris, and she offered to introduce Anderson to Stein. Using the voice of Alice B. Toklas, Stein writes lovingly about their first meeting:
Gertrude Stein was moved and pleased as she had rarely been. Gertrude Stein was in those days a little bitter, all her unpublished manuscripts, and no hope of publication or serious recognition. Sherwood Anderson came and quite simply and directly as is his way told her what he thought of her work and what it meant to him in his development. He told it to her then and what was even rarer he told it in print immediately after. Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson have always been the best of friends but I do not believe even he realizes how much his visit meant to her. (197)
Just how much the visit meant soon became obvious, and she spoke of him as highly as he spoke of her.
In 1935, she wrote and published “Idem The Same,” a valentine about Anderson. The valentine includes a reference to Anderson as sweet fruit, a comparison she would often make, and one she finally explains in “Sherwood’s Sweetness” (1941), her epitaph to him: “in New Orleans when he came into the room he had a bag of oranges, twenty-five for twenty-five cents, and he and we ate all the twenty-five oranges; they were orange sweet” (White 114). Somehow, the simplicity and pleasure of that moment personified Anderson for her. She always saw him as the great but humble man who helped foster twentieth-century American literature.
In a letter written to him in August 1926, Stein praises Sherwood Anderson’s Notebook, including his portrait of David, a character he apparently based on his former drinking companion, William Faulkner; she told Anderson, “some day Sherwood you must write a novel that is just one portrait and nobody else’s feelings coming in” (White 56). Her review of Puzzled America, Anderson’s 1935 collection of essays about the depression, compares him to Mark Twain in his ability to capture the paradoxes and personalities of America’s people. In a letter written to Anderson in April 1935, she praises Puzzled America again, saying, “your writing is progressively getting more power and more simplicity” (White 95).
Why would she consider increasing simplicity power? I think she saw Anderson’s work as containing a sharp use of language that needed little elaboration, just as her work uses simple words in the most complex ways. She seemed to see this easy reading as Anderson’s strength, as something he gained from Twain—not shallowness, but something profound with a simple surface. That holds true not just for Anderson’s writing but for his personality as well: he portrayed himself as the irresponsible but lovable country-bumpkin story-teller; that image might fit his father as well as Anderson himself, but he obviously held deep insight into both literary technique and human nature.
Besides encouraging his sharp use of language and his tendency to create portraits rather than stories, Stein’s advice to him often addresses sentences. In a 1925 letter, she tells him that her book The Making of Americans includes “some pretty wonderful sentences in it and we know how fond we both are of sentences” (White 49). Like her claim about power and simplicity, this statement speaks volumes about the writing styles of Stein and Anderson. They would create sentences they considered wonderful, then spend the rest of the story, novel, or essay experimenting with variations on those sentences—constantly returning to and adapting them. When they liked the way a sentence sounded or the connotations it evoked, they would rework it exhaustively. If we removed all the repetitions from Winesburg or Lives, the deletions would leave us with two rather thin, disjointed volumes.
Anderson appropriated that use of repetition after falling in love with the Three Lives story “Melanctha.” In fact, no other work seems to germinate Winesburg more than “Melanctha.” In a 1924 letter, Anderson remembers his initial reactions to that story, the first Stein work he read: “Why it hasn’t been included in some of the lists of great short stories I don’t know” (White 39). In fact, Anderson helped Stein achieve much of her reputation by simply challenging people to give her work a chance, by explaining how she champions the beauty of words, and by writing an introduction to her 1922 collection Geographies and Plays. In “The Work of Gertrude Stein,” Anderson praises her decision not to seek fame or acceptance, but to “go live among little housekeeping words, the swaggering bullying street-corner words, and all the other forgotten and neglected citizens of the sacred and half forgotten city” (White 17). Also, in his 1934 essay “Gertrude Stein,” Anderson calls her “a releaser of talent” and “a pathfinder” who “dared, in the face of ridicule and misunderstanding, to try to awaken in all of us who write a new feeling for words” (White 83). In his “Four American Impressions” (1922), Anderson sees Stein as a cook in a kitchen who finds new flavors in words (White 25-27). She works slowly and deliberately, and he takes great interest in her work. Her cooking in “Melanctha” would forever alter his approach to writing. This love for language typifies both “Melanctha” and Winesburg.
A love of character also typifies both works. In Lives, Stein offers expanded sketches of individual characters—not their life stories but simply stories of their lives, stories that illustrate how it feels to be those three women. Stein experiments with a non-linear form, which she calls a “continuous present” (“Composition” 498). To understand the continuous present and the impact of Stein on Anderson, we must first consider the life of Gertrude Stein and the life of the fictional Melanctha Herbert. In college, Stein took three classes taught by the psychologist William James, who introduced her to concepts such as what he called “stream of consciousness.” In the first class, he worked with two other teachers and used his Principles of Psychology (1890) as his text, a book whose theories permeate Stein’s early fiction. He later convinced Stein to attend medical school, as she hoped for a career in psychology, but she soon lost interest in it. They corresponded until he died in 1910, just after James had sent her an acknowledgment of how much he enjoyed Three Lives.
Of her many borrowings from James, we can probably benefit most by first considering his “Five Characters In Thought,” from Principles of Psychology:
1. Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness.
2. Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing.
3. Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous.
4. It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself.
5. It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects—chooses from among them, in a word—all the while. (49)
According to James, our perceptions of individual activities and events change over time, and we wonder how we once treasured something we now detest or ignored something we now consider paramount. Even past events receive constant new interpretations, as we grow and continually look back through new lenses: “Experience is remolding us every moment, and our mental reaction on every given thing is really a resultant of our experience of the whole world up to that date” (49). He even finds change within how we perceive and choose which objects and events we consider important; those foci come either from the present or from past events that inform our consciousness in the present.
Exactly how much these teachings affected Stein will seem obvious shortly, and we will also see how she served as a conduit between James and Anderson. Her involvement with James also included an elaborate experiment, which she explains in her 1935 essay “How Writing Is Written.” The experiment involved what and how people write in various situations; rather than learning so much about their writing, she learned of “a certain kind of human being who acted in a certain kind of way, and another kind who acted in another kind of way, and their resemblances and differences” (156). From there, she became interested in those similarities and differences, both in people and in moments. Her supposed use of constant repetition grew naturally from this interest in what she actually saw as repetition with variation, what James would call “consciousness.” She uses the example of someone telling a story to one person then to another, changing the details ever so slightly with each re-telling, letting one’s perspective change with each attempt to articulate what happened (158). That metaphor leads into another one that can help us understand how to read “Melanctha,” including the arguments between the two main characters.
All my early work was a careful listening to all the people telling their story, and I conceived the idea which is, funnily enough, the same as the idea of the cinema. The cinema goes on the same principle: each picture is just infinitesimally different from the one before. If you listen carefully, you say something, the other person says something; but each time it changes just a little, until finally you come to the point where you convince him or you don’t convince him. (158-59)
Though she followed in James’s theoretical footsteps, she dropped out of medical school and soon expatriated. As I will show in Chapter III, the teachers of Winesburg seem like dislocated centers—living outside the community they try so desperately to impact. We could say the same about Gertrude Stein. Though a uniquely American writer who championed American ambition and fostered many other American writers, she lived in France, which meant not needing to hide her lesbianism or her feminist views—neither of which would have received a warm welcome in early-twentieth century America. It also meant neither needed explanation, apology, or discussion. She lived the better part of her life with Alice B. Toklas. However, even in France, she used the innocuous term “companion” in place of “lover.” At any rate, the two women obviously loved each other dearly, and that love included a romantic, sexual relationship. Furthermore, she and Toklas hardly isolated themselves in France. Stein’s brother collected paintings by emerging artists, and introduced many of those artists to Stein. Those painters, especially Matisse, influenced her focus on character and spatiality. Like Anderson in Chicago, Stein found herself in the center of a constantly changing and energetic circle of writers, painters, philosophers, and critics.
Stein’s “Melanctha” provided the catalyst for bringing Anderson’s orbit into her system. This almost-plotless tale follows an African American woman who, preoccupied by a best friend raised in the white world and a doctor guided by traditional philosophies of black self-improvement, tries to avoid introspection about her life of continual wandering and desiring. Of course, form dominates “Melanctha” more than anything else.
To help readers understand the structure of her work, Stein explains her techniques in her lecture “Composition As Explanation.” The same lecture introduces readers to her terms “prolonged present,” “continuous present,” “beginning again and again,” “insistence,” and “using everything,” terms that constantly suggest the influence of James’s principles of thought. I will continue to use those terms throughout my studies of Stein and Anderson, so it will help to look at what Stein apparently means by them, no matter how difficult her language might seem. She says that in writing “Melanctha,”
there was a constant recurring and beginning there was a marked direction in the direction of being in the present although naturally I had been accustomed to past present and future, and why, because the composition forming around me was a prolonged present. A composition of a prolonged present is a natural composition. . . . I created then a prolonged present naturally I knew nothing of a continuous present but it came naturally to me to make one, it was simple it was clear to me and nobody knew why it was done like that, and I did not myself although naturally to me it was natural. (Composition 498)
From there, Stein says she began to see that a series of repeating events and phrases seems to occur in the past, present, and future of an individual, defining that individual. Therefore, she tried situating that person in a continuous present, with the phrases and events that keep imposing themselves on that person. All changes seem subtly muted, because of the echoing similarities, but those changes occur as part of the similarities: the repetitions occur in constantly new variations.
If she shows us one picture a thousand times, she will let us see it from a thousand different angles; therefore, we actually “see” different things, revisiting the object on different levels of consciousness. She tried “using everything,” so she could fully explore every angle, every detail, every nuance (500). Besides her metaphors about a retold story and the cinema, we might compare her to a detective constantly going back over a crime scene and constantly replaying testimonies, always finding something new, always experimenting with new perspectives, always discovering—though the crime scene and the actual events remain the same. Stein apparently saw herself not as creating something bizarre but as creating something natural, something closer to the natural rhythms of thought, speech, and life than the artificial formulas of the fiction she usually read; in essence, she wanted to create what she saw in life, through an approach that reflects how people absorb events, reactions, etc., into their consciousness.
The “direction” to which she refers in the passage above should not evoke the usual paradigm of a story moving from balance to imbalance to crisis to resolution. The direction moves instead ever deeper into consciousness. That means moving backward and forward in time, constantly repeating, to get at the complete expression of the moment, the now. The work might or might not use a certain amount of linear movement. More importantly, its main direction involves, to paraphrase a Winesburg citizen, getting at what the characters think, not just what they say. Getting there involves admitting a frustration with language and other human interactions; it also involves a constantly varied repetition of both—a constant rehearsal for the moment of successful contact. In bringing all of these elements into her work, Stein succeeds at creating a sense of consciousness within a work of fiction.
Unfortunately, most of her contemporaries neither saw nor wanted to see her accomplishments, and the literary establishment worked hard for the next few decades to block her from the literary canon. In “Gertrude Stein and the Modernist Canon,” Marianne DeKoven claims that the establishment sought to marginalize Stein because they preferred not to acknowledge the literary innovations of a woman, especially not a gay woman (11-12). According to DeKoven, some critics even went so far as to suggest Stein coerced Anderson and other men into liking her work. Anyone who reads Anderson’s writings to and about Stein can see that he needed no coercion to stand in awe of her accomplishments: her reclaiming of language and restructuring of narrative.
In drawing attention to those accomplishments, Carolyn Faunce Copeland explains Stein’s narrative ability of picking up the speech patterns of characters (22). Copeland says Gustave Flaubert’s narrative techniques greatly influenced Three Lives, as Stein had been impressed with those techniques while translating Flaubert’s Trois Contes. However, she clarifies that Stein uses a much less distant narrator than Flaubert, one who can adapt to the individual character, one who
enters the minds of her characters without appearing to do so. In fact, she is not, strictly speaking, inside their minds; but her narrator picks up their speech patterns and rhythms—thereby ‘sounding’ like the characters themselves. (22-3)
While Flaubert works to give the narrator and the characters separate voices from each other, the narrator of “Melanctha” seems to blend with the fabrics of Melanctha, Jeff, and Rose, making the narrative voice sound much like the dialogue or thought patterns of those characters. Though never using first-person, the narrator still seems to become the particular characters in certain ways.
For example, the narrator uses a slow, steady pace that relies on circumlocution whenever focusing on Dr. Jeff Campbell, who relies on circumlocution; also, the slow evolution of the repeated phrases reflects the hesitance of Jeff and Melanctha toward each other, as they come closer to touching (Copeland 31). Sitting on the stairs while her mother is dying, Jeff and Melanctha keep repeating themselves, with slight variations, slowly but cautiously revealing their interest in each other. Just as the sentences take many repetitions to become only slightly different, it takes Jeff and Melanctha many attempts to move only slightly closer together—ten pages of seemingly unchanging narrative. However, the sentences and the situation both develop.
Continuing her point about the narrator’s appropriating a character’s voice, Copeland quotes a passage from “Melanctha,” which shows Jeff lying in bed thinking about a disagreement with Melanctha (Lives 178). According to Copeland, Stein makes the narrative seem more natural by using Jeff’s language:
Her use of the gerunds ‘his thinking,’ and ‘any sleeping,’ echoes Jeff’s use of the present participle in his thoughts. The narrator blends with Jeff again in the phrase, ‘and it all came clear to him.’ Strictly speaking, that phrase is not standard English; but it is the English that Jeff speaks. (32)
Stein allows the narrator—and the reader—to get below the surface of the story, into what the characters think and feel, by weaving their thought patterns into the narrative.
To distinguish Melanctha from Jeff, and to show their opposing views, the narrator constantly refers to Melanctha’s “always wanting new things just to get excited” (Lives 119). Like most of the characters in Winesburg, she lives her life desiring something inexpressible, and wanting to go on desiring. As Lisa Ruddick illustrates in her book Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis, Jeff wants to know through watching people, while Melanctha wants to know through random and exciting experiences. Both consider their way of knowing superior; however, Ruddick clarifies, the “question endlessly debated by Jeff and Melanctha is whether life is to consist of ‘excitements’ cultivated for their own sake or whether it should be directed toward broader ends” (17). Jeff and Melanctha keep moving in circular repetitions while trying to both meet their individual needs and win the on-going argument with the other person. That circular motion, of course, feeds into the words of the narrator, who seems sympathetic toward both characters but mostly interested in Melanctha.
The narrator describes her as “always losing what she had in wanting all the things she saw” (89). Like many of the women in Winesburg, Melanctha sometimes takes sudden risks to fulfill her desires, but then regrets those risks. In fact, though the setting differs, Melanctha’s wandering and desiring sounds like that of many Winesburg characters: she keeps going to the railroad yards, hoping to find something, not knowing what. The fall of darkness gives her more courage, and she sometimes lets the men in the railroad yard go further than merely flirting. Later, she wonders why she goes there. Jeff seems to refer to such behavior when he criticizes other African Americans for always looking for ways “to get excited” and for not being good (119). Melanctha points out that Jeff never even goes to church, but he counters that he sees church as a necessary safeguard for most blacks, an alternative to getting into trouble; of course, he sees himself as an exception. After their long talk on the steps, Melanctha excuses herself to go lie down, leaving Jeff there to ponder his realization that he feels something deeper for Melanctha than all the people who find him interesting but only briefly keep him amused. In this sense, Melanctha and Jeff both live in a constantly unfulfilled state of desire.
A relationship slowly blossoms, but then they begin to grow apart, as their failure to communicate goes from a challenge to a source of annoyance. Notice how the repetition of the word “always” emphasizes the relentless nature of their frustration:
It was a struggle, sure to be going on always between them. It was a struggle that was as sure always to be going on between them, as their minds and hearts always were to have different ways of working. (153)
The difference between how men and women think and feel seems to erect a barrier, keeping them from understanding each other. We will encounter this same frustration repeatedly during my remaining chapters, as I look at some of the Winesburg citizens Melanctha apparently inspired.
The narrator’s portrayal of Jeff also seems to affect many of Winesburg’s citizens. For example, like George Willard, he begins to see the difficulty of knowing what other people think and feel—who they really are and what they really want. If he cannot even decide what he wants for himself, how can he grasp someone else’s desire? Jeff admits to himself that he cannot understand himself or Melanctha, nor can he understand what they want from each other, just as Winesburg citizens like the teacher Kate Swift and her student George Willard never quite know what to say to each other or what they want from each other. That comparison seems especially apropos here, because, in his frustration, Jeff half-mockingly frames their relationship as student/teacher, though they actually learn from each other: “‘I sure am a good boy to be learning all the time the right way you are teaching me’” (160). Continuing with the same metaphor, he calls himself “‘a good scholar’” who is “‘never playing hooky ever’” from his teacher.
As in Winesburg, the teacher/student relationship often goes awry. In the case of Jeff and Melanctha, both learn as much as they can from each other then grow bored. Worse yet, their sense of direction thwarts their connection: his life goes forward while his language goes in circles; Melanctha lives in circles but demands straight-forward language. In her unhappiness and restlessness, Melanctha begins to think she can no longer stand their discussions or his verbiage. In the following passage, his repetition of “always now” builds on the repetition of “always” I mentioned earlier, and it brings out his frustration with the rut they fall into, though he cares about her. He fears telling her his feelings, because they will argue. She expects him to always act a certain way and talk unequivocally, though he prefers to be in charge and to talk in circles:
Always Jeff felt now in himself, deep feelings.
Always now Jeff had to go so much faster than was real with his feeling. Yet always Jeff knew now he had a right, strong feeling. Always now when Jeff was wondering, it was Melanctha he was doubting, in the loving. . . .
Always now Jeff felt in himself, deep loving. Always now he did not really know, if Melanctha was true in her loving. . . .
Always now he liked it better when he was detained when he had to go and see her. Always now he never liked to go to be with her, although he never wanted really, not to be always with her. Always now he never felt really at ease with her, even when they were really good friends together. Always now he felt, with her, he could not be really honest to her. (165)
This fear of staying together and fear of letting go resolves itself when Melanctha returns to her wandering, and Rose returns to the center of her life. Melanctha never comes to understand her desiring and wandering, though she keeps finding new people to “get excited” with and new distractions to keep her mind occupied. She feels trapped in a man’s world, a strong black woman in a system that prefers silent white women, but never quite articulates those feelings. Instead, she just keeps wandering and wanting not to wander. She knows she wants something more, but not how to obtain it or even recognize it.
In Winesburg, Louise Bentley’s story echoes Melanctha’s desire for understanding, learning, and communicating, as well as Melanctha’s feeling of being trapped in a man’s world. In this story and throughout Winesburg, Anderson appropriates much from Lives, including Stein’s use of what she alternately refers to as the “prolonged” or “continuous” present. Louise echoes Melanctha in other ways as well, as I will show after considering her story.
The following explication relies on chronological order, unlike the narrator’s telling of the story. Most short stories take place in chronological order, within a short span of time—possibly including a brief flashback or a framing flashforward, but mostly limiting themselves to a few scenes that take place over a few days or weeks. If we follow Anderson’s Steinien experimentation with time, we find a different order. First of all, it works as part of a story cycle that occurs within a larger story cycle, so it blurs the traditional sense of a short story as an independent and isolated work. Bravely assuming the story “Godliness III” begins where “Godliness II” ends, we see that “Godliness III” opens with Louise as a middle-aged woman who recently let her son go live with her father; I make that assumption because the narrator begins by referring to Louise as living with John, but not with their child.
With that in mind, we can establish the following time structure for “Godliness III: Surrender”: (1) a middle-aged Louise; (2) looping back to her early childhood; (3) Louise as a fifteen-year-old; (4) one evening, shortly after her arrival at the Hardy home; (5) some time within two months after her arrival; (6) one evening that winter; (7) the next day; (8) the next evening; (9) several days later; (10) two or three weeks later; (11) looping back to the Friday before the scene I mention as #10; (12) whenever Louise and John Hardy become lovers (no definite time lapse given); (13) a few months later, when they marry; (14) a few more months later; (15) the first few months after their child’s birth. The story never returns to the latest time-frame, the time with which it begins: the closing scene happens years before the opening scene. Anderson’s use of time here warrants attention not only because the narrative order shifts around like consciousness (i.e., like Stein’s narrative) but also because it epitomizes the “everything is now” approach of “Melanctha” and Winesburg, the continuous present.
As with many of Winesburg’s other citizens, we can relate Louise Bentley to learning and communicating, partially because of her love for books and studies, which, ironically, isolates her. The narrator tells us that “The story of Louise Bentley. . . is a story of misunderstanding” (87). Furthermore, he sees Louise, like many of his other characters, as another job for the poet, another soul he cannot understand but can only try to understand by writing about her: “Before such women as Louise can be understood and their lives made livable, much will have to be done. Thoughtful books will have to be written and thoughtful lives lived by people about them.”
At age fifteen, Louise leaves her widowed father to live in Winesburg, with Albert Hardy’s family, so she can go to Winesburg High School. She wants to better herself, to make an education possible. Albert lives with his son, John, and two daughters, Mary and Harriet. Louise and John will later become lovers, but Mary and Harriet despise her, responding jealously to her success in school. Albert, a member of Winesburg’s board of education, keeps telling his daughters about the need for books and learning, using Louise’s studiousness as an example they should follow. He thinks an education would have made his life easier, and he knows his two daughters will need an extra edge to survive. Harriet replies, “‘I hate books and I hate anyone who likes books’” (88).
The narrator links Louise to books, then shows Harriet’s rejection of books. He says we need to read books to understand Louise, then makes it clear that the Hardy sisters want neither to read books nor to understand her; thus, she remains isolated, a book left on a shelf. Besides, Louise’s education fails to help her with human interaction, her most immediate need. As I will discuss in Chapter III, the teacher Kate Swift worries that George Willard will write without looking beneath the surface of lives, thus finding nothing substantial to say when he writes; Louise embodies Kate’s concern in that she reads and writes without living, loving, questioning, or being heard. She never sees beneath the surface of her own life, much less anyone else’s.
As noted above, Louise’s studious nature leads to acknowledgment and acceptance from Albert Hardy. Though she never seems to notice his compliments, they make the other two girls envious. Louise even starts going back to the loneliness of the isolated farm during the weekends, to escape the loneliness of a crowded house and town. Realizing Mary and Harriet will never accept her, she begins to think of making friends with John and catches herself watching him. Like Melanctha, who gives up her wandering for the black patriarch Jeff Campbell, Louise turns to a patriarchal figure for safety, even if he can offer her nothing else.
Louise’s longing for acceptance from the young man seems to spring, at least in part, from the way her father rejects her. In “Godliness I,” Jesse wants a son to help him carry out God’s will, a son he will name David. Given Jesse’s obsession with the Bible and with biblical names, even Louise’s name suggests Jesse’s rejection of her, in that the name Louise never appears in the Bible. Maybe Jesse rejects her because he assumes a woman cannot serve a divine purpose, other than bearing a child; Jesse treats his wife poorly, and she then fails to show love to Louise. Whatever the limited connection between Jesse and Louise, she will later name her male child David, in accordance with the wishes of a father who never grants her wish for love.
With no template for the expression of love, Louise’s attempts at contact manifest themselves in surprising and absurd ways. She acts as desperately as Melanctha in her desire for something she cannot articulate. Though she never acts out her mental wandering sexually, as Melanctha does, she still manages to put herself into unexpected situations.
At one point, she impulsively projects her amorphous desire for John onto the farm hand who brings her home during the weekends. In one of the book’s most comical moments, he ignores her advances, so she leaves him on the side of the road. However, that angry reaction happens after we learn the depths of Louise’s bafflement; the desolation of her childhood mixes with a new loneliness, and she tells the “frightened” boy, “I hate everyone. . . . I hate father and old man Hardy, too. . . . I get my lessons there in the school in town but I hate that also” (95). The Steinien echoing here sounds like Harriet’s hate dialogue, which Louise integrates into her consciousness of her situation. It links the characters together, unifying them while ironically emphasizing their isolation; after all, if the characters fully recognized each other’s isolation, they would probably understand how to destroy those barriers or at least how to accept them as simply a part of human existence.
Louise wants contact, a shared quality of some sort. Like Melanctha’s relationship with Jeff, Louise’s relationship with John keeps bringing the two young people near contact, understanding, but they never quite reach it:
The mind of the country girl became filled with the idea of drawing close to the young man. She thought that in him might be found the quality she had all her life been seeking in people. It seemed to her that between herself and all other people in the world, a wall had been built up and that she was living just on the edge of some warm inner circle of life that must be quite open and understanding to others. (91)
That passage uses the book’s pervasive metaphor of the walls between the characters, but the more Louise explores her feelings, the more those feelings move from mystery to status quo:
The age-old woman’s desire to be possessed had taken possession of her, but so vague was her notion of life that it seemed to her just the touch of John Hardy’s hand upon her own hand would satisfy. (94)
That sentence contains many of the words the narrator uses for repetition throughout Winesburg: desire, vague, notion, touch, hand; she suddenly resigns herself to Winesburg’s stagnation. While Melanctha thinks casual sex might fulfill her longings, Louise thinks physical yet unsexual contact might work, but she cannot be sure of anything about such a vague desire. John also acts from an old notion, when he figures she simply wants sex. Also note the Steinien wording of “desire to be possessed had taken possession of her.” Rather than falling in love with John, she falls in love with a notion of security and tradition. By belonging to someone, she can feel safe, if not fulfilled, so she continues trying to gain John’s interest, hoping he can end the isolation.
Like Melanctha, and like her fellow Winesburg citizens, Louise makes most of her attempts at contact under the cover of night, telling herself, “‘In the darkness it will be easier to say things’” (93). One night, wanting to spend some time with John, Louise accidentally walks in on Mary and a young man, but neither notices her; seeing their passion furthers Louise’s notion that she simply needs a man. The same night, fearing she will never make an ambitious enough move toward John, she slips a note under his door. She tries to articulate her desires within the note, but it says nothing about him or her attraction to him. Instead, it only reflects the ambiguity of her desire and the fact that she settles for the nearest young man: “‘I want someone to love me and I want to love someone’” (94). In other words, she chooses John by default; he happens to live in the same house. From there, she states not her love for John but simply the urgency of “someone” meeting her needs. The letter concludes with directions for setting up their rendezvous, not with any question of how John might feel about her.
It takes John “two or three” weeks to come to her (94). The narrator’s use of indefinite time here adds to the timelessness of the book, the non-linear structure of the stories, and, most importantly, the idea that Louise’s life seems somehow shapeless, indefinite, poorly defined. Most writers would give a definite time, or say “after a while,” but Anderson makes a special point of giving two different, undistinguished times, projecting the directionlessness of Louise’s life into that of the narrative, in the same way Stein makes Melanctha’s story wander as much as her mind and body. Like Jeff’s circumlocution and Melanctha’s desiring, Louise’s monotony and sense of futility affect the language of the narrator.
Predictably, Louise becomes lovers with John, and, fearing pregnancy, they soon marry. Actually, she just wants friendship, or something else she cannot explain to herself, and she soon comes to resent his confusion of emotional needs with sexual desire. His misinterpretations start from the time she first initiates contact with him, and they never seem to end.
Not surprisingly, Louise’s affair with John Hardy begins after she writes him the note. Again, her inexpressible feelings tie in with written language, a desire to exist on the page, a desire to find articulation. And again, no one understands—not even the writer. She neither understands what she hopes to say nor understands why her designated “someone” sees her advances as strictly sexual. Even after they marry, he always sees her effort at communication as an endeavor to initiate sex. He interprets none of it on a communicative level, other than the communication of sexual desire; instead, he reduces all her language to a mating call. Like Jeff, he cannot comprehend what his lover expects of him. Maybe she could correct him, if only she knew what she wants to voice, but the narrator makes it clear she never knows that:
All during the following year Louise tried to make her husband understand the vague and intangible hunger that had led to the writing of the note and that was still unsatisfied. Again and again she crept into his arms and tried to talk of it, but always without success. Filled with his own notions of love between men and women, he did not listen but began to kiss her on the lips. That confused her so that in the end she did not want to be kissed. She did not know what she wanted. (96)
The words “vague and intangible” suggest something abstract—not concrete, not solid, not expressible—the desire she shares with Melanctha, a desire for desire itself. Her desire, like her life and the narrative, lacks definite lines or boundaries. How can she possibly explain such a desire to someone else?
More confusingly, the narrator refers not to a “vague and intangible need” but to a “vague and intangible hunger,” so even the readers cannot help but interpret her desire as sexual, just as we cannot help but see Melanctha’s desire as sexual when she wanders through the railroad yard looking for men. Louise becomes angry and frustrated at John for interpreting her advances sexually, but the advances sound sexual; her unsatisfied hunger causes her to creep into his arms. Why would he not interpret that sexually? Why does that surprise her? As the narrator points out, society conditions John to interpret her advances as erotic, rather than think she might actually want to articulate something. He cannot see her attempts at making a metaphysical connection. In his mindset, he merely performs the function society, and Louise, should expect of him.
Instead of trying to consider any other possibilities, John shuts her mouth by pressing his mouth against it: “he did not listen but began to kiss her on the lips.” The lips almost used to express her meaning become the lips used to physically express their indescribable connection—or lack of connection. The lips that cannot convey can only kiss. Louise accepts the kiss, and certainly seems to like it at first, considering that the narrator says it “confused her so that in the end she did not want to be kissed” [emphasis added]. This suggests that she wants his kisses at first, but since the kissing never transcends physical connection, she eventually rejects even the physical connection. For most of the Winesburg characters, sexual contact tends to replace any emotional contact, but when the substitute becomes paramount, it becomes worse than nothing. We might say that sex repulses her, an attitude she would share with many Winesburg citizens, or we might say that sex serves only as a painful reminder of the deeper “hunger” no one seems capable of filling.
The same passage that begins with the inexpressible (“vague and intangible”) also ends with the inexpressible: “She did not know what she wanted.” Without knowing what she wants, how can she explain it to him? She knows only that she wants something. How can she share a message she cannot articulate for herself? How can she escape her shell without knowing what locks her inside it? Like Melanctha, Louise feels entrapped in a patriarchal world but cannot articulate her entrapment or how to escape it. Marilyn Judith Atlas explains:
Through the development of Louise . . . Anderson again explores how the society they live in and the people with whom they associate victimize women. When Anderson presents Louise Bentley’s frustrated life and her inability to find the love she needs he has his narrator intrude with a statement [about the need for certain books and lives] indicting society and calling writers of the period to action. (258)
Ultimately, Atlas sees Louise Bentley as “one of the female victims of Winesburg whose strength and creativity lead nowhere” because Anderson traps her with an incompatible life and situation (259). However, Atlas feels such depictions actually help women, by exposing injustice, but I will save that discussion for later chapters. The point to consider here is that Louise feels a longing, wants to communicate, and becomes a victim of misunderstanding—including her own misunderstanding of her own desires. In a better society, Louise’s education would garner more encouragement, and would benefit her more, leading to a more productive life. In Winesburg, Louise’s education means nothing, except the chance to meet a man and produce another man-child.
Despite how this continued lack of contact makes her feel, Louise passes the problem on to another generation. In a surprising reversal of Winesburg tradition, Louise rejects her male child, treating him the same way Jesse treated her:
Sometimes she stayed in the room with [David] all day, walking about and occasionally creeping close to touch him tenderly with her hands, and then other days came when she did not want to see or be near the tiny bit of humanity that had come into her house. (96)
She will eventually submit him willingly to the father who failed to love her. She resents David but figures that, as a boy, he will survive. Consumed by her loveless upbringing, she says she would have been a better mother to a girl.
The story ends there, on a seemingly hopeless note. However, we might consider that, in all his going back and forth in time, the narrator never stops referring to Louise as “Louise Bentley,” despite her marriage to John Hardy. If this marriage completely traps her and destroys her identity, why would the narrator continue to use her maiden name? Living in rural America at the turn of the century, it seems unlikely for a woman to keep her maiden name after marriage, and they are clearly married when “Godliness III” begins. Yet the narrator still calls her “Louise Bentley.” Perhaps a part of her continues to assert itself, and the narrator wishes to reflect that. Whatever the case, her entrapment never completely suffocates her, just as Melanctha continues to struggle within the confines of patriarchy.
Consider the similarities between this story and “Melanctha”: (1) the use of continuous present, with all of Louise’s life seeming to occur at the same time; (2) the use of beginning again and again, with the story looping backward and forward, as many as three times within a single paragraph, just as “Melanctha” uses the analeptic structure I will discuss momentarily; (3) a woman who feels unloved by her parents; (4) a woman who wants to assert herself within a patriarchal society, but resorts to men as a safety net; (5) a desire to keep desiring, for “ways to get excited”; (6) a courage linked with darkness, which I will also discuss more momentarily; (7) an awareness of and boredom with tradition. As examples of that last similarity, we might consider Melanctha’s not caring about what Jeff or Rose see as “right” for her, as well as Louise’s not feeling any need to maintain her marriage or care for the son she knows society will embrace. And if we broaden our comparison to look not just at the story of Louise Bentley but also to include the other tales from Winesburg, we find further evidence of Anderson’s constant appropriations from “Melanctha.” Stein and Anderson both avoid cause and effect: “Melanctha” and Winesburg both ask us to recognize repetition with variation, part of Stein’s notion of a continuous present. Anderson even re-uses the same plots, but with different characters and situations; in fact, many of the characters have almost the same name, which only summons more attention to their similarities.
In both works, the semantics of social interaction keep breaking down, leaving the characters unable to truly express themselves. Linda W. Wagner sees the failure of language to help characters finally reach an anticipated connection as the “mood of isolation, of emotional poverty, that haunts the stories of Winesburg and gives them the strongest bond with Stein’s Three Lives” (83). I will explore that mood in the chapters ahead, but I think the connections between Winesburg and “Melanctha” go even further.
Anderson and Stein both loved to create long but simple-sounding sentences, either by swirling phrases around a single noun, or by listing adjectives or verbs. Take, for example, this sentence from one of the Winesburg stories: “Before they knew what had come over them, the base runners were watching the man, edging off the bases, advancing, retreating, held as by an invisible cord” (107). The sentence starts with a slow and steady subordinate clause, then intensifies by stringing together participles; thus, the sentence structure reflects the excitement and anticipation the sentence describes. In a less easily discernible though no less innovative manner than Stein, Anderson captures the playful experimentation with syntax that she uses to capture Melanctha’s moods. Of course, that playfulness sounds more obvious in “Melanctha,” but without Stein’s radical experimentation, Anderson would never have taken that reclaiming of language and applied it to his supposedly tame prose style. Though his sentences seem to bear no resemblance to hers at first, we can easily see that many of them, including the one I just quoted, use a folksy sounding version of Stein’s sentences, like this one from “Melanctha,” which mirrors Rose’s overbearing personality:
And so Rose had Melanctha Herbert always there to help her, and she sat and was lazy and she bragged and complained a little and she told Melanctha how she ought to do, to get good what she wanted like she Rose always did it, and always Melanctha was doing everything Rose ever needed. (215)
With both writers, the sentences reflect the action or the mood, by stringing together participle phrases.
Besides such toying with a sentence’s structure to add to the impact of its words, Anderson also appropriated Stein’s tendency to repeat words to show a slowly changing viewpoint. Compare Jeff’s “always now” passage I quoted from earlier with the following passage in the Winesburg story “The Strength of God,” which I will discuss in Chapter III. I will italicize the words used for insistence: passion, lust, has, and will. Notice that lust replaces passion right after will replaces has, as if moving from the lifeless has to the more determined will somehow adds to the savagery the passage describes. Read aloud, the passage demands more intonation with each will. Frustrated with his desire for the teacher Kate Swift, the Rev. Curtis Hartman tells himself,
“She has always been ashamed of passion and has cheated me. . . . Man has a right to expect living passion and beauty in a woman. He has no right to forget that he is an animal and in me there is something that is Greek. I will throw off the woman of my bosom and seek other women. I will besiege this school teacher. I will fly in the face of all men and if I am a creature of carnal lusts I will then live for my lusts.” (154)
That passage borrows Stein’s technique for revealing the process of consciousness through the use of repeated words that form slowly evolving sentences.
Stein explains that sentence usage in “More Grammar For A Sentence” in which she defines a paragraph as complete and not in need of repeating. Rather than merely a collection of sentences, it forms a work with closure. The paragraphs end, but the sentences continue. Any sentence worth using the first time will probably begin again. A work contains rivaling sentences, and they will war in varying forms, creating different paragraphs. Seeing sentences as more important than paragraphs, Stein keeps referring to paragraphs as “natural” and “resolution.” She takes more interest in the sentences that build the paragraphs, explaining that a paragraph “says so,” but implying that a sentence leaves itself more open to interpretations and possibilities (White 562). Letting her sentences manifest themselves in constantly new forms helps her build the continuous present.
Download this book for your ebook reader.
(Pages 1-26 show above.)