SOURCE: Kramer, David S. “Sherwood Anderson's Beyond Desire: Femininity and Masculinity in a Southern Mill Town.” Southern Studies 5, nos. 1-2 (spring-summer 1994): 73-79.

[In the following essay, Kramer examines the role of traditional Southern structures of masculinity and femininity and the changing industrial landscape in Beyond Desire.]

From 1927 to 1931 Sherwood Anderson was the publisher and editor of two newspapers in Marion, Georgia, a period of labor unrest in mining towns and textile mills following the southern industrialization of the previous decades. In his novel Beyond Desire (1932) Anderson took an old theme of his—the destructive impact of the machine age on men and women—and developed it within the context of the new South of his observations.

Changing conditions were precipitating a cultural crisis. In broadest terms, traditional ideologies glorifying the sanctity of white womanhood and the chivalry of the southern gentleman were collapsing in the wake of new economic forces. Anderson demonstrates this stress in the gender relationships between his characters, in both the bourgeosie and working class. His exploration of tawdriness and domination, reveals, if unwittingly, connections between ideology and sexuality, specifically how the failure of the former leads to the twisting of the latter. The tragedy of the novel is that for women this juncture does not become an opportunity for liberation, but rather, for self-defeating actions, and in some cases, a perverse allegiance to the old system. The new South is merely the substitution of one master for another.

Beyond Desire is primarily set in the fictional mill town of Langdon, Georgia. Red Oliver is the protagonist, a young man who is more a non-hero than an anti-hero. He is predominantly a malleable, wandering half-participant in the action. The episodic plot mirrors Red's wavering self. Red flees from a failed liaison with Ethel and accidentally falls in with North Carolina strikers. Doris thinks he is sexually attractive. He almost gets together with Molly, and is finally shot by Ned Sawyer, Louise's brother.

In a world of less empowered southern gentlemen, of dehumanization and emasculation among workers, of a new south left to imitate the North, Anderson situates his five major female characters, three bourgeoisie and two proletarian. Fittingly, in a fragmenting society, each operates in isolation. All, however, must define themselves against a common system; these reactions, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, are in some degrees both similar and disturbing.

The first character, Susan, Red's mother, is largely a caricature of the old South's pure womanhood. She married Red's father, a doctor, with the hope of living in the genteel ante-bellum style, fancying herself a gentlewoman. Red's family had come from a distinguished line of aristocrats. Their mansion had been built by Red's grandfather, a Confederate surgeon. It had been opulent: “great people of the old South built generously” (59). But, by the 1920's, the house was dilapidated and the rooms mostly empty.

Red's father, Doctor Oliver, had proved unambitious and uninterested in wearing the mantle of a great man. He even had a flippant bedside manner, and took death lightly. Like his fellow southerners, he suffered from a morbid ineffectuality, not bothering to resist the house's decay. As such, Susan, whose status was established through marriage, is constantly frustrated and bitter. The older ideal, which Susan seeks, is summed up by the narrator:

Women of the South, of the Old South, in the old Doctor Oliver's day, were ladies. The Southern white men, of the slave-owning class, made great talk of that. “I don't want my wife to soil her hands.” The women of the old South were to remain always the white spotless ones.

(62)

Critically, the passage reiterates that such a system, such an ideological conception of a “lady,” is only possible in the master/slave society, where the white patriarch has absolute control. Now, not only have changed socio-economic realities made such control impossible for men like Doctor Oliver, but he has also actively abdicated the role.

Susan's response to her life below expectations is anger towards her husband, and finally, sexual estrangement: “Go away. I do not want to sleep with you anymore” (22). She does find some solace from her dysfunctional marriage in religious revivalism; her animated participation is represented as a release valve for her suppressed libido. Finally, though, Susan reveals little self or social awareness. She is incapable of imagining an alliance with either working class or black women. Her religious escapism is just another ideological opiate.

Ethel Long is presented as far more self-aware than Susan. Ethel was educated at the University of Chicago, and only returned to Langdon to be the town librarian. In the North, she became critical of the provincial narrowness of the southern way of life. She describes herself as “not in the true Southern woman tradition, at least not in the old tradition,” and the narrator says, “Ethel was a modern. [None of] that old talk of a fine Southern civilization … making gentlemen, making ladies” (106, ellipsis by Anderson). She positions herself outside the tradition because of her superior intellect, but also because she can admit to possessing sexual desire: “there was that dream of a spotless white southern womanhood. She had herself thoroughly exploded that myth” (105). Ironically, however, she is a virgin at twenty-nine, having successfully fended off a rape attempt by a northern financier. Physically, she is still pure womanhood.

Ethel's narrative frequently revolves around her relationship with men, her father, Red, and Tom Riddle. This is the summer she has resolved to end her chastity—literally forsaking the myth she has ideologically repudiated. Ethel's father, Judge Long, is the closest approximation to what remains of the Southern Gentleman. He had a respected position in Langdon, almost not willing to help Ethel get a job because of the possible taint of favoritism: “I'm a Southern gentleman and a Southern gentleman doesn't do such things” (133). Ethel acknowledges his integrity and decency; he was “a good man, an honorable man. He didn't tell little lies. He didn't chase off secretly after brown women” (139). Ethel, however, rejects him for his weakness, or rather, his lack of total command. She thinks, “he was really a humble man, too humble” (116).

Half-consciously, Ethel has internalized the ideology of gender; as Anderson portrays her. Psychologically, she believes that males should dominate, and when they do not, they are less than men, less than desirable. Ethel muses on her father's ancestors when the family owned slaves, and projects on them a raw potency: “Why read when you can ride abroad over fields and command slaves? You are a prince” (111).

Ethel extends the dissatisfaction with her father onto other men, seeking in them an intensified masculinity, a search which often plunges into masochism. There is some similarity with Susan Oliver, both, as bourgeois women, receive status from the men they are allied with, the stronger the man, the higher the status. However, here, it is far more psychologically complex. Ethel (like the South in limbo between old and new) is caught between two ideological worlds—rejection and internalization. Ultimately, what may be happening is that the exposure of the older ideology reveals the oppressions it sought to mask. Ethel's reactions are a reflection of the suppressed violence at the core of oppression; as social symbolism they are symptomatic of the ideological crisis.

The persistent desire of Ethel for male subjugation becomes evident through fragmentary glimpses into both her conscious and unconscious mind. Most graphically, she fantasizes about a man, “Beat me. Beat me. Make me nice. Make me beautiful” (107) and “Pluck her. Bite her. Eat her. Hurt her” (110). On a slightly more articulate level, she thinks, “I guess I want a brute of a man, one who will pay no attention to my whims” (121) and “If a woman could find a man, even a brute man who would stand up” (138). She wants “American men able to do it, who dared to try doing it. Unscrupulous men, daring men, masculine men” (110). Ethel's atavism and masochism differs from Susan Oliver who, still without self-consciousness, responds in outward directed anger. Ethel suffers from a divided mind, directing her anger both inward (desire for pain) and outward (rejection of male compromise).

This divided mind is apparent when Ethel first thinks of herself as a woman who “dreams sometimes of a new freedom, separate from men's freedom.” And, she declares, “Men having failed in America, women trying something.” But, she undercuts this possibility of emancipation with, “Were they really?” (108), and, “But perhaps we want punishment” (107).

In the end, unable to choose a separate freedom, Ethel marries Tom Riddle, a lawyer. Like the pun in his name, Riddle is an anomaly. He is a Southerner who is not a Southerner. The marriage itself is dispassionate—necessarily lacking the illusions of chivalry and true womanhood—the couple sleeps in separate bedrooms. It is an imperfect accomodation, but, for Ethel, unable to free herself from notions of male power, it is the best available choice.

Ethel's decision to marry Riddle is made understandable in comparison to her relationship with her father's new wife, Blanche. Shortly before Ethel's return to Langdon, he remarried a younger woman. Blanche and Ethel have an ambivalent relationship; “the two women did not like each other. They did. They didn't” (137). On the one hand, they are rivals for the father/husband's attention. On the other, their commonalities are stressed—both are disappointed with the Judge.

At one point, Blance is frustrated by the Judge's age and ineffectuality. She thinks, “I am wanting something I guess you are too old to give me.” Further, the narrator, in an apparent reading of her deeper feelings, offers an internal monologue:

I want to bloom. Here I am a pale woman, not very well. I want to be spread out, thickened, and broadened, if you please, made into a real woman. I guess you can't do it to me, damn you. You aren't man enough.

(126)

Blanche is shown to share Ethel's sado-masochistic impulses. Ethel speculates about Blanche that “what his [Judge Long's] new woman needed was a good beating. ‘I'd give her one if she mine’” (139). This is internalization of ideology (when men aren't man enough), the result is a twisting of personality, a distortion of desire.

Blanche and Ethel's relationship reaches a pivotal climax. Blanche comes to Ethel in hopes of erotic or romantic communion, “the hand continued creeping up and down her body, over her breasts, her hips. … Blanche's lips touched Ethel's shoulder.” For an instant, Ethel almost accepts the advance: “there was a queer dawning notion of womanhood, something even noble, something patient, something understanding” (222-23). She is on the verge of an ideological epiphany, or at least, a movement away from a divisive desire for male control. They speak of men:

“They won't do. They won't do.
“I hate them.
“I hate them.
“They spoil everything. I hate them.”

(222)

But, at the moment of decision, Ethel says, “We let them. We even go towards them. There is something in them we want” (223). Suddenly, the women engage in a physical brawl in which Ethel throws Blanche to the floor. She decides to marry Tom Riddle, for “she had got back the thing by which she lived, her contempt” (224).

Ethel's inability to adequately define herself outside the received ideological system is seen, to a lesser degree, in the relatively minor character of Louise Sawyer, who studies economics at Columbia. In many respects, Louise is the most liberated woman. She does not mourn the old South's passing. She even imagines the undermining of middle-class authority, saying of the working class, “they'll begin more and more to realize that there is no hope for them—looking to people like us [the bourgeosie]” (338). She correctly analyzes the old aristocratic ideal in terms of black oppression, “Robert E. Lee. An attempt at kindness built into it. It's sheer patronage. It's a feeling built on slavery” (338). She thinks that capitalism is washing away the ideal. Yet, for all her rhetoric, at an important juncture when she looks at her brother Ned wearing his National Guard outfit, defending North Carolina against communism, she says, “I guess it's us women, falling for you men in your uniforms … you men going out to kill other men … there's something savage and ugly in us too. There must be something brutal in us too” (337). And this is what happens. Ned kills Red Oliver; the strike is suppressed.

Fundamentally, it is not just bourgeois women who cannot escape internalized sexism. A central proletarian character is Doris, a young woman still full of vitality. Her husband Ed, though, is listless and passive, “Ed Hoffman wasn't a very strong man. She would have liked a strong young man” (69); “Ed couldn't do and go. He was always feeling done up and had to lie down” (70). Later, he is upset about conditions and says, “I'd like to get up a union here and I ain't got the nerve” (78). Again, the novel emphasizes the emasculation of factory work; its reduction of traditional male power.

Doris never displays anger towards Ed, rather, she takes a condescending view, “Ed was almost like a girl in some things” (72)—revealing her excessive valorization of masculinity. At one point, after watching a movie about the wealthy, Doris has, like the bourgeois women, a mild masochistic urge, “a queer feeling inside … after seeing such a show sometimes, she wished some rich wicked man would come and ruin her just once.” She contemplates if Ed has a similar fantasy—“it would have been funny if Ed wished, just for awhile, that he was rich and could live in a house like that and ruin such a young girl” (83)—but she dismisses him as not up the task.

Like Ethel, Doris has what appears to be an erotic or romantic relationship with another mill woman, Grace. Every night, the two women rub each other's tired bodies. On the one hand, their friendship is positive and empowering. On the other, however, it never reaches a self-conscious level. Rather, it is shown not as an instance of female solidarity but as a a lesser substitute for Doris's tepid marriage; “she'd rub Grace all over … what she did to Grace she also did to Ed” (77).

In the Langdon mill, the values of the middle class are duplicated; a woman's identity is established by her relationship to men. Thus, the women feel a vague dissatisfaction about the inefficacy of their men. They are never able to see the problem in terms of economic class; if they did, they would be less concerned about the machismo of their mates, and more committed to their collective power. Here, the latter does not exist; the result is stasis and acquiescnce.

Red's role in the novel is especially important at closure, the pessimistic ending which includes the collapse of the strike and his pointless death. As mentioned earlier, he is often an aimless drifter in the narrative, but at the same time a symbol of hope for the South. However, he never lives up to his billing. Despite his good looks, his personal quest to prove his masculinity goes unsatisfied. On one date, he is too awkward and vacillating to make a pass, and thinks later, “Suppose a man could make a woman out of her. How is that done? How absurd really. Who am I to call myself a man?” (21).

It is through his haphazard involvement with the labor movement that he feels stirrings of manhood. Once, in the factory when mistaken for a Communist, Red is flattered; it implied “that he was something braver and finer than he was” (291). Later, Red's short tenure with the Communist-inspired North Carolina strike bolsters his ego, briefly becoming like them, “harder, more unscrupulous, more determined” (270)—truly being Red. His Marxist machismo begins to win Molly's heart. But the strike is broken by the militia, and Red is killed by Ned Sawyer, completing the narrative's macabre circle.

Finally, Anderson seems intent on upholding prevailing views on gender. At the same time, he is revealing more than he may intend. In internalizing this ideology, each woman is stymied, unable to imagine a collective consciousness, each trapped in either individualistic hostility (Susan Oliver towards her husband) or individualistic flagellation (Ethel's desire to be beaten). Without concurrent ideological deconstruction, remaking the world means changing one domination for another. A courageous Communist agitator is better than a ruthless Riddle, but neither brings freedom nor authenticity.