[In the following essay, Colquitt observes the connection between Anderson's polarization of male and female and the narrative techniques of “Death in the Woods.”]

Like most writers, Sherwood Anderson was vitally concerned with the workings of the imagination and the creation of art. For Anderson, these concerns were also inextricably linked to questions of personal salvation. In letters to his son John, himself a painter, Anderson asserted that “The object of art … is to save yourself”: “Self is the grand disease. It is what we are all trying to lose” (The Letters of Sherwood Anderson 166, 167). Given Anderson's faith in the redemptive possibilities of art, it is not surprising that the writer frequently compared “literary [and nonliterary] composition to the experience of pregnancy and deliverance, and also to the poles of maleness and femaleness in life” (Letters XV). One letter composed three years before the author's death well illustrates Anderson's understanding of the problematic nature of such “deliverance”:

The trouble with the creative impulse … is that it tends to lift you up too high into a sort of drunkenness and then drop you down too low. There is an artist lurking in every man. The high spots for the creative man come too seldom. He is like a woman who has been put on her back and made pregnant, but even after he gets the seed in him, he has to carry it a long time before anything comes out.

(Letters 414)

If, as Anderson claims, “There is an artist lurking in every man,” so, also, did the writer believe that there is a woman “lurking” in every artist. Indeed, the image of the male artist whose “lurking” burden is the female within is depicted repeatedly in the correspondence, perhaps nowhere more explicitly than in a letter Anderson sent late in life to his mother-in-law, Laura Lou Copenhaver: “There is a woman hidden away in every artist. Like the woman he becomes pregnant. He gives birth. When the children of his world are spoken of rudely or, through stupidity, not understood, there is a hurt that anyone who has not been pregnant, who has not given birth, will never understand” (Letters 428).¹

The assumptions “hidden away” within such assertions are easily gleaned from letters in which Anderson frankly acknowledges his “old-fashioned”² views about men and women. In another letter to his son John, Anderson admitted, “I do not believe that, at bottom, they [women] have the least interest in art. What their lover gives to work they cannot get” (Letters 187). As a result, the writer held that the sole “high spot” available for women to experience in life is childbirth. To be sure, Anderson understood that the biological impulse also moves man,³ but, as he makes clear in letters to his male friends, the love of woman “isn't enough for an eager man”: “No woman could ever be in herself what we want or think we want” (Letters 168, 324). Thus, whereas woman's destiny is circumscribed by biology, man's destiny transcends the purely physical and finds consummate expression only in the creation of art. As Anderson explained to Dwight MacDonald in 1929:

There is no purpose other than the artist's purpose and the purpose of the woman. The artist purposes to bring to life, out of the … hidden form in lives, nature, things, the living form as women purpose doing that out of their lovely bodies.

The artist there[fore] is your only true male. …

(Letters 192)

The “tru[ly] male” quality of Anderson's artistic imagination and of his polarized worldview is forcefully represented in his short stories and novels, as well as in his letters and memoirs. Indeed, to speak of woman's destiny in the context of Anderson's fiction is to call to mind what is undoubtedly one of the master storyteller's most disturbing tales, “Death in the Woods.” Written at the “peak of his [creative] powers” (Howe 160), “Death in the Woods” has provoked a varied critical response, ranging from interpretations that see the tale much as Anderson claims he did, as a biological allegory depicting woman as feeder, to more recent interpretations that focus less upon the plight of the old farm woman and more upon the narrative consciousness that constructs her story. This shift of focus has led several critics to conclude that “Death in the Woods” is “a story about the creation of a story” (Joselyn 256; see also Robinson), hence Anderson's many attempts to unveil the mechanics of the creative process through the workings of the tale's narrative center, an older man who looks back to one scene from his childhood out of which he will spin his yarn.⁴ To borrow from the title Anderson gave to his first published memoir, “Death in the Woods” has been increasingly viewed as “a story teller's story.” As Wilfred Guerin argues, “It is a story about how fragments become a whole and have meaning, partly through the workings of the unconscious, partly through the conscious memory” (5).

That there exists an intricate bond connecting the “real story” (“Death” 423) of an old woman's life and death and the “creating” consciousness⁵ who narrates her tale has long been acknowledged. Critics have also observed that the relationship between narrator and reader is similarly complex. As early as 1959, Jon Lawry astutely perceived that the narrator's tortuous labors to give meaning to the death he describes are offered as both an interpretative and experiential model for the reader of “Death in the Woods” to follow: “The audience is invited to enter as individuals into a process almost identical with that of the narrator. … to share directly not only the narrator's responses but his act of discovering and creating those responses” (308). What few critics have since examined, although both Lawry and William Scheick point toward the issue, are the implicatory bonds that result when the reader blindly accepts this enticing invitation; for if the reader succumbs to the narrator's interpretative wiles, he becomes enmeshed in a web of guilt that connects him not only with the “I”/eye of the tale but also with the other men and boys in the woods who pruriently feed upon the body of a dead woman. By further exploring the peculiar design of this web, I hope to illumine the obsessive concern evidenced in this short story with the process of reading and making meaning. This is of course the very experience that Anderson's reader must also enact if the story is to be grasped, as the narrator himself claims to have done, as an aesthetic whole: “A thing so complete has its own beauty” (424).

Several critics have noted the somewhat unorthodox alternation of tenses that operates throughout “Death in the Woods,” as in the first paragraph of the story: “She was an old woman and lived on a farm near the town in which I lived. All country and small-town people have seen such old women, but no one knows much about them. Such an old woman comes into town driving an old worn-out horse or she comes afoot carrying a basket” (410-411). Although critics differ as to the effects of such shifts, many would agree with Guerin's explanation that “In this and in the second paragraph of the story the historical present tense of the verbs makes clear the timeless quality of the regularity of such old women and their doings” (4).⁶ Diverting the reader's attention from the particular to the general, from the life of one old woman to the experience of “such old women,” the narrator strives to “universalize” his story in a timeless setting by removing the “she” of his opening description from history and by granting himself the authority to speak of “all country and small-town people” in categorical terms. Such ahistorical maneuvering complements another effect of this passage that no critic has yet observed: “Death in the Woods” begins much like a fairy tale. Further, any reader who reflects upon the tales passed on in childhood may note a slight echo here with one of our culture's most famous allegories of female feeding, the Mother Goose story of the old woman who lived in a shoe. In addition, the reader may come to see Anderson's narrative as cautionary, particularly if other tales of wolves, women, and dark woods come to mind. From this initial description then the reader comes to two important realizations. First, the frame in which the “Death in the Woods” occurs is both fanciful and remote, a timeless realm that suggestively resonates with the surreal landscape of children's stories. Second, the reader learns that the tale is not to be interpreted simply as the narrative of an isolated farm woman but rather as a fiction that has universal implications. After all, one of the first statements the narrator makes about the old woman is that she is “nothing special” (411).

Having been thus directed toward the ostensible subject of the story, the reader soon finds that the interpretative process is effectively impeded by obtrusive references the narrator makes concerning his own past. Indeed, in the opening section of “Death in the Woods,” the reader learns almost as much about the narrator's childhood as about the plight of old country women. Interestingly, the narrator's allusions to his past closely resemble the boyhood recollections set forth in Anderson's memoirs; yet, despite the similarities that seem to link the storyteller with his tale, Anderson himself “persistent[ly]” interpreted the narrative of Mrs. Jake Grimes in thematic, not autobiographical, terms:

In a note for an anthology Anderson wrote that “the theme of the story is the persistent animal hunger of man. There are these women who spend their whole lives, rather dumbly, feeding this hunger. … [The story's aim] is to retain the sense of mystery in life while showing at the same time, at what cost our ordinary animal hungers are sometimes fed.”

(Howe 165)

Anderson's reading is a superb illustration of what John Berger calls critical mystification—“the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident” (15-16)—for as Irving Howe noted more than thirty years ago, this interpretation is “apt, though limited. … Anderson could hardly have failed to notice that the story may be read as an oblique rendering of what he believed to be the central facts about his mother's life: a silent drudgery in the service of men, an obliteration of self to feed their ‘persistent animal hunger,’ and then death” (166). Regardless of the limits of Anderson's analysis, one fact is clear: Anderson, like his narrator, is trying to steer critics of “Death in the Woods” away from the realm of history—from the varying records of a writer's conflicted relationship with his mother—to the hallowed domain of myth. Having fastened upon a presumably “safe” and unalterable interpretation of his story, Anderson thereby avoids public confrontation with painful memories of his childhood.

How painful those memories were is suggested in several of Anderson's more revealing letters. Of these, perhaps none more poignantly illustrates the writer's anguished ties to his past than one addressed but never mailed to Paul Rosenfeld. Given the highly personal nature of its contents, it is easy to see why Anderson chose not to post it; for far more than a simple communication to a friend, this lengthy letter represents an aging artist's “effort to justify” his politics and clarify his “obligation” as a writer (Letters 358). Of primary importance to Anderson in 1936 was his relationship with the proletariat, a relationship that led the writer to remember the tedious “hopelessness” of his mother's struggles to support her family:

You must remember that I saw my own mother sicken and die from overwork. I have myself been through the mill. I have worked month after month in factories, for long hours daily, have known the hopelessness of trying to escape. I have seen my own mother stand all day over a washtub, washing the dirty linen of pretentious middle-class women not fit to tie her shoelaces, this just to get her sons enough food to keep them alive, and I presume I shall never in my life see a working woman without identifying her with my mother.

(Letters 361)⁷

Several points immediately emerge from this passage. First, Anderson sees a significant portion of his own adult experience as closely resembling his mother's. As members of the working class, they have both “been through the mill.” Second, this excerpt obliquely suggests how much their lives diverged, for, unlike his mother, Anderson “escaped” and rose out of his class to enjoy a successful career as a writer. That he did so, he implies, is in some part a testament to his mother's decision to sacrifice herself “just to get her sons enough food to keep them alive.” Not surprisingly, a legacy of unresolved guilt still haunts the writer. Anderson avoided his mother's fate, it seems, precisely because he chose another course; for Anderson, self came first. Indeed, the proliferation of I's in this passage points toward the egocentric nature of his interests. In short, Anderson as artist is evidently more enthralled by his own vision of martyred motherhood than by the grim particulars of his mother's impoverished existence, hence the heavy reliance upon varying forms of the verb “to see” in the passage above: “I saw,” “I have seen,” “I shall never … see.”

This shift of focus away from the mother and toward the artist parallels the narrative stratagems employed in the opening section of “Death in the Woods.” Here the narrator also moves quickly to guide the reader's attention away from his apparent subject, an old farm woman, to what is ultimately his larger concern—himself. Particularly jarring is the narrator's first substantial digression concerning the liver he was forced to eat as a child, a digression that interrupts his account of what old women do when they come to town:

Such an old woman … takes [eggs] to a grocer. There she trades them in. …

Afterwards she goes to the butcher's and asks for some dog-meat. Formerly the butchers gave liver to anyone who wanted to carry it away. In our family we were always having it. Once one of my brothers got a whole cow's liver at the slaughterhouse near the fair grounds in our town. We had it until we were sick of it. It never cost a cent. I have hated the thought of it ever since.

(411)

Clearly, this is a narrator who needs close watch, for as such digressions multiply, the reader becomes increasingly fascinated not with the “real story” (423) of an old woman's death but rather with the peculiar manner in which her story is told. This first digression is peculiar enough, suggesting as it does a puerile hostility on the narrator's part toward his past as well as the bonds of poverty and sickness that bridge the narrator's memories of his childhood with the experience of “nameless” (411) country women. At this juncture, the narrator also reveals that when he first noticed the woman he soon identifies as Mrs. Jake Grimes, he himself was literally sick in bed with “inflammatory rheumatism” (411), a statement that takes on added significance when he subsequently remarks that Mrs. Grimes had journeyed to town even though “she hadn't been feeling very well for several days …” (415). Given the vehemence of these boyhood reflections, the reader might justifiably wonder at this point if the “inflammatory” child has ever fully recovered, for as the unpredictable narrator continues to weave his tale, the reader begins to sense that this man is still none too well.

Following this unsettling digression, the narrator sketches the rough outlines of Mrs. Grimes's life. Through him we learn that in her youth she worked as a “bound girl” (412)⁸ for a German farming couple: “At the German's place she … cooked the food for the German and his wife. … She fed them and fed the cows in the barn, fed the pigs, the horses and the chickens. Every moment of every day, as a young girl, was spent feeding something” (414). That her life was neither one of ease nor happiness becomes plain when the narrator discloses that the “young thing” (412) was sexually abused, perhaps raped, by her employer. Interestingly, however, the reader's knowledge of the bound girl's life is unstable, for the narrator evidences uncertainty concerning the particulars of her story. Thus, in the opening section of “Death in the Woods,” the narrator first hesitantly supposes that the young girl was “bound”—“You see, the farmer was up to something with the girl—she was, I think, a bound girl …” (412)—whereas only shortly afterwards he claims that he knows the woman was so: “I remember now that she was a bound girl and did not know where her father and mother were” (413). Such wavering causes the reader to question the narrator's confidence in the truth of the tale he says he has only “suddenly” remembered: “I have just suddenly now, after all these years, remembered her and what happened. It is a story” (411). By calling attention in this way to the manipulative possibilities of narration, Anderson directs his audience to larger questions concerning the nature of “story” telling. As Mary Joselyn observes, “the fact that [Anderson] goes out of his way several times to tell us that the story might have been told … differently is important, for these statements emphasize that the process of creation is essentially one of choice and of selection” (257).

The role that choice plays in the shaping of fiction is stressed on several occasions in “Death in the Woods” when the narrator returns to scenes or conversations that he has previously described. In the opening section of the story, the narrator records two conversations that take place between the bound girl and Jake Grimes, another employee on the German couple's farm. Although the conversations are not identical, the subject of these talks is: both focus upon the sexual abuse that the young girl allegedly suffered on the farm. The narrator first recounts that before Jake became the bound girl's lover, she confided in him that “when the wife had to go off to town for supplies, the farmer got after her. She told young Jake that nothing really ever happened, but he didn't know whether to believe it or not” (412). Between this and a later dialogue occurs a fight involving the German and his hired hand, which the narrator delightfully describes: “They had it out all right! The German was a tough one. Maybe he didn't care whether his wife knew or not” (413). In the midst of this passage, the reader gradually realizes that the narrator could not possibly know all the details he provides of the scene, for there were no witnesses to the brawl. Indeed, the narrator himself seems aware of this problem when he parenthetically inserts: “(I wonder how I know all this. It must have stuck in my mind from small-town tales when I was a boy)” (413). Following this admission, the reader learns of the conversation that takes place after the fight when Jake finds his lover “huddled up … crying, [and] scared to death” (413). Now, however, the narrator's phrasing suggests that the bound girl's “stories” are not to be believed: “She told Jake a lot of stuff, how the German had tried to get her, how he chased her once into the barn, how another time … he tore her dress open clear down the front” (413). The narrator's unwillingness to grant the woman any degree of credibility in either of these confessions is further emphasized when he reveals that Jake Grimes “got her pretty easy himself, the first time he was out with her” (412), an assertion that may once again lead the reader to wonder how the narrator can possibly “know all this.”

What Anderson himself knows of course is how to construct a story, a story that, as its narrative voice becomes increasingly assured, causes the reader to question any interpretation offered concerning the meaning of the life and death of Mrs. Jake Grimes. Indeed, as the description of the fight scene suggests, the narrator identifies himself less with the plight of the “young thing” who is “scared to death” (413) than with the men who are able to bind such women to their will. This is, moreover, not the only occasion in which the narrator reveals his sympathy with brutal forms of masculine expression, as is evident in the second section of the story when Mrs. Grimes makes her last trip to the butcher's:

she went to the butcher and he gave her some liver and dog-meat.

It was the first time anyone had spoken to her in a friendly way for a long time. The butcher was alone in his shop when she came in and was annoyed by the thought of such a sick-looking old woman out on such a day. … [He] said something about her husband and her son, swore at them, and the old woman stared at him, a look of mild surprise in her eyes as he talked. He said that if either the husband or the son were going to get any of the liver or the heavy bones with scraps of meat hanging to them that he had put into the grain bag, he'd seen him [sic] starve first.

(416)

In spite of the narrator's tacit assumption that his audience will see this interchange as positive, many readers imagining this encounter might question how “friendly” such a conversation would appear to a woman grown accustomed to “the habit of silence” (414) who suddenly finds her family being sworn at and threatened by a man she hardly knows.

Immediately following this passage, the narrator depicts the death that has been anticipated since the opening lines of the story. In this middle section of the narrative, the old woman starts her journey home. Laden with a sack of provisions too heavy for her, Mrs. Grimes decides to take “a short cut over a hill and through the woods. … She was afraid she couldn't make it” otherwise (416-417). In the midst of her “struggle” (416) home, the old woman “foolish[ly]” allows herself to rest against a tree and “quietly” (417) falls into a sleep from which she never completely awakes. The interest in the “strange picture” her death presents lies with the several dogs that are “running in circles. … round and round” her sleeping form: “In the clearing, under the snow-laden tree and under the wintry moon they made a strange picture, running thus silently in a circle their running had beaten in the soft snow” (418). At this point, the narrator shocks the reader by disclosing that he also has been part of a similarly “strange picture”: “I knew all about it afterward, when I grew to be a man, because once in the woods in Illinois, on another winter night, I saw a pack of dogs act just like that. The dogs were waiting for me to die as they had waited for the old woman that night when I was a child …” (419). Like most critics, Jon Lawry dismisses this revelation as fictive, suggesting that Anderson is striving to unveil the “negative capability” necessary to the artist (308). According to Lawry, even the narrator knows that at this moment he is telling tales. Evidence in the memoirs, however, suggests that the adventure in the Illinois forests may be interpreted less figuratively; for the experience the narrator records seems modeled upon a “strange performance” Anderson himself claims to have witnessed when, as a young man, he awoke to find himself encircled by a pack of dogs:

In the forest on the winter night dogs kept leaving the mysterious circle in which they ran and coming to me. Other dogs ran up the log to put their forelegs on my chest and stare into my face. It seemed to me, that night, that they were caught by something. They had become a wolf pack. …

That there was such a thing as man, that they were the servants of man, that they were really dogs not wolves in a primitive world. That night I stood the strange performance as long as I could and then I arose and ran. … I shouted. I … picked up a stick and ran among the dogs, hitting out at them.

(Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs 426)

“It was on that night,” Anderson avers, that he “got the impulse for one of [his] best stories” (Memoirs 425)—“Death in the Woods.”

In many respects these three “moonlit” pictures are strikingly similar, as if Anderson is attempting to suggest that the shared experience of the “primitive world” unites all human beings. To be sure, within the story itself, this is the moment at which the narrator most identifies with the plight of the dying woman; yet as soon becomes clear, his identification with her is remarkably shortlived. Indeed, the narrator survives the nightmarish “performance” precisely because he, like the combative writer depicted in the memoirs, is “young” and male and “ha[s] no intention whatever of dying” (“Death” 419). By contrasting the two male-centered portraits with the “strange picture” of Mrs. Grimes's death, I hope to show how fundamentally separate these varying wintry images are. A brief look at the history of the composition of “Death in the Woods” will aid this contrast.

If, as Anderson claims, “the telling of the tale is the cutting of the natal cord” (Story 93), then the creation of “Death in the Woods” was an exceptionally laborious birth.⁹ In his memoirs Anderson reveals that he “did not succeed in writing it at once. It was one of the stories I wrote, threw away and rewrote many times” (425). One fragmentary reference to an “old woman … who died alone in a wood on a winter day” appeared in 1924 in a passage from A Story Teller's Story where Anderson describes at some length the “strange life” that peopled his boyhood imagination:

As a boy lying buried in the hay I presume I had some such notion as that and later as a man standing by a lathe in some factory some such notion must have still been in my mind. I wanted then to be something heroic in the eyes of my own mother, now dead, and at the same time wanted to be something heroic in my own eyes too.

One could not do the thing in actual life so one did it in a new world created within one's fancy.

And what a world that fanciful one—how grotesque, how strange, how teeming with strange life! …

There are so many people in that land of whom I should like to tell you. … There is the old woman accompanied by the gigantic dogs who died alone in a wood on a winter day, the stout man with the grey eyes and with the pack on his back who stands talking to the beautiful woman as she sits in her carriage, the little dark woman with the boyish husband who lives in a small frame house by a dusty road far out in the country.

(92)

Somehow this “grotesque” image of an old woman's death became fused in the artist's imagination with that “strange performance” depicted in the posthumously published memoirs. There as well the experience in the woods looms larger than life as if the dogs roaming within and without Anderson's “fancy” world were all “gigantic[ally]” “large German police dogs.” Although Anderson never admitted to being “frightened” by this “primitive” encounter, certainly most people would see this experience as threatening:

How long I lay there that night I'll never know. I was warmly clad. It is possible that I slept and dreamed although I do not think so.

The dogs had become silent and then suddenly there was one of them, a large German police dog with his bare leg on my chest. He was standing, his hind legs on my legs, his forelegs on my chest and his face close to my face. In the moonlight I could look directly into his eyes.

I thought there was a strange light in his eyes.

Was I frightened?

Well, I can't remember.

(Memoirs 425-426)

Importantly, neither passage from these autobiographical writings is dominated by sexual overtones; nor does an undated precursor of “Death in the Woods” entitled “The Death in the Forest” depict as sexually menacing the “big ugly dogs” that accompany Ma Marvin (Mrs. Grimes in the final version) on her journey to town. Rather, the narrator simply mentions as a matter of fact that “of course [the] pack … one always saw lying about Ike Marvin's ruined saw mill … had come with her” (235). This early version of the story differs from “Death in the Woods” in other ways as well. Notably, in “The Death in the Forest,” the “Marvin dogs … gro[w] bold” only after the old woman is dead, at which time they tear through the bag on her back in order to get “the hunk of salt pork within” (235). Between this and the final version of the story we know as “Death in the Woods,” Anderson drastically reenvisioned the particulars of this scene. Whereas the “Marvin dogs” were merely “big” and “ugly,” the “Grimes dogs” are “all tall gaunt fellows” (418), and when one of them “left the running circle and came to stand before” the half-conscious woman, the “dog thrust his face close to her face. His red tongue … hanging out” (418-419). Clearly, this image represents a significant departure from those winter landscapes depicted in the memoirs and in the undated manuscript of “The Death in the Forest.” Bluntly put, in “Death in the Woods” the narrative thrust is directed elsewhere, for the threat Mrs. Grimes faces from these “tall gaunt fellows” is the threat of rape, as becomes plain when the narrator records what happens after the sleeping woman dies.

The seven dogs, which had run round Mrs. Grimes as if operating by “some old instinct, come down from the time when they were wolves” (418), now drag her thinly clad corpse into the open. As they rip the food sack from her back, they tear through her clothing “clear to the hip” (420), conveniently leaving her body unharmed. This last image echoes the earlier “rape” scene in which the German farmer tore the bound girl's “dress open clear down the front” (413), even as it also nicely complements the second section of “Death in the Woods” in which the narrator reasserts woman's role as feeder. According to his report, Mrs. Grimes's married life was merely an extension of the monotony she knew on the German couple's farm: “Horses, cows, pigs, dogs, men … [all] had to be fed” (416). Even her sexual relations with her husband are imaged by the fixated narrator as a form of feeding when he envisages Mrs. Grimes's relief at no longer being sexually desirable: “Thank heaven, she did not have to feed her husband—in a certain way. That hadn't lasted long after their marriage” (415).

In the final sections of “Death in the Woods” the process of reading and interpretation is brought to the fore, for the first person to discover the partially exposed body is a hunter who seemingly “misreads” the scene. “Something, the beaten round path in the little snow-covered clearing, the silence of the place, the place where the dogs had worried the body trying to pull the grain bag away or tear it open—something startled the man and he hurried off to town” to tell “his story”: “‘She was a beautiful young girl. Her face was buried in the snow’” (420, 421). Once again, the reader notes the narrator's identification not with the woman herself but rather with the man who had been so “frightened” by his discovery that he “had not looked closely at the body”: “If something strange or uncanny has happened in the neighborhood all you think about is getting away from there as fast as you can” (421). This rationalization sets the stage for the “mystical” transformations that result when a “crowd of men and boys,” including the narrator and his brother, accompany the hunter back into the forest. Following this journey, the young boy knows that he and his brother, like the hunter before them, will “have something to tell” (421).

The “fragments” (423) with which the narrator pieces together his story are modeled upon the hunter's wish-fulfilling vision of the “beautiful young girl”:

She did not look old, lying there in that light, frozen and still. One of the men turned her over in the snow and I saw everything. My body trembled with some strange mystical feeling and so did my brother's. It might have been the cold.

Neither of us had ever seen a woman's body before. It may have been the snow, clinging to the frozen flesh, that made it look so white and lovely, so like marble.

(421-422)

What the narrator remembers from this epiphanic moment is “only the picture there in the forest, the men standing about, the naked girlish-looking figure, face down in the snow. …” He further acknowledges that “the scene in the forest had become for me, without my knowing it, the foundation for the real story I am trying to tell. The fragments, you see, had to be picked up slowly, long afterwards” (423). As several critics have observed, this “real story” can be interpreted on one level as the boy's sexual awakening, or as William Scheick has argued, his failure to do so (144). On another level, however, this experience represents an aesthetic metamorphosis: the “slight thing,” who previously moved through town unnoticed, becomes in death a symbol for the feminine ideal, an object d'art worthy to serve as the “foundation” for a “real story.”

This final metamorphosis—woman into art—can prove disturbing, particularly if the reader has accepted Anderson's invitation “to enter … into a process almost identical with that of the narrator” (Lawry 308). Yet no matter how appealing this invitation is, our experience of this “mystical” transformation differs considerably from what the male posse “saw” in the woods, for even as Anderson's trembling narrator reenvisions this scene, we know, as the crowd in the forest does not, exactly who this woman is. Indeed, it is only when her body is carried back to town and protected from men's eyes by the blacksmith's coat that the beautiful marbled nude is discovered to be the naked corpse of the old Mrs. Grimes. In distinguishing between Mrs. Grimes's shifting status as “naked” and “nude,” I follow John Berger's analysis of these terms set forth in his insightful study Ways of Seeing. There Berger asserts that “To be naked is to be oneself,” as Mrs. Grimes is when there are no men or boys about pruriently relishing the “lovely” vision of her “frozen flesh.” Mrs. Grimes becomes “nude,” however, when she is put “on display.” As Berger maintains, “To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display” (54). Had the crowd encircling the “faceless” torso not been exclusively male, Mrs. Grimes might have been identified more quickly. That Anderson himself sensed this is suggested by a significant revision he made in the course of composing his story. In the early version of the tale I have already discussed, “The Death in the Forest,” the crowd that “went out to Grimes' woods” includes both men and women: “Even women who had no babies to look after went” (234). Largely because of this, the townspeople's discovery of Ma Marvin's clothed body seems quite prosaic when compared with that “mystically” male moment in “Death in the Woods” when the men and boys “see” only a projection of their collective imagination.

Importantly, the narrator returns in the final section of “Death in the Woods” to the episode in which he also “had a half-uncanny, mystical adventure with dogs in an Illinois forest” (423). What startles the reader in this passage is not the narrator's repeating himself—he has done that before—but rather the vague confession that prefaces this second reference to the “mystical adventure”: “Things happened. When I was a young man I worked on the farm of a German. The hired-girl was afraid of her employer. The farmer's wife hated her. I saw things at that place” (423). If nothing else has previously alerted the reader to the narrator's disturbing identification with the community of males that, within the bounds of this short story, routinely victimizes women, this hesitant admission should; for here the narrator firmly locates himself in a position of power identical to that of Jake Grimes, a position that grants him the ability to “get” frightened “young things” to satisfy his various hungers. Contrary to what William Scheick has argued, the young boy's sexual development clearly has progressed according to the definition of masculinity accepted by “all country and small-town people.”

Several critics have discerned the shattering effect with which Anderson's male narrators depict their initial sexual encounters with women. Judith Fetterley's analysis of “I Want to Know Why” pertains well to “Death in the Woods”: “What Anderson's boy resists is not just growing up, it is specifically growing up male” (14). Yet as Fetterley demonstrates in her criticism of the earlier story, and as I hope to have shown in my own study of “Death in the Woods,” any resistance felt by Anderson's narrators on this score is eventually overcome. Indeed, one might argue of “Death in the Woods,” as Fetterley does of “I Want to Know Why,” that the story is “infused with the perspective it abhors, because finally to disavow that perspective would be to relinquish power” (xiv). Or in the terms offered within Anderson's own interpretation of “Death in the Woods,” to abandon power is to become like one of those “women who spend their whole lives, rather dumbly, feeding” the “persistent animal hunger of man.” Thus, despite the narrator's attempts to sympathize with the “simple story” (424) of Mrs. Jake Grimes, his allegiances are ultimately with the powerful and most definitely closed male community—with the “crowd of men and boys” who go to the woods, with the “frightened” hunter and the “friendly” butcher, and most especially with the two men who strive to “get” the bound girl. Admittedly, the narrator does seem to regard Mrs. Grimes more compassionately than any other man who is fed by her; yet the story he tells deals less with the miserable reality of an old woman's life than with the transforming power of artistic genius. Indeed, it is only as an artist that the narrator can justify this woman's life by envisioning her in death as a “slight” but nonetheless “beautiful” “thing.” The “foundation” of this “real story” of the artist-as-a-young-man may rest upon the bones of a dead woman, but it certainly little concerns her. In short, the narrator/artist can effectively ignore the political realities facing “such old women” by making of one woman's life a poetical whole, a lyric that suggests that Mrs. Grimes's destiny—and by implication, the destiny of her sex—is biologically determined: “The woman who died was one destined to feed animal life. Anyway, that is all she ever did. She was feeding animal life before she was born, as a child, as a young woman working on the farm of the German, after she married, when she grew old and when she died” (423). The many cyclical images within the story, as well as the narrator's passing references to his own mother and sister (421), reinforce such a constricted view of woman's fate.

The essential hopelessness that pervades Anderson's fiction has long been recognized. As Robert Morss Lovett observed in 1922,

this hopelessness is not an interpretation playfully or desperately imposed on the phenomena of life from without by thought or reason; it springs from within; it is of the essence of being. … It is as if, to use Cardinal Newman's words, man were implicated from birth in some “vast aboriginal calamity”; only instead of placing the fall of man historically in the Garden of Eden Mr. Anderson traces it biologically to the egg.

(67)

To recall that Mrs. Jake Grimes herself takes eggs to market in order to buy food for her family; to recall that this woman dies only when she “foolish[ly]” deviates from her customary route home; to recall that the narrator interprets her existence solely in terms of feeding—to recall these is to realize that Anderson's own aesthetics are most narrowly “bound.” Naturally the story proves unsettling to many readers today; for if we are taken in by the interpretative web Anderson's narrator seductively dangles before us, if we also become trembling voyeurs in the woods, then we also implicate ourselves in that “vast … calamity” of masculinist convention that proceeds to dehistoricize woman by objectifying her into art. We may of course recognize the alluring contours of this web without becoming ensnared in the trap, which led one of America's most distinguished storytellers, Edgar Allan Poe, to maintain that the “most poetical” of melancholy subjects is not the story of a real woman's life but rather the “death of a beautiful woman” as imagined by the artist who loves her (486).

Notes

1. One of Anderson's most illuminating apologies for his “children” appears in A Story Teller's Story, where the artist/mother records his discomfort at once having to listen to a speaker who “praised [him] as a writer but spoke slightingly of the figures that lived in the tales [Winesburg, Ohio]”:

   Could the man not understand that he was doing a quite unpermissible thing? As well go into the bedroom of a woman during her lying-in and say to her—“You are no doubt a very nice woman but the child to which you have just given birth is a little monster and will be hanged.” Surely any man can understand that, to such a one, it might be permitted to speak at any length regarding her own failings as a woman but—if the child live—surely this other thing must not be done. “It must not be condemned for the failings of the mother,” I thought shivering with fright. (93-94)

   For similar imagery, see also letters to Charles Bockler, Norman Holmes Pearson, and Gilbert Wilson (17 February 1931, 242-243; after 13 September 1937, 387-388; 12 October 1937, 390).

2. The term is Anderson's and comes from a letter to Roger Sergel in which the writer explains why “the modern factory” has affected men and women differently:

   I dare say I [am] an old-fashioned male. I do not think that men and women are alike or that they react to life in the same way. I know that saying this often annoys some women, but still I stand my ground. I do not believe that women employees have been hurt by the modern factory as men have. It is possible for the woman to create in her own person in the flesh, and it is not possible for men. It seems to me that to be is as important as to do. Basically, I do believe that the robbing of man of his craft, his touch with tools and materials by modern industry does tend to make him spiritually impotent. I believe that spiritual impotence eventually leads to a physical impotence. This belief is basic in me. The darkness is a darkness of the soul.

   (Letters 377)

3. Anderson's awareness of his own physical needs is well suggested in his correspondence. As he wrote Roger and Ruth Sergel, “I've never been able to work without a woman to love. Perhaps I'm cruel. They are earth and sky and warmth and light to me. I'm like an Irish peasant, taking potatoes out of the ground. I live by the woman I love. I take from her” (Letters 245). As I will argue in my paper, the narrator of “Death in the Woods” is similarly parasitic, for, like the other men particularized in the story, the artist/narrator also feeds upon the hapless Mrs. Grimes.

4. Many critics have observed the frequency with which Anderson portrays artists in his work. William V. Miller, for example, asserts that “the most important character type in Anderson's stories is the artist. His stories are filled not only with painters and writers but also with potential artists, story-tellers like May Edgley in ‘Unused’; and what may be called the ‘artistic impulse’ is shared by an even wider scope of characters.” Although he never discusses “Death in the Woods,” Miller's comments on Anderson and his narrator/artists also apply to that story:

   [T]he distinctive narrators, whether they be Anderson thinly disguised or separate characters, are actively present in the stories, apparently creating the tale as it progresses and inviting attention to the process through little asides like “I don't know how I learned this” or “you know how it is.” Indeed, after we recognize the full dimensions of the role of the artist in Anderson's fiction, rare is the story in which we do not discover elements of this role.

   (13)

5. This last term is Jon Lawry's, who argues that the story concerns the gradual metamorphosis of the “receiving … consciousness” into a “creating” consciousness (307).

6. Mary Joselyn argues similarly about this shift:

   The first part of the sentence is purely a statement of fact from and about the “real” world, a generalization framed in the present tense as a truism should be, but the second clause leaps out of the level of realistic detail to suggest a more universal realm where deeper issues are raised—the meaning of seeing, the amazing possibility of seeing better in a transforming half-light, of perceiving something not revealed clearly by the physical sight.

   (252-253)

   William Scheick analyzes these shifts from another perspective, holding that “whenever the narrator elliptically moves from objective observation of the woman's dilemma to imaginative identification with her thoughts,” he “readily mixes past and present tense. … His confusion of tenses represents a suspension of time identical to what occurs during a mystical experience. He cannot pass beyond that frozen mystical moment when he unconsciously identified with the dead woman”

   (143).

7. Sherwood Anderson remembers his mother's struggles less bitterly in the following passage from the Memoirs:

   Often when the fall fear comes, I tell myself that it is because I am thinking of my mother, of how she suffered. She took in the family washing of other and more prosperous families and the winter must have been bitterly hard for her. I remember her blue cold hands, her skirts, sometimes frozen stiff so that she could take them off and stand them like skirts of wood beside the kitchen stove.

   (28)

8. In his autobiographical writings Anderson repeatedly asserted that his own mother had been “bound”: “Mother had been a bound girl and must have been quite lovely. Her picture, as a young and beautiful woman, is before me on my desk as I write” (Memoirs 33). However, as Ray Lewis White notes in his edition of Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs, “Emma Smith Anderson apparently was never a ‘bound girl’” (33). That the line separating fact from fiction is blurred in Anderson's personal commentary is irrelevant. What is important is the stratagem of avoidance by which Anderson as critic refuses to admit—or perhaps even see—the connections joining his “fictions” about his mother with his narrative of Mrs. Jake Grimes.

   The two women are also “bound” by their relative “fatherlessness.” In the first section of “Death in the Woods,” the narrator reveals that the “bound girl” “did not know where her father and mother were. Maybe she did not have any father. You know what I mean” (413). According to White, Emma Smith Anderson “may have had little family life as a child, for her father, William H. Smith, annulled his marriage to Emma's mother” shortly after her birth (Memoirs 33).

9. Two versions of the story were published in 1926. The first appeared as an untitled chapter in the autobiographical Tar: A Midwest Childhood; later that year the story was published separately as “Death in the Woods.” Several changes distinguish the chapter in Tar from the story included in the September, 1926, issue of The American Mercury. The most important of these involves narrative technique: whereas in the former, the third-person narrator speaks to the “reader” about Tar (the unnamed “I”/eye of “Death in the Woods”) and his efforts to understand “the story of the old woman's death” (Tar 141), in the latter version of the tale, the first-person narrator speaks for himself and colloquially addresses his audience as “you.” Identical to the September, 1926, narrative is that which appeared in 1933 as the title piece to Anderson's last collection of fiction, “Death in the Woods” and Other Stories.

Works Cited

Anderson, Sherwood. “The Death in the Forest.” Ed. William V. Miller. Tar: A Midwest Childhood 232-236.

———. “Death in the Woods.” The Portable Sherwood Anderson. Ed. Horace Gregory. New York: Viking, 1972. 410-424.

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

———. Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs. 1942. Ed. Ray Lewis White. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1969.

———. A Story Teller's Story. 1924. Ed. Ray Lewis White. Cleveland: P of Case Western Reserve U, 1968.

———. Tar: A Midwest Childhood. 1926. Ed. Ray Lewis White. Cleveland: P of Case Western Reserve U, 1969.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 1972.

Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978.

Guerin, Wilfred L. “‘Death in the Woods’: Sherwood Anderson's ‘Cold Pastoral.’” CEA Critic 30 (1968): 4-5.

Howe, Irving. Sherwood Anderson. 1951. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1966.

Joselyn, Mary. “Some Artistic Dimensions of Sherwood Anderson's ‘Death in the Woods.’” Studies in Short Fiction 4 (1964): 252-259.

Lawry, Jon. “‘Death in the Woods’ and the Artist's Self in Sherwood Anderson.” PMLA 74 (1959): 306-311.

Lovett, Robert Morss. “The Promise of Sherwood Anderson.” Rev. of The Triumph of the Egg. Dial Jan. 1922: 79-83. Rpt. in Sherwood Anderson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Walter B. Rideout. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1974. 65-69.

Miller, William V. “Portraits of the Artist: Anderson's Fictional Storytellers.” Sherwood Anderson: Dimensions of His Literary Art. Ed. David D. Anderson. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1976. 1-23.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition.” 1846. Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. David Galloway. New York: Penguin, 1967. 480-492.

Robinson, Eleanor M. “A Study of ‘Death in the Woods.’” CEA Critic 30 (1968): 6.

Scheick, William J. “Compulsion toward Repetition: Sherwood Anderson's ‘Death in the Woods.’” Studies in Short Fiction 11 (1974): 141-146.