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A Reading of Sherwood Anderson's “The Man Who Became a Woman”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Howard S. Babb
Howard S. Babb*
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
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Extract

Although almost anyone's list of Sherwood Anderson's successes in fiction would include “The Man Who Became a Woman,” this haunting story has provoked less commentary than it deserves. Irving Howe provides the fullest discussion in Sherwood Anderson, though the nature of his book prevents him from treating the story in detail, and we may take his interpretation of it as standard. For Howe, “The Man Who Became a Woman” is concerned essentially with homosexuality, showing us an older man not even yet “secure in his male adulthood” who is driven to narrate some extraordinary experiences of his youth: experiences in which “psychic needs and moral standards clash,” and which may reveal the youth's “hysteria as a result of accumulated anxieties about his sexual role.” In what follows, I shall not be denying that homosexuality is a major motif, but arguing that Anderson is writing about something more: about a particular integrity of being that the youth must experience as a requisite for growing up. To this extent I shall be reversing Howe's emphasis, suggesting that the story centers on the conditions under which the narrator matures, and taking the homosexuality as one instance among others of the narrator's special quality—his openness to the contrarieties of experience. Perhaps some support for this reading inheres in the fact that the teller periodically denies being homosexual in any ordinary sense (e.g., pp. 188, 207, 209): while these denials may be seen as his psychologically necessary effort to shield himself from the truth, they may also be plausibly viewed as indications that the heart of the story's significance lies elsewhere. In any event, the teller himself—when addressing the reader on behalf of the story—insists on its unconventionality: “I'm puzzled you see, just how to make you feel as I felt that night. … I'm not claiming to be able to inform you or to do you any good. I'm just trying to make you understand some things about me” (p. 208). Disclaiming a traditional instructional or ethical aim, he invites us simply to participate in his crucial experience on “that night.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 80 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1965 , pp. 432 - 435
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965

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References

1 Sherwood Anderson (New York and Toronto, 1951), pp. 160–164. James Schevill—in Sherwood Anderson: Bis Life and Work (Denver, Colo., 1951), pp. 188–190—also refers to the narrator's homosexuality, but etherealizes it into “the feminine side of a man's nature” and feels that the narrator is concerned with a “question … central to the understanding of American society: Why is man in this country often so blindly aggressive? Is it because he refuses to value or understand the feminine side of his life?” I sympathize with Schevill's desire to extract some further meaning from the homosexual tendencies portrayed, but I think his reading has the effect of softening them unduly. My own interpretation of the story owes much to discussions with Robert Estrich and Eric Solomon—which is not to saddle them with responsibility for my views.

2 I give page references to and quote from the story as it appears in Horses and Men (New York, 1923).

3 Irving Howe views Herman's references to being a normal adult as a “somewhat desperate claim” (Sherwood Anderson, p. 164), the critic sensing that the narrator remains haunted by his homosexual tendency as a youth. Clearly I am taking Herman's claim as essentially truthful, for this seems to me consistent with the trajectory of the story's meaning.

4 Jon S. Lawry has argued that “Death in the Woods” is really concerned with the narrator-as-author; see his fine article “ ‘Death in the Woods’ and the Artist's Self in Sherwood Anderson,” PMLA, lxxiv (1959), 306–311. But Lawry's reading, sensitive as it is, seems to me not to take enough account of the weight given the young boy's experience in the story. However that may be, the whole subject of Anderson's first-person narrative mode—whether the “I” be author, author-and-character, or character—deserves exploring. No doubt his continuing desire to marry a tale to a teller was determined in part by Anderson's interest in the possibilities of an oral, as opposed to a literary, narrative convention. See Russell H. Barker, “The Storyteller Role,” College English, iii (1941–42), 433–442. But I wonder whether Anderson's narrative mode may not also reflect the literary traditions of America. In The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, 1961), Roy Harvey Pearce notes that the American poet has been marked by his “self-consciousness,” by his need “to catch himself in the act of being a poet” (p. 10). And in American Renaissance (New York, London, and Toronto, 1941), F. O. Matthiessen shows how ideas of organic form became domesticated in our literature, one of them suggesting that the form of a work should be generated by the “spontaneous growth” of an “inner urge” in the work's creator (p. 134).