[In the following essay, Atlas discusses Anderson's relationships with the women in his life and the effect they had on his characterizations of women in Winesburg, Ohio.]

Winesburg, Ohio has been studied biographically, geographically, historically, thematically, structurally, mystically, and mythically.¹ However one enters the novel, attention is given to its characters. Edwin Fussel and Carlos Baker have seen the novel within the tradition of the Bildungsroman and have found George Willard's journey toward self and subsequent escape from Winesburg to be its center;² David D. Anderson has demonstrated that George Willard's role is secondary to the people about whom each story centers and that one must understand the individual characters and their human experience in order to fully comprehend the novel.³ But serious critical attention has not been paid to all of the individuals in Winesburg. The women, although they appear in almost every story, have not been studied collectively. Such a study can illuminate Winesburg, Ohio as well as Sherwood Anderson's understanding of and relationship to women. One scholar, Chris Browning, has attempted to understand Anderson's relationship to women by exploring one character, Kate Swift, the teacher of Winesburg. In her essay, “Kate Swift: Sherwood Anderson's Creative Eros,” she discusses Anderson's relationship to this character, establishing that Anderson's portrait of Kate Swift is an embodiment of his ideal woman.⁴ And if we accept that Kate Swift is Anderson's ideal, is this kind of idealization enough? Why does Anderson leave her isolated and weeping in Winesburg? How typical is this pattern in the novel?

As empathetic as Sherwood Anderson was toward the women he created in Winesburg, Ohio, he allowed neither Kate Swift nor any of the other women in Winesburg the escape that he hinted was possible for George Willard. While for George, Winesburg might become a background on which to paint his dreams of manhood, for even the most promising women of the town—for Kate Swift, Elizabeth Willard, Louise Bentley, Alice Hindman, and Helen White—Winesburg remained the foreground, if not the entire canvas of their lives. Even when Sherwood Anderson made George Willard and Helen White momentary equals and allowed them to find understanding and acceptance in one another, he ended his novel treating them in vastly different ways. The last image the reader has of George is one of ascension. He is boarding a train that will take him away from his home town and ideally toward further understanding of himself; the last image that the reader has of Helen is one of misdirected energy. Helen chases the very same train on which George departs, hoping to have a parting word with him, herself having no thought of permanently leaving town. While Helen chases George, he is seated on the train preoccupied with himself and his future. Granted, it is George Willard, not Helen White, who is the main character of these stories, and it is his growth and escape which is central to Winesburg, Ohio, but since Anderson clearly portrayed that there was no salvation for those who remained in town and since he did allow a few other male characters—David Bentley, Seth Richmond, and Elmer Crowley—the possibility of beginning a new life elsewhere, one wonders why no woman leaves Winesburg.

Perhaps one of the reasons Anderson allowed no woman to leave Winesburg was because he created out of his own experiences, and his early experiences with women were with those who may have been sensitive but who were also clearly trapped. His mother, Emma Smith Anderson, followed the pattern of the sacrificing woman, dying in her forties worn out from having to maintain a family of six children with insufficient financial and emotional support from her husband. Anderson was very much affected by his mother's drudgery and as an adult confessed that he never looked at a working woman without recalling his mother's life.⁵ Not only did he perceive his mother's hard life, but he also perceived her yearning for something past the surface of her experience. He acknowledged her influence on him in his dedication to Winesburg, Ohio, where he gave her credit for his hunger to see beneath the surface of lives.

The other major female figure of his youth, his older sister Stella, led an equally self-effacing life. If Anderson inherited his mother's sensitivity, Stella inherited both that sensitivity and a sense of obligation to be the family's nurturer. Before her mother's death she wrote verse, graduated as valedictorian from her high school class, and taught for two years, but after her mother died her personal ambitions were frustrated. She became the caretaker of her five brothers and found few outlets for her own creative energy. In his memoirs, Anderson recalled that one evening she asked him to walk with her and pretend he was some other man. On their walk her fantasy burgeoned. She caressed her brother's hair and asked him “‘Do you love me, James?’” In recreating this scene, Anderson touched delicately yet powerfully on the extent of his sister's desperation. Eventually, Anderson's older brother, Karl, and he responded to their sister's need for her own life, and Stella was able to attend the University of Chicago. But she stayed for over six years, and Sherwood and Karl decided that was too long. Sherwood Anderson was chosen to tell her that she would have to quit school and work. In his memoirs he recalled his sister's initial anger at his request and verbalized that he found her response to be both inappropriate and selfish. While he empathized with Stella's need to make her own life, he was displeased when her independence exceeded the boundaries he and his older brother had established for her. Soon after Sherwood's request Stella quit school, found a teaching job, and had an overpowering religious experience which caused her to repent her “selfishness.” She apologized to Sherwood. Later she married, but felt that her life should have been dedicated to God. In 1917, forty-two years old, she died. A tract she wrote, “The Story of a Christian Life,” was read at her funeral: in it she portrayed her life as one of self-sacrifice and obligation.⁶

Anderson's mother and sister both had starved lives and their lives understandably left a strong impression on Anderson. Many of the frustrated lives in Winesburg, Ohio are very likely patterned on these women. But there were other women in Anderson's life who were strong and confident.

His first wife, Cornelia Platt Lane, was a graduate of Western Reserve University, a literary editor of the school Annual, and an avid fan of the theater. After her marriage to Anderson she remained active in literary clubs and discussion groups, and after their separation she turned her attention to getting work in order to support herself and her three children. She taught from 1915-1917, clearly trying to see her options and to make the most life-giving choices she could.⁷

The woman Anderson was involved with during the creation of Winesburg, Ohio, Tenessee Claflin Mitchell, was an intelligent, creative woman who was making untraditional choices. She left a small town, Jackson, Michigan, to move to Chicago where she danced, sang, sculpted, and wrote, supporting herself by teaching music and dance, and by tuning pianos.⁸

There were many other independent, expansive women in Anderson's life by the time he began writing Winesburg in the fall of 1915. Margaret Anderson, editor of The Little Review, was one of Anderson's first connections to the literary world of Chicago.⁹ Edna Kenton, Harriet Monroe, and Agnes Tietjens were all part of Chicago's artistic community, the community which nurtured Anderson's own exploration and intellectual growth during that period of his life.

One of the writers who was to most strongly influence his work was Gertrude Stein. Irving Howe suggests that his response to Stein and her innovative art was not simply positive as Anderson recollected in his memoirs. Howe presents the evidence:

Anderson has recalled that he “had come to Gertrude Stein's book about which everyone laughed but about which I did not laugh. It excited me as one might grow excited in going into a new and wonderful country where everything is strange. …” The truth, however, was somewhat more complex than Anderson's memory. His first reactions to Stein were antagonistic: at a Chicago party in 1915 he told Edna Kenton that he thought it merely funny that anyone should take Tender Buttons seriously, and shortly afterwards he even composed a parody of Stein for his advertising cronies.¹⁰

Regardless of how Anderson actually responded to Stein, he was aware of her impact on experimental writing, of her power, independence, and individuality.

It is clear that while Anderson was writing Winesburg, Ohio, he was aware that women, even some from small towns, were escaping from their repressive environments and trying to live creative, self-directed lives. He even mentioned in “Adventure” that there was a “growing modern idea of a woman's owning herself and giving and taking for her own end in life.”¹¹ But Anderson was not interested in making any woman of Winesburg a carefully delineated, fully developed “modern woman.” He began to make a number of his women strong but each one eventually catches herself in a traditional trap: Elizabeth Willard needs love first as does Louise Bentley. Alice Hindman can go as far as accepting economic independence, but she too prefers to live through her lover, even after he has obviously deserted her; Helen White shows potential: she is intelligent and seems capable of making choices, but Anderson finally chose not to develop her individuality, and presented her only through her relationships with others. At the end he was more comfortable leaving her safely at home.

While Anderson could be sympathetic to women, he could also unrealistically limit not only his presentation of them, but his understanding of what they needed. Too often he was comfortable assuming that what women wanted most was to give themselves away to an ideal lover. His belief that women wanted men and men wanted to create is depicted in the love relationships of Winesburg. Alice Hindman's relationship with Ned Currie and Helen White's relationship with George Willard are examples of this belief. What he portrayed in Winesburg, Ohio, he stated in his later essay, “The Modern Writer.”¹¹ “It is true as there is a sun in the sky that men cannot live in the end without love of craft. It is to the man what love of children is to the woman.”¹² Anderson did not let his experiences with women get in the way of his idealizations: contact with intelligent, creative, ambitious women did not liberalize him. Rather as he grew older these stereotypes crystalized. Even while accepting that his memoirs were never edited by him, it is still impossible not to take seriously the implications of his statements about women. For example, in his memoirs, he began one discussion about modern women by analyzing the difficulties his wives had living with an artist, who, like all artists, emotionally withdrew when in the process of creating. While he willingly took blame for his unsatisfactory marriages, he managed to define women and men at the expense of women's creative and independent natures. He wrote not only about himself, but about all artists, male artists, that is:

When one of us makes a failure of marriage it is, almost inevitably, his own fault. He is what he is. He should not blame the woman.

The modern woman will not be kicked aside so. She wants children. She wants a certain security, for herself and for her children, but we fellows do not understand the impulse toward security. When we are secure we are dead. There is nothing secure in our world, out there, and as for the matter of children we are always having children of our own.¹³

Anderson needed to make women simpler than they are and when angry, or frustrated, or afraid, he easily moved into traditional, and safe, categories. When angry at critical responses to his work he could write that success was overrated and amounted to nothing more than “silly women mouthing over you.”¹⁴ But he knew in the midst of his statements that women wanted men and men wanted to create, that women needed more security than men, that women were somehow more stupid than men, that he was frightened of women. Most of all, he was frightened of needing them, losing his independence, of somehow being seduced by sexuality into being corporeal rather than creative. Whether emotionally or artistically, Anderson was convinced that “One of the things a man has to learn is to fight most bitterly the influence of those who love him.”¹⁵ It was easier for him to create what he did not fear and what he did not need.

When Anderson wrote “Impotence,” a story concerning the life of Marietta Finley, a woman with whom he corresponded from 1916 to 1931, rather than trying to portray her strength, he consciously limited it. He wrote to her, willing to share his creation, but afraid of insulting her. He warned her that “Impotence” was not an accurate presentation of her life or her strength:

Now let me explain. If you want to see the story I shall have to have an understanding with you first. There is something gone out of my Marie that is not gone out of you. You have a thousand things she has not. I could not bear to have this story taken as an interpretation of your life. That will have to be understood or I will tear it up and throw it to the winds.¹⁶

Anderson was not totally unconscious of his fear of strong women. In “Loneliness,” one of the Winesburg stories, he reduced the main character, Enoch Robinson, to a complaining child because Enoch is so afraid of strong women that he makes his life devoid of love. In love, Enoch Robinson runs from a woman to whom he is attracted because he is convinced that she is too “large” for his room and will subsume him. He treats her cruelly, forcing her out of his life. Overcome by the implications of his actions he whimpers: “‘I'm alone, all alone. … It was warm and friendly in my room but now I'm all alone.’”¹⁷ Although Anderson's depiction of Robinson is not sympathetic, his involvement with this story was very strong; he was very anxious that it be accepted by his friend and editor, Waldo Frank, for publication in Seven Arts. Anderson, by recreating the horrors of isolating oneself because of fear of strong women, was making a statement which he found important and for which he needed outside support. When Waldo Frank rejected the story in December 1916, Anderson responded strongly:

Damn it, I wanted you to like the story about Enoch Robinson and the woman who came into his room and was too big for the room.

There is a story every critic is bound to dislike. I can remember reading it to Floyd Dell, and it made him hopping mad. “It's damn rot,” says Floyd. “it does not get anywhere.”

“It gets there, but you are not at the station,” I replied to Floyd, and I think I was right.

Why do I try to convince you of this story? Well, I want it in print in Seven Arts. A writer knows when a story is good, and that story is good.

Sometimes when I am in New York, I'll bring that story in, and I'll make you see it.¹⁸

Anderson was himself confused over the strength of his response, but if one remembers that this exchange took place six months after his marriage to Tenessee Claflin Mitchell, a marriage that according to his memoirs “did not take,” a marriage to a woman who was trying to be creative, who may at times have felt too “large” for his room, his passionate response makes psychological sense. He might condemn his character for forcing the strong woman out of his life, but he understood the impulse and the fear of being subsumed.

Anderson also knew that if he were large enough, an independent woman would not function as a threat whom he needed to perceive in limited terms. Rather, she could be a friend with whom he could share both sensuality and art. In a larger mood he wrote to Waldo Frank:

The world has a wart on its nose.

In the night the winds come down out of Medicine Hat.

They play in dead cornfields.

In the cold and the night the gods burrow deep in the ground.

There is a stretch of land in the West over which a man may walk 30 days seeing nothing but cornfields. I have a picture. In the midst of that vast open space, exposed to the winds that tramp the world, Edna Kenton and Harrison Grey Fiske are talking of art.

See the moon. Isn't the night delightful?¹⁹

In Anderson's ideal world two Chicago artists, a man and a woman, serve as allegorical figures. They are connected to nature and art and they walk without fear. But in his own life, and in his creation of women in Winesburg, Ohio, he felt that he must settle for less.

The women that Anderson created most sensitively in Winesburg, Ohio were those who posed no threat for either him or his male protagonists. Helen White is a potential threat to George Willard's freedom and she is a possible competitor: leaving her behind with no solid aspirations of her own and only George Willard's wish that she not become like all the other women in Winesburg, was as much strength as Anderson was willing to allow her. Anderson created no overt power struggle between these two characters and he in no way dealt with the fact that he sacrificed Helen's potential in order to simplify George's exit.

But Anderson's unwillingness to allow his female characters the same amount of mobility as he allowed his male characters did not blind him to the fact that men's attitudes toward women can and do damage them irreparably. In “Godliness,” Anderson created a protagonist who succeeds in killing his wife, not out of cruelty but by watching her take on a role for which she is not sufficiently strong, and who succeeds in emotionally crippling his daughter because she was not the son who would help him “‘pluck at last all of these lands out of the hands of the Philistines.’”²⁰ In Winesburg, Ohio Anderson questioned some of the traditional myths; but he embraced others. Women, in Anderson's understanding, did not long to be worked to death, they did not long to be rejected because they were female, but they did long to be subsumed in a man.

If one journeys through Winesburg, Ohio looking carefully at the female characters that Anderson created, one senses that even if Anderson was not accurately or openly exploring all the various aspects of women in a small Midwestern city, he was seriously exploring them. The stories reflect both a deep sensitivity to female traps and an unwillingness to allow women the same choices, needs, and strengths that it allowed men. The first woman in Winesburg that Anderson presented in detail appeared in “Paper Pills.” She remained nameless throughout the story, hardly more than a sacrifice. The force of her powerlessness and of her accepting silence colored not only this tale, but all of Winesburg, Ohio. The reader is told little about her other than that her parents are dead and have left her a large fertile farm, and that this inheritance, coupled with the fact that she is dark, mysteriously attractive, and alone, interests suitors. One young man, the jeweler's son, talks constantly of virginity and another, a silent, black-haired boy, impregnates her. She is, in the context of Winesburg, a twisted apple, sweetest of all those in the orchard, and she sees herself in just such passive terms:

At times it seemed to her that as he talked he was holding her body in his hands. She imagined him turning it slowly about in the white hands and staring at it. At night she dreamed that he had bitten into her body and that his jaws were dripping.²¹

When the silent, dark-haired suitor seduces her, it is not without violence. In his moment of passion, he bites her. Shortly after this barbarous but brief encounter she realizes that she is pregnant and goes to see Doctor Reefy. In his office, she watches a woman whose tooth is being removed bleed. The woman's husband is also watching, and at the moment of extraction both the woman and her spouse simultaneously scream. The main female character does not react. She accepts the pain around her as simply as she accepts her own. The story quickly progresses and we are told that she falls in love with Doctor Reefy, and passively accepts the truths he shares. After a vague illness in which she loses her unborn child, she marries Doctor Reefy, and in the spring of that year, she quietly dies.

From this silent, bloody, dreamlike tale, the reader is introduced to Elizabeth Willard, George Willard's mother. She, unlike the woman in “Paper Pills,” has the hunger to express herself, but she is no less silent and no more free. Elizabeth prays that her son be allowed to express something for them both. Desperate for this, her prayer becomes violent and the violence is willingly directed against herself:

“Even though I die, I will in some way keep defeat from you,” she cried, and so deep was her determination that her whole body shook. Her eyes glowed and she clenched her fists. “If I am dead and see him becoming a meaningless drab figure like myself, I will come back,” she declared. “I ask God now to give me that privilege. I demand it. I will pay for it. God may beat men with his fists. I will take any blow that may befall if but this my boy be allowed to express something for us both.”²²

When we are introduced to her, she is forty-five and broken. Her death hovers over the length of the novel and her wish for George Willard's creativity increases our own investment in it. In “Death,” one of the last stories in Winesburg, Ohio, we are told of her love relationship with Doctor Reefy and of her youthful aspiration to be an actress. As a young woman, her need of love stood in the way of her need of self. This, the narrator explains, is the way of women. But Elizabeth is less sure of this. She takes some responsibility for her defeat and states that she “let” the dream within her be killed.²³ But more frequently she feels that she has been a victim. Anderson has her put down her head and weep when the Winesburg baker throws sticks and bits of broken glass at the druggist's cat who crouched behind barrels in an attempt to escape the abuse. Elizabeth eventually stops looking at the grey cat. The relationship between the cat and the baker seems too much like “a rehearsal of her own life, terrible in its vividness.”²⁴

In “The Philosopher” we are again introduced to women as victims. Doctor Parcival describes his mother quietly working without complaint: “‘My mother, who was small and had red, sad-looking eyes, would come into the house from a little shed at the back. That's where she spent her time over the washtub scrubbing people's dirty clothes.’”²⁵ This story ends with another bloody image of women's lives and women's lot: a female child is defenselessly thrown from a buggy and killed.

Louise Trunnion, one of the two central characters in the next sketch, “Nobody Knows,” is a return to the Elizabeth Willard type: a female character who hungers but does not get what she wants. Louise Trunnion is a confused young girl living in her father's house who wants something for herself but she is neither sure what she wants nor how to get it. First, she sends George Willard a note offering herself: “‘I'm yours if you want me,’” but she is not comfortable being the chooser and when Willard appears she sulkily says, “‘How do you know I want to go out with you. What makes you so sure?’” George's encounter with her is coldly insensitive. After it, he is simply impressed that his pleasure is free: “‘She hasn't got anything on me. Nobody knows,’ he muttered doggedly and went on his way.”²⁶

The next story, “Godliness,” is written in four parts. Through the development of Louise Bentley, the central female character, Anderson again explores how women are victimized by the society they live in and the people with whom they associate. 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 indicting society and calling the writers of the period to action: “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.”²⁷ Ironically, it is also in “Godliness” that Anderson states his theory that what women want most is to be possessed: “Sometimes it seemed to her that to be held tightly and kissed was the whole secret of life, and then a new impulse came and she was terribly afraid. The age-old woman's desire to be possessed had taken possession of her. …”²⁸ But in developing his character, Anderson shows that Louise Bentley wants more than someone to possess her: she wants spiritual communication with another human being.

All through her life Louise longs for love. Her father had rejected her because she was not the son with whom he could build God's kingdom on earth; Mary and Harriet Hardy, the daughters of Albert Hardy, the man whose house Louise lives in while she attends Winesburg's high school, view her negatively because she receives their father's praise for being academically successful. Wanting control, Louise decides that if she were only braver, she could get the love for which she longs. Anderson carefully depicts that bravery is not the issue: the issue is communication and the channels are not yet open between either men and women or women and women.

In creating Louise Bentley and giving her a need for love which overpowers all her talents, Anderson is dooming her to an unhappy life. Wanting a friend, she takes John Hardy to be her lover, but sexuality does not satisfy her. John cannot understand what she wants and her frustration turns to bitterness. Her unhappiness does not cause her to reconsider the practicality of love as life's central solution. Instead it leads her to be an angry, ineffectual woman, and a hater of men. Interestingly, she does not reject women; for her they remain fellow victims, but she rejects all men and this anger negatively affects her relationship with her son whom she treats ambivalently. When her husband reproaches her for being a cruel mother she laughs: “‘It is a man child and will get what it wants anyway,’ she said sharply. ‘Had it been a woman child there is nothing in the world I would not have done for it.’” But Louise Bentley does not have a woman child and she is given no opportunity to satisfy either her need to love or her need to be loved. She is clearly one of the female victims of Winesburg whose strength and creativity lead nowhere.

In the next story, “A Man of Ideas,” Anderson creates a strong female character, but he fails to develop her. Sarah King is an outcast of the town; she is neither beautiful nor a member of a socially acceptable family. While the story suggests that a meaningful relationship exists between her and Joe Welling, another outcast, and that this relationship is mutually fulfilling, he fails to support this. While the two characters nurture one another, the relationship seems to lack honesty. Joe Welling may tell her that she is intelligent, and Sarah King may allow him to talk to her about his ideas, but she is frightened when he decides to share these ideas with George Willard for she is convinced that Joe and George will quarrel over their worth. Her response implies that she finds Joe's ideas less intelligent than she privately encourages him to believe. Anderson, through the narrative tone, implies that Sarah is lucky that she is not more isolated being neither of fine breeding nor fine beauty, and certainly the town's people laugh at Joe's protestations of love, but the reader must question the degree of her luck, her happiness, and her strength.

Anderson is not allowing women many options. In his next story, “Adventure,” we are introduced to Alice Hindman who has good standing in her society, is strong and creative as well as beautiful. But he has her use that strength to repress herself rather than to love or create. In her youth, she impulsively and passionately loved Ned Currie, a reporter, who goes to Cleveland promising to return when he has found work. He clearly deserts her and the remainder of the story explores her unwillingness to let him go and to find some other route toward her own happiness and fulfillment. Alice Hindman is willing to support herself economically, but she is unwilling to make realistic life plans for herself. She waits for Ned Currie to return, at first actively rejecting other suitable men, and then, in desperation, passively accepting the attention of a middle-aged drug clerk. After a few years of his tedious visits she can no longer bear his company and only then will she send him away. She represses her passionate nature as long as she can and only when she is beyond reason does she allow herself to act. If she is going to betray her lover by being sexual, she can only do so unintentionally:

For a moment she stood by the window hearing the rain beat against the glass and then a strange desire took possession of her. Without stopping to think of what she intended to do, she ran downstairs through the dark house and out into the rain. As she stood on the little grass plot before the house and felt the cold rain on her body a mad desire to run naked through the streets took possession of her.

She thought the rain would have some creative and wonderful effect on her body. Not for years had she felt so full of youth and courage. She wanted to leap and run, to cry out, to find some other lonely human and embrace him. On the brick sidewalk before the house a man stumbled homeward. Alice started to run. A wild, desperate mood took possession of her. “What do I care who it is. He is alone, and I will go to him,” she thought; and then without stopping to consider the possible result of her madness, called softly. “Wait!” she cried. “Don't go away. Whoever you are, you must wait.”

The scene ends in irony. The man to whom she calls is old and somewhat deaf. He does not comprehend her, and she, realizing what she had done, drops to the ground, waits for him to go, and then crawls home.

Alice Hindman tries to force herself to accept that many individuals live without love. She at no time considers finding a healthy outlet for her needs, but rather she demands that instinct be controlled; she does not consider being larger and learning to own the various parts of her nature, but rather demands that she be smaller and survive that smallness.

Instead of moving forward, creating a woman who is attempting to define new, more life-giving categories for herself, in Anderson's next story, “Respectability,” he depicts two female characters who are destructively passive at best, evil at worst. The central character of “Respectability,” is Wash Williams, a woman-hater who once idealized a woman, and because she disappointed him has decided that all women are “bitches.” He tells George about his days of innocent happiness with the woman who wronged him:

“In the garden back of our house we planted vegetables, … you know, peas and corn and such things. We went to Columbus in early March and as soon as the days became warm I went to work in the garden. With a spade I turned up the black ground while she ran about laughing and pretending to be afraid of the worms I uncovered. Late in April came the planting. In the little paths among the seed beds she stood holding a paper bag in her hand. The bag was filled with seeds. A few at a time she handed me the seeds that I might thrust them into the warm, soft ground.”

Wash Williams' relationship with his wife seemed ideal; their gardening is a metaphor of interdependent fertility. But as we watch each character play his or her respective role we realize that they are exactly that, characters, to each other: Wash does not know his wife, nor is there any evidence that he cares to know her. When she takes lovers he is surprised and feels betrayed. He sends her back to her mother who, in an attempt to reconcile the couple, invites Wash to her home, sits him in the parlor and then sends her daughter to him naked. When she enters the parlor she stands passively awaiting Wash's acceptance or rejection of her. Wash responds with violence, striking the mother, but fails to kill her. As he finishes his tale he tells George that his only regret is that the mother died a few months after this incident and therefore removed all possibility that he might take his revenge later. George Willard empathizes only with Wash Williams. In this tale Anderson is indirectly portraying the empty lives of women, but he has his narrator identify only with the man who suffers because women's lives are empty. Wash is portrayed as loving his wife even if he does not attempt to understand her, and Anderson's sympathy for him implies that love, without any attempt to understand, is enough. The fact that a dream cannot be actualized if it is not built on solid ground, the fact that women should be accountable to themselves before they are accountable to either husband or mother, are not explored or in any way discussed. Wash Williams is angry and hurt, and Anderson, through George Willard, simply accepts that anger as righteous. There is no hint that George will ever consider Wash Williams' story from the point of view of either woman and there is no hint that Anderson sees the danger of so limited a focus.

Kate Swift, the teacher, stern and cold toward her students, unable to communicate though passionate and sensitive, fares no better than her less intelligent, or less good, sisters. At thirty, she is considered a spinster, and has no outlet other than aborted attempts to communicate, and late night walks. Her mother, Elizabeth Swift, is angry when she stays out late. She reinforces her daughter to repress all instinct. During one quarrel she tells Kate:

“I am glad you're not a man. … More than once I've waited for your father to come home, not knowing what new mess he had got into. I've had my share of uncertainty and you cannot blame me if I do not want to see the worst side of him reproduced in you.”

Kate Swift stays in Winesburg frustrated, unwilling to be sexual, unable to communicate, watching herself grow old. Once she was adventurous and travelled, but five years have passed since then, and there is no hint that she will search her fortune elsewhere.

Helen White, the woman with the most potential in Winesburg, Ohio, first appears in “The Thinker.” She is still young, a high school student, and, according to George Willard, has more “get up” than any other girl in Winesburg. She is attracted to George Willard, and to any young man, it seems, who has the least potential for leaving Winesburg and directing his own life. In “The Thinker,” Seth Richmond and George Willard compete for her attention. Rather than being shown her spiritual or intellectual complexity, we are shown her hunger for a worthy suitor. When Seth Richmond tells her that he is going to leave Winesburg and get some work, she is immediately impressed: “‘This is as it should be,’ she thought. ‘This boy is not a boy at all, but a strong, purposeful man.’” She does not think of her own freedom, but rather is overcome by the sadness of losing the possibility to relate with Seth.

We meet Helen White again later, but we never see her actively working out her own goals. She is always caught between men, watching other characters define themselves and strike out new paths or she is simply the object of admiration and fantasy. In “Drink” Helen White appears as Tom Foster's fantasy. Tom works for her father, the town banker, and falls in love with her, but is afraid of sexuality and wants only to get drunk and verbalize his dreams of her. He tries to tell George Willard about these fantasies, but succeeds only in aggravating him. Helen White appears as a fantasy in “Death,” the story that centers on the death of Elizabeth Willard. When George's mother dies, he thinks of Helen and how he would have to postpone being with her. George's vision of her, young, alive, sexual, becomes intermingled with his thoughts about his mother. He longs to lift the sheet covering Elizabeth and imagines that somehow she is not underneath the sheet at all, but another woman is there who can spring up from the bed and comfort him. George's vision almost overpowers him. When his Aunt Elizabeth comes into the room, George is shaken by sobs. First he tells his aunt that his mother is dead and then half turning from Aunt Elizabeth says, “‘The dear, the dear, oh the lovely dear.’” The impulse that urges him to verbalize this is outside himself. He weeps for his mother's lost youth. Again, the story turns toward Helen White. She will serve as the place where he can momentarily rest his heart:

With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another. If he prefers that the other be a woman that is because he believes that a woman will be gentle, that she will understand. He wants, most of all, understanding.

George looks to Helen White for comfort less as an individual than as a nurturing woman. However, while he thinks of her, she is entertaining a young instructor whom her mother, the town organizer for poetry study groups, has invited down from college. Helen is also thinking of him. The main difference between George and Helen lies in the fact that George is caught between his thoughts of her and his thoughts of his own future, while she is much more involved in comparing two men than in seriously considering her independent existence.

When George and Helen next meet, George is more interested in telling her what he needs her to be than in listening to what she herself feels she needs:

“I want you to do something, I don't know what. Perhaps it is none of my business. I want you to try to be different from other women. You see the point. It's none of my business I tell you. I want you to be a beautiful woman. You see what I want.”

Helen is neither offended nor satisfied. They part before either one of them is ready and they both want to somehow reestablish contact. George's solution is to go over to her house. Helen is less comfortable being so calculating and simply runs to her garden and calls his name. He is within hearing by then and they walk, successfully establishing mutual feelings of unity. But it is George Willard's feelings, the narrator tells us, which are reflected in Helen White. He is renewed and refreshed by her presence. While the narrator feels comfortable dealing with George's thoughts, at this point of the novel, the narrator refuses to deal with Helen's. He tells us: “There is no way of knowing what woman's thoughts went through her mind but, when the bottom of the hill was reached and she came up to the boy, she took his arm and walked beside him in dignified silence.”

Helen White is thus reduced to an abstract figure whom we cannot know. She is the shadow of a strong woman and her major role at the end of Winesburg, Ohio is one of reflection rather than independent action. Here is Anderson's chance to develop a character who might try to break old patterns, find more life-giving categories, use her impulses and intelligence to form a balanced, self-directed life, but Anderson does not take it. We are given no evidence that Helen White will ever leave Winesburg or that she will ever transcend traditional roles. We have never seen her do so, and there is no suggestion that she can.

One might apologize for Anderson by simply accepting that George Willard's exit is what he is concentrating on at the end of Winesburg, Ohio, or, as Nancy Bunge points out in her article, “The Ambiguous Endings of Sherwood Anderson's Novels,” we might say that the ending of this novel reflects his general difficulty finding satisfactory endings. Bunge feels the inadequacy of his endings reflects his need to be optimistic:

Anderson would rather write novels with indeterminate endings than reinforce the despair he sees around him. The generous wish that Americans can be cured rather than a faulty aesthetic sense makes him stop in mid-air rather than follow the lives of his characters through to their logical conclusion.

I do not believe that the ending of Winesburg, Ohio portrays Anderson's lack of an aesthetic sense; nor do I believe that the ending portrays Anderson's generous wish that Americans be cured. Perhaps he does wish American men to be cured, for through George Willard he grants them mobility, but he cannot wish American women to be cured if he leaves them, like Helen White, at the platform speaking to the wind.

While Anderson is harsh in his final depiction of Helen White, this harshness seems to come from his discomfort in viewing her as anything more than a fulfillment of George Willard's momentary need for warmth. He is more comfortable with Tandy Hard who embraces her role as reflection. Only a child, she wants nothing more than to be “‘brave enough to dare to be loved.’” The grief to which she gives herself over at the end of her story is never explained. She sobs with abandon “as though her young strength were not enough to bear the vision the words of the drunkard had brought to her.” The story is presented without irony for Tandy Hard's solution is one whose legitimacy Anderson does not question. Anderson is also more comfortable when he presents Nell Gunther in “The Untold Lie,” because she is a threat to no male protagonist. She has been impregnated by Hal Winters who after some thinking decides to willingly do the honorable thing and marry her. Hal Winters is fond of her because she is strong and because she makes no demands. His older friend, Ray Pearson, trapped into marriage by his pregnant lover and now overwhelmed with pale, thin children, runs to discourage his friend from making the same mistake, but after Hal tells Ray of his intentions, Ray realizes that whatever advice he would have given Hal would have been dishonest. There are losses and gains for men whichever way they choose. In Winesburg, Ohio men are given the privilege of the decision and women are often rewarded for being silent and making no demands.

For all the sensitive attention Anderson can pay to his female characters, for all the sympathy he uses to present the story of Louise Bentley, Alice Hindman, and Kate Swift, for all his tenderness toward Elizabeth Willard, he does not, even when the opportunity naturally presents itself, create a female character who wants, and is able, to form her own life. It is interesting that between 1915 and 1917 when Winesburg, Ohio was being created, Anderson was attempting to form an I-Thou relationship with a woman; he did not succeed. It may be that through the Helen White-George Willard relationship Anderson is also attempting to form this type of relationship, but again he does not succeed. He is not yet ready, even fictionally, to create a liberated woman with whom his protagonist must relate on equal terms. But Sherwood Anderson is aware that attitudes toward women must change, for the lives women are forced to live are unnecessarily cruel and destructive. If Anderson does prefer women to be reflections of men, he does not want them to be tortured or destroyed. Winesburg, Ohio does not satisfactorily portray the possibility of an active, independent, and creative woman who is also a survivor, but at least it portrays the women whose lives are limited because they live within a system which was never created for their benefit. By exploring the lives of the women in Winesburg we explore the biases of a period, the biases of a town, and the biases of an author, but we also experience moments of insight from which we may explore our own biases, our own potential, and our own alternatives.

Notes

1. Douglas G. Rogers, Sherwood Anderson: A Selective, Annotated Bibliography (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1976), pp. 111-28.

2. Edwin Fussell, “Winesburg, Ohio: Art and Isolation,” Modern Fiction Studies, 6 (Summer 1960), p. 106; Carlos Baker, “Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg: A Reprise, “Virginia Quarterly Review, 48 (Autumn 1972), p. 578.

3. David D. Anderson, “Sherwood Anderson's Moments of Insight,” Critical Studies in American Literature: A Collection of Essays (Karachi, Pakistan: University of Karachi, 1964), p. 123.

4. Chris Browning, “Kate Swift: Sherwood Anderson's Creative Eros,” Tennessee Studies in Literature, 13 (1968), p. 141.

5. William A. Sutton, The Road to Winesburg: A Mosaic of the Imaginative Life of Sherwood Anderson (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1972), p. 503.

6. Ray Lewis White, ed. Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs: A Critical Edition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1969), pp. 105-09; 135-41.

7. Sutton, pp. 162; 181; 237.

8. Sutton, p. 244.

9. Sherwood Anderson to Oscar H. Fidell, January 9, 1933, Howard Munford Jones and Walter B. Rideout, eds., Letters of Sherwood Anderson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1953), pp. 274-75.

10. Irving Howe, “The Book of the Grotesque,” The Achievement of Sherwood Anderson: Essays in Criticism, Ray Lewis White, ed. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1966), p. 93.

11. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (New York: The Viking Press, 1965), p. 115.

12. Sherwood Anderson, The Modern Writer (San Francisco, Edwin and Robert Grabhorn, 1925), p. 29 as quoted in Bernard Duffey, Chicago Renaissance in American Letters (East Lansing: The Michigan State College Press, 1954), p. 203.

13. Memoirs, p. 9.

14. Sherwood Anderson to Waldo Frank, after? November 18, 1917, Letters, p. 26.

15. Sherwood Anderson to Waldo Frank,? May, 1917, Letters, p. 14.

16. Sherwood Anderson to Marietta D. Finley, December 21, 1916, Sutton, p. 328.

17. Winesburg, Ohio, p. 178.

18. Sherwood Anderson to Waldo Frank, December 14, 1916, Letters, p. 5.

19. Sherwood Anderson to Waldo Frank, December 7, 1917, Letters, p. 28.

20. Winesburg, Ohio, p. 73.

21. Ibid., pp. 37-8.

22. Ibid., p. 40.

23. Ibid., p. 43.

24. Ibid., p. 41.

25. Ibid., p. 53.

26. Ibid., p. 62.

27. Ibid., p. 87.

28. Ibid., p. 94.