Fenton 1

Toward the Epicene: Mechanisms for Gender Dissolution in Sherwood Anderson and Floyd Dell

Introduction: The Chicago Literary Renaissance

Sherwood Anderson and Floyd Dell are well-recognized as two of the foremost authors from the Chicago Literary Renaissance, a period that refers to the second wave of Chicago writing spanning the years 1910-1920. The larger movement of Chicago writing spans the turn of the century through the 1940s. While the Midland realism of Hamlin Garland and Robert Herrick laid necessary foundations, the second wave – which gave rise to Sherwood Anderson, Floyd

Dell, Carl Sandburg, and perpetuated Theodore Dreiser – saw a defined literary environment coalesce around Chicago. Newspapers and small magazines, such as Dell’s Friday Literary

Review, proved literary testing-grounds for the city's literary surfeit. These newspapers represented an emerging Modern literary dialogue, presenting writers from Chicago as well as foreign literary influences, such as Joyce, Yeats, and Lawrence. The Chicago Literary

Renaissance was possible in part due to nascent institutions such as small magazines. Similarly,

Jane Addam’s Hull House Theater staged experimental plays. As a result of this literary

“establishment,” H.L. Mencken proclaims Chicago as the “Literary Capital of the United States.”

Furthermore, Mencken identifies in Chicago (and its attendant sensibility) an “original, genuinely national literature that made art from the principal stories and idioms of American life”

(Mencken The Literary Capital of the United States). By the end of the 1920s the literary (and social) capital had shifted to New York’s Greenwich Village, the physical embodiment of

Fenton 2

Bohemian sensibilities. High Modernism saw a further expatriation of literary capital. Though

Chicago’s importance diminished, Dell and Anderson abide as literary figures. In moving to

Greenwich Village and assuming a role as editor for The Masses, Dell again assumes a determinative role in literary taste as critic and novelist. Anderson does not identify with

Greenwich Village as ostensibly as Dell. Indeed, in 1924 Anderson re-locates to New Orleans.

Nonetheless, Anderson’s influence is undeniable. William Faulkner, in a June 1953 interview in

The Atlantic, cites Anderson as paramount in his decision to become a novelist. Anderson’s publisher, Boni and Liverlight, was responsible for publishing the full version of Hemingway’s

In Our Time in 1925. It is unsurprising then that Faulkner in the Paris Review (Spring 1956), stated that Sherwood Anderson was "the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on." Though the subsequent period of High Modernism ushered in a preference for Greenwich Village and the European, the seminal position of Floyd Dell and Sherwood Anderson guarantees their enduring vision. Floyd Dell and

Sherwood Anderson’s treatment of gender confirms many Modernist tendencies toward equality and sameness. Anderson and Dell present an effective fulmination against ingrained 19th Century values and an indictment of industrialized consumerism as part of an epicene vision for society that is achieved by an affirmation of play, sex, and the imagination. The imagination's potential to destroy and reform society is also explored. The implications of Dell and Anderson’s gender neutrality and the challenges they present to conventional values, such as marriage or monogamy, continue to resonate and present an alternative society founded on “mutual respect” and “creative desires.” Nonetheless, this creative vision offers some challenges in its own right.

Anderson and Dell

Fenton 3

Sherwood Anderson and Floyd Dell's professional and personal association began as early as 1913 when Dell, as editor of the Friday Literary Review of Chicago's Evening Post, reviewed Windy McPherson's Son. His review of the unfinished work was positive, stating that he “had seen recently an unfinished novel by a yet unpublished writer which if finished as begun will overtop the work of any living American writer.” As editorial disputes prevented Anderson's publishing of Windy McPherson's Son, he gave Floyd Dell the manuscript. Dell brought the novel to New York in October of 1913 and sought a new publisher. After a circuitous exchange

(Dell sent the novel to a reader in England who passed it to a New York office; the New York reader recalled Theodore Dreiser's praise of Anderson), the novel was finally published in 1916.

As a result, Anderson claimed Dell as his “literary-father.”1

Dell's arrival in New York as assistant editor in 1913 “sharpened [the Masses'] adeptness at appealing to an audience drawn to metropolitan sophistication as well as political ideas”

(Tanselle 174). In many ways, his work at the Masses continued his previous activities at

Chicago's Friday Literary Review. Dell held the position of editor of the Masses and the

Liberator from 1914-20 where “the journal constantly discussed issues of equality in marriage, access to divorce, free love, prostitution, and sex discrimination...making another third space where the sexes seemed to mingle and talk, easefully, in print” (Stansell 174). In his visits to

New York City (and Dell), Sherwood Anderson “found confirmation of Chicago's subordination to Greenwich Village in matters of the new writing” (Stansell 175). Given Dell's influential position as managing editor of the Masses and Anderson's influence on a future generation of writers it is clear both men were involved in a similar task – imagining present and future society

1 The biographical information is assembled from Tanselle's “Realist or Dreamer: Letters of Sherwood Anderson” and Stansell's American Moderns

Fenton 4 through the lens of equality, specifically gender equality. Equality is the explicit message of the

Masses, the implicit message of Anderson's works, and the message of the Chicago Renaissance and Greenwich Village.

Despite this similarity, though, some distinctions must be made between the two authors.

In a series of letters written after the publication of Dell's Moon-Calf on 27 October 1920, Dell and Anderson discuss their literary differences. Dell characterizes himself as “a boy who because he fears reality is in love with Shadow-shapes – much more so than this novel tells. Who lives and breathes in the queer world of Poe, of Dore, of Coleridge” who “must reinforce his ardor for reality by theory—he must beware of the seductions of fantasy” (Tanselle 534). Dell professes a

“religious-philosophical sternness he should refuse” and a constant insistence upon, “like Kim in the story, [saying] to himself, 'two times two is four, two times three is six, two times four.” Dell identifies strongly with the realist, despite his desire to dwell in the fantastic. Anderson responds to Dell's letter by stating that “as a personality, I am made in a different way” and that “perhaps you [Dell] and I do need two different approaches to come to the same end. You may need to punish the poet in you. I may need to give my poet breath and life.” Dell's final response is a promise to “express the part of me that believes 2 x 2 = 5 – even if I do have a footnote soberly pointing out the inaccuracy” (Tanselle 535, 536). As G. Thomas Tanselle notes, this correspondence “help[s] to clarify [Anderson's] attitudes toward the craft of fiction” and “also form an eloquent discussion of an eternal dichotomy: the realist versus the dreamer, the businessman who must 'punish the poet' in him versus the individual who rejects the multiplication table and follows his own 'strange and beautiful impulses” (537).

This “eternal” dichotomy is most salient when considering the nature of Dell's and

Fenton 5

Anderson's respective works. Dell's work on the socialist Masses is vested largely in material reality. Anderson's highly imagistic and symbolic writing tends toward dreams and poetry, a fault according to Dell as “[Anderson’s] tendency to be poetical or mystical was leading him away from the truth” (Tanselle 533). Though Dell writes fiction (his plays are featured in Greenwich

Village), he produces considerably more non-fiction than Anderson. Looking at Life is a collection of editorials and essays published from 1914 to 1923; Were You Ever a Child (1921), imaginatively investigates childhood, education, and art (both the Child and the Artist are placed on trial as a dialogue between the narrator and conventional middle-class thinkers). Despite the creativity, including the future vision of education, “Education in 1947 A.D.,” Dell remains largely in the mode of non-fiction. Conversely, Anderson's Perhaps Women (1931) could function as a companion piece to Were You Ever a Child insofar as both examine the effects of industrialism on future generations. In contrast, though, Anderson presents his views “partly in story form, partly in broken verse, partly in opinions, thrust out at the readers” (Perhaps Women

1) Considering that “opinions thrust out at readers” are the most prosaic form of representation offered, it is unsurprising that Anderson lists it as last. According to Tanselle, the different literary styles of Anderson and Dell were even represented by their dress: “Dell no longer wore a black stock or carried a walking stick as he had in Chicago but wore instead a blue flannel shirt which was, as Dell said, 'definitely proletarian and therefore suitable to a Socialist editor.'

Thereupon Anderson decided to begin using a black stock and walking stick” (533). Though

Tanselle maintains that “the matter of clothes has a greater significance for the relation between the two men,” the emphasis of the Anderson and Dell correspondence should rest on their similar goals, rather than the disparate means by which both mean achieve them.

Fenton 6

The Machine Song

A rhetoric of non-gendered equality pervades the works of both Anderson and Dell. Both authors condemn industrialism and the consequent effect on domestic and gender relations. For

Anderson, industrialism is an emasculating force; he maintains “a growing conviction that modern man is losing his ability to retain his manhood in the face of the modern way of utilizing the machine and that what hope there is for him lies in women” (Perhaps Women 1). In Were

You Ever a Child, Dell laments that “craftsmen are no longer children at play – that is to say, no longer free men” and that workers are “more or less unwilling slaves of a system of machine production” (92). Furthermore, he cites industry's insistence on utility as the reason for the loss of the craftsman/artist: “It is only because utility has become bound up with slavery that artists and people with artistic impulses revolt against it and in defiance produce utterly and fantastically useless things. This will be so, as long as being useful means being a slave” (102).

Both authors view the loss of agency and a general nullification of the worker as the primary problem of industrialism: “the man who works the machine feels too small. It makes him feel inferior. His spirit gets tired. The spirit of the machine doesn't tire – it hasn't any” (Perhaps

Women 46). Anderson is most direct on this topic in Perhaps Women. He claims that “we civilized people are no longer a part of nature. We live in houses. We go into factories” (38). The processes of industrialization have totally divorced “civilized,” modern men from nature. This disconnect, as well as the previous discussion of spirit, alludes to authenticity. According to

Anderson, there is some manner of authenticity in nature that is opposed to the purely mechanical nature of machines which has been lost with the advent of the machine age:

the work itself made into a mere meaningless mechanical process...

Fenton 7

That reacting upon the souls of men...

Making them spiritually impotent...

Physical impotence, perhaps in a whole race of men, to follow that... (Perhaps Women

143)

The “broken” nature of the verse as well as the repeated use of trailing ellipsis conveys impotence and surrender in the face of mechanical repetition. These verses, in conjunction with

Anderson's admission that Perhaps Women is “nothing but an impression, a sketch,” do much to elucidate Anderson's related belief that “the American artist [has] also failed. We have become impotent in the face of the machine. That is what I am trying to say” (97). The artist’s inability to properly represent his own time is linked with the workingman’s loss of potency.

Anderson's experience with a millworker in a chapter entitled “Ghosts” is most emblematic of the effects of industrialism on men. Discovering “in the darkness what at first I took to be a man walking with stooped shoulders,” Anderson characterizes the man as “a grotesque, it almost seemed that his head grew, not between the shoulders but out of his breast.

His arms were like pendulums swinging at his side” (Perhaps Women 90). In addition to directly calling the man a grotesque, Anderson’s imaginative vision of the man portrays him in a quasi- human light – the man’s head grows from his chest. Anderson further dehumanizes the millworker in comparing the movement of his arm to the regular, mechanic motion of a pendulum. Anderson links the mechanical and the perverted human. The conflation of man and machine is made total as Anderson avers “for some reason the figure of the American man, the workman as I thought, seen thus that night, seemed suddenly to represent to me all modern

American life. Was it impotence I felt in him – or It? Had the word impotence come at that

Fenton 8 moment into my mind because I had been spending months in mills?” (93).

Anderson inculpates the mills as precipitating impotence. The environment of industrialism, the mill, which has, “as there always is to the modern American factory, the suggestion of a vast prison,” produces impotence (93). Following Anderson’s vision of the worker, he then falls into one of gullies “washed deep” by “recent rains” (93). Anderson falls

“forward in the soft red mud” after which “the mud” clung to his clothes “like blood” (93). “The soft red South Carolina mud” is opposed to the industrial. Industry – specifically, machines – grants a false sense of vicarious power: “You, in your fine roadster, have but to step on the gas.

You shoot past. What is in your mind?” (Perhaps Women 104). Anderson does not equivocate on the automobile: “Is there not a queer vicarious sense of power in you, of false power? Admit there is” (104). The machine renders men impotent because men transfer their potency to the machine. Thus, the mud, insofar as it is related to “that farmer, a man who has worked all his life in fields, out under the sun and wind, who has raised food to feed many people, who has been all his life honest and simple-hearted, who is the father of all these children, future citizens of the

State,” represents authenticity and natural power (104). The mud is the natural element that men have given up in favor of the false power of machines. Anderson’s mud baptism consummates his profane illumination1.

1 In 1929's “Surrealism,” Walter Benjamin defines profane illumination, as opposed to religious illumination, as “a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson.” He vests in profane illumination the capacity for 'loosening:' “loosening of the self by intoxication is, at the same time, precisely the fruitful, living experience that allowed these people to step outside the charmed space of intoxication.“ 1928's “Main Features of My Second Impression of Hashish” describes how “the first trance loosened the objects, and lured them from their accustomed world; the second inserted them quite quickly into a new one.” This loosening and substitution can be, according to Benjamin, used to “win the energies of intoxication for the revolution” (“Surrealism”). Benjamin connects intoxication to the abstract process of dreaming which “loosens individuality like a bad tooth” (“Surrealism”). Anderson's use of the Surrealist mode and placement of “Ghosts” at night, “the time of strange thoughts, of dreams,” creates an alienating effect powerful enough to produce profane illumination (Perhaps Women 136). In connecting the banal image of the

Fenton 9

The direct effects of industrialism are harder to discern among women. Anderson asks

“what about the women? Why are they more triumphant than the men in such an age?” (Perhaps

Women 47). In asserting that “it may be they only seem to be less touched” Anderson arrives at the indirect effects of industrialization of women. Women are most affected by the loss of men, potent men:

If they cannot get men, they will take goods.

But what do they want?

Love, eh?

Where are they to get the lovers, the mates?” (47)

In this fragment of verse, Anderson identifies a lack of masculine presence. Commodities are offered as a substitute for men, and love is seen as impossible without ‘proper’ lovers. The conclusion to Perhaps Women mirrors this scene: “Kiss me while the lights are out,” the voice said. “The male voice was not much. “Who? Me?” it asked, wearily. “No, not you. None of you.

I want a man,” the girl’s voice said. “The women often do that sort of thing, the young mill superintendent afterward said to me. “Why?” “Oh, they are making fun of the men,” he said coldly enough” (144). Once again, Anderson presents impotent men who are incapable of fulfilling the role of lover. The weariness of the man evinces his defeat, a defeat that is multiplied into polyphony when four other men “(hopefully)” ask if they are the intended man. “No woman,” after all, “really wants a man who feels defeated, crushed by life” (48). Through women, however, Anderson locates a potential escape from the “machine song:” “the women are affected less. It must be because every woman has a life within herself that nothing outside her can really touch except maybe a mate” (Perhaps Women 9,48).

millworker to the larger cultural implications, Anderson describes a “materialistic, anthropological inspiration.”

Fenton 10

Mechanized Love

Before fully considering the matter and implications of female potency, the implications of industrialism on conventional love and social relationships must be considered first. During a discussion with Anderson in Perhaps Women, a woman contends that “writers are still in the

Victorian age” and that they “think that if you can solve the sex problem you solve all” (144).

The woman continues to assert that writers act “as though life wasn’t always all one thing. You couldn’t ignore parts of it. You had to take everything in. You mean we have to take in the factory too? Surely” (144). The woman’s critique of Anderson is that he is too specific. In dealing specifically with sexuality he has missed the larger scope, the intricacies and complexities of social interconnectedness. To talk of sexuality requires a discussion of the factory. Similarly, love and relationships, in general, are influenced by the economic considerations. Industrial capitalism encourages the formation of a specific set of values – those of the bourgeoise. This conflation of industry and society (and all other things) is illustrated by

Anderson’s basic description of mill villages: “In these villages, in many mill villages built about factories everywhere in America, the churches also had come under the control of the employer”

(Perhaps Women 73). Insofar as the church is representative of cultural and moral thought (and it most certainly is in the United States), the employer has co-opted control of social instutions.

Worship of industry, worship of the machine, worship of the “bitch success,” have pervasive influence on all parts of social interaction (Perhaps Women 77). Dell says “it is no secret that adults generally have not yet learned how to be happy in love. And the reason for that, aside from the economic obstacles to happiness which do not come within the scope of our inquiry, is that they are still children” (Were You Ever a Child 181). Though Dell acknowledges the economic

Fenton 11 obstacles to happiness, i.e. an industrial economy’s negative effects on love, he focuses on a fundamental flaw in the way people conceive of each other. Furthermore, Dell avers that “it may seem somewhat of an impertinence to blame [that men and women are unhappy in love] upon the early influences of the home, when there are so many outstanding customs and laws and economic conditions which are founded upon the theory of the inequality of men and women”

(183). For Dell, a sense of inequality is built directly into the customs, laws, and economic conditions. “The theory of the inequality” of genders is structurally sanctioned.

Marriage: “The Untold Lie”

As evidence of this structural inequity, Dell and Anderson depict marriage almost consistently as a trap for both genders. In Were You Ever a Child, Dell characterizes “wedded love” as a “kind of disgrace” and “bondage” that “serious-minded men and women” should question (183). Anderson characterizes marriage as “a job,” opposed to “mating” which “if it were real mating, would last” (Perhaps Women 49). Anderson believes “we are all coming to realize slowly, as we get more and more education in life, that love, meaning desire, comes and goes” (49). Marriage is thus set in opposition to mating/desire. Marriage is a practical and economic arrangement: a job. Love and desire are transitory moments to be experienced: “a restless seeking after perfection that is beauty in the world of fact, the world of flesh” (49).

Marriage and its concomitant “accidents of life,” children, are the subjects of a chapter entitled

“The Untold Lie” (209). In it, the married Ray attempts to dissuade Hal from marrying and thus becoming “old and worn out” (209). Ray is ineffectual and Hal submits to marriage.

Many Marriages tells “a tale of an ordinary unsuccessful marriage” (197). When protagonist John Webster returns home for lunch he “has a feeling [he and his wife] both thought

Fenton 12 there was something wrong, almost immoral, about his being home at that time of the day” (21).

The inequality of genders manifests physically through separate spaces. Webster’s presence in the domestic is transgressive in the same way the wife’s presence would be in the sphere of business. Similarly, Webster and his wife do not sleep together. Occasionally, “she wanted him, let him know in some woman's way that she wanted him, and he went, not happily or eagerly, but because he was a man and she was a woman and it was done;” for the most part, though, “what she had wanted was that there be no love-making between them except for the purpose of breeding children” (24, 186).

The Webster marriage is mutually destructive. John associates with his wife “that notion…of a kind of death of the flesh,” and her once-glistening yellow hair acquires “the air of being dead at the roots and there were folds of quite meaningless flesh on the face among which little streams of wrinkles wandered” (30, 21). The first love-making attempt “turned out badly,

[with] a tall slender girl who had submitted her body to a man, but who had been all the time frightened and beset by a sense of guilt and shame” (185). Traditional, middle-class values demand virtue and chastity in the name of respectability. The guilt and shame experienced by

John and Mary (she is named directly only once or twice in the novel) is representative of conventional values’ failure to understand and accommodate lust and desire2. Though Mary, a daughter “out of the respectable families in respectable Illinois manufacturing towns,” internally produces her sense of shame, John’s guilt comes only externally: “Outside voices cried –

“Shame! Shame!” Should one listen to the voices or should one close the ears, close the eyes?”

(176, 163). Indeed, it is Mary who inculcates guilt in John: “Tears had come into his own eyes.

2 For a more complete analysis of shame and guilt see Susan Hegeman's “Naive Modernism.” She presents an excellent reading of Anderson's use of shame and the vicarious effect on the reader.

Fenton 13

What she said almost everyone said” (188). Mary’s personal animadversion of their lust validates society’s standards, the very standards that created Mary’s values in the first place. As a result,

John associates the love-making with “rape, rape of the conscious, rape of the unconscious”

(185).

Anderson’s depictions of marriage in Winesburg, Ohio are similar in the prevalence of misery, misalignment of desire, and entrapment. Elizabeth Willard “for years had hated her husband” though “her hatred had always before been a quite impersonal thing. He had been merely a part of something else she hated” (30). Elizabeth’s husband, Tom, represents an entire set of values, a larger problem. The marriage problem signifies greater malaise. Elizabeth's beginning as “a real adventurer in life” ends when she marries Tom Willard, “a clerk in her father's hotel [who] was at hand and wanted to marry at the time when the determination to marry came to her” (227). There is a lack of genuine interest on the part of at least one party: marriage and desire are not aligned. Elizabeth implicitly realizes this, but she assumes that

“marriage might be full of some hidden significance” (228). Elizabeth refuses both her father's advice and “eight hundred dollars” which “may prove to be a door, a great open door to you”

(229). Eight hundred dollars frees Elizabeth of the economic necessity of marriage (for a time) that compelled many women to marry. Nonetheless, she chooses to marry Tom, becoming jaded as a result. The violent diction and hunting imagery employed by Anderson capture a sense of savage malevolence: “as a tigress whose cub had been threatened would she appear, coming out of the shadows, stealing noiselessly along and holding the long wicked scissors in her hand”

(32). In her son George, Elizabeth detects “within him...a secret something is striving to grow. It is the thing I let be killed in myself” (28). Elizabeth aligns herself with George against Tom as

Fenton 14 representative of social convention. Elizabeth's decision to marry ends her life as an adventurer, a life of “parading through the streets with traveling men guests, wearing loud clothes and urging them to tell her of life in the cities out of which they had come” (30). Marrying Tom extinguishes the “great restlessness in her” (30).

“The Strength of God, concerning the Reverend Curtis Hartman,” portrays a marriage also built on ambivalence: “he had married her after a formal and prolonged courtship, carried on for the most part by the girl herself” (146). Reverend Hartman thinks “himself fortunate in marriage” because his wife received “five thousand dollars and [was promised] “at least twice that amount” via will (146). Satisfaction is economic. Despite never having “permitted himself to think of other women”, he begins to lust after a member of his congregation (146). He admits that he is “beset by the same temptations that assail” others and that he “[has] been tempted and

[has] surrendered to temptation” (147). The increasingly desperate actions of Curtis regarding

Kate Swift, concluding with a seemingly insane outburst, indicate neurosis, defined by Dell as “a conflict of desire,” especially when individual desires conflict with social expectations (Looking at Life 245). “The Strength of God,” however, is most important as a commentary on the failure of the establishment to sufficiently incorporate lust and desire. Curtis first tries to integrate Kate into his sermons “with a rush of determination” and “zeal to reach the ears and the soul of this new listener” and use her as an inspiration for righteousness. This escalates, terminating in his decision to give up the pulpit, punching through glass, and finally declaring Kate an “instrument of God” (153). The title may be read in a number of ways: an ironic commentary on the failure of a priest, as representative of the strength of god, or, a considerably more subversive reading in which the strength of god is the strongest force depicted, the powers of lust and desire, or thirdly,

Fenton 15 as a commentary on the pervasive nature of religion – the strength of God prevails inasmuch as

Curtis is returned to his faith through psychosis.

Anderson's attitudes toward conventional marriage is best evinced by his application of the word “respectable.” In addition to the aforementioned example of Many Marriage's Mary as coming from “respectable families in respectable Illinois manufacturing towns,” Anderson devotes a chapter of Winesburg, Ohio to “Respectability” and Wash Williams, a “young telegraph operator madly in love” (118). Wash proceeds through courtship with a kind of religious fervor” managing “to go through the pitfalls of his youth and to remain virginal until after his marriage” (118). Wash discovers “after two years of that life” that his wife “had managed to acquire three other lovers who came regularly” (119). Giving her “four hundred dollars” and the proceeds from the sale of the house, Wash returned her to her mother. Anderson provides a second instance in which a marriage is dissolved by financial means, rather than legal or emotional. Wash's wife's mother then invites him to Dayton. Wash notes that “their house was stylish. They were what is called respectable people. There were plush chairs and a couch in the room” (119). Anderson links the concept of respectable with the bourgeois concepts of style, interior design, and home ownership. Anderson subverts the supposed positive connotation of respectable as the wife's mother takes “the girl's clothes off, perhaps coaxing her to do it...waiting, hoping we would – well, you see – waiting” (119-20). Respectable in this case is used ironically to highlight the egregiousness of the mother's actions. In titling this chapter

“Respectability,” Anderson also extends an ironic reading of respectability to the institution of marriage itself. The need for a “respectable” marriage, one that is clearly against the desires of one party, results in heartbreak for Wash and shame for the girl, who “stood perfectly still staring

Fenton 16 at the floor” (120). The mother “die[s] of a fever a month after” (120).

Lust and Desire

The concepts of lust and desire factor largely into the discussions of marriage. Many marriages depicted by Anderson result from a non-coincidence of desire, love, and lust. He is especially cognizant of the significant difference between lust of flesh and the desire for possession. While Victorian and 19th Century American conventions sought to quash and extinguish lust, Anderson identifies in these ideas a more dangerous lust: the lust for possession.

The woman who becomes Dr. Reefy's wife discusses two suitors, with one representing lust and the other possession:

One of them, a slender young man with white hands, the son of a jeweler in Winesburg, talked continually of virginity. When he was with her he was never off the subject. The other, a black-haired boy with large ears, said nothing at all but always managed to get her into the darkness, where he began to kiss her. Beneath his talk of virginity she began to think there was a lust greater than in all the others. 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. She had the dream three times, then she became in the family way to the one who said nothing at all but who in the moment of his passion actually did bite her shoulder so that for days the marks of his teeth showed (Winesburg, Ohio 21).

The white-handed jeweler's son is associated with virginity and possession. The dark- haired boy is opposed to him, and represents lust of the flesh. Anderson subverts conventional expectations by portraying the white-handed son of a business-owner as the more dangerous suitor. Physical consumption (through biting and pregnancy) by the dark-haired boy is preferred to the abstract potential for total consumption of the self presented in the jeweler's son.

Intrinsically related to the concept of desire and lust is the social imperative to channel and

Fenton 17 control passion. Following the shameful attempt at love-making, John Webster vows that he and

Mary will lead “clean pure lives…trying never to give way to the animal impulses that shocked and frightened people” (Many Marriages 188). Fearing further humiliation and transgression,

John is forced to suppress his desire, ‘the sex-instinct.’ His desires are associated with the animal; man, as he is defined via society, through its mores and conventions, ascends from bestial savagery: “Man was a conscious thing trying to struggle upward out of animalism” (188).

Anderson portrays this exact mechanism of control in “Drink, concerning Tom Foster.” Tom falls in love “with Helen White, daughter of the man for whom he had worked” and “found himself thinking of her at night.” As this “was a problem for Tom,” he maintained a “fight, a quiet determined little fight of his own, to keep his desires in the channel where he thought they belonged” (Winesburg, Ohio 217). It is unclear whether the problem of Helen White is that she is the daughter of his employer or that Tom thinks of her “at night.” The matter potentially becomes economic, a relevant factor in marriage, as seen by the propensity of men to dispense of women with financial compensation. The problem may also be a matter of lust alone as Tom fears thinking of her at night and concerns himself with “the manner of thoughts” rather than having thoughts at all. This may be an admission of the indefatigable nature of desire, or a privileging of love over lust. Compounding lust/love and employment, nonetheless, is a commentary on class difference in the context of romance and/or desire.

The narrator makes the distinction that Tom himself believes his thoughts must be controlled. This suggests that the values inculcated in Tom by society result in self-monitoring and policing of desire, while alluding to an alternative society or mode of existence that does not relegate desire to a limited and segregated “channel”. One of the persistent images of Many

Fenton 18

Marriages, the well of life, evinces Victorian efforts to limit the extent of desire: “Life tore the heavy iron lid off the well. Dark hidden things, festering in the well, came out and found expression for themselves” (217). The heavy iron lid represents the establishment’s (purported) ability to limit desire. The forces of desire, associated with darkness, mystery, and decline, only find expression when social limits are dissolved -- the well empties.

While marriage and sexuality (that is, the experience of lust) represent the “customs and laws…which are founded on the theory of the inequality of men and women” of which Dell spoke, the theoretical inequality of men and women extends beyond interactions between the genders into the social process of defining each gender’s identity. Tom Willard chastises George for “go[ing] along for hours not hearing when you are spoken to and acting like a gawky girl.”

Tom continues, insisting that George is “not a fool,” “not a woman,” but “Tom Willard’s son” and he’ll “wake up” (Winesburg, Ohio 29). Tom impresses upon George a need to be productive and practical via an appeal to masculine expectations. Idleness -- George’s preference is “to go away and look at people and think” (33) – is womanly and thus to be suppressed in George.

Tom’s use of the phrase “wake up” sets productivity and practicality in direct opposition to dreaming; George’s failure to hear when spoken to and desire to go away and look are related to day-dreaming.

The sexual encounter itself both forms and demonstrates gender identity. As an example of a failed sexual encounter, Anderson provides Kate’s attempted seduction of George in terms of male and female actions; the depiction is highly gendered. There is an expectation for George to become “wholly the male, bold and aggressive” (46). The masculine expectation for action (as opposed to passivity) is linked to the expectation for production. Sexual power is economic. Kate

Fenton 19 responds with the female “desire to be loved by a man” which “takes possession of her.” George,

“ready to play the part of a man,” attempts to possess Kate (162). Depicting the sexual encounter this way, Anderson illustrates the highly gendered nature of conventional sexual mores.

Condemning the Past: Identifying Stagnation

Anderson and Dell, in cataloguing primarily the spiritual effects of industrial capitalism, give an opprobrious reading of their time. Along with this sense of condemnation, though, is a persistent revolutionary rhetoric. Anderson and Dell provide not only a critique of their social institutions but a radical call for total dissolution; they identify in the prevailing values of their time a suffocating brand of ossification and offer an alternative value-set that affirms equality.

Winesburg, Ohio’s prologue, “Book of the Grotesques,” evinces the process of constructing social conventions and their subsequent ossification: a vision of “the beginning when the world was young [and] there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth.

Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful” (6). Anderson harkens to a pre- social period in which values did not compete but existed together freely. According to

Anderson’s theoretical model, ossification occurs “the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it [thereby becoming] a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood” (6). The fluidity of ideas and convention is again seen in Doctor Reefy’s habit of erecting from discarded paper scraps “little pyramids of truth and after erecting knock[ing] them down again that he might have the truths to erect other pyramids”

(19). Reefy’s paper balls, upon which are written “thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts,” represent the ossification of ideas and convention as they become “little hard round

Fenton 20 balls” (19). A radical re-envisioning of gender would destroy the ideas that have become set for so many, that have become the “falsehoods” embraced by “the grotesques.”

In Perhaps Women, Anderson notes that “life is shifting, changing. Old values are being destroyed” (65). Despite the rapidly shifting socio-cultural fabric of the United States, the

“successful men are so walled-in by…possessions” that they “cannot receive new impressions”

(65). Anderson equates the capitalist imperative for possession with a type of perceptual anesthesia. The practical men of business cannot perceive, let alone conceive of, the new, the modern (and then what hope is there for the Modern?). On this topic Anderson is equally direct in

Many Marriages, as “it was all very well to be thinking that better boards should be put into washing machines that poor women bought, but one might easily become corrupted by giving oneself over to such thoughts. There was danger of a kind of smug self-righteousness got from thinking about putting only good boards in washing machines” (13). Anderson cautions against becoming fixed in ways of thought, against allowing values to ossify to the detriment of society.

In Triumph of the Egg (in “Seeds”), one character complains to his psychoanalyst that he

“miss[es] the whole point. The lives of people are like young trees in a forest. They are being choked by climbing vines. The vines are old thoughts and beliefs planted by dead men. I am myself covered by crawling creeping vines that choke me." Old thoughts and beliefs are characterized as a suffocating force opposed to growth, opposed to the “pale green things…just pushing their way up from among the dead brown leaves” (Many Marriages 178). For Anderson there is a ubiquitous sense that “everything got started wrong and then nothing could be set straight again” (171). Indicative of this total dismissal of prior values, Anderson inveighs against the “Protestant kind of man’s…age of reason” as a “dreadful kind of egotism” (Many Marriages

Fenton 21

235). Man’s belief that they “could trust their own minds” is problematic for Anderson as men rarely “[know] anything at all of the workings of their own minds” (235). The conventions of

Western thought, insofar as they developed in the Enlightenment with a preference for the

“rational,” are founded upon a fallible reliance on reason.

Dell processes the matter of ossification similarly, imagining “some children who rebel against slavery,” who “do not want to grow up into slavery” (Were You Ever a Child 117). Dell indicts the capitalist economy as a manifestation of the institution of slavery. To grate against convention incurs “disapproval and anxiety” from one’s “families, who tell them they must grow up” (117). The values of capitalism are such that they establish, and then perpetuate, slavery.

Children are born into an economic system that is taken as natural by virtue of its precedence.

For Dell, the forces of enculturation are subject the same rules of ossification; on the subject of whether children can be taught good taste, he states “only too easily. And their ‘good taste’ will lead them infallibly to prefer the imitations of what they have been taught to praise, and quite as infallibly to reject the great new art of their generation” (Were You Ever a Child 112). When social conventions and values become set, whether they are economic or artistic in nature, they necessarily suppress and suffocate alternative ideas. The old is privileged at the expense of the new on the merit of maintaining the status quo.

As an inversion of this concept – what might follow if everything got started right – Dell presents a utopian vision of “Education in 1947 A.D.” This ideal school has “play, production, and exchange as they would exist in the outside world if these things were to be done and managed wholly with the intention of making better and wiser and happier citizens. The difference, of course, is simply that one is run with an educational and the other with a productive

Fenton 22 intention” ( Were You Ever a Child 196). Dell notes that “the difference seems…that your school is really democratic and your adult world isn’t quite,” concluding that “after going to these schools, your people would want the rest of the world run on exactly the same plan.” The head of the school grants that “it does rather have that effect” (196). Dell’s utopian vision imagines an educational system that inculcates a true sense of democracy with the assumption that equality will follow in other facets of society; however, in order to properly imagine such an institution we must first “fully realize [we] are living in a time when prophecies come true” ( Were You

Ever a Child 191).

Affirming the Future: Inventing the New

Dell’s remark on the potential for realizing prophecy indicates the larger project inherent in the works of both Dell and Anderson: to imagine an alternative society that operates under the aegis of true equality. Dell frames the discussion in terms of gender, introducing the supposition that “the distinction between the sexes were abolished: what new institutions would slowly grow up to take the place of those to which we give so large a part of our constructive and destructive abilities?” ( Were You Ever a Child 200). Anderson, eschewing Dell’s highly prosaic mode in favor of one more imagistic in nature, approaches the same question through the character of Joe

Welling, “A Man of Ideas.” Joe, like Dell, also introduces a thought experiment – “suppose all of the wheat, the corn, the oats, the peas, the potatoes, were all by some miracle swept away. We’d begin, you see, to breed up new vegetables and fruits. Soon we’d regain all we had lost. Mind, I don’t say the new things would be the same as the old. They wouldn’t. Maybe they’d be better, maybe not so good. That’s interesting, eh? A lot might be done with milkweed, eh? ” (Winesburg,

Ohio 102). Anderson returns to organic imagery to characterize the destruction of the old order

Fenton 23 and the rise of the new order. Milkweed, as representative of new alternatives, is equated with the

“pale green things”. Through their organic nature, both images convey a sense of growth (that is, the process of social construction) and fragility (the nascent institutions are threatened by established and ossified values, if those institutions continue to exist: they do in “Seeds,” they do not in “A Man of Ideas”). The “almost unbelievable” potential of milkweed and the “new vegetable kingdom” are synonymous with Dell’s “new institutions” (102). That both authors employ the word “suppose” indicates the theoretical nature of the argument as well as an implicit assumption that their position is heterodox. supposition indicates the hypothetical and necessarily alternative nature of the thought experiment.

Femininity and Play

One such institution Dell and Anderson are most interested in is that of the woman, specifically what it means to be a woman in the Modern context. Dell avers that “the modern man does not have to invent something for the modern woman to be. She is what she is, and we adjust ourselves to her as well as we can” (Looking at Life 28). Dell identifies a certain degree of idealized gender ambiguity in that of the burlesque dancer: “And yet life would be a poor thing if our desires could not upon occasion create, before a painted background set against the night, some demoniac wisp of girlhood in whom the attributes of sex are heightened into sheer radiant sexlessness – in whom the very vividness of human life is flaunted and tormented and whipped into something inhuman and superhuman” (Looking at Life 235). Dell is ambivalent in his representation. He emphasizes radiance, vividness, and a sense of the superhuman. He then problematizes this new configuration of gender as demoniac, tormenting, whipping, and inhuman. Dell heralds the advent of the modern woman without ignoring potential personal and

Fenton 24 social disruptions: “reckless, merciless confusion of dream!” (235). Dell adopts George Bernard

Shaw’s Rita of “Fanny’s First Play” as a model of female (insofar as it remains gendered) modernity:

What Rita wishes is that these men would stop making calf eyes at her for a while – would really lose themselves in the magnificent adventure they are having, forget that she is a female and by children or enthusiasts along with her, live for a moment in the life of the spirit in which, as in the Kingdom of Heaven, there is no marrying nor giving in marriage. And when she finally does give herself to Monsieur George it is because [there is] a chance to find in him some promise at last of what she wants – a playfellow (Looking at Life 254).

For Dell, the ideal female position is not one of femininity so much as a claim upon a non-gendered alternate title/role founded upon equal personage. In Dell, this equality is manifested as mutual play, a life without “marrying nor giving in marriage” but of equal

“playfellows”. In an essay entitled “Enter the Woman,” Dell literally allows the Modern woman to represent herself. Upon asking what she “wants” to do (emphasis Dell’s), “the girl” responds,

“I want to stay here with you boys and talk about a new book by Havelock Ellis…I want to look over that feminist article you’re writing and tell you what’s wrong with it, and then copy it out for you on the typewriter” (Looking at Life 30). The girl asserts herself as having equal claim to the processes of work and play. We must assume that the article being written is not the type of work Dell believes is bound so closely with the slavery of utility as to rob it of its inherent value as art-play; he defines “play” as “effort which embodies one’s own creative wishes, one’s own dreams.” Play is, therefore, work that coincides with desire: “when you were first married, and began to keep house was that work or play, madam?” (Were You Ever a Child 91). Dell then links the personal sense of play and work with the larger social environment, portraying “the

Fenton 25 cathedral which the artisans and craftsmen of the middle ages created so joyously” as “the realization of a collective wish to which the creative fancy of every worker might make its private contribution” (Were You Ever a Child 91). The modern female thus desires a position that allows her to pursue her dreams and creative wishes thereby equaling men as playfellows.

Dell identifies in the “happy marriage” the “capacity for swift and unconscious change and interchange of roles. The happy lovers can vary the tenor of their relationship because they are free to be more than one thing to each other. And they have that freedom because they are equals. That equality is comradeship, is friendship” (Were You Ever a Child 182). Friendship, insofar as it is the exchange of play, is the basis of equality. Dell continues the theme of gender interplay as central in stating that “equality in love means only the freedom to experience all, instead of compulsion to experience only a part, of the emotional possibilities of love in a single relationship” (Were You Ever a Child 182). In both cases, Dell presents a type of relational fluidity that rejects differentiation. His non-gendered theory of “interchange of roles” is a significant departure from the standard 19th century theory and practice of separate spheres, as manifested by John’s sense of intruding upon his own home. Dell’s theory provides for equal interchange and even presupposes gender classification. In this vein, Dell requires that Modern society “must learn, and the sooner the better, that girls are interesting human beings, that they are good comrades and jolly playfellows” (Were You Ever a Child 186). There is the sense in

Dell that if men and women learn to regard each other as equals in play first and foremost, the rest will follow. Indeed, he states that “so long as girls and boys are to any extent educated separately, encouraged to play separately, and treated as different kinds of beings, the remoteness hinders the growth of real friendship between the sexes, and leaves the mind empty of any

Fenton 26 realistic concepts” (186). In imagining a society founded on true gender equality, Dell offers “a world where [boys] could be, as it were, as much of a boy as [boys] liked” with the possibility for (it is a potential as much as it is a consequence) feeling “freer than…ever…to be – a girl”

(Looking at Life 256). Dell’s use of em dash indicates a rupture of thought; Dell’s call for free and fluid interchange between gender identities is radical and arresting -- in terms of both content and form. In this way, Dell shifts from agitating against (but within) the gender binary toward some new gender concept that lays equal claim to male and female to that extent that it may dispense with these terms altogether; from male and female to human.

Anderson’s representations of modern women bear similarity to those of Dell with reference to play, especially the concept of “adventure.” Like Shaw’s Rita, Anderson’s Elizabeth

Willard (“Death”) “had tried to be a real adventurer in life. At eighteen life had so gripped her that she was no longer a virgin [though] she had never entered upon an adventure by desire alone” (Winesburg, Ohio 227). It is unclear to what Anderson refers specifically when employing adventure. Her attempts to be an adventurer lead to sexual activity, but it is not clear if one causes the other necessarily. The desire for adventure, and the related restlessness, is most likely a desire for “a real lover” and the search for “something” which she “sought blindly, passionately, some hidden wonder in life” (227). The sense that men do not love women in the manner which they require is evident in both Dell and Anderson.

Louise Hardy (“Surrender”) and Kate Swift (“The Teacher”) are other translations of the modern female character. “For years,” Louise “had dreamed of the time when she could go forth into the world” where “all must be gaiety and life,” where “men and women must live happily and freely, giving and taking friendship and affection as one takes the feel of a wind on the

Fenton 27 cheek” (Winesburg, Ohio 76). She again represents adventure as a way of discovering satisfaction. A “tangible hunger” leads Louise to seduce a man. Though, as he was “filled with his own notions of love between men and women, he did not listen but began to kiss her upon the lips” and Louise is dissatisfied as a result (Winesburg, Ohio 85). The moral expectations of John

Hardy, as they represent the old order, prevent the fruition of Louise’s desires. Despite representing a new value set, she does not yet triumph; Louise is “Surrender.”

Kate Swift’s predilections for “smoking a cigarette while she read[s] a book” and taking walks at night express her modernity (Winesburg, Ohio 145). It is more than coincidental that

Reverend Curtis experiences a crisis of faith in response to Kate’s nude reading – “he was horror stricken at the thought of a woman smoking and trembled also to think that his eyes had looked upon the bare shoulders and white throat of a woman” (145). Kate’s walks are a manifestation of restlessness. The (male) physician “scolds” Kate for “it was foolish for [her] to be abroad in the storm, foolish and perhaps dangerous” (158). Kate is associated with the storm: chaos and disorder. Furthermore, the Doctor’s use of “foolish” and “perhaps dangerous” could be applied as a reading of the modern woman’s sense of adventure and restlessness. Her foolishness is in opposition to her “bold, excited mood” (158). Kate is also described as possessing something

“biting and forbidding;” she is “silent, cold, and stern” (158). In this way, Kate is rather masculine. Anderson transfers to Kate the once-masculine “streak of cruelty” which Jane also acquires in Many Marriages (104). This cruelty is “a kind of health in her eyes now” evinced as the desire “to know” (104). Cruelty, in this case, has a positive effect and is a masculine quality that should be appropriated by women.

A New 'New Woman': Tandy Hard

Fenton 28

These women, the moderning women of Dell and Anderson, present a set of values and behaviors that require a new socio-cultural environment to exist without neurosis. Despite the sense of gender ambiguity and neutrality, these characterizations represent women reacting against 19th Century values as women (though they may appropriate the masculine at times). As a reaction, these women are couched in the past. Conversely, Tandy Hard, as a messianic figure, represents a revolutionary gender formation that obliterates 19th century values and shifts the perspective toward the future. “Tandy, concerning Tandy Hard” fully evinces the sense of prophecy alluded to by Dell. A stranger arrives rather mysteriously and pronounces his vision of

“a woman coming,” a woman who is “strong to be loved;” “out of her defeats has been born a new quality in women” (Winesburg, Ohio 141). He continues, naming this quality of woman

“Tandy” and finally exhorting the-soon-to-be-Tandy Hard to “be Tandy, dare to be strong and courageous. Venture anything. Be brave enough to dare to be loved. Be something more than man or woman. Be Tandy” (142). The stranger’s exhortation thus parallels Dell’s theory of fluid- gender identity, the freedom to be as much a boy or girl as one may desire. The stranger’s reference to his having been a “true dreamer” before his “body became vile” and the force with which Tandy responds to becoming Tandy (her given name is never even given; she is only

Tandy) provide a prophetic image of gender reformation. Elizabeth Willard and Louise Hardy are the Modern response to 19th Century values. However, Elizabeth dies at the end of Winesburg,

Ohio. Louise dies, metaphorically, earlier via surrender. Tandy, thus, is a new type of person, rather than simply a new woman. Tandy is revolution. The implications of Tandy, as a concept and force, are a re-examination and re-formulation of gender on the principle of equality.

Anderson’s titling the chapter as “Tandy, concerning Tandy Hard” speaks to the complexity of

Fenton 29 defining what or who Tandy is. Many of the chapters in the novel refer to a specific behavioral pattern or role fulfilled by a person: “Mother, concerning Elizabeth Willard,” “The Philosopher, concerning Doctor Parcival,” “A Man of Ideas, concerning Joe Welling,” “The Thinker, concerning Seth Richmond,” “The Teacher, concerning Kate Swift.” Alternatively, Anderson names chapters after germane concepts or certain emotions: “Adventure, concerning Alice

Hindman,” “Respectability, concerning Wash Williams,” Loneliness, concerning Enoch

Robinson,” “Sophistication, concerning Helen White.” Thus Tandy is characterized as both a role and position to be fulfilled – “Be Tandy” – and an attitude or “a new quality.” Tandy is the new subjectivity of equality, developed through love.

Anderson provides no details in Winesburg, Ohio as to how one becomes Tandy. She is given as an ideal, but no mechanism for transformation follows. The implications of a society of

Tandies would be considerable and numerous. The character of Tandy (and the larger concept of gender equality) is, however, developed with greater depth in Anderson’s later works.

Anderson uses the epithet “strong enough to be loved” as an identifier for Tandy and then attaches it to Many Marriage’s Natalie: “O, my Natalie, you are a woman strong to be loved”

(70). Given the four year span between the writing of Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Many

Marriages (1923), it is fair to read Natalie as a development of the Tandy ideal. Natalie is an adult Tandy. Both Natalie and Tandy are testaments “of the inner strength, of the living potence of present-day American women, of their hunger, the potentiality of new strength in them, that may save American civilization in the very face of the machine” (Perhaps Women 97). Anderson hopes to contrast, “if [he] succeeds in writing,” the woman “with the present-day impotence of the American man” (97). For Anderson, the woman “at her best, is and will remain a being

Fenton 30 untouched by the machine…it cannot paralyze or make impotent her spirit. She remains, as she will remain, a being with a hidden inner life. The machine can never bring children into the world” (Perhaps Women 140). The machine triumphs over men because men exchange their own potency for false, vicarious power. The machine cannot triumph over women because a woman’s potency is impossible to transfer. So long as machines cannot bear children, women maintain authenticity and potency. Anderson is nothing but lucid in declaring women as “where our hope lies. If these machines, brought by man, so casually in the world…are ever to be controlled, so that their power to hurt men, by making them impotent, is checked, women will have to do it.

They will have to do it perhaps to get men back, so that they may continue to be fertilized, to produce men” (140). Perhaps women alone offer hope “because every woman has a life within herself that nothing outside her can really touch except maybe a mate” (Perhaps Women 48). In addition to the opposition created between men and the machine, Anderson formulates women against machinery with the assumption that women may triumph where men fail. It is absolutely necessary, then, that Anderson emphasizes that “nothing outside” can access a woman’s inner life, her sense of authenticity, except “maybe a mate” (48). By alluding to mating and sex,

Anderson links men and women in their opposition to the machine. More importantly, however, he provides a mechanism by which men may access authenticity and regain potency: sex. The fertility of women requires sex which produces a gender communion of sorts. Sexuality is a force that connects and nullifies distinctions.

New Sexuality

Though many of the sexual moments in Winesburg, Ohio are unsuccessful or subverted by convention, Anderson provides examples of positive sexuality. In Perhaps Women, Anderson

Fenton 31 insists that “we will have to quit being afraid of sex. It isn’t so terrible really. Life would lose three-fourths of its charm without sex” (58). When Alice (“Adventure”), “betrayed by her desire to have something beautiful come into her rather narrow life,” grows excited at the prospect of physical passion she feels “the outer crust of her life, all of her natural diffidence and reserve, torn away and she [gives] herself over to the emotions of love” (Winesburg, Ohio 104). Love

(and lust) dislodges a suffocating patina. Alice’s “adventure” with Ned is described in terms of

“wonder and beauty” (105). When Alice later acknowledges a new, different desire to “be loved, to have something answer the call that was growing louder and louder within her,” she again feels “some creative and wonderful effect on her body. She wanted to leap and run, to cry out, to find some other lonely human and embrace him” (111). Sex is anodynic; it is life. This concurrence of life and sexuality is manifested in Kate’s attempted seduction of George as she acts with “a passionate desire to have him understand the import of life, to learn to interpret it truly and honestly, swept over her. Leaning forward, her lips brushed his cheek” (Winesburg,

Ohio 161). Kate’s desire to impact George intimately and personally in matters of life becomes

“something physical” (162).

Anderson’s usage of sexuality in this way gives for a broader interpretation of sexual acts, as seen in “Sophistication.” On the precipice of his departure, George wishes to “see [Helen

White] for another purpose. He wanted to tell her of the new impulses that had come to him. He had tried to make her think of him as a man when he knew nothing of manhood and now he wanted to be with her” (Winesburg, Ohio 239). George is “conscious of the girl growing into womanhood as he grew into manhood” (239). The scene is initially sexual. “With all his heart,”

George expresses a desire “to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands,

Fenton 32 be touched by the hand of another” (239). As the scene escalates toward a sexual encounter, the language becomes increasingly de-sexualized: “In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. I have come to this lonely place and here is the other” (246). Finally, “they were both embarrassed and to relieve their embarrassment dropped into the animalism of youth. They laughed and began to pull and haul at each other. In some way chastened and purified by the mood they had been in, they became, not man and woman, not boy and girl, but excited little animals” (247). Sex is a form of play. Anderson frames this scene sexually, through George’s desires and his own choice of diction. As it progresses, the sexuality shifts toward an alternative manifestation of intimate connection. The genders of both characters are lost – the discussion moves away from a “consciousness of Helen’s womanhood” toward “two human atoms.” George and Helen are even described as youthful “playing things” and “excited little animals,” anything but man and woman. In short, George and Helen’s tryst represents, “for a moment, the thing that makes the mature life of men and women in the modern world possible” (247). George and

Helen engage in a non-sexual type of sexuality – intimate human connection.

. In moving from sexual to non-sexual intercourse, Anderson introduces an expansive definition of sex that includes myriad forms of human connection. In Many Marriages, John

Webster conceives of Natalie, the woman after whom he lusts, as:

a house and he were looking in through a window. Natalie herself lived within the house that was her body. What a quiet strong dear person she was and how strange it was that he had been able to sit near her every day for two or three years without ever before thinking of looking into her house. 'How many houses there are within which I have not looked (7). The house image, tied as it is to the body, is a way one may be experienced by others; to look in one’s house is sexual and non-sexual. John continues, asking “why could not more than one

Fenton 33 person live within such a house” and deciding that “it would clear a good many things up if such an idea got abroad” (15). From the common image of individuals as houses, John arrives at the idea of “all men and women standing on a common ground. All over America, all over the world that matter, men and women did outward things much as he did. They ate food, slept, worked, made love. Men and women tried to go within one another’s bodies, were at times almost insanely anxious to do it. That was called making love. He wondered if a time might come when men and women did that quite freely” (16). Anderson, via John, provides free or open sexuality as an institution alternate to marriage. Moving from the numerous failed sexual encounters in

Winesburg, Ohio, to George and Helen’s consummated quasi-sexual encounter, to John

Webster’s endorsement of free sexuality, Anderson’s trajectory of an expansive, egalitarian sexuality is clear. Sex is the manner in which the genders dialogue. Intercourse, in its double meaning of conversation and sex, is a matter of communication and connection. Sexuality, thus, inscribes equality and dissolves distinctions.

Connection through Sexuality

Through a new, free sexuality Webster arrives at “a dream one vainly hoped to find, wandering about somewhere, a woman who by some miracle would love with freedom and abandon. Along through the streets one went usually in dark badly lighted places where there were factories and warehouses and poor little dwellings. One wanted a golden woman to step up out of the filth of the place in which one walked. It was insane and silly and one knew these things, but one persisted insanely...love came flooding their two bodies” (Many Marriages 28).

Like Tandy and Natalie, the ideal woman loves with “freedom and abandon.” The ideal woman is also an egalitarian force that cuts through class distinction. John provides a second vision that

Fenton 34 functions quite similarly:

It would be an amazingly beautiful thing to have happen in the world if everyone, every living man, woman, and child, should suddenly, by a common impulse, come out of their houses, out of the factories and stores, come, let us say, into a great plain, where everyone could see everyone else, and if they should there and then, all of them, in the light of day, with everyone in the world knowing fully what everyone else in the world was doing, if they should all by one common impulse commit the most unforgivable sin of which they were conscious, what a great cleansing time that would be (33). Webster provides an image of total connection, total community. This great vision imagines a society opposed to houses and factories and stores. This is reminiscent of Anderson’s call for “a new religion, more pagan, something more closely connected with fields and rivers.

There will have to be built up a new and stronger sympathy as between man and man” (Perhaps

Women 58). The natural and idyllic imagery recalls Eden; while Anderson is not precise on the nature of the “most unforgivable sin,” the Original Sin may be the most egregious. Anderson’s vision, in looking forward to a period of great cleansing, is utopian; in recalling the Edenic, the vision is antediluvian. Thus, Anderson again speaks to a potential for intimate connection that is both sexual and non-sexual. Whether Anderson wishes to produce utopia in the future or re- capture a formative, pre-social golden age is irrelevant. Indeed, this paradoxical tendency

(looking toward tomorrow and back to yesterday to define today) is perhaps intentional as either interpretation of the same image, nonetheless, affirms the corrective potential of an alternative worldview that rejects the current. The cleansing nature of the communal sin indicates an apocalyptic moment: a new order must follow. Anderson’s sense of revolution is more apparent in Many Marriages than his earlier works. John imagines “something like a great wind would sweep through the world” and that “the outer walls are, you see, just things stuck up, like scenery on a stage. A breath can blow the walls down or an outburst of flames can consume them all in

Fenton 35 an hour. The women in the rooms back of these walls are all fair sweet women and you should just go into the rooms” (42, 68). Entering of rooms, a sexual image, is the process that destroys walls. The creative forces John imbues from his love for Natalie allow him the “quick vision of many people lying in the beds stuck high in the air. The walls of the houses had receded them”

(76). John experiences a “life-giving thing,” the ability to “wipe out walls as a wind shakes the branches” (77). Thus, a kind of sexuality becomes the primary force for dissolving social distinctions. This sexuality, as it is manifested in dreams of entering of houses or “fancying” walls falling as “a wind shakes the branch,” is associated with creative energy. Anderson describes “love-making” as “something more filled with meaning than the mere act of two bodies embracing, the passage of the seeds of life from one body to another” (78). This is most evident in the interactions between John and his daughter Jane. John, talking to his daughter, is described as “frankly making love to her and she had somewhat fallen under his influence”

(102). John realizes he has “been a father as well as a lover. Perhaps the two things cannot be differentiated” (146). This semi-incestuous depiction indicates non-sexual sexual intimacy. The distinction between conversational and sexual intercourse blurs. John is not afraid to recognize

“the loveliness of his daughter’s flesh” (146). The scenario is only sexual because John and Jane reach a personal communion. This is illustrated briefly between John and another one of his employees: “They stood for a moment looking into each other’s eyes and the look was like a kind of lovemaking too. It was very strange and the moment would afterward give him much to think about” (82). All human connection is sexual: “’Huh, it's marriage, every one is seeking marriages. People would gain a lot if they could but learn to keep that thought in mind,’ he thought” (222).

Fenton 36

Anderson endorses an expanding of sexuality to the detriment of monogamy. John reveals a cognizance of the potential for many lovers: “He wondered why it had happened that he had become Natalie's lover instead of the lover of one of these girls. I could have loved either of them had she opened the doors of herself as Natalie has done” (72). Loving Natalie does not preclude loving others, possibly many others. John believes “a rich man might have many marriages. It was certain that the possibility of human relationship had not even been tapped yet.

Something had stood in the way of a sufficiently broad acceptance of life” (72). Thus an expansive sexuality (in both scope and manner) is necessary for a “broad acceptance of life.”

Again, sexuality is aligned with life. John imagines that his daughter “might have many loves, you see, and the jewels might be the jewels of experience, the challenges of life she had met”

(205). John imagines, via his daughter’s future, a time when embracing sexuality and life are one in the same. Thus, we arrive at Anderson’s “great hope”, to imagine “a time when love like a sheet of fire will run through the towns and cities. It will tear walls away. It will destroy ugly houses. It will tear ugly clothes off the bodies of men and women. They will build anew and build beautifully” (78). A new sexuality will introduce a new relationship in men and women; a new world will be designed around principles of equality. According to Dell, “the more intellectually adventurous in each generation begin to wonder if the attempt at faithful and permanent love ought not to be abandoned” (Were You Ever a Child 183). John’s conversion experience, renouncing his wife in favor of the free-loving, shame-free Natalie, indicates this redemptive force: “the rooms of his house echoed with new sounds, with joyous sounds. His body trembled. Now, after this had happened, a new life would begin for him. His body would be more alive. He would see things, smell things, taste things, as never before” (58). John gains

Fenton 37 access to the true experiences of life through sexuality. Anderson heralds a new age in which people ask “are you for me? Am I for you? People had developed a new sense, many new senses.

The deeper-lying, buried-away senses of the body had been developed too. There was no more slow starvation of men and women. Long lives did not have to be lived during which one knew, and then but faintly, a few half-golden moments” (170). The new sexuality is an affirmation of life and tolerance. Anderson associates with a sufficiently enlightened society “a new feeling of respect if the notion should once get fixed in people's minds that, at any moment, anywhere, one was likely to come upon the one who carried before him as on a golden tray, the gift of life and the consciousness of life for his beloved” (222). Anderson’s new sensibility of sexuality engenders tolerance and multifarious connection at the expense of monogamy. Had John failed to perceive Natalie’s open doors or had he failed to open his own, he would have remained damned to “a kind of death of the flesh” associated with his wife.

Sex, Play, and Imagination

Anderson’s approbation for free and open sexuality affirms Dell’s use of play as a mechanism for reaching gender dissolution. Men and women that play together, that is, that interact on a truly equal plane, will inevitably come to regard each other as true equals.

Sexuality, as it is developed in Anderson, is a connective force. Through sex, humans are connected equally and personally; sex is, after all, a form of mutual play amongst adults.

Childhood and sexuality are similar processes for imagining the reformation of values. For Dell, the “object of a democratic education is to enable [one] to remain always a child…learning rather to take realities for his toys, and entering blithely into the fascinating and delightful game of life” (Were You Ever a Child 90). The child’s imagination is a way of processing reality.

Fenton 38

Insofar as the imagination is the vehicle for childhood play, “play is the effort which embodies one’s own creative wishes, one’s own dreams” (91). Play (and imagination) produces the child’s worldview. In “A Child’s View of Color,” Walter Benjamin theorizes that “the child’s uncorrupted imaginative activity springs from the soul” and that “children see with pure eyes”

(51). He also avers that a child’s “imagination is developed only by contemplating colors” (51).

For Benjamin, the way a child conceives of color is representative of the processes of imagination, in general. Children perceive color as “not [being] reduced to things but…constituted by an order consisting of an infinite range of nuances” and “not as a lifeless thing and a rigid individuality but as a winged creature that flits from one form to the next” (50).

The imagination of the child rejects the ossification attached to the establishment on the part of both Dell and Anderson. Furthermore, the child understands fluidity and change rather than discrete definition thereby recalling Dell’s requisite “interchange of roles.” Benjamin identifies the “task of childhood: to bring the new world into symbolic space. The child can do that of which the adult is thoroughly incapable-- recollecting the new” (Benjamin “Arcades Project” M fragment). The child is opposed to the adult, whose “task is to provide a world order” (“A Child's

View of Color” 51). “Productive adults derive no support from color” which “is the pure expression of the child’s pure receptivity” (51). The child’s imagination, as it is opposed to order, is, thus, the only vehicle for change: “the imagination as the de-formation of what has been formed. It is characteristic of all imagination that it plays a game of dissolution with its forms”

(“Imagination” 280). Following this, Dell identifies a reciprocal relationship between the child and the artist: “The child is an artist; and the artist is always a child” (Were You Ever a Child

100). Dell champions the “direct, naïve, unspoiled vision” of the child as paramount (100). It is

Fenton 39 the “unspoiled” nature of the child’s vision that allows for the potential of alternative value-sets.

Dell elucidates this process in the aforementioned discussion of the child’s ability to learn “good taste” and then “infallibly reject the great new art of their generation” (112). Artists “aim to recover [the child’s] vision” because it is not yet diluted by society. Dell identifies play as necessary to the re-formation of gender. Furthermore, play and the imagination are necessary to any re-imagining of society. When “young men and women have learned to play with machinery” they “will want to use it to make themselves and the world happier – to serve their own creative dream of a useful and happy new society” (Were You Ever a Child 95).

For Anderson, the imagination and the concept of dreaming (as they are attached to sexuality) function in much the same way. John conducts his myriad thought experiments as

“one pitched little thoughts into the air idly, like boys at play, pitched and then caught them again” (Many Marriages 180). John’s imaginative power, the method by which he arrives at his concept of free love, is associated with play and idleness, forces diametrically opposed to the hyper-productivity emphasized by a conventional and industrial society: “Money is power.

Power must be used. The mill costs too much. It cannot stand idle” (Perhaps Women 135). In the first chapter of Winesburg, Ohio, Wing Biddlebaum exhorts George to “dream. From this time on you must close your ears to the roaring of voices” (13). Taking this affirmation of the dreamer as central to his texts, Anderson then provides further examples of the power of imagination: “Her imagination, like a child awakened from long sleep, played about the room. Deep within her there was something that would not be cheated by phantasies and that demanded some definite answer from life.” The imagination is linked with the child and is a powerful internal force to be experienced. This is a departure from the 19th century concept of “channels of desire”

Fenton 40 characterized elsewhere. In Many Marriages the primary images of sexuality are also highly imaginative. The “dream” of the “golden woman out of the filth” is sexual – “love came flooding their bodies” – but it is merely hypothetical (28). The dream is thus a sexual ideal; a world to be imagined. John’s vision of “outer walls” falling down is the imaginative implication of a free sexuality of open connection. The redemptive and constructive powers of the imagination are tied directly to the sexual: “the love-making in the field had after all been but a symbol of something more filled with meaning.” The concurrence of sexual and imaginative construction is repeated in John’s “great hope” in which “love like a sheet of fire will run through the towns and cities. It will tear walls away” (78). The purely speculative nature of Anderson’s project is evident when John declares that “perhaps to speak of the things that had been in his mind that day something almost like a new language would be required” (37). Anderson’s sexuality is such that it cannot be discussed – that is, it is totally foreign -- in contemporary terms. This indicates the revolutionary potential of imagination. Perry Anderson describes this potential, an

“imaginative proximity of social revolution.” as one of three “conjunctural” elements in the

“periodization” of Modernism (325).

For Dell, mutual play is the path toward gender equality, perhaps the total equality of non-distinction. For Anderson, open sexuality – a life with many marriages – will result in a more equitable society. These two processes become fundamentally the same when considered with reference to imagination. The necessarily imaginative nature of play is that it encourages the realization of one’s desires. An educational system that affirms this, as argued in “Education in

1947 AD,” will result in a democratic population willing “to serve their own creative dream of a useful and happy new society” (Were You Ever a Child 95). A society that plays mutually will

Fenton 41 regard each member as an equal – regardless of gender. Dell’s interest in gender becomes subsumed by the larger egalitarian project of socialism. Similarly, Anderson’s sexual project relies heavily on imaginative power. The new sexuality that John comes to represent is developed almost entirely imaginatively: the novel takes place largely in the Webster home one night. There are limited scenes in which John and Natalie actually interact. Sexuality, as a type of play, is invested in the realization of desires. Sexuality becomes a type of currency in the economy of imaginative construction, as does mutual play or mutual work or “conversations in bed”

(Looking at Life 45). Sex and play are similar manifestations of imaginative exercises in constructing an alternative, revolutionary world. Play and sex are of the same essence.

Furthermore, insofar as mutual play and open sexuality move toward dissolving gender distinctions (and, potentially, class), they represent active steps in overturning convention and ushering in a new era: to offer Tandy Hard as the ideal, epicene model.

Ramifications: “Queer” and “as many branches as a tree”

Any dissolution of gender entails a necessary re-evaluation of homosexuality and the concept of ‘queer.’ If the binary between male and female loses its rigid significance, the hetero/homosexual dichotomy proves increasingly tenuous. The word queer is woven throughout

Anderson’s texts. His intended meaning is not always clear nor is it always fixed. The original usage of ‘queer’ was to denote anything “strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric” (OED). The contemporary usage of ‘queer’ to denote homosexuality is an early 20th century development.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s first usage of ‘queer’ in this sense is found in a Los Angeles

Times article dating from 1914. Thus, Anderson’s texts are contemporaneous with this moment of semantic differentiation. This fact is reflected in Anderson’s own varied use. In Winesburg,

Fenton 42

Ohio ‘queer’ is regularly used in the traditional sense, to signal departure from the norms. In a story entitled “Queer, concerning Elmer Cowley,” the eponymous Elmer declares that he “will not be queer – one to be looked at and listened to. I’ll be like other people. I’ll show that George

Willard” (194). George thus comes “to stand for something in the young merchant mind;”

George symbolizes convention – he is representative of Winesburg (194). Being queer in the case of Elmer is a matter of being different. Similarly, Alice Hindman identifies in her “isolation” the sense of being “old and queer” (Winesburg, Ohio 109). Queerness is again used in the traditional sense to denote separation from the mainstream. By invoking the normal/queer binary, Anderson signals the oppressive nature of convention. Elmer and Alice represent the marginalized other.

Anderson further problematizes the perceived distinction between what is normal and what is queer in George. As George, to Elmer, “belonged to the town, typified the town, represented in his person the spirit of the town,” Elmer could not “have believed that George Willard had also his days of unhappiness, that vague hungers and secret unnamable desires visited also his mind”

(Winesburg, Ohio 195). However, George, in stating that “it is better to be alone,” affirms his own queerness: “If I talked like Art Wilson the boys would understand me but they wouldn’t understand what I’ve been thinking down here” (183). Queerness is thus a measure of authenticity. The individual, as opposed to the community, is manifested in that which is queer.

The mainstream, “the greater enemy -- the thing that smiled and went its own way -- the judgment of Winesburg,” demands uniformity at the expense of individuation (195). This is expressed in Perhaps Women when a middle-class townsperson explains that they “keep off the streets on Saturday afternoons” on account of “such queer horrid people on the street” (72). The queer are those who differ from conventional values, those who disturb. If the queer upsets

Fenton 43 convention, and Anderson’s work initiates the dissolution of order and convention, then

Anderson necessarily affirms the queer. This is implicit in the sympathetic portrayal of George as both representative of the town but also distinctly “detached and apart from all life” (185). It is made more explicit via John’s acceptance “that I am at present insane and only hope I shall remain so. After all, it was quite apparent that the sane people about were not getting such joy out of life as himself” (Many Marriages 86). Given that insanity and queerness are merely points of reference on the spectrum of “normalcy,” John’s affirmation of insanity is a rejection of the mainstream on the basis of authenticity. Linking the insane to the immoral, John reflects that

“perhaps the very sins he had committed, his shamefaced running off sometimes to other women in the cities, had saved him” (Many Marriages 190). The redemptive nature of John’s “sins” coupled with his characterization of insanity as salutatory reveals a complete rejection of the traditional and normal. Through the concept of queerness, Anderson arrives at a sense of tolerance and acceptance. He states that “love has as many branches as a tree” therein rejecting any prescriptive sexualities as “there are a thousand things in life no one rightly understands”

(Many Marriages 83). Through imaginative play, John arrives at the goal of contemplation which is to “get a sense of the fragrance of all things, of earth, plants, peoples, animals, insects, all together in the mind. One could weave a golden mantle to spread over the earth and over people…they could weave all manner of designs” (Many Marriages 180). Anderson presents an image of uniformity that includes all things. A totally inclusive “design” cannot differentiate between queer and normal. Indeed, the grand design must include, search out even, the queerer elements of the margins. In accepting “all thinking, all imaginings, as one accepted the flesh of people, animals, birds, trees, plants, one might live a hundred or a thousand lives in one life” one

Fenton 44 will come to the “notion that one could become something more than just one individual man and woman living one narrow circumscribed life” (Many Marriages 191). Anderson grants the imaginative physical potency – from ideas to flesh – and dissolves social constructions differentiating both gender and individuality in favor of a multifarious, fluid, and communal existence. This recalls Dell’s “happy lovers [who] vary the tenor of their relationship because they are free to be more than one thing to each other. And they have that freedom because they are equals” (182).

Anderson, does, however, speak to matters that are more strictly homosexual, or at least potentially homosexual. The implications of a gender-neutral society are such that homosexuality as we conceive it is wholly useless. Indeed, any panoptic and genderless society must make a space for the contemporary ‘queer.' In Perhaps Women, Anderson declares “there will have to be built a new and stronger sympathy as between man and man. We may find the new mystery there” (57). It is unclear if man is being used generally as human or a male. Given Anderson’s conscious use of man and woman in conjunction to signify both genders, it is possible he refers strictly to males. If this is the case, the “new mystery” may very well be homosexual, or at least homosocial. A new quasi-spiritual way of relating between males is required. New male-male relational paradigms may reflect that “spiritual love and physical love…were two different and distinct things” (Many Marriages 189). Though Anderson notes that they are different and distinct, they are both facets of love; in this way, spiritual love and physical love may correspond to conversational intercourse and physical intercourse (both being sexual). John’s relationship with his daughter is thus spiritually incestuous in the same way new male relationships may be spiritually homosexual rather than physically so; spiritual sexuality dominates.

Fenton 45

Anderson’s asseveration that the industrial complex has “destroyed old ideas of government, of the relationship of man to man” presents male-male relationships as a potential avenue for development. This recalls Anderson’s belief that “the new mystery” may be found in male-male interactions as well as the general as-of-yet-untapped “possibility of human relationship” (Perhaps Women 72). Anderson communicates this theory to Theodore Dreiser, calling, in almost precisely the same words, “for a relationship between man and man"

(Townsend 304). In a later correspondence with friend Roger Sergel, Anderson clarifies that what he “really wanted . . . [was] something like [a] tenderness that dares to go on and on.” Townsend maintains that Anderson “did not mean, as is the case of man with woman, the going to the flesh”

(306). This rejects a reading of physical love. This does not preclude an interpretation of spiritual love as “a tenderness that dares to go on and on.” In this case, the spiritual love would be homosexual in that it occurs between men as men.

Anderson’s characterization of George’s sexual desires for Helen indicates a second example tending toward homosexuality: “With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human…if he prefers that the other be a woman, that is because he believes that a woman will be gentle” (Winesburg, Ohio 239). Anderson builds the implicit option of finding connection with another male directly into George’s consciousness. An equal chance for connection exists with men and women; the determining factor is preference. Similarly, John wonders, after he “and the workman stood looking at each other as but a little while before he had looked at Natalie,” if he

“might go within his house also” (Many Marriages 16). Anderson transfers the intimate connection of the shared gaze – a connection Anderson earlier describes as “a kind of lovemaking too” (83) – from Natalie to a man. John’s consideration of entering his house affirms

Fenton 46 the potential for male-male connection. The sexual language employed with respect to Natalie or women is also applied to men. It is necessary to note that John only becomes cognizant of men after he is aware of Natalie’s openness. He must open his doors, in general, before he can open them to men, potentially. The homosexual potentiality is an aftereffect of embracing sexuality per se. Enoch Robinson, in going “about a good deal with young men” and failing to “have an affair with a woman…growing afraid and running away,” is the closest example of a potentially homosexual character (Winesburg, Ohio 166). However, his queerness is also characterized as

“odd delicate thoughts hidden away in his brain” and childlike in that “it was a handicap to his worldly development” (166). Thus Enoch represents both uses of queer: marginal and homosexual.

Anderson’s usage of queer, as both “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” and homosexual, demonstrates a general sense of the semantic inter-regnum

(Halperin 62). Queer is nebulously defined as a general opposition to the mainstream or as homosexual. The first definition allows Anderson to draw a contrast between convention and everything else. Queer becomes the repository for those who fail in the mainstream (the Crowley store or, as Tom Willard puts it, those who do not “wake up”), but also those who glean authenticity from without – the isolated and insane (Winesburg, Ohio 29). Furthermore, by affirming the queer, Anderson lays the foundation for the singular “golden mantle spread over the earth and over people.” The latter definition of queer makes salient the contradiction inherent between the concepts of equality and gender differentiation, while alluding to the creation of future social spaces. If the social program of gender equality is successful, the hetero/homosexual binary would lose all significance. As part of the all-encompassing

Fenton 47 philosophy proclaimed, homosexuality must be integrated. Furthermore, through the lens of homosexuality, Anderson approaches the potential for unexplored human relationships. In this way, Anderson’s work, as well as that of Dell, fits into the larger Modernist project of fostering connection: trans-Atlantic examples are Mrs. Dalloway which emphasizes the psychological link between Clarissa and Septimus (amongst others) and Howards End which offers as its epigraph

“only connect.”

On the destructive nature of Anderson and Dell’s vision

One necessary caveat to the artistic endeavors of Anderson and Dell is that their imaginative vision is constructive only insofar as it is destructive. The new order is made positive through the destruction of the old order, the negative. Mary Webster, representative of

19th Century values, commits suicide. The fatalistic plot of Many Marriages builds slowly toward this inevitable result. As presented by Anderson and Dell, the old order must be destroyed if the new is to exist. Anderson’s and Dell’s reconciliation of this destructive reality relies on distinctions made between Life and Death. For Anderson, the 19th Century value set is already associated with death. Mary represents “a kind of death of the flesh” who “in the process of living her life had become the large heavy inert one” (Many Marriages 30, 119). Anderson’s position that the old order is death obviates some concerns about the destructive nature of revolution: “when people do not live they die and when they are dead they look dead” (Perhaps

Women 93). Mary is dead because she identifies with outdated, conventional values. Thus, to destroy these values is ultimately constructive because those values represent death and stagnation. Mary is “surrender” and possesses something in her that has already died” (Many

Marriages 207-8). The only way to preserve the force of Life is to reject Death. John, in

Fenton 48 opposition to his wife, represents the avant-garde of those people “who live.” If John’s position becomes popular, that is, “there [is] a world inhabited by people who [live],” then “there would be an end to continual mouthings about death” (Many Marriages 169). According to this position, Anderson and Dell are interested in destroying only death itself; the old, via Mary, has no response: “her eyes were looking directly at him. Still the eyes had nothing to say…hopelessly puzzled” (Many Marriages 206).

Nonetheless, Anderson does recognize that “there was something barbaric and savage in all this business of breaking down walls, making cracks and gaps in the wall of life” (Many

Marriages 153). John admits that it “was rather absurdly cruel how impersonal he felt toward

[Mary],” that “few people in the world ever realized what depths of cruelty lay sleeping within themselves,” and that “killing was a business one had to learn” (Many Marriages 191, 154).

These statements parallel Anderson’s remark that cruelty inevitably “became a part of one's manhood” as they also affirm the necessity of destruction (Many Marriages 183). Furthermore,

Anderson describes “revolutions, when they come,” as “wars” which “accomplish, if they do accomplish, at terrible cost…everything promised, sometimes nothing gained” (Perhaps Women

66). It is even possible that revolution leads to “new cruelties” in “place of the old” (66). While

Anderson refers specifically to the Russian Revolution (thereby a materialist rather than spiritual revolution), he nonetheless admits the stagnant and destructive reality of radical construction.

Neither Anderson nor Dell offer reconciliation or mediation. John lives, Mary dies.

Destruction is inevitable because it is the only path to new constructions. Secondly, this destruction is acceptable because it targets already destructive forces. The dual organic images of “pale green things” and “young trees choked by vines” evince the antagonism between the old

Fenton 49 and the new; the impulse for ossification versus the process of growth. The old cannot be reconciled with the new because the old destroys the new. Dell elucidates their unapologetically destructive position with all the efficiency of brevity in saying that he “weep[s] no tears for the past. I only wonder about the future” (Looking at Life 201). Dell’s use of balanced sentence structure makes salient the binary between the past and the future – between old values that extinguish the new and the new that usurp. The only choice, then, is between Convention and

Modernity; Death and Life.

Conclusions: Evaluating Anderson and Dell

Floyd Dell and Sherwood Anderson share a common artistic goal: to establish an

“imaginative literature” that “interpret[s]” woman “not as a terrifying intruder, but as one who has every right, as a human being, to be there” (Looking at Life 256). The implication of this type of gender equality is gender dissolution that would subsequently impact other facets of social construction – class, marriage, reproduction (race is conspicuously absent). Neither Dell nor Anderson commits the fallacy of thinking “that if you can solve the sex problem you solve all.” Rather, Dell and Anderson both understand the extreme permeability that exists between social constructions: one must consider industry and the economy along with sex, as aspects of the same discussion. Dell and Anderson depart to an extent from each other in that each author presents respective vehicles for gender equality. Dell emphasizes the primacy of play and the concomitant imagination in promoting equality (if the play, like education, is correct), as well as the capacity for both to construct alternate realities more in line with desire. Anderson focuses on a specific form of play, sex, but similarly vests an equalizing power in it. The leveling nature of play proves a method for arriving at gender equality. Play is an aspect of imagination, and as

Fenton 50 such is involved in the larger task of defining and re-defining reality. Imagination is a means of conceiving alternatives. It is also a necessary step anterior to the realization of those alternatives.

Dell and Anderson are acutely revolutionary.

It would then behoove us to measure the success of Dell’s and Anderson’s works against the work of sexologists, both in terms of their contemporaries as well as ours. One of the dominant sexologists of the late 19th and early 20th century is the aforementioned Havelock Ellis.

Janice Irvine’s survey of gender ideological progression, “From Difference to Sameness: Gender

Ideology in Sexual Science,” states that “Ellis highlighted the sexual differences between the genders, differences which he considered biological” and was thus “often decidedly Victorian”

(10). Ellis, like most sexologists at the time, emphasized the “harmonious and complementary male and female roles” (10). Anderson and Dell repudiate this position, privileging instead fluid, epicene interchange. Interchange is diametrically opposed to complementarity. Historians Estelle

Freedman and John D’Emilio describe the 1920s and 1930s as a period of increasing “sexual liberalism – the emphasis on erotic pleasure as an integral part of person and marital satisfaction”

(1988). Furthermore, “as the Victorian socio-sexual boundaries of separate spheres blurred, it was becoming increasingly difficult to define what it meant to be a man and what it meant to be a woman” (Irvine 13). In anticipating these concerns, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio

(1919) and Many Marriages (1923) are thus poised as seminal works; similarly, the essays that

Dell compiled as Looking at Life were published from 1914-1923. Irvine continues, noting that the Kinsey reports, specifically 1953’s “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” “shifted the balance to state that women and men were more alike than dissimilar” (Irvine 14). Kinsey’s scientific work empirically proved some of the theoretical foundation established by Dell and

Fenton 51

Anderson. Thus, Anderson and Dell’s position pre-dates the ideological developments implicit in the work of Kinsey. Irvine indicates, though, some degree of conservatism in Kinsey’s position as Kinsey maintained marriage as the basic unit. Thus, Kinsey “attempted to undermine traditional conceptions of mysterious sex differences” with “an unstated cultural assumption” that “companionate marriage of partnership” was fundamental. Kinsey lacks the “critique of marriage that challenged economic inequalities, disparities in domestic and childrearing responsibilities, and sexual violence” that is both implicit and explicit in the texts of Anderson and Dell (Irvine 14).

Irvine continues, citing Masters and Johnson as “consolidating” the “ideology of gender similarity” (17). Nonetheless, she identifies the common theme of “emphasis on sameness as strategy to promote heterosexual relationships and marriage and thus enhance the perceived value of modern sexual science” (17). Dell and Anderson’s critique of marriage as representative of the structural inequities faced by women is considerably more progressive than the position of sexologists decades later. This patterns repeats with reference to homosexuality. Masters and

Johnson’s study of the anatomical difference between heterosexuals and homosexuals yielded no difference. Dell and Anderson anticipate and obviate this study in their acceptance of the queer, and the promotion of a society that countenances all things. Gender dissolution also presupposes sexual orientation. Ultimately, Irvine concludes that “it was hardly a radical gesture for sexologists to claim sex/gender similarity at an historical moment when it seemed as though such an assertion would both bolster traditional marital relationships and heighten the credibility of the emergent sexual science.” For Anderson and Dell, however, it was a radical gesture. The trajectory of sexology in the 20th century proves a tendency toward Dell and Anderson’s position:

Fenton 52 an affirmation of gender similarity and inclusion of greater variance in human sexual behavior.

The success of Dell’s and Anderson’s artistic vision is demonstrated in their ability to anticipate the trajectory of sexology. The concept of play provides a mechanism by which the two genders can interact in true equality. The result of this interaction is the erasure of deleterious gender distinctions – the substitution of man or woman for human – and the creation of a sensibility of equality evident in the works of Floyd Dell and Sherwood Anderson.

Fenton 53

Bibliography

Anderson, Perry. "Modernity and Revolution." Marxism and The Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 1988. p 325. Anderson, Sherwood. Many Marriages. New York: B.W. Huebsuh, Inc, 1923. Print. ---. Perhaps Women. New York: Horace Liveright, Inc, 1931. Print. ---. Triumph of the Egg. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1988. Print. ---. Winesburg, Ohio. New York: Signet Classics, 2003. Print. Benjamin, Walter. Arcades Project. Trans. Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1999. Print. M Fragment. ---. Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913-1926. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2004. Print. ---. Selected Writings Volume 2, part 1, 1927-1930. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2004. Print. Dell, Floyd. Looking at Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1924. Print. ---. Moon-Calf. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1921. Print. ---. Were You Ever a Child? New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1921. Print. D'Emilio, J. and Freedman, E. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper and Row. 1998. Print. Faulkner, William. “Art of Fiction No. 12.” The Paris Review. Spring 1956. Print. ---. “Sherwood Anderson – An Appreciation by William Faulkner.” The Atlantic. June 1953. Print. Forster, E. M. Howards End. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997. Print. Halperin, David. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1997. p. 62. Hegeman, Susan. “Naive Modernism and the Politics of Embarrassment.” Discipline and Practice: The (Ir)Resistibility of Theory, eds. Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. 2004. Print. Irvine, Janice. “From Difference to Sameness: Gender Ideology in Sexual Science.” The Journal of Sex Research 27.1 (Feb., 1990), pp. 7-24. Mencken, H.L. “The Literary Capital of the United States.” 1920. Pinkerton, Jan and Randolph H. Hudson. “H.L. Mencken.” Encyclopedia of the Chicago Literary Renaissance. p. 4. “Queer.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd ed. 2007. Online. . Accessed 18 April 2011. Stansell, Christine. American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc. 2000. Print. Tanselle, G. Thomas. “Realist or Dreamer: Letters of Sherwood Andeson and Floyd Dell.” The Modern Language Review 58.4 (Oct., 1963), pp. 532-537. Townsend, Kim. Sherwood Anderson. New York: Houghton Mifflin, Inc. 1987. Print. p. 304. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. Print.

Fenton 54