SOURCE: Bidney, Martin. “Anderson and the Androgyne: ‘Something More than Man or Woman.’” Studies in Short Fiction 25, no. 3 (summer 1988): 261-73.

[In the following essay, Bidney analyzes “the androgynous model of the psyche” as the unifying element to the stories in Winesburg, Ohio.]

No previous study of Sherwood Anderson has noted his use of the androgynous model of the psyche in Winesburg, Ohio.¹ The present essay attempts to show that the androgyny myth is in fact the organizing principle of Anderson's complex book, the unifying vision tying together the remarkably varied stories. Anderson strategically places in his work three passages which metaphorically articulate his psychological and artistic ideal. The first of these orienting passages occurs in the prefatory “Book of the Grotesque”; the second is found in the visionary tale “Tandy,” at the exact center of the volume, with ten stories preceding and ten following (the preface excluded); the third appears in “Sophistication,” George's culminating epiphany, near the book's conclusion. We have in these three passages the beginning, middle, and end of a progress of vision: first an old writer sees the androgyne vision in quasi-scriptural figurations; then a drunkard sees it as potentially realizable in the future growth of Tandy; finally George and Helen experience it for the briefest of moments on earth.

The old writer in “The Book of the Grotesque” sees the androgynous potential within himself. Close reading of the relevant passage shows its central image subtly doubled—an androgyne within an androgyne: “He was like a pregnant woman, only that the thing inside him was not a baby but a youth. No, it wasn't a youth, it was a woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight.”² “He” is “like” a “woman”—male and female fused—and the “woman” inside him, at first indistinguishable from a “youth,” wears “mail like a knight.” The images are arranged in a male-female symmetry: the “youth,” moved aside for a moment to make way for the young woman, returns in the final image of the armored knight. Going from old man to pregnant woman to baby to youth to young woman to knight, we are left with an androgynous blur, something between Joan of Arc and Don Quixote. The coat of mail of the questing knight suggests the qualities which masculinity is held to add to the androgynous synthesis: boldness and initiative, to balance the intimacy and receptivity of the female in the Anderson world. The female within the old man looks male and wears mail.

This vision of androgynous wholeness is the “young thing within the writer” (22), the thing that “saved the old man” (25) from becoming a grotesque. It is a vision of life “in the beginning when the world was young” (24)—Genesis—and it is introduced by a conversation with a compassionate carpenter, “for the purpose of raising the bed” (24)—a play on “raising the dead,” or the Apocalypse (cf. “For a time the two men talked of the raising of the bed” [21]). The carpenter—Anderson's hint at a Jesus-family theme, with messianic resonances—becomes “the nearest thing to what is understandable and lovable of all the grotesques in the writer's book” (25), for his womanly weeping endears him to the writer: it shows that he too approaches a male-female synthesis. We learn from the writer's vision that the seizing of individual truths—primal apple-greed—turns them into fallen falsehoods: the imagery of that vision informs us further that the supposed truths, but real falsehoods, of isolated maleness and femaleness are the worst consequences of the fall.

Angus Fletcher has argued that the protagonists of all allegories are “divided androgynes”: for him, allegories shade into religious or mythic vision when their fixated, one-sided personae approach androgynous awareness, as in the concluding apocalypses of Blakean epics.³ Certainly the Andersonian vision, at once spiritual and psychological, has marked affinities with the Blake-Shelley tradition of androgynous mythmaking. Albion must unite with Jerusalem, Prometheus with Asia, a male psychic/cosmic force with its female counterpart: the apocalyptic marriage means, for both world and mind, a higher version of primal wholeness.⁴ Later writers have focused either on the religious expressions of this vision, as Eliade in The Two and the One (originally titled Méphistophélès et l'Androgyne), or on its psychological content, as in Jung's posited unity of male self with anima, female with animus. Psychological androgyny has been more recently reconceived by June Singer and Carolyn Heilbrun.⁵ Sherwood Anderson contributes powerfully to this important tradition.

Central to the meaning of Winesburg, Ohio are the utterances of Anderson's persona, the visionary drunkard of “Tandy.” The unnamed, and thus intriguingly mysterious, “stranger” sees a five-year-old girl whom he speculatively envisions as perhaps the future woman of his lifetime dream, the new woman who will be “strong to be loved,” who will be—in a phrase of crucial import—“‘something more than man or woman’” (145; emphasis added). It is implied that God is peculiarly manifest in this young girl: we are encouraged to believe that Tandy Hard (her new first name the drunkard's visionary gift) will be the divine woman—or man-woman, since she must transcend male and female. The mysterious stranger has a “faith” in the new “strong and courageous” being, but he fears his faith “will not be realized” (144-45). Tandy Hard can hardly “bear the vision” (146) thrust upon her.

What does it mean to be “strong to be loved”? What does it mean to say, as the drunkard says to Tandy, “‘Be brave enough to dare to be loved’”? (145). Strength here seems closely allied to initiative and courage; “to be loved” implies intimacy and receptivity. Be “strong,” or “dare,” plus “to be loved” thus strongly suggests the formula: Be man plus woman; be the androgyne. The phrases “dare to be loved” and “strong to be loved” connect the androgynous vision of “Tandy” with George and Helen's initiation into maturity near the book's end. George “wanted to love and to be loved by” Helen (241). This is a clue that George—and Helen, too, who has similar feelings at the same moment—has understood, as the drunken visionary wanted Tandy Hard to understand, the need to combine and thus transcend both active and passive, boldness and vulnerability, the need “to love” and the need “to be loved.” Just as Tandy has sobbed “as though her young strength were not enough to bear the vision the words of the drunkard had brought to her” (146), so too George has to try “With all his strength” to “hold and to understand the mood that had come upon him” (241).

How does one go about daring to be loved—combining strength and tenderness, boldness and vulnerability, active initiative and quiet receptivity, so as to become “‘something more than man or woman’”? The people of Winesburg do not show us. Instead, they characteristically overcompensate for the frustrations of imposed or felt passivity by a blind rush into some form (often a destructive or unreasoned form) of activity. Rebelling against feeling “female”—and this applies to men as well as women—they try, desperately and ineffectually, to assert their “maleness.” But afterward they fall back into their original passivity, or else their “male” and “female” qualities simply persist, together but separate, in mutual antagonism. In place of androgynous synthesis, we see a double distortion in the grotesques of Winesburg. Femaleness becomes twisted or suppressed into mere passivity, and maleness becomes brutally simplified into mere egotistic assertiveness or gestures of pointless aggression.

All of Anderson's characters in Winesburg are failed androgynes—even Tandy and George are not so much exceptions as intimations of something different, suggestions for the future social or spiritual development of our capacity for synthesis. But their failure would mean little if their inherent potential for androgyny were not correspondingly great. And just as, in Romantic mythmaking, the artist is the intensified type of humanity in general, so too in the neo-Romantic Andersonian world it is the artist who embodies the most urgent need and longing for androgynous synthesis, which is the fundamental requirement of Andersonian humanity.

The two women whose mental worlds Anderson describes most fully in Winesburg, Elizabeth Willard and Kate Swift, are also the women who correspond most fully to the designation of failed artist. Elizabeth combines the interrelated roles of failed actress and failed androgyne:

For years she had been what is called “stage-struck” and had paraded through the streets with traveling men guests at her father's hotel, wearing loud clothes and urging them to tell her of life in the cities out of which they had come. Once she startled the town by putting on men's clothes and riding a bicycle down Main Street.

(45)

Elizabeth dreams of combining male boldness and female intimacy, of “wandering over the world, seeing always new faces and giving something out of herself to all people” (46). Turned eventually by overwork into a “ghostly” shadow of her true self, she one day overhears her husband berating their son for acting like an absent-minded, “‘gawky girl’”: “‘You're not a fool and you're not a woman. You're Tom Willard's son and you'll wake up. … If being a newspaper man had put the notion of becoming a writer into your mind that's all right. Only I guess you'll have to wake up to do that too, eh?’” (44). Elizabeth realizes that her husband is trying to suppress or distort the boy's androgynous potential, to make George equate “fool” and “woman” so he will think of writing not as expression of intimacy but as male-oriented journalistic pragmatism.

Because Elizabeth has been praying to God for years to let “‘this boy be allowed to express something for us both’” (40)—i.e., to achieve a form of expression that would combine his truth and her own in a synthesis of male and female inwardness—she reacts vigorously to the threat her husband now poses. To defend George against the imminent destruction of his androgynous/artistic instinct—“the thing I let be killed in myself” (43)—she resolves to stab Tom with her dagger-like sewing scissors, half hoping that after the murder she too would suddenly die. But she collapses on a chair when she hears George's footsteps outside, and when he tells her of his decision to leave town to “‘to go away and look at people and think’” (48), she feels too weak, perhaps too permanently repressed, to express her joy. It is wonderful that George still has a chance to become a true, uncorrupted writer, but Elizabeth's own chance at a starring role in high tragic drama has just passed her by.

Kate, too, is a failed artist/androgyne. Her frustrating internalized passivity and consequent sadomasochistic overcompensation attempts parallel those of Elizabeth. For schoolchildren she teaches, but even more for her own benefit, Kate makes up “intimate” stories about Charles Lamb, counterbalanced with anecdotes about “bragging, blustering, brave” Benvenuto Cellini (161)—a revealing choice of contrasting heroes, mild modesty and violent braggadocio respectively embodied in figures manifesting those elements seen as “female” and “male” in Winesburg society. Like Elizabeth, Kate wants George to express something in his writing for her also. In fact, she is in love with him, though most of the time she doesn't realize it, and when he fails to respond to her confused advances, she beats on his face with her fists. Aggressively but vainly, she rebels against her passive “female” role. As we see her walk distractedly through the wintry streets with her “features of a tiny goddess on a pedestal” (160), we recall the vague “gods” which timid Dr. Reefy claimed that he and Elizabeth Willard had worshiped together. Anderson uses fantasy-deities and pedestalled goddesses as ironic comments on the imprisoning idealizations practiced by imaginatively gifted but confused and inhibited people. One is amazed at the boldness of the sarcasm Anderson directs against forms of idealism which, he feels, frustrate union and thwart internal synthesis: it is no accident that Kate, on one of her walks, follows a street that “led over Gospel Hill and into Sucker Road …” (161).

Less imaginative than Elizabeth and Kate, and with less androgynous potential, Alice Hindman and Belle Carpenter make less determined efforts to counter the frustrations of their imposed “female” vulnerability. Alice, left behind by a man, remains faithful for two or three years to the quixotic ideal of his eventual return. But even after giving up on him, Alice lacks the initiative to seek out anyone else, except on one occasion when, seized with the wish to convert her vulnerability into defiance, she impulsively runs naked from her house to the sidewalk in the rain. When the man to whom she desperately calls turns out to be old and half deaf, she treats this fact simultaneously as a relief and as a punishment. She makes a swift retreat, physically into her home, mentally into a stoical acceptance of the supposed “fact that many people must live and die alone …” (120). Principled subjection to her supposed fate is Alice's form of mind-stunting idealism. Belle Carpenter seems somewhat stronger—“When black thoughts visited her she grew angry and wished she were a man and could fight someone with her fists” (179)—but after only one brief, delightful episode of defiance, when she smeared soft mud on her tyrannic father's clothes-press, she reverts to her customary passivity. She even chooses as her beloved a man who, in his bullying aggressiveness, is a mere copy of her bullying father, who had brutally abused her mother. Her only defiance of Ed Handby—a few walks with the notably unthreatening non-rival George—is of the mildest sort. Like Alice, Belle understands maleness as pure activity, femaleness as sheer passivity. Since both conceptions are badly oversimplified, neither woman can imagine a valid androgynous synthesis. What's needed is “something more” than “man” or “woman” as Winesburg grotesques like Alice and Belle understand these terms.

Louise Bentley—to conclude the roster of major Winesburg women—is highly intelligent, enough so to serve as provocation for the jealousy of the two Hardy sisters, who play the role of evil stepsisters to Louise's Cinderella. But she, too, quickly reverts from balked “male” ambition (“Be strong,” “dare”) back to “female” passivity (“to be loved”), and cannot begin to conceive of the needed androgynous synthesis. Frustrated in her intellectual ambition, she seeks salvation in being loved by some Prince Charming: “Sometimes it seemed to her that to be held tightly and kissed was the whole secret of life” (94). She places her faith in “Surrender” (the title Anderson gives to his account of her younger years), and when satisfaction in marriage fails, she, like Elizabeth Willard, resorts to futile gestures of murderous aggression: “She got a knife from the kitchen and threatened her husband's life” (74). Then she turns the sadism into masochism—or combines the two—through drugs, drink, reclusiveness, and frantic driving, aimlessly, “furiously through the quiet streets” (75). Louise conforms to the typology of the Winesburg woman, who seeks to make up for the limitations of “feminine” tenderness and receptivity through some act of “masculine” boldness or daring. Such acts prove useless: defiance is fruitless; destructive impulses boomerang.

We have seen that this pattern of impulsive but futile overcompensation takes variant forms among Winesburg women. The compensatory activity is sometimes aggressive, sometimes self-destructive (or both together), and sometimes it is still so submerged or muffled by inhibitions as to be hardly more than a pathetic gesture, mere token rebellion, followed by regressive perseveration in the behavior it was meant to counteract. The men of Winesburg, starting from the same frustrating feeling of imprisoning (“female”) passivity, overcompensate in the same ways as the women, with equally disappointing results. Re-actions rather than actions, their assertions of “maleness” are panicky, misguided, distortive.

The pattern shown by Elizabeth, Louise, and Kate is repeated in the lives of Elmer Cowley, Curtis Hartman, and the George Willard of “Nobody Knows.” Elizabeth and Louise threatened their husbands with knives; Kate beat on George's face with her “fists” (165). The Winesburg men aren't desperate enough for knives, but Elmer and Curtis carry over the fist motif. Perennially passive Elmer finally projects years of frustration at being considered “queer” on the nearest person who might serve as embodiment of the community he feels has victimized him: Elmer hits George Willard “blow after blow on the breast, the neck, the mouth” (201). Afterward Elmer feels less “queer.” But the meaningless tokenism of Elmer's revolt does nothing to free him from his lifetime of passive subjection to his supposed fate of queerness.

Rev. Curtis Hartman thinks he wins a violent victory through the strength of God. But the only God that Anderson values is the God “manifesting himself in the little child” Tandy, the potential androgyne (143). And this God will remain forever unknown to fearful Hartman, who tries to fight off lustful thoughts by smashing the stained glass window with a hole in the corner, through which he had seen the naked figure of Kate Swift. But it was only through such voyeurism that Hartman had ever succeeded in generating enough passion to enable him, for the first and only time, to be “something like a lover in the presence of his wife” (151). So Hartman's bloody fist indicates nothing but self-defeat, a relapse into passive celibacy-within-marriage. Hartman's brief aggressive act wholly defeats his maleness and insures the continuance of his lifelong passionless passivity.

George, too, tries to use egotistic “male” aggressiveness to counteract a deeper “female” fear. On his way to a tryst initiated by Louise Trunnion's note, George “was afraid … that he would lose courage and turn back” (59). Like Wash Williams, he timidly imagines that “Just to touch the folds of the soiled gingham dress” of his love object would “be an exquisite pleasure” (60). Overreacting against the idealizing timidity that makes him feel unmale and vulnerable, George finally, for the briefest moment, becomes “wholly the male, bold and aggressive,” with “no sympathy” for Louise “in his heart” (61). But after this bit of cruelty, his nervous unease predictably returns: hapless, exaggerated gestures contain no promise of synthesis.

Anderson also offers several richly developed male examples of the same kind of heavily inhibited and thus merely token rebellion enacted by female personae such as Elizabeth and Belle. Tom Foster, Seth Richmond, and the George of “An Awakening” all illustrate the paradigm of pathetically inhibited, token boldness or “male” activity, followed by relapse into a “female” passivity which hardly makes much of a contrast. Maleness is as hopelessly oversimplified and misunderstood as femaleness in Winesburg.

Tom and Seth are astonishingly passive people, grotesques of overwhelming “femaleness” as Winesburg understands it, males without “mail.” “So gentle” was Tom's nature “that he could not hate anything and not being able to understand he decided to forget” (215). Brought up in rough circumstances, he edits the roughness out of consciousness—or tries to. It returns in his fantasies, transformed into masochistic pleasure. When he falls “in love with Helen White,” he images her as a flame to his dry and leafless tree, a stormy and “terrible” sea-wind to his solitary, abandoned boat (216). When, in a mood of rebellion, Tom resolves to imitate all those other people he sees and knows—that vast majority of mankind which “suffers and does wrong”—he decides to get drunk. Getting drunk, he feels, is the only thing he can do that would not “hurt someone else” (219); it is unaggressive. It's “like making love” because it “hurt … and made everything strange” (219): pleasure and meaning are seen as things painfully inflicted. Activity is possible for Tom only insofar as it feels like passivity. He wholly lacks the “male” component of the needed androgynous unity.

Seth is even more passive, more grotesquely non-“male.” Tom, at least, savors a myriad of tiny joys, but Seth “sometimes wondered if he would ever be particularly interested in anything” (133). Resolved to court Helen White, Seth imagines himself “buried deep among the weeds beneath the tree,” holding hands with Helen, who is buried right beside him; a “peculiar reluctance” keeps him from kissing her, and he listens instead to the “masterful song of labor” of the bees overhead (140). Like Tom, Seth cannot transcend masochistic passivity (death, burial) even in his fantasies: love itself must take this symbolic form.

In the ironically titled story “An Awakening,” George Willard remains unawakened because the brief experience of cosmic consciousness that makes him feel “unutterably big and remade” (185) really only conveys to him a sense of his pathetic passiveness in a mythically idealized form. Of the five “brave” words he mutters—“Death,” “night, the sea, fear, loveliness” (185)—the first four entities are large, dark, threatening things. And so the final item, “loveliness,” takes on the same passive-making, forbidding and man-dwarfing largeness. George's passivity has overmastered him: though he holds Belle's hand, he thinks not of her but of comfortingly abstract generalities: “lust and night and women” in the plural (188). We are prepared to see Ed Handby toss George casually aside: Belle, sensing George's passivity, would hardly consider him worth helping. Like those of Seth and Tom, George's inhibited attempt at passionate, active self-assertion is hardly more than an unwittingly transformed but, to the reader, barely disguised idealization of passivity. No “mail” is here, either.

There is one more major group of Andersonian failed androgynes, a group characterized not by some isolated, sudden act of real or idealized rebellion, but rather by a long-term split within the psyche. In these grotesques, the impulse toward rebellious “activity” is strong enough to make over at least half of the mind on a fairly permanent basis. But since the “active” impulse never truly transforms the “passivity” it so dislikes, the result is an unhappy stalemate, or an alternation of power between the two warring components within the mind. Unintegrated, the “male” and “female” components are each twisted away from a fulfilling purpose toward something self-punishing or destructive. Each person in this group embodies an unmastered war within, a battle of two deformed sub-selves, ruling out any prospect of an androgynous union.

Dr. Parcival and Jesse Bentley are physical grotesques because their disjointed or dissociated “vision” is mirrored in their abnormal eye movements. Each persona overcompensates, unwisely but too well, for a delicacy or vulnerability which is felt as a source of never-appeased irritation. The unsuccessful suppression of this “female” component is symbolized by an intermittent hampering of vision in the left (Latin, sinister: disapproved) eye. In Dr. Parcival's case, “The lid of the left eye twitched; it fell down and snapped up” (49), while of Jesse Bentley we learn: “At one time in his life he had been threatened with paralysis and his left side remained somewhat weakened. As he talked, his left eyelid twitched” (81). The grotesqueness of this one-sided vision is the more pathetic in that both men have an uncommonly expansive, artistic androgynous potential. “To write [a] book Dr. Parcival declared was the object of his coming to Winesburg to live” (55). Jesse, for his part, was “born an imaginative child” and had “within him a great intellectual eagerness” (71). Each man is inherently an artist: the prime object of their lives is a total “vision” (Parcival is even named after Sir Perceval or Parsifal, the Holy Grail visionary).

Both men were brought up religious and were closely attached to their mothers; later, trying to become less “odd” and “womanish,” they each tried to work out a more “male” form of religious vision, accenting power and hardness. The “dream” of Parcival's mother, whom he loved obsessively, was to make him a “Presbyterian minister” (52); of Jesse's family, “only his mother had understood him, while everyone else was simply “amused” to see him, “small and very slender and womanish of body,” dressed in the traditional garb of “young ministers” (66). Parcival's worshipful love of his mother proved unrequited—“‘My mother loved my brother much more than she did me’” (53)—and since the brother, a domineering person, treated Mother roughly and managed the household finances like a dictatorial god, the jealous Parcival reluctantly concluded that the bossy brother was his superior. He conquered jealousy by identifying with, even deifying, his brother, a “superior” being whose capacity for “hatred and contempt” seemed to set Parcival an example of callous, proud lordliness (55). Eventually Parcival's brother, drunk, was run over by a railroad car, and it seems likely that even in Parcival's final philosophical formulation—“everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified” (57)—he is still identifying with his brother, this time as deified martyr. Parcival's philosophy is partly true, but hopelessly one-sided. Like Christ, we all suffer, but like Cain, we also inflict suffering, as Anderson emphasizes with his references to Parcival's fantasies of committing murder and to the mysterious bloody birthmarks, recalling the mark of Cain, on the hands of Tom Willy. Parcival's superman ethic is as absurd as his obsessive compensatory guilt at having refused to examine the dead child in the motor accident. Deifying his harsh brother has simply intensified Parcival's guilty self-pity as Mother's unloved, passive, and vulnerable child.

Jesse Bentley's overcompensation for being “womanish” and an “odd sheep” in the family takes the form of so massive an identification with the twin male power-myths of Biblical-patriarchal leadership and industrial-technological prowess that he works his wife to death “in his service” (69) and terrifies his grandson by trying to mark him out as his divinely chosen successor in a weird ritual of initiation. The power-crazed, yet somehow “wavering, uncertain stare” (99) of the old Jesse is so threatening to his grandson David that the latter fells Jesse with a slingshot as an inimical Goliath. Jesse had wanted, for his own crazed mystical reasons, to rub the boy's head with the blood of the lamb, but now poor David, thinking himself a murderer, feels more like Cain than Christ. The story of Jesse's unloved, neglected daughter Louise is called “Surrender”; that of Jesse's ritual assertion of power over David is called “Terror.” Surrender and Terror—the grotesque extreme of “female” vulnerability and “male” aggression—together haunt the Bentley family like a curse of the Atreidae.

If Parcival and Jesse show us a mode of vision in which the left eye (in Jesse's case, the whole left side), felt as female or oversensitive, is partly disabled by the right eye (representing male strength, approved by society), Wing Biddlebaum and Wash Williams each show an analogous sort of mental rift, this time between regions designated as “upper” and “lower.” These two men, like Parcival and Jesse, are instructive examples of failed androgynes because they, too, are inherently artists, with highly imaginative temperaments.

Wing, a boy-man of idealized and diffused sexuality, is “not unlike the finer sort of women”; a gifted, poetic teacher of young people, he rules “by a power so gentle that it passes as a lovable weakness” (31). His hands are compared repeatedly to wings, as of the Holy Spirit, for they express his aspiration to a communion of dreams. But after he is run out of town on false charges of molestation, Wing's hands change their function. No longer “pennants of promise” (31) to awaken the poetic imaginations of apathetic pupils, they are now employed in the male-approved business world of “activity”: “With them Wing Biddlebaum had picked as high as a hundred and forty quarts of strawberries in a day” (29). The strawberry business is something “high,” highly valued in the community, while the deeper sort of community Wing longs for is lowered, degraded in the estimation of his fellows. In terror, Wing suppresses his wish to talk to George of dreams and goes home instead to practice his frustrated communion ritual on the floor, where he picks up bread crumbs “like a priest engaged in some service of his church” (34). Male-oriented society demotes Wing's “female” values to the lowest level.

Hands⁶ are central to the symbolism of rifts between “upper” and “lower” regions in the psyche of Wash Williams as well. Here hands represent the upper, approved world of rationality or male activity, while the rest of Wash's body is equated with the unconscious, with sexuality, with everything Wash has disowned and banished as “female.” Wash himself was extremely “female” in Winesburg terms—passive, vulnerable, delicate, tender—throughout his marriage. His androgynous potential was great, his imaginative capacity expansive but idealizing: a religious poet, he worshiped his wife. “‘When the hem of her garment touched my face I trembled’” (126). When his mother-in-law tried shock tactics, organizing an exhibition of her daughter's nudity to startle Wash out of passive idealism into active desire, she succeeded only in making Wash feel dishonored. Now he keeps his hands pure for his cerebral telegraph work, while he expresses his unconscious sense of defilement by letting himself become repellently fat, dirty, and ugly—a mirror image of the offensive wife whom he hates, as something “foul,” with the “abandon of a poet” (124). Since Wash has unwittingly made himself into a mirror image of the object of his hatred, we must conclude that he unwittingly despises the female within himself as well. Yet he remains “still proud” of his ability as telegraph operator—perhaps still “the best telegraph operator in the state” (122). In the male world of business and brains, self-respect is still partially possible.⁷

Our last three examples of failed androgynes with permanently split personalities—Dr. Reefy, Enoch Robinson, and Joe Welling—each overcompensate for a “female” passivity through various forms of male hardness, futile assertion of power, or unrelenting, driving will. Reefy is an aphorist, Enoch a painter, Joe a homegrown natural philosopher. Though each is a potential artist, all remain fragmented, unrealized.

Since Enoch Robinson can never paint the ideally beautiful “wounded woman” (170) who embodies his vulnerable anima, he overcompensates through two equally futile forms of male-oriented power. He pretends to hold a job, to pay taxes, to get married—that is, in a manner which R. D. Laing has analyzed, Enoch does all these things with his “unreal self.”⁸ Meanwhile, with his “real” self, Enoch peoples his mental world with imaginary beings, over whom he is the male ruler, “a kind of tiny blue-eyed king” (171). But his unreal marriage falls through, and when his ex-wife visits him in his lonely room, her fleshly reality dissipates the insubstantial beings he has created. Nothing is left but the invisible wounded female who, once again, overshadows the animus-that-might-have-been. Enoch has never been able to paint this invisible woman and never will: he has not “mail” enough for an artist/androgyne.

Contrasting with Enoch's atrophied maleness is Dr. Reefy's suppressed femaleness. In Dr. Reefy were “seeds of something very fine” (35), like the truths he is always writing down on scraps of paper, but these seeds have compacted and hardened into something dead, like paper pills, or “hard balls” (38), or Reefy's own wooden-looking knuckles, or the fatal reefs in his own name. Reefy can't produce a coherent structure out of the truths he discovers because together they form a huge truth that becomes terrifying. So he repeatedly takes the fragmented scraps or paper pills out of his pocket and throws them defiantly at John Spaniard, whom he calls a “‘sentimentalist.’” (36), thereby indicating that what threatens Reefy is a truth that might be construed as sentimental or overly tender (read “feminine”).

Joe Welling is so passive in relation to his inspirations as to resemble an epileptic in his “seizures” (124). But, like Coleridge's unhappy ancient mariner whom in many ways he closely resembles,⁹ Joe projects his extreme (“female”) passivity outward as compelling, merciless power. “‘In me,’” he says to the hypnotized ballplayers he coaches, “‘you see all the movements of the game’” (107). These words are the motto of Joe's life: he bosses and bewitches rather than communicates. Although he rhetorically asks, “‘You can't be too smart for Sarah, now can you?’” (111), Joe is really much “too smart” for his “sad-looking” financée (108), for he talks at her, not to her, showing that he cares as little for her as for anyone else. Unconsciously overcompensatory power-drive has turned Joe into a solipsist: the victim of seizures seizes total power.

Finally, a word about “The Untold Lie.” Though adventurous Hal Winters has asked the “quiet, rather nervous” (202) Ray Pearson for advice on whether to marry the young woman whom Hal had audaciously but predictably gotten “in trouble” (205), anything Ray says “‘would have been a lie’” (209). Horribly henpecked, the abjectly passive Ray cries out at one point against his life of enslavement to wife and children. The beauty of the land at sunset makes Ray want to “scream or hit his wife with his fists” in frustration (206), behavior reminiscent of Kate or Elmer or Curtis. But Ray's children have given him “pleasant evenings” (208-09) of deep value. In sum: Ray's excessive (“female”) passivity has been no worse and no better, no more or less one-sided, than the assertive (“male”) adventurousness for which Hal is notorious in Winesburg. Hal and Ray are each incomplete. They are the split halves of the psychological androgyne.

If, in the people of Winesburg, “feminine” receptivity is continually suppressed into forms of inertness, delusion, and fear, it cannot be said that the qualities of boldness and enterprising action defined as “masculine” receive adequate expression either. Sometimes, as with Tom, Seth, and Enoch, “male” attributes are repressed. When affirmed, “male” qualities are misused; employed in panicky re-actions rather than originative actions, they too are twisted out of shape—into forms of oblivious, egotistic willfulness. The result is a lack of fertile interaction between self and anima, or animus. Instead we see recurrent confict, inner rifts. The greater the androgynous/artistic potential, the more tragic the rift. No one in Winesburg is unaffected. The day of the psychological or spiritual androgyne is not yet. But like the old man and the carpenter at the book's beginning, Anderson himself speaks implicitly of the raising of the dead.¹⁰

Notes

1. Sally Adair Rigsbee, however, has broken new ground with her valuable emphasis on the “crippled feminine dimension of life” in Anderson's book; see Rigsbee, “The Feminine in Winesburg, Ohio,” Studies in American Fiction 9 (Autumn 1981), 236. Her correlation of femininity, as defined in Winesburg, with the values of “vulnerability, intimacy, and tenderness” (pp. 236-37) is accurate and has also been adopted here. But she devotes no attention to masculinity, or to androgyny, in Anderson's vision.

2. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (New York: The Viking Press, 1960), p. 22; all quotations are from this edition. For biographical background, see Robert George Kraft, “Sherwood Anderson, Bisexual Bard: Some Chapters in a Literary Biography,” diss. Univ. of Washington, 1969. Rigsbee's description of the above-cited passage as depicting an “image of artistic power as a woman within a woman” is misleading: such a formulation ignores half the image-data in the passage, as my analysis makes clear.

3. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1964), p. 356, n. 61.

4. Though one cannot prove Anderson studied Blake or Shelley, for general Romantic affinities, see Walter Göbel, Sherwood Anderson: “Ästhetízismus als Kulturphilosophie (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1982), pp. 141-52. Though Plato's Aristophanic myth of the primal androgyne in Symposium is a possible reference point, more immediate thematic parallels may be found in Whitman. On parallels between Blake and Whitman, see my “Structures of Perception in Blake and Whitman: Creative Contraries, Cosmic Body, Fourfold Vision,” Emerson Society Quarterly: A Journal of the American Renaissance 28 (Winter 1982), 36-47. In Anderson's quasi-Whitmanesque A New Testament (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), p. 11, we find the following androgynous vision:

   At times, just for a moment, I am a Caesar, a Napoleon, an Alexander.

   I tell you it is true.

   If you men who are my friends and those of you who are acquaintances could surrender yourselves to me for just a little while.

   I tell you what—I would take you within myself and carry you around within me as though I were a pregnant woman.

   Anderson the would-be prophet is a pregnant Napoleon. His androgynous vision, dubbed “insanity” to disarm critics, comes through clearly in paired images of a clinging vine and a phallic worm: “My insanity is a slow creeping vine clinging to a wall. / My insanity is a white worm with a fire in its forehead” (15).

5. See Mircea Eliade, The Two and the One, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Harper and Row, 1965); Méphistophélès et l'Androgyne (Paris: Gallimard, 1962). Also, C. G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 11-22; June Singer, Androgyny: Toward a New Theory of Sexuality (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977); Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Knopf, 1973).

6. For more on hands in Winesburg, see Carl J. Maresca, “Gestures as Meaning in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio,” College Language Association Journal 9 (March 1966), 279-83.

7. Not only does Wash hate his wife with the “abandon of a poet”; we can probably even identify the specific poet-mentor Anderson may have in mind. Wash's description of his wife as a “living-dead thing … making the earth foul by her presence” (122) recalls the lines, “The Night-mare Life-in-Death was she, / Who thicks man's blood with cold.” See “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” ll., 193-94, in The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1912), I, 194.

8. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Baltimore: Penguin, 1965), passim, especially pp. 94-105, “The false-self system.”

9. “Pouncing upon a bystander he began to talk. For the bystander there was no escape. The excited man breathed into his face, peered into his eyes, pounded upon his chest with a shaking forefinger, demanded, compelled attention” (WO 103). Cf. Coleridge: “‘Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’” (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” l. 11).

10. This would be my reply to David Stouck's sensitive but pessimistic appraisal, “Winesburg, Ohio as a Dance of Death,” American Literature 48 (January 1977), 525-42.