[In the following essay, MacGowan explores the significance of paternity and patriarchy to “The Man Who Became a Woman.”]

Sherwood Anderson's short story “The Man Who Became a Woman,” from his 1923 collection Horses and Men, is often acknowledged to be one of his finest successes in the form. However, analysis of the story has usually focused upon the themes—central to much of Anderson's earlier work—of adolescence, sexuality, and sexual roles. While these are important in the story, what has been missed is the degree to which these concerns are integrated into a tale that is a story about story-telling and story tellers, and the attenuated promise of both in an America oppressed by its patriarchal, religious, and industrial heritage.

In the tale, Anderson's narrator, Herman Dudley, claiming to be now a happily married adult, describes what he admits is still a very disturbing adolescent experience he had while working as a race-horse swipe. While working at the racetracks, Herman has for some weeks a close friendship with another young swipe, Tom Means, a would-be writer. With the help of Tom's “talking,” Herman comes to appreciate the joys of the nomadic, unconventional race-track life. However, once Tom moves away to another circuit, Herman becomes lonely, depressed, and subject to confusing reveries—although a black swipe, Bert, befriends him and helps him with his stable duties. One Saturday night, depressed at his social and sexual isolation, Herman leaves the stables to visit a seedy saloon, and after a couple of drinks is horrified to see his face reflected as a woman's in the cracked mirror behind the bar. After witnessing a fight between two customers, he returns to the stables to be startled, when asleep, by two tipsy negroes who apparently mistake him for a girl. Fleeing in terror onto the track, and then into a nearby field, Herman stumbles into the skeleton of a horse near an abandoned slaughter house. The fall into the bones defuses his hysteria. He spends the night in a haystack with some sheep, and runs away from the track the next morning.

Such readings as those of Irving Howe, Howard S. Babb and Welford Taylor, emphasizing the pressures of social conformity and the loss of youthful naivete, present Herman Dudley's plight as an inevitable consequence of growing up, although some other readings of the story have touched on its more ambivalent attitude to the forces shaping the adult Herman¹.

Anderson himself saw “The Man Who Became a Woman” as differing in its degree of complexity from the adolescent trauma behind such earlier stories as “I'm a Fool,” conceding to Van Wyck Brooks that ‘I'm a Fool’ “is a story of immaturity and poses no problem,” and suggesting he look instead at three other stories, including “The Man Who Became a Woman” (Letters, 102). Something of what Anderson had in mind here, and in his declaration of Alfred Stieglitz that the Horses and Men volume contained “some new ventures in it” (Letters, 99) becomes clearer if we read the story as concerning the potential for writers and writing. We are invited to do this in the volume's dedication and introductory paeon to Theodore Dreiser. The world of writing inhabits this tale through the presence of Dreiser, and also through the appearance as a character of Alfred Kreymborg. These two figures offer a yard-stick against which to measure the performances of Tom Means and the tale-telling narrator, and to gauge what Herman Dudley loses when he falls into the horse skeleton—the experience which “burned all that silly nonsense about being a girl right out of me” (225). In having “all that silly nonsense about being a girl [burned] right out of me” Herman is also having his potential of being an artist burned out of him. Or, more exactly, almost burned out of him. For while Herman does not realize the full price of his social integration, he does feel “forced, by some feeling inside myself, to tell” his story (189). Herman Dudley may feel, along with a number of commentators upon the story—most recently Charles Modlin in Certain Things Last—that he is “putting the experience to rest” (Modlin xi), but Herman's story becomes an illustration of his failure to confront the key contradictions of his inner imaginative life.

Herman's narrative exhibits a recurring tension, surfacing every few pages, between confidence in his sense of his mature adult identity, and a continuing disquiet concerning the full significance of the events he relates. Herman cannot reduced his story to a chronological framework, although he tries. But the attempt produces only the tale of the attempt. The first half of the story rambles between various non-sequential events, before Herman tries to shape the past from the refuge of his present.

Herman's refuge in the present is characterized by a—literal—domestication of the feminine qualities that the story itself links to creativity and possible imaginative growth:

You see, I can think this whole thing out fairly now, sitting here in my own house and writing, and with my wife Jessie in the kitchen making a pie or something. … but I tell you what, I didn't think things out … that night.

(219)

While Herman thinks things out now, Jessie creates in the kitchen. Herman's claim of mutual support is actually a scene of separation, and Jessie's confined “making” is a necessary condition of Herman's feeling able to make his tale. Herman earlier provides another analogy to his tale telling—“like cleaning up the room you live in” from his days of being “a bachelor, like I was for so long” (190)—another separation of the feminine from the creative. But a third, his calling his tale “my knitting” (193), unconsciously reveals the violation of conventional sexual and domestic roles that, for Anderson, are necessary for imaginative “making.”

Horses are equated with feminine qualities throughout the story. Walking the gelding Pick-it boy in a circle in the gathering darkness, Herman confesses “I wished he was a girl sometimes or that I was a girl and he was a man” (200). Herman relates that on his last night at the track, he felt a desperate craving for a woman, but one “with something in her like a race horse” (202). After his experience in the saloon, he comes back to the stables and starts touching the horse, “running my hands all over his body, just because I loved the feel of him and as sometimes, to tell the plain truth, I've felt about touching with my hands the body of a woman I've seen and who I thought was lovely too” (217). The climax—and supposed resolution—of Herman's narrative, the fall into the horse skeleton, involves the negation of flesh and femininity, a skeletal male embrace, with breasts reduced to ribs:

I had fallen right in between the ribs of the horse and they seemed to wrap themselves around me close. And my hands, clutching upwards, had got hold of the cheeks of that dead horse and the bones of his cheeks were cold as ice with the rain washing over them. White bones wrapped around me and white bones in my hands.

(225)

Herman's failure as a tale-teller is set against the past and present achievement of Tom Means, who, Herman relates, “wanted to be a writer later and what he said was that when he came to be one he wanted to write the way a well bred horse runs or trots or paces.” Herman adds, “Whether he ever did it or not I can't say. He has written a lot, but I'm not too good a judge of such things. Anyway I don't think he has” (189). In addition to his profligate writing, Tom Means also separates the feminine from his writing ideal. Noting Tom's still unrealized ambition to write a biography of the driver Pop Geers, Herman comments:

I suppose Tom wanted to feel, when he became a writer, like he thought old Pop must feel when his horse swung around the upper turn, and there lay the strecht before him, and if he was going to get his horse home in front he had to do it right then. What Tom said was that any man had something in him that understands about a thing like that but that no woman ever did except up in her brain. He often got off things like that about women but I notice he later married one of them just the same.

(193)

Tom's earlier promise lay in his sensitivity to the imaginative, unconventional, vital qualities of race-track life, and his ability to articulate and share his passion in the “talk” that fires Herman's imagination. But the limitations of Tom's passionate talking are revealed by the contrast with Pop Geer's silence—“They called him, around the tracks, ‘The silent man from Tennessee’” (192). A further danger sign in Tom's “talk” is a self-consciousness about writing, what Herman calls “some notions about writing I've never got myself around to thinking much about” (189). In this story, Herman becomes not only a woman but also a horse, the climax of the tale finding him pursued as a woman, and actually running on the race track. For all of his limitations, Herman, not Tom Means, is the one who might articulate something of Pop Geers' ideals.

Tom and Herman's failures are measured against the presence in the story of two writers Anderson admired, poet and editor Alfred Kreymborg, and Theodore Drieser—the latter living three doors away in New York, on St. Luke's Place, when Anderson worked on this story.

Kreymborg appears as Tom Means' employer, “a tall black-mustached man” who owns the “pacing gelding named Lumpy Joe.” Although the character Kreymborg is initially presented as “trying the best he could to make the bluff” that the horse is “a real one” (186-87), after Kreymborg leaves, his bluffing turns out to be something of a double-bluff:

There was a story going about the stalls that Lumpy Joe … wasn't really named Lumpy Joe at all, that he was a ringer who had made a fast record out in Iowa and up through the northwest country the year before, and that Kreymborg had picked him up and kept him under wraps all winter and had brought him over into the Pennsylvania country under this new name and made a clean-up in the books.

(191)

Earlier in the story the morality behind such actions as Kreymborg's is linked to the free exercise of imagination unencombered by conventional, especially material and sexual, constraints. The figures around the tracks, Herman declares, were “about the best liars I've ever seen, and not saving money or thinking about morals, like most druggists, drygoods merchants and the others who used to be my father's friends in our Nebraska town” (186)².

While Kreymborg is presented as a paternalistic, inventive rogue in the story, Dreiser's presence is more explicitly linked to the promise of writing. Following the dedication of Horses and Men to Dreiser (who had helped Anderson publish his first three novels) Anderson adds: “In whose presence I have sometimes had the same refreshed feeling as when in the presence of a thoroughbred horse.” And in light of this connection of Dreiser to the racehorse qualities in this and the volume's other stories, it may be no coincidence that in the short impressionistic piece titled “Dreiser” that precedes the stories the writer is described as “lumpy” (xi)—a designation that “Lumpy Joe” may pick up.

As well as these general thematic associations introduced by the volume's prefatory matter, some specific details in the story suggest Dreiser's presence as a kind of unifying force linking the potential of Herman Dudley and Tom Means. Tom Means, Herman notes, “was five years older than me.” Dreiser, born in 1871, was five years older than Anderson. The name Herman is both the name of Kreymborg's father, as Anderson would know, if only from the poem “Misterman Kreymborg” in Kreymborg's 1916 volume Mushrooms; and also Dreiser's first name as he was christened (thus Herman's Dudley's initials are actually the same as the young Dreiser's).

On his final evening at the track Herman is the self-designated protector of the horses, but abandons the stables to enter one of the miners' bars. Typically the outcast “fly girls” of the towns, having come to the stables, and touched the horses, arrange dates for “up town after supper” (195). By contrast, the conventional women of the town stay indoors on a Saturday night to look after the children. The men—deprived by a division they themselves sanction—find release from the drudgery of mining in the bars.

By entering the bar Herman tries to join this exclusive world of male values, but in terror he sees in the “old cracked looking-glass back of the bar” his face reflected as that of “a lonesome and scared girl” (207). A similar dislocation characterizes the miner, “one of the cracked kind” (210), who enters with a child. When turning to beat up a man who has been taunting him, the miner recognizes the female side of Herman, thrusting the child into his care.

The miner's recognition of the dehumanizing aspects of industry (he mutters to himself “Rats, rats, digging in the ground—miners are rats”), the “feeling” Herman gets from the man “like the feeling you get maybe from a horse,” (211, 209), and the minner's acceptance of a maternal role, separate him from Herman's condemnation of the hellish male-created and ironically “man-eating” industrial landscape that he views just before entering the bar (206).

The miner is not only connected with the feminine, but also with the equally outcast negro, the miner's “lips were thick, like negroes' lips” (210). Like the miner, the two black men who stumble into the stable later that night also recognize the female side of Herman, and their aggression, like that of the miner, scares him. The adult Herman notes that the social segregation of negroes separates them from white women. And with the negro swipe, Burt, Herman can never be as close as he was to the white Tom Means, because “there's been too much talk about the difference between whites and blacks” (194-95). Burt's potential to reinforce and continue the imaginative growth begun by Tom's “talk” is denied by “talk” now as division.

Although the adult Herman retains a sensitivity to what he sees as the potential of the negro and the injustices of racial segregation, the sensitivity remains largely abstract. His running away from the racetrack is effectively his severing of his connections with his closest black friend. The whiteness of the horse skeleton's embrace takes in the world of white, as well as male, hierarchy.

The social mores that divide the potential forces in men, women, horses, and negroes, and stifle the full expression of imagination through writing, are manifest most clearly in “The Man Who Became a Woman”—as in much of Anderson's work—through the oppression of industrialism and religion. Both aspects of the heritage are represented by Herman's fall into the horse skeleton.

The legacy of the now disused slaughterhouse near the track is a stench that promises a fatal accident, for the “horses hated the place” (203) and rear and try to run from it. It had existed to make a last “dollar or two” from “an old wornout horse” (224). Herman's fall into the horse bones reads like a pastiche of the language of conversion experience, a conversion to the constrictions of what Anderson—in common with many writers of his time—saw as the Puritan heritage of repression and materialism:

And when I fell and pitched forward I fell right into the midst of something, still and cold and white.

… I fell and pitched forward and my side got cut pretty deep and my hands clutched at something. I had fallen right between the ribs of the horse and they seemed to wrap themselves around me close. …

There was a new terror now that seemed to go down to the very bottom of me, to the bottom of the inside of me, I mean. It shook me like I have seen a rat in a barn shaken by a dog. It was a terror like a big wave that hits you when you are walking on a seashore, maybe. … So the wave comes high as a mountain, and there it is, right in front of you and nothing in all this world can stop it. And now it had knocked you down and rolled and tumbled you over and over and washed you clean, clean, but dead maybe.

And that's the way I felt—I seemed to myself dead with blind terror. It was a feeling like the finger of God running down your back and burning you clean, I mean.

I burned all that silly nonsense about being a girl right out of me.

(224-25)

Herman feels an identification with Christ (a wound in his side), and a sense of terror and the annihilation of self that in conversion experience prefigures the acceptance of God's will. Subsequently, Herman literally becomes a kind of passive shepherd, spending the night in a “straw stack” with for disciples “about a dozen” sheep (226). Next morning Herman goes through his own version of the Fall. His acute sense of the sinfulness of flesh producing acute shame at his nakedness. As he runs from this now-fallen world, his last view of Burt is as a devil figure, swinging and lunging a pitchfork at the other men.

Herman is finally a victim of his heritage, just as his father was. When the father, “a retail druggist,” dies, his legacy to Herman is not only the four hundred dollars his mother gives him “to make my start in the world,” but also the social and sexual dislocation that causes his mother to immediately reject him and all males, and to move West “to her sister in California” (185). Herman's flight is effectively the end of his struggle against this dislocation. His story tells the three-fold tale of the present making itself the prisoner of the past—in the defeat of his father, of the young Herman, and of the present Herman. For Anderson, the escape from such defeat lies in breaking the bounds of this rhetorical, temporal and cultural constriction—for Herman Dudley to learn from Herman Dreiser. But the sexual and imaginative aridity of the present that Herman desperately offers as a superior condition marks his fearful acceptance of the heritage of his father, and of the Fathers.

Notes

1. Irving Howe, Sherwood Anderson (New York: William Sloane, 1951), 160-64; Howard S. Babb, “A Reading of Sherwood Anderson's ‘The Man Who Became a Woman,’ PMLA, 80 (1965): 432-35; Welford Taylor, Sherwood Anderson (New York: MLM, 1977), pp. 65-67. See also Frank Gado, Sherwood Anderson: The Teller's Tales (Schenectady: Union College Press, 1983), pp. 15-17; Glen A. Love, “Horses or Men: Primitive and Pastoral Elements in Sherwood Anderson,” in Hilbert H. Campbell and Charles E. Modlin, Sherwood Anderson: Centennial Studies (Troy: Whitston, 1976): 235-47; Lonna M. Malmsheimer, “Sexual Metaphor and Social Criticism in Anderson's ‘The Man Who Became a Woman,’” Studies in American Fiction, 7 (1979): 17-26.

2. Perhaps in the spirit of this particular tribute to the imagination as creative “liar,” Kreymborg protests in the opening pages of his autobiographical Troubador that he knows nothing of his name-sake character in the story, and “nothing about horses and horse-dealers. …” “Naturally not. The work is a work of fiction” (21-22).

Works Cited

Anderson, Sherwood. Letters of Sherwood Anderson. Ed. Howard Mumford Jones and Walter B. Rideout. Boston: Little, Brown, 1953.

———. Horses and Men. New York: Huebsch, 1923.

Babb, Howard S. “A Reading of Sherwood Anderson's ‘The Man Who Became a Woman.’ PMLA 80 (1965): 432-35.

Gado, Frank. Sherwood Anderson: The Teller's Tales. Schenectady: Union College Press, 1983.

Howe, Irving. Sherwood Anderson. New York: William Sloane, 1951.

Kreymborg, Alfred. Troubadour. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925.

Love, Glen A. “Horses or Men: Primitive and Pastoral Elements in Sherwood Anderson.” Sherwood Anderson: Centennial Studies. Ed. Hilbert H. Campbell and Charles E. Modlin. Troy: Whitston, 1976. 235-47.

Malmsheimer, Lonna M. “Sexual Metaphor and Social Criticism in Anderson's ‘The Man Who Became a Woman.’” Studies in American Fiction 7 (1979): 17-26.

Modlin, Charles ed. Certain Things Last: The Selected Stories of Sherwood Anderson (New York: Four Walls, 1992).

Taylor, Welford. Sherwood Anderson. New York: MLM, 1977.