Sacred Land : Sherwood Anderson, Midwestern, Modernisms, and the Sacramental Vision of Nature [1 ed.] 9781612776835, 9781606351567

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Sacred Land

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Sacred Land Sherwood Anderson, Midwestern Modernism, and the Sacramental Vision of Nature

Mark Buechsel

v the kent state university press Kent, Ohio

© 2014 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242 all rights reserved Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2012043500 isbn 978-1-60635-156-7 Manufactured in the United States of America library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Buechsel, Mark., 1976– Sacred land : Sherwood Anderson, Midwestern modernism, and the sacramental vision of nature / Mark Buechsel. pages cm. Based on the author’s dissertation (doctoral)—Baylor University, 2006. Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-1-60635-156-7 (hardcover) ∞ 1. Anderson, Sherwood, 1876–1941—Criticism and interpretation. 2. American literature—Middle West—History and criticism. 3. Modernism (Literature)—United States. 4. Middle West—Intellectual life. 5. Regionalism in literature. 6. Middle West—In literature. 7. Protestantism in literature. 8. Landscapes in literature. 9. Nature in literature I. Title. PS3501.N4Z549 2013 813'.52—dc23 2012043500 17 16 15 14 13   5 4 3 2 1

To Maria, my wife—Te iubesc din suflet To our son, Timotei, who was born during the writing of this book To my mother, Mary And to my late father, Heinz Büchsel

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The most tempting of all false first principles is: that thought, not being, is involved in all my representations. Here lies the initial option between idealism and realism, which will settle once and for all the future course of our philosophy, and make it a failure or a success. Are we to encompass being with thought, or thought with being? . . . Man is not a mind that thinks, but a being who knows other beings as true, who loves them as good, and who enjoys them as beautiful. For all that which is, down to the humblest form of existence, exhibits the inseparable privileges of being, which are truth, goodness and beauty. —Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (1937)

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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1 An American Venus and Virgin: The Sacramental Dynamic of the Middle West

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2 Protestantism, Literalism, and the Sacramental Body of the Midwest

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3 Winesburg Under the Sway of “New Englanders’ Gods”: Puritanism, Industrialism, Materialism, and the Midwestern Fall

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4 “The fields fell into the forms of women”: Sexual and Gendered Associations of the Land in Horses and Men 117 5 Laughing at “Fake Talk”: The Guttural Silence of the Midwestern Land in Dark Laughter 142 6 “Fleshly but beyond just flesh”: The Salvific Sacramental Meaning of the Land in Poor White and Beyond Desire 178 7 “I’m a good Catholic, but I could get along with caring for trees”: Nature and Sacramental Community in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and My Ántonia 206 8 “A Story of the West, After All”: The Sacramental and Midwestern Pastoral Subtext of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby 243 9 The Return to “Hard, Natural Things”: From Pastoral Delusion to Rock-Bottom Reality in Ruth Suckow’s The Folks 261 10 Sacramentalism in a Postmodern Farm Novel: Ginny Smith’s Spiritual Journey in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres 283 Epilogue

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

First, thanks be to God, from Whom all blessings flow. One of the greatest blessings He has given me is my wife, Maria—thank you for your loving support and the many sacrifices you made in order to enable me to write this book. Thanks also to my parents, Dr. Heinz and Mary Büchsel, who have supported me in myriad ways I shall not attempt to recount; you also first sparked my interest in literature. I want to thank my dissertation director at Baylor University, Dr. Joe B. Fulton, for your detailed critiques, encouragement, and guidance in planning my dissertation as a book. Thank you to my good friends, Dr. Evan Getz and Dr. Joshua Avery, for sharing your passion for the Great Text tradition, your marvelous insights, and for pointing me to so many literary treasures; without you, my education would be terribly incomplete. Thank you most of all for your friendship, which sustained me through the stressful years during which I wrote this book. Thank you to my siblings and their spouses, Tim and Isabel Buechsel and Ruth and Justin Strackany; many of my reflections on community were nourished in a very real way by the community you provided. Thank you to Dr. Marcia Noe of the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, who encouraged me to keep pursuing publication and who pointed me to Kent State University Press. Thank you to my colleagues at the University of Saint Francis–Fort Wayne, who surrounded me with a wonderfully supportive collegial atmosphere during the years I wrote this book: Drs. Ken Bugajski, Ted Remington, Stephen Sullivan, Mathew Fisher, Kim Bowers, Weston Cutter, Jason Summers, and Andrew Prall. Also, thank you to the dean of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Matthew Smith, for your support throughout my years at Saint Francis. Thank you to the Episcopal Church of the Holy Spirit in Waco, Texas, and particularly Father John Wells, for teaching me so much about sacramentalism and for providing sacramental community to me; thank you, in that same vein, to – xi –

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Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and particularly to Pastor Thomas Eggold. Thank you to the acquisitions editor at Kent State University Press, Joyce Harrison, for your helpfulness and patience with delays. Thank you to Mary Young, managing editor at Kent State University Press, for seeing this manuscript through to publication, and to Valerie Ahwee, who copyedited my manuscript with superb thoroughness and competence. Also, thank you to my readers, Dr. William Barillas and Dr. David Pichaske, for their wonderfully helpful feedback; I was astonished at the amount of work you put into reviewing my manuscript. Thank you, Barbara Chen, of the University of Saint Francis, for helping me with my many interlibrary loan requests in such an efficient manner; your professionalism greatly facilitated the writing of this book. There are many others to whom I owe thanks in various ways; know that I have not forgotten you, even if I am not able to be truly comprehensive in these acknowledgments

Introduction

As do so many scholarly projects, this one, too, has its roots in the author’s personal experience, particularly the experience of growing up between a medieval village crowned by a hilltop castle in Germany and the cornfields, front porches, parking lots, shopping malls, and decaying Main Streets in northern Illinois. Unlike so many of my fellow Midwesterners, I have never taken the American Midwest for a comfortable and friendly but not very exciting place; as a boy growing up in Germany, I looked forward to the summers spent with my Illinois grandparents with keen anticipation. What awaited me there always seemed a sensory feast, a scintillating, radiant wonderland: wide, tree-lined avenues stretching toward vast horizons, fancifully turreted and gabled houses in unabashed candy colors—mint green, bright red, yellow, even pink—set in unfenced, sprawling yards that blended together into one endless parkland, squirrels flitting about everywhere with elfin grace, Canada geese gliding by on glinting ponds, the sweet-smelling humid air bearing all the intoxicating scents of a lush and fertile land, lightning bugs dancing in the dusk, and, beyond the town, a veritable golden-green ocean of corn that seemed majestic and made it easy to imagine the mighty prairies of not so very long ago. The people seemed cheerful and laid-back, bearing remarkably open and unfeigned smiles, and they spoke in genial, mellow, honeyed tones so different from the harsher German sounds that usually surrounded me. It made sense to me that the red, white, and blue flew everywhere—who wouldn’t be proud of such a fabulously beautiful and lovable country? When, at seventeen, I moved to Illinois, staying with friends of our family, I was pleased to be living at the edge of town where the golden corn began. However, it did not take long to realize some painful differences: unlike in Europe, there was no way to actually enter the landscape before me, no way to enter on foot, anyway—no way to merge with the farm country directly, up close and personally, as a pedestrian. In Germany, I had grown up playing in the meadows and forests, hiking and biking from village to village, from city to city, with the whole world easily accessible to me. Little dirt paths, trodden by generations throughout the centuries, led through – 1 –

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all of the land, and were actively maintained by the communities benefiting from them. Forest lands were public and the whole countryside was largely regarded as public space in which children could play, adults could walk, and everyone could gather berries and mushrooms. Strict rules guided the development of the land to preserve the landscape’s historic integrity, the lovely interplay of orchards, fields, meadows, woodlands, and church spire–dominated, red-roofed villages. Now, in Illinois, my teenage self faced a wall of corn, impenetrable, with no paths inviting walkers, and the streets leading out of town were major traffic arteries not suitable for pedestrians or bicyclists. Walks around the newer parts of town revealed culde-sac after cul-de-sac, which thwarted pedestrians who wanted to walk places. It was a fragmented cityscape of continuous dead ends that left me feeling virtually imprisoned, unable to move about. New developments were springing up all around this particular suburb, rows of lookalike townhouses were erected seemingly overnight, soulless and stark in their impersonal monotony; big box stores mushroomed as well, surrounded by desert wastes of glittering blacktop. Walking places seemed to become increasingly difficult in these more newly developed areas, and it was clear that people were expected to live in and out of their cars. Whereas my non-air-conditioned German high school had large windows that could be opened as needed, my American high school had none, and each classroom resembled a high-security prison cell. Video games, television, fast food, and shopping at sterile indoor malls seemed to be the major elements in my American peers’ lives, with organized sports remaining as the primary “natural” outdoor, communal, physical activity. My high school peers seemed epochs removed from my American grandparents and great aunts and uncles, all born prior to or during the 1920s, who surrounded me during my childhood visits to Illinois. I realized that I needed to make sense of the American Midwest all over again, that I needed to gain an understanding of the region’s history, in order to recover my sense of connectedness: How and why did we get to where we were, what possibilities had the region shown over the years, and how completely had these been lost, and what had remained? And so, I turned to Midwestern literature: Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Hamlin Garland, and, finally, a host of other authors. I discovered that many Midwestern writers had loved their region quite passionately and had felt a deep sense of loss at how the region had developed, that they had searched for reasons and answers as I had, and that a certain early twentieth-century generation of writers had envisioned alternative paths for Midwestern culture and had turned to the medieval European past for inspiration. This generation of writers proved stunning in



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their profundity, subtlety, complexity, and in their passionate commitment to facing life and history with unflinching honesty; their vision, for the Midwest and for America as a whole, formulated as a corrective and counterbalance to prevailing cultural conditions and attitudes, is still relevant in today’s context. And their understanding of what the particular cultural and spiritual history of the Midwest has to say to the nation and, ultimately, to the modern world remains a powerful and stimulating critique of the mental and material structures our contemporary Western and Westernized societies inhabit. In order to “get beneath” the perceived cultural-historical missteps and errors that, in these writers’ views, had betrayed the possibilities of the fantastically fertile and naturally abundant Midwestern region, these writers themselves seek, and portray in their literary works, transformative encounters with Midwestern nature—encounters that elicit life-changing and potentially culture-changing insights. This study is concerned with these transformative encounters with the Midwestern land, a concern that leads to the main title of this book, Sacred Land. This introduction is designed to provide overall definitions of concepts crucial to the discussion of what the Midwestern land has meant to Midwestern writers. Subsequently, the first chapter surveys various prominent Midwestern authors, presenting a panorama of the Midwestern modernist literary movement as a whole, and the second chapter develops the discussion’s concepts, touched upon in the introduction, in further depth, applying them to Midwestern literature. Finally, four Midwestern modernists—Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ruth Suckow—are investigated closely, and the final chapter connects Jane Smiley’s postmodern Iowa farm novel A Thousand Acres (1991) to the Midwestern modernist tradition. Though this book focuses on Sherwood Anderson as a prime exemplar of a modernist writer elaborating in his fiction a neo-sacramental vision of the Midwestern land, four chapters have been added dealing with an equal number of other Midwestern writers who, in their various ways, share Anderson’s fundamental cultural critique and vision of Midwestern nature. These writers are discussed for the sake of demonstrating that Anderson truly is part of a larger tradition revolving around a particular sacramental understanding of Midwestern nature. The writers were partly chosen on the basis of seeking to demonstrate that the Midwestern vision under discussion extended across lines of gender, background, or subregion. Thus, Cather derives from Nebraska, a state profoundly different from Anderson’s native Ohio, being much more rural, hardly industrialized, and more arid. Fitzgerald is a lapsed Catholic hailing not from a small town but from Saint

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Paul, Minnesota, and in The Great Gatsby (1925), he is writing of Midwesterners transplanted to the East. Suckow, a masterful, undeservedly forgotten novelist highly acclaimed in her own time, grew up as a small-town Congregationalist pastor’s daughter in Iowa, that state often seen as exemplifying the very epitome of Midwestern fertility and yeomanry. And Smiley, of an entirely different generation than the other writers, captures the disintegration of an Iowa farm family from a late-twentieth-century ecofeminist perspective. The discussion, for the most part, is ordered chronologically, proceeding from the early to the later works of Anderson, and from Cather’s 1913 O Pioneers! to Smiley’s postmodern text.

The Pastoral Myth When one speaks of the Midwestern “land,” some clarifications are required. After all, the American Midwest has a large variety of soils and landscapes and does not function as a topographical unit. How can one compare, for instance, the rich blacklands of Illinois with the comparatively arid plains of the western Dakotas? In what sense can the Midwest and its land be discussed as a unit? The answer, elaborated in Chapter 2, lies as much in the mythical conception of the region in American public consciousness as it does in the region’s physical realities. As cultural historian James R. Shortridge discusses in The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture (1989), the term “Midwest” became associated with the American pastoral myth in the late nineteenth century and ended up designating those agriculturally productive, famously fertile northcentral states that were perceived as “pastoral” places, realizing Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a great American garden in which independent family farmers live dignified, happy lives, providing for their households’ needs abundantly by cultivating the rich and rewarding soil, leading lives free from care, and being preserved in virtuous character through honest labor. The states in question are still today defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as the Midwest and are also still popularly known under this label: they are, from east to west, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota. All of these states have historically had in common a consciousness of being associated with the pastoral ideal, and a shared history of having been settled primarily during the nineteenth century, with all of the technological and social changes of that century set against the backdrop of recent memories of an “unspoiled” presettlement past. Thus, the interaction of the nineteenth century’s increasingly industrial civilization with a



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fertile region full of mythical pastoral promise is the central experience defining the region’s identity. Since the pastoral myth is central to the Midwestern experience, and thus to Midwestern literature, it merits definition. The roots of European pastoral literature reach back to ancient Greek literature, to the third-century B.C. verse of Theocritus of Syracuse, whose Boukolika (“ox-herding poems”) veer from the dramatic heroics of epic to evoke in a poignant and highly stylized manner the smaller events in humble peasants’ lives; as Theocritus’s translator Anthony Verity points out, however, his “‘bucolic’ poetry differed in many ways from what followed, and ‘pastoral’ really evolved from particular imitations and ‘readings’ of, first, Theocritus and, subsequently, of Theocritus’ greatest imitator, Virgil” (vii). Virgil’s first Eclogue is discussed by Leo Marx as definitional of the pastoral genre. Noting the opening image of the shepherd Tityrus happily playing his pipe while “lying at ease” under a beech tree, Marx first discusses the significance of the musical activity: Tityrus is civilized and artistic, but in a simple manner, retaining his closeness to the primary realities of nature while also benefiting from the blessings of human art (221–22). Unlike the primitivist, who “locates value as far as possible in space or time or both, from organized society[,] the shepherd [and, thus, anyone who shares a pastoral vision] . . . seeks a resolution between the opposed worlds of nature and art” (22). In other words, pastoralism is about the ideal balance between nature and civilization. This ideal “middle landscape” lies between two alternative spheres of which neither is desirable: This ideal pasture has two vulnerable borders: one separates it from Rome, the other from the encroaching marshland. It is a place where Tityrus is spared the deprivations and anxieties associated with both the city and the wilderness. Although he is free of the repressions entailed by a complex civilization, he is not prey to the violent uncertainties of nature. His mind is cultivated and his instincts are gratified. Living in an oasis of rural pleasure, he enjoys the best of both worlds—the sophisticated order of art and the simple spontaneity of nature. In a few lines Virgil quickly itemizes the solid satisfactions of the pastoral retreat: peace, leisure, and economic sufficiency. (22–23)

An exemplary vision of the kind of rural landscape fitting this pastoral ideal is Oliver Goldsmith’s famous poem “The Deserted Village” (1770), from which several American cities derive their name, most famously Auburn, Alabama, but also Midwestern cities, such as Auburn, Indiana:

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Sweet Auburn! Loveliest village of the plain, Where health and plenty cheer’d the labouring swain, Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid, And parting summer’s lingering blooms delay’d: Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease, Seats of my youth, when every sport could please, How often have I loiter’d o’er thy green, Where humble happiness endear’d each scene! How often have I paus’d on every charm, The shelter’d cot, the cultivated farm, The never-failing brook, the busy mill, The decent church that topt the neighbouring hill, The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade, For talking age and whisp’ring lovers made! How often have I blest the coming day, When toil remitting lent its turn to play, And all the village train, from labour free, Led up their sports beneath the spreading tree . . .

(Poetical and Prose Works of Oliver Goldsmith, London: Gall & Inglis, 1870, 17) Here, labor and rest are in proper proportion, happiness is “humble” but all the more solid for having nothing to do with extravagance or decadence, life is communal, nature is cultivated and benevolent, its threatening rawness having been turned to a realm of nourishing farms, and the “decent church . . . top[s] the neighbouring hill,” with religious devotion, health-and-plenty-bestowing toil, youthful flirtation, elderly gossip, leisure and sports all given their due and orderly places. As in Virgil’s poems, the idyllic oasis where all aspects of life are in balance is threatened by urban corruption. In Virgil’s first eclogue, Tityrus’s neighbor Meliboeus has lost his farm to an expropriation program engineered by the corrupt Roman government; similarly, Goldsmith’s Auburn is undone by urban forces, here, a brutal and unjust capitalistic economic system: “But times are altered; trade’s unfeeling train / Usurp the land and dispossess the swain.” And just as malarial marshland encroaches upon Tityrus’s blissful pastures, so in Goldsmith’s poem does a natural world that is violent, unruly, and inhospitable receive the dispossessed and exiled Auburn villagers; they emigrate to a “horrid shore” where “blazing suns . . . dart a downward ray / And fiercely shed intolerable day.” In this fierce, pitiless landscape, the “matted woods” are impenetrable, and “birds



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forget to sing”; “poisonous fields” are not only noxious but entirely unruly and overwhelming, a vegetation “with rank luxuriance crowned,” the antithesis of the modest, orderly world left behind. It is a land “where at each step the stranger fears to wake / The rattling terror of the vengeful snake,” that ancient symbol of evil that led to the fall of Creation and drove humans out of paradise (Gen. 3). Here, “oft in whirls the mad tornado flies / Mingling the ravaged landscape with the skies,” the elements given over to sheer irrational force, to madness, with signs of God’s good providential order obscured by a primeval chaos. The “horrid shore” described here happens to be the British colony of Georgia, envisioned as an intensely threatening tropical place and revealing the European discomfort with the American wilderness. However, the New World did not merely have a deterring aura, attracting only desperate souls, such as Goldsmith’s destitute exiles: the continent also became fodder for pastoral dreams, dreams of the creation of a garden world where people lived in blessed rural independence as modest but hale and happy landowners, as self-sufficient farmers. In other words, America, to many, promised to become a land of Auburn villages, a land where it was possible, once the wilderness and its native inhabitants had been subdued, to sustain a pastoral economy and life such as had proved unsustainable in Europe. Cultural historians of the United States generally agree that, as Henry Nash Smith observes, the American continent was seen “through a haze of rhetoric” (131).1 Annette Kolodny observes that: the earliest explorers and settlers in the New World can be said to have carried with them a “yearning for paradise.” When they ran across people living in what seemed to them “the manner of the golden age,” and found lands where “nature and liberty afford vs freely, which in England we want, or it costeth vs dearely,” dormant dreams found substantial root. . . . No mere literary convention this; an irrefutable fact of history (the European discovery of America) touched every word written about the New World with the possibility that the ideally beautiful and bountiful terrain might be lifted forever out of the canon of pastoral convention and invested with the reality of daily experience. (4–6)

Critic Ronald Weber makes the link to the particular relevance of the American pastoral dream for the Midwest: The emergence of agrarian thinking in the America of the Revolution was immeasurably strengthened by the opportunity to put ideology to the test: what

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in land-scarce Europe was only possibility could in land-rich America become reality. The opening of the vast agricultural land beyond the Alleghenies [i.e., Ohio, Indiana, etc.] added further emotional weight to the agrarian vision. Here was the possibility of realizing on a scale previously beyond man’s grasp the perfect rural landscape of family farms and contented communities. What was in origin a literary concept had been transformed into mass passion, and what was a vision of America as a whole took particular root in the fertile Midwest. (19)

He also delineates the dilemma posed by this agrarian vision of the nation and of its most mythically pastoral region: Yet from the beginning the myth of a New World garden superimposed on the Midwest posed a central dilemma. It was an essentially static conception that was at odds with the changes wrought by another vision of American life, that embodied in the driving force of progress in its commercial and urban dress. . . . If the Midwestern garden was a tableau of perfection, change could play little or no part in it. Nor could ambiguity or qualification in any form. The experience of suffering, natural affliction, economic disaster—in theory, none had a foothold in the earthly paradise. When such evils did rear their heads, they could only be ascribed to sources located beyond the garden—in the East, in the Old World, somewhere. The lack of effective intellectual or emotional means within the garden itself for dealing with the murky or simply more complex aspects of human experience led inevitably to bewilderment and anger. Nonetheless, long after the Midwestern garden ceased in any real sense to resemble the garden of myth, the idea of an agricultural paradise in the heartland—simple, in harmony with nature, based on an economy of self-sufficiency, blessed by divine providence—continued to exercise a powerful hold on the imagination. (19–20)

Not only did the older sections of the Midwest, especially Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois, see the emergence of numerous urban industrial centers, but even in those areas still primarily devoted to agriculture, industrial models of farming began to displace traditional, more pastoral ways of life. This latter development has been described in detail by William Conlogue in Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture (2001); the main contrasts between traditional and industrial agriculture are summarized in the following passage from Conlogue’s introduction:



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Agricultural industrialization requires farmers to conceive of plants, animals, land, and people through a narrow mechanistic frame that tends not to see them as living things. The industrial farm works toward ever-greater control over nature as a factor in production rather than working with it. Profit is the measure of the new farm, not a family’s continuance on the land, its quality of life, or its relations to the larger community. The new farmer rejects traditional conceptions of agricultural work, work whose model is the husbandman. . . . By the 1880s and 1890s the agricultural press was representing farmers not apart from manufacturers, but as manufacturers—the measure of farm success would no more be the well-kept homestead; it was to be the most efficient, most profitable business in a new industrial order. (16)

All of the qualities of life that lend to pastoral its strong mythical attraction are erosive in a context of modern agribusiness; humans no longer live in stable communities and in an intimate connection with nature but are part of an abstract, highly competitive money-based economy that demands a massive intrusion of civilized artificiality into everyday life in the form of machines, economy of scale, and so forth. Humans no longer stand in an actual relation to the land, “working with it,” as Conlogue puts it, but are instrumentalizing it for maximum financial profit rather than striving for families and small communities to be directly nourished by the land. Similarly, urban economies have moved away from artisans working creatively with their hands to humans becoming mere cogs in a vast, machine-driven production system; and the ugliness and monotony introduced into cityscapes by industrial culture are infamous. In other words, pastoral balance, people living in harmony with nature and with one another, modestly but well, in an economy of self-sufficiency and direct sustenance from the land, and with primal as well as artistic-intellectual needs being met—this sort of balance seems to have vanished from Midwestern life for good by the late nineteenth century, only a few decades after the region had been settled. The original vision that had inspired Midwestern settlers had turned out to be an ahistorical, merely literary ideal after all. Several of the writers investigated by Conlogue have a Midwestern background, such as Willa Cather, Frank Norris, and Jane Smiley; other writers responding critically to industrial farming hail from California, such as John Steinbeck and Ruth Comfort Mitchell, or the South, such as Ellen Glasgow and Wendell Berry. What appears to distinguish the Midwestern modernist authors’

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response to the loss of the pastoral dream, a distinction with which Conlogue’s study does not concern itself, is a particular interpretation of their region’s spiritual history and the evocation of a sacramental vision of nature as a corrective for the culture’s spiritual failings. Namely, Midwestern authors see the failure to establish a sound cultural relation to human nature and to the so recently claimed fertile land as a matter of Protestant ethics and modern spiritual attitudes misshaping the American mind, making it impossible for a truly wholesome society to be realized. In formulating their vision of cultural wholesomeness, these authors tend to pit Catholic spirituality against Protestantism and medieval values and perspectives against the beliefs and sensibilities of modernity. Thus, for instance, Sherwood Anderson, in his first of three autobiographies, A Story Teller’s Story (1922), reflects repeatedly and quite explicitly on medieval Europe as a model for American civilization’s development. At one point, he finds himself, in his fancy, in France, at the Cathedral of Chartres, and he explains that it represents to him “the beauty shrine of my life,” with “beauty” a crucial term designating a value system opposed to American industrial utilitarianism. He feels himself in the presence of something vast, something divine and Other, yet relational, approachable, life-giving—a sacred female Other, the Virgin: “Can it be Chartres, the Virgin, the woman, God’s woman?” (187). He then realizes that he cannot possibly be at Chartres: “I am an American and if I am dead my spirit must now be in a large half-ruined and empty factory, a factory with cracks in the walls where the work of the builders was scamped, as nearly all building was scamped in my time.” As is apparent from the passage’s details, the centuries-old “shrine of beauty” is being contrasted with something cheap, impermanent, purely functional, ephemeral, shoddily built, and ugly, something grotesquely inadequate when seen in juxtaposition with death, spiritual presence, and the human soul. What follows is quite humorous: “It cannot be I am in the presence of the Virgin. Americans do not believe in either Virgins or Venuses. Americans believe in themselves. There is no need of gods now but if the need arises Americans will manufacture many millions of them, all alike. They will label them ‘Keep smiling’ or ‘Safety first’ and go on their way, and as for the woman, the Virgin, she is the enemy of our race. Her purpose is not our purpose. Away with her!” (186). The fanciful reflection culminates in a mockery of American industrialism’s heroes—“Stephenson, Franklin, Fulton, Bell, Edison”; their “triumphs came to the dull and meaningless absurdity, of say a clothespin factory. There have been sweeter men in old times, half forgotten now, who will be remembered after you are forgotten. The Virgin too, will be remembered after



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you are forgotten. Would it not be amusing if Chartres continued to stand after you are forgotten?” (187–89). Unlike many American intellectuals of the 1920s, Anderson does not expatriate himself to France, though he does visit the expatriates there; his autobiography ends with an affirmation of his Americanness, wanting instead to draw inspiration from Europe’s past in order to formulate new paths for America’s future, for “the future of the western world lay with America” (407). It is the inspiration drawn from Europe’s Catholic sacramental civilization that shapes modernist Midwestern writers’ encounter with Midwestern nature and underlies both their spiritual critique of Midwestern history, and their vision for a more wholesome, a (w)holier future, a new kind of “sacramental pastoral.”2 Therefore, a brief survey of the different character of medieval sacramentalism on the one hand, and modernity and Protestantism on the other, will be helpful.

Sacramentalism The word “sacrament” essentially means “mystery” (Richter 16), and, thus, the discussion of sacraments is bound to stretch the limits of human understanding. In the postmedieval world, the mystery of the sacraments has grown even less comprehensible, for, essentially, the Hellenic heritage of the West has, for now, won the day and shaped our minds in a categorical, skeptical, and literal manner not conducive to the development of a sacramental way of seeing. Perhaps a good starting point for discussing sacramentalism is to contrast the Baptist and Catholic understandings of communion. Since Christ Himself, in the Gospels, institutes this religious ritual explicitly (Matt. 26.26–29; Mark 14.22–25; Luke 22.17–20), virtually all Protestant denominations3 and the Catholic Church accept it as a “sacrament,” an essential, required practice of the Christian faith. However, the Baptist view of this practice contains little “mystery” compared to the traditional medieval (i.e., Catholic) view. For instance, communion tables in Baptist and other Protestant evangelical churches frequently bear the inscription “This Do in Remembrance of Me,” which are the words Christ utters during the Last Supper before His crucifixion. The crucial word in this Protestant context is “remembrance”: the bread is broken and the wine is drunk as a commemorative act, reminding the believer of how Christ sacrificed His flesh and blood for a sinful world on the cross. Many evangelical Protestants would describe the commemorative ritual as “symbolizing” Christ’s life-giving death for sinful humanity; however, they would be using the term “symbolize” in a modern,

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reduced sense of the word, indicating the substitution of a representative sign for what is actual. The traditional meaning of “symbol” is explained by German Catholic theologian Klemens Richter as follows: Originally, “symbol” meant “the broken halves of a whole,” the two parts of a divided object. When the two halves were brought together . . . the symbol could serve as a means of recognition. . . . So a symbol is a sign consisting of two parts, in such a way that the whole is only visible when the two halves are brought together. . . . For people in the ancient world, a symbol was not only the visible part of a whole. In the symbol, the visible reality of the whole was present, although in its entirety it remained invisible. So “symbol” means “a whole reality” insofar as it presents itself through the symbol. . . . A genuine and original symbol thus does not “stand for” something different, something which it “means.” It is not a substitute; it is really what it represents and means. (13–14)

Therefore, while the Baptist communicant is remembering through a tangible imitation a real event, the Catholic communicant is actively participating in the event; namely, the grace-instilling “sacrifice” of Christ; and while the Baptist communicant is eating bread and drinking wine that are, by a certain suggestive resemblance, to remind him or her of Christ’s flesh and blood, the Catholic communicant is actually receiving Christ’s flesh and, through the priest, His blood, and through partaking of the physical sacrificed body of Christ is also partaking of His inseparably intertwined spiritual sacrifice (i.e., Christ’s total surrender to God), receiving reconciling love. This mystical reality of eucharistic communion is described by St. Cyril of Alexandria in the following words: “To merge us in unity with God and among ourselves, although we have each a distinct personality, the only Son devised a wonderful means: through one only body, his own, he sanctifies his faithful in mystic communion, making them one body with him and among themselves. Within Christ no division can arise. All united to the single Christ through his own body, all receiving him, the one and indivisible, into our own bodies, we are the members of this one body and he is thus, for us, the bond of unity” (qtd. in de Lubac 91). The mystery of the Eucharist is the incorporation into Christ’s body. In partaking of the Eucharist, the Catholic believer is actually, physically, and spiritually entering into communion, into full relational oneness with the triune God and with the Church, which is linked to Christ as His Bride, as His very own physical-spiritual Body. Essentially, what happens at the Eucharist is what happens in marriage—matri-



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mony, of course, being yet another Catholic sacrament. For, according to Catholic doctrine, in marriage, two people become one—physically and spiritually. Their individuality is not wiped out, just as the distinct personhood of the three members of the Trinity persists; but their individuality is contained within a profound, substantive, all-encompassing relational union, much as the Trinity exists in such a substantive, mystical union of love. The physical, sexual union of husband and wife, if it is, as it should be, an expression of love, is a means of grace in a very real sense: it brings into being, it fully realizes, finalizes, the couple’s union; it serves as a concrete as well as spiritual revelation and imparting of love, the whole of the spiritual-physical (or, one might just say, human) reality is contained in the physical act, and it has the potential even for the creation of new life, God, thus, allowing us to participate in His loving work of Creation. Similarly, at the Eucharist, the physical action of partaking of Christ’s body realizes the spiritual as well as physical union of the believer with others, the physical act and its corresponding spiritual act being two halves of the same whole. The eucharistic meal, thus, possesses the complete joyful as well as solemn reality of a wedding feast. Christ’s first miracle was changing water into wine at the wedding at Canaan, and the Christian believer looks forward to the wedding feast in heaven, the feast of the Lamb.4 Hence, the sacrament of communion possesses extraordinary reality and power in the Catholic tradition: it is a grace-giving, fully realized act of uniting with Christ and with the Body of Christ that is the Church. What then is a sacrament, and what is a sacramental worldview? At its most basic level, a sacrament is a visible sign effectively bestowing an inward grace. Bernard Cooke, professor of systematic theology at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, defines “grace” by distinguishing between two different modes of grace: “‘uncreated grace’ refers to God himself in his graciousness towards human beings,” being “God’s loving self-gift” (80–81); “‘created grace’ refers to that special (‘supernatural’) assistance God gives to humans to heal and strengthen them to a level of being compatible with their eternal destiny” of holy communion with God in that place of holiness, Heaven (80–81). Sacraments, therefore, are physical signs that contain and confer a personal spiritual presence (i.e., God Himself) and which transform us inwardly to be in purer communion with that personal presence. A sacramental worldview is one in which the physical realities of Creation—such as food, sex, other people, our human selves, all of nature—are not merely material realities but realities containing and conferring spiritual, in a Christian context specifically divine, presence. This presence invites a relational, loving response to its own self-gift.

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Many in the Judeo-Christian tradition have addressed the sacramental aspect of all of Creation, from the Old Testament psalmists to the Church Fathers to contemporary theologians. King David proclaims, in Psalm 19, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. / Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. / There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard” (Ps. 19.1–3). The psalm continues to celebrate the good order of Creation established by God, and God’s good laws, which are seen not as a mere set of rules but as a life-giving revelation eliciting a profoundly personal response, the turning of one’s inmost being: “The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple” (Ps. 19.7). This notion of an order of Creation, the notion that “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein” (Ps. 24.1), implies that those who do not encounter God in His Creation are not only out of tune with God, but, as creatures, with their very own selves and with the world they inhabit.5 In Midwestern authors’ works, the notion that encountering Creation sacramentally is the necessary starting point for building a functional personal life and a functional culture derives from the Judeo-Christian tradition, and, more specifically, from medieval Catholic sacramentalism, as shall be elaborated in the first two chapters. A contemporary theologian, Vanderbilt University professor Sallie McFague, in her 1993 work The Body of God: An Ecological Theology, provides an intriguing reflection on seeing the world sacramentally in her discussion of Exodus 33. In this chapter of Exodus, Moses pleads with the Lord, “I beseech thee, shew me thy glory” (Ex. 33.18). Since no human can look upon the full glory of God and live, the Lord does the following for Moses: “And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by; / And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen” (33.22–23). McFague interprets this striking passage with a touch of humor: The passage is a wonderful mix of the outrageous (God has a backside?!) and the awesome (the display of divine glory too dazzling for human eyes). The passage unites guts and glory, flesh and spirit, the human and the divine, and all those other apparent dualisms with a reckless flamboyance that points to something at the heart of the Hebrew and Christian traditions: God is not afraid of the flesh. . . . Like Moses, when we ask, ‘Show me your glory,’ we might see the humble



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bodies of our own planet as visible signs of the invisible grandeur. Not the face, not the depths of divine radiance, but enough, more than enough. (131–32)

What seems particularly significant in McFague’s reflection is the acknowledgment that there is an incompleteness, a limitation in earthly, sacramentally mediated encounters with God. Her observations closely relate to St. Paul’s statement that we see “but through a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13.12). Submitting to creaturely finitude and to the postlapsarian fact of living in a broken world is just as much part of approaching the world sacramentally as is the perception of and experience of God’s presence, just as in the Eucharist crucifixion and wedding feast are melded. In this point, sacramentalism is profoundly different from Emersonian romanticism; while both worldviews perceive spiritual presence in nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s romanticism describes how the intuitive and authentic person’s ecstatic visions transform him or her into a “transparent eyeball” that sees all comprehensively in one transcendent moment. Differing from this ultimately very Platonic model of “beholding the form,”6 sacramentalism involves entering into limitation, finitude, details, the concrete and physical fabric of life ever more deeply to find vast meaning symbolically, fully present precisely in these very limits. This important aspect of approaching the world sacramentally is described by McFague in her definition of “attention epistemology”; the quotation from Iris Murdoch that she includes states this sacramental principle with moving poignancy: Attention epistemology is a rather abstract term for a very concrete and basic phenomenon: the kind of knowledge that comes from paying close attention to something other than oneself. . . . Attention epistemology is listening, paying attention to another, the other, in itself, for itself. It is the opposite of means-ends thinking, thinking of anything, everything, as useful, necessary, pleasurable to oneself, that is, assuming that everything that is not the self has only utilitarian value. An attention epistemology assumes the intrinsic value of anything, everything, that is not the self. . . . Since the existence of each entity and being is in and for itself (and not “for me”), then knowledge of difference, that is, of the teeming multitude and variety of things that comprise the universe, can occur only when we pay attention to radical particularity. In a passage that invites meditation, Murdoch combines art, morals, love, and reality: “Art and morals are, with certain provisos . . . one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely dif-

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ficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.” (50)

This love of the Other means a love of detail, a love of the full physical and spiritual reality of the Other, and a striving toward a communion that does not subsume or dissolve the Other in whom one delights. McFague points out how such a view of Creation mirrors, in the Christian tradition, that of the Creator, and again she supplements her own theological understanding with a brilliantly succinct quotation: “Simone Weil expresses the deepest dimension of the Genesis myth when she writes: ‘God, if he exists, is good because He delights in the existence of something other than Himself.’ The comment upon completion of Creation, that everything that God had made was ‘very good,’ contains aesthetic delight in the existence of all the others (the day and night, ocean and sky, plants and animals, including great sea monsters, creeping things, and humankind)” (51). Only a relational communion, such as exemplified by the Trinity, can simultaneously join self and Other while preserving each in his, her, or its particularity. Therefore, in a sacramental model, the world must be approached relationally, lovingly: we are to be stewards of the Earth and of one another, not exploiters or instrumentalizers. If we violate this order of Creation, we fail to realize our very own creaturely being and hand ourselves over to nothingness, that is, evil and destruction.7 Again, the difference from romanticism must be stressed; for instance, the following passage from Emerson’s “Nature” (published in 1836) may seem sacramental at first glance, but is its opposite: The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both. Is not the charm of one of Plato’s or Aristotle’s definitions strictly like that of the Antigone of Sophocles? It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought, that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognized itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula. (29)

While Emerson sees spiritual presence in nature, he sees the physical matter dissolving before the spiritual reality, and this spiritual reality is monistic rather



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than Trinitarian; it is based on the ultimate dissolution of the personal and the particular within the impersonal universal “all.” Natural “matter” becomes nothing but a spiritual principle, a “single formula.” Midwestern modernists tend to orient themselves toward a sacramental vision of the world without being actual Catholics, or even Christians; rather, most of them seek to draw on the sacramental worldview of the Catholic Middle Ages without subscribing to Catholic dogma in a stricter sense. Hence, these writers’ sacramentalism often contains unresolved tensions; however, the emphasis on the inextricable interfusion of the physical and the spiritual, on particularity and the mystery to be found in the particular, on “presence,” on intrinsic value, relational communion with the natural and human other, on entering into limitation in order to find freedom, on submitting to one’s given, natural place in Creation, and on a commitment to gradual, “organic,” concretely experiential process—all of these are crucial values seen as inherent in the natural order and learned from encounters with the often mystically depicted Midwestern land. These writers’ sacramental vision is a direct reply to the perceived failings of modernity, failings blamed on the Puritan heritage of Midwestern settlers. Hence, a brief survey of modernity and its connection with Protestantism, particularly Calvinistic Protestantism, shall serve as background for the discussion ensuing in the following chapters.

Protestantism and Modernity It is a well-known story, the tale of Martin Luther confronting the medieval Catholic Church’s abuses of power, and not only would few contemporary Catholics probably deny that such abuses did, in fact, exist, medieval Catholics themselves would not necessarily have been shocked at the notion of corruption in the Church. For instance, Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century Decameron tales, popular in their own right and largely based on preexisting popular tales, are full of corrupt and lecherous clergy, and the entirely devout fourteenth-century Florentine poet Dante Alighieri depicts in his Inferno numerous popes and ecclesiastical leaders burning in hell for their various sinister deeds and flagrant hypocrisy.8 And yet, Luther’s stand against the Church’s corruption dealt the deathblow to a medieval European culture based on sacramentalism, for Luther and his followers drew on Renaissance insights and cultural developments to

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purify the Church in such a radical manner that the entire spiritual structure of European Christendom never recovered; indeed, one might see the Protestant Reformation as a major step toward European secularization. In the Middle Ages, the Church itself was seen as a sacrament, as the visible presence of Christ in the world. As Cyril Vollert explains, “As Christ is the sacrament of God, the Church is the sacrament of Christ. As the actions of the earthly Christ were the actions of God performed in a human way, so the actions of the Church are the actions of the now invisible Christ permanently carried on in visible form. Thus the Church is the perfect living sacrament of Christ whose redemptive Incarnation it announces and communicates” (92).9 Because of this function of the Church to embody Christ and confer His grace, the Church possessed considerable authority. Individuals within the Church were acknowledged to have abused that authority hypocritically, but the notion of tradition assured believers that ultimately, Truth would always triumph in the Church: if a doctrine had been accepted for several generations within the Church, it was considered to possess the blessing of the Holy Spirit, who dwelt within the Body of Christ and would not permit error to persist in it. However, when Renaissance editing practices revealed textual corruption in traditional literature, when the ancient Greco-Roman world, with its modes of critical inquiry, was being rediscovered, when the budding of the modern natural sciences revealed the lack of a factual basis for allegorical interpretations of the natural world, faith in the validity of tradition began to crumble. As a result of this development in Western culture, Protestant reformers were inspired to do away with traditional interpretations of Scripture and to locate hermeneutic authority in Scripture itself, a Protestant doctrine summarized succinctly by Luther scholar Paul Althaus: “[Scripture’s] character as the final authority, which is grounded in and bears witness to itself, precludes the possibility that the standard of its interpretation could somehow come from outside itself. It also includes the fact that it interprets itself; and this self-interpretation is therefore the most certain, most easy, and most clear interpretation” (76). As a result of scriptural meaning needing to be self-evident, we see the rise of a typical modern mode of reading: literalism. This new hermeneutic, emerging out of the Reformation, is summarized by Althaus as follows: “The principle that Scripture interprets itself includes the rule that the Scripture is to be interpreted according to its simple literal sense. One may depart from this principle only when the text itself compels a metaphorical interpretation. In all so-called ‘spiritual’ interpretation, however, each one can read his own spirit into the words. Scripture loses its clear meaning in the process. In all its parts Scripture has one and the same simple



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sense. The self-interpretation of Holy Scripture presupposes that the Scripture is clear in itself ” (77). With this new belief in the immediate clarity of Scripture came the impulse to translate the Bible into Europe’s vernacular languages so that every believer would be able to access its truth directly and immediately, free from corrupting mediation. The individual believer, assisted by the Holy Spirit, was to arrive at the clear and self-evident truth of Scripture. Authority, thus, had shifted away from institutions, and had been located in the clear, literal meaning of a revealed text as well as in the individual believer, in whom dwelt the Holy Spirit. It is not hard to see the transition from this Protestant spirituality to the rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While at first the individual sought truth in Scripture with the aid of the in-dwelling Holy Spirit, now the individual sought truth via his or her in-dwelling reason, and no longer necessarily in Scripture, as Scripture itself had not proven immune to the questioning of traditional authorities set so powerfully in motion by the Reformation. However, while Holy Scripture no longer provided the touchstone of truth, the Protestant habit of “reading” the world literally had persisted. Hence, the astonishing epistemological confidence of European and American intellectuals of this period, a confidence born of an assurance of the clear and straightforward referentiality of “the sign”—“sign” meaning, in the Age of Reason, a rational mental category on the one hand, or an empirical material fact on the other. No longer credible was the old mystical way of reading the world, of visible things containing, expressing, conferring the presence of spiritual mysteries, mysteries hinging on the mystery of mysteries, the incarnation, the Word becoming flesh, God taking on humanity. Christ’s incarnation was the perfect image of how God reached out to humans through the medium of Creation, with all of His Creation in some way embodying, incarnating Himself. This intensely personal, ambiguous, mysterious presence was decipherable to a culture with a symbolic manner of reading; to a modern culture of literalism, with human reason as its locus of authority, abstract principles, moral laws, and the “Great Mechanic,” the impersonal divine Law-Giver of Deism, were comprehensible, but medieval mysticism could only persist as a highly subjective phenomenon, no longer a communally shared way of seeing the world with the power to bind together societies and shape institutions. The paragon of all modern thinking is that great early exponent of rationalism, René Descartes. In his profoundly influential 1637 treatise A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, Descartes exemplified all of the chief characteristics of a modern mindset: radical skepticism and distrust of authority and tradition, a highly individualistic

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pursuit of truth over and against secondhand communal wisdom, a privileging of the human intellect above all other instances of truth, and a rejection of the symbolic nature of physical reality. Regarding all thought as suspect for being potentially derivative and unverifiable, Descartes realizes that the one incontrovertible fact is his own individual consciousness: “I resolved to pretend that everything that had ever entered my head was no more true than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately afterwards I noted that, while I was trying to think of all things being false in this way, it was necessarily the case that I, who was thinking them, had to be something”—and, thus, he formulates the first principle of his philosophy, “I am thinking therefore I exist” (28). Having established the epistemological primacy of his own consciousness, Descartes proceeds to prove the existence of God based on humans being conscious of a perfection we do not ourselves possess, the consciousness of which must, therefore, have been implanted from a more perfect Being, transcending our limitations; he then proceeds to formulate a literalistic epistemology in which all “clear and distinct ideas” within the rational person’s consciousness constitute a canon of absolute truth: “[E]ven the rule which I stated above that I held—namely, that the things we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true—is only certain because God is or exists, because he is a perfect being, and because everything that is in us comes from Him. From which it follows that our ideas or notions, being real things which moreover come from God, insofar as they are clear and distinct, cannot thereby but be true” (33). Modernity, thus, establishes the primacy of human mental categories over and above concrete physical reality, as exemplified by the famous “Cartesian split” between subject and object, body and soul. Arguing that he can “pretend that I had no body and that there was no world or place for me to be in,” but that he cannot pretend to himself that he does not possess a consciousness, does not think, Descartes concludes that “I was a substance whose whole essence or nature resides only in thinking, and which, in order to exist has no need of place and is not dependent on any material thing. Accordingly, this ‘I,’ that is to say, the Soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body and is even easier to know than the body; and would not stop being everything it is, even if the body were not to exist” (29). Here, we can remark that return to the Hellenic heritage of the Western world that occurred during the Renaissance and came fully into its own after the dissolution of medievalism in the sixteenth century, for Descartes is entirely Platonic in his radical separation of mind and matter, and implicitly but nonetheless flagrantly rejects any notion of the physical world having sacramental meaning.



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Commenting directly on the Cartesian split in modern thinking, Anderson expresses the modernist neo-sacramentalists’ concerns in a passage that in many ways is programmatic for the way the Midwestern modernists conflate modernity with Protestantism/Puritanism and for the role they see themselves playing as writers in bringing about a spiritual change. In his indictment of modernity in Note IV of A Story Teller’s Story, Anderson first identifies a split in the modern mind, which he labels as a split between “fact” and “fancy,” a relatively clear echo of the Cartesian split between matter and spirit: “To the imaginative man in the modern world something becomes, from the first, sharply defined. Life splits itself into two sections and, no matter how long one may live or where one may live, the two ends continue to dangle, fluttering about in the empty air” (77). At this point, then, Anderson turns to discussing the “life of fancy” before turning to discuss the “life of fact” (77–78). The fact/fancy label of this fundamental split in modern Western consciousness addresses implicitly the issue of literalism in modern thought, which is closely allied with the word “fact.” In such a literalistic mindset, factual categories are delineated with absolute clarity, whereas in the life of spirit and imagination, i.e., “fancy,” “life separates itself with slow movements and with many graduations into the ugly and the beautiful” (77–78). The subtext of imaginative thought processes resembling organic growth processes in the natural world hints at the natural world being a locus of truths not accessible to modern thinking and portrays modern categorical realism as out of tune with the order of Creation. The aesthetic values of beauty and ugliness involve a physical, sensory aspect of goodness not necessarily present in abstract moralism. Never a precise philosopher, Anderson here hints at the concern for a holistic form of concrete goodness not easily captured in abstract maxims, a goodness in which the spiritual is bodied forth—in other words, a sacramentally tangible goodness. “Beauty” is associated with life, “ugliness” with death, when he summarizes the contrast in its following restatement: “What is alive is opposed to what is dead” (78). What becomes apparent here is that Anderson gears his value standards toward breath, spirit, presence. On this basis, he, in succeeding passages, condemns “the cheap, hurried, ugly construction of American physical life” (79), and celebrates traditional, preindustrial craftsmanship and the slow growth of traditional cultures: “A slow culture growing up, however—growing as culture must always grow—through the hands of workmen. In the small towns artisans coming in—the harness-maker, the carriage-builder, the builder of wagons, the smith, the tailor, the maker of shoes, the builders of houses and barns too. . . . In their fingers the beginning of that love of surfaces, of the sensual

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love of materials, without which no true civilization can ever be born” (80–81). Modern American culture is moribund because it was never allowed to grow naturally; rather, “Puritans,” “reformers,” and “dry intellectuals” tried to “remake life on some definite plan conceived within the human brain.” In other words, a modern Protestant culture, privileging human rationality, has tried to conform life, in its given, objective, concrete reality, to abstract schemes of perfection. In yet other words, Protestant literalism has led to a separation from the physical world that has eventuated in a dead, lifeless culture bound to crush the human spirit even as it achieves “glorious” mechanical triumphs, such as in Anderson’s ridiculous and violent example of “hurl[ing] bodies through the air at the rate of five hundred miles an hour” (77). We see in this brief passage from Anderson’s autobiography the crux of the spiritual program to which Midwestern modernists devoted themselves, an overcoming of Protestant-derived modern literalism, a return to a sacramental perception of the world, and a resulting transformation of an ugly modern industrial culture, with “beauty” emerging as a new, central, holistic, and sacramental value.

Max Weber’s Critique of Protestant Culture While the critique of modern culture formulated above captures, generally, what motivated Midwestern modernists to turn toward sacramentalism, a further, more specific critique of Protestantism, and particularly its Calvinistic variety, must be noted. As are all of the concepts in this introduction, Midwestern modernists’ view of the West’s Protestant heritage generally, and American Puritan-Calvinistic heritage in particular, are discussed in more depth in Chapter 2. However, one may note that Midwestern writers stress the foundational role played by New England settlers in the early formation of the Midwest and that the culturally Calvinistic heritage of these settlers is seen as clashing with the intensely fertile, intensely sexual, alive, and abundant Midwestern land. This clash between a Calvinistic culture and a landscape with powerful, sensually mystical presence is the true drama underlying the fictional world created by these authors and investigated in their texts. Calvinism was the most rigorously logical, rationalistic, and literalistic form of Protestantism to emerge from the theological turmoil of the seventeenth century, distancing itself more radically from medieval sacramentalism than does, for instance, Lutheranism. One of its central tenets is the total depravity of humankind,



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a doctrine here formulated by Jean Calvin himself in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, in the third chapter, which is tellingly titled “Only Damnable Things Come Forth from Man’s Corrupt Nature”: “The spirit is so contrasted with flesh [in Rom. 8.6–7] that no intermediate thing is left. Accordingly, whatever is not spiritual in man is by this reckoning called ‘carnal.’ We have nothing of the spirit, however, except through regeneration. Whatever we have from nature, therefore, is flesh” (289). Further on, after quoting several passages from Psalms and one from Isaiah, all of them drawn upon by St. Paul in his letter to the Romans, Calvin continues this theme: “With these thunderbolts [Paul] inveighs not against particular men but against the whole race of Adam’s children. Nor is he decrying the depraved morals of one age or another, but indicting the unvarying corruption of our nature” (291). In other words, whereas medieval Catholicism was focused on the bodying forth of God’s goodness and grace in His Creation, a goodness that can be perceived even through the brokenness and distortion of a fallen world, Calvinism emphasizes that nature and grace are radically separated, that all of fallen Creation is totally corrupt and sinful. Consequently, the transcendence, the “above-ness,” of God is also greatly stressed; whereas in Catholic theology humans are seen as actively cooperating with God and His grace, in Calvinism, depraved humans are so utterly incapable of such responsiveness that they must be scooped out of the mire against their own depraved will by God’s irresistible grace. In this context, it is clear how Calvinism’s highly controversial doctrine of double predestination forms an integral part of Calvinism’s doctrinal logic: with a totally depraved human nature precluding free will and with salvation having to be bestowed entirely over and against human nature’s total resistance, salvation becomes not a matter of individual humans responding to a grace freely offered to all, but instead completely a matter of whom God chooses to save and whom to leave in the mire. Calvin formulates this doctrine as follows in Chapter XXI of his Institutes: “As Scripture, then, clearly shows, we say that God once established by his eternal and unchangeable plan those whom he long before determined once for all to receive into salvation and those whom, on the other hand, he would devote to destruction. We assert that, with respect to the elect, this plan was founded upon his freely given mercy, without regard to human worth; but by his just and irreprehensible but incomprehensible judgment he has barred the door of life to those whom he has given over to damnation” (931). What follows is crucial for Midwestern modernists’ critique of their region’s Calvinistic heritage; Calvin explains how one might distinguish on Earth between the elect (those elected for salvation)

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and those who are damned: “Now among the elect we regard the call as a testimony of election. Then we hold justification another sign of its manifestation, until they come into the glory in which the fulfillment of that election lies. But as the Lord seals his elect by call and justification, so, by shutting off the reprobate from knowledge of his name or from the sanctification of his spirit, he, as it were, reveals by these marks what sort of judgment awaits them” (931). With German sociologist Max Weber, whose ideas are discussed in Chapter 2, Midwestern intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s tended to believe that Calvinists’ anxiety about their elect status fueled what Weber calls the “Protestant ethic,” namely, a sense of being faithful to a “calling,” a systematic, self-sacrificing devotion to one’s duty (79–92). As Calvin explains in his Institutes, the elect are marked by God perfecting in them His salvation (978), that is, while good works cannot possibly earn salvation, the call to salvation issues in good works. While the Catholic believer can go through the concrete, simultaneously physical and spiritual sacraments of confession and penance and can receive grace concretely in the Eucharist, the Calvinistic believer has only a continual perfecting of his or her whole person to confirm his or her being in a state of grace. In other words, systematic selfdiscipline, perfectionism, became ingrained in Calvinism-derived cultures, such as the northern United States. This Calvinistic concern with “marks of election” became, as previously Calvinistic societies secularized, a concern with marks of success; it became the American success ethic, which instrumentalized people, making them slaves of their own success. A cultural mindset shaped by Calvinism also led to a systematization of life that no longer allowed for any complexity or ambiguity; the whole world became subjected to an efficiency-devoted capitalistic economic system. Western society had turned into a merciless machine, devoid of any concern for beauty and meaning. Tragically, what had begun as a religiously motivated perfectionism and systematicity became secularized into the relentless efficiency of capitalist industrialism. This perceived development of Calvinism into capitalism was blamed by early twentieth-century intellectuals on a fundamental shortcoming of Protestant, and particularly Calvinistic, theology: namely, the splitting of matter and spirit, of nature and grace. Only in returning to a sacramental spiritual relation to nature, our human selves, and all of society did Midwestern modernists see any hope for restoring some of the early promise of their region; and, more universally speaking, only in such a dedication to a new sacramentalism did they see any hope for all of modern Western culture to find meaning and a firm, wholesome grounding.

1 An American Venus and Virgin The Sacramental Dynamic of the Middle West

Had not men always used symbols to help carry them over the rough places in life? There was the Virgin with her candles. Was she not also a symbol? At some time, having decided in a moment of vanity that thought was of more importance than fancy, men had discarded the symbol. A Protestant kind of man arose who believed in a thing called “the age of reason.” There was a dreadful kind of egotism. Men could trust their own minds. As though they knew anything at all of the workings of their own minds. —from Many Marriages by Sherwood Anderson

Among Americanists, it is a long-standing tenet that cultural critic Henry Adams provides key metaphors for the American experience when he, in Chapter XXV of The Education of Henry Adams (1907) defines the modern American age as the era of the dynamo in contrast to medieval Europe’s centeredness on the Virgin. This pair of metaphors is rich in meaning and has often proven a useful tool in cultural analysis—and it can serve as a starting point for investigating a largely undiscussed aspect of American modernism, namely, the orientation of Midwestern regionalists of the 1920s and 1930s toward Adams’s Virgin and toward a sacramental rejuvenation of American culture, a rejuvenation inspired by the fecund Midwestern land seen in contrast to the Puritan-descended, New England–derived culture imposed on that land. The dynamo, always looming in the background of Midwestern authors’ descriptions of a brutalizing industrialism or of control-oriented forms of mas– 25 –

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culinity, is, of course, grotesquely phallic: thrusting, aggressive, and powerful, it lacks the human attributes of warmth, living organicism, feeling, passion, or spirit. It is cold, soulless, driven by electricity, by mechanical laws. It is the symbol of sheer force, of movement devoid of significance, almost movement en pure, and the scientific machine culture it represents does not return any lost teleology1 or meaningful structure to a modern world forlorn and spiritually drained, as here stated by Adams in this third-person autobiography: “Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, [Henry Adams] turned at last to the sequence of force” (363). According to Adams, the culture of the dynamo lacks significance and cannot foster art, which is inherently sacramental, i.e., dependent on meaningful form: “[St. Gaudens and Matthew Arnold] and all other artists [of their era] constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres” (368). The dynamo’s power is frighteningly abstract; it is a force without higher reference, mere force, and therefore incapable of taking on spiritually significant concrete form. Its only significance is the anti-significance of materialism and nihilism. Strikingly contrasted with the dynamo is the Virgin, which, paradoxically, in Adams’s mind, is synonymous with the force of sex: [I]n America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force—at most as sentiment. No American had ever been truly afraid of either. . . . The trait was notorious, and often humorous, but anyone brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength. . . . Everyone, even among Puritans, knew that neither Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the oriental goddesses was worshipped for her beauty. She was goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction—the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund. (364–65)

The dynamo, here, is “animated,” that is, the force has been given spirit, and there is a mystery in it, the mystery of “reproduction,” of life. Sex is the expression of this life force. In contrast to the mechanical thrusts of the dynamo, sex possesses an organic and purposeful teleology, the mysterious germination of body and spirit, of another “animated” being, i.e., of another soulful being. This mysterious, organic, and meaningful aspect of life, one capable of giving



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rise to significant form, to sacrament, to Chartres, to art, is, in America, mostly regarded as “sentiment.” Its full actuality is dismissed, and it is reduced to the status of a fickle, insubstantial emotive illusion programmatically evoked for pleasurable consumption. Citing St. Gaudens and Arnold as typical representatives of Anglo-Saxon culture, Adams notes that they, while seeing the impossibility of mechanical culture inspiring art, nonetheless, were unable to turn to the Virgin for inspiration: “Neither of them felt Goddesses as power—only as reflected emotion, human expression, beauty, purity, taste, scarcely even as sympathy” (368). A longing is evident in these words, a longing to recover a sense of meaningful spiritual powers rather than to be lost in a materialistic universe. Adams yearns to return to an age where human culture is sacramental in its attempts at meaningful form, linked to significant cosmic realities, rather than merely engaged in a sentimental human exercise of clothing harsh nothingness in comforting illusions. The Puritan disdain of sex—of the bodily, the sensual—is for Adams a main culprit in modern American society’s lack of sacramentalism.2 It is clear that a recovery of a more holistic culture would require a rehabilitation of the concrete, of the sensual, and a reinvestment of the concrete realm with spiritual meaning. Adams’s thought, symptomatic of a widespread discontent with the mechanistic culture of early twentieth-century America, is shared by Midwestern modernists who portray the fecund Midwestern land as a spiritually significant, highly sexual, and sacramental realm at odds with the New England–derived, post-Puritan, anti-sacramental, and anti-sensual culture imported into the region. Not only is Adams’s thought generally shared by Midwestern modernists, but his direct influence occasionally becomes evident. While this discussion does not concern itself with tracing Adams’s influence, it is, nonetheless, significant to note that the notion of a Midwestern modernist neo-sacramentalism is at times supported by clear Adamsian references made by key Midwestern writers. As a highly definitive figure within Midwestern modernism, Sherwood Anderson serves as the focal point of this book. His Adamsianism is explicit and his highly sexual images of sacramentalism reflect Adams’s notion of the Chartresinspiring Virgin as a sexual force. Anderson most clearly acknowledges his debt to Adams in his 1924 autobiography A Story-Teller’s Story. After identifying Puritanism as the force in American culture that “renounce[s] life” (376) and defending his own sexually frank writings as “clean” (and life-affirming) (377), Anderson moves on to quote Adams’s chapter on the Virgin and the dynamo extensively. In the next chapter, he opens with a reference back to the Adams quotation: “‘An

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American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist,’ he had said and it was an accusation that an American could neither love nor worship” (380). Worship and love, two relational, inherently teleological, and spiritually significant attitudes involving the whole person, emotions and intellect, body and soul—these attitudes, Anderson explains, have not been entirely squelched in the Middle West, though the squelching has been attempted continually: “At any rate I was a man of the Middle West. I was not a New Englander. For my own people, as I had known them, it was absurd to say they had neither love nor reverence. . . . We had simply been cheated. Our Virgins and Venuses had to be worshiped under the bush. What nights I had spent mooning about with middle-western boys, with hungry girls too. Were we but trying to refute the older men of New England who had got such a grip on our American intellectual life, the Emersons, Hawthornes, and Longfellows?” (380). Before discussing the positive sacramental view of the Middle West implied in this passage, one might briefly address the contrastive negative view of New England. It is clear that what Anderson loosely calls “Puritanism” or the “New England tradition” is not a very carefully differentiated category; it generally stands for a large, broadly conceived counterforce to nature, to a nature-oriented neopaganism or neo-sacramentalism, and it stands in contrast to cultures perceived as more organic, such as African American or medieval European cultures. This broad, ill-defined category includes all that is perceived as systematic thought lacking in a sacramental or “natural” openness to mystery, to the elusive, symbiotically physical and spiritual reality of life itself. Intellectualism, idealism, capitalism, materialism, mechanical culture, literalism, conventionality, any kind of abstraction, any categorically defined ideological systems, as well as actual Calvinism—all of these fall under the heading of “Puritanism” or “New England thought.” This is so because Calvinism’s highly developed theological systematicity and its strong emphasis on transcendence were seen, not just by Anderson but by many intellectuals of the time, as the origin of Western culture’s systematic and mechanistic approach to economics, intellectual matters, and all aspects of life.3 While it is hard to see a densely symbolic and in many ways antimechanistic writer such as Hawthorne as representative of a coldly categorical mindset, Anderson likely associates Hawthorne’s at times remarkable allegorical precision and stylized language with the kind of “unnatural” New England abstractionism that he considers America’s cultural bane. One can only speculate on the precise nature of his misgivings about Emerson and Longfellow, but based on the contexts in which these names are mentioned, it is safe to presume that Anderson’s



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misgivings revolve around these writers’ generally idealistic and Platonic vision. An instance of such matter-dissolving Platonism is Emerson’s definition of nature as merely “an appendix to the soul” and his championing, in his 1836 essay Nature, of the world of abstract spiritual forms, that is, “Ideas”: “[Intellectual science] fastens the attention upon immortal necessary uncreated natures, that is, upon Ideas; and in their presence we feel that the outward circumstance [i.e., the physical world] is a dream and a shade. . . . [N]o man touches these divine natures, without becoming, in some degree, himself divine. . . . No man fears age or misfortune or death in their serene company, for he is transported out of the district of change. Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative” (29–30). What Emerson attempts in this passage is to define humans outside of their mortal and physical context, to place humans in a world of capitalized abstractions that confer their own static eternal quality upon the human beholder. In order to escape what Anderson sees as the New England romantics’ false distillation of life from the actuality of the flesh, he treats in stark and for his era even shocking detail the rough edges of life, such as sex, grotesquerie, psychic distortion, violence, drudgery, and death.4 As concerns the positive image of the Middle West contained in the “I was a man of the Middle West” quotation, there emerges Anderson’s view that life in the Middle West has a chance to bubble up to the surface, resisting the supposed cold grip of New England intellectualism. The divine sacramental powers of sex, life, and nature assert themselves more strongly in an extremely fertile and lush region that is at a remove from the New England cradle of Puritan-derived American civilization, a civilization founded on the imposition of systematic spiritual categories on reality. Of course, as mentioned, Anderson and his contemporaries fall prey to a reductive reading of Puritanism that turns it into a scapegoat for all that is wrong with American civilization. Thus, for instance, one might consider sexual prudery a Victorian rather than a Puritan trait, though some might argue that the seeds for Victorian culture were planted in various aspects of Protestantism and/or Puritanism. Yet, while most Midwestern writers of the early twentieth century may not qualify as good historians, they, nonetheless, evoke powerfully a sacramental approach to life that is worth investigating even at the cost of having to accommodate oneself to the historical reductiveness of the Puritan foil used to evoke that sacramentalism. That mystery, sacrament, and experiential knowledge are always the key to insight in Anderson’s oeuvre is evident in the programmatic statement in A

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Story-Teller’s Story when the author is taken with the view of a disillusioned academic: “He was a man who had been a professor in colleges and knew what was conventionally called thinking and he had said that thinking meant nothing at all unless it was done with the whole body—not merely with the head” (381). In clearly Adamsian terms, Anderson defines the Middle West as a region that in its exuberant fertility and sensuous lushness is naturally close to the sacramental energy of the Virgin, but which is still struggling against the culture of the dynamo. This latter culture is deplored in A Story-Teller’s Story, and just as Adams treats the dynamo as a pseudo-religious symbol, so Anderson treats America’s machine-culture as a pseudo-religion, as, indeed, idolatry, to which the true and life-giving worship of the Virgin must be opposed: The Virgin was dead and her son had taken as prophets such men as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Benjamin Franklin, the one with his little books in which he set down and saved his acts and impulses, striving to make them all serve definite ends as he saved his pennies and the other preaching the intellectual doctrine of self-reliance, Up and Onward. The land was filled with gods but they were new gods and their images, standing on every street of every town and city, were cast in iron and steel. The factory had become America’s church and duplicates of it stood everywhere, on almost every street of every city, belching black incense into the sky. (220)

Gods “cast in iron and steel”—the reference to idolatry is clear. And two Bostonians serve as illustrations of the New England tradition that has caused the problem. First, Anderson refers to the highly systematic rationalism exemplified by Franklin, who famously subjected his life to clear-cut disciplines and lived by the definite formulas expressed in Poor Richard’s Almanac (1733); and then he mentions Emerson, whose idealism Anderson tended to see as a form of rationalism due to its intellectual systematicity and strong sense of internal logical consistency, and due to its privileging of spirit at the expense of physical substance.5 These two representatives of New England illustrate the cultural background for industrialism, which, of course, is highly systematic and mechanistic and abstract in its core conception. America needs real churches, as opposed to factories; it needs a Chartres, needs meaningful, spiritual forms inspired by real life forces such as the Virgin (or Venus) represent. Then the sky, nature, will not be polluted, but rather an organic culture will arise, mirroring in artistically sublimated form the actual living reality surrounding it, a culture that points and leads toward life rather than repressing and undermining it.



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Such a cultural switch from a deadening materialism to a Chartres-building sacramentalism is evoked in another passage from A Story-Teller’s Story: While we were building all of our big ugly hurriedly thrown-together towns, creating our great industrial system, growing always more huge and prosperous, we were as much in earnest about what we thought we were up to as were the French of the thirteenth century when they built the cathedral of Chartres to the glory of God. They built the cathedral of Chartres to the glory of God and we really intended building here a land to the glory of Man, and thought we were doing it too. That was our intention and the affair only blew up in the process, or got perverted, because Man, even the brave and free Man, is somewhat a less worthy object of glorification than God. (301)

Self-reliance, a Cartesian focus on the human mind as the prime reality, intellectualism, abstractionism, systematicity, all of this amounts to a glorification of Man, but humans cannot impose themselves on the cosmos they inhabit in such a manner without losing their very souls and the soul of culture, and, thus, Anderson advocates a return to the Virgin, to a humility before mysterious cosmic life forces that are larger than human beings. And he has hopes that a new religiously inspired culture in tune with larger spiritual realities will replace the ugliness and crassness of an inhuman modern American culture. Anderson hopes that the Midwestern land might serve as a sacramental source of spiritual guidance and inspiration, that the fecund land’s sacramental reality, resistant to easy human categorization, would facilitate a spiritual rejuvenation of Midwestern culture and eliminate the stultifying intellectualist and industrialist New England spirit. While this particular hope in the Middle West is alluded to in A Story-Teller’s Story, it is plainly discernible in Anderson’s poetry and fiction. “The New Englander,” a story published in Anderson’s first short story collection, The Triumph of the Egg (1921), functions more obviously than any other as a clearcut allegory of the conversion from stifling New England Puritanism to a new Midwestern sacramentalism inspired by the land. In the story, the New England protagonist, Elsie Leander, changes from a sexually, relationally, and spiritually repressed Vermont spinster to a sensually liberated Iowa farm woman. As a matter of fact, the land has a rather direct agency in her conversion to, essentially, life; in a crucial scene in the story, Elsie responds sexually to an Iowa cornfield (158). The first thing we learn about Elsie is that she is “thin” and that the Vermont farm on which she lives has “soil [that is] not very rich” (134). Land and woman lack participation in the life force, and life is severely threatened in this environ-

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ment: “The fields were like cups filled with a green liquid. . . . The mountains, far off but apparently near at hand, were like giants ready at any moment to reach out their hands and take the cups one by one and drink off the green liquid” (135). When, after a series of misfortunes, the Leander family moves west to Iowa, the trip there begins to transform Elsie: “The trip west on the railroad train jolted Elsie out of herself. In spite of her detached attitude toward life she became excited” (137). In the night, she “stretche[s] herself ” and yawn[s],’” which she has never done before (139). Her body loosens as she passes through “a new kind of land” (138). In this new environment, a striking contrast emerges between petty New England domesticity and Midwestern nature’s vastitude: whereas the fields “in this vast open place” (143) are like “the waters of a sea” (142), Elsie’s father seems, in contrast, petty as he works “with small tools, doing little things with infinite care, raising little vegetables. In the house her mother would crochet little tidies. [Elsie] herself would be small” (143). Yet a “large” feeling takes possession of her; Elsie begins to realize her place in a vast living reality that transcends the narrow confines of New England civilization (143). The Iowa plowmen, to Elsie, become fertility gods of sorts; she is fascinated by their connection to the life force as they, in obviously sexual imagery, plow the fertile earth: “A young man who drove six horses came directly toward her. She was fascinated. The breasts of the horses as they came forward with bowed heads seemed like the breasts of giants. The soft spring air that lay over the fields was also like a sea. The horses were giants walking on the floor of the sea. . . . The young man who drove them was also a giant” (143). Submerged in a sea of air and earth, in the vastness of the living natural world, the gigantic hard-breasted horses and plowmen represent sexual potency, the sensual-spiritual mystery of life. In contrast to the smallness of her family’s mode of living, Elsie here finds something of larger significance, life connected with cosmic realities and yet intensely concrete and, thus, encounterable. The corn, in August, grows into a veritable corn-forest, and to Elsie, the “mysteriously beautiful” cornrows become “warm passageways running out into life” (145). Sensing a deeper life in the world of nature, a mysterious spiritual reality, Elsie runs out into the corn in order to be born again: “Elsie ran into the vastness of the cornfields filled with but one desire. She wanted to get out of her life and into some new and sweeter life she felt must be hidden away somewhere in the fields” (154–55). As she runs through the corn, her hair “becomes unloosed and f[alls] down over her shoulders,” and “her cheeks become flushed,” and, though thirty-five years old, she looks like a “young girl” (155). The front of her dress is torn and her breasts are exposed, the yellow corn pollen makes “a golden crown about



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her head,” and her dress becomes soiled (155). When she finally stops running and throws herself on the ground, she experiences a surrender and a release that, like her frantic, disheveling race, has a highly sexual quality. In this moment of deep peace, Elsie is torn away “from her past and the past of her people”; she is free from New England (156). When Elsie sees her Iowa-bred cousin Elizabeth kissing a young plowman in the cornfield, she throws herself on the ground face downward and presses her lips into the dust, and her “tense hands gras[p] one of the corn stalks,” a fairly obvious phallic symbol. And then she is revisited by the voices of unborn children, the children she has longed to have. It is her moment of sexual epiphany, of acknowledging the mysterious life force within her. A thunderstorm washes over her, and she heeds not her parents’ calling to her through nature’s mighty roar with their “thin voices” from the house; she is purged by Midwestern nature, and New England no longer has a hold on her (160). The allegorical vision of the Middle West’s role in America’s spiritual salvation is complete. Images of Midwestern nature-sacramentalism versus post-Puritan New England abstractionism abound throughout Anderson’s poetry, fiction, memoirs, and theoretical works—to him, this Midwestern potential for a sacramental renewal of American culture is a core theme. Thus, for instance, John Webster, the protagonist of Many Marriages (1923), decides against any further participation in Midwestern industrialism and instead, with devotional candles and a framed picture of Mary, builds a shrine to the Virgin on his bedroom dresser (85). Before long, he converts his daughter to the cult of the Virgin, and in doing so, he is inspired by reminiscences of old cellars redolent with the produce of the Wisconsin countryside; and thus, also, Midwestern farm work goes hand in hand with a sexual and spiritual awakening in one of Anderson’s longest stories, “An Ohio Pagan” (1923), which was originally conceived as a novel about a new Midwestern sacramental paganism. And yet, this religious significance of the Midwestern landscape has not been subjected to any larger-scale systematic critical investigation. The theme is prevalent not just in Anderson’s works, but in those of a host of other Midwestern modernists as well; one can justifiably speak of a movement of sorts, a tradition of viewing the Midwestern land as a site for American culture’s sacramental rejuvenation. While few are as explicitly programmatic as Anderson, similar themes and perspectives are evident in a large number of other Midwestern modernists, including, among others, Willa Cather, Edgar Lee Masters, Floyd Dell, Carl Sandburg, Sinclair Lewis, Glenway Wescott, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Louis Bromfield, Ole Edvart Rölvaag, August

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Derleth, Herbert Quick, Roger Sergel, Josephine Herbst, Bess Streeter Aldrich, Margaret Wilson, Phil Stong, Marquis Childs, Josephine Donovan, Josephine Johnson, Carl Van Vechten, and Ruth Suckow. Three of these authors—Cather, Fitzgerald, and Suckow—are covered in some depth in the final chapters of this book, yet, even with a brief survey of some of the remaining writers, one can already establish some important thematic and visionary commonalities that define the Midwestern tradition under investigation. The following overview of three Midwestern authors and their main works may demonstrate the reality of the Midwestern tradition that this book assumes. This tradition centers on the notion that Protestantism has led to an abstract, deadening, systematicity in Western thought, that a sacramental approach to Being is the only means of restoring presence and substance to Western experience, and that the Middle West has been a particularly striking arena for the struggle of a natural, substantive sacramentalism against a highly artificial “literalism.” The special intensity of the Midwestern version of this struggle is largely due to the perceived fact that in this region a rigid, anti-sensual, Protestant-derived culture was planted upon the most luscious and vital of landscapes. Catholic as well as pagan imagery, references, and trappings form part of this anti-Protestant Midwestern sacramental tradition, and Adams’s Virgin makes its occasional explicit appearance. The three writers selected to illustrate the nature of this tradition, and to demonstrate its validity as a critical category, are Masters, who with his 1916 Spoon River Anthology brought national attention to the Chicago Renaissance, which was the spawning ground of a self-consciously Midwestern modernism, and who set the tone for all those Midwestern writers who were emerging at the time, including Anderson; Dell, who mentored Anderson and was a center of critical and popular attention during Midwestern literature’s most fertile decade, the 1920s; and Louis Bromfield, of a slightly younger generation, who began writing in the mid-1920s and carried the Midwestern tradition over into the 1930s. All three are unique, critically acclaimed, complex, and highly representative figures of the modernist tradition, which they here function to help outline. One of Anderson’s immediate predecessors, and one of the fathers of the brand of Midwestern modernism that flourished through the 1930s, is Masters, whose 1916 Spoon River Anthology galvanized the literary scene and inspired Anderson’s masterpiece Winesburg, Ohio (1919). In simple prose poems, the lives of the residents of Spoon River, Illinois, modeled after Masters’s Illinois hometowns of Petersburg and Lewistown, are summed up by the deceased and buried residents themselves. Many, in their life on Earth, were enamored of nature but tortured by



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a society that has little real human empathy and is founded on superficial notions of respectability. The classic conflict between Midwestern nature and a highly artificial society imported from New England is, thus, present. In a 1927 article for the Commonweal, Masters writes of the New Englanders that dominate his Illinois hometowns as “hard, dry, thrifty Calvinists” and makes his dislike of them apparent (qtd. in Hallwas 9). In Across Spoon River, as John Hallwas notes, “Masters asserts that the cultural environment in [New England–dominated] Lewistown was ‘calculated to poison, to pervert, and even to kill a sensitive nature’” (62). To Masters, the New England-derived culture of the Middle West is unnatural in the true sense of the word; in its systematic, literalist, and categorical approach to life, it goes against the spiritual realities manifested in all of nature and also in human nature. Certainly, prominent representatives of nineteenth-century New England culture, such as Thoreau and Emerson, would find Masters’s attribution of stifling, insensitive coldness to that culture rather surprising, at least were it applied to them and their tradition, but, of course, unlike Anderson, Masters is merely targeting the average Yankee commoner full of narrow principles, not the great poets and philosophers of the region. What Anderson and Masters do have in common, however, is their suspicion of all things even remotely traceable to a Calvinist heritage. Both perceive a generally Calvinism-influenced New England mindset at work in Midwestern society, and both reject it as spiritually unwholesome, with Anderson focusing on representative New England thinkers and Masters on the more plebeian and provincial variety of New Englander. Because of its stifling literalism and spiritual narrowness, Masters resents his native, New England–derived culture and holds to a Spinozistic nature mysticism, as elucidated by a 1926 interview quoted by Hallwas: “I have been called an atheist . . . but my atheism is that of Spinoza, in whom I find my profoundest satisfaction—and he was an all-God man, not an atheist. . . . I see just one force in the world, in the universe, and everything from chemical activity to spiritual aspiration is a manifestation of it” (21). This sacramental view of nature as expressive of a divine life force is alluded to throughout the Anthology. One particularly remarkable poem in this regard is “Arlo Will,” which asks the question of the mystic: “Have you walked with the wind in your ears / And the sunlight about you / And found it suddenly shine with an inner splendor?” The sacramental journey from concrete, physical experience to spiritual insight, to a transfiguring epiphany amounting to an entrance into heaven, is possible for the “strong of soul”: “Out of the mud many times / Before many doors of light, / Through many fields of splendor, / Where around your steps a soundless glory

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scatters / Like new-fallen snow, / Will you go through earth, O strong of soul, / And through unnumbered heavens / To the final flame!” The imposition of will on one’s environment, on human relations, and on one’s own nature can be fatal— experiential sensitivity to mysterious sacramental realities is more likely to lead to truth than rigid, categorical thinking. Thus, the warning in “Louise Smith” that the “will” is a poor gardener, a poor steward of living, natural realities: “Do not let the will play gardener to your soul” (149). The adultress Sarah Brown’s spiritual fate has nothing to do with categorical ideas of marriage and of right and wrong but instead is governed by her natural ability to experience an Other’s spirit through the flesh, to intuit spiritual mysteries sacramentally manifested in corporeal form. Embedded in nature, the deceased woman lies “under this pine tree. / The balmy air of spring whispers through the sweet grass, / The stars sparkle, the whippoorwill calls.” She tells her lover to comfort her husband “[w]ho broods upon what he calls our guilty love.” She concludes that “through the flesh / I won spirit, and through spirit, peace. / There is no marriage in heaven, / But there is love” (120). Since Sarah has found both her husband and her lover sacramentally, her sexual life has not been debased but has led to spiritual peace against the assumption of a categorically thinking Calvinistic community. Finally, Masters’s nature sacramentalism, in explicit defiance against New England Calvinist culture, takes on the trappings of Catholicism in the poem “Father Malloy.” The priest is buried “where holy ground is”—an allusion to the sacramentality of nature, which the priest understood, for he “did not seem to be ashamed of the flesh.” Communal rather than judgmental, Father Malloy was “human . . . / Taking a friendly glass sometimes with us, / Siding with us who would rescue Spoon River / From the coldness and dreariness of village morality.” While Protestants have “clouded vision,” the Catholic Church has “divined the heart,” and thus many were tempted to convert to the Roman Catholic faith (274). In Masters’s works, as in those of Anderson, Midwestern nature stands against a systematic, literalist mindset that is seen as deriving from Protestantism—and in its sacramental mystery, nature lends itself to being associated with Catholic or pseudo-Catholic beliefs and concepts. A similar vision informs the writings of Illinoisan novelist, playwright, and theorist Floyd Dell, who achieved his one outstanding popular and critical success with Moon-Calf in 1920, the same year that Lewis’s Main Street burst on the scene, starting a literary vogue of Midwestern small-town novels. Dell’s novel revolves around what was for Midwestern novelists the most important sacramental experience—marriage and its physical consummation, sex. The novel’s protagonist



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bears a significant name—Felix Fay. He is a “fay” in the sense that he tends to occupy a dream world—that mode of consciousness is his response to the narrow and empty provinciality and conventionality of the Illinois small town where he grows up. Literature becomes his first great escape, and later, as a young man in an Iowa river town, he seeks to live that escape. Locating the emptiness of their culture in a literalist, stifling Protestantism, Felix and his friend Stephen make a determined and, paradoxically, literalist effort to live as “pagans” (102). Frequenting an ice-cream parlor on the town square, they order “champagne ice always. They did not particularly like the taste of it . . . [b]ut the magic of the name served their purpose. It was a symbol—understood mutually without explanation—of the pagan attitude toward life” (102). Meanwhile, as the young men indulge in the symbolic ice cream and discuss atheism, some young women try to flirt with them, but lost in their abstract discussions, the would-be pagans ignore them. They, thus, inadvertently mirror the very lack of substance and the very literalism they despise in their culture. Their deeply Protestant mentality becomes flagrantly evident when Stephen dreams of being a new Martin Luther. This Protestant turn of thought occurs when Felix and Stephen exit the ice-cream parlor and walk past First Baptist Church, failing to notice a pair of lovers who are using the church steps as a trysting place: “Felix looked and saw—as though the building were covered with gargoyles—a thousand fantastic and execrable shapes. . . . In this mild edifice where he had recited dull Sunday School lessons he saw all hatefulness and hypocrisy, all terrorism and tyranny summed up. ‘Some day,’ said Stephen softly, ‘some one will come along and do what Luther did at Wittenberg.’ ‘Theses!’ cried Felix” (103). It is ironic that in combating Protestant narrowness, the young men would dream of theses, of systematic, theoretical formulations, and identify with the igniter of Protestantism. The irony is heightened by the motif of the pair of lovers, who remind one of the real human connection Felix and Stephen in their contrived paganism have just ignored at the ice-cream parlor. It is clear that what Felix needs to learn is a substantive, experiential engagement with the real, tangible world; only then will he truly exit the abstract categorical Protestant culture he claims to shun. When Felix turns to writing poetry, he is transported by his art to a “realm of dreams,” which is inhabited by a shadowy, sexless muse: “[H]e was companioned by a shadow, soft and vague—a mere hint of whisper, so unobtrusive it was, of a being almost without sex as it was almost without existence, yet faintly breathing the perfume of girlhood—a delicate and perfect comradeship” (140). And yet, shadowy as the muse is, she keeps taking on a frighteningly real life of her

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own—she becomes the dreaded Adamsian Virgin: “She was [Atlantis’s] Virgin Queen and he her Harper. . . . And she leaned forward smiling, and said, ‘Kiss me!’ . . . She was all that he hated and feared and could not give up; she was reality, and pain, and heart-break, she was the world of difficulty and danger, of hope that turns to despair, of ambition that ends in failure. She was Life, mocking, malign, and alluring. ‘Kiss me!’” (142). The power of sex, of life, of male-female reciprocity, of intimate sensual-spiritual relationship, is the road to a fulfilled existence, not the world of intellect and abstraction, and Felix must reluctantly acknowledge this reality. He must learn to turn from the realm of pure ideality to the concrete, tangible manifestation of a mystery not easily categorized but accessed experientially; he must turn to a relational sacramentalism that only love for a woman will be able to teach him. The woman who does teach him this truth is Joyce.6 Felix’s attraction to her clearly transcends any easy categories in his mind: “‘I’m interested in you,’ he said. . . . She was silent. In that silence there was a revelation for him which he felt she shared—a moment of utter intimacy such as no words can give” (27). It is Joyce herself—her very core, transcending her individual parts and yet expressed in them—that Felix loves, and words, literal categories, cannot express the couple’s deep connection so that silence becomes appropriate to the moment. With its religious connotation, the word “revelation” highlights the spiritual and sacramental character of this moment while the scriptural associations of the word are debunked by the moment’s prevailing silence and explicit wordlessness. Joyce has access to her uncle’s cabin on a little sequestered island in the Mississippi River and, thus, becomes intimately associated with the river and with nature. In the context of the couple’s overtly domestic island idyll, Felix’s insistence on his contrived ideology of “free love” becomes particularly ridiculous; he does not believe in marriage as an institution and believes that promises of commitment are artificial and hypocritical, and yet he plays “marriage” with Joyce in their little nature-enveloped domestic sphere. When Joyce asks Felix whether he would choose between his “sweetheart” and his principles if forced to choose, Felix answers that he would choose his principles (286). He tragically fails to learn the lesson of going from the substance of experience and from the substance of being to theoretical conclusions rather than vice versa. In other words, literalism is competing with sacramentalism. Wistfully gazing at “the shimmer of moonlight-edged hair about [Joyce’s] face,” Felix “wish[es] that it was not his duty to preach to her,” but in the end, he remains deeply Protestant, a literalist—a preacher. To Joyce, giving oneself truly and, thus, permanently to an



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Other is the deepest yearning of human nature, and she does not argue ideologically but personally: “I want to belong to one person always—all of me, and for ever. If I should give myself to you, Felix, it would be a marriage to me. I would want to believe that it was for always” (299). In Joyce’s eyes, the institution of marriage arises out of human nature and is founded on a manifestly and experientially evident spiritual reality whether or not one is able to defend or explain the institution’s validity theoretically. Felix learns his lesson only after losing Joyce to another man, but he then does get married in the sequel to Moon-Calf, which is The Briary-Bush (1921). The Protestant, through his encounter with a closely nature-associated Virgin figure, does ultimately find his way to sacramentalism. The conflation of the Virgin, Woman, Midwestern nature, and sacramentalism in opposition to an ideological cluster centered around the dynamo (mechanical culture), abstraction, industrialism, literalism, and the New England tradition can be traced in any number of Midwestern works. Anderson is this vision’s programmatic prophetic voice, and perhaps his closest disciple is Louis Bromfield, who, therefore, shall serve as our third and concluding example of a Midwestern modernist in league with Andersonian sacramentalism. Bromfield, like Anderson a native Ohioan, shares the older writer’s interest in the history of the eastern fringe of the Middle West, which is the part of the region most thoroughly transformed by industrialism. In his autobiographically inspired fictional history of an Ohio family, The Farm (1933), Bromfield recounts how the pernicious influence of New England culture gradually ruins a most blessed and beautiful part of the Earth, and how possibilities for salvation remain in the exuberantly fecund natural world of Ohio. The first section of the book, “The Colonel,” portrays an old Maryland family patriarch entering the Ohio territory in the early nineteenth century in order to start a farm. Here he makes friends with a Jesuit priest about to leave for Mexico, abandoning Ohio to the Protestants: “And there were the settlers. They were fiercely Protestant. They came, nearly all of them, from Massachusetts and Connecticut. They were Puritan and New England. They suspected and hated Jesuits” (8). The Maryland Colonel agrees that New Englanders are the root of all evil: “He cherished New Englanders less than Father Duchesne himself. They were tradespeople and shopkeepers, interested only in making money and swindling one another and the rest of the country” (8). Fierce Protestantism and impersonal capitalism seem to be part of the same texture—we can see Max Weber lurking right around the corner. A culture of system rather than sacrament, of capitalism rather than Catholicism, is taking over the Midwest. As Father Duchesne puts it, the rich soil of the Midwest is being paved over by

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a cultural barrenness: “I am left in a barren spot, like a seed lodged in a rock from which the hurricane has torn all the soil. Who am I to defeat a whole race, a whole civilization? I am a Latin. This new country is lost to us. In a little while there will be . . . only shopkeepers where God is a tradesman’s god. In Mexico, it’s different” (9). Catholicism here is blatantly associated with nature, the soil, and Protestantism with a soil-eroding, petty, impersonal, despiritualized system. In fact, the whole American Utopia is based on Protestant unnaturalness and abstraction: “There is the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of man,” says the Jesuit. “The kingdoms of men are alike, whether they be republics or tyrannies” (10). The New Englanders seem like “ghost[s] in paradise” (12) because they impose an artificial order on the living Earth that has little to do with life as it really exists. It fills the Jesuit with sadness to lose a particularly fine country such as Ohio to the Protestants: “It was beautiful, mellow country, all low hills and pleasant wooded valleys, and the little swollen streams flowed between banks where the pussywillows were in flower and the tropical green of the skunk cabbages pushed through the brown of last year’s leaves. . . . [T]his was the kind of country to which [Father Duchesne] belonged—a country, gentle, smiling, well-watered and fertile, out of which man might make a new paradise if he were good and wise enough” (15–16). This landscape is deeply life-sustaining—well-watered, lush, green, and of a gentle, yielding topography, and the cycle of life is powerfully evoked in the image of the green of new vegetation breaking through the brown, nourishing layer of yesteryear’s vegetation. The wisdom necessary to make this land a “paradise” is exemplified by the Ferguson family descended from the old Colonel. Renouncing the Presbyterianism that through marriage had temporarily entered their family, they instead fall back on a grateful nature-inspired paganism that is more in keeping with their direct engagement with the bountiful natural world of Ohio. Thus the successor of the Colonel, family patriarch Jamie Ferguson, has a simple conviction that no priest or parson knew any more about God than himself, and so could tell him nothing, and he believed that Sunday morning spent in going about his farm did more good to his soul than sitting in any church. Yet he always had a genuine religious feeling compounded of a delight in nature and a respect for God as the mystery which stood behind nature. It was almost a pagan feeling which was associated with his fields and his cattle and which caused him to offer up a prayer of thanksgiving vaguely directed toward the heavens when he sat down to a vast meal surrounded by his children and grandchildren. (85)



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And, thus, we have almost a summary of Midwestern sacramentalism, of sex, nature, and relationship possessing inherent spiritual meaning that can only be accessed experientially and not via abstract doctrine; and insight can only result from spiritually sensitive engagement rather than from ideological conformity. As industrialism begins to ravish the Ohio county portrayed in The Farm, and as capitalism increasingly undermines traditional farms’ viability, nature remains a sacred site from the vantage point of which the narrator of this family history learns to perceive clearly the destructiveness of American culture and to perceive the mystery of life ignored by that culture. A similar vision pervades Bromfield’s earlier novel The Green Bay Tree (1924), and here one finds the motif of the Virgin important in Midwestern modernism; the sensual unwed mother Lily Shane proves the true Virgin, as opposed to her sister Irene, who becomes a nun and sublimates her sexuality in a flagrantly eroticized religious ecstasy rather than understanding that the Virgin stands for warm, relational, organic motherhood and not for abstinence and denial of nature. Lily is intimately associated with the Shane family’s lush garden full of the pagan statues of Greek gods—a garden emblematic of Midwestern sacramental paganism. One of the novel’s most significant statements about Lily is that “amid the others who took their pleasures so seriously, she was a bacchante, pagan, utterly abandoned” (112). Irene, who bears a striking similarity to her anti-Catholic Presbyterian spinster aunt Eva Barr, forces herself into an ideological, self-denying, unnatural mode of living that is the very opposite of Lily’s pagan abandonment to the natural mysteries of the world. The two fundamentally different sisters’ final breach of relationship occurs when a Ukrainian factory worker whom Irene has sought to educate into a positive leader for the proletariat becomes enamored of Lily, whom he recognizes as a true Woman, as opposed to Irene, who sees him and everybody abstractly, as allegorical figures in her ideological scheme. It is the true, sexual, pagan Virgin who proves the counterbalance to the ugly, encroaching industrialism that is ruining the pagan garden of the Shanes and enslaving Krylenko, the Ukrainian worker—it is not the kind of idealistic, technically pure Virgin represented by Irene. And thus, the same sacramental, Catholic-inspired but largely pagan mysticism weaves itself through many a modernist Midwestern text and anchors itself in a vision of Midwestern nature as a spiritually restorative site and as an antidote to New England Protestant capitalist culture. Many aspects of this discussion, such as the themes of Puritanism, sacramentalism, and nature vs. culture, have been touched upon in one way or another by various critics of Midwestern authors. However, none have discussed in depth a

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Midwestern modernist tradition centered on the sacramentality of Midwestern nature. Critics have acknowledged the grappling with the pastoral myth evident in much of Midwestern literature, they have identified women characters as goddess, virgin, or redeemer figures, and they have, to some extent, investigated Midwestern authors’ concerns with communion and sacramental communication, and yet the formulation of an anti-Puritan neo-sacramentalism based on the Midwestern land as the core of a regional modernist literary movement has not been explored previously at any length. Nonetheless, some important insights have been uncovered by previous critics, and these have significantly contributed to the discussion at hand. Particularly, Thomas Wetzel’s dissertation “A Graveyard for the Midwest: Sherwood Anderson, Søren Kierkegaard, and the Sacred in Midwestern Literature” (2000) has delineated some of the sacramentalism inherent in Anderson’s work. While Wetzel is somewhat unconvincing in portraying late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Midwestern culture as deeply imbued with Kierkegaardianism (he focuses heavily on Scandinavian immigrant communities and on strongly Scandinavian areas such as Minnesota, subcultures of which Anderson did not form a part), he still demonstrates that Kierkegaardian theology provides a useful tool for understanding the nuances of Anderson’s works. For instance, Wetzel relates Anderson’s evident distrust of abstractions, rigid categories, and clear-cut ideas to the Kierkegaardian belief that indirect communication is essential because it avoids freezing reality in time. Since “the individual, unlike history or pure theory, is in the process of existing” (152), “any communication about human existence as human existence must itself become indirect or negative communication—communication that itself takes on the process quality found in the rest of the individual’s life” (153). In other words, the process-nature of human life demands a form of communication that is itself process-oriented rather than centered on static categorical formulations, which can never really be true to life as it is. This process-oriented, indirect form of communication is likened by Kierkegaard to transubstantiation, the mystical changing of the communion bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ, and, thus, Wetzel explains, “As with transubstantiation, such communication is sacramental. The sacraments are efficacious signs of grace; in other words, they not only point to the workings of grace in the world, but they confer grace in one’s participation in them. . . . Analogously, indirect communication not only unveils the hidden nature of the individual . . . but it also makes present that nature” (155). Just as in Catholic doctrine the elements of communion do not merely stand for an abstract truth but become a personal presence in which the individual communicant can participate physically as well



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as spiritually, so indirect communication conveys an individual’s personal presence with a certain concrete fullness and invites another to share in that presence, rather than merely pronouncing truths. While a “pure immediacy” of communication is impossible (180), sacramentally mediated relationship is possible, that is, relationship mediated by concrete and simple actions, gestures, words, or objects that convey “real presence” without trying to capture all that they convey in any explicit or categorical sense: “The individual in the religious sphere attempts to enter fully into the particularity of his or her existence. Kierkegaard rejects the idea of supernatural ‘epiphanies,’ experiences that break into the everyday from beyond with some mystical revelation. . . . Kierkegaard instead accepts a more Joycean sense of epiphany: knowledge, insight, or wisdom distilled from direct involvement with the world” (182). Such a direct, purposive, and open “involvement with the world” is what is missing in the lives of many of Anderson’s grotesques who cling to absolute, categorical facts rather than apprehending life sacramentally (Wetzel 109). Occasionally, sacramental communication does occur in Anderson’s works, and these are the redemptive moments that weave light into a dark texture. Though Wetzel is incisive about Anderson’s sacramental beliefs about communication, and while he briefly mentions the contrast between an anti-sensual culture and a highly sensual land (9), he does not focus on the particular attachment of Anderson’s sacramental vision to the Midwestern land; and yet, for Midwestern modernists, the supremely fertile Midwestern land is the great fact of their region that serves as a primary inspiration for a self-consciously regional literature that hopes to reenvision from its unique historical and geographical vantage point all of modern culture. It is the land that, in these writers’ vision, presents a debased culture with a corrective foil; both the culture (Puritan-derived American materialism) and the land (mythically pastoral, settled relatively recently, the most fertile on Earth) are unique to the Middle West. The sacramental, relational, and anti-categorical vision distilled from the clash between the Midwestern land and Midwestern society is the regional literary tradition’s contribution to the modernist quest for a new cultural wholeness. Furthermore, in relying on Kierkegaard for his framework, Wetzel largely ignores the self-consciously pseudo-Catholic trappings of the Midwestern modernists’ anti-Puritan vision, though, with Kierkegaard, he does employ the image of the Eucharist;7 yet, for example, the Virgin and Midwestern authors’ frequent and explicit anti-Protestant references have little place in his discussion. He also spends little time linking Anderson to a sacramentally oriented Midwestern

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tradition to which he alludes but which he does not explore in detail beyond Anderson himself, and which he links, somewhat questionably, to a culturally pervasive Kierkegaardian rather than to the more likely Adamsian disillusionment with Protestant culture. Similarly focused on sacramentalism in Anderson is Terrell L. Tebbetts, who argues that the grotesque, distorted characters in Winesburg, Ohio have as their central spiritual problem the rejection of incarnate life, that is, life “in the flesh,” for the sake of a boundless romanticism: “One step to authentic incarnate life, it must be concluded, is recognizing spirit and flesh as both distinct and, at the same time, related and complementary qualities” (133); he sees Winesburg’s central character George Willard as maturing because he learns to accept his limits and learns to live with uncertainty: “This uncertainty marks George’s understanding; the failures who merely experience the limitations of incarnation but never understand and accept them, alternately rebelling against the limitations or vainly proceeding as if they did not exist, always act with certainty” (138). Once more, Anderson’s sacramentalism and questioning of romantic idealism have been identified but not extensively linked to a vision of Midwestern nature or to a regional literary tradition that centers on the land. Of those critics that do address the issue of nature in Anderson’s writings, Glen A. Love is perhaps the most important. In “Winesburg, Ohio and the Rhetoric of Silence” (1968), Love sees nature in Anderson’s works as a realm of “purposeful silence” (53) whose organic, meaningful unfolding contrasts with the “sterile repetitiveness of a machine” (47). In “Horses or Men: Primitive and Pastoral Elements in Sherwood Anderson” (1976), Love notes that Anderson is not a primitivist but advocates a fruitful holistic symbiosis of spirit and flesh that mirrors the pastoral ideal of a middle landscape between city and wilderness. While the spiritual significance of nature is acknowledged, it is not linked to a larger, complex neosacramental movement designed to use a regional experience for the sake of correcting the spiritual development of Western culture since the Reformation. The same holds true for gender analyses of Anderson’s writings; while critics see Anderson upholding the spiritual importance of “feminine” values such as relational openness, acceptance of mystery, trust, and a direct connection to the mysteries of the organic world (e.g. Sally Adair Rigsbee, Marc C. Conner, and Mark Whalan), and while Martin Bidney persuasively formulates Anderson’s holistic, balanced ideal of androgyny, there seems to be no extensive discussion of how the female principle, sacramentalism, and the Midwestern land have all conjointly formed a spiritual vision shared by many early twentieth-century



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Midwestern authors. The crux of this book’s discussion is to establish the cultural meaning of a region and its land within the religious and cultural discourses of its time as these are reflected in a literary tradition that was both critically acclaimed and widely popular. Such a discussion is a missing piece in understanding the great American project of seeking to negotiate meaning in the strange clash between the continent’s primeval natural world and the nation’s rapidly evolving technological-industrial culture—to determine what truth might be distilled amidst the failure of America’s old Utopian pastoral dream. This discussion also provides a new window on international modernism’s great project of restoring to a spiritually fragmented world a credible, holistic vision: while throughout Western modernism a turn to sex, to nature, to primitivism or other potentially machineculture-transcendent sites of wholeness are common, Midwestern modernism organizes its new holism in a particular manner directly influenced by regional experience, history, and topography.

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2 Protestantism, Literalism, and the Sacramental Body of the Midwest

Now in the midst of the broken waters of my civilization rhythm begins. Clear above the flood I raise my ringing voice. In the disorder and darkness of the night, in the wind and the washing waves, I shout to my brothers—lost in the flood. —from “Song of Industrial America” by Sherwood Anderson, Mid-American Chants I awoke and the bands that bind me were broken. I was determined to bring love into the hearts of my people. The sacred vessel was put into my hands and I ran with it into the fields. In the long cornfields the sacred vessel is set up. —from “The Cornfields” by Sherwood Anderson, Mid-American Chants

Midwestern Regionality and America’s Pastoral Dream “Who hasn’t heard the region referred to as ‘fly-over country’?” asks Jon Gjerde in his essay discussing the “middleness” of the Midwest (186), its cultural status as the vaguely defined, indistinct “middle” of the nation where various far more distinct regions of the country intersect on a featureless plain inhabited by people who lead equally featureless, statistically average, middle-class lives. Thus, too, in the same collection of essays, The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History (2001), Andrew R. L. Cayton observes: Whether or not internalization of conflict, the repression of identity, is at the heart of Midwestern culture, the fact remains that at no point in its history have either – 46 –



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its residents or its critics developed a discourse of regionality. Which is, in the end, the major reason that Midwestern studies do not flourish. Regional identity never took root in the region. It never became a significant way of thinking. Indeed, since the burden of life in the Midwest has been to deny any kind of difference, the whole notion of asserting a unique or peculiar configuration of people and environment contradicts its unarticulated sense of regional identity. (158)

Cayton points out that the Midwest, as the nation’s heartland, “so thoroughly embodied the fictions of the national discourse that there was no sense of regional isolation” (157). While it is certainly true that the Midwest has in some sense functioned as an “anti-region” in American cultural discourse, as a bland place where America’s overall national values and traits are the primary characteristics of a culturally very leveled and standardized life, it is also true that at various times in its history, the Midwestern scene has been experienced and discussed as a particularly intense dramatization of America’s deepest conflicts and, thus, as a place, not really of blandness, but of rivetingly meaningful struggles and tensions, and a place of both enervating beauty as well as debilitating oppressiveness. If conflict has been “internalized” in the Midwest, as Cayton suggests, then the region’s surface blandness may be the very mark of its embedded drama. If this Midwest is the “heart” of the nation, it is so not just in the sense of blandness and standardized “normalcy,” but also in the at least superficially conflicting sense of existential turmoil; it is the site of the nation’s very heartbeat, the place where big dreams are dreamt, crushed, and reenvisioned, a place where truth is defined in opposite, clashing ways, a spiritual battlefield. The particular historical Midwestern discourse with which this study concerns itself is the striking flourishing of a distinctly Midwestern literature in the period between the two World Wars. Certainly, this flowering had been prepared in the preceding decades, as far back as the 1870s, when, in 1871, Indiana writer Edward Eggleston published his novel The Hoosier School-Master, which for the first time interested a wide reading public in the details of Midwestern life. It was followed by Maurice Thompson’s surprisingly complex and realistic short story collection Hoosier Mosaics (1875), which refrains from idealizing the ague-ridden Indiana backwoods. By the 1880s, writers such as Illinoisan Joseph Kirkland and Missourian Edgar Watson Howe were translating urban-focused literary naturalism into Midwestern rural settings, casting a simultaneously critical and loving eye on the region’s realities, and Hamlin Garland, in the 1890s, poignantly deconstructed pastoral myths about the Midwestern countryside in his highly acclaimed and popular fiction, especially the short-story collection Main-Travelled Roads (1891).

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Finally, Theodore Dreiser, with his epic novel Sister Carrie (1900), provided a frank, unrestrained, naturalistic vision of the Midwestern urban jungle, specifically Chicago: at this point, an unflinchingly realistic Midwestern tradition of writing had taken shape. Then, set in motion by the disillusioning force of World War I, by the general upheaval of traditional social values in the 1920s, and by the culturally destabilizing increased mechanization of life, Midwestern literature took a new turn. Going beyond naturalistic depictions of life, this literature actively sought to locate an existential, spiritual anchor amidst what seemed like the final disintegration of the already long-battered American dream. This dream, hardly credible in a more and more urbanized society, involved the notion of nature and civilization combining in a symbiotic reciprocity and thereby fostering a wholesome, free, and organically structured society based on natural principles and enabling people to lead fully realized lives. And this brings us to the crux of our discussion: this American dream was felt to have been nearly captured in the traditional agrarian society of the Midwest, and its loss, its concrete as well as apparent spiritual depletion, was felt to be most keenly dramatized in the region that had come closest to realizing its golden promise. Many Midwestern authors writing in the 1920s and 1930s, such as Anderson, Cather, Bromfield, Suckow, Wescott, and Lewis, to name only a few, had been born from the 1870s to the 1890s and had experienced, each in his or her own subregionally distinct way,1 the Midwest’s shift to an industrial, mechanized, thoroughly capitalistic, and, in their eyes, sordidly dehumanized culture, either as witnesses of the process or as those born in its immediate wake. Now, in works set both in the late nineteenth century and in the interwar period, they wrestled with the questions of what went wrong and of what could be learned from such cultural disillusionment. The answer to the first question as to what went wrong is closely connected with the very nature of the dream that ended up failing. The nature of this dream, thus, requires some more explanation. Given its historical and geographic realities, America’s vision and dream of itself has, not surprisingly, been firmly bound up in the concrete fact of its land: an unfathomable extent of sparsely settled and hardly cultivated land made available to a highly advanced European civilization for which the Old Continent scarcely provided enough room. This historical situation was bound to trigger visions of a new beginning for (European) humanity and of an Edenic, garden-like state of existence supported by such plenitude of land. Scholars of the American garden myth tend to stress how a tired European literary mode, the unattainable



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Virgilian pastoral ideal, was revitalized by a perception of America as literally lending itself to the realization of what hitherto had been recognized as a myth. Thus, when Jim Burden, in the opening section of Cather’s My Ántonia (1918), observes about Nebraska, “There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made” (718), he is expressing about the nineteenth-century Midwest what had been felt by Europeans in the first three centuries and more after Columbus’s discovery about the American continent as a whole: here was the basic material of nations, still to be molded, and still malleable by the dreams and visions of humans, of which the sweetest were those of the garden and of paradise. Thus, Annette Kolodny observes the following in her pivotal 1975 study of the conception of the American land in female terms: Eden, Paradise, the Golden Age, and the idyllic garden, in short, all the backdrops for European literary pastoral, were subsumed in the image of an America promising material ease without labor or hardship, as opposed to the grinding poverty of previous European existence; a frank, free affectional life in which all might share in a primal and noncompetitive fraternity; a resurrection of the lost state of innocence that the adult abandons when he joins the world of competitive self-assertion; and all this possible because, at the deepest psychological level, the move to America was experienced as the daily reality of what has become its single dominating metaphor: regression from the cares of adult life and a return to the primal warmth of womb or breast in a feminine landscape. And when America finally produced a pastoral literature of its own, that literature hailed the essential femininity of the terrain in a way European pastoral never had, explored the historical consequences of its central metaphor in a way European pastoral had never dared, and, from the first, took its metaphors as literal truths. (6)

This kind of literalizing of the pastoral myth rings through the writings of early discoverers, such as Columbus himself, through that of early colonists, such as Robert Beverley, through the rhetoric of eighteenth-century immigration tracts, and through Early Republic treatises, poetry, fiction, and drama, of which works of literature mainly those remain in the canon that problematize the pastoral idea of America, such as, perhaps most notably, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823).2 Thomas Jefferson, of course, in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), provided a crucial formulation of the American pastoral, a vision we still today label “Jeffersonianism”: “But we have an immensity of land courting the industry

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of the husbandman. . . . Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which He keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth” (730). Thus, manufactories are to be left in Europe, where land is scarce and the possibilities for husbandry are limited (730). In the Early Republic, human improvement of the landscape was still believed to be containable within the bounds of the pastoral “middle landscape” in which the balance between civilization and nature proves ideal: thus, for instance, Jefferson was able to believe that America’s immensity of land would help forestall almost indefinitely the need for any European-style urbanization or industrialization. Critic Leo Marx observes about that other writer of the Early Republic who gave decisive expression to the American pastoral ideal, namely J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, that “we may well ask [how he] reconcile[d] his admiration for roads, bridges, fair cities and improvements of all sorts with the bucolic ideal? What did he think would happen when the new society approached that delicate point of equilibrium beyond which further change, which is to say, further departure from nature, would be dangerous?” (114–15). The answer perceived by Marx (and his successor in this field of inquiry, Kolodny, would agree) is that pastoralists like Crèvecoeur, who sees the absence of large-scale manufacturing as a guarantee of America’s continued healthy pastoral development, are “obviously . . . unaware of any necessary relation between large-scale manufacturing and changing social institutions, the connections between technology and economic development, and the thrust of deprived people for a higher living standard, which we take for granted, did not exist for him; as he thinks about America’s future, it involves nothing of that irreversible and accelerating process of change now regarded as the very powerhouse of history” (115). What gives early-twentieth-century American writers such a different perspective is that industrialization and mechanization have happened, and the “middle landscape” has effectively vanished even in places where corn still grows, as powerfully evoked in this passage from Sherwood Anderson’s novel Poor White (1920): The car ran down the hill road from the Butterworth farm, through a dozen residence streets in town and then out upon the long, straight roads in the rich, flat country to the north. . . . Its great nose pushed through the troubled air of the quiet roads, frightening horses, breaking the silence with its persistent purring, drowning the song of the insects. The headlights also disturbed the slumbers of



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the night. They flashed into barnyards where fowls slept on the lower branches of trees, played on the sides of barns, sent the cattle in the fields galloping away into darkness, and frightened horribly the wild things, the red squirrels and chipmunks that live in wayside fences in the Ohio country. Clara hated the machine and began to hate all machines. (326)

As Kolodny notes a desire to regress from adult life back to a kind of prenatal womb-like state, so Marx notes an impulse in American pastoralism that sees “America as the ‘great asylum,’ a ‘refuge’ from Europe, from power struggles, politics, or, in our sense of the word, from history itself ” (116). The “idyllic Virgilian landscape” shines through in, for example, Crèvecoeur’s “idealized picture of America. It is a place apart, secluded from the world—a peaceful, lovely, classless, bountiful pasture” (116). It is this actual belief in the literal escape from history, a literal return to a prelapsarian garden state of sorts,3 that has been at the core of America’s national dream and the failure of which proved very troubling to those writers born in the region in which disillusionment was delayed, in which the pastoral promise seemed within reach until very late in the nineteenth century, and where the impact of technology and industrialization became a pervasive fact of life even in relatively rural regions only during these authors’ late-nineteenthcentury childhoods (or the period immediately preceding). The literal realization of the myth had failed—now its validity, and the whole issue of literalism in general, became a major point of debate. Had the old Jeffersonians failed to take into account the fallenness of the world? Had they ignored the human condition and, therefore, failed to produce a communal model actually attainable? Had they taken the old human dream of paradise and failed to match it against the real, limiting, difficult, and recalcitrant complexity of actual existence? How could a dream take root if it shunned the Earth—if it retained its theoretical character, unresponsive to the real world? The mindset that human reason could shape the Earth according to rational theories—such a top-down approach, conforming the world to a letter, was bound to lead to defeat. A bottom-up movement was needed as a corrective. This from-the-bottom-upwards dynamic by which insight and wholeness are gained is a major theme in Midwestern modernist literature. It is this essentially sacramental concern of Midwestern writers that, for instance, underlies Wisconsin author Glenway Wescott’s critique of the “ideal prose” religion that conquered the Middle Western frontier portrayed in his novel The Grandmothers (1927): “[It] was a religion of ideal prose; all the beauty it had was the elegance of a perfect law, a Napoleonic code. It deified Jesus, but

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deified Him as a social leader and teacher martyred for His virtue” (240). The Midwestern Jesus is not so much a person to whom the believer can relate but a virtuous abstraction out of which the earthly life and divine substance have died. Likewise, the land and the life upon it have been subjected to an abstract notion—and a life-denying culture has been the result.

Protestantism, Literalism, and the Loss of Sacramental Wholeness Before addressing the particular Midwestern experience of the American dream and its failure in more depth, I shall further elaborate what precisely seemed inherently flawed about this dream in the first place. An answer has already been hinted at: of course, an actual escape from history is not humanly possible, and to believe in the possibility of a technologically advanced Western nation remaining in a kind of pastoral stasis rather than being challenged by the rapid changes of modernity is a scenario the unlikelihood of which is patently evident to any contemporary. And yet, it is fruitful to go beyond this, from a twenty-first-century perspective, rather obvious explanation and look more closely at the issue of the literal quality of the American pastoral, a literalism that is at the heart of what a generation of Midwestern modernists found troubling about the American dream and about its intensified Midwestern version. This frustration reverberates throughout Midwestern literature of the period, for instance, in Carl Sandburg’s poetry, where the American pastoral has become the site of a merely economic and quantitative and, thus, literally apprehensible ideality. In the Sandburg poem “Improved Farmland,” “hogs grunt over the fodder crops” and it is hard “to remember once it had a great singing family of trees” (305), and in the poem “New Farm Tractor,” “a bucket of oil and a can of grease” have replaced “your hay and oats” and where, for the sake of “rear axles [that] hold the kick of twenty Missouri jackasses . . . it’s good-by now / to leather reins and the songs of the old mule skinners” (258). In both poems, song is opposed to utility. Midwestern writers see this gross, degrading, capitalistic/ industrial fixation on quantifiable economic benefit, in utter disregard of beauty, as the latter-day, degenerate result of the search for a literal, physical realization of the Edenic myth and human pastoral dream. In seeking to get rid of the postlapsarian curse of sweat and tears, of allowing the human-made alternate reality of technology to reshape life, in seeking to progress literally to a millennial state of a physically perfected mode of existence, we have ruined ourselves spiritually and



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lost a deeper sort of Eden, which is the Eden of spiritual harmony and balance. The closest we can come to that kind of harmony with our world is a successful adjustment to that world’s deeper spiritual realities, which can only be accessed experientially, and among which realities is working in the sweat of one’s brow, that is, submitting oneself to the fallenness of the world. Accepting the curse is part of achieving a harmony of sorts with our world, and no perfectionism, no literalization of human dreams, can ever bring us the wholeness we crave.4 And, thus, in investigating the spiritual issues involved in Midwestern authors’ critique of “literalism,” we need to turn our attention to some theological developments in Western history that happened to coincide with the discovery of America and shaped, in particular, the cultural development of the United States. “The modern man is in general, even with the best will, unable to give religious ideas a significance for culture and national character which they deserve,” writes Max Weber in his famous study of how Protestantism gave rise to modern capitalism (183); interestingly, his observation does not necessarily hold true for early-twentieth-century Midwestern writers, who very much identified Protestantism, and more particularly Calvinism, as being at the root of seemingly secular problems that on the surface have little to do with religious doctrine or theology. What was at stake for these writers, mainly, was a healthy, holistic way of reading the world: a Protestant literalistic epistemology seemed to have resulted in unintended gross materialism; despiritualized, quantitatively oriented scientism; dehumanizing and exploitive industrialism; and in a compulsive progressivism unable to confront evil and the brokenness of the world. That such a critique would lead back into the direction of the sacramental worldview preceding scientism and literalism is not surprising. It is, thus, worthwhile to cast a brief glance at the profound shift in Western culture that involved a transition from a symbolic to a scientific conception of the universe. In his comprehensive study of precisely that shift, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (1998), Peter Harrison fittingly begins with a delineation of the medieval worldview and epistemology that was to be replaced. In this worldview, influenced by Platonism, natural, visible realities are believed to resemble invisible, spiritual patterns (Harrison 15); words referring to the natural, visible world are not polysemous, i.e., multiple in meaning, in themselves, but the concrete objects to which they refer contain a multiplicity of spiritual allegorical meanings (28). A complex dynamic emerges in which the concrete, literal meaning of Scripture’s words delimits the allegorical meanings of which visible, natural objects are capable while, nonetheless, leaving open a multiplicity of meanings (29).

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Literal reality is fully real, and yet, sheer literalism, the denial of the complex higher reference of signs, is condemned as idolatry of the sign,5 and so we find a sound basis for the following claim made by David Lyle Jeffrey in his significant study of Christianity’s relation to literary culture, The People of the Book (1996), a claim concerning literary theories throughout time that one might validly describe as Christian: One may doubt that any of these various theorists would have been content to be described as “logocentrists.”[6] Rather, they might well have thought the term to involve a serious misconstruction, imagining with Augustine that the function of language is preeminently to be a means of expressing intention, and that meaning resides thus not in the word but in the person. They might well have thought, too, that the common element in their positions which could seem polar to nihilism was not an apotheosis of the verbal construct but a primary affirmation of Being. (4)

In other words, the Church Fathers, such as Augustine, do not attempt to portray words themselves as divine and absolute; rather, they see them as imperfect but indispensably useful means for expressing the perfect meaning intended by the perfect Being known as God. It is the divine Author of both Scripture and nature whose Person we are led back to by means of concrete signs: the world and the language of Scripture are filled with divine intention and constitute divine communication, and the physical realm as well as Scripture speak to us intelligibly, leading us to Presence, to Being, to God. Along similar lines, Louis Dupré, in his discussion of the Western world’s cultural-historical “passage to modernity” during the Renaissance and post-Reformation eras, notes that the medieval cosmos was incarnational,7 a physical expression of God, and that signs possessed “inexhaustible expressiveness” because they embodied spiritual reality, that is, were animated by God and participated in His Being without defining or categorizing Him. In the medieval worldview, nature is “intrinsically symbolic,” its “symbolic potential constitut[ing] its very essence.” Therefore, Nature’s symbolism, much like the human body, does not denote a “clear idea,” some definite abstract, formulaic meaning, but expresses actual being, the creature’s as well as the Creator’s mysterious and ultimately indefinable presence—“hence, unlike the precisely conceived metaphors of modern symbolism, symbols display a much looser and less definitive character” (Dupré 36). Natural symbols are not mere letters from which one can build a definite concept but contain a rich and complex personal spiritual Presence, and it is this



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Being, this Presence, in which truth ultimately resides rather than in the signs themselves: thus, “a merely literal reading of nature [or texts] would have fallen far short of full understanding” (Dupré 3). How then did it arise, the logocentrism, i.e., abstract, definition-oriented “word-centeredness,” and literalism so decried by the Midwestern authors we shall discuss? Harrison sees a profound shift occurring in the twelfth century, when due to increasing interest in understanding natural similitudes with spiritual realities, the study of nature became a more important theological endeavor. In order to ascertain more clearly what exactly the ancients had said about nature, the gradual development of textual criticism occurred, which cut through centuries of textual corruption and led to the unexpected result of inconsistencies and contradictions within and between traditionally revered texts (70). These flaws eroded the authority of the tradition, and facts drawn from direct physical observation became the standard by which to judge textual accuracy (Harrison 77). Eventually, however, due to humanist textual editing and to direct observation of nature,8 the authoritative literary context in which the meaning of natural phenomena had been securely intelligible breaks down: “The meanings of things [had] always [been] accessible through reference to a rich, literary tradition. Now, however, what had once been a coherent universal language was inundated by an influx of new and potentially unintelligible symbols. . . . The literary allusions, the etymologies, the morals, the emblematic significance—all were absent” (Harrison 91). In the context of these shifts, the objects to which language refers lose their actual referentiality and become merely their physical selves, and by implication, one might add to Harrison’s observations that language itself loses its ultimate reference: “A disturbing implication of this development was that the purportedly natural representative functions of living things were in fact merely conventional, that the things of nature bore no universal, God-given, significance, but instead had been arbitrarily allocated meanings by human agents” (91). The split that had occurred between texts and nature, between words and things, with allegory remaining a literary device only and no longer functioning as an epistemological tool, led to, in essence, a turning away from nature in the sphere of religion (92). The humanist scholars had sought sound, canonical textual editions, faithful to original sources, and now, Protestantism turned to an epistemology “founded solely on the authority of canonical texts . . . constructing a new exegetical science which could find no place for the symbolic interpretation of the book of nature” (92). The Church itself, as a living, emblematically significant manifestation of spiritual reality, as the Body of Christ, loses its authority, and its tradition is not seen as binding, but rather, Scripture, the sacred text, becomes the all-important

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yardstick and standard: “The authority of the church, according to Calvin, derives from the authority of scripture, and not the reverse” (Harrison 95). Since natural, emblematic revelation was no longer possible and since humanist textual criticism had created a consciousness for texts having a history and an awareness of how commentators often corrupted original intentions, the Bible became the sole and “final court of appeal on matters of religious doctrine” and, thus, “it would need to be interpreted in a way which reduced ambiguities and multiple meanings. Only a literal method, or more strictly a method which allowed but a single meaning to be assigned to each passage of scripture, could serve this purpose” (113). For this reason, reformers insisted upon the “literal sense, grammatical sense, historical sense, plain sense” (111). So succinctly does Harrison sum up the transition from a symbolic worldview to a modern, scientific one as set in motion by this Protestant hermeneutic that the passage is worth quoting at length: The Protestant insistence on the literal sense of canonical texts has far-reaching, if unintended, consequences. . . . To insist now that texts be read literally was to cut short a potentially endless chain of references in which words referred to things, and things in turn referred to other things. A literal reading of scripture was one in which the previously open-ended process of deriving a series of references from a single word was terminated once a word had performed its basic task of referring to a thing. The assertion of the primacy of literal reading, in other words, entailed a new, non-symbolic conception of the nature of things. . . . As an inevitable consequence of this way of reading texts nature would lose its meaning, and the vacuum created by this loss of intelligibility was gradually to be occupied by alternative accounts of the significance of natural things—those explanations which we regard as scientific. In the new science of things, objects were related mathematically, mechanically, causally, or ordered and classified according to categories other than those of resemblance. (114–15)

“Signifying powers” were now denied to natural objects, and to human artifacts as well—hence the Reformed iconoclasm (115). The traditional idea of the sacramentum as a “‘figure,’ ‘allegory,’ ‘enigma,’” was bound up with the old allegorical hermeneutic, and so, medieval sacramentalism was essentially dismissed. It is precisely this literalistic Protestant dismissal of a symbolic and sacramental approach to reality that the Midwestern writers concerned in this discussion felt had fundamentally deformed American culture, and we shall observe the way in which they seek a return to sacramentality.



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Protestantism and Capitalism In progressing from the broad panorama of Western history more closely toward the American scene, it is necessary to briefly survey how America’s early dominant version of Protestantism, namely Puritan Calvinism, helped foster a capitalistic, materialistic, and ultimately industrialist culture, and how these definitive American developments might be linked with the Protestant literalism at issue here. Without question, it is the aforementioned Max Weber who still a century after his seminal study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) is to be regarded as the primary authority on this topic. Weber argues that modern capitalism, a highly rationalized and systematized economic order centered on maximum acquisition, depends, in its origins, on an irrational ascetic ethos that posits accumulation and acquisition as an end in itself, of sorts, and is not content with the mere satisfaction of needs or even permissive toward the enjoyment of wealth. The Ur-capitalist, exemplified for Weber by Benjamin Franklin, “gets nothing out of his wealth for himself, except the irrational sense of having done his job well” (71). This mentality, “the spirit of capitalism,” is “what . . . seen from the view-point of personal happiness [is] so irrational about this sort of life, where a man exists for the sake of his business, instead of the reverse” (70). This ethos, according to Weber, seems irrational because it has been severed from its original religious context. Really, it is based on the Protestant idea of the calling, and much more so on its Calvinistic than its Lutheran version (86–87). The Calvinistic God is utterly transcendent, having preordained all worldly events from His heavenly throne, having chosen the elect and rejected the damned from eternity, and His image in humans thoroughly obscured by total depravity. Furthermore, he is unapproachable via the visible Church, which often includes the damned. Given this stark degree of divine transcendence, Early Modern Calvinistic believers were “fundamental[ly] antagonis[tic] to sensuous culture of all kinds” (Weber 105). They tended, in practice, to find that instead of immediate relation to a rather inaccessible God or to fellow believers with whom there is no clear and creditable sacramental bond, conscientious fulfillment of one’s duty in the scheme of Creation was the best expression of love for God and of brotherly love (Weber 103–08). For “the world exists to serve the glorification of God and for that purpose alone,” and fulfilling one’s role in this glorious design of Creation was, thus, of utmost importance to these Ur-Calvinists (Weber 108). Since the design of Creation is purposeful and rational, thus must be human social organization; and since all is purely for the glory of a transcendent God, no personal, fleshly,

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immanent interest is to enter into one’s social relationships: “Brotherly love, since it may only be practiced for the glory of God and not in the service of the flesh, is expressed in the first place in the fulfilment of daily tasks given by the lex naturae; and in the process this fulfilment assumes a peculiarly objective and impersonal character, that of service in the interest of the rational organization of our social environment” (Weber 108–09). Thus derives a powerful emphasis in Calvinism on “labour in the service of impersonal social usefulness [since it] appear[s] to promote the glory of God and hence must be willed by Him” (Weber 109). Further intensifying this sense of duty in a calling was the fear of damnation since one could not quite be certain whether one was one of the elect or not. The best remedy for this profound existential worry seemed a life tangibly manifesting elect status: “The community of the elect with their God could only take place and be perceptible to them in that God worked (operatur) through them and that they were conscious of it. That is, their action originated from the faith caused by God’s grace, and this faith in turn justified itself by the quality of that action” (Weber 113). Since the issue was that one’s very mode of existence ought to display elect identity, individual good deeds were not sufficient: “The God of Calvinism demanded of his believers not single good works, but a life of good works combined into a unified system. There was no place for the very human Catholic cycle of sin, repentance, atonement, release, followed by renewed sin. Nor was there any balance of merit for a life as a whole which could be adjusted by temporal punishments or the Churches’ means of grace” (Weber 117). And, thus, working in one’s place in Creation, working in one’s calling, becomes the foremost concern in the believer’s life: “Labour came to be considered in itself the end of life, ordained as such by God” (Weber 159). The systematization of the economic order, the frugal accumulation and reinvestment of wealth, the reliable, highly motivated labor force, and the organization of a system of specialized callings that was fostered by the religious influence of, to a degree, Protestantism at large, and much more strongly by Calvinism in particular, profoundly shaped the ethos and structure of much of European and certainly of Anglo-American culture. As Puritan and Calvinistic faith waned in Europe and the United States, its cultural and economic legacy continued: “[The capitalistic system] no longer needs the support of any religious forces. . . . [It] has become emancipated from its old supports” (Weber 72). And on a similar note, Weber adds later: “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. . . . [The economic order fostered by Calvinism] is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism . . . with irresistible force” (181).



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How, then, does this Calvinistic “spirit of capitalism” relate to the overall Protestant literalism the history of which Harrison has comprehensively analyzed? In respect to this question, one may note Weber’s emphasis on the non-relational and non-sacramental aspects of Calvinism—in fact, he remarks that “the complete elimination of salvation through the Church and the sacraments . . . was what formed the absolutely decisive difference [of Calvinism] from Catholicism” (104–05). With the concrete, immanent, natural, and human world, and even the visible Church, emptied of its sacramental significance, transcendence, in a sense, “takes over” in a rather world-external, super-imposing, and mechanical manner: rather than infusing the immanent world, rather than embodying itself, it becomes a grand, external dictate, an external scheme into which the individual must be fitted like a cog, and relationship gives way to system. Words no longer refer to presence and being, are no longer superseded by these: rather, they become imperatives, and abstraction, symbolic system, lays claim to the conformity of the concrete, which is an alien reality dichotomous to the imposed system. This, of course, is not necessarily a truthful description of the nature or effects of Calvinism, yet it is a possible impression one might derive from the comparatively non-sacramental and transcendental theology of Calvinism, and as shall become evident throughout this discussion, it is an impression that Midwestern writers of the 1920s and 1930s did derive. Whatever the proper assessment of Protestant theology ought to be, Protestant literalism and Puritan transcendentality were blamed for a secularized American culture in which abstract order, system, and a highly mechanical and materialistic worldview were dominant, a world of wellexplained physical interrelation and causality but largely devoid of meaning and signification. In this world, human identity, which includes the spiritual dimension and rests on a fusion of body and spirit, and all organic reality, that is, nature itself, thus all of Creation, were being oppressed, instrumentalized, subjected to some inhuman, impersonal, meaningless system ultimately fed by a diabolic obsession with power, the very epitome of the anti-relational and non-sacramental.

Blaming the Puritans: American Cultural Criticism in the Early Twentieth Century While this negative view of Puritanism’s effect on American culture will be evident in the works of fiction investigated in subsequent chapters of this discussion, it is, nonetheless, worthwhile to cite early twentieth-century cultural criticism exemplifying this widespread perception. Thus, Sherwood Anderson mentions in his

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“fictional autobiography” A Story Teller’s Story (1924) that he had been “deeply moved” by Van Wyck Brooks’s thoughts on American cultural development, and he also mentions another prominent New York cultural critic who became a friend and an influence, Waldo Frank (348). Anderson echoes explicitly what these critics have to say about Puritanism’s impact on America. After observing that men in factories tended to boast of their sexual potency because modern culture was increasingly depriving them of effectiveness as men, and that women were adopting an increasingly masculine identity because the modern age was depriving them of their ability to realize full womanhood, he identifies the following root cause of this phenomenon: “For two or three hundred years the western peoples had been in the grip of a thing called Puritanism. Mr. Brooks and Mr. Waldo Frank . . . had declared that industrialism was a natural outgrowth of Puritanism, that having renounced life for themselves the Puritans were determined to kill life in others” (376).9 He immediately transitions to his sense of misunderstood purity in light of the accusations of sexual perversion leveled against him because of his frank fictional treatment of sexual problems and neuroses, implying that Puritanism was still stifling art and the lives of people in 1920s America. Finally, he concludes the chapter by citing another great American cultural critic, Henry Adams: “The true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of the feelings; he read the letter, but he never felt the law. Before this historic chasm, a mind like that of Adams felt itself helpless; he turned from the virgin to the dynamo as though he were a Branley coherer. . . . An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist” (378–79). Thus we see a whole tradition of American cultural criticism opening up behind the sensibilities of Sherwood Anderson, one that sees Puritanism as resulting in “repression,” in a turn from the spirit to the letter of the law, in a turn away from the body to utter transcendence and from concrete, personal relationship (Virgin) to relations of purely systematic power (dynamo) and to a rejection of sexuality (Venus), and, thus, a rejection of the most intense form of concrete human relationship. Having first denied their own full human identity, Puritans wanted to control and repress that of others, setting free a dynamic of mechanical power relations that destroys the natural gender identities of men and women and makes them both substitute power for a healthy reciprocal sexuality. Frank, in his influential cultural history Our America (1919), sees, much as Weber does, an antagonism toward sensuality, toward the realm of the natural, and toward sacraments, as definitive of Calvinism, and, like Weber, he sees this antagonism as, ironically, leading to a crass materialism; he even goes so far as to



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call Puritanism “essentially an irreligious force” responsible for “the spiritual desert of the Twentieth Century” (67). For to Frank, “energy is One: it is neither material nor spiritual. It is both—or neither” (24). Therefore, tending to one exclusive focus implies the obverse fallacy, and, thus, Transcendentalism and materialism are flip sides of the same coin. Puritan denial of sacramentality, of the fusion of the spiritual and material, and its exclusive emphasis on transcendence, is really just an obverse form of crass, despiritualized sensuality. And, unfortunately, as Frank’s verdict goes, the primitive pioneering conditions of the early Puritan days merely reinforced both the asceticism and the paradoxically accompanying materialism already inherent in the faith: “The man who denies the flesh is brother to him who is its slave. But if the ferocity of Puritan denial is an obverse form of sensuality, it has vast advantages over the conduct of high living. It conserves energy; it sharpens wits; it quickens all the machinery of action. In other words, it prepares the pioneer” (63). An asceticism directed toward self-conquest, subjecting the self entirely to impersonal transcendent dictates, leads to a domination-oriented rather than a relational mindset, and the exertion of mastery and power becomes the chief delight of an otherwise deprived existence: “[The Puritan pioneer] had soon learned the sweets of austerity. Now he became aware of the power over himself, over others, over physical conditions which the austere life brought with it” (Frank 63). Again, early American conditions cemented the Puritan mindset, including its obsession with mastery: “The stern problems of self-preservation brought intensity to [pioneers’] inner inhibitions. And the inviting immensities of the American field suggested outward movement to their activities. The pioneer had become a man, innerly locked up, outwardly released” (Frank 20). In the complete externalization of identity, triggered by the extreme transcendentality of Puritan religion and by the conditions of pioneer life, all becomes “futile” which is not “instrumental” (Frank 68); in other words, “value, therefore, does not implicitly inhere in being. Life is a machine, and like a machine externally produces. In consequence, individual desire [defined by Frank as ‘the emotional and aesthetic and spiritual capacity of man’] is bad, save insofar as it conforms with the Machine’s abstract activity” (Frank 28). Thus, while Europe’s “fall” to the depths of materialism has been slow, “in America, it [has been] immensely swift. Absorption in the outer world became with us an imperious need: compelled attention to impersonal channels. The personal life faded. The personal God also” (Frank 67). Calvinism’s remote God, its dichotomy between the spiritual and the natural, its emphasis on self-control and the systematic organization of life, have led to an inability to relate

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to the world and to one’s self in any other form than dominance and imposition, abstract, systematic control. In other words, “literalism,” an external focus on “the letter,” has killed off life and fulfillment, depleting a meaningful cosmos in which the symbol, the letter, merely suggested a larger, embodied world layered with many meanings and vibrant with spiritual presence. Thus, the harsh verdict on Puritanism: “For more than three hundred years, [the Puritan] has willfully slain life for power. And from the material of his race, mastery has sprung. . . . Life, downed by precept, has become a hidden thing that gnaws and festers” (Frank 149). Anyone familiar with Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) will immediately realize by this statement of Frank’s how similar Frank’s and Anderson’s outlooks on modern life are, for Anderson’s Winesburg populace consists of tragically externalized individuals haunted by a repressed and festering spiritual life. Whether Anderson was in some way already directly influenced by Frank or Brooks as he wrote Winesburg is unclear, as their seminal cultural critiques were published, in Frank’s case, almost concurrently with, and in Brooks’s case, after Winesburg. However, the similarity in all three authors’ analyses of America’s cultural and spiritual condition is conspicuous and indicates that all three were participating in the same contemporary discourse, expressing ideas prevalent in the intellectual circles of their time, ideas probably traceable to Weber. Since Brooks closely echoes Frank, a few quotations from The Wine of the Puritans (1921) suggesting the parallels shall suffice. Like Frank, Brooks believes that the materialistic tendencies inherent in Puritanism were fatally reinforced by America’s pioneering conditions, and that “all remained as a habit long after the need for this materialism had passed, when there were peace and plenty for more gracious purposes” (15). Work, even separate from making money, sheer activity, has become a value in America: “And where we approve of a man for the mere fact that he is busy—without considering the purpose of his activity, we really approve of him for keeping his mind distracted, and for perpetually spurning the present moment. And all this because we regard activity as a symbol of efficiency, and efficiency as the holy and inviolate proof that the machinery of life is running well” (Brooks 55–56). Here we can clearly trace a parallel to Weber’s argument about how impersonal service for the larger social good became a visible sign to the Calvinistic believer that he or she had elect status; efficiency and activity eventually took on a life of their own, and the materially focused “machinery of life” replaced the idea of a providential God-glorifying scheme of Creation. Paradoxically, just as asceticism, being but the obverse of sensuality, leads to materialism, so “spurning the present moment” leads to a



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restless preoccupation with immediacy: without a holistic spiritual background pervading all aspects of our lives, we become myopic and eternally engaged with the merely mundane, not seeing through to any larger reality: “We apparently want to distract ourselves from the present by being always busy, and yet at the same time we are for ever occupied with the things of the moment” (56). A lack of sacramentality due to suspicion of the immanent world ironically leads to a merely immanent focus, as nothing any longer truly signifies transcendence. According to Brooks, the Cartesian, Protestant split between the world of objects and that of spiritual truth has led to an unhealthy dualism in American life, with Emerson and other New England Transcendentalists supposedly standing in complete abnegation of the physical world while otherwise, crass materialism rules the day: “You put the old wine [of Puritanism] into [the] new bottles [of a changing, post-Puritan America] . . . and when the explosion results, one may say, the aroma passes into the air and the wine spills on the floor. The aroma, or the ideal, turns into Transcendentalism, and the wine, or the real, becomes commercialism. In any case one doesn’t preserve a great deal of well-tempered, genial wine” (18). And, thus, we see once more the depiction of the Puritan legacy in America as one that has rendered the world sadly material, completely external to human individuals, and unrelatable, and it is a world in which life is a “machinery,” and the dehumanized individual a mere cog instrumental to an abstract, impersonal, superficially rational mechanism. H. L. Mencken, as the most influential critic of culture in the 1920s and 1930s, states in his Treatise on the Gods (1930): “Protestantism, in truth, save in those borderlands where Roman altar-fires perfume and denature it, is endurable only to hinds” (281). And that particular form of Protestantism called Puritanism is “the worst obscenity of Western civilization” (245).

Literalism and the Fall of the Midwest So far, we have examined how literalism, a categorical, definitive, and ultimately abstract approach to the world, characterized the American pastoral myth, how literalism evolved in the Reformation era against the medieval Catholic sacramental worldview, how, via Calvinism, it inspired modern capitalism and industrialism, and how Protestant/Calvinist-derived literalism was seen as the crucial spiritual problem of America in the early twentieth century. But what does all of this have to do with the Midwest in particular? This brings us back to our earlier assertion that the Midwest, in the literature of the interwar

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period, was perceived not merely as a place of indistinct national normality but also as a region in which the nation’s “fall” from its old pastoral dreams was felt with particular keenness and where America’s spiritual battles were dramatized especially vividly. This “battle” primarily involves an insistence on a new sacramental approach to reality and on a spiritual revitalization of culture versus the dominant cultural insistence on pragmatism, materialism, and, ultimately, secularized, post-Protestant “literalism.” In the context of this battle, the fertile Midwestern land became a powerful sacramental symbol in a manner in which no other region of the country could function symbolically. Our question now is just why the cultural battle between sacramentalism and literalism was particularly intense in the Midwest, and in what way the Midwestern land became an important symbol in the context of these tensions. The loss or degeneration of the pastoral American dream in the wake of industrialism, pollution, mechanization, and capitalistic exploitation was felt with particular intensity in the Midwest because it felt itself to be and, to some degree, had actually been, that dream’s most literal embodiment in the nation’s history. As Scott Russell Sanders observes, “More than any other region, the Midwest has fulfilled our vision of America as the land of plenty. Here is the mouth of the cornucopia, overflowing with abundant fruits. Here are the deep soils, thick timber, rich deposits of coal and oil and ore, the slow-moving, navigable rivers, the level terrain so easily traversed” (38). And Sanders reaches back into history, showing how already early on, the Midwest was seen as the true promised land within the larger American Canaan. He quotes Alexis de Tocqueville to the following effect: “No power upon earth can shut out the emigrants from that fertile wilderness which offers resources to all industry, and a refuge from all want. Future events, whatever they may be, will not deprive Americans of their climate or their inland seas, their great rivers or their exuberant soil” (38–39). Sanders observes how other regions could not compare to this vision: “Already in the national mythology by Tocqueville’s time, New England was known to be stony, stingy ground, with short growing seasons and withering winters; the South was thin-soiled, poor in minerals, with a fitful prosperity that depended on slavery; the far West was mountainous and dry; while the Midwest was loamy and moist and luxuriant” (39). The Midwest alone seemed really, fully to support the pastoral idea. In what is to date probably the most comprehensive study of the cultural image and identity of the region, James R. Shortridge’s The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture (1989), the author observes that the very name “Middle West,” originally referring only to Kansas and Nebraska (located in the



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“middle” between the then-“Northwest” of the Dakotas and the Southwest of Indian Territory and Texas), was eventually applied to the entire fertile inland region because this area fit the pastoral image for which the term had come to stand (23). Though originally plagued by drought and locusts, Nebraska and Kansas had come into their own by the 1890s, when they started to be called the “Middle West”—the triumph of this egalitarian, land-owning garden society over initial adversity was celebrated enthusiastically in the press and in popular literature, and the term “Middle West” acquired exceedingly positive, pastoral associations, making it an attractive, desirable label: “One can begin to understand [the] territorial expansion [of the regional label beyond its original core] by noting the euphoric descriptions of Kansas and Nebraska society at the turn of the century. . . . [I]t seems that the Middle West evolved rapidly from its status as the momentary incarnation of the idealized rural society into a permanent label and symbol of the idealization itself ” (21). Since the emergence of the Pacific Northwest as a region was destabilizing the old regional labels of the Dakotas (the New Northwest) and of the Upper Mississippi and Upper Ohio River valleys (the Old Northwest), with three regional Northwestern labels creating an awkward situation, the term “Middle West,” expressive of the pastoral qualities with which such states as Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa liked to associate themselves, became applied to the entire northern inland region (23). This process seems to have been solidified by about 1912, by which time this expanded meaning of the label seems to have been taken for granted (Shortridge 20). This region, based in its very inception on the American pastoral myth, is praised in much the same way in which colonists and writers of the Early Republic had praised the Eastern Seaboard: “The words vary little from what Hector Crèvecoeur or Thomas Jefferson had written more than a century before in describing the Eastern Seaboard. Most writers began with a statement on the richness of the land and the resultant prosperity of the farmers. . . . Bountiful rural life fostered independence and self-reliance, and these traits in turn produced other characteristics of yeomen: an egalitarian society . . . a natural aristocracy . . . and social progress on a wide variety of fronts” (Shortridge 29). And though these descriptions echo what had been said about America in general, they now became the special property of the Midwest, with no other region having equal factual claims to being a pastoral paradise: By the early nineteenth century . . . it had become obvious that pastoralism could not be applied to the country uniformly. Instead of [being] a land of

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egalitarian rural prosperity, the East was characterized by abundant farms and growing industry; in the South, a distorted agrarianism based on an ordered feudal society was dominant. After 1850, writers began to equate the image of the yeoman-farmer with the West in general, but this association, too, proved only temporary as climate and terrain in many areas precluded the realization of a bounty-based prosperous farming culture. (28)

Thus, “[t]he realization that the West could no longer serve as a metaphor for pastoralism took place about 1900. This date, of course, corresponds to the emergence of Middle West as a regional name. The two concepts—pastoralism and the Middle West—which initially were similar in several respects, rapidly intertwined and soon became virtually synonymous” (Shortridge 28). Even as sections of the Midwest became urbanized and industrialized, the pastoral image remained dominant: “Pastoralism and industry were segregated mentally; the former was assigned to a regional ‘box’ called Middle West; the latter, to one called East” (Shortridge 41). Thus, the Midwest, out of all regions, became the particular locus of a tension over the American pastoral dream and its betrayal. As Ronald Weber puts it: [A] general observation to be made about Midwestern literature is that its writers, at their bests, have . . . known or sensed a Fall. It is a Fall neither so elaborated nor as intensely felt as that known in the South; certainly it cannot be so firmly linked to specific historical events. It is a Fall, nevertheless, that has brought with it an awareness of lost innocence and of human limitation, in some hands a sense even of mystery. What I have in mind is the Fall from pioneer perfection—an awareness of the failure to create or sustain within the Great Valley a rural Eden. It may be true that all regional expression is rooted in a vision of paradise lost as manifest in a compelling past set against a disappointing present. (17)

It is this particular Midwestern fall, containing as it does the nation’s fall with special intensity and recency, that gives Midwestern writing between the World Wars its main impetus. At the core of the Midwestern pastoral dream is an impossible literalism that inevitably had to be thwarted by reality. Harrison notes that Protestant literalism caused Europeans to search for the literal Garden of Eden, and that they understood the story of Genesis in such literal, physical terms that hopes for physically restoring paradise through concrete obedience to the command “subdue the



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Earth” flourished, particularly in reference to the newly discovered American continent. Thus he observes the following: “For the seventeenth century, the story of the Fall was literal and not allegorical. It was about the material world, not merely the spiritual. It contained an imperative, as well as an indicative. True, it portrayed the past, but also held out a vision of the future, a future in which the human race could attain perfect knowledge of nature, and with that, a mastery of the world. Having once been cast out of a divinely-created Eden, it was now time for mankind to make amends, and begin the reconstruction of a paradise made with human hands” (248–49). This sort of literalizing of Eden within history ultimately led to a strange cancellation of history, as observed here by Ronald Weber: “[F]rom the beginning the myth of a New World garden superimposed on the Midwest posed a dilemma. It was essentially a static conception” (19). In other words, the world of myth, of prelapsarian existence in harmony with time, was taken out of the realm of myth and literalized, “superimposed,” on a time-bound, concrete, historical reality to which it was not appropriate. In the name of the garden myth, those native inhabitants of the American continent who had supposedly failed to cultivate it, to “garden” it, had been decimated (Harrison 243); in the name of subduing it, of creating an ideal, pastoral middle landscape, America had been overdeveloped, exploited, ravished (Marx 221–26; 360–63). All of this mirrored the central flaw of the Protestant and especially the Calvinistic mindset: its static, transcendent, abstract, “literal” superimpositions of schemes upon complex, misunderstood, or ignored actualities. Rather than encountering in and through concreteness larger spiritual realities, it presupposed just how concrete reality ought to fit into and conform to these larger spiritual realities, which were, of course, rationally conceived and spelled out with logical consistency. In literally, systematically seeking to build a secular version of the Kingdom of God, secularized Midwestern post-Calvinists had not taken into account the fallenness of the world, in other words, history, mortality, corruption, time itself, and all the other concrete realities of the human condition; they had also not taken into account the mystery of spiritual reality, its larger-than-human-reason elusiveness, and its only relationally accessible nature, that is, its concretely and indirectly revealed nature resisting through its very incarnation an easy, facile grasp by humans. Seeing the spiritual world as rationally definable and the physical world as materially subduable, Calvinists had established a form of grasp and power that would have vanished before the mystery of sacramentally embodied spiritual reality, which demands relationship and humility and thwarts attempts at

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mastering its complexities. Thus, if the spiritual mistake that led to America’s and the Midwest’s degradation is to be at least partially remedied, a new sacramental and relational view of the world must be established, one that acknowledges both fallenness and mystery and does not seek to merely remove either. It is in this context that the fertile Midwestern land, and lush Midwestern nature in general, the misguiding material of pastoral dreams, becomes a central metaphor and symbol. It is precisely the superimposed symbolic structure, the fatal misreading of this land, that tempts Midwestern writers to reinterpret it. Of these reinterpretations, the most explicitly visionary are perhaps the least successful since the ultimate aim of this endeavor was not to leap to grand abstractions but to find in the concrete encounter and engagement of a repressed civilized world with a fertile, luxuriant, yet treacherous and at times demanding and recalcitrant natural realm, glimpses of insight that lead to a new relational openness to the mysteries of all that is Other. The land refuses to reward, to nourish imposed schemes—these may “subdue” it in a superficial sense but only succeed in creating a jarring contrast between ugly human reality and natural beauty. Sanders notes “the forests, fields, and prairies, the wandering rivers, wide skies . . . the grasses and flowers, hawks and hickories” that form part of the picture painted by Midwestern authors when they evoke the countryside of their native region. They are less glowing about its culture: “Again and again in literature about the Midwest you can find a dismal, confining human realm—farm, village, or city—embedded in a mesmerizing countryside. In story after story, the hero or heroine despises the town and loves the land” (Sanders 32). The very sensuousness of the land challenges post-Protestant literalism, challenges its antagonism to concreteness, its dualism of systematic abstractionism and materialism: “If you notice the stress on fecundity in these literary landscapes, you can appreciate something of the Midwestern writer’s dilemma. For where is the fear of sexuality or suspicion of the flesh more severe than here in this juicy region, where corn thrusts skyward and hogs breed and birds flock and every living thing sprouts and fattens? During most of our history, the conflict between a farming way of life and an ascetic religion has divided the Midwestern psyche. Nowhere else in America are fertility and prudery so at odds” (Sanders 38). One might add to Sanders’s observation that “ascetic religion” here can serve as a stand-in for the whole larger secularized mindset and cultural reality fostered by this religion: materialism, industrialism, “respectability,” commercialism, repression. Upon a “region that is all body” was imposed a “religion that fears the body” (Sanders 39); and in this context emerges a generation of authors that seeks to find in the bodily, material world a liberating



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mystery and that finds a way to access this mystery relationally. These authors, thus, in various ways, explore the mysteries of the Midwestern “body.”10 What most of these authors end up depicting, in tale after tale, poem after poem, is something one might, for the sake of creating an analytically useful term, call “sacramental resistance”: Midwestern nature, if materialistically exploited, intellectually imposed upon, or treated as a mere malleable object to be molded by human dreams, does not reward humans with a satisfying existence, with wholeness or fulfillment, even if it does at times meet certain commercial expectations. For though orthodox Christian faith may be absent in most of the Midwestern writers under discussion, there is a profound realization of the spiritual as well as material givenness of the world: we, as human beings, do not get to define it according to our desires but must learn to relate to it in a respectful, caring, open, and concrete manner that accepts obscurity and mystery; only then will we gain insight. It, therefore, ultimately benefits us that we cannot get away with being conquerors: by resisting our easy, self-aggrandizing transcendence, nature leads us back to the relational and mysterious identity that is our true Self, an identity in which body and spirit, the tangible and elusive, are deeply complementary and integrated. It is the given and not humanly constructed revelatory power of the concrete world that we discover as our abstractions, our attempts at spelling out reality, our “literalism,” bangs up against the resistance of a sacramental world. Herein lies the difference of the Midwestern modernists’ nature mysticism from that of the American Transcendentalist tradition: for the early twentieth-century Midwestern authors, it is precisely in the humiliation of romantic leaps at insight that true insight happens. To believe that the individual subject, in its microcosmic nature, can readily gain a vantage point from which to survey the macrocosm, is to deny the fundamental breach in a fallen world by which the individual part is spiritually severed from the larger wholeness and, thus, from every other part; it leads to a precarious identification of microscosm with macrocosm, one that begins to fit the story of the macrocosm into that of the microcosm. There is a dangerous reversal of hermeneutic hierarchy—it is the wrong kind of bottom-to-top approach because, in the end, it places the bottom at the top. The Midwestern writers with which this study concerns itself seek to start once more at the bottom, at nature, and to work their way to larger-scale spiritual insights humbly and gradually. Too much has happened to America since Emerson; as the derogatory comments of Frank, Brooks, and many others can attest, full-fledged romanticism had lost its credibility in post-World War I America and even earlier, in light of the terrors of industrialism. A new distinctive

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sacramental note flourished most strikingly in the roughly thirty-year period of Midwestern modernist literature’s great ascendance.

Sacramental Resistance The concept of “sacramental resistance” is inspired by Catholic literary critic William Lynch, who in Christ and Apollo (1960) formulates a sacramental approach both to life and literature and criticizes authors11 who have produced unconvincing literature because of their attempts to superimpose on their literary materials abstract visions of redemption. Lynch argues against the very kind of abstract thought (“the world of Ideas”) that Midwestern writers see as the spiritual downfall of America and of their region: In the world of the senses (and of poetry!) there is an horrendous problem of intermixture; but not so in the world of Ideas; there all is startlingly clear; the boundaries of each Idea are sharply and comfortably cut off from every other; by means of the latter, we will have created an instrument to explain the simple unities of words (a rose is a rose is a rose) and of our clear internal concepts (which seem to represent only one quality of reality at a time). But we will not yet have explained the everyday, workaday world where a rose is red and many things besides, but still a rose, both many and one. (144)

In other words, abstract definitions and systems do not fully explain the complex and intricately interrelated identities of the concrete phenomena of the real world and, consequently, do not really touch the mysterious web of existence. However, Plato’s theory of participation complements a Catholic idea of spiritual/physical analogues and incarnation. Thus, the absolute fact called “the one,” the Ideal, the ultimate type, or however one may conceive of “the one,” is not a monotonous fact; it only becomes itself by articulating itself into many jointings and members, and it has not become itself until, in its advance, it has created the last member, the last jointing of itself. If it does not allow each member to become fully itself, then it does not itself become itself. And if it does not allow all the members of the unity to take up a certain intricate relationship among themselves, the same consequence will develop. But under no circumstances must we any longer suppose that there is a central core of content



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which is the unity structure, and a number of details which are irrelevant to that unity. (Lynch 145)

In other words, higher realities do not exist abstractly, with concrete details merely obscuring them or providing weak, extrinsic illustrations of them; rather, it is the concrete details that are the very life of the higher reality, its expression, its being. Lynch speaks of the eyes of the Mona Lisa; they are “fully human eyes . . . No semi-human principle has shaped such eyes” (145). That is to say that the higher reality of “humanity” is fully expressed, and exists solely in individual humans, its concrete manifestation—and, thus, with all higher, larger, metaphysical realities (Lynch 145). This higher reality, this one, does not “descen[d] as a unifying blanket over a set of details which already exist and which only need this rather dubious process of being unified. It is the one, the structural and structuralizing principle, which is fashioning and determining its own membership out of its own inward and creative resources” (Lynch 145). Thus, unity did not descend and glue Mona Lisa’s preexisting eyes to her preexisting face; it brought forth the whole, fully human Mona Lisa, eyes and all. The literal, in this manner of reading the world, is both fully itself, and yet more: it is sacramentally significant of ideal patterns and of spiritual realities. However, “there are no shortcuts to beauty or insight. We must go through the finite, the limited, the definite, omitting none of it lest we omit some of the potencies of being-in-the-flesh” (Lynch 7). This is precisely where, according to Sherwood Anderson and his contemporaries, American Calvinists and postCalvinists had failed, and it is what their generation of Midwestern writers sought to remedy. Going through the finite “does not mean that we should go through it violently, looking for a means to a breakthrough” (Lynch 7), for “smashing away at detail only bruises the total intelligence, and is an obstacle to that suppleness of attack which is necessary for vision” (Lynch 147–48). And so we have what might be considered Lynch’s summative statement: “The finite is not itself a generality, to be encompassed in one fell swoop. Rather, it contains many shapes and byways and cleverness and powers and diversities and persons, and we must not go too fast from the many to the one. We waste our time if we try to go around or above or under the definite; we must literally go through it. And in taking this narrow path directly, we shall be using our remembered experience or things seen and earned in a cumulative way, to create hope in the things that are not yet seen” (7). Thus, submission to concrete sacramental experience is the key to insight—given, finite realities must be entered into in order for one to receive full insight into given spiritual realities.

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As Lynch demonstrates at length in his discussions of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury literature, any attempt to circumvent the finite will fail; the real world sacramentally resists our attempts at improperly and insensitively imposing upon it or violently breaking through it. Of course, this epistemological perspective presented in Lynch’s literary criticism is deeply informed by Catholic sacramentalism, and since Midwestern writers, in their reaction against Protestant literalism are prone toward a Catholic-derived neo-sacramental mode of thought, it is not surprising that they would link insight to a submission to concrete experience, discovering and rejoicing in the “sacramental resistance” put up by Midwestern nature against Midwestern civilization. In the works of early twentieth-century Midwestern writers, those characters who embark on any course of ideological imposition of reality, be it that they live by the success myth (e.g., Lewis’s George F. Babbitt), hold their spouse to conventional ideals (e.g., Wash Williams in Anderson’s Winesburg story “Respectability”), choose the world of art over that of life and relationship (e.g., Jim Burden in Cather’s My Άntonia), or fixate obsessively on one narrow goal (e.g., in Irene Bromfield’s The Green Bay Tree), will be resisted by the reality they are trying to ignore. They end up spiritually drained and unfulfilled and exist in a living death. Only those who, broken of their idealistic frame of mind, subject themselves to the mysterious concrete dynamics of life succeed spiritually; and these characters will generally learn from some contact with nature to reject their culturally determined distortions and access a deeper, pastoral reality lying at the heart of Midwestern nature but ignored by Midwestern society. This pastoral reality has to do with presence: in letting go of hard definitions, certain characters in Midwestern fiction open up to the mystery of life in nature as well as in other human beings. They, thus, become capable of relationship: community amidst a broken, fragmented world is ultimately the pastoral striven for in this literature. Sacramentalism, while not equivalent to Edenic wholeness, nonetheless, involves a symbiosis of the external and inward, of the objective and spiritual, of the Self and the Other, that mirrors the nature-civilization symbiosis envisioned in the pastoral “middle landscape.” It is in this manner that pastoral and sacramentalism become synonymous, and this new wholeness can be achieved only when concrete reality, the spiritually significant natural reality of Creation, resists a false ideological pastoral by leaving drained and broken those who look toward the ideal rather than the reality.



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3 Winesburg Under the Sway of “New Englanders’ Gods” Puritanism, Industrialism, Materialism, and the Midwestern Fall The flowers in their gardens have known an ecstasy unfettered by any awareness of responsibility, but man is something else. For ages he has been taking himself with extraordinary seriousness. . . . As for the earnest God-fearing people, among whom John Webster and his wife then lived and as one of whom they had for so many years counted themselves, the chances are no such thing as ecstasy is ever acquired at all. There is instead, for the most part, a kind of cold sensuality tempered by an itching conscience. That life can perpetuate itself at all in such an atmosphere is one of the wonders of the world and proves, as nothing else could, the cold determination of nature not to be defeated. —from Many Marriages by Sherwood Anderson

If Winesburg, Ohio, in a sense, is the ultimate Midwestern small town, one can easily imagine that it would function as a site of “Puritanism,” whatever form of religious or cultural narrowness that term might betoken. After all, that sort of thing is what small towns, particularly in the Midwest, have traditionally been known for. But what about industrialism? Interpreting a rural, berry- and cabbage-producing, late nineteenth-century Ohio village as in any way a setting for America’s grand drama of industrialization seems somewhat unlikely, especially since Winesburg does not share the fate of that other famous Andersonian town, Bidwell, of Poor White (1920), which metamorphoses from a tranquil farming community into an industrial boomtown. And yet, the Puritanism of Winesburg is intimately connected to the crass materialism and industrialism – 73 –

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of, say, Cleveland, this small community being spiritually and culturally not as far removed from its nearest urban neighbor as one might at first imagine. For the spiritually mechanical outlook fostered by Puritanism and issuing, in the nineteenth century, in the vast cultural complex of materialism, industrialism, and urbanization is very clearly found in the still residually pastoral world of Winesburg. Consequently, this small farm town possesses a spiritual kinship with the dehumanizing world of factory towns. A jarring, disruptive note can be discerned in what could be a real village community, and there are many signs of how the larger national realities of brutal capitalism and materialism have made inroads into Winesburg’s rural realm. Throughout the various tales that comprise this small-town novel, the interrelated phenomena of Puritanism and materialism/industrialism appear hand in hand and are both felt strongly. Thus, already in one of Anderson’s earliest works—and in his deservedly most famous—we have the basic diagnosis of what the author throughout the next two decades would continue to identify as the root causes of the Midwestern “fall” from pastoral perfection. We can also already see the value of “sacramental resistance,” as fertile Midwestern nature resists the systematic and materialistic impositions of Winesburg’s citizens and embodies a countercultural spiritual message for those who engage with it or are directly resisted by it. It must be stated that Anderson’s somewhat facile lumping together of Puritanism, conventional Victorian respectability, abstraction in general, capitalism, industrialism, machine culture, the success myth, and jingoism as one large complex is related to, on the one hand, the influence of serious scholarly work such as Max Weber’s that had linked Puritanism with some of these machine-age realities, but, on the other hand, is also due to the fact that Anderson thought in large-scale associative mythic terms and was not prone to careful historical analysis and differentiation. As Glen A. Love has noted in “Winesburg, Ohio and the Rhetoric of Silence” (1968), Anderson was “never a systematic thinker [but] reveals himself most meaningfully in the words and images which characteristically cluster about his subjects” (40). Though an occasional mention shall be made of the actual theology in back of what Anderson sees as Puritanism, it is, nonetheless, important to remember that Anderson is critiquing a vaguely conceived complex of attitudes and cultural realities, some of which derive only distantly and, perhaps, questionably from historical Puritanism or Protestantism. Anderson is primarily critiquing what he sees as secularized derivations from Puritanism (e.g., materialism), but he shares in his period’s sense that Calvinist theology was to blame for originally giving rise to what became a dehumanizing, morally



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as well as materially mechanistic culture. There, thus, lurks a vague theological critique behind the more general cultural critique that Anderson provides, and for this reason, this discussion does include references to actual Puritan theology. I shall discuss this theology from a Weberian perspective emphasizing the Calvinist diminution of sacramentality and orientation toward transcendence. Employing the Weberian understanding of Calvinism is appropriate because this particular perspective was shared by many cultural critics of the early twentieth century and appears to find its parallel in Anderson’s own thinking, though, of course, in coarsened and simplified terms. The reductiveness with which I use the term “Puritanism” derives not from any actual scholarly claim about Puritan theology but from a reflection of what early twentieth-century American intellectuals thought Puritanism and its contemporary afterlife to be. In keeping with Anderson’s imagistic and associative approach to thinking, I shall begin my discussion of the theme of Puritanism in Anderson’s writings with a look at his poetry, which is a gold mine of philosophically significant image-clusters. In Mid-American Chants (1918), his poetry collection immediately preceding the 1919 publication of Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson formulates the Midwestern spiritual problem caused by Puritanism, the connection between Puritanism and industrialism, and the new sacramental salvation to be attained via a spiritual return to the land explicitly and clearly; this poetry, thus, may serve as a useful preface to a discussion of Winesburg. In the long and prominent poem “MidAmerican Prayer,” the speaker first asserts his, and by extension every man’s and woman’s, primal, natural, human identity, an identity of which his Midwestern natural surroundings subtly inform him: “I sang there—I dreamed there—I was suckled face downward in the black earth of my western cornland” (69). Upon first standing up (from being suckled), the speaker sees “all about [him] the corn—in the fields mysterious and vast—voices of Indians—names remembered—murmurings of winds—the secret mutterings of [his] own young boyhood and manhood” (69). Three mysterious realities are conjoined in this sentence: first of all, the mute, silent mystery of concrete nature, of the fields and the wind; secondly, the historical memory of now muted Native American people whose voices, however, still are faintly heard across time; and then there are the realities of the human body, which, akin to nature with its silence and murmuring, and akin to the vaguely vocal presence of the Native Americans, is “muttering.” The poet experiences himself primordially as part of nature, part of the larger human race, and as a physical and sexual creature. Indistinct, indefinable voices are informing him of his interconnection with real physical and spiritual presences that his small-town

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community would like to ignore; the presence of natural, sexual, bodily realities; the profoundly actual violence against real people in history; the real, full physical humanity of all people regardless of race; and the interconnectedness of all nature and all people. This universal interconnection is expressed, for instance, in the image of suckling the Earth’s breast and in hearing in the nourishing Earth the presence of dead generations, here explicitly Native ones, who are still mystically communicating with the present world.1 It is out of the ground, out of nature, out of his body, that the speaker ultimately draws his sense of human identity and of human interconnection, and this faith is destroyed by New England Puritan abstractionism: “The men and women among whom I lived destroyed my ability to pray. The sons of New Englanders, who brought books and smart sayings into our Mid-America, destroyed the faith in me that came out of the ground” (69). The poet now feels called to “def[y] the New Englanders’ gods, trying to find honest, mid-western American gods,” and he seeks these in the corn, in nature. Unfortunately, the post-Puritans’ “empire” (one may note this term’s connotation of power, of mastery) spreads “west and west,” and bringing first agriculture, these descendants of Puritans then destroy this potentially pastoral assertion of dominion for one that is utterly dehumanizing and irredeemable: “We lived in houses in cities and we forgot the fields and the praying—the lurking sounds, sights, smells of old things” (70). In other words, Midwesterners forgot primal things, nature, the originary concrete reality of which we are primarily a part, which in its dense concreteness, its “sounds, sights, smells,” could bring us back to the original mystery of our human identity.2 Eventually the poem progresses to the ugly urban realities of Chicago, the deceptive symbolic rhetoric of flag-waving, and the destructive ideological blindness driving America’s participation in World War I, which war Anderson referred to as “industrialism gone mad”3—all of these he blames on the idealistic New England mindset as exemplified by the speaker’s small-town Midwestern folk, who, thus, are part of a vast, destructive machinery that is ruining the Midwest, America, and the world and in which the full concrete actuality of human beings is of little account. Since the Great War confronted Americans with the bloody reality behind the culture’s machinery of power and behind abstract rhetoric, Anderson is hopeful for a spiritual regeneration based on the “sacramental resistance” occasioned by the ugly concreteness of the war: “May we get to gods and the greater brotherhood through growth springing out of the destruction of men” (72). Destruction can bring to America a regeneration with which, ironically, the old world is already familiar: “No talk now of what we can do for the old world. / Talk and dream



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now of what the old world can bring to us—the true sense of real suffering out of which may come the sweeter brotherhood” (71). It is suffering their bumping up against concrete resistance to their abstractions, to their dreams, to their rigid interpretive self-impositions on reality, to their Protestant-inherited “literalism,” that Midwesterners, and, ultimately, the Western world, can realize a new, open, more authentic understanding of the world, and it will take them back to concrete, organic realities, the forces of life that are not under our control but under “God’s,” whatever or whoever this mysterious force is: “God, lead us to the fields now. Suns for us and rains for us and a prayer for every growing thing. / May our fields become our sacred places” (71). In this new, fallen, suffering world, in which mortals submit to the mystery of life and accept that their grand-scheme visions and meta-narratives cannot be imposed, that they are part of and not above concrete reality, that is, nature (all humans are growing things that need sun and rain just like the rest of nature), people will find, if nothing else, a human bond: “May the sound of enmity die in the groaning of growing things in our fields.” This vision of reconciliation contrasts with the small community of Winesburg, where the descendants of New Englanders are not attuned to the bountiful natural world surrounding them, and where the dehumanization and the destruction of community associated with an industrial and materialistic culture are in full swing. The lesson of the Midwestern landscape has been neglected by the people of Winesburg and by the Midwestern society they represent. Behind the Winesburg stories lurks a presence, that of the fertile land upon which the town is planted. This land embodies a missed reality and an unheeded truth, not in the symbolicliteral manner of a propositionally understood word but in the symbolic-mystical manner of a sacrament and, thus, in a manner the Winesburg characters, living in a materialistic culture, have not been trained to read. For instance, where a literalist sees the body as merely a physical entity, as nothing but an object devoid of reference to anything beyond its obvious, physically investigable matter and processes, the sacramentalist realizes, in the spirit of Lynch, that “the body is the manifestation of the soul, through which and in which the soul realizes its own essence. The sign is therefore a cause of what it signifies by being the way in which what is signified effects itself ” (Rahner 38). That is, if we fail to recognize the essential fusion of the spiritual and the physical, the realization of the spiritual in the physical, then we have not only missed the spiritual dimension of reality but have even misunderstood its physical dimension, which concretely resists our misinterpretive impositions. Sacramental reality, the truth embodied by the very landscape upon which the culture has ideologically imposed itself,

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cannot ultimately be denied, for it is a truth in the true sense of the word. The characters of Winesburg experientially encounter this truth, as in the poignant moment when Ray Pearson in “The Untold Lie” is “affected by the beauty of the country” (204), which experience leads him to “run across the field,” to “shou[t] a protest against his life, against all life, against everything that makes life ugly” (207). Not that the possibility of a life free from trouble can be concluded from the beauty of the Midwestern land—but the beauty of the land does teach what the culture denies: a beauty beyond the quantitative categories of materialism. In its aesthetic rather than practical nature, it speaks to a need for goodness, for love, for communion, for all that is not instrumentally but spiritually meaningful, so that Ray and his fellow workman stand “in the big empty field with the quiet corn shocks standing in rows behind them and the red and yellow hills in the distance, and from being just two indifferent workmen they had become all alive to each other” (205). From instrumental cogs in a mechanism geared solely toward productivity, what Waldo Frank would call “the machinery of life,” these “workmen” have now become “alive to each other”; they sense in each other a soul, a deeper life, and being that transcends the utilitarian and instrumental roles that have thus far only superficially brought them together.4 A shift has occurred in their relation: they have become aware of a precious and mysterious spiritual reality that animates them both, makes them indefinable and so much more than materially useful bodies. In their mutual responsiveness to beauty, which in itself is a mystery transcending easy quantification, a mystery discoverable experientially but not categorically definable, two souls have found each other. In its sacramental beauty, a beauty that transfigures the very practical “corn shocks standing in rows” into signs of something more than the purely material gratification they serve on a literal level, in its inexplicable and yet powerful beauty and significance, the landscape becomes a means of communion; where the land is misread, two alienated, isolated, and dehumanized workmen will slave away their meaningless days. In the landscape becoming the site of alienation and spiritual frustration is a sign of resistance of the sacrament to its cultural misappropriation; for a sacrament contains presence, reality, truth, and cannot yield real, substantial satisfaction if this truth is denied, reconfigured, or in any way abused or arbitrated. This notion, strongly present in Winesburg and other Midwestern works, corresponds to the Catholic notion of the “necessary disposition” of the recipients of sacraments, which enables them to receive grace, and of the “accidental disposition,” which increases the grace conferred by the sacrament: “No grace will result [from the sacrament] unless the recipient has



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some kind of a disposition. . . . The drier the wood, the more easily it burns. The better a person prepares to receive a sacrament, the more grace he obtains from it” (McAuliffe 19–20). Though Anderson is not a Catholic writer, his neo-pagan, Virgin-inspired sacramentalism, nonetheless, echoes Catholic belief as it resists a secularized but Protestant-derived literalism that predisposes humans not to perceive the deeper spiritual mysteries manifested in material and bodily life. Ray Pearson is directly engaged with the land, a fact that prepares him for his moment of insight. Generally, however, the post-Puritan, materialistic, capitalistic society, of which Winesburg forms a part, is not disposed to realize the truths that inhere in the sacramental world of nature by which it is surrounded. This post-Puritan sacramental indisposition, this misinterpretation and misreading of the land, is most graphically and extensively illustrated in what shall be the main focus of this chapter, the section of Winesburg significantly titled “Godliness.” As Thomas Wetzel has observed, the four-part story “Godliness,” even though it is set chronologically prior to the rest of the book and outside of the town limits, might still well be seen as central to the novel in that a “sense of the indefinite, the concealed truth, and the confused narrative pervades all of Winesburg, Ohio, calling the reader to read indirectly, away from the obvious and confused ‘truth’ of how the stories appear, and to look for different sorts of cues to find the essence of personal truth within Anderson’s tales” (11). Indeed, as out of place and separate as this section may appear in the Winesburg cycle, it, nonetheless, provides the cultural-historical background from which all the other Winesburg characters derive and against which they can be understood. Before analyzing this cultural history at the core of Winesburg, however, one may profitably note how Anderson opens his novel with a story inconspicuously and subtly presenting the themes to be made much more explicit in “Godliness,” and, as it were, preparing the reader for the revelation that is the “Godliness” narrative: already in the first story, “Hands,” Puritanism and its descendant, capitalism, are charged with misreading the reality embodied in the Midwestern land, and a Protestant-derived literalism and perfectionism deprives the story’s various characters of a strong rootedness in actuality. “Hands” begins with a problematized and disrupted pastoral, a rustic setting in which is undermined any notion of literally, physically imposing a prelapsarian state on American soil. Though one soon catches the enchanting summer evening atmosphere over the fruitful land, this tranquil aura is hardly allowed to emerge until the disrupting aspects of the picture have already been presented. Not only does the decayed veranda of protagonist Wing Biddlebaum’s house speak of the

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decomposing forces of nature and of human negligence or poverty, and not only do we learn that Biddlebaum is a compulsively nervous “fat little old man,” but the landscape itself contains a jarring note. This disruptive element is the location of Biddlebaum’s house “near the edge of a ravine,” a potentially picturesque but also infertile and rugged landscape feature not suited to agriculture; furthermore, the house is separated from the highway by “a long field that had been seeded for clover but that had produced only a dense crop of yellow mustard weeds,” again, a potentially picturesque sight but dissociated from notions of fertility and from the generally positive and even romantic-idyllic associations of “clover” (27). This image of a clover field overrun by mustard weeds is related by Clarence Lindsay to an undermining not only of Midwestern pastoral dreams but also to a subversion of Wing’s self-concept, as developed later in the story: “Because Wing’s dreams are closely connected to romantic pastoral mythologies, this image of failed clover, with its idyllic pastoral associations, stands as a sort of gloss for the collapse of Wing’s first selfhood, the pastoral romantic dream that he will later invoke for George” (27). We see, here, an individual and larger cultural crisis intertwined; both involve a coming to terms with a “fallen” reality that requires a painful and self-surrendering engagement with a resistant “Other.” A possible hope for resolving this crisis is contained in the juxtaposed uses of the words “seed” and “mustard,” recalling the following well-known biblical statement on faith: “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you” (Matt. 17.20). Such a small, humble seed of faith (the mustard seed was reputed to be the smallest seed) has a power that all prideful attempts at mastery lack. In the passage surrounding this verse, Christ’s disciples fail to drive out a demon due to their lack of faith and lack of dependence on God. Similarly, the distorted, “possessed” figure of Wing, and the distorted culture of the Midwest, will not be returned to a natural, healthful state without a certain relational openness to a higher reality, a world that is Other and does not conform to the self ’s rhetoric, dreams, or schemes. What follows the philosophically and theologically charged opening sentence is a highly symbolic scene that directly presents a clearly pastoral tableau but subverts it, practicing the strategy that Lindsay has diagnosed as a fundamental pattern of the Winesburg stories: “Some form of comic dramatic juxtaposition of opposed states . . . is an essential dramatic rhythm in Winesburg, Ohio. . . . This fundamental rhythm of the narrator’s imagination expresses at different levels—sentence, paragraph, tale, and entire novel—the principal opposition between appealing abstraction and



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subverting, contradictory realities” (27). The scene has, indeed, a highly abstract quality: “youths and maidens” are returning from the berry harvest on wagons loaded with the bounty of the land as the sun romantically sets behind them. As they ought to, according to pastoral-type scenes, these young berry-pickers tease one another boisterously and are engaged in lively courtship (Winesburg 27). Human sexuality, the fruitfulness of the land, harmonious, communal labor, and youthful playfulness—all of these “ingredients” of pastoral perfection are bathed in and blended together by glorified lighting. A scene could hardly be more conspicuously of the “type set” variety. And yet, as in almost any pastoral of literary value, darkness intrudes and complicates the goodness and serene simplicity of the scene, as, for instance, noted by Glen A. Love: “Anderson’s choice of archaic ‘youths and maidens’ suggests an idealized, even mythical, landscape, but the brief glimpse of innocence is dimmed by the cloud of dust across the sun and by a taunting cry from one of the berry pickers, a cry which serves to carry us back to the figure on the veranda” (“Rhetoric of Silence” 46). Lindsay describes the “cloud of dust that floated across the face of the departing sun” as “a crepuscular image of what we might casually mistake for wistful nostalgia, a yearning for a bucolic past that has departed, and a foreshadowing of a loss of innocence” (29). I would add that the “dust” also bears a clear reference to mortality; the cycle of day and night, alluded to via the “departing sun,” and the cycles of nature in general, call to mind the intimate connection between birth and death, between budding youth and the decline of old age. Furthermore, as Lindsay points out, the “purity” implied in the scene’s pastoral imagery and diction is further compromised by connotations of rape in the play of the youths and maidens: “The violence—the dragging and screaming and shrillness—surpasses, if only barely, what we expect or want in familiar youthful play. It is play, but it is playful rape, aggressively heterosexual, merriment with an edge to it” (28). In fact, it is this play that leads to the kicking up of the mortal dust across the face of the setting sun: “A boy clad in a blue[5] shirt leaped from the wagon and attempted to drag after him one of the maidens, who screamed and protested shrilly. The feet of the boy in the road kicked up a cloud of dust that floated across the face of the departing sun” (Winesburg 27). Love, sexuality, birth, mortality, violence—all is contained thematically within Anderson’s carefully crafted sentences, which outline this scene with a few bold strokes. Issues of power, mastery, and aggression seem to be linked with an ideal vision that ignores the basic human condition and the “fallen” nature of the world. It appears that the scene not merely calls attention to a misperception of reality, but links that misperception with dangerous, oppressive possibilities.

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This sense of pastoral idealism being implicated in a “violence” of sorts becomes more pronounced when a truly discordant note blatantly breaks up the overall pastoral harmony in which the various subversive elements of the text had hitherto been subsumed: “Over the long field came a thin girlish voice. ‘Oh, you Wing Biddlebaum, comb your hair, it’s falling into your eyes,’ commanded the voice to the man, who was bald and whose nervous little hands fiddled about the bare white forehead as though arranging a mass of tangled locks” (27). This voice, e.g., in its thinness, is both physically, literally out of tune with its bountiful and vibrant environment and concomitantly signifies a deeper spiritual discrepancy. It is easy to see a connection between this voice and the “thin voices” of Elsie Leander’s parents in “The New Englander,” which call Elsie back from the Iowa cornfield where she is experiencing a Dionysian6 death of sorts, a surrender of her artificial self to nature, an erotically charged spiritual ecstasy, while thin voices are calling her back to a home in which the New England spirit reigns, a home based on a long line of “thin women” living off a “soil . . . not very rich,” a land where the trees are “all old and gnarled” and where “rocks app[ear]” everywhere (Triumph of the Egg 135). Clearly, in Anderson’s imagery clusters, “thin voices” represent the antithesis of what he sees embodied in the lush Midwestern land from which the berry-pickers are returning in “Hands”; such “thin voices” are associated with a life-denying spirit un-nurtured by the generous, abundant vitality in nature, but simultaneously with a death-defying spirit, as emblematized by the “old and gnarled” trees or by the inanimate rocks. Having absorbed the Nietzschean ideals so pervasive in early twentieth-century Western culture, Anderson here appears to be opposing a bloodless “Apollonian” attitude, one that fears both death and life, with a “Dionysian” one that surrenders itself to nature completely, recognizing that life and death are inseparable. The sterility of an Apollonian mindset is connected for Anderson with the Puritan-derived “spirit of New England,” an attitude in which life-denying ideals are imposed upon reality, thereby suffocating human nature.7 What breaks up the pastoral scene here is, on the one hand, merely the arrogance of youth mocking old age, but the girl’s “thin voice” shows that her triumphantly superior vitality is not the primary point in this depiction. Rather, at the heart of the girl’s arrogance is actually a lack of vitality, a lack of substance, a negative “thinness” that seems the opposite of pastoral (or youthful) abundance. For it is an unsustainable “transcendence” that the mocking maiden asserts, one based on denial of the human condition we all share. In fact, the thinness of the maiden’s voice links the woman to the object of her mockery in ways she does



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not intend, for both her vocal quality and Wing’s bare head figure as symbols of death. The scene incorporates a traditional element of pastoral designed to disrupt any idealizing falsifications likely to spring from a pastoral perspective, a feature discussed here by Marx: “During the seventeenth century, Poussin and other landscape painters introduced the image of a speaking death’s-head into the most delicate pictorial idylls. To make the meaning of this memento mori inescapable they sometimes inserted the printed motto, Et in Arcadia Ego, meaning ‘I [Death] also am in Arcadia” (26). In a footnote, Marx refers to Erwin Panofsky for the following elaboration: “In an illuminating essay, Panofsky has shown that at this time the motto was reinterpreted so that the words, instead of being attributed to Death itself, were taken as the sentiments of another shepherd. Thus what had been intended as a dramatic encounter with death was replaced by a relatively sentimental and tranquilizing idea, in consonance with the main drift of the age” (26). It is precisely such a sentimentalization of the pastoral scene that the narrator is counteracting. He depicts a cruel encounter between a rural maiden who, bearing a sign of missing vitality herself, mocks Wing, who, as a “bald” man with a “bare white forehead” functions as a memento mori skull in the berry-pickers’ Arcadia. Wing’s head is completely foregrounded in this scene, since he is being specifically mocked for his baldness and reaches for his nonexistent hair, significantly referred to as “tangled locks,” a clichéd romantic phrase highlighting the literary dream that Wing’s visibly mortal presence is disrupting.8 Wing’s bald head, the incongruous skull in the youths’ Arcadia, should warn the mocking maiden of her own finitude and mortality. Yet such a skull does not belong in America’s Garden, and, thus, the “maiden” assumes the stance of superior mockery, even implying in her accusatory phrasing a kind of character deficiency in the fact of Wing’s baldness. He lacks the mark of election in his obvious mortality and decay; yet she herself will soon face the decay represented by Wing. A note of post-Puritan American intolerance for imperfection renders this pastoral scene highly imperfect in spiritual terms. The grotesque, aging loner who stands in such stark contrast to the flirtatious young berry-pickers is mocked precisely because he stands in such strong contrast to the romantic pastoral narrative inhabited by this dubious group. The girl, by mocking him as an outcast from youth, from happiness, from community, from love, thereby simultaneously establishes her own belonging to all of those categories. She is, in other words, in some sense “socially elect” and takes pleasure in evoking the chasm between her and Wing, the “damned,” the aged and visibly decaying man, marked as such by his baldness. Her dehumanizing

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sense of election, which causes her to forget that she holds the same decay-bound humanity in common with Wing, and her inclusion of herself in the category of pastoral perfection, symbolized by the sunset-silhouetted mirthful berry-pickers’ wagon, can be linked to America’s national pastoral perfectionism. In this Arcadian vision, the old memento mori of medieval painting can only receive superior mockery. America, in its sense of pastoral election, has placed itself above history, above decay, above, essentially humanity, as, for instance, observed by Anderson’s Midwestern contemporary Glenway Wescott: “Indeed it was an instinctive law for Americans. . . . Never . . . try to interpret as an omen the poverty, the desperation, of the past; whoever remembers it will be punished. . . . At home in a land of the future where all wish to be young. . . . The past was by nature tragic. . . . [T]ragedy was treason” (378). This national form of pastoral self-idealization is, in turn, connected to a Calvinistic mindset in which the self perfects its life systematically in order to assure itself of its own elect status; the old Catholic reliance on sacramental means of grace has been abandoned for a highly idealistic systematic perfectionism (M. Weber 115). This mindset, in its secularized metamorphosis, along with the American literalizing of Eden in a static conception of history, may have bred the judgmental, perfectionist attitude of this Winesburg girl who, we can be sure, is unaware of the great cultural and historical processes at work in her. It is significant that it is over the long field of mustard weeds that the girl’s voice calls mockingly to Wing; just as in the context of the biblical mustard seed imagery the disciples failed to restore a demonpossessed child to its natural self because they relied on their own strength and lacked even the tiniest grain of faith, so all the characters in this encounter remain distorted because they have failed to recognize their own limitations and to see the possibilities for communion and restoration, for “grace,” arising in that very condition of limitation and fallenness. As Wing’s story unfolds, the potentially pastoral berry-picking activity introduced in the opening scene, but undercut in its pastorality by the meanness of one of the berry-pickers as well as by a whole array of symbolic hints, is undermined yet further. We learn that Wing, generally an outcast in Winesburg, is, nonetheless, also a source of town pride due to his phenomenal berry-picking ability. Initially, the narrator tells the reader that “[t]he story of Wing Biddlebaum’s hands is worth a book in itself. Sympathetically set forth it would tap many strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men. It is a job for a poet” (29). In other words, a significance lies in Wing’s hands that relates to beauty, meaning, truth, and human identity. They are sacramental in that they body forth a reality that cannot



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be perceived in a literal reading. Rather, the spiritual presence by which they are animated and which they materially express can only be apprehended poetically, that is, intuitively, relationally, symbolically, aesthetically and via analogy. This is not the kind of reading of which the Winesburg community is capable: “In Winesburg the hands had attracted attention merely because of their activity. With them Wing Biddlebaum had picked as high as a hundred and forty quarts of strawberries in a day. They became his distinguishing feature, the source of his fame” (29). Rather than his hands suggesting the whole of Wing, Wing is reduced to his hands, a reduction resulting from taking the spiritually expressive sacramental symbol as a material reality only, of instrumental value only, within an impersonal system of efficiency in which instrumentality becomes the very reason for being. Thus, Wing is identified entirely with his efficient manual instruments, and they are not seen as signs of the fuller reality that is his whole person. Noting the “quiet inexpressive hands of other men who worked beside him in the fields,” Wing is intent on avoiding any individual expressiveness that might go through his hands; he is afraid of offending his materialistic society, and, thus, seeks to function as the perfect cog. In fact, his fingers have become “the piston rods of his machinery of expression” as he rejects any spiritual value that they might signify and allows them to become mere machinery incapable of authentic communication, the kind of communication Catholic theologian Karl Rahner means when he speaks of body language in sacramental terms, saying that sacramental significance is evident in “the sphere of activity” where through “bodily gesture . . . the inner attitude itself which is expressed by it first attains its own full depth” (38). The inner attitude manifesting itself through Wing’s at times nervous, at times crazily efficient hands, is that of his own dehumanization, his externalization of identity, his repression of his own spiritual dimension in a Puritan-derived and capitalist society. It is a perversely anti-sacramental body language fostered by the cultural/spiritual tyranny under which Wing labors. And yet, as I shall seek to demonstrate, Wing’s dehumanization also stems from his own failure to respect the mystery, the “otherness,” of others and from his absorption in his own subjectivity. He is a figure caught in between two life-denying forces: his society’s Puritan-derived materialism and his own romanticism. Wing’s hands, in “their restless activity, like unto the beating wings of an imprisoned bird,” have given him his first name—“some obscure poet of the town had thought of it,” that is, someone has had nonliteralist perceptive faculties and has possibly caught some of the sacramental meaning of Wing’s hands (28). However, we cannot rest too comfortably in an “inspirational” reading of Wing’s

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poetic nickname. Lindsay points out that Wing’s first name, very clearly, is “the product of . . . the community’s interpretation of him,” a narrated identity that may or may not conform to substantive reality and the fictiveness of which is highlighted in the text as we learn about the name’s origins. The reader is called to ponder the particular significance of Wing’s name more thoroughly. A negative, anti-sacramental reading of the name “Wing” is, for instance, performed by Terrell L. Tebbetts, who has pointed out that “Wing ends as a kind of grotesque romantic, repudiating the clay of the earth, fluttering with his hands rather like a bird, perhaps an injured skylark or a sick eagle longing for the sky” (133). The bird connotations of Wing’s name, in Tebbetts’s reading, point to an unwholesome lack of sacramentality: he fails to “recogn[ize] spirit and flesh as both distinct and, at the same time, related and complementary qualities” and, consequently, cannot achieve the “authentic incarnate life” (133). The “fluttering” of Wing’s hands seems to express a body-soul split, with Wing impatiently seeking release from his body, from his finitude and humanity. Thus, while Wing’s nickname points to a spiritual reality expressing itself in bodily form, that physical-spiritual expression may well be aiming at a splitting of the two spheres, an aiming at abstraction and the “free,” “unfettered” realization of romantic ideals, a realization unsullied and unrestricted by our concrete physicality and mortality. While Wing is victimized by the Puritan-derived society of small-town Mid-America, he himself, tragically, has internalized his society’s mindset and, himself does not achieve sacramental humility, i.e., he does not strive toward a potentially redemptive, though painful, working out of his life “in the flesh,” as becomes increasingly clear throughout the story. Already, Wing’s romantically connotative name hints that he shares in the romantic self ’s “imperious isolation” evident in all of the Winesburg stories (Lindsay 34), an imperious, violent quality of which we catch glimpses when Wing relates his “dreams” to Winesburg’s young journalist, George Willard, his voice becoming “shrill and loud,” his body “wriggl[ing]” (28), his eyes “glowing” (30); such body language reiterates previous allusions to demonic possession, implicit in the biblical mustard seed imagery’s embeddedness in an exorcism anecdote. Rather than pointing toward Holy Ghost-related dove-like connotations, toward an infusion of heavenly grace that turns the human body into a temple,9 Wing’s name seems emblematic of the opposite scenario, in which the sacramental union of body and spirit disintegrates and hell breaks loose. Significantly, given Winesburg’s general emphasis on the “imperious” self, Wing’s last name is chosen by himself; like Protestantism, like modernity, like America, he is cut off from centuries of tradition, from history, in this case, from a family



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name passed down for generations. The old German meaning of his original name, Myers, indicates that his ancestors were farmers, grounded, rooted people tied to a particular piece of land; but as Wing jumps a train to leave his hometown behind him for good, as he heads west, he is severing his ties with the past, rupturing his life, in a gesture that emblematizes how all of American (or, more generally, modern) life is fundamentally ruptured. In spite of the basic self-inventing romanticism of this self-naming gesture, its romantic possibilities are largely thwarted by the name’s association with crass commercialism. Wing assumes his new last name when he leaves his Pennsylvania hometown, fleeing his fellow townsmen’s outrage over his supposed homosexual molestation of students: “The name of Biddlebaum he got from a box of goods seen at a freight station as he hurried through an eastern Ohio town” (33). The goods are unspecified, but that there is a reference to the berries Wing picks so efficiently is likely, especially in light of one of the story’s closing images: “When the rumble of the evening train that took away the express cars loaded with the day’s harvest of berries had passed and restored the silence of the summer night, [Wing] went again to walk upon the veranda” (33). We recognize in this image, in which the noisy train clashes with nature’s silence, what Leo Marx identifies as a key metaphor in American literature: “The ominous sounds of machines, like the sound of the steamboat bearing down on the raft [in Huckleberry Finn] or of the train breaking in upon the idyll at Walden, reverberate endlessly in our literature. . . . [I]ndeed it is difficult to think of a major American writer upon whom the image of the machine’s sudden appearance in the landscape has not exercised its fascination” (15–16). Here, the machine not only inorganically disrupts the larger wholeness of nature, of the peaceful summer night, but it carries away nature’s bounty as commodities to be bought and sold in a capitalistic system catering particularly to urban consumers. Wing’s last name is the name of some packing or distributing company and is, thus, emblematic of capitalism. This economic system, of course, is linked by Weber to Calvinism, and it was experienced as spiritually degrading by the cultural critics of the era. The name reinforces Wing’s anti-sacramental identity from a more commercialist perspective, which is not seen as entirely distinct from romanticism: cut off from organically grown communal tradition, the romantic self, rather than entering transcendent freedom, becomes contextualized solely within the impersonal system of capitalism’s economic reality. One could make a cynical connection to contemporary American cities, where the flags waving over shopping malls and big-box discount stores seem to promise primarily the freedom to consume all that has been mass-produced and prepackaged by globally operating corporations.

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Ironically, the last syllable of Wing’s commercialism-associated last name, “-baum,” means “tree” in German (as mentioned above, Wing is of German extraction); if we imagine a wooden box, a commodified tree, the irony is consummate. The name, because of the way Wing obtained it, thus, stands for Winesburg’s materialistic relation to both Wing (and humans in general) and nature; it stands for the imprisoning worldview and social system, in which Wing, Winesburg, the Midwest, and, ultimately, America, are trapped. The agricultural activity with which much of Winesburg, including Wing, is involved, has become completely deprived of any human meaning, and the human laborers are mere machine-like instruments in the service of purely material ends. They produce commodities loaded onto freight trains and sold at distant markets, an impersonal process in which the worker is alienated from the (here literal) fruits of his or her labor. The landscape is read as a commodity-producing factory inhabited by machine-like workers. Not only do we now recognize the “pastoral” opening scene as overshadowed by an unrecognized fallenness, human finitude, and death, but we recognize the “youths and maidens” as implicated in a dehumanizing economic system and culture of materialism. The spiritual significance of the girl’s mockery of Wing’s physical deficiency is, thus, reinforced by the story’s various references to a commodity culture. In a culture unable to see beyond the material surface, physical perfection is everything, and the poetic vision that gave Wing his first name, that would see a transcendent significance, is absent. And, as has already been mentioned with reference to Weber, it is precisely in this materialistic approach to the world where lies the intersection of the related phenomena of (now secularized) Puritanism and capitalism: the importance of the physical, visible manifestation of salvation and the surface-level, quantity-oriented, materialistic value system of capitalism go hand in hand to make spiritual imperfections and limits invisible while simultaneously turning “beauty” into something so purely material that the true apprehension of aesthetics, which involve the fusion of spirit and form, or of spiritual beauty, becomes occluded. Thus, a superficially beautiful youthful maiden derides a man whose natural human beauties have been distorted just as, less visibly, hers have been. And, thus, “evil” and “good,” “sin” and “beauty,” become equally imperceptible, with tragic spiritual consequences for all the commodified humans involved, as the details of Wing’s story attest. If “sin” is invisible in materialistic nineteenth-century America, it is, of course, also paradoxically conspicuous to all the Victorian denizens of this culture. However, this socially recognized form of evil is defined by a distorted, reduced, externalized idea of sin, one detached from complex and elusive spiritual substance



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and instead purely focused on conventionally conceived, crudely visible signs, clear-cut acts of transgression against an externalized order. Wing, under his birth name of Adolph Myers, was a teacher in a small Pennsylvania town. In relating to his students, Wing uses unselfconscious touch “to carry a dream into the young minds” (31). His “power” over them is “so gentle that it passes as a lovable weakness” (31). According to what the unreliable narrator indicates, echoing Wing’s own self-perception, it is a power so independent of coercion that there is nothing forced about it. It is natural and creates harmonious desires, transforming because touching the Other spiritually rather than guiding the Other externally. Wing, the narrator states, is toward his students “not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men” (31); and here, if we read carefully, the narrator’s formulation bears odd and disturbing implications that give us pause. In a reading sympathetic to Wing, we might understand the narrator as saying that spiritually, he contains a precious and delicate force associated with female nurture rather than male aggression. And yet, we might also read a hint of sublimated sexuality here in Wing’s relation to his students. While the story of Wing’s expulsion from his hometown is, at the most obvious level, the story of a literalistic, narrow-minded provincial society brutalizing and excommunicating a misunderstood, gentle, poetic spirit, a closer reading reveals many clues pointing to a greater ethical and spiritual complexity. Repeatedly, the text subverts our immediate impressions, following the strategy so clearly described by Lindsay: “This narrator never allows us to indulge fully our emotional appetites and always thwarts our clichéd expectations. . . . The expected formulaic response is suppressed because there is something not quite right in the language” (36). In light of this realization, we can read a crucial statement the narrator makes in the following sentence in a double way. After making his observation about Wing’s love being like that of the “finer sort of women,” the narrator observes, “And yet that is but crudely stated. It needs the poet there” (31). Again, the narrator emphasizes the necessity of poetic perception: to truly understand the significance of Wing’s behavior, the spiritual reality bodied forth sacramentally in Wing’s body, a kind of reading is necessary that does not take phenomena at face or surface value but is open and sensitive to analogy, higher reference, and mystery. On the one hand, this statement invites us to read the story in such a manner that we see Wing transgressing inadvertently and innocently against the sexual mores of a society that has no way of reading his complex sexuality in other than a crudely reductive manner. The ensuing episode then becomes yet more evidence in “Hands” of a spiritually bankrupt society that cannot conceive of its world symbolically, poetically, sacramentally. When

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a “half-witted boy” starts to “imagin[e] unspeakable things” at night and “in the morning [goes] forth to tell his dreams as facts,” the town’s materialistic inclination to perceive subtle, elusive phenomena as straightforward, literal facts leads to the simplistic charge of homosexual child molestation, and Wing is beaten and driven from town, becoming an inexpressive, antisocial berry-picking machine in Winesburg whose compulsive nervous habits alone distortedly reveal something of the person he formerly was. On the other hand, we might understand the narrator’s statement as an invitation to look for ambiguity, to realize the complexity of what is being related, and to avoid simplistic responses. The obviously suggested narrative of the uniquely sensitive individual being victimized by a rigid and inhumane society has been upheld by many critics. Jim Elledge, for instance, defines the Dantean subtext of “Hands” and, comparing Wing to the Inferno’s adulterous Paolo and Francesca, states, “Unlike their carnal love, Wing’s ‘love of men’ . . . is a Platonic love of humankind which was misinterpreted by his students’ parents and his neighbors as homosexual desire. Their misinterpretation of his actions compelled them to consider murdering him” (12). In his conclusion, Elledge argues that “if Wing Biddlebaum had realized he committed no wrong by following his natural mode of teaching, his torment would have ended” (15). Similarly, Monika Fludernik suggests that Wing’s inspired teaching in Pennsylvania was “the proper activity congenial to Wing’s hands driven by a spiritual hunger” (120). Also assigning ethical failure mainly to the Pennsylvania townsmen who cannot understand Wing’s fine spiritual nature, Tebbetts assesses the deeper meaning of Wing’s story as follows: The idiot boy’s mind has failed twice—first, to be moved by physical act into spiritual growth and, second, to see any difference at all between dream, however physical, and the finite world of action. One step to authentic incarnate life, it must be concluded, is recognizing spirit and flesh as both distinct and, at the same time, related and complementary qualities. The boy who cannot do so catalyzes the townspeople’s reaction which crushes Wing, keeping him ever after too frightened of the flesh to make any further attempt to use the body to express the spirit. (133)

More recently, Robert Dunne, in his Foucauldian analysis of the social “surveillance” under which individuals are placed in Winesburg, has defined Wing as a victim of his culture’s oppressive “normalized standards” (46). The culture will accept only what it can categorize and, thus, control:



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Dreams in this tale and throughout Winesburg are regarded positively by the narrator; but dreams, like the concept of understanding, cannot be captured precisely in language. Because of their elusiveness, dreams can lend themselves to misinterpretation, as happens in the story when the “half-witted boy” related his sexual “dreams as facts.” . . . Like Winesburg (or, by extension, like any societal organization), the Pennsylvania town is suspicious of such communication because it cannot be neatly gauged and assessed, and accordingly, people like Adolph who resort to such expression also raise suspicions. Deemed a pervert, Adolph Myers is run out of town not knowing exactly why, except that “the hands must be to blame” [33]. The town thus instills in him a similar distrust of his hands. (47)

Certainly, these critics have a valid point: small towns in Anderson’s fiction, as in that of most American writers, tend to be populated by narrow minds prone to literalistic moralism, and Wing’s hometown is, as evidenced by its lynching mob,10 not any more reflective or understanding than one might expect of, say, Sinclair Lewis’s Gopher Prairie. American culture’s a-sacramental crude “hermeneutic,” its narrow way of conceiving of and responding to events, is certainly being critiqued in “Hands” based on the small-town persecutors’ inability to comprehend their victim. However, there is more to the story than such an exposure of narrow-mindedness, and Anderson’s brilliance as a writer shows itself in such not immediately obvious, even unsuspected, additional layers of meaning. Some critics, since the late 1960s, have noted how “Hands” resists a reading entirely sympathetic toward Wing. In his 1972 groundbreaking analysis of the story, Ralph Ciancio points to George D. Murphy’s 1967 article “The Theme of Sublimation in Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio” as the first instance of a critic arguing that “in the fact of caressing George, Wing again becomes aware of his sexual ecstasy [as he experienced it in Pennsylvania when interacting with his students] and the truth of the accusations he has run from” (998). Murphy briefly suggests that Wing is psychologically paralyzed by the recognition of his sexual urges, which he is used to sublimating “exquisitely” (239). Following the lead of this suggestion by Murphy, Ciancio presents an in-depth analysis of the psychological processes operative in Wing throughout the story and frames his discussion in theological terms, acknowledging that Anderson’s ultimate concerns are spiritual. His analysis is highly relevant for understanding what the story expresses concerning Anderson’s sacramental vision and his critique

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of the Puritan legacy in American culture, and Ciancio’s incisive wording merits quoting him at length: Wing chooses to crucify himself rather than to desecrate his dream. . . . [The grotesques’] social crises are simply the external and metaphorical counterparts of their struggle against the internal limits of their being, of their innate finitude, of contingencies which circumscribe their dreams from within and which the grotesques attempt to transcend: they are bent upon immortality. . . . [H] aving met with the opposition of experiential fact but seeking in their hearts the apotheosis of their emotions, they discredit the objective reality of the first and make absolute the subjective reality of the second. And when this fails, they tend to regard their finitude as absolute: they make of objective reality the totality of all there is. (998)

What Ciancio is suggesting here could theologically be termed Wing’s failure to accept and admit the fallenness of the world. His caressing touches of his male students could be understood as an unconscious and sublimated attempt at erotic intimacy, an attempt at a full sensual-spiritual integration with others, an Edenic wholeness. And this Edenic longing of Wing is brought explicitly into a connection with the Western literary tradition of pastoral: On the grassy bank Wing Biddlebaum had tried again to drive his point home [to George Willard]. His voice became soft and reminiscent, and with a sigh of contentment he launched into a long rambling talk, speaking as one lost in a dream. Out of the dream Wing Biddlebaum made a picture for George Willard. In the picture men lived again in a kind of pastoral golden age. Across a green open country came clean-limbed young men, some afoot, some mounted upon horses. In crowds the young men came to gather about the feet of an old man who sat beneath a tree in a tiny garden and who talked to them. Wing Biddlebaum became wholly inspired. For once he forgot the hands. Slowly they stole forth and lay upon George Willard’s shoulders. (30)

The picture Wing paints here—and the word “picture” in the text points to the long Western tradition of pastoral painting—is truly a pastoral genre picture, with its “green open country” and hale and healthy swains gathering under a tree to listen to a wise elder resembling Socrates. The balance of nature and culture, expressed, for example, by teaching under a tree, the harmony and reciprocity be-



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tween people, the intergenerational continuity, with ancient wisdom being passed down to a new generation that eagerly and reverentially absorbs it, the domestic animals aiding humans, the beauty and restfulness—all of these features, indeed, sound like a vision of the pastoral golden age, a vision not realizable in a broken, fallen world. If this is the world Wing inhabits in his mind, then he is certainly, to put it ironically, “out of touch” with the world as it really exists and is imposing impossible dreams upon his concrete teaching activity. As a visionary cultivator of minds who is internally disconnected from the very real soil he must cultivate, he resembles, symbolically, the Midwestern settlers imposing unrealistic visionary schemes upon a world harsh, concrete, complex, and resistant to such schemes. This incongruity between the world as it is and the way we would envision it must be accepted for a wholesome and natural identity to emerge; in other words, the self must open up to the Other that is the world, must let go of ideal systems of “truth” and allow for immediate experience and reality to provide a corrective. While Wing’s Greek pagan pastoral may be very different from a Puritan “city on a hill,” what both visions have in common is that they mandate a perfection that closes off the Self to a full, natural humanity lived out concretely and responsively in a broken world. To return to the dream/finitude divide pointed out by Ciancio, which he also terms a flesh/spirit divide (998): the spirit must accept the flesh, the concrete world, and the limitations imposed by the flesh. Only if the Self is willing to be mortified in this way will it genuinely open up to the Other, will it become relational and find a new wholeness in that relationality. For Wing, in his inspired teaching, is not relational. We see this failure to relate, for instance, in the way he interacts with George Willard when he verbally paints his golden age picture for the younger man. When Wing begins to talk to George, he sighs and “launched into a long rambling talk, speaking as one lost in a dream” (30); in other words, he has virtually forgotten about George and is indulging in his own reverie, obliviously running on with disregard for courtesy. Lindsay takes this basic point further, explaining the astonishing depth of Wing’s self-absorption: [Wing’s] urgent “teaching” of George Willard, his text ostensibly aimed at George, has Wing himself as the principal audience. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how George might be construed as a possible audience for this dream that seems to have nothing to do with Wing’s ensuing message of radical estranged individualism, the thrust of which is “Don’t listen to those clods.” Only if we assume that the implied “point” of the dream is a message of worshipful subservience of young men (George) to older and wiser men (Wing) can we see any logic

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to George as audience. Wing would certainly never admit to any such intent. Regardless of whether such adoration is Wing’s unconscious meaning, the narrator suggests that the pastoral dream is directed mainly at Wing himself. He displays a glassy-eyed sensual indulgence “speaking as one lost in a dream”; he sighs contentedly as he caresses himself with his own words. (44)

We can only assume that Wing’s teaching in Pennsylvania, which he connects with his golden age Socratic dream, had a similarly self-absorbed quality. The wholeness Wing envisions is centered on himself; the world he depicts is his world, a community of reverent youths drinking up the wisdom flowing out of his own self. It is a world subsumed in Wing’s inflated ego. In this context, the homoerotic overtones both of Wing’s pastoral vision and of his interactions with George become indicative of further unwholesomeness. Given contemporary society’s more favorable understanding of homosexuality, it is important to remember that Anderson, for all his postmodern tendencies, consistently views homosexuality negatively, as can be gleaned from statements in his Memoirs11 and from his stereotyped, clearly homophobic, even creepy, depictions of homosexual characters, such as Kate Chanceller in Poor White, Esther Walker in Dark Laughter, and Blanche Long in Beyond Desire. Male-female reciprocity was Anderson’s ideal, and same-sex relations seemed to suggest to him a lack of wholeness, a failure to truly engage the Other, a form of self-absorption. In Wing’s pastoral vision, we find an all-male world, and the young men are “clean-limbed,” a striking phrase alerting us to Wing’s erotic attraction, with the mention of horses potentially underscoring an aura of sexual virility still further. The ancient Greek context, in which teacher-student sexual relationships were celebrated (see, for instance, Plato’s Symposium), also contributes to the homoerotic overtones. The conspicuous absence of girls is noted by Lindsay: “Unlike the real classroom back in Pennsylvania, there are no girls in this garden, thus aligning Wing’s Eden with other American male protagonists who seek to inhabit purely male gardens” (43). Wing’s ignoring of the opposite sex and his incorporation of the male students into his erotically charged dream of a self-centered pastoral wholeness indicates how much he disregards others’ real presence. Even though Wing is “not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men” (30), that is, not crassly physical but, rather, sublimated in his eroticism,12 his “power” over the children, nonetheless, contains an unempathic substratum and a coercive component, however subtle it may be. Lindsay points out that the narrator’s statement concerning Wing ruling “by a power so gentle that it passes as a lovable weakness” gives one pause



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because “to say that something ‘passes’ emphasizes the mistaken identity, even hints at conscious duplicity. Maintaining his polite stance, the narrator intimates an impolite suggestion, that this power that Wing rules by may be neither lovable nor weak” (31). And, indeed, the fact that the “young men” of Wing’s dreams are, in actuality, children adds a disturbing dimension to his erotic reverie. For Anderson, homosexuality in itself already seems to imply a refusal to engage with the Other, in this case, the opposite sex; but Wing’s erotic energy being directed toward children takes his suggested refusal to engage with a full-fledged counterpart to an entirely new level. In Wing’s interactions with George, we may note (along with Lindsay, whose close reading of this scene hardly leaves a stone unturned) that Wing’s hands “steal forth” when he begins touching George, the phrasing offering a sinister suggestion; the softening of his voice and his sighing also have sexual connotations (Lindsay 46). Finally, he becomes loud and shrill, “the voice,” rather than “his voice,” talks, and his eyes start glowing, all descriptive suggestions of demonic possession (Lindsay 46). With horror, Wing realizes that he is caressing George and flees, “thrusting his hands deep into his trouser pockets” in an onanistic gesture (30). As Murphy, Ciancio, and Lindsay indicate, Wing perhaps has had his moment of self-recognition, a horrible realization he would rather not face, namely, that his inspirational talk cloaks base desires of a self-aggrandizing and lustful nature. The imagery of demonic possession connects well with Dunne’s Foucauldian analysis of the Winesburg grotesques. Here, he comments on Cloyd Head’s 1915 play Grotesques, relating it to Winesburg: In Grotesques we are presented with characters who are lifeless until they are assigned roles to play and lines to speak. Unconscious role players, they assume their parts at the whim of both an individual . . . and an anonymous power source . . . , and their performance is closely monitored by both. Achieving consciousness, they permit themselves to continue being subjected until, reaching a point of abject frustration, they attempt to break through their confined condition; but, fearing the unknown consequences of such an act, they willingly submit to their role, which is now made more intolerable because they are conscious of their subjection. Removed from the context of the play, this paradigm could apply nearly verbatim to the context of the Winesburg grotesques. (39–40)

When Wing shrilly admonishes George not to conform to society, he uses this striking formulation: “From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring

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of the voices” (30). These indelicate voices that “roar” are, of course, the roleassigning voices of a society too crude to be in dialogue with individual human beings in all their complexity. Thus, on the one hand, the glow in Wing’s eyes might well be the flame of lust or of “demonic” self-obsession, which, ironically, de-individualizes since individuality exists via relationship and community; but on the other hand, the look of horror in Wing’s eyes, and his compulsive body language, may bespeak another kind of “possession” by an external force, namely that of social surveillance. Through both types of possession, Wing’s natural self is annihilated, the self that would be capable of actual love, real communion. The fact that Wing’s grotesquery is intimately linked to a pastoral dream makes the relevance of his case to a failed Midwestern society clear. Though his dream is pagan, hedonistic, and erotic, as opposed to Puritan, it also paradoxically denies the flesh, the real world he inhabits, and his own mortal finitude and sexuality. For if he freely acknowledged his sexual longings, he might be able to manage or direct them better; what gets him into trouble is his sublimation and resulting failure to recognize what he is doing. Similarly, the Puritan legacy in American culture has given rise to a destructive, life-denying culture of industrial and capitalistic values that fails to acknowledge its own disharmony with human nature and nature in general, turning the rich Midwestern land into a surreal series of inhuman factory towns in which wholesome living and community have become difficult to attain. This connection between Wing’s catastrophic idealism and the Puritan substratum of American culture becomes more strongly evident in what might be termed the “mob sequence” of Wing’s story. His excommunication from the town begins with a saloon keeper named Henry Bradford, who comes to the schoolhouse and gives Wing a beating (32). The man’s name seems laden with significance, as do all of the names in Winesburg. First, we may note the contrast with Wing’s original name, Adolph Myers; while Myers’s first and last name stand out as clearly being German, Bradford’s names are stereotypically English.13 Henry is the most commonly used royal British name, and it most famously recalls Henry VIII, known, of course, for two things: divorcing and executing his wives and proclaiming England a Protestant nation. The family name Bradford recalls William Bradford, Puritan pilgrim father and author of Of Plymouth Plantation (1656). Hence, both names are associated with Protestantism, with America’s English Protestant heritage, and, in the case of Bradford, specifically with Puritanism. Symbolically, a descendant of the Puritans is beating up a morally dubious German intellectual full of dreams of classical Greece. What complicates the symbolic scheme is that Henry Bradford is, of all things, a saloon keeper. Lindsay sees Anderson as sug-



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gesting as one possible interpretation a “wry ironic treatment of the repressive New England temperament, represented by the downwardly mobile bartending descendant of America’s founding fathers now reasserting a last dominion, reasserting the puritanical, sexually repressive strain of New England over the European newcomer” (54). I would add that the possible Henry VIII allusion connects with a shedding of sacramentality, and, therefore, the communal drinking at the bar might be a secularized substitute for the sacrament of communion, which has lost its grace-bestowing power in a Protestant world, the bar being a graceless and powerless substitute for the Church, the spirits served there a cheapened materialistic version of the Holy Spirit. That Anderson had communion on his mind when writing Winesburg is indicated by the very name he gave the town: Winesburg, through which flows Wine Creek. In the eighteenth story of Winesburg, “Drink,” the protagonist Tom Foster, like the legendary Doctor Faustus,14 whose name Tom’s last name resembles phonetically, uses alcohol in order to have an illusionary, imaginary sexual experience with Helen, here, Helen White; in the Faust legend, a doctor of theology sells his soul to the devil and asks him for Helen of Troy, with whom he then has a marriage that is later revealed to have been a demonic illusion; after the doctor has to pay the price of his bargain with the devil and descends into hell, Helen and the children he had with her disappear into thin air, having merely been impersonated by demons. In both texts, the Helen figure is a symbol of perfect beauty, achievable only via self-deception. However, Anderson’s Tom Foster is more self-aware than Faustus, knowing he is indulging in an illusion, willingly hurting himself. For him, alcohol produces an illusory sexual communion, a painfully empty substitute for the real sacrament of matrimony, the real sacramental communion of sex. In other words, America’s Protestant culture, of which Henry Bradford is a representative, has substituted empty, merely physical forms of communion for actual spiritually substantive ones. The resulting empty materialism15 now clashes with Wing’s empty fleshsublimating idealism, American materialism meeting German romanticism. In his crude materialistic literalism, Bradford cannot perceive the complexity of Wing’s spirit but perceives him in literal terms as a flat-out child molester, based on the rather slight confirmations of the “half-witted” boy’s charges: “Trembling lads were jerked out of bed and questioned. ‘He put his arms about me,’ said one. ‘His fingers were always playing in my hair,’ said another” (32). Taking these vague indicators as proof of a gross transgression, Bradford performs a sort of rape with his hands. Lindsay makes the following observation concerning Bradford’s beating of Wing: “The fact that the ‘hard knuckles beat down into the frightened face’ rather

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than on to strengthens the metaphorical rape quality” (54). Ironically, Bradford is crassly, physically literalizing what he accuses Adolph Myers of having done. The subtle way in which Myers, in fact, has violated the students is beyond Bradford’s grasp. In this bizarre scene of the schoolhouse beating is, therefore, expressed a grotesque dichotomy of Puritan-derived literalism and materialism on the one hand, and its flipside, a sublimating romantic idealism on the other, neither of which allows for a relational encounter with the Other, and neither of which allows access to a sacramental reality that is both fully physical and fully spiritual. What Wing does receive from this encounter is a starkly physical confrontation with the world outside of his own mind. As Bradford pounds Wing with “hard knuckles” and calls him a “beast,” Wing is confronted with the animal, physical part of himself that underlies his dreams and with the palpable hard reality of another whose presence he can in no way absorb into his dream world. The fact that Bradford “roars” at Wing connects with Wing’s warning to George not to listen to the “roaring voices” that tell you not to dream: “You must shut out the roaring voices.” It is precisely by shutting out the revelation of a reality resistant to his dreams, by shutting out the hard, objective world, that Wing fails to become truly human. He passes up his chance for gaining insight into himself and others. Some of the blame does fall on Bradford also: roaring and beating are such naked acts of self-assertion that they crush rather than teach. Thus, Bradford, when he roars, “I’ll teach you not to put your hand on my boy, you beast,” does not accomplish his teaching mission; for he does not teach Wing what it really means for him to touch his students. Externally, Wing learns his lesson; he refrains with a sense of panic from ever touching people again. However, he has not learned the deeper meaning of hands, of intimacy, touching, of genuine communication, of how to relate the self to the other, of appropriateness, and, generally, of wholesome relationship: “Although he did not understand what had happened he felt that the hands must be to blame” (33). A literal, external lesson has been learned from a figure representing Puritan literalism; but Wing’s spirit is not reformed in the process, just shut up within him, manifesting itself in neurotic behaviors, such as nervous hand movements, which mark him as a grotesque. This sad state is ushered in not alone by Bradford, but by a group of men representing the community at large, or at least its patriarchal upper echelon: “Adolph Myers was driven from the Pennsylvania town in the night. With lanterns in their hands a dozen men came to the door of the house where he lived alone and commanded that he dress and come forth. It was raining and one of the men had a rope in his hands” (32). As is his wont, Anderson loads this brief passage with



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resonant words and images, layering what at first appears to be a simple passage with connotative meanings. It is a dozen men who come to lynch Wing—twelve men. The number is sacred in traditional Judeo-Christian numerology, and when applied to a group of men, recalls Christ’s twelve disciples. As was already hinted via the saloon image, Wing is being persecuted by a pseudo-church, a pseudocommunity, a twisted, spiritually emptied version of that communion of saints, the Church. The man with the rope most likely alludes to Peter, to the following passage in which Christ institutes Peter as the foundation of His Church: “Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed . . . unto thee [that I am the Messiah], but my father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the Kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matt. 16.17–19). Of course, the authority bestowed on Peter here is not meant to be of the tyrannical sort: Peter is to represent Christ on Earth and, hence, is to do nothing merely out of his own wisdom or authority. His binding and loosing authority involves admission into the Kingdom of God or exclusion: hence, St. Peter is said to hold the keys of heaven. The Peter in Anderson’s scene, representing the pseudocommunity of a modern post-sacramental culture (a pseudo-pope, if you will) is also not acting merely on his own authority but clearly is just a representative of the larger mob’s will. What he brings, in the name of his false church, is not the Gospel of grace, but the gospel of death-dealing retribution: in other words, the Church, based originally on God’s love, has become corrupted and changed into a society based on self-righteousness and power, and a spiritual binding has crudely been translated into a literal binding, a lynching (which in turn exemplifies the spiritual fetters of literalism, which strangle life). Moreover, these twelve apostles bring literal lantern light rather than the light of truth and grace. Though the men call on Wing to “dress and come forth,” we do not learn of Wing dressing: all we know is that he is a “small, white, and pitiful” figure, the whiteness suggesting not so much Wing’s clothing (though he could be wearing a white nightgown) but the pale skin of a frightened, exposed, and vulnerable person. Wing’s white figure arouses the townsmen’s compassion, and they let him go: “They had intended to hang the schoolmaster, but something in his figure, so small, white, and pitiful, touched their hearts and they let him escape” (32). Though the men want Wing to dress, what confronts them is his undisguised humanity, and this humanity takes on Christological connotations in its very lamb-like whiteness

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and from the fact that they are about to hang this spotless figure from a tree. In another instance of Andersonian irony, we have a symbolic scenario of St. Peter intending to “bind” Christ Himself, recalling how the biblical Peter denied the bound Christ just prior to the latter’s crucifixion, thus, in a sense, participating in it. Later, Peter had to repent by answering three times the following question posed to him by the risen Christ: “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me?” (John 21.15–17). In “Hands,” “Peter” and the others also repent for their part in the crucifixion and, in a sense, opt for love. What we glimpse here is a flicker of what in Anderson’s symbolic vision is the true sacramental Church emerging out of the darkness of a life-denying literalism: Wing’s human presence, his human spirit in all its broken nakedness, makes the lynch mob realize the common human bond they share with him, makes them look beyond the label with which they have categorized him, makes them empathize and no longer feel entirely separate from him. In a moment of sacramental perception, the men see something spiritual, a light emanating from Wing’s body, and they see more than the social role (pervert, criminal) by which they have identified him. A moment of natural humanity, and, thus, of grace, has come upon them, and for a fleeting moment, there occurs an intangible compassionate communion with their intended victim. In this context, the Christological associations of Wing become understandable: it is not that Wing is entirely guiltless, but that they have scapegoated him to assure themselves of their own righteousness. In a sense, he is to bear their own evil, a scapegoating function also noted by Lindsay: “We might suspect that the twelve men . . . repress their own desires by planning to eliminate the man whom they have been led to believe has acted out those desires” (56). While they may not have pederastic inclinations, nonetheless, they might be exorcizing on a more general level, their own fleshly frailty, asserting a righteous and firmly “masculine” identity. The moment they begin to identify with Wing as a fellow human being, their need to distance themselves from him by scapegoating and killing him fades in intensity. And yet, much like the romantic Wing, these post-Puritan small-town apostles cannot bear to face any full recognition of their own humanity, any true encounter with their own nature: “As he ran away into the darkness they repented their weakness and ran after him, swearing and throwing sticks and great balls of soft mud at the figure that screamed and ran faster and faster into the darkness” (32–33). The “repentance” here is ironic since it signifies a return to the old self-righteous ways, rather than an opening up to grace. However, the mob does not really return to its former hard-hearted state: none of the objects they throw after Wing, i.e., words, sticks, and “balls of soft mud,” could possibly do him much harm. It



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is as though the mob is pretending to themselves and to one another that their holy wrath is continuing unabated. The sticks and balls have phallic suggestions, but their simultaneous harmlessness indicates that the aggressive masculinity they are to represent lacks force. Besides being testicular objects, the balls of mud have a land-related meaning relevant to this discussion of the sacramentality of the Midwestern land. The ground is muddy because it is a rainy night, and rain, in Anderson’s oeuvre, as in literature generally, is associated with fertility and the life force. An especially striking example of Anderson’s use of rain in Winesburg occurs in “Adventure,” which tells of Alice Hindman’s sexually frustrated, naked run through the rainy town: “As she stood on the little grass plot before the house and felt the cold rain on her body a mad desire to run naked through the streets took possession of her. She thought that the rain would have some creative and wonderful effect on her body” (119). The language here (“creative and wonderful effect on her body”) indicates a desire for pregnancy, for children, and also bears connotations of rejuvenation, perhaps of baptism. The rain on the night of Wing’s eviction from his hometown has softened the soil, and it is this soft, life-suffused, fertile soil that the mob throws after Wing’s fleeing white figure. In a certain sense, just as Alice in “Adventure” seeks a sexual sort of baptism in the rain, “nature’s baptism,” in order to emerge renewed, transformed, Wing here is almost receiving a nature baptism. Instead of being washed white, he needs to be washed with mud, needs to recognize, face, understand, and embrace his natural fleshly humanity and that of others, needs to come down from his sublimated, pseudoSocratic pedestal. His idealism needs to be soiled, return to earth. Similarly, the post-Puritan materialists pursuing Wing also need to take their lesson from the soft fertile mud they are throwing; they would do well to acknowledge their own soiled nature, their fleshly, mortal, fallible humanity and their common bond with all sinners. Mud, dirt, dust, function as symbols of mortality; in the soaked mud, both vitality and mortality are emblematized, life and death wrapped up together in cyclical complementarity. Nature, the deep rich soil, is inviting its inhabitants to open up to death in order to receive life, to open up to concreteness in order to receive truth, to open up to frailty in order to receive full being, and to open up to grace and love in order to have a wholeness that is true and organic rather than a stifling attempt at fitting life into a perfect scheme. Unfortunately, none of the participants in the small-town drama accept nature’s lesson. Wing, rather than entering into a personal rebirth at Winesburg, becomes a completely externalized individual; no longer finding it possible to live in dreams, he goes to the other extreme and becomes a machine-like creature. As mentioned

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earlier, he is known in his new hometown only for his robotic productivity; he lives a soulless life without human connection, a cog in the machine of capitalist agriculture. Doubly denaturalized, both by his romantic idealism and by the Puritanism-derived interconnected cultural phenomena of literalism, materialism, and industrialism, Wing lacks any means of bridging the split between body and spirit, lacks the means to live out the animal-angel balance that, in a sacramental worldview, is the crux of being human. The story “Hands” ends with an image that, by way of its biblical reference, contains a significant critique of American Puritanism with its emphasis on election, its rigid, external standards of measuring this “elect,” communally integrated status, and its literalizing of the idea of the New Israel in an American context, an ideological imposition on the American land that via idealistic vision has led to cynical exploitation and to the culture’s ruthless self-aggrandizement. This charged image is presented soon after the “quiet summer night” has once more closed over Winesburg with the departure of the harvest-carrying train. In his decaying home, Wing has just set up his cot for the night: “A few stray white bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor by the table; putting the lamp upon a low stool he began to pick up the crumbs, carrying them to his mouth one by one with unbelievable rapidity” (33–34). Lest the religious significance of this action be lost on the reader, the narrator transfigures it into a liturgical ritual: “In the dense blotch of light beneath the table, the kneeling figure looked like a priest engaged in some service of his church. The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well have been mistaken for the fingers of the devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his rosary” (34). It is a very non-Puritan sort of devotion imagined here, one that accords thematically with the notion of salvation outside the national bounds of God’s people, Israel, a theme that is central to the Bible passage referenced here. In this story from the Gospel According to Matthew, a Canaanite woman requests of Jesus that He heal her demon-possessed daughter, and Jesus replies that He ought to reserve His blessings for Israelites only since they are the chosen people to whom He has been directly sent: “It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to the dogs.” The woman answers humbly: “Truth, Lord: yet even the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table,” to which Jesus replies, “O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt” (Matt. 15.21–28). It is noteworthy that the affliction troubling the woman’s daughter is possession by an external force. The woman is asking Jesus to remove the power of a malevolent external agency and to restore her daughter to her true and natural self. This resto-



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ration of self is granted because the woman dared to trust that God’s love and His salvation applied even to her. It is such a realization—a faith in his own humanity, in a deeper identity that should not be externally dictated, in a spiritual reality in which he is a lovable, communal being—that Wing needs. He needs to see himself in his larger human context and needs to learn to understand and accept his own and others’ fleshly as well as spiritual common nature. Tragically, the rapidity of his hands is inappropriate to ritual and reveals that his rejection as a fellow human being by his categorical, materialistic, exploitive society, as well as his own blinding and self-absorbed idealism, has condemned him to a church of one, has put him “out of touch,” has barred any communal self-realization. Instead of the expressive touch, which would be communal, a nervous rapidity reveals empty efficiency, a ritual drained of meaning. The rosary16 reference points once more to the salvific possibilities in nature, unknown to the post-Puritan “elect” (i.e., “respectable” citizens) and to their devastated reject Wing alike: the reference to Catholicism in the image of the rosary points to the important image of the Virgin (an image, for Anderson, filtered through Henry Adams), a female, organic principle neglected by America’s post-Puritan, capitalist society. This organic principle, embodied by the Midwestern landscape from which comes the bread that feeds all, has been rejected at great spiritual cost by Midwestern society. The problem of a Puritanism become materialism and the resultant inability to perceive the meaning of Creation, of nature, the land, though evident in “Hands,” is particularly explicit in “Godliness,” in which we find an 1860s–1880s farmer deeply shaped by Puritanism but also affected by the new industrial and materialistic spirit in America, fusing both influences and thereby demonstrating the relatedness of both and their dire spiritual consequences. Furthermore, because Jesse Bentley is a farmer, his drama unfolds against the backdrop of the Midwestern land and relates America’s spiritual fall directly to lessons not learned from the land. At the story’s midpoint, the narrator pauses for a lengthy reflection on the two influences, Puritanism and capitalism, that drive Jesse’s life. Aesthetically, this explicit discussion of Jesse’s historically conditioned mindset may break the dramatic storytelling mode too much, disrupting it with what feels like a lecture. Yet this section, nonetheless, illuminates the cultural, historical, and spiritual undercurrents at work in the story. On the one hand, a New England–derived sensibility is elucidated: Jesse “regret[ts] the fate that had not let him live in a simpler and sweeter time when at the beckoning of some strange cloud in the sky men left their lands and houses and went forth into the wilderness to create new

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races” (80). Here we recognize the Puritan impulse to found a new race, a people of God, in the American wilderness and to impose on the American situation the Old Testament patriarchal typology of Abraham’s journey and the nation of Israel’s exodus into the Promised Land. It is significant that the settlement of America and of pioneer Ohio is seen in terms of an application of biblical typology to the American land. Cultural historian Roger Lundin sees the Protestant typological tradition of the seventeenth century, especially that of the Puritans and Pietists, as a part of what Hans Frei calls “the great reversal” in Western hermeneutics. In applying biblical types to the individual Christian’s inward life, these religious thinkers, unchecked by the old medieval ecclesiastical authority, proceed to, in Frei’s words, make “interpretation . . . a matter of fitting the biblical story into another world with another story rather than incorporating that world into the biblical story” (qtd. in Lundin 64; Frei 130). Lundin observes that “[w]ith their descriptive power and narrative authority significantly weakened, the Scriptures would increasingly be left with the primary task of feeding the self ’s insatiable appetite for metaphors and meaning” (67). Romanticism, according to Lundin, is a direct outcome of this Puritan/Pietistic typological theology; the self has become autonomous of authority and subsumes religion within its own narrative (68). Jesse, significantly, is not only a latter-day Puritan but also somewhat of an American romantic with Transcendentalist leanings: “His walking in the fields and through the forests at night had brought him close to nature and there were forces in the passionately religious man that ran out to the forces in nature” (80). Here, an identification with nature takes place that assumes that some pervasive force after the manner of Emerson’s Over-Soul pervades both the individual and the cosmos. The individual, in a sense, thus, contains the cosmos within him- or herself and can intuit truth. Whether Jesse is submerging nature within his self, the way he has done with biblical typology, remains unclear in the laconic, cryptic reference to his romanticism. Does he say, with Emerson, “Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. . . . What we are, that only can we see”? (42). Or does he actually realize that he is part of nature, part of a world that is larger than him and contains him, that has given birth to him and which he is not able to shape, master, or even fully understand? Whatever the case may be, there are dangers inherent in Jesse’s experience of the microcosm, of his own inner forces reflecting those in nature. Peter Harrison observes that the “link between the human being (the microcosm) and creation (the macrocosm) became a rich source of allegorical interpretation” (48), providing a basis for humans to see themselves as part of the larger patterns of things and to relate those patterns



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to themselves, establishing an interpretively fruitful mirroring of the one in the many. And yet, over time, this interpretive advantage was increasingly seen as a tool for the exercise of power: “Microcosmic conceptions had formerly made known the meaning of the world, now they would hold out the possibility of its mastery. From being an interpretive principle, microcosm-macrocosm came to be an ordering conception by which the world could be known, and in theory, manipulated” (50). As in the connection between the Transcendentalism of Calvinism and its strange obverse sociohistorical end result, materialism, we see here a connection between a transcendent conception of the self and a temptation to crass exploitiveness. If Jesse’s romanticism is indeed of a selfish, world-subsuming kind, such as is his Puritan typology, then the concomitance of his materialistic and acquisitive exploits is not surprising. In spite of both the historical Puritan as well as the Transcendentalist claims to truth that exist in his consciousness, Jesse does not feel at this midpoint of the story that he indeed possesses truth. This is so because he, for one, has been thwarted in his desire for a son and thus is not able to sustain patriarchal fantasies, nor has he been able to experience the sense of a cosmos truly in tune with himself. Since the self and its visible typification of spiritual realities have become central, any defeat will set the framework of truth off-kilter. Overall, the narrator seems to see Jesse’s romanticism as a positive development, at least relative to who Jesse has been before: his faith has become more diffusive, less rigid, his “egotism” has been “softened,” his sense of revelation and mission less specific and personal and more general (80). Yet, this vague identification with nature is not ultimately satisfying to Jesse’s hunger for significance. Jesse “work[s] night and day to make his farms more productive and to extend his holdings of land,” yet he “regret[s] that he [cannot] use his own restless energy in the building of temples, the slaying of unbelievers and in general the work of glorifying God’s name on earth” (80). The split between transcendence and materiality tortures Jesse: in the absence of a clear spiritual infusion of the concrete world, there is, instead of a spiritually meaningful materiality, merely one to be mastered by spirit—by the lonely, individual spirit. The mention of Jesse’s restlessness is of supreme importance because it refers to the central spiritual value of “peace,” which he himself admits he is missing and because it explains the connection between his “Puritanism” and his materialism and his consequent materialistic misreading of the American land. Early in the story, the narrator reports Jesse’s feeling that “he would have given much to achieve peace and in him was a fear that peace was the thing he could not achieve” (68).

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Peace, in a larger spiritual sense, implies a resting place, a letting go, a security and shelteredness, a state of harmony with others or the Other, and an identity that has been consummated in such a way that the self is not at war with its own principles or with the larger principles and laws under which it is subsumed. However, Jesse’s self bears a heavy spiritual burden: living not in the “sweet and simple” days of Puritan or Old Testament times, he is a (New) Israel unto himself, upholding, in his desire for meaning, a typology carried merely by his own realization of it. In his self-defined world, he is not in harmony with the true structure of the universe, nor with his society, nor even with his own true human nature. Yet he forges ahead, driven by the fear of meaninglessness and blind to the solipsism he is essentially practicing. Since God has not spoken to him directly and has not answered his prayers, Jesse takes it upon himself to prove his blessedness because he “want[s] terribly to make his life a thing of great importance,” not being able to “bear to become . . . such a clod” as the tired, dull farmers around him (69). Not realizing that “importance” derives from one’s relation to an Other to whom one is important, to whom one does have meaning, Jesse determines to give himself meaning and to build what are essentially monuments to himself. He does not realize that his desire for temple-building is really not a worshipful impulse directed at an Other but a desire for giving his own Self significance: the Puritan God is so transcendent that material marks of election (e.g., Jesse’s temple) rather than a faith relationship become central. There is no relational resting point, then, no assurance, no shelter but one’s own continual, tangible self-assurance: peace is out of the question. Jesse’s yearning is too self-referential to resemble in any way the powerfully consoled because trustingly God-directed yearning of the biblical Psalmist. This Psalmist does enter into the presence of an actual Other, into the presence of a God who is far more relational than Jesse’s, who provides a true home for the soul: “One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in his temple” (Ps. 27.4). Once more we may cite Max Weber as he comments on Calvinism’s tendency, in practice, to place the isolated self at center stage and to emphasize the self ’s role as an agent of spiritual control over materiality, and consequently positing it in a peaceless, non-relational power role that never comes to rest in an Other. Weber states, “[H]owever useless good works might be as a means of attaining salvation . . . they are indispensable as a sign of election. They are the technical means, not of purchasing salvation, but of getting rid of the fear of damnation. . . . In practice this means that God helps those who help themselves” (115). Out



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of fear of damnation, that is, of living the dull, meaningless life of a “clod,” Jesse restlessly “helps himself.” Weber makes the following link to capitalism: “good works” mean that in one’s material calling in this world one does one’s best. Abilities and possessions require good stewardship, which in turn is a sign of election: “The greater the possessions the heavier, if the ascetic attitude toward life stands the test, the feeling of responsibility for them, for holding them undiminished for the glory of God and increasing them by restless effort. . . . The significance [of this belief system] for the development of capitalism is obvious” (170). And so Jesse is touched by that intense form of capitalism, “modern industrialism” and participates in “the most materialistic age in the history of the world” (81). Not only does he display a ruthless acquisitiveness in his farming, acquiring neighboring farms galore and thinking “about the farm night and day,” but he even goes so far as to repudiate the land out of an extreme of acquisitiveness: “The greedy thing in him wanted to make money faster than it could be made by tilling the land” (81). To his banker son-in-law he states that he would also become a banker if he were younger, and he dreams of owning a factory. How is it possible that the land representing a New Israel has become exchangeable for a factory or a role in finance? For this reason: as the illusion of creating a New Israel is increasingly frustrated in Jesse’s life, the originally supposed God-centered impulse of achieving material signs of blessedness has lost its spiritual typological anchor and floated free as a materialism-sans-God in which acquisition freed from religiously specific typology has become an end in itself. The land, misread from the beginning, lies utterly ignored and ravished by industrialism. Unpeaceful, because self-serving, temple-building has become restless material acquisition. How then could the land have brought joy and peace to Jesse and have kept him from a life of unfulfilling and isolating greed? As William James might have said, since the truth and validity of something can often be judged by whether its results are beneficial or not, one might direct one’s attention to the points in the narrative where joy resides and those where it does not. Though such a pragmatic method of looking for truth may seem anti-theological, it could, quite to the contrary, be seen as a sacramental method: using a concrete starting point and exploring such concrete reality thoroughly, one might then arrive at the higher insights accessible in the tangible effects of spiritual realities. In this spirit, one may begin by contrasting the Bentley farm’s past with its spiritually dire present. The narrative begins with an inventory of the later Bentley household followed by a flashback to what it had been like before Jesse’s takeover. The description of the antebellum Ohio farm life at first glance appears none too joyful; though the

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hardest pioneering work has been accomplished, Jesse’s father and brothers “clung to old traditions and worked like driven animals” (64). Into their lives “comes little that was not coarse and brutal and outwardly they were themselves coarse and brutal” (65), eating greasy food, covering themselves with mud all day, and sleeping on beds of straw. It is crucial to note that the Bentleys are “outwardly” coarse; inwardly, they retain something that goes beyond mere coarseness as becomes clear every Saturday night when they drive to town on roads that are “a sea of mud” and, freed from the “heroic labor” of their week, are possessed by a “crude and animal-like poetic fervor” (65). “Animal-like” though this fervor may be, it has already been noted in relation to “Hands” how significantly the word “poetic” figures in Winesburg. It connotes a distance from a literalist, conventional, materialist, factualist culture that in its closed and rigid modes of perception cannot perceive substance; only by relating to the world poetically, that is, by entering into concrete presence and finding there in concrete and limited manifestation and incarnation the larger intangible, ever elusive and indefinable higher mysteries, can we escape a life of merely abstract (yet ultimately unreal) meaning or mere material factuality. Though the Bentleys’ poetic fervor is “crude and animal-like,” it is, nonetheless, “poetic”; in the crude concreteness of their existence, in their inability to conquer and ideologically impose themselves on their environment, they experience reality, presence, and substance in a truer manner than do many of the latter-day townspeople of Winesburg whose lives are less crude but, ironically, more dehumanized and materialistic. One may note most modernist Midwestern fiction writers do not present quite as negative a view of American pioneers as do the cultural critics of the time, notably, Frank and Brooks. Similarly, Anderson does not see pioneer conditions as always merely reinforcing the Puritan obsession with externals rather than the relational and spiritual, but also as precisely counteracting this externalism via the “sacramental resistance” offered to human impositions by the very real and recalcitrant Other of American nature. And so it seems that the sacramental world of fiction, where ideas are concretely “embodied,” proves more complex and less reductive than its more rarefied, literalist, and Gnostic superstructure called “criticism.” The land, thus, in its very physical resistance to the Bentleys, nonetheless, teaches them what critic Tebbetts sees Jesse as lacking. Pointing out Jesse’s “Faustian desire for boundless self-expansion,” Tebbetts notes that Jesse, “[i]n refusing to accept the limitations of his own human nature . . . has sought to violate the harmonious bond of human incarnation and has not expanded his existence but has radically contracted it” (136). Incapable of anything like a Faustian flight, the



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Bentleys remain profoundly incarnate, fallen human beings, fallen just like their sea of mud, the land, but nonetheless, substantive and real unlike the absurd, deluded, and dehumanized Jesse. It is a positive sign in the context of Andersonian fiction that the Bentleys do not express themselves much in words: “It was difficult for them to talk and so they for the most part kept silent” (65). Words, in Anderson, are often removed from presence, conventional, and not densely expressive enough to convey substance. Of course, one cannot evaluate the Bentleys’ silence simplistically in completely positive terms: it means authenticity and avoidance of straying from substance, but it also means a degree of isolation in light of a physical reality that leaves little room for some of the finer nuances of relationship. “Nuance” is, indeed, not necessarily what the Bentleys are known for: they release their “poetic fervor” in fighting (sometimes physically) and singing. Music and violence both function here as substantive, intensely concrete, and deeply experiential and, thus, unfalsified expressions of the two basic aspects of human nature, one positive and openly beauty-seeking, the other aggressive. Neither form of expression is “literal”; both are instinctually driven, tangible, experiential manifestations of underlying realities and are thus “poetic,” and, in a sense, “sacramental,” like the land itself. Of course, we do not have here an unproblematic portrayal of sacramentally realized existence: while their lack of refinement saves the Bentleys from civilized fakeness and empty “word-slinging,” to use a favorite Andersonian expression, and while it does keep their lives in a densely substantive state, the raw and sometimes destructive forms of release practiced by these characters may not be examples of an ideally balanced fusion of the spiritual and the sensual. But, at least the spiritual and the sensual are fused and not torturously pitted in dichotomy to each other. So powerful is the bond and communion created between the Bentleys, that is, Jesse’s father and four older brothers, that when Enoch Bentley, in a “momentary passion,” strikes his father Tom with a whip and nearly kills him, none of his family relationships are put into question: hiding in a barn, fed by his mother, Enoch awaits his father’s death or recovery, ready to flee if his act should turn out to be murder—“[w]hen all turned out well he emerged from his hiding place and went back to the work of clearing the land as though nothing had happened” (65). This is so because, in a sense, nothing has happened; substantively, he loves his father, and a momentary outburst, no matter the dire consequences, does not change that more permanent reality. Another powerful testimony to the existing communion between the instinctually driven and greatly limited but substantive men is that when all four of his older sons die in the Civil War and when his

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wife dies also soon after, Tom Bentley becomes unable to work the farm where weeds now grow high in the corn. Without a community for him to care for, the farm loses its meaning for Tom, for its meaning is communal. The land is broken for the sustenance of the family, and the body is worn for the sustenance of the family; the motivation is love and care, and in the breaking of land and body, a deep family communion is achieved. It is a lesson learned well by Jesse’s elder brothers whose bodies are broken for the sake of the national family, the Union, in an age differing profoundly from the materialistic age described later on in “Godliness” as one in which “wars [are] fought without patriotism” and when “the will to power . . . replace[s] the will to serve” (81). The elder Bentleys found meaning in the land and meaning in America when they approached it not with intellectual, ideological, or theological impositions but concretely in their own bodies, engaging with it in a spirit not of self-aggrandizement but communal sustenance. Subsistence off the land left no room for anti-communal individualism and desires for power: it required full personal, concrete immersion in communal effort, an effort transmuted into a sacrament of communion. Jesse takes over the farm when his brothers have died, coming home from a Presbyterian seminary where he was studying to be a minister. What we first learn of his conducting of farm affairs is that he carelessly kills his delicate wife Katherine by overworking her, being as “hard with her as he was with everybody about him in those days” (67). Instead of fostering a communal spirit, he introduces a spirit of power, having “the trick of mastering the souls of his people” (67). There is no joy; his goals are competitive and acquisitive rather than focused on life needs and sustenance: “He wanted to make the farm produce as no farm in his state had ever produced before” (68). His mind fixes on the grand purpose of turning his farm into a realm of “vast significance, a place peopled by his fancy with a new race of men sprung from himself,” a realm where, as in the old Puritan dream, humankind might be regenerated: “kingdoms might be created and new impulses given to the lives of men by the power of God speaking through his chosen servant” (70). Rather than an analogical imagination aware of human limitation and of mystery and seeking knowledge and substance through an open and concrete engagement with the immanent world, Jesse’s is the typological imagination of the Puritans that fits a large preconceived meta-narrative into a new self-defined story, imposing this story on the immanent world and working hard to assure, to personally ensure, its material realization—hence also the restless bent toward material acquisitiveness. Jesse “terribly” wants “to make his life a thing of great importance” (69) and tragically, he takes the matter of



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creating that importance into his own hands rather than openly engaging with the concrete real world around him, humbly seeking clues to larger meanings, larger patterns, in the details of life. He, thus, does not really live but merely obsessively tries to force life into an artificial mold. Once Ohio farmers were too deeply confronted with concrete reality to obsess over significance, and the narrator’s description of their lives contains cues that this condition in some ways was salutary: “Men labored too hard and were too tired to read. In them was no desire for words printed upon paper. As they worked in the fields, vague, half-formed thoughts took possession of them. They believed in God and in God’s power to control their lives. In the little Protestant churches they gathered on Sunday to hear of God and his works. The churches were the center of the social and intellectual life of the times. The figure of God was big in the hearts of men” (71). One may note once more the distrust of words, reiterated by the Winesburg narrator and the more sensible of his characters time and again; while Jesse becomes a distorted, anti-relational grotesque being filled with the Word he studied at seminary and, as we learn later, with newspapers and magazines, those farmers whose “brutal ignorance . . . had in it also a kind of beautiful childlike innocence” are more focused on the person of God Himself, have the social/relational deeply intertwined with the intellectual, and avoid becoming grotesques according to the very specifications given in the prefatory chapter of Winesburg, “The Book of the Grotesque,” in which the writer of the Winesburg stories is introduced. Echoing the words of Genesis, the narrator reports the old writer’s theory of the grotesque: “That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths 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” (23). Grotesquery emerges when a truth is made definite and proclaimed as all-encompassing or absolute. The Ohio farmers’ “vague, half-formed thoughts” arising amidst concrete physical engagement with Creation are far from grotesquery and are “beautiful.” Such was the spiritual state of things “in the beginning of ” Ohio. People were not relativists in the contemporary sense, but rather, attuned to the mysteriousness of reality buried beneath concrete manifestation and not literally ascertainable but only experientially, vaguely, and elusively.17 However, Jesse, upon walking through “[g]reat open stretches of field and wood” with “the moon [coming] out from behind clouds” and shining down on a “tiny stream [that] [runs] down over stones,” has an absurdly arbitrary, definite, and “literalizing” reaction to the atmospherically complex natural scene around him: he is Jesse,

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father-to-be of a David-to-be who needs to take away all the surrounding lands from the Philistines, that is, neighboring farmers (72–73). Rather than engaging, he subsumes all in a scheme, longing to acquire rather than to engage with and know, and feeding his and others’ joylessness, peacelessness, and isolation.18 Though Jesse interprets his given name in a self-destructive because selfaggrandizing manner, it nonetheless does point to a real way in which his offspring becomes an important leader. Joseph Dewey is convincing in his argument that the union between God and man has been replaced in the vision of Winesburg with a union between man and man, a union mediated through art, the sacramental vehicle of “poetic” perception. As Dewey puts it, “Typologically, Jesse corresponds to the Old Testament patriarch, the prosperous sheep-farmer who gives to Israel his son David, the maker of songs, the harper-king” (258). Jesse’s grandson David Hardy, who runs away from Winesburg because he is frightened by Jesse’s attempt at an Old Testament-style lamb sacrifice, and whom Jesse reports as having been taken by God, is taken, in Dewey’s words, by “the new god that Anderson offers for the seemingly hopeless disorder of the early century—the god of art” (258). What Dewey does not examine in any detail is how David becomes an artist partially at least through what he learns on Jesse’s farm in his interactions with nature. The narrator spends a great deal of time emphasizing that David functions as a spirit of joy when he moves onto the farm (at Jesse’s request and without resistance from his neurotic, self-absorbed mother). His “young voice [goes] ringing through the narrow halls where for so long there had been a tradition of silence” (82). Sounds are emphasized; to David, “[t]here in the country all sounds were pleasant sounds” (82). These sounds have no literal meaning—for the most part, they are not words, and even when they are, it is not at the literal propositional level that these sounds matter to David. The giggling of a half-witted girl, Elsa, being teasingly poked in the ribs by a farmhand, the bawling communications of stable and pasture cows, farmhands addressing horses (where tone but not literal meaning counts), the neighing of horses, farmhand jokes and laughter, all these impress him because of the spirit they express, not because of any literal content. To drive home the point about David’s nonliteral manner of relating to the world of the farm, the narrator reports him performing the most “literal,” objective, and quantitatively oriented activity there is—counting—in a qualitatively oriented mode: a sow with her litter wanders about an orchard, and “[e]very morning [David] count[s] the tiny pigs at her heels. ‘Four, five, six, seven,’ he say[s] slowly, wetting his finger and making straight up and down marks on the window ledge” (83). This little ritualistic inventory has in it certainly not an acquisitive business



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urge but an appreciative one: one can sense the sheer delight in the boy’s wetting his fingers and making a mark for each little pig, and his joy in seeing the animals every morning. It is significant that the pigs wander through an orchard since orchards, in Anderson’s stories, generally figure as idyllic, even mythic, garden images. It is this garden full of a community of interrelated creatures that captivates David; where his grandfather dreams typological and acquisitive dreams, all of which amount to an urge toward mastery and control, David rather is dazzled by the wondrous Other of his environment in a mode resembling love. Every morning, he is overwhelmed by a “feverish desire to get out of doors,” eliciting the housekeeper’s symbolically significant comment that he is “trying to tear the house down” (83). Once outside, the boy “look[s] about with an amazed air of expectancy. It seem[s] to him that in such a place tremendous things might have happened during the night” (83). One of the mysteries alluded to here, of course, is sex, a particularly profound form of communion that is holistic and alinguistic and requires an open engagement with an Other. David’s capacity for wonder in his encounter with the farm environment, his openness toward what it might reveal, and his intuitive knowledge of a creative mystery contained in it (the “creative life force” diffused in Wing Biddlebaum and for which he is ostracized) all are part of an essentially sacramental attitude in which the recipient is open to and in acknowledgment of the larger presence contained in the sacrament, but in a concrete manner that submits to the necessity of going through the concrete sacrament in order to experience that which transcends the sacrament, for the transcendent reality “articulat[es] itself ” in its “jointings and members,” and these must, therefore, be known (Lynch 145). Far from abstraction, propositionality, preconception, or self-absorption, David, in his open and appreciative wonder, is capable of apprehending “life” and of experiencing the joy of living. As the narrator states, “On the farm, life began to reveal itself to him” (82). Jesse’s and David’s differing relation with nature is dramatized in two scenes, in both of which Jesse takes David into the woods in order to invoke a sign of blessing from God. In both scenes, David identifies with little animals, though in somewhat different ways. In the first instance, as his grandfather is “excited to the edge of insanity,” with his “mind in a ferment” over his religious purposes, the boy “clap[s] his hands and dance[s] with delight” when a rabbit “jump[s] up and r[uns] away” (84). David himself is about to run away from his grandfather—in his delight in the elusiveness and freedom of forest creatures, and in their very presence and existence, a delight that triggers a full mental and bodily reaction

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from him, David demonstrates the opposite sensibility from his grandfather, who soon holds him “tightly gripped in his fingers” to pin him down for the invective toward heaven. The word “mind” is mentioned several times in relation to Jesse, and his anchorless mental life unwholesomely takes over his body, causing the left side of his face and his left hand to twitch. Where David responds receptively to nature in a balanced harmony of body and mind captured in the word “dancing” and does not seek to pin down or control the elusive Other, his grandfather is “harsh and insistent” and in his translation of mental notions of control into physical control becomes unrelational and physically distorted. So distorted does he, indeed, become that David later on swears to his grandfather that “[t]here is a terrible man back there in the woods,” not even recognizing the identity of his grandfather with the man in the woods (86). This innocent declaration out of a child’s mouth is testimony to the self-realizing potential of a sacramental, concrete approach to the mystery of the Other as opposed to the dehumanizing, self-destructive approach of mastery, literal definition, and control. The final crisis of “Godliness” occurs under similar circumstances: Jesse ties up a lamb born out of season and has David carry it, following him into the woods where he intends to make a sacrifice in order to elicit a sign of election and blessedness from God. Once more, Jesse is frightening, and once more David responds very receptively to an animal, that is, to the lamb he is carrying. When, in the moment of greatest terror, Jesse attempts to butcher the lamb, the narrator comments that David’s “face became as white as the fleece of the lamb.” He is here reiterating an identification with the animal already presented earlier: “There was something in the helplessness of the little animal held so tightly in his arms that gave him courage. He could feel the rapid beating of the beast’s heart and that made his own heart beat less rapidly” (101). Here we have the connection of touch so important in Anderson as an alinguistic and very “poetic,” experiential, holistic form of communication, a communication that here is very directly heart to heart, in a combined physical and spiritual sense. The courage with which David is infused is of a protective nature; as he becomes focused on an Other, as he identifies with an Other, he loses that which holds back his own Self and spiritually and physically unties fetters, his own spiritually and the lamb’s physically. In his thought addressed to the lamb, “If anything happens we will run away together,” once more is reiterated a lesson learned in nature, namely that of elusiveness: nature can be pinned down, but only destructively. It flourishes in freedom, and the ethic of control, sprung from the spiritual self-impositions of Puritanism and the related culture of materialism, is not in tune with the design of Creation, with



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nature’s course. It is care, not mastery, which brings the fruit of fulfillment—for care acknowledges the full reality, and thus the elusiveness, of the Other, and does not pretend to actually own it in any other than a relationally earned sense. As Jesse seeks to butcher the lamb, David and the lamb both run away, and David, in a panic, shoots his grandfather with a sling. Just like the earlier patricidal incident in the family, this one also does not have fatal consequences; Jesse recovers his consciousness eventually and returns home without the boy who is never seen again in or around Winesburg. Unlike in the family’s earlier near-patricide, however, in this one, the consequences for the family relationship are fatal. As David says to himself, “I have killed the man of God and now I will myself be a man and go into the world,” he is essentially saying that he will leave Jesse and his dehumanizing abstractions firmly behind himself and embrace “the world,” that is, whatever he concretely encounters. He sets out openly, uncertainly, prefiguring Winesburg’s artist figure George Willard in the novel’s final chapter who is characterized by the same open attitude, as noted by Tebbetts: “[U]ncertainty marks George’s understanding . . . He is willing to live . . . with only one remaining desire, that the understanding which has made him aware of his own limits and which is itself limited may continue expanding toward whatever uncrossable chasm awaits at the farthest edge of the world” (138). David simply wants to be “a man” and enter into “the world”; it is a lesson he has learned from nature, which resists transcendent or self-absorbed impositions and becomes spiritually nourishing only to those who give up the drive for control and accept and delight in its mystery and elusiveness in which nonetheless can be encountered fullness and reality, “presence.” To corroborate the observations about “Godliness,” one may cast a quick glance at the story that strategically follows it, “The Thinker.” The “thinker” in question, an adolescent boy named Seth Richmond, is, like Jesse, incapable of relationships because, being inarticulate and not socially skilled, he sees himself as fundamentally different from others and is filled with an ungrounded, self-imposed sense of his own importance. Significantly, the control crisis of the story takes place in the Richmonds’ garden where Seth has walked with his love interest Helen White. The two have walked through twilight, a complex, uncertain atmosphere indicative of the possibility of finding love and communion in a delicate elusiveness and openness. Sitting next to the girl in the garden, Seth remembers a vision he has had: amidst fragrant, purple-blooming weeds, which, as the weeds in “Hands,” point to the recalcitrance of nature against human control, he and Helen are lying side by side as about them hum the bees. The bees’ song is described as a “sustained masterful

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song of labor” (140). At this moment of his vision, Seth self-importantly decides to inform Helen of his plans to find “labor” in the city, namely that of a mechanic so he can “just . . . work and keep quiet,” avoiding the silly talk of people (141). He says this with the intention of “impressing” the girl. Her response is highly significant: “The garden that had been so mysterious and vast, a place that with Seth beside her might have become the background for strange and wonderful adventures, now seemed no more than an ordinary Winesburg backyard, quite definite and limited in its outlines” (141). In other words, the garden to her becomes a mere material reality and loses its sacramental mystery, a mystery that involves communion, love, and “adventures,” that is, unpredictable, uncontrollable but rewarding experiences. The world loses its possibility for sacramental experience because Seth has misread nature in the bees’ song of labor. He does not see the sexual implications of the bees’ activities, he does not hear their “song” as a song, and he misses the beauty and the organicism of what is occurring and equates it with an encouragement to mindless, mechanical labor. Honey, the product of the bees’ labor, comes up in the story “Queer”; concerning the image in this story, critic Thomas Yingling notes that “honey—an organic substance produced by bees in a process that is the very icon of meaningful, unalienated labor—is reduced to equality with substitute collar buttons in [a commodity] economy” (113). In other words, the “garden” teaches a communal, open, and sacramental ethic that vanishes when the self asserts its importance and reduces the environment to mere material for its own molding, either mentally or physically. This is the land’s “sacramental resistance” as it operates in “Godliness” and to varying degrees of pronouncedness in the other Winesburg stories as well. What the land sacramentally resists throughout is, in the American Midwestern context, primarily the de-sacramentalizing influences of Puritanism and its child, materialism.



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4 “The fields fell into the forms of women” Sexual and Gendered Associations of the Land in Horses and Men

In the spring I press your body down on wet cold new-plowed ground. Men, give your souls to me. I would have my sacred way with you. —from “Spring Song” by Sherwood Anderson Out of the cornfields at daybreak, Ready to run through the dawn to the place of beginning, Creeping, I come, out of the corn, Wet with the juice of bruised corn leaves—out of the corn I come. Eager to kiss the fingers of queens, Eager to stand with kings, To breed my kind and stand with kings. —from “Song of the Mating Time” by Sherwood Anderson

In Anderson’s works, as observed in the previous chapter, the Midwestern land resists an ethic of mastery and control, of Faustian self-expansion and the imposition of transcendent schemes on immanence. Rather, the land becomes a sacrament through the dense concreteness of which alone transcendent mystery can be reached, and this concreteness and sacramentality are closely associated with sexuality, the mystery of the sex act, and with an organic feminine principle from which Anderson wishes men to learn. The post-Puritan and materialistic culture depicted in Winesburg frequently rejects sexuality and women and, – 117 –

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thus, indirectly, nature herself, and the very mystery of life.1 For instance, Jesse Bentley’s daughter Louise, rejected by a father who aggressively asserts transcendence and mastery, becomes a love-starved neurotic, her and Jesse’s life emptied of all the beautiful possibilities of relationship; Helen White is rejected by her romantic interest Seth Richmond for the sake of his self-importance and desire to prove himself in the world; Wing Biddlebaum’s feminine sensitivity becomes distorted into hyperactive nervousness by a society suspicious of that part of him; and George Willard’s mother Elizabeth goes unloved and unrecognized by her “smart,” boastful, and materialistic husband and the community, walking through the shabby Willard Hotel as a forlorn living ghost. It becomes clear that much beauty and meaning are lost to the community as well as to these individuals: Louise Bentley could have been a loving wife and mother; Helen a great lover to Seth; Wing could have been a charismatic, Socratic teacher; Elizabeth a vivacious and cherished wife, mother, and hostess. Those who suppress the feminine go against their own nature and stunt their own spiritual fulfillment. As Sally Adair Rigsbee has pointed out, “[F]emininity is the crucial issue [even] in the lives of all the male grotesques. In Winesburg, Ohio mature development depends upon the male’s ability to accept affection and passion as natural and valuable aspects of life” (236). Rigsbee further notes that “Anderson shows that the qualities of the feminine are intricately related to the powers of creativity and spirituality, and, therefore, the devaluation of the feminine means that these dimensions of human life do not develop in Winesburg” (237). The sexual act, if rightly understood as a reciprocal and deeply concrete and sacramental experience (i.e., a physical reality in which spiritual meaning manifests itself), as a complementary symbiosis of the male and female principles, and as a surrender involving the relinquishment of mastery and control, becomes a transformative experience in which the American male can redemptively encounter the female so necessary to his fulfillment and regeneration; conversely, if rightly, i.e., sacramentally, approached by the male, the female can transcend unnatural structures of oppression and flower into her latent beauty. While much has been written on the redemptive potential of femininity in Anderson, little or no attention has been paid to the manner in which it is linked to the redemptive qualities of the American land, particularly the rich and fertile Midwestern land. As many scholars of American history have pointed out, most prominently Annette Kolodny, the American land has through centuries been conceived in almost exclusively feminine terms, with two metaphors dominating: that of the mother and that of the object of sexual desire or lover. Both images



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are intimately associated with a state of communion and integration, with what Kolodny calls “the total female principle of gratification—enclosing the individual in an environment of receptivity, repose, and painless and integral satisfaction” (4). The “inevitable paradox” involved in seeking such pastoral gratification from the American land was that “the success of settlement depended on the ability to master the land, transforming the virgin territories into something else—a farm, a village, a road, a canal, a railway, a mine, a factory, a city, and finally, an urban nation” (7). As even the earliest writers on the meaning of the American land noted, the abundantly fertile virgin territories could be a source of evil as well as good to its settlers, so that the nation’s central problem was that of an “appropriate response” to the landscape; between the extremes of passive sponging on the land (infantile feeding) and active exploitation and destruction (“raping”), a relational balance involving reciprocity had to be found in order to realize the ideal pastoral middle landscape perfectly situated between wilderness and city (Kolodny 15). While “the Puritan mind . . . self-consciously turned away from the seductions of a feminine landscape” (Kolodny 15), a response implying mastery over the flesh and clearly no alternative to Anderson, as has been demonstrated, Anderson also sees a healing return to nature in its maternal guise as impossible in twentieth-century or even late nineteenth-century America, which to him is clearly a “fallen” world, irrevocably severed from a Rousseauian “natural state.” Rather, he advocates a kind of translation of nature’s organic, feminine principle into human relations, a translation that would result in a less dehumanizing and power-obsessed society. The key lesson to be learned from nature is, as already mentioned, reciprocity, a reciprocity that occurs when the Self lovingly merges with an Other it does not and cannot master, just as nature must be caringly engaged rather than exploited if the unfolding of its bounty is to be sustained over time, just as nature needs the active pastoral care of man but must not be overly imposed upon by civilization. Such ideas of reciprocity are prefigured at various points in American writing, e.g., in J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782); the symbolic notions concerning the American land occurring in this work are here summarized by Kolodny: “The Mother, after all, must be impregnated in order to be bountiful. And insofar as the husbandman aids, but does not force, her willing bounty, he at once maintains his separate masculine and consciously human identity while reaping the benefits of an acceptable and guiltless intimacy” (62). In other words, the American landscape has traditionally functioned as a highly feminine metaphor for American culture’s tension between regressive, primitivist tendencies on the one hand,

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focusing on the land as Mother, and, on the other hand, healthy, reciprocal, as well as aggressive-destructive sexual impulses. Anderson’s similarly constructed metaphor of woman relates to his vision of the American land, which as a concrete sacramental reality refuses to fully nourish a culture of domination but which flourishes when husbanded pastorally. This pastoral interaction, though having been lost in relation to nature, is, nonetheless, advocated by Anderson as a model for human interaction. The tragedy of the rape of America’s potentially pastoral landscape is reenacted in the spiritual and sometimes physical rape of American women, a rape in which the male perpetrators themselves become their own spiritual victims; a return to a healthy sexual reciprocity beckons as one of American culture’s most promising hopes. Though this chapter shall center on the 1923 short story collection Horses and Men, no discussion of the feminine principle in Anderson can omit at least a brief mention of the mythical vision of a female Messiah in “Tandy,” a short tale located at the center of the Winesburg story cycle. It is in this story that Anderson gives the most succinct, evocative, and spiritually exalted formulation of his redemptive hopes in womanhood, though the theme recurs throughout his oeuvre. The story opens by announcing the Nazareth- and Bethlehem-like lowliness of its setting: in an “unpainted house on an unused road,” lives an unloved little girl of seven2 whose father is obsessed with expounding his agnosticism, apparently fighting hard to deaden the spiritual longing that threatens to torment him (143). A stranger from Cleveland comes to Winesburg to be cured of his alcoholism in supposedly less tempting rural environs. He fails to recover from his addiction because of a spiritual problem; unwilling to settle for a finite, imperfect woman, he is waiting for the ideal woman and is, thus, “a lover [who has] not found [his] thing to love” (144). In the neglected daughter of Tom Hard,3 young and full of potential, he sees the possibility of that woman: “There is a woman coming . . . you may be that woman” (145). The girl’s, and the imagined ideal woman’s, pathetic situation appeals to him: “It is because of her defeats that she is to me the lovely one. Out of her defeats has been born a new quality in woman. I have a name for it. I call it Tandy” (145). His admonition to her is to “[b]e Tandy, little one . . . Dare to be strong and courageous. . . . Be brave enough to dare to be loved. Be something more than man or woman. Be Tandy” (145). What is foregrounded in these words is a paradox of simultaneous and, indeed, identical strength and weakness. Since the story is full of biblical allusions (“the stranger” is a John the Baptist figure announcing the coming of the Messiah), we can assume that its emphasis on the paradox of simultaneous defeat and victory



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contains a Christological allusion. For this a paradox is, of course, crucial to the Christ who dies that men might live, who accomplishes victory over death in dying, and says, “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal” (John 12.25). The paradoxical nature of this traditionally held Christian truth resolves itself when one considers that, according to Christian teaching, God’s Kingdom is not of this world: what in a material sense may seem real is ultimately less real than what is not seen, and what appears weakness is ultimately strength. Therefore, the cross is a symbol of salvation rather than death: in Christ’s defeat lies His victory, out of His death comes life. Spiritually, relinquishment of Self to the Other is a courageous act, and the broken and defeated Self has the best chances to practice this surrender and be loved. In surrendering to the Other, the Self becomes more than itself, and in sexual love, “more than man or woman,” thus, achieving the androgynous wholeness Martin Bidney has called “the fundamental requirement of Andersonian humanity” (264). It is “under the trees,” walking with her father in the stillness and darkness of a summer evening that the little girl insists on her new name Tandy; the natural setting implies an organic principle, a principle of growth unfettered by abstract impositions but evolving out of a deeper, engrained design in which the unifying One effects itself in the fully realized many, and in which distinct Selfhood and mutual Oneness are not contradictory. In the dark and still, womblike organic unity of the summer night, Self and Other are distinct yet indistinct, and the rationalistic, classifying, highly linguistic, and categorizing faculty has abdicated to the mute sacramentality of nature, making room for communion. In considering the role of nature in teaching a lesson of reciprocity and healthy gender identities and relations, the first Anderson story that is likely to come to mind would be the aforementioned allegorical tale “The New Englander” from The Triumph of the Egg because it so blatantly allegorizes Anderson’s notion of the Midwestern land restoring to people repressed by the New England tradition their natural identity. In this story, Elsie Leander, a New England spinster who moves to Iowa and is overwhelmed by the intense fertility of the land, hears the voices of children in the corn every night, yearning for motherhood. Eventually she surrenders to a thunderstorm, lying in helpless erotic ecstasy in a cornfield, letting go of all reservations and proprieties, acknowledging her human need. Because this story is a rather straightforward allegory, especially in its depiction of a Puritan mindset breaking up in the face of the heartland’s luxurious lushness, it presents few challenges to the interpreter and has attracted, perhaps for this reason, little critical attention.4 Nature’s role as a sacramental sign of spiritually

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satisfying love relations much more subtly pervades many of the stories in Horses and Men (1923), the title of which collection already indicates its nature versus civilization theme, contrasting a world close to primary Creation with a modern world far removed from it. Two of the collection’s longer stories (both of which were taken from the same aborted novel, “Ohio Pagans”),5 “‘Unused’” and “An Ohio Pagan,” incorporate experiential encounters with nature relating to gender, sex, and more generally, communion. The first emphasizes a female, the second a male perspective; in both cases the perspective is adolescent, a perspective that Anderson excels at portraying. “‘Unused’”6 is the story of May Edgley, a girl who, growing up in the small Ohio town of Bidwell in late nineteenth-century Ohio, suffers from her disreputable family being regarded as “cattle” by the community. Her two sisters are essentially prostitutes, but the town expects better of May since she excels in school above and beyond all the other students. She is still an outcast, however, bearing the stigma of her family. One day in June during the berry-picking season, when all of the town is engaged in the work, a young man, Jerome Hadley, playfully takes up a flirtation with May, just to see where it will go. Never having had a man approach her before due to her outcast status, May is deeply touched and takes his teasing suggestion to go to the woods together seriously. Traumatized by the ensuing loveless, exploitive sexual encounter and the ruin of her reputation in town, May flees into a lonely life of the imagination until at a dance outside Bidwell, a young man from Bidwell exposes her hometown ill repute and tries to make love to her. Traumatized once more, May runs away, gets caught up in a current as she runs through a creek, and is found dead days later in Lake Erie. The story is obviously a study in corrupted and destructive gender relations, and the reader is led to ask the question how May could arrive at the overwhelming fear of life that propels her frantic and fatal flight at the end: “And now she ran . . . with a fear that was no longer physical . . . a fear of life itself, all she had ever been permitted to see of life” (134). The question is what of life she should have been permitted to see, and we catch glimpses of it throughout the story. The “life” May has missed is particularly foregrounded in the opening section. The opening section of the story describes the occasion of its telling and allows the reader to encounter the narrator directly. He is, significantly, a stable boy working for a Bidwell doctor. The stable boy and his employer are both close to the physical world, in their respective involvement with animals and the human body, and a great naturalness characterizes their relationship. The doctor never asserts a false superiority but “was one sane enough not to talk down



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to a stable boy,” instead imparting “intimately . . . his impressions of men and events” (35). He is one not to take himself too seriously—he has a “cheerfulness that . . . [carries] him with a smile on his lips through whole days and nights of work” and can self-deprecatingly joke about his paunch. When there is work to be done, he does it with all of his concern centered on his patients and not on his convenience, and he is comfortable with his own personal flaws, such as his overweight figure. After all, he deals with human frailty all day. This natural acceptance of human finitude opens the door to relationship; his friendship with the narrator, his stable boy, is genuine, and the days they spend fishing on Lake Erie, close to nature, are “long delightful days” of togetherness. This is not the communion of the Emersonian Transcendentalist with the Over-Soul behind nature, in which the individual human self discovers that it is essentially identical with the all-pervading divine Spirit; rather, it is the communion of two finite beings who, being close to the physical world, have accepted their finitude and found a relationship that is complementary precisely because the finite Self does not seek to dominate or submerge the Other. And it is such an idyllic moment of togetherness in nature that is interrupted by the news of May’s death: the doctor has to go and investigate the girl’s body. On this occasion, he uses the word “unused,” empathically sensitive to the girl’s wasted human potential, and this word stimulates the stable boy’s imagination as it points to the spirit that once inhabited the now disfigured body. On the drive home, the doctor speaks of May to the boy: “He was as one who goes through a wide long field, newly plowed by the hand of Death, the plowman,[7] and as he went along he flung wide the seeds of May Edgley’s story, wide, far over the land, over the rich fertile land of a boy’s awakening imagination” (35). In this agrarian image of the imagination, Death, the ultimate mark of human frailty and finitude, opens up the boy’s imagination to receive a kind of impregnation, that is, an empathic intuition and understanding of an Other. It is thus as humans learn from nature (e.g., Death) to realize their concrete finitude that they open up to other finite beings and start to know an Other in the limited but deep, sacramental manner of intuition. Intuition is a sacramental manner of knowing because existential realities are larger than human reason and cannot be formulated as what Lynch, drawing on Descartes, would call “clear ideas,” that is, completely delimited categories; therefore, intuitive knowledge, which is experiential and defers to mystery, perceiving “through a glass, darkly,”8 is particularly appropriate to a sacramental understanding of the world in which the One effects itself in the many and is

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known in the many, though indirectly and not all at once. As the details, the concrete reality, the “many,” are experienced, the One, that which is our common ground and binds the many together, becomes increasingly clear—experientially, existentially, intuitively, through a glass darkly. Thus entering into limitation becomes the pathway to larger truths, to transcendence. It bears reiteration how far this view is removed from Transcendentalism: rather than the Self essentially encompassing the universe, it is pronouncedly fallen and limited, as are all the concrete manifestations of Nature, and precisely in this limitation lies the possibility for transcendence, one that includes a genuine transcendence over the Self—a transcendence indirect and relational, deferential to the mystery that is the Other and to the larger One in which both the Self and the Other participate. At the outset of the narrative, May is caught up in pronouncedly unnatural relations to people and to nature. Like the rejected and neglected Louise Bentley in Winesburg, she overcompensates for being unloved by being academically successful, thus winning a kind of approval that she later recognizes as external to her humanity and worthless: “What was smartness? . . . It might have meant something . . . if she could have understood anyone, if anyone could have understood her” (72). Her learning is mechanical and separate from human meaning. Her relationship to the Midwestern land is almost exactly that of Wing Biddlebaum in Winesburg: like him, she picks berries with mechanical rapidity, thus earning the praise of the man to profit from her labor, playing the part of a perfect cog in the mechanism of commodity economy. For the other townspeople, berrypicking involves socializing, taking breaks, and occasionally eating the berries; unlike May, they can afford this more human approach to work because “who were the . . . wives, sons, and daughters of prosperous artisans, to kill themselves[9] for a few paltry dollars” (43). Unshielded by prosperity, May falls prey to the dehumanizing demands of a capitalist system, and socially, intellectually, and in her physical labor, she functions like a piece of machinery. Then steps into her life railroad mail clerk Jerome Hadley, who upon approaching her, winks at other young men, thereby implicating himself through this gesture in a male community intent on physical conquest, power, and bragging rights. May misses that wink of the eye and to her, Jerome’s coming to her seems like a “simple and lovely fact in life” (65). What happens between them is “natural and yet . . . strange” (64). The most simple and natural occurrence, one human being reaching out to another, seems to sweep her living death away: “Like a beautiful flower she opened to receive life. Strange beautiful things happened and her experience became the experience of all life, of trees, of flowers, of grasses and most of all of



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other women. Something arose within her and then broke. The wall of life was broken down. She became a living thing, receiving life, giving it forth, one with all life” (66). In the vicinity, the talk is of canning fruit, of artificially embalming it, so to speak—“Cherries take so much sugar”10—but in May’s heart, something is coming to fruition naturally. As her heart opens to another, May experiences an unfolding and inner quickening that links her to organic life, a life sensitive and open to the touch of the sun and the nourishment of rain: Jerome becomes her sky, and she, the Earth, unfolds her beautiful, latent possibilities in his light and his rain. This awakening is deeply sexual; May feels transformed into a woman. Her own receptiveness to the male Other brings her into her natural identity. She is one with all life because she has opened up to one particular Other: as Terrell L. Tebbetts has noted, reaching out finitely to the infinite is a recognized necessity in Anderson’s works; he states, here specifically concerning Jesse Bentley, that “[i]n refusing to accept the limitations of his own human nature, he has sought to violate the harmonious bond of human incarnation and has not expanded his existence but has radically contracted it” (136). Or, as Lynch expresses it on a more general, theological level, “The imagination [must] follo[w] a narrow, direct path through the finite. With every plunge through, or down into, the real contours of being, the imagination also shoots up into insight, but in such a way that the plunge down causally generates the plunge up” (12). In Jerome, May has found her particular venue to Life itself—no longer alienated from nature, no longer an automaton berry-picker, she begins to actually partake of nature: “She no longer picked at lightning speed but loitered along, stopping to rest and put choice berries into her mouth” (45). Better yet, she uses nature as a means of communion: “‘Eat that,’ she said boldly passing a great red berry across the row to the man” (45). Not understanding the sordid possibilities to which relational openness can be subjected in her culture, May, in a headlong rush, opens the gates of her being and extends a total invitation to Jerome. The Edenic allusion of her Eve role in handing her Adam the fruit and bidding him to eat it foreshadows May’s fall: she is about to enter a new level of the knowledge of good and evil. Jerome now assumes the serpent’s role and whispers in May’s ear that he would like to be alone with her. Craving the proffered fruit of Jerome’s love, May, during the berry-pickers’ break, walks into the nearby woods, provoking Jerome with looks to follow her. Deceived by the serpent’s lies, she is accepting the forbidden fruit that promises a new and fuller mode of life but will bring her death instead. What according to May’s inner needs was supposed to happen was the following: “May expected to walk into a new world, into life—she expected to

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bathe herself in the living waters of life. There was to be something warm, close, comforting, secure. Hands were to arise out of darkness and grasp her hands, her hands covered with the stain of red berries and the yellow dust of fields. She was to be held closely in the warm place and then like a flower she was to break open, throw herself, her fragrance into the air” (67). Touch, warmth, and shelter are aspects of a need to incarnately, in the flesh, that is, sacramentally, experience the spiritual reality of love, communion, and belonging. The darkness out of which the tangible hand will reach is the spiritual mystery out of which will emerge the visible manifestation of the loving Other. The dust and stains on her hands will not pose an obstacle; the finite, physical, bodily will not stand in the way but rather become a venue to reach the infinite, transcendent, encompassing spiritual reality of love. These physical details will merely add to the rich sensation of love. The image of the flower recurs: as in all Creation, there lies in her a beauty that can flourish if nourished rightly by the water of life and warmth of love. The delicacy and elusiveness of that beauty is emphasized in the sensual image of “fragrance,” a fragrance to be released into the world, a subtle, delicate emanation. When later on May imaginatively creates the perfect love scene she had envisioned, a hand “creeps out of the darkness, seem[ing] to come out of the very ground under her” (98). Though this occurrence is unexpected, “[t]he thing that . . . happened was too big to be afraid of. It was like being in the presence of God and one couldn’t be afraid. How could one? A blade of grass isn’t afraid in the presence of the sun, coming up. That’s the way May felt—little, you see—a tiny thing in the vast night—nothing” (97). Again we have love (on both sides of the relationship) presented as a kind of growth from out of a dark mystery into concrete, tangible manifestation, with warmth, nourishment, that is, the offering of one Self to an Other, spurring the growth. The Other does not cause fear because it is like God; if nature (the ground out of which the hand comes, the night) is the larger living but subconscious context, then the hand, the concrete Other (identified with God) is the conscious, fully individuated effect and manifestation of these larger, less individually conscious realities. In other words, out of impersonal but living nature emerges a spiritually aware individual effect of the larger natural life. That is why this appearance is like God: as in theistic belief, there is a personal divine consciousness at the heart of nature, so in Anderson’s belief, where there no longer is a personal God, human individual consciousness is the consolingly encounterable Other we can find in nature. This Other is distinct from the receiving Self of May, and yet it presences a larger mystery that contains both May’s Self and the Other, in which both participate and within which both exist in relation



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to each other, just as the sun exists in a natural and fostering relation to a flower, both contained in the larger phenomenon of nature. Fear has no place because of the natural interrelation of Self and Other, because their full distinctiveness goes hand in hand with their full, mysterious, transcendent oneness. In love, two finites overcome their finitude while entering into each other’s very finite distinctiveness: a hand comes out of the night, and the one grasping and the one extending the hand become one with the night, participate in it, no longer alienated, having overcome isolation. Via the clasping of two finite hands, the larger, mysterious connectedness effects itself, just as nature effects itself through the interaction of sun and rain and soil and in every growing blade of grass. In love, the infinite, thus, infuses the finite and leads to subtle but tangible, physically real but spiritually animated expressions of beauty, of which fragrance in its highly subtle tangibility is an apt symbol. What occurs instead is a loveless assault, a conquest, that rather than having anything to do with reciprocity, results in pride of possession: Jerome boasts to the other young men of his conquest and describes May as “easy” (47–48), in other words, as the perfect object of male possession. Rather than sensing the mystery and sacramentality of the act, rather than catching the subtle fragrance of beauty released by a false promise of sunshine, Jerome enacts the codes of behavior that his materialistic and control-oriented society dictates. He takes the values of that society with him into the woods, the wilderness where May, in defiance of society, sought a “new world”: the drama of the American experience is reenacted in miniature. Though it is hard to determine with certainty whether such an allusion was intended by Anderson, the term “new world” does lend itself to associations of May’s personal experience with the American national experience: for the settlement and development of America was frequently motivated by the millenarian dream of a regeneration of humanity, literally of a “new world.” A continent abounding in natural beauty and offering the chance for a new beginning has been made the site of the same unnatural spiritual debasement experienced by May because the corrupt values of European society, exemplified by Jerome, were imported into it. Another hint at the nationally relevant aspect of May’s experience is that at one point she identifies with the thoughtlessly eradicated species of buffalo: “When the country was new millions of buffalo walked up and down the plains. She was a she-calf among the buffalo but she had found lodgment in a town, in a house made of boards and painted yellow, but the field below the house was dry now and long grass grew there” (77). The house is felt to be flimsy, the longing seems to go out to the field,

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and she identifies with the exterminated buffalo that used to roam the plains of which this field is a remnant. In her betrayal by Jerome and by the town, which judges her at the moment her humanity is revealed, she feels a resemblance to a larger cultural tragedy in which occurred what the eighteenth-century Reverend Boltzius, cited by Kolodny, warned of in this way: “The Land is really very fruitful, if the sins of the Inhabitants, and the Curse of God for such sins, doth not eat it up, which was formerly the unhappy case of the blessed Land of Canaan” (18). In her incipient flowering, her fruitful potential, May is cruelly disappointed and betrayed, and through the allusive word choices and images, she is identified in this betrayal with the raped American land. And, thus, May flees into nature, spending large amounts of time hidden among the elders and willows behind her house, which the narrator is careful to note are “fragrant” (50), possessing that elusive, organic, sacramentally expressive quality ignored by the brutal Jerome. Among these trees, May finds the regressive womb-like pastoral Kolodny sees as one of two prominent American pastoral archetypes; the critic describes James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo as an example of a figure immersed in an American pastoral conceived in maternal terms: “Only as son can he maintain the nondestructive, non-exploitive harmony he seeks; but the price, as Cooper tacitly acknowledged, is his adult sexuality and with it, much of what we know as civilized norms. Natty can never experience adult human relations within the social community; the pastoral impulse has led him back into the liquid embrace of nature’s womb” (114). So May, disillusioned with adult sexuality, “dr[aws] herself into a little lump and close[s] her eyes,” enjoying in this fetal position a total sequestration from human interaction: “‘I am lost here and no one can see me or find me,’ she thought, and the thought gave her intense satisfaction” (50). It is clear that her regressive return to nature’s womb is life-denying, that the womb is also a grave: “How warm and close it was there, buried amid the dark green shadows of the willows” (50, emphasis added). However, what has thrust her into unconscious nature is the fact that in the conscious world of people, her spirit has been “lacerated.” Thus, she compares nature’s embrace favorably to Jerome’s: “The gnarled twisted limbs of the trees were like arms but unlike the arms of the man with whom she had lain in the wood they did not grasp her with terrifying convulsive strength” (50). Here lies the crux of what May has missed in life: the “natural” organic embrace of a conscious being that allows her to grow and open up rather than pinning her down. As Robert Allen Papinchak points out, May is so traumatized by Jerome’s callous embrace that she “convinces herself that sex is something dirty, something



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she must wash away” (46). And yet, fleeing from sex is not the answer, for what nature cannot give her is the encounter between two conscious beings—in other words, a social encounter. On the other hand, what Jerome failed to give her is nature’s openness and sacramental subtlety, its organic “growth” character that unfolds when husbanded but not exploited. Such natural growth never happens for May: she is stuck in a fetal position, unable to truly emerge into the social world of consciousness, unborn, “unused.” There is for her no pastoral middle— unhusbanded, she can only be wilderness or a raped, destroyed landscape. The Andersonian relational pastoral, where the conscious combines with the natural, remains unachieved. May’s further development is tragic; unlike the stable boy narrator, she does not develop an empathic but rather an escapist imagination, what she refers to as her “tower of romance,” a “new world of boundless release,” an America made up of fantasy: “[I]f she could not live in the life about her, she could create a life. . . . A tower was to be built, a tall tower on which she could stand, from the ramparts of which she could look down into a world created by herself, by her own mind” (73). Given cultural critic Van Wyck Brooks’s influence upon a whole generation of inter-World War American writers, and given Anderson’s occasional references to Brooks in his works as well as his frequent restating of some of Brooks’s ideas, it is likely that Anderson’s detestation of all that smacked of an ivory-tower mindset was reinforced by Brooks’s views on the matter. In The Wine of the Puritans, Brooks argues that the Puritans’ desire to turn away from the reality of evil rather than understand it had diseased the American imagination with an escapist impulse, seeking a refuge from rather than an engagement with life (102). Brooks, in fact, sees Puritanism as the source of the split in the American mind between crass materialism on the one hand and a highly ethereal Transcendentalism on the other, a split that represents just one more manifestation of the anti-sacramental body-soul split in the post-Reformation stage of Western history, i.e., the modern era. Both materialism and Transcendentalism occlude any sacramental apprehension of the world’s positive mysteries, and the real given world resists May’s fictive self-detachment from it just as it resists ideological impositions that treat it as perfectly malleable. Certainly, May’s escapist imagination, resulting in a sterile sense of her own purity, leads to catastrophe: when a man from Bidwell, Sid Gould, attempts to have his way with her outside a dance hall on the shores of Lake Erie, May sees her tower of romance cruelly invaded. Not having experienced true relationship or love in her life, she hates life and dies in a desperate manner that smacks of

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suicide. For when she flees the scene of her disturbing encounter with Sid Gould, she seems willingly oblivious to her own safety and runs through a treacherous creek without caution, apparently tired of life and no longer caring to protect it. Frightened by life, she has never really faced it and despairs of it the moment she suffers another one of its assaults. Her own lack of openness to the actual possibilities that still inhere in a fallen world, her unnatural rigidity and understandable but stifling unwillingness to expose herself to the adventure of life, however painful the journey may prove, her need to control her life by confining it to a realm of the fancy, in other words, her escapist romanticism, breaks her.11 Cut off from life, she does not grow; she has placed herself in her ivory tower like a flower into a vase, and she dies. It is up to the narrator to draw out in his narrative the existing, latent beauty May was never able to express, to let her story be a seed that can flourish in the ground of an empathic imagination, plowed by Death. This narrator’s naturalness, his androgyny (he is the feminine receptive soil as well as the masculine constructive narrator), provides an amelioration of May’s tragic existence. And yet, she is destroyed by her society and by the individual cruelty of Jerome Hadley and Sid Gould. The life that would have flowered among them, the people of Bidwell have destroyed because they have failed to comprehend the lesson of nature: that one cannot easily label and categorize, that each being must be apprehended as a mystery that can only be known gradually and through concrete, sensitive, open interaction, that the spiritual and material are always intertwined and cannot be separated, that imposition deadens where care makes flourish, that coercion and mastery never yield wholeness but leave death and destruction in their wake. Love is a growing thing that withers under mere mastery.12 As May’s hometown, Bidwell, Ohio, learns in another work of Anderson’s, the novel Poor White (1920), in which the town’s promise of an industrial boom proves to be a nightmare, one cannot prescribe reality in mechanistic, rationalistic, categorical terms: reality will turn out differently from what is intended, for the mysterious spiritual realities contained in Creation can only be ignored or betrayed at the price of great spiritual and even physical loss. Empathy, a humble entering into the actuality of the Other, is the first step to overcoming the fatal distorting literalism of which May is the victim. Tom Edwards, the protagonist of “An Ohio Pagan,”13 is considerably better off than May Edgley; he learns to see the relational and fulfilling aspects of life that impart to him, at the end of the story (which also is the end of the Horses and Men story cycle), a poetic and visionary sense of adventure, a sense of the great



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rewarding possibilities lurking in life in spite of all the pitfalls. As in “‘Unused,”” the lessons of reciprocity and openness are contained in the natural realm, which bodies forth a spiritual reality of which humans and their interrelations form a part. As in “‘Unused,’” however, nature alone is not enough to satisfy the human soul. What the individual Self needs is to apprehend consciously the lessons of nature and find a natural relation with a conscious Other and, thus, attain in this relational manner what is essentially a pastoral symbiosis of consciousness and nature. This relation is not achieved in the opening situation of the story, which presents a maternal womb-like pastoral, to the like of which May retreated in the willows and elders and which is an unviable model for adults living in a fractured world. What we find here is the very American temptation of primitivism, of regressing into an infantile state of passive gratification and ease, of merely siphoning the maternal bounty of nature, such as was troubling already the settlers of early colonial days: “But these [eighteenth-century immigration tracts] do more than emphasize the fact that, for many, the full and painless gratification of pastoral longings was not possible on the American continent; they also make clear how powerful those longings were—and how difficult to abandon” (Kolodny 18). A “pattern of indolent engulfment” is seen as threatening the feasibility of a true pastoral society in America and as impeding America’s inhabitants’ full realization of adult identity (Kolodny 16). The struggle with primitivist regression is a drama reflected in much of American literature, a cultural tendency tempting mythic figures from Natty Bumppo to Huck Finn (both of whom remain curiously asexual children of nature), and it is reflected in Anderson’s May Edgley and Tom Edwards. Tom is an orphan in Bidwell, Ohio, sharing the same hometown with May, and works at a stable for race horses, sleeping in an adjacent barn. He is virtually unschooled (though he did acquire basic reading skills) and hardly socialized, as far as people are concerned; his relationships and socialization have mainly been exercised with and among horses. Particularly important is his relationship with the racehorse Bucephalus with whom he finds a reciprocal and, in a sense, androgynous symbiosis that, quite literally, proves to be a winner. Bucephalus, named, of course, after the legendary horse of a legendary king, Alexander the Great, is frequently associated with the notion of royalty. He is a “black stallion, who had in him the mighty blood of the Tennessee Patchens” (124), Bucephalus being the “son royal of the Patchens” (127). It is in Bucephalus’s royal nature to refuse being conquered. The horse is, thus, the very emblem of sacramental

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resistance: it insists on its Otherness and will not simply be molded or imposed upon by a human Self but thwarts such attempts by violently asserting its own actuality, and here, its authentic being, a concrete Otherness that has to be reckoned with and can only be accessed once a higher mystery in which both the Self and the Other participate, has been apprehended relationally, not coercively. In other words, a sacramental disposition of openness and surrender is needed in order to align the human Self with this noble animal being.14 Only two people are able to subdue him, the stable owner Harry Whitehead and Tom, but their methods are “entirely different” (123). Whitehead’s last name links him to Bidwell’s truant officer and superintendent of the Baptist Sunday School, who is described as a “thin[15] man with white hair” (125); Whitehead thus is associated with the official culture of the Ohio town, that is, with an ethic of mastery and of conforming reality to rigid, preconceived “objective” structures. The symbol of this imperialistic objectivity is the “cruel, long whip” with which Whitehead enters the stable, to “conquer or to be conquered” (123). The whip might have phallic associations and represent the brutal, assaultive masculinity evident, for instance, in Jerome Hadley. Whitehead comes out of the stable “victorious,” having mercilessly whipped the proud horse into obedience. The free spirit of the horse has buckled under sheer physical coercion; it is the rape May Edgley fears when she says of Jerome Hadley that he “had tried to commit a murder and how often such attempts must have been made in the history of other men and women. . . . The spirit within was killed” (76). Tom, however, approaches Bucephalus with love, responding to the living spirit within the horse and thus establishing a spiritual reciprocity that replaces any need for physical coercion: “He loved Bucephalus and the wicked animal loved him” (124). As in the opening section of “‘Unused,’” humor is very important in this image of a “natural” relationship: “When the stallion was in a temper he sometimes turned at the boy’s entrance and with a snort sent his iron-shod heels banging against the sides of the stall, but Tom laughed and, putting a simple rope halter over the horse’s head, led him forth” (124). Where Whitehead sees the horse’s tantrums as an affront to his sovereignty over his property (among which the horse numbers), Tom laughs and simply ignores, essentially disqualifying the tantrum from having any serious import16—he can treat the tantrum with such levity because he does not take his power over the horse as a preexisting condition to which the horse must of necessity defer. In a sense, he takes himself lightly, acknowledging and respecting the Otherness of the horse while deep down assuming the higher mystery of a substantive relationship not to be



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obliterated by a fit. Rather than seeking to suppress the Otherness of the horse, he reaches out to it and simply trusts it, and the horse responds cooperatively. Astonishingly, Bucephalus becomes submissive the moment he is trusted, that is, invited into voluntary relationship, rather than merely commanded. The complementarity of Tom’s and Bucephalus’s relationship is underlined in the statement that it was “[a] sight . . . to see the boy with the blood of Twm O’r Nant in his veins leading by the nose Bucephalus of the royal blood of the Patchens” (124). At this point, it needs to be mentioned that Tom is the descendant of Wales’s national poet, “a gigantic figure in the history of the spiritual life of the Welsh” (122). This man, combining both physical and spiritual impressiveness and practical as well as artistic feats, represents the ideal of the mutual, sacramental interfusion of the spiritual and the physical. To see the grandson of this man, the spiritually, poetically sensitive boy Tom Edwards leading Bucephalus, a royal free spirit of great physical might, is an emblem of the perfect androgynous symbiosis of the female and male principles, of gentle kindness and powerful assertiveness, and it recalls the famous millenarian vision of Isaiah, in which “[t]he wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them” (Isa. 11.6). This symbiosis of gentleness and power is further expressed in the victorious races the “big stallion and the slender boy” win, in which “[f]rom amid a mob of cursing, shouting, whip-slashing men,” the two emerge, the “pale boy” leaning close to the horse’s head and “murmuring” to him, “Go on, boy! Go boy! Go boy!” over and over like a chant (124). The tenderness of the physically slight boy toward the mighty horse is accentuated against the backdrop of the general violence of the race, and the mighty horse, motivated intrinsically rather than extrinsically, driven, in all its physical force by spiritual tenderness, wins the race. What then is problematic about Tom’s existence? The answer partially lies in the following passage describing his Bidwell life, racing young colts around the fairground track: “That was a life! Round and round the track they went, young colthood and young manhood together, not thinking but carrying life very keenly within themselves and feeling tremendously. The colts’ legs were to be hardened and their wind made sound and for the boy long hours were to be spent in a kind of dream world, and life lived in the company of something fine, courageous, filled with a terrible, waiting surge of life” (128). Here we seem to glimpse the self-enclosed womb-pastoral that Tom’s life with horses represents: the aimless circularity of the movement, its freedom from thought and from all but instinctual sensation, its dream-like harmony and lack of individualization

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(he sees himself as an instance of “manhood” rather than as a “man”) all signify a state of mere instinctual being, of being little more than an impersonal vessel of a larger life force. This reduction to essential existence is partly possible because of the boy’s poetic sensitivity. Sensing the spirit of the horse, he is able to be in harmony with it, to share in its being, to sink below the surface of the material world into its deeper vibrations, its pervading and animating vital force. In this way, Tom can access Bucephalus and can win races because he is attuned to the deeper life dynamics of animals rather than being focused on competition. And yet, and here lies the problem, the world of people does not consist of some prelinguistic, immediate, instinctual community, does not exist on a subconscious, intuitive plane. Thus, when the truant officer seeks to order Tom to school and Tom rejects academic learning as useless, he is in some ways refusing to leave the womb of his instinctual pastoral and is refusing to enter the world of men to which he by birth belongs, though he has spent his life among horses. Ironically, Tom believes himself to be grown up already and to not be in any need of preparation for the world, yet this is because he sees the world entirely in terms of horse racing, as is revealed by, for instance, the following comment: “What other schoolboy knew what he did about life? Had he not seen and spoken to several of the greatest men of this world, men who had driven horses to beat world records, and did they not respect him?” (126). He cannot see beyond his immediate environs; human greatness, maturity, knowledge of life, all is measured in terms of horse racing. Unable to see beyond the rim of his self-contained, instinctually gratifying world, he flees Bidwell on a freight train rather than endure the indignity of submitting to a process of socialization he sees as beneath him. And yet, nature, the world of animals, has given him an instinctually based education in reciprocity, openness, mystery, trust, and acceptance of the Other, an education that will later assist him in the socialization process he eventually embraces.17 This instinctual education haunts him in the profoundly non-instinctual world of industrial Cleveland, where all is either mechanical or, in terms of human relationships, about power rather than togetherness. The sounds he hears are, on the one hand, the loud boasting of his roommates (who put him down as a “rube”) and the “roar and clatter of machinery in great factories” (128). Both sounds express an empty externality from meaning or relationship; the antirelational self-promotion of his comrades and the inorganic, impersonal roaring of the machines both preclude any communal connection of the individual with his or her environment. An observation Irving Howe makes concerning the



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adolescent protagonist of the story “I Want to Know Why” seems pertinent also to Tom Edwards: “Life can never again seem so simple and fraternal as it once was; he has entered the blighted arena of knowledge and judgment, he must now confront experience in terms of ambiguity and qualitative distinctions, he must choose rather than absorb” (156). It is as though Tom had eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; no longer able to merge in any simple, natural, given manner with his environment, Tom faces choices, and his first choice will be a return to the countryside in order to see what options for a fulfilled life it still offers him. As he seeks to return to a state of integration and communion, his urban alienation’s lingering effect will be a new conscious quality, a mode of effort and intentionality rather than the mere “being” he enjoyed before. Ironically, in his alienated urban life, Tom drives a milk wagon, delivering that which is organic, maternal, and nourishing. And having been severed from that maternal, organic world, he remembers it wistfully; not only is it in this context that the already mentioned reminiscence of jogging colts occurs, but the soil itself comes back to his remembrance: he remembers “thundershowers rolling over fields of wheat, just appearing, green and vivid, out of the black ground—. . . the sweet smell of new plowed fields” (127). The life-giving interaction between earth and sky and between earth and (plow)man; the rain-induced miracle of growth and of life itself; and the beauty that characterizes living things—all of this admonishes him that the completely commodity- and control-oriented world of Cleveland’s factory districts is not universally valid. Rather, the world of the city lies embedded in a larger and meaningful mystery with which it is strangely out of tune, and the “song of bees visiting early blossoms” that he recalls reminds him of a form of existence and labor that is instinctually gratifying, natural to one’s existence, organic, and beautiful. Thus, when similarly to May Edgley, he faces “some strange nameless dread of the life about him,” he, unlike May, is able to save himself from complete despair, for nature’s lessons have been more powerful with him than with the protagonist of “‘Unused’” (perhaps due to his greater immersion in nature early in life); he understands that the cruelly impersonal social world he has encountered is not all there is to life, and so he searchingly, inquisitively, rather than just passively, returns to the rural realm where he has sensed meaning: in “the early summer of his seventeenth year Tom left the city and, going back into his own Northern Ohio lake country, found work with a man named John Bottsford who owned a threshing outfit” (28–29). However, Tom’s return to a natural setting does not lead to a reconstitution to his former blissfully instinctual state; the alienating experience of the city has

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resulted in a state of conscious Otherness from nature, and Tom struggles to formulate a reconnection between himself and the country. The man for whom he works has long had a problematic relationship with the land: the land he used to farm was “rented,” so that he was caught up in a negative capitalist system that denied the working renter a large part of the fruits of his labor and left him without a permanent home; at his threshing outfit, he and his four sons work all day “like driven slaves,” a phrase reinforcing the dehumanizing economic forces in which the men are engulfed. Seeking to bridge the gap between him and a treacherous, often unjust world, Bottsford turns to Jesus, praying fervidly every night in the barns where the threshers sleep as they go from farm to farm. Tom lies awake, listening to these prayers with fascination, for they address his own struggles concerning his relation to the world and particularly to nature. Sensing the common fears and yearnings between himself and Bottsford, Tom reflects that he is “in the country that he loved, in the yellow sunwashed fields, far from the dreaded noises and dirt of city life, and here was a man of his own type, in some deep way a brother to himself, who was continuously crying out to some power outside himself, some power that was in the sun, in the clouds, in the roaring thunder that accompanied the summer rains—that was in these things and that at the same time controlled all these things” (129).18 Tom is intrigued by a power outside of the Self; having lost his easy, instinctual symbiosis with the animal world, which was his only world, Tom now has to encounter the world as Other and is longing to find out the identity of the cosmic Other, God. The thought of God being both within and without nature holds fascination for Tom because of the symbiosis it represents between a Self and the world. In accessing the divine Other, the human Self may have found the bridge to the whole world since the divine Other is symbiotically one with the cosmos. What becomes problematic, however, in Tom’s newfound theism is the notion of control: the divine Other being pictured as in control leads to the human Self ’s desire to control the world via access to the divine Other, thus, essentially subsuming the world in the Self. Whatever the divine prerogatives are, it is clear that for the human Self, the attempt at total control has led to the kind of dehumanizing culture represented by industrial Cleveland. It is precisely this attempt at control, the attempt at imposing a definite and controllable scheme on nature, that did not work for Jesse Bentley and does not work for Tom. When Bottsford prays for good, sunny threshing weather, the prayer seems answered, exciting Tom into religious interest: “Came the warm fair days and Tom wondered” (130). Tom “ma[kes] himself a figure of Jesus as a



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young god walking about over the land,” with “a wave of his hand summon[ing] the smiling days” (131). At this point, the story probably reaches its height of complexity, for there are multiple subtle spiritual dynamics converging. First of all, Tom’s Jesus is jarringly Apollonian and pagan, and strikingly out of tune with the biblical Jesus, who walked on Earth in sorrow and bore the world’s sin and fallenness on one of antiquity’s most horrific instruments of torture, the cross. In fact, Tom’s god walks “on the soft earth,” an earth that, due to this god, has become a “smiling,” halcyon heaven. Tom commits, in other words, the great American folly: to mistake this world for paradise. There is no room for suffering in this Apollonian faith. Furthermore, it becomes clear that Tom’s god is a projection of himself: he “makes” the god, and he shapes him after the youthful man that he himself is and hears him in the echo of the thumps his own horse makes. That horse’s name is Pegasus, linking Tom with Apollo: his Apollonian god, therefore, is but a reflection of the Apollonian young pagan that Tom is himself. Here we see the danger of self-apotheosis: Tom feels, by divine proxy, in control of the world. His relation to the world is one of mastery. And yet, there is, nonetheless, something positive in this self-deifying poetic vision, expressed in the following narrator’s comment: “Tom leaned forward and listened and his cheeks became a little pale. He was no longer the growing man but had become again the fine and sensitive boy who had driven Bucephalus through a mob of angry, determined men to victory. For the first time the blood of the old poet Twm O’r Nant awoke in him” (131). This reference to an intuitive empathy and symbiotically directed identification with another, learned by Tom in his early school of nature, lends the passage an essentially positive tone: while out of tune with suffering and fallenness and with his own finitude, Tom, nonetheless, is intuitively responsive to the mysterious presence of an Other, to an unquantifiable presence behind the tangible surface of the phenomenal world. If nothing else, he has understood the sacramentality of nature due to poetic, that is, symbolic perception. The indirect nature of this mode of perception is emphasized when he moves toward an orchard where he believes Jesus to be hiding, only to stop and realize that “[i]f Jesus is there he will not want me to find him” (136). He understands, at this point, the necessity of a sacramental as opposed to a definitive approach to truth: God is visible in a wet hilltop that in the evening sun is “for a moment . . . crowned as with a crown of jewels,” an image representing the crown of life and expressive of how spiritual presence dwells in and behind its tangible manifestations, is indirectly present through them as the sun is through the drops of water functioning as prisms. In not seeking literally to

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find Jesus Himself but to see Him indirectly through the beauty of nature, just like the sun is gloriously seen through the prism of the raindrops, Tom is submitting to indirect, sacramental perception. As Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton states in Orthodoxy (1908), his treatise advocating a sacramental worldview: “The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world” (33). Tom’s mysticism may be highly problematic, but it is a starting point for beginning to explain and understand the world in an authentic, sacramental manner.19 When Tom asks God for a girl and does not receive a swift answer to his prayer, his too literal and thereby control-oriented faith wanes, but he is left with poetry.20 His poetry now takes a healthier, more Other-directed turn that finally enables him to bridge the gap between himself and the world and even enables him to return to the city. Still sensing presence and mystery in the world, Tom envisions nature in terms of Woman, an Other, not divine or controlling, but fecund and full of life and interactive, to be related to reciprocally. One of the preparatory instances leading Tom to this new vision is the one and only visit to a church that he will make in his lifetime, when he attends a service at a small rural chapel with John Bottsford and his sons. The sermon is on Jesus’s temptation on the mountain, where Satan offers Him the whole world. This story alludes to Tom’s own temptation to believe he could master the world through his problematic, indirect self-apotheosis; it is a warning against the desire to master. Yet Tom, gazing out of the church window at nature, hears a different story, but one with essentially the same import: he believes Mary Magdalene, mentioned earlier in the sermon, is offering Jesus her body. To him, this becomes a parable of Jesus’s need of an Other, and he cannot accept the idea that Jesus would have refused: “‘Do you think he really refused?’ Tom asked over and over” (133). The gospel Tom hears at his only visit to church in his life is that the bridge between the Self and the world is not to be achieved through the Self ’s mastery of the world but through the Self ’s acceptance of its finitude and its need of an Other. Because his god refused him that Other when he, out of his natural sexual yearning, asked for it, Tom has realized that the Other cannot be coercively demanded but must be pursued in an open and relational manner. When nature’s god declines to provide a literal, immediate answer to his prayer and thus reality tangibly resists Tom’s self-imposition upon it, the youth undergoes a sacramental experience of



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the real Otherness of the Other, and this experience transforms his knowledge of the mystery of that Other. Seeing husbands and wives at work on the farm where the Bottsford team’s last threshing job of the season is being done, Tom arrives at this clear formulation of his spiritual discovery: “All men and women seemed made for each other” (143). In a barn, always in Anderson a realm synonymous with instinctual life, Tom sees a young mother breast-feeding her baby, giving herself in love to an Other, an Other distinct from her and yet intimately a part of her. In his perception, Tom has moved from seeing a God who is distinct from nature and yet also pervasively present within it to seeing people as distinct from each other yet belonging to each other. Rather than seeing a hierarchical God-centered interrelation, Tom now sees a more diffusively, horizontally interrelated world, a vision that places, for instance, Wing Biddlebaum’s diffusive sexuality, associated with a Socratic golden age, into a very positive perspective. As Tom takes a walk, “Women bec[o] me to him something different than anything else in nature, more desirable than anything else in nature, and at the same time everything in nature bec[omes] Woman” (144). One of the crucial imports of this vision is that the human, not the natural realm, becomes what is most important. Pastoral oneness with the world is translated into a new pastoral of relationally based Oneness with a human Other; this oneness, however, functions similarly to Tom’s earlier faith in God in that through this human Other, as previously through the divine Other, nature and the whole world became accessible because “everything in nature,” in a sense, is that Other: it is concretely manifested in a particular Other and in loving that Other, the Self sacramentally loves the All just as in the Christian faith, man loves God by loving his neighbor. We, thus, return to Lynch’s concept of the Mona Lisa’s eyes fully containing and not being separate from the full principle of humanity, which effects itself21 and only has existence in such details as a pair of human eyes (145); the detail, the individual Other, and the concrete love of the individual Other, thus, has a larger spiritual reference and real sacramental potency. In spite of this sense of having access to the All, however, there is no longer an attempt at mastery or an ignorance of suffering and finitude. In loving a concrete Other, in acknowledging the finitude and limitation of one’s Self and of that Other along with the larger interconnectedness of the All, it becomes possible to accept partial, limited happiness while still experiencing a sort of cosmic gratitude, for in entering deeply into limited, concrete relationship, one sacramentally penetrates the deepest mystery of the All, a mystery that effects itself in such limited manifestations as

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concrete relationships. Here we have Lynch’s analogical principle at work: “The act of existence descends analogously, ana-logon, ‘according to a proportion.’ The degree of possibility, by the degree of fullness of being any possibility may receive. . . . No one yet knows how much the form of man can hold. But the proportion is always one and the same and altogether unvarying” (149). When human beings enter into a relationship, they find in their two individual forms the common thread of humanity, and they experience in the realm of this common ground the larger One of which both are in equal proportion a part. Though the individual differences may be great, the “forms” widely divergent, yet the analogous proportion of individual human form to human spirit is not divergent. Their relationship becomes a fully realized analogy of the larger mysterious relationship between the One and the many. In all its limitation and individuality, the relationship becomes transcendent. The final section of the story details Tom’s poetic vision of the Ohio landscape as Woman: apples become breasts, fields “f[all] into the forms of women’s bodies,” clouds do the same. An orgiastic experience occurs when Tom climbs a hill, “the highest place in all that part of the country,” and on this highpoint suddenly relaxes and falls into the grass, “[a]n odd lassitude cre[eping] over him” (144). It is a moment of intense poetic communion with the world, the moment of consummated love and of relaxing surrender of the Self. When in the shoreline of Lake Erie Tom detects the contours of a woman, the reality of human suffering and finitude becomes fused with the joyous mystery of communion: “Her form was distorted by pain but at the same time the giant woman smiled at the boy on the hill. There was something in the smile that had come unconsciously to the lips of the woman who had nursed her child in the shed” (145). There are allusions to a woman’s labor pains here, and they are linked to the subsequent joy a mother feels in communing with her child once she has delivered it. In applying this imagery to the country he used to experience as a kind of womb, Tom seems to evoke a positive vision in which the pain of leaving the womb-like pastoral of the subconscious opens up the joy of continued possibilities for relational oneness. He seems poetically to posit the idea that the Earth is our origin, and, though severed from it, we can still engage in relationship, distinct and finite, yet simultaneously indistinct and infinite. In this analogical conception lies the key to Tom’s, and Anderson’s, vision of nature. There now is hope for a nation of industry and cities, despite Thomas Jefferson’s belief that only an agrarian republic could sustain virtue and freedom. As Kolodny notes, America’s original pastoral myth contained the danger of an infantile identity, with the superabundant, unspoiled land accom-



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modating a womb-like state of existence in which easy, effortless gratification prevented the assumption of adult responsibilities (156). With America fallen from mythical pastoral into cruel history and from an unspoiled natural condition into an increasingly urbanized state, new horizons have opened up: the myth of a maternally enveloping primordial wholeness is gone, but a more conscious, more adult, and probably more precious wholeness of relationship with an Other can now take place. Felix culpa: perhaps America can outgrow what Kolodny describes as “a kind of communal act of the imagination, recapitulating in adult activity the [womb- and mother-centered] symbolic mode characteristic of childhood” (156), and maybe Anderson will be able to lift his curse on “all the gods of my age that ha[ve] made men” lose the pastoral opportunity of living as “farmers, shepherds or craftsmen” and have made them “futile fellows, ever more and more loudly proclaiming their potency as they fe[el] the age of impotency asserting itself in their bodies” (Story Teller’s Story 200). For learning from both natural wholeness and cultural fallenness, Tom becomes a man, becomes “potent.” Our fall from the illusion of primal harmony is fortunate if we find a real pastoral, one that will keep us from dying slowly amidst an inhuman culture; in “An Ohio Pagan,” Tom’s fall opens the door to a more meaningful manner of relating, that of the distinct, conscious, and individualized Self choosing, in all of its individuated fullness, a loving surrender to the Other. Thus, what the narrator of “‘Unused’” has learned from nature, namely an empathetic imagination (which is precisely what May failed to find in any of the people around her), Tom, in “An Ohio Pagan,” has learned also: he is excited about giving himself to another and has learned to perceive the world poetically in terms of the mystery of the Other, a lesson nature has taught him both by manifesting beauty, life, and instinctual symbiosis and by refusing to yield to his self-apotheosis. Tom decides to go back to the city; though the narrator indicates that he is too exuberantly naive, having forgotten his negative experiences and hardships in Cleveland, there still is an indication that Tom is right when he believes that meaning and relationship are possible and that “American towns and cities [can be] places for beautifully satisfying adventures for all such fellows as himself ” (146).

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5 Laughing at “Fake Talk” The Guttural Silence of the Midwestern Land in Dark Laughter

One sensed in the darkness somewhere a deep quiet splendor of life and ran toward it. There was a desperate eagerness. . . . There was something lovely in life one must find. One said the words and then, after all, they did not mean anything. They were trick words of the sort that were always fooling people into false positions. He had come to hate such words. “Now I accept the flesh first, all flesh,” he thought vaguely. —from Many Marriages by Sherwood Anderson

Anderson’s 1925 novel Dark Laughter proved to be the author’s only true best seller, for it hit the pulse of the times. In the era of African American celebrity Josephine Baker’s banana-skirt dances in Paris and other European capitals, there was a pervasive fascination with what was perceived as “the primitive” and “the exotic.” Longing for authenticity in a Western world rocked by a traumatizing war and experiencing its most daring revolution in mores in recent history, the European and North American public longed for the supposedly uninhibited, more natural, and less complex conditions of “primitive” tribal cultures. The imagined exotic, primitive Other became an object of Western sexual fantasies, of which sexual objectification the phenomenon of Josephine Baker’s success is a conspicuous emblematic expression. In Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America: The Short Story Cycles of Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer (2007), Mark Whalan notes the following regarding this contemporary context of Dark Laughter: “[B]ecause – 142 –



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primitivism was so concerned with usually vague links between vast but emotive ideas such as freedom, the body, sexuality, and a kind of primal integrity, it was a discourse that was as flexible as it was attractive. This, of course, made it an ideal discourse for mass consumerism and popular fiction. . . . [P]rimitivism allowed for the possibility of wish fulfilment, usually of an erotic nature, within a space exempt from the moral codes and restrictions that publishers attended to white characterization—and promised a sizeable readership in doing so” (110–11). In this context, Anderson’s tale of a white couple’s sexual liberation, inspired in part by their contact with “uninhibited” African American culture, struck a chord. Anderson’s use of modernist writing techniques, such as a pseudo-Joycean stream-of-consciousness style, also catered to popular tastes, with earlier modernist writers having paved the way for the public’s acceptance of these styles. These writing techniques also sought to develop a mode of uncensored authenticity, the free, highly associative, rhapsodic flow of characters’ thoughts, for instance, conveying their inner truth more fully, it was believed, than traditional narrative modes. What excited the American public of the mid-twenties, however, fared less well with contemporary critics and even less so with critics in subsequent decades. No one has researched the early reception history of Dark Laughter more thoroughly than Walter Rideout in the first volume of his excellent critical biography Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America (2006). According to Rideout, while early reviews in September 1925 were largely negative, complaining, for instance, of Anderson’s “undervaluation of the human will” (i.e., the novel’s celebration of an amoral self-abandonment to instinct), October saw a positive critical consensus arising: “The reviews asserting that Dark Laughter showed [Anderson’s] increased control of the long novel form gradually outnumbered those asserting the opposite, even though many of the positive reviews raised minor objections. Probably the best news for the author at this point, however, was that as promised Liveright was selling the book” (596–97). However, the stinging parody of Dark Laughter, written by Anderson’s “prize pupil,” his literary mentee Ernest Hemingway, under the title The Torrents of Spring (1926) proved such a devastating critique of the novel that Anderson fell into a deep depression (I. Howe 202–04). The point of Hemingway’s critique is clear: he finds Anderson’s solemn primitivist mysticism ridiculous, as exemplified by the parody’s closing scene in which the protagonist Yogi Johnson walks off into a wintry “Northern night” naked, with a naked “squaw” by his side, the diction rising to mock pompousness: “On they stride. Into the North. Into the Northern night” (Hemingway 87–88). This negative view of Anderson’s self-conscious primitivism in the novel has largely

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been shared by critics. Thus, Lionel Trilling makes, in 1941, the following keenly insightful statement: Anderson’s affirmation of life by love, passion, and freedom had, paradoxically enough, the effect of quite negating life, making it gray, empty, and devoid of meaning. . . . [W]hen feeling is understood as an answer, a therapeutic, when it becomes a sort of critical tool and is conceived of as excluding other activities of life, it can indeed make the world abstract and empty. . . . In Anderson’s world there are many emotions, or rather many instances of a few emotions, but there are very few sights, sounds, and smells, very little of the stuff of actuality. The very things to which he gives moral value because they are living and real and opposed in their organic nature to the insensate abstractness of an industrial culture become, as he writes about them, themselves abstract and without life. (134–35)

For a nature mystic and sacramentalist, such as Anderson, focused precisely on resisting abstraction, Trilling’s assessment is a serious criticism. Most critics concur with Trilling, for instance, Frederick J. Hoffman, who notes that the “simple repudiation” of civilization celebrated in Dark Laughter “offers no real solution to the problems [the novel] raises” (190). And, elsewhere, Hoffman reiterates this point by remarking that “too often . . . Anderson does not himself know what to do with the truth he has discovered; and he can only write what often amounts to a parody of what he has intended to write” (238). While Anderson believes the life of the senses, the “natural” life, to be the answer to modern Americans’ civilized malaise, he fails to portray, to dramatize, this life or the path to this mode of living convincingly, instead producing a contrived, strained allegory that feels obtrusively didactic. This point is stated succinctly by Rex Burbank in his 1964 booklength study of Anderson: “Dark Laughter is thoroughly artificial in style and characterization and only slightly better than the earlier book [Many Marriages] in dramatic enactment of its thesis” (113). Specifying, Burbank points out that the novel “consists largely of the reflections of the principal characters. . . . Moreover, their wandering recollections and self-analyses impede rather than advance or generate action” (114). Again, the novel’s failure is identified as an abstraction of sensualism, a failure, ironically, to enter fully into concrete sensory portrayal. Cultural historian T. J. Jackson Lears indicts Dark Laughter as a product of Anderson’s “theatrical posturing,” leading him to a “sentimental primitivism,” a self-consciously assumed ideological stance that lacks substance (33). Despite its glaring faults, however, the novel has attracted some critical appreciation even after its 1920s zeitgeist appeal faded. In his introduction to the



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1960 edition of Dark Laughter (its last printing), prominent Americanist Howard Mumford Jones does the novel the honor of close critical attention, for instance, discussing at some length, without being evaluative, its “radical” style elements and its difference from a Joycean modernist style; Jones acknowledges the novel’s structural purposefulness, noting that “what appears to be sheer disorder should not conceal the truth that the elements of the plot are introduced in proper dramatic order and with uncanny skill (including a good deal of veiled foreshadowing)” (6). In concordance with the critics cited above, Jones does acknowledge that Anderson’s salvific vision remains vague and unrealized, but he indicates that this is a feature of most 1920s American literature, and adds that “perhaps most literary generations are like that” (7). His charitable verdict speaks to some degree of personal meaning the novel must have held for Jones: “Meanwhile, Dark Laughter exists, it is surprisingly good, and it makes a firm and lasting impression (with all its faults) upon the imagination of the reader” (7). One of the few lengthier studies of the novel (discussing it in conjunction with Winesburg, Ohio and Many Marriages) is David Stouck’s 1985 article “Sherwood Anderson and the Postmodern Novel,” in which he reframes perceived flaws of Anderson’s later novels as postmodern writing practices, namely, “experiments with fantasy, expressionist symbolism, and the self-conscious narrative voice” (316). Like Jones, he identifies careful artistic purpose in what seem at first glance to be chaotic texts, and he in particular defends Many Marriages and Dark Laughter against the frequently raised criticism of being works marred by too much abstract reflectiveness: “The plural notion of reality inherent in [a postmodern] philosophical position . . . erodes the importance of plot: life cannot be experienced or understood as a simple linear sequence of causes and effects” (307). Anderson’s later 1920s novels can be seen as “fable[s] about the inner life” (308), with frequent discursive intrusions into the narrative serving to present the flux of characters’, or the narrator’s, psyche (309). Surely, both Jones’s and Stouck’s sympathetic reading of Anderson’s literary craftsmanship in his little-acclaimed Dark Laughter do serve to underscore the fact that even a less successful text by Anderson has its rewarding elements, its subtleties, and serious artistic attributes. There is one significant statement by Stouck with which I differ since it makes too much of a postmodern out of him; it seems to me that he is still primarily a modernist sacramentalist. Stouck claims Anderson for postmodernism in that “the larger sense of life that Anderson sought to explore through experiments in language and loose narrative structures was the world of fantasy that he believed to be the essence of life and more ‘real’ than history. He anticipated those nonrealist, postmodern fiction writers whose surest philosophical premise is that life is a

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fiction, a wholly contingent arrangement, and that accordingly the only realistic narrative is one which continually draws the reader’s attention to the fact that everything is fictional” (307). As shall, perhaps, become evident throughout this chapter, Dark Laughter does not evoke complete fictionality as an inescapable condition of human life; rather, the novel seeks to dispel socially constructed fiction to find in the encounter with nature ambiguous, mysterious, and complex truths—truths not open to a literalistic mode of perception, but truths nonetheless. Herein lies the sacramental aspect of Anderson’s fiction; while he does approach postmodern sensibilities in various ways, Anderson, fundamentally, is not a postmodern. As Robert Dunne notes, in a recent book-length study of Anderson that does emphasize various postmodern characteristics of Anderson’s texts, there, nonetheless, is a strong orientation toward accessing Reality: while Anderson destabilizes “factual meanings,” he does strive for an “understanding [that] implies a more intuitive grasp of something that is nonetheless comprehensive” (12). Ultimately, Anderson is always seeking for the actual meaning of life, for the order of Creation, which we inhabit. No survey of Dark Laughter’s critical history could be complete without reference to what may well be the two most sensitive and in-depth analyses the novel has so far received, namely, Walter Rideout’s reflections on the novel’s merits in his aforementioned critical biography of Anderson, and Judith Brown’s remarkable article of the same year, “A Certain Laughter: Sherwood Anderson’s Experiment in Form” (2006). Brown’s article, dealing with Anderson’s use of laughter as a structuring device in the novel, is directly relevant to this chapter’s discussion and shall hence be quoted where applicable rather than being summarized here; Rideout’s balanced assessment, however, shall serve as the closing note of the general critical discussion of the novel. Rideout asserts that “the weaknesses of Dark Laughter should not obscure its strengths” (597). In particular, Rideout values the often highly lyrical tales embedded in the novel’s text, and the way they cohere: “One of the strengths of Dark Laughter . . . resides in Anderson’s continued ability to lead the reader by . . . associative links into sudden awareness of the full implications of an only apparently simple, only apparently digressive tale” (599). Again, we glimpse Anderson’s belief in the mysterious meaningfulness and ultimate coherence of life’s details; it is this deep and genuine sense of mystery that shines forth occasionally with a certain poetic power, even in one of Anderson’s most contrived and over-the-top, inadvertently self-parodying texts, this sense of mystery paired with carefully developed strands of thematic resonances, that lends this flawed novel some potential for moving the reader. Noting the spiritual



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momentum of the text, Rideout observes that “as always [Anderson] had been looking for, not facts, but ‘the essence of things’” (603). Whenever this “essence” radiates from lyrically evoked details and from the “plastic” language praised by Stouck, this awkward novel is at its best and at its most sacramental. Because Dark Laughter is, despite its noteworthy virtues, an unintentionally comic literary lapse, several steps down from that wonderfully balanced masterpiece Winesburg, Ohio, the critical discussion surrounding it has been largely of an evaluative nature. The ensuing discussion is not intended to be evaluatively focused, but instead seeks to establish with some precision in what way this novel develops Anderson’s sacramental vision of the Midwestern land; in other words, the intent is to locate the spiritual significance within the novel’s densely woven texture and to position it within the spiritual narrative developed by Midwestern modernism. The evaluative discussions of the novel intersect with this analysis insofar as they touch upon the novel’s complexity of meaning. It is hard not to agree that the novel is marred by a glib and sentimental primitivism, a willingness for self-abandonment to a somewhat unconsidered, simplistically unrealizable, and, above all, irresponsible sensualism. However, in its spiritual critique of modernity’s literalism, the novel is culturally, including theologically, insightful, and in the careful development of its theme of “silence,” it does offer a sensitive meditation on sacramental alternatives to modernity’s relation to language. Again, it is Midwestern nature that speaks to Midwestern culture of a nonliteralistic manner of relating to the world humans inhabit. One cannot read Anderson without being struck by the thematic prominence of “silence.” It is almost always wordless communication that brings Anderson’s characters their communicative breakthroughs, yet, by the same token, words distract them from a more substantive level of relating. Words often glide over the surface of reality and erect a conventional framework of meaning that imposes upon authentic being and imprisons the soul. The following passage from “Out of Nowhere into Nothing” (1921) is characteristic of Anderson’s fiction: “It was Melville Stoner who lifted the town of Willow Springs out of the shadow of death. Words were unnecessary. With him she had established the thing beyond words, beyond passion—the fellowship in living, the fellowship in life. They walked in silence to the town’s edge and then Melville Stoner put out his hand” (265). Walking in silence, extending a hand, getting at “the thing beyond words,” which is life itself, the “fellowship in life”—much of the Andersonian philosophy of silence is present in this little passage as it is in countless others throughout his oeuvre, from his early works to the very last.1 Quoting from Anderson’s early

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novel Marching Men (1918), Robert Dunne describes Anderson’s association of silence with freedom, liberation, and his association of rhetoric with inauthenticity, a loss of one’s natural being, and, consequently, subjugation in a falsely constructed narrative designed to exert power: The novel’s protagonist, Beaut McGregor, “characterizes the contented, comfortable middle classes—as well as those who aspire to them—as being ‘mere slaves to words and formulas’” (26). Concerning the depiction of the working class in the novel, Dunne observes that like the grotesques, the individuals in Marching Men have sanctioned their insignificance by submitting themselves to accepted formulas and then allowing themselves to be judged by various sources in society. The manipulation of language is a key force in both the grotesqueness of the Winesburg characters and the insignificance of the Marching Men masses. McGregor’s distrust of language reinforces his fondness for action, because action at least seems to produce tangible, real results, while language and its manipulation result in deception. (27)

While Marching Men offers an unconvincing, unproductive solution to the problem of language’s abuse, reductiveness, and inefficacy, namely, the rather literal solution of having protesting workers march in dogged silence, Winesburg, Ohio, according to Dunne, offers a tentative, intuitive solution that escapes the didactic reductiveness of Marching Men’s conclusions: “[W]hat solutions there may be for the modern grotesque are to be found in fleeting moments of intuitive understanding that both reject language and rely on human subjectivity—on part of both the individuals involved and the readers of the tales themselves. A foundational modernist work, Winesburg, Ohio is also a seminal precursor to postmodernism” (109). Both Dunne and Benjamin Spencer, the latter in his discussion of Anderson’s “mythopoeic” style, emphasize that Anderson’s literary form became crucial to his successfully critiquing the problem of language in modern culture. While Dunne points to Anderson’s “replac[ing] both artificial plotting and objective narration with incomplete and subjective glimpses into people’s lives” (43) and “employing a style of narration that constantly questions the veracity of what is narrated” (44), Spencer, similarly, focuses on a poetic, suggestive style that avoids the objective aura of traditional realism: He was not, of course, in the strict etymological sense of the word a “mythopoeist,” a maker of myths; but his imagination achieved its finest expression in narratives such as “Death in the Woods” or in part of Dark Laughter where the preternatural or archetypal not only gave it unity and direction but also evoked a



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connotative style approaching the idiom of poetry. The term is therefore broadly used here as the most adequately comprehensive one to indicate the orientation and mode of Anderson’s fiction as contrasted with those of such contemporary naturalists or realists as Dreiser and Lewis. (3)

Spencer’s remarks are particularly significant for the topic of sacramentalism since he points to the mythical intent of Anderson’s indirect, poetic style; whereas Dunne, from an explicitly postmodern perspective, investigates Anderson’s undermining of any stable notions of “reality,” Spencer discusses the quest for mythical, i.e., spiritual, timeless, universal human truths underlying our individual human stories. Paradoxically, Anderson both deconstructs narration and language and, simultaneously, uses language to suggestively point toward and lead to a preverbal and supra-verbal authenticity, to the Truth and full Being to be found in this dimension of meaningful silence. Such Truth can never be formulated as a mere maxim and can never be systematized—at that point, it would become language and a source of distortion, grotesquery. Rather, it is precisely the Truth of silence, of mystery, the Word made flesh—the Truth of sacrament. This silent, preverbal depth in Creation is connected to an old agrarian vision of America, as Glen A. Love points out: “Anderson seems to mirror the larger image which Americans have historically had of themselves—clear-eyed Jeffersonian yeomen, free from the pestilential grip of cities, men of deeds and not of words, disdainful of fancy talk and palaver. . . . [H]e is the sort of writer who cannot be dissociated from his idealized image of either himself or his country” (38–39). Anderson depicts garrulous characters as spiritually empty (e.g., Tom Willard, father of Winesburg’s protagonist George Willard) and associates the modern age with a “roar” and with a “flood of words” that destroy clear thinking and substantial communication. Furthermore, in Anderson’s fiction, meaningless slogans of progress and success blind people to their true human needs, bragging is a clear symptom of impotence, and the moralistic rhetoric of society is completely detached from individual person’s spiritual reality. In this context, the symbolic has replaced the real because it essentially has lost its symbolic nature. Words’ symbolic nature, in an Augustinian and generally sacramental sense, consists in their pointing to and being signs of a fuller and larger reality that is beyond the visible sign. While words may point to a concrete object, that object, in its turn, will bear a reference to a yet larger origin or pattern, and so there is always an ultimate transcendent reference that is merely pointed to, referred to, but that is never fully defined.2 The transcendent spiritual reality referred to by visible signs (and by words) is merely suggested by these signs and thus remains

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essentially mysterious. However, when words become rigid mental categories that define rather than suggestively point to reality, humans’ ability to apprehend reality is actually impeded. When words, ideas, and mental constructs in general supersede and circumscribe reality rather than being mere tangible venues to it, they fail to lead to the real.3 Their sacramental power is lost in that their chain of reference ends in a fixed notion that is not a spiritual mystery but a category of human reason—and they glide over that which is authentically present until they encounter what for the sake of this discussion has been labeled “sacramental resistance.” Such resistance occurs when that which is authentic and real disrupts and discredits the empty rhetoric of society and the mechanistic worldview behind it. Reality, in Anderson’s fiction, offers resistance to false words in the form of powerful physical, emotional, and spiritual experiences that are out of joint with what the world of words, e.g., social discourses, would dictate. These experiences often elude easy verbal categorization and thus pose a form of sacramental, mysterious presence and being against the literal-categorical and against false symbols or mere convention. Modern culture’s language, in its literalist epistemology, is no longer suggestive or poetic but has become reductive, deadening, and detached from substance and has thus opened itself up to being subverted by substance, the actualities of life undermining the ideal constructs that have sought to usurp life’s place. The Other, so exuberantly discovered by Tom Edwards in “An Ohio Pagan,” is found by him through poetry—it cannot be reached when rigid categories, i.e., a literalistic language, reduce the various linguistic and alinguistic forms of symbolic, sacramental communication between Self and World and bar the suggestive path to substance. It is in the silences, in what words do not say, that presence and substance, the mystery of life, can be found. Words can embody this larger silence sacramentally, yet only if they do not supersede the silence but are embedded in it, serving as its humble channels, as the venues through which a substantive being can impart some of its deeper life and reality to another being. This subtle, relational aspect of language, its function as a bridge between two nonverbal, i.e., “silent” realities, is acknowledged by Bruce Dudley, protagonist of Dark Laughter, when he daydreams of saying to his wife, Bernice, who is conceited about her identity as an author: “Words are tender things, leading to poetry—or lies. Leave craftsmanship to me. I’m going towards it slowly, carefully, and humbly” (60). Language can function properly only if it functions as poetry; for only then does it let rest in silence the mystery to which it refers, humbly acknowledging it as a mystery, and refraining from any leaps at breaking



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into the silence of this mystery. Suggesting, evoking what is there but cannot be defined or captured, poetic language defers to a larger silence and only because of this deference to silence has something substantive to say. Thus, according to Anderson, a return to an apprehension of silence, an escape from the clutter of literal, merely conventional words, is necessary for human spiritual growth. What does all of this have to do with nature, with the Midwestern land? Love, perhaps the only critic to discuss at any length the connection between nature and silence in Anderson, observes that “[i]n the setting of Winesburg, the fields and farms and the simple round of town life, are to be found the sources of the book’s undeniable evocation of lost goodness. Through the setting is expressed the essential unity of country life, linked to the natural cycle of crops, to the weather, and the slow turning of the seasons. Here is a world organic and yet impervious to time. Its calmness and stillness indicate the silence of self-sufficiency, full of promise and significance” (43). Natural movement, growth, primarily constitutes the ameliorative, peaceful quality of the natural world: all the manifestations of life unfolding themselves, each according to its particular design, going through all the necessary stages of development and coming to fruition. Here one encounters not a wilderness setting or a primitivist philosophy: the growth in the fields is ordered, consciously cultivated, and yet, it is not suppressed in any way and unfolds according to its inner design. What Love calls “self-sufficiency” is the quality of being fully oneself, one’s identity consciously ordered and cultivated but in such a way that the full, primordial substance of one’s being is not distorted or suppressed: a fully realized identity, allowed to realize itself in a gradual unfolding and being sensitively guided and fostered rather than forced into an unnatural mold. In Anderson’s view, one shared by many of his nature-oriented contemporaries, silence accompanies such growth since natural processes are primal and, therefore, more densely symbolic than linguistic acts: the closer one gets to the deeper mysteries of life, the more one finds a non-linguistic union of being and meaning, a fuller, more complex and, therefore, less rationally articulate manifestation of meaning. For human reason and language are largely analytical and thus, by definition, reductive: analysis implies a breaking down, a dissecting, a reduction of a whole to an assembly of parts that, each taken singly, are more easily digestible and comprehensible than the living, present, mystically interconnected whole, which in its fullness is larger than the sum of its parts. One may return to the already cited view of Kierkegaard that all existing phenomena are in the process of existing, and therefore, any communication about existing things must

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not be categorical but have a concrete process quality, so that the dimension of body language, sacramental rituals, and suggestive rather than definitive words becomes vital to substantive communication (Wetzel 153–55). The realities of nature, of the biological realm, of course, are densely concrete and are always in process; they are physical but nonetheless, because they are animate and living, are connected to the deeper primal mysteries of life and thus have a spiritual dimension. The spiritual presence they contain is expressed by a densely physical and silent state of being, a state of being that is unapologetic,4 mere being. This state of “being” contains a full living presence, in a sense, life itself. The lack of the verbal dimension that characterizes human culture preserves nature from diminishing its powerfully suggestive, densely symbolic expression of life, its sacramentally integrated quality as body-animated-by-spirit. The “sign” here, in the realm of nature, contains the “signified,” life itself. In keeping with such a vision of nature’s wholesomely silent being, Anderson, in his poem “The Cornfields,” contrasts the primal function of “breathing” and actual living with an urban culture’s “choking on words”: “Into the cities my people had gathered. They had become dizzy with words. Words had choked them. They could not breathe.” In order to escape the fate of his people, the speaker of this poem goes “into the ground” where his “body die[s]” as if he were a seed: “I emerged into the corn, in the long cornfields.” This move from verbose city to quiet cornfield has the following spiritual result: “I will renew in my people the worship of gods.” Where the literalized symbolic and articulate chokes humans’ very being, a return to the primal sphere of nature, to a sphere devoid of the clutter of words, leads to a deep, mysterious, existential renewal that has the power to create a new religion, a whole new spiritual identity. When in the final story of Winesburg, George Willard, now having matured into a potential artist, takes a walk in nature before departing his hometown “to walk again in the silence,” Love sees his “‘organic’ nature” being set “in opposition to the static qualities of the grotesques. The sterile, unchanging quality of their words and actions has been a constant counterpoint to the growth and change of the young man. Their repetitiveness and rigidity suggest, finally, spiritual atrophy and death, just as George Willard’s change and growth are linked with the natural world’s health and quiet vitality” (55–56). Being a grotesque, thus, is being stuck in a rigid, machine-like structure of thought and action, one that involves a repressed muteness5 or a sputtering of words detached from substance: the dynamic force of growth involves openness to the preverbal, pre-categorized Other, to the mysterious Being that is the Self and to a complex universe that resists definition and allows its individual manifestations



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a certain freedom to evolve according to what is encoded at the deeper core6 of their integrated spiritual and physical nature. This natural openness allows them to become truly themselves, a natural freedom often thwarted by and largely absent in the human-created cosmos of machines, ideology, preconception, and literalism. Nature is the counterworld of this prison-like, human-created world, and from and in it can be learned the virtues of “silence.” It is, perhaps, ironic that the notion of “silence” permeates a work called Dark Laughter (1925), yet this paradox finds its explanation when one reflects on what has already been said about Anderson’s attitude toward language: if literalism is the problem with language and if silence is associated with embodied and tangibly realized substance rather than abstractly denoted categories, then laughter, as literalism’s Andersonian counter-category, is indeed very close to silence. Judith Brown makes a similar point, explaining that “laughter may be viewed as a rhetorical trope that is itself anti-rhetorical. . . . [L]aughter is not articulate . . . because it defies representation and is, therefore, threatening to our systems of meaning” (148). Laughter silences our systems of meaning, our rhetoric; it bursts forth with inarticulate, nonverbal “presence,” an immediate presence, one not mediated by verbal symbols, thus, in a sense, a “silent” presence. Brown describes this nonverbal presence as “voice” itself: “Anderson doesn’t invoke speech so much as voice, the bodily presence represented by the warm interiors of the speaking organ, the mouth. Voice will stand for presence in the novel, uncorrupted by the written systems of language” (148). Here, without referring to sacramentality, Brown, nonetheless, is essentially describing the sacramental meaning that laughter holds for Anderson: it conveys a real aesthetic presence within a concrete physical sign, the sign inseparable from the presence it imparts, the laughter inseparable from the emotion it imparts. Laughter issues forth spontaneously from the human body; does not denote but only connote; and, generally, if the laughter is genuine rather than forced, involves a full, holistic, spirit-body response that parallels a natural unfolding as opposed to a rigid, imposed structuring of human life. Anderson, in his poem “Song to the Laugh,” quite explicitly opposes laughter, silence, nature, and sex, on the one hand, to the roaring world of modern industrial culture, on the other, a loud world that, as has been discussed, is closely associated with Protestant-derived literalism: “At the end of the lane we lay, beyond the roar and the rattle. / Hark! In the silence the laughter! / . . . Then we kissed and our bodies caressed. / We prepared, my beloved, to add our voices to those of the others. / In the cold and wet we crept and laughed in the darkness.” Sacramental, bodily

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communication such as kissing, caressing, and lying next to each other, that is, sharing presence as opposed to communicating on a more abstractly categorical level via verbal constructs, is here associated with laughter, another full-bodied, nonabstract means of sharing concrete presence. This form of communication is physically distanced from the “roar and rattle” of modern urban civilization, an abstract, mechanistic culture that has lost its connection with the full indefinable presence of life, its connection with “being.” Creeping on the ground, feeling its wet and cold reality, the couple’s laughter rings out—human sexuality, the life of nature, and laughter form one of Anderson’s philosophically significant image clusters, all of them located “at the end of the lane,” where the noise of civilization has been replaced by natural, silent (and laughing) being. Thus, there is an indirect link between the laughter that gives Dark Laughter its title and the natural world, the Midwestern land, the sacramental meaning of which is the primary concern of this discussion. Like the natural world, laughter, in this novel, forms a counter-reality to an insubstantial, detached, and debased human civilization. It is called “dark” for two reasons: when Caucasian characters laugh, their laughter is “dark” because they have undergone the horror of a bankrupt civilization imploding in World War I, their laughter thus being motivated by a dark horrific tension requiring release; when African American characters laugh, their “dark” laughter is “dark” not in the sense of being tinged with horror but in the sense of being detached from whiteness, that is, from a European-built civilization centered on unhealthy and life-denying literalism and idealism of which the epitome is the “whiteness”-associated ideal of “purity.” Thus, for instance, African Americans are associated (in a well-intentioned but embarrassingly racist manner) with the natural openness discussed above, an openness unimpeded by categorical mental constructs or cultural imperatives: “[African American women] would think as their natures led them to think, feel as their natures led them to feel. . . . They are like children looking at you with their strangely soft and innocent eyes. White eyes, white teeth in a brown face— laughter. It is a laughter that does not hurt too much” (266). “Dark laughter” here implies the child-like naturalness of African Americans, their freedom from any artificial channeling of their identity. Of course, darkness also connotes the black, fertile Midwestern soil, mentioned frequently in the novel; that is, darkness refers to African Americans’ “naturalness” as well as to nature itself, both of which are associated with the organic silence of natural becoming and growth that Anderson so prizes. In this typically Andersonian associative web, the novel’s central notion of “dark laughter” is intimately linked with silence and with nature.



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Though it is not pronouncedly linked to nature imagery, there is a central scene in the novel from which one might launch an elucidation of the book as a whole and of its conflation of silence and nature as restorative alternative realms to a disintegrated and highly verbal civilization. The scene is relayed amidst a complex string of events. John Stockton, the novel’s main protagonist, is locked into a meaningless marriage with Bernice, a talkative intellectual and aspiring writer who does not want children and criticizes John’s lack of ambition. Leaving Bernice, his job as a journalist, and the oppressive city of Chicago behind, John, renaming himself Bruce Dudley, travels down the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, inspired by the Huck Finn myth. After a sensuous, contemplative time in an African American neighborhood in New Orleans, “Bruce” returns to his native town of Old Harbor, Indiana, on the Ohio River, where he takes a job at the Grey Wheel Factory. Noticed by Aline, the wife of Fred Grey, the factory owner, Bruce is hired as a gardener at the Grey mansion, and soon he and Aline have an affair. After it is sexually consummated, Bruce leaves, only to return after a while and claim Aline as his own; she gladly follows him, leaving behind a desperate Fred Grey. In the middle section of the novel, we learn Aline’s story, how, the year after the war, she travels to Paris with the Walkers, a couple of dubious portrait artists who live a life of flattery and take advantage of the sentimentalities of rich people. Aline’s father has been their latest prey as they have painted his son, Aline’s brother, who died in the war. Anderson is known for his characters making striking appearances in the nude: the crucial scene encountered by Aline during her stay in Paris, the evening she meets her future husband Fred Grey, also involves a kind of symbolically charged exhibitionism and self-baring except that it is verbal rather than physical—which is precisely the problem, in a sense. The setting is a party at the apartment of American gossip-columnist Rose Frank to which the Walkers have taken Aline. Of course, the gossip Rose gathers for an American newspaper is emblematic of a degraded state of language in which words have become commodified. Sold as mindless newspaper entertainment, these words have been drained of any relational or true informative value. Tired of this empty language and of her own relational isolation in a world of gossip and pretension, Rose erupts verbally. Aline is sensitive to Rose’s disturbed state of mind and imagines what she must be thinking: “I’ve been up against something. I’ve been banged. I’m going to talk. I’ve got to. It doesn’t much matter to me who is here” (172). Rose has encountered her own form of “sacramental resistance.” Besides its obvious sexual connotation, the statement “I’ve been banged” refers back to an earlier

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statement in the novel that relates to encounters with the phenomenal and natural world: “You go along in life, . . . thinking life is so and so, and then—bang! Something happens. You aren’t at all what you had thought you were. A lot of people found that out during the war. . . . After all, it might be, you never knew anything really until it had touched your own life, your own body. . . . What is a tree? . . . [H]url your body against it. It is unyielding—like a rock. . . . There is blood on your cheek” (139). Along the same lines, the narrator later reflects: “Everything—at least most things—are obvious enough. Perhaps even a tree is not a tree for you until you have banged against it” (154). The Self, in danger of solipsism, thinking that reality meets its definition of it, needs to experience concrete and tangible resistance in order to begin to understand the substance of reality that eludes its categories. This resistance has to be intensely concrete in order to not be manipulable: it has to be nonverbal, physical, undeniable in its physical obviousness, physically penetrating the Self, making its blood run. As alluded to in the first of the two passages cited above, World War I provided such an experience for Western civilization as its ugly reality resisted patriotic and idealizing rhetoric. Thus both the natural world and the war experience (as well as the sexual realm) are evoked in Rose’s thought, “I’ve been banged” (172). Rose feels the need to express the trauma that has jolted her, but the party she is hosting is a microcosm of Western society, an aggregate of people who are representatives of the media, politics, and the arts and who, as budding cultural arbiters of society—“newspaper people, young radicals, art students”—are not about to drop the stability of cultural discourses and feel uncomfortable with Rose’s air of passionate imbalance. Sensing the coming outburst, the party crowd delves into one of its own, “a hurried, rather nervous outbreak of talk” (172). When Rose begins talking, a reporter recently returned from Ireland, seeks to stop her by recounting his latest interview and ambition for a raise, thinking, “I’ll talk and then someone else will talk. We’ll get through the evening comfortably and nicely” (176). It is at this point that we first encounter explicitly the phrase that gives the novel its title: “It would not work. Rose laughed, a queer high nervous laugh—dark laughter that” (176). Rose is laughing at the inane party talk that is supposed to suppress what she has to say: a visceral, spontaneous, natural, and whole-bodied response breaks through the conversation meant to gloss over substance, reality. Rose’s laughter is emblematic of an experience that has transcended easy definition and verbal categories: “Well, the devil, I was there. I took part in it all, saw



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it all, felt it all” (176). She has had an experience in which she has been so fully involved on every level of personhood, so concretely, tangibly, and sensually involved, that she can truly say, “I was there.” The reference to the devil seems to suggest a breaking loose from idealized vision. The place where Rose has been is the Quat’z Arts Ball, an annual ball of Paris art students where inhibitions are tossed aside: “Delicacy of line, tenderness of line, color sensitiveness—for to-night—bah! . . . Everyone goes the limit” (177). There is a sensual substructure of life that is sublimated and rechanneled through the arts but bursts its channels at the Arts Ball. The Arts Ball of 1919 has been dreaded by the city because of the postwar intensity of feeling pervading society. One of those emotions is “grotesque joy,” an unrestrained insistence on sensual enjoyment after wartime suffering; the other is anger at the war rhetoric, “[a] debauch of lying” focused on “outlast[ing] the other liar,” abusing the name of God, the name of Love, the ideal of Liberty (178). Physical debauchery is, thus, a direct answer to a “debauch of lying,” tangible, in a sense, sacramental resistance to false idealization—with one hitch. A sacrament points to mystery whereas at the Arts Ball, all is demystified into mere animalism. The orgy is presented as understandable, but not as attractive; Rose Frank reports what she has witnessed with shrill hysteria, and, as Brown points out, the word “sick” is very insistently repeated in one of the passages in which she speaks of the event, and it and the word “laughter” are associated in a “diseased alliance” (147). I would add that the word “attempt” in the same passage also bears great significance in establishing the diseased nature of the students’ “dark laughter”: “The Armistice—release—the attempt at naked joy. Rose Frank talking—the flood of naked words—dancing. After all, most of the women at the ball in Paris were what? Whores? An attempt to throw off pretense, fakiness. So much fake talk during the war” (192). What we have here is not “naked joy,” not the free sensual essence of joy, but, rather, a desperate, violent, grasping attempt at seizing it. The ball attendees are literally naked, but the spiritual, elusive mystery of naked freedom, of intimacy, of immediacy, spontaneity, authenticity, the innocence and harmony of the Garden of Eden, where shame is not a concept, all of these potential positive characteristics of nakedness escape them. For these students are literalists, believing they can violently grasp at something qualitative as though it were merely quantitative. Not only does the “attempt at naked joy” fail, but the “attempt to throw off pretense, fakiness,” fake talk, fails as well; for what immediately precedes the claim of doing so is a demeaning label, “whores,” that reduces women to objects in a capitalistic economy, denying the spiritual

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dimension of these women’s nature, reducing them to sheer instrumental status. In other words, a cynical linguistic category is now obscuring reality much as before sentimental patriotic rhetoric deceived young men, feeding them into the horrific machinery of war. The men described in this passage engage in what Whalan has identified as a frequently critiqued masculine behavior in Anderson’s fiction, a behavior Anderson associated with World War I militarism, and which Whalan sees exemplified in the George Willard figure of Winesburg: By placing himself and his environment within [a] narrative sequence [formulated by himself], George becomes . . .”excited” by the sense of his own power in controlling previously unconnected phenomena. . . . This heady sense of empowerment only intensifies George’s desire to create order through narrative, which centers on the objectified body of Belle Carpenter, whom he has arranged to see later that evening. George hopes to “achieve in her presence a position he had long been wanting to achieve.” The double-entendre of this quotation exemplifies well the way in which Belle simultaneously becomes an object of sexual desire and a figure in a set of linguistic relations, able to be repositioned and re-contextualised by George to achieve a narrative—and sexual—consummation. George feels a “sense of masculine power” in his walk with Belle up the hill to the fairground, a power grounded in his certainty that masculinity has the ability to write the script. (“Dreams of Manhood” 236–37)

Regarding the above passage from Dark Laughter in the light of this poweroriented masculine scripting process, one may perceive how the students at the Four Arts Ball are creating a narrative of revenge and inscribing female bodies in a cynical manner that will allow them to dominate the horrors (whores) that have been dominating them. This assertion of power is intimately linked with literalism, with a “closed” form of reading that asserts self-serving narrow meanings and rejects humility and wonder, or careful relational approaches to the mysterious Other. This power-driven literalism bars the path to a true communion with another’s presence, to an entrance into reality; hence, no sacramental authenticity can emerge. The “dark laughter” associated with this mindset is a release of nervous tension, a symptom of neurotic emotional conflict, as observed by Judith Brown (147), a conflict stemming from the pursuit of emotions that are deferred by the very mode of the pursuit. In their misdirected and vengeful animalism, the art students, denying their humanity, violate the order of Creation and become neither animal nor human, falling into a nothingness that is the very essence of evil.



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However, their undisguised materialism (for animalism is essentially materialistic, being exclusively focused on the physical), despite everything, still does fulfill, obliquely, a negative sacramental function of sorts: it points up the starkness and evil of which human beings are capable, exposing the reality of evil behind the facade of ideals—thus, also, Rose’s reference to the devil. Particularly, women’s involvement in evil behind their aura of purity is exposed, a fact especially significant when we remember the importance of the female principle in Anderson as evinced in, e.g., “An Ohio Pagan”—Woman, the potentially redemptive Other, has been made the vehicle of deceptive and destructive rhetoric: “Slap it to the women once! They were in it up to the neck. Sentimentality! Gush! . . . Roll’em in the stench of it! Life! Western Civilization!” (179–80). Amidst this tirade is embedded the French line, “Cherchez la femme!”—“Seek out Woman!” Behind the rhetoric-smashing anger is, ultimately, a desire for real encounter, a desire for finding an Other, for finding Woman. Thus the exposure of evil and stench becomes in an indirect manner a sacrament pointing toward the mystery of communion and the Other, to a positive substance beneath the obvious fallenness and corruption and the false symbolism. When the art students burst conventional limits by going the limit, they are ultimately seeking to break down the borders that separate them from the Other. Driven by a “hunger for the limit,” Rose has persuaded an American art student to go to the ball with her. Throughout the orgy, he saves her from being raped; however, Rose is not sure if she really was “saved” by remaining untouched: “That saved me if I was saved. Can anyone be saved in this world?” (184). Her hunger for the limit is not satisfied—in not ultimately surrendering her body, she remains, if just barely, within the confines of civilization even though she has “[s]uch a strange feeling in [herself]—something primitive like a nigger woman in an African dance” (184). The dance here, one of free sensual expression devoid of the artificial restraints of Western civilization, is linked to a freeing of repressed dreams, particularly sexual fantasies: “All your thoughts acted out by humans—men and women, right before your eyes, showing yourself up to yourself—for once. . . . Could a woman subscribe to it, fall into the swing of it?” (184). As most utterances in this densely woven text do, so the dancing imagery here has an echo throughout the novel where African Americans are associated with dancing, with a life of instinctual wholeness and free self-expression. Again and again, they are portrayed as having the aura of dance as in the following statement describing Bruce’s New Orleans experience: “Niggers on the docks, niggers in the city streets, niggers laughing. A slow dance always going on” (75).7

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However, what here is natural, healthy, slow, and organic “dance” and a joyful kind of “dark laughter” is something entirely different with Rose. Rather than a natural unfolding of herself, she has experienced a jarring and negative, debasing jolt away from the civilization that is her mental and spiritual home except that she is still defined by that civilization and has not truly escaped it: “What seemed to hurt her most was that she had come out of it physically untouched, had escaped. ‘Such cheating when I felt that way inside! Mud! Muddy men! Muddy women! The war! Why should I have escaped?” Not having physically “banged” against her “tree,” not having truly delved into the “mud” around her, Rose’s knowledge of the realities of her world has only been partially imbibed and an essential detachment remains. The scene of Rose’s outburst is full of ambiguity, much of it residing in the richly associative wording. “Mud,” for instance, can be associated with the “dust” of which humans are made, with human physicality, and hence, human mortality: “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Gen. 3.19). “Muddy” men and women would, therefore, be mortal men and women, a lesson humans have been taught by the war, aware now more keenly of their true condition. And, of course, mud, in the wake of the Great War, was very much associated with the trenches, and, thus, once again, with suffering and death. However, mud is also frequently associated quite positively with the Earth itself, with nature, and, particularly, in its moistness, with fecundity, with the life force, with sexuality. When Rose, whose name connotes the ideal of romantic love, longs for “mud,” she is most certainly longing for an exit from abstraction and sterility into the concrete, physical reality that is also indicated by her ambivalent name, which stands both for an ideal and for an actual plant. Perhaps, she wants the blossom and knows that it cannot be had without the thorns—without entering fully into human life, a life that includes both vitality and death, both suffering and ecstasy, violence and intimacy—all of it. Her flood of words is a sign of grotesquery, of having grasped a truth but abstractly and, thus, not understanding reality fully. Rose was “there,” but not “there” enough. What wells up in her at the sight of the aggressively uninhibited orgy, the dream of presence, of authenticity, symbolized by the primitive African dance she envisions, is not the reality by which she is surrounded. Rather, her dream represents the intuition of what everyone else is, to some degree, attempting to capture, but distorting, perverting in that attempt, narrating a cynical animalism and literalistic materialism instead. Neither Rose nor anyone else gets to escape the noise of language, gets to enter the easy, preverbal, natural, and free “dark laughter” and “slow dance” of African Americans. As is emphasized by her extreme verbosity, Rose, even after her semi-epiphanic



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experience, is still trapped in a Western civilization deeply characterized by a reliance on language and not in tune with nature, with trees and mud. Nor has Rose allowed herself to be touched by death, despair, the trauma of war, in other words, by human suffering; even that remains repressed, abstracted, and released only on a verbal level. Deeply affected by Rose’s outburst, Aline returns to it in her mind throughout the novel—significantly, though, her intuitive understanding of Rose begins before the outburst and, thus, has that silent, preverbal quality indicative of depth and openness. Where the other members of the party seek to suppress what Rose has to say, Aline feels that it deeply concerns her and concludes: “Rose had given her the war, the sense of it—all in a heap—like a blow” (203). The blow is Aline’s banging into a tree—concrete bodily and physical reality has bubbled up, and it contains a spiritual, substantive reality out of sync with the culture’s rhetoric. Yet just as Rose was “there” at the Arts Ball, and yet not truly “there,” so Aline, to her own spiritual detriment, “escapes” from “the limit,” from the ultimate confrontation with reality, and thus remains locked in a dehumanizing and reductive framework of literal language, separating her from nature: “Aline wanted to be in something—up to the hilt—the limit—once, anyway. She had got into—A marriage with Fred Grey” (203). Fred Grey, having decided to remain in France after his military service in order to try his hand at art, is present at Rose Frank’s party as is a silent young American with whom Aline feels a curious unspoken connection. Rose, Fred, the young American stranger, and Aline form an unspoken community whom Rose’s outburst “concern[s] as it could not concern the others” (174). All four are somehow sensitive to the significance of Rose’s experience, yet Fred runs away from having to face the reality of his war experience—sensing Aline’s American female detachment from the war, he “cl[i]ng[s] to Aline. ‘You are someone I can understand. I am out of my depths here’” (175). Later, he and Aline leave the party together—Aline longs to surrender to him sexually, to “go the limit,” to let go of ideas of purity and propriety and to experience instead an intensive encounter. Yet Fred’s needs are different: though in the trenches he has felt the need to shatter the false abstractions of language and culture and “[t]o say words that reeked and stank as trenches stank . . . [to] [s]wear—curse God—go the limit,” he has ultimately clung to the dream of “America—far off. Something sweet and fine. You’ve got to believe in that—in the men there—the women there. Hang on! Grip it with your fingers, your soul! Sweetness and truth! It’s got to be sweet and true. Fields—cities—streets—houses—trees—women. Specially women” (199). It

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is clear that Fred insists on a certain truth summed up in the word “sweetness,” a reality that is smooth and unproblematic and, most of all, not truly physical, not bound by concreteness: “Fred clung to her. He did not kiss her, did not want that. ‘I want you to marry me—live with me in America’” (200). Instead of concrete contact, Fred wants something verbally based; marriage instead of a kiss, a sheltered life in an idealized “America” rather than first and foremost a life with Aline. It is not primarily her individual person in which he is interested: “He was like a child, wanting something she stood for—to him—wanting it desperately” (201). The America of cities, streets, fields, trees, and women he envisions is a pastoral dream of unproblematic harmony, a dream that does not do justice to the mud of reality, a mud out of which may grow abundance, but mud nonetheless. He fundamentally misunderstands what America, and particularly his native Midwestern region, truly is, especially in light of this lengthy but powerful evocation of the pronounced sensuousness of Midwestern nature earlier in the novel: “A warm rich land of growth—trees growing rank—woods and corn growing rank. The whole Middle American empire—swept by frequent and delicious rains, great forests, prairies on which early spring flowers grow like a carpet—land of many rivers running down to the brown slow strong mother of rivers, land to live in, make love in, dance in. Once the Indians danced there, made feasts there. They threw poems about like seeds on a wind. Names of rivers, names of towns. Ohio! Illinois! Keokuk! Chicago! Illinois! Michigan!” (113). The Middle West evoked here is emphatically unruly: vitality springs up rankly and wildly. The “brown slow strong mother of rivers” is the very emblem, in its brownness, of non-white, nonideal but instinctual vitality, in its slowness of the dynamic-organic principle resisting any static notions as well as the forced, inhuman speed of machinery, in its strength of nature’s resistance to easy civilitory mastery, and in its maternal character as the site of instinctual bonding and physical nurture. It is a land of life, sex, dance—inviting humans to share in its physical fullness, in its concreteness, and in an internal fusion of the spiritual and physical expression as most powerfully emblematized in the highly physical but spiritually expressive acts of sex and dance. It is thus a land inviting humans away from abstractions and from a literalized language to a fuller and more complete, sacramental form of expressing and communing. Particularly significant is the reference to Native Americans—traditionally supposed to have lived in harmony with the American land—who here are seen as poets, in whose lovely, vocalic naming of the land is evident a poetic rather than literalistic relation to it, an attitude also evident in the fact that “the Indians danced there.” Theirs is



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here imagined as a full-bodied, personally engaged, relational response to the land, one in tune with its rhythm of vitality and apprehending its mystery in aesthetically suggestive rather than merely categorically literal names. Fred, however, sees an abstract ideal of America deeply dissociated from concreteness, his idealistic detachment from nature further evinced by the cultural iconography in his mind: “Names floated before his mind—names that stood for something in American life. Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, William Dean Howells—‘The better aspects of our American life’—Roosevelt, the poet Longfellow. Truth, liberty—the freedom of man. America, mankind’s great experiment in Liberty” (98). Another list of names is provided here in order to suggest a particular attitude toward America, one that differs from the Native American attitude described above. These personal names, instead of place names, stand for a national American idealism that proves a barrier to a concrete engagement with the land that is “America.” The name of Emerson may surprise in the context of signifying a character’s detachment from nature, but Anderson associates this New England sage with an idealized vision of nature that tends to dissolve and abstract the very thing it celebrates. Franklin serves as Max Weber’s prototype of the secularized Calvinist, as a conspicuous practitioner of the Protestant ethic, bent on a utilitarian systematization of life, and he is similarly perceived by Anderson: he represents the spiritually stifling effects of both the Puritan and the Enlightenment legacy in American culture. Wiliam Dean Howells, known in his day as the “dean of American letters,” is associated in Anderson’s Notebook with a genteel version of realism that avoids the grittiness of actual life in America (198). Teddy Roosevelt stands for trite patriotic optimism, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is an iconic figure in traditional literary histories of the United States, favored for his polished verse, which Anderson seems to associate with glibness and a soulless imitation of European literature. Hence, we have a gallery of national icons who, for Anderson, represent idealistic abstractionism; the abstract, clichéd snippets of patriotic rhetoric accompanying these illustrious names reinforce the notion that the English language, and, more abstractly, white American ideological discourse, has erected a false mental world, barring us from entering authentically into reality, into the very land we inhabit. Fred, therefore, is a representative of mainstream American culture when, in his insistence on “sweetness and truth,” he is utterly unable to “see” America. Not only does Fred misinterpret the American land, but he also misinterprets the whole cosmos by approaching it from a preconceived, abstract vantage point rather than concretely. He and Aline are at a café near the Cathedral of Notre

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Dame after the party at Rose Frank’s, and Fred is struck by the angel sculptures of the cathedral as emblems of desexualized female purity: “At night on the roof of Notre Dame angels may be seen walking up into the sky—white-clad women—stepping up to God” (200). Earlier in the novel, the Old Testament has been celebrated as one of Bruce’s favorite works because of its unabashed concreteness and sensuality: “[H]oney, bees, barns, cattle—men and women going into barns to lie on the threshing-floors. . . . ‘And he turned unto her by the way and said, Go to, I pray thee, let me come in unto you’” (97). Fred, however, detaches religion and God from nature and is inspired by a vision of lifeless statues poised toward otherworldly transcendence, untainted by anything organic. Instead of understanding the living mystery suggested by the medieval statues, he celebrates their very absence of mystery, their very materiality as pure and untainted stone. He reads literally rather than poetically. An important subtext at this point is, as occurs so frequently in Midwestern modernist literature, Adams’s notion of the medieval Virgin as an organic principle, as discussed in the introduction. Concerning his native region’s relation to the Virgin in A Story Teller’s Story, Anderson observes Adams’s dictum that Americans have neither a Virgin nor a Venus and know neither how to love nor worship. In lines previously quoted in the introduction but worth reiterating, Anderson observes that Middle Westerners have both “love” and “reverence” but have had to worship their “Virgins and Venuses . . . under the bush. What nights I had spent mooning about with middle-western boys, with hungry girls too. Were we but trying to refute the older men of New England who had got such a grip on our American intellectual life, the Emersons, Hawthornes and Longfellows?” (380).8 He asserts that in the Middle West, a Virgin might actually “dare command” and a Venus might “dare exist” (380). People have but to learn to shake off the New England–derived tyranny of the intellect and learn that “thinking meant nothing at all unless it was done with the whole body” (381). The Cathedral of Notre Dame is named after this organic medieval Virgin—but Fred sees only a sterile, idealized, anti-organic Protestant Virgin, and his religion is an effete abstraction from the genuine, earthy Hebrew faith. This point is made perfectly explicit when Fred is reported to be thinking the following thoughts later on in the novel: “White, pure women, walking off a cathedral roof into the sky. Help us to believe in that. We latter-day men are not the men of antiquity. We cannot accept Venus. Leave us the Virgin. We must have something or perish” (294). Tragically, Fred does not realize that the Venus and Virgin are one, as Adams had pointed out and as Anderson reiterates. Unlike the men of antiquity



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or of the middle ages, the modern civilized man, devoid of faith and far removed from nature, transforms the potent Virgin of old into a lifeless abstracted ideal. He is a Middlewesterner who has fallen for the Puritan-inherited schemata and typologies, drained in modern America of any vigor they may have had in pre-Victorian times. Thus Aline does not find the reality, the adventure, the immersion in the concrete that she is seeking with Fred. Rather, she finds herself placed in the Garden of the American Middle West as a linguistic abstraction, the organic become pure sign an sich rather than a mystery being poetically bodied forth in the concrete individual: “In Old Harbor, where the Greys had a brick house in the garden set on the very top of the hill above the river, how exquisite she would be—like one of the small, old-fashioned white marble statues people used to set on pedestals among green foliage in a garden” (197). It is out of this lifeless American Eden that Bruce rescues Aline—only through him does she enter a real garden as a real human being. It must be noted that in Fred Grey’s highly symbolic Midwestern garden, two types of silence clash virulently, with one eventually triumphing over the other: one is a silence founded on rigid, literal linguistic categories that essentially shut down life and thus lead to a silence that ironically has been fostered by language itself—it is the silence of the stone statue that signifies nothing but an abstract ideal and is devoid of soul and thus strangely, paradoxically, both mere material and mere ideal; the other silence is that quiet vitality characteristic of the organic world, or the foliage in which the statue is set. Ironically, in this silence where mysterious forces manifest themselves tangibly, a substantive sacramental language seems to speak in an authentic, physically direct, though spiritually vague and elusive manner. Thus both silences are bound up with language: one with a literal, the other with a poetic/sacramental language. Aline’s marriage to Fred is characterized, obviously, by the first kind of silence—on multiple levels. Fred’s rigid definition of Aline not as a person but as an ideal and his own entirely externalized role in life as a man of affairs fulfilling the obligations of wealth leave the couple without anything about which to communicate: “What was to be said? There was nothing to talk about. . . . How could they talk? There wasn’t anything special to be said” (282). Significantly, Fred responds to the embarrassing silence by frantically reading the newspaper, portrayed in the novel as meaningless, standardized “wordslinging”; Aline, on the other hand, yearns for natural life and goes “out to walk about in the garden in the darkness” (282). Aline resents the empty, unrelational socializing of the Old Harbor upper crust—tired of formulaic interactions and communication, she shuns interaction altogether. Fred, on the other hand, throws himself

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into the most linguistically debased venture possible: a national advertising campaign. Finding meaningless “catch-lines,” mere attention-getters without any substantive meaning, an originality based in rhetorical formulae—Fred’s preoccupation with this venture is emblematic of his state of existence in which there is only prefabricated rhetoric. Bruce himself has been through a marriage to a Chicago intellectual who is so focused on writing that she disregards life (including her relationship with Bruce) and ends up with highly artificial stories that have nothing to say (49). Having escaped to New Orleans, Bruce learns a different sort of silence from the one that characterized his marriage to Bernice: “Song—a slow dance. A white man lying still on docks, in a five-dollar-a-month bed. Heat. No hurry. When you get that hurry out of you the mind works maybe. Maybe song will start in you too” (81). Away from the “wordslinging” of his Chicago newspaper and his wife Bernice, in the lulling heat, surrounded by a more organically grown, historical urban setting than Chicago and by a sensual, song- and laughter-filled African American culture, Bruce is able to drain “hurry,” externally propelled activity, out of himself, and experiences as a result the natural, gradual unfolding of his own inner life. This natural unfolding leads him away from the formulaic, commercialized language of journalism to poetic language; “song” does begin in him, and he writes poems, of which a few samples are given, such as this stanza: “I am giving out of the richness of myself to many mornings. / At night, when the waters of the seas murmur I am murmuring. / I have surrendered to seas and suns and days and swinging ships. / My blood is thick with surrender” (78). Bruce is murmuring with the seas—speaking in tune with nature. He has surrendered to nature, to its concreteness, to its vagueness, to the indefinable mystery it contains. His blood has thickened as he has moved away from abstraction to a language and a sensibility more concrete, more physical, not trying to leap at or master the spiritual but submitting to its elusiveness and to its containment within the tangible. Thus Bruce is able to give the reader advice as to how to enjoy his poetry: “What did that mean? Oh, laugh a little, men! What matters what it means?” (78) The reader, intent on defining, mastering, and categorizing, is encouraged to enjoy and respond more viscerally, in a sense, surrendering to the poetry instead of seeking to conquer it. The theme of surrender is certainly vital; it involves an acceptance of the really existing manifest world’s sacramental resistance to imposed mental schemes and categories. It is with this newly acquired “natural silence,” a supra-verbal silence that is song, that Bruce arrives in Old Harbor to work at the Grey Wheel Factory, where Aline spots him. The intuitive, silent communication she has with him



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promises an outlet from the oppressive silence of her life with Fred: “But she had stared at him. There had been a look in her eyes as though she were about to speak to him, a workman in her husband’s factory” (97). Across the lines of social categories, a silent speech begins between Aline and Bruce that leads to her hiring him as—what else?—her gardener. Bruce, as the Greys’ gardener, fulfills a primal role intimately associated with organic silence and with poetry. Aline is one of the World War I fiancées deprived of their grooms (her fiancé Ted Copeland died in France); she is described as a field waiting for its gardener, who never comes: “Suppose you are a field and it is spring. A farmer is coming toward you with a bag filled with seed. Now he has almost reached the field, but instead of coming to plant the seed he stops by the roadside and burns it” (142). In reflecting on his former marriage to the aspiring writer Bernice, Bruce applies the seed imagery to himself and thinks of his hunger for “planting” himself: “What a floating disconnected thing Bruce felt himself. He was a strong man physically. Why had he never taken hold of life with his hands? Words—the beginning of poetry, perhaps. The poetry of seed hunger. ‘I am a seed, floating on a wind. Why have I not planted myself? Why have I not found ground in which I can take root?’” (60). In both Aline’s and Bruce’s case, what has been missing in the unfolding of their identity is “gardening,” a physically “grounded” encounter, one that is concrete, involves the whole (including the preverbal, physical) person, and is free from the mental categories that inhibit women’s realization of what they need, which point is illustrated when the narrator points out the unacceptability of his clearly sexual soil imagery to “nice” women: “Women can’t have such thoughts, not directly. They can’t if they are nice women” (142). This soil imagery is identified as “the poetry of seed hunger” in Bruce’s reflection—in other words, the problem of “nice” women is that they cannot go beyond a rigid definition of themselves through inflexible “literal” social labels, that they cannot approach their own identity as an intuitively felt primal mystery of which language can only be suggestive, and only so, if it is freed from convention and literalism and becomes image-focused, bodying forth sacramentally that which is intangible. In one of the novel’s excessively numerous reflections on poetry, Bruce thinks of “symbolism” as “getting off your base, saying one thing and meaning another” (100). Further along in the same paragraph, Bruce notes, “The fancy was a tricky thing. What one was trying to do with the fancy was to link oneself, in some rather mysterious way, with others” (101). Poetic perception, poetic language, imaginative thinking are here understood as acknowledging a mysterious Other in that which is literally there, a meaning different from the purely denotative

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content of the word itself. A word, a physical phenomenon, a gesture, everything is ultimately symbolic and makes present analogically a reality larger and fuller than that which the symbol in and of itself literally is. Poetic vision thus launches off one base to arrive at another, looking at one thing and seeing another, fuller phenomenon behind it: in this manner, the Self can get off its own base and apprehend in itself and in an Other larger and significant, mysterious realities that are indirectly, suggestively there in their concrete manifestations. In truly seeing another, the Self has a new, more actual form of access to the Other, fulfilling the following dream of Anderson, expressed here in his poem “The Dreamer”: “By indirection I have been making love to all the men and women of a city.” For, as portrayed in Anderson’s poem “Word Factories,” linguistic interchange should be like lovemaking—beneath the structure of culture and language and ideology lies real life, life stifled by an industrial, capitalist, post-Protestant society: “Words are living, breathing things. They are children of men that have been put to work in a factory. Their little bodies have become bent and stooped and twisted” (86). The poet, seeing the actual life beneath the symbolic order, is essentially a lovemaker: “The female words have found no lovers. / They are barren. / It was not God’s wish that it be so. / I am one who would serve God” (86). The poet—poor chap—must fulfill the job the other men in his society are neglecting: “Have not my brothers the male words been castrated and made in to eunuchs” (86). He alone, with the poet’s eye, is able to perceive the vaster actualities, the substantive realities, the indefinable mysteries beneath the material surface and fixed ideological superstructure of the modern world, and he alone thus finds true access to the Other—put in eucharistic terms, he alone finds communion because he can see the human soul and the true presence in the elements. Woman cannot be perceived by a conventional, idealistic man like Fred Grey; it takes the poet who is willing to first see concreteness and then apprehend poetically, that is, indirectly and intuitively, that which is a mystery. This, of course, is the point of the gendered associations of the land, the poetic imagining of the land as Woman, in “An Ohio Pagan,” and here once more, in Dark Laughter: the land in its sacramental Otherness becomes the analogical, poetic symbol of the human Other, which, from a man’s perspective, is woman, and which must be known through “seed-hunger,” through a concrete, existential intuition of and knowledge of its life, its deeper, breathing, living being. Here we arrive at Anderson’s differences from feminism: the concrete, physical, natural reality of sex reveals a gender complementarity similar to the pastoral symbiosis of the husbandman and the land. That is, man is the poet and woman is his poetic element, that which nourishes his poetry as the soil nourishes the



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seed. We find here the ideal symbiosis of silence and poetry, reminiscent of the natural silence of both Helen White and the Ohio countryside that nourish the maturing poet George Willard in the two concluding stories of Winesburg, Ohio. In a world “full of meaningless people saying words” (239), the whispering blades of the corn and the silent presence of Helen become to George a revelation of presence itself, of people’s authentic reality beneath their words: Now that he had come out of town where the presence of the people stirring about, busy with a multitude of affairs, had been so irritating, the irritation was all gone. The presence of Helen renewed and refreshed him. It was as though her woman’s hand was assisting him to make some minute readjustment of the machinery of his life. He began to think of the people in the town where he had always lived with something like reverence. He had reverence for Helen. (241)

Having discovered substance in the silence of nature and in the wordless but tangible presence of a woman, George will be able to find words of substance, words that connote the reality out of the deep experience of which they are born, that incarnate and presence the substantive reality a sacramental poet such as Gerard Manley Hopkins would call “inscape”: “Hopkins’ sacramental view of language enables him to trust language to carry the enfleshed Word he finds in nature. . . . The words of the poem bring about a kind of incarnation. The realization of inscape through words can engender a selving, or instress an inscape, in the hearer” (Ballinger 230). Having experienced primal presence in nature (and, in Anderson’s world, in woman), the poet can use words to embody this substantive experience aesthetically, and so he can incarnate linguistically what is vaster than language and which certainly eludes definitive categories. On the one hand is the mysterious “Other,” profoundly concrete, overwhelmingly sensual and physical and somehow, in its inarticulate, quiet, organic life revealing a deeper spiritual force, which, if tapped into imaginatively or experientially, if partaken of sacramentally by man, the poet, can flower into a more conscious, articulate expression while still remaining essentially sacramental and mysterious. Nature thus feeds art, and in his role as gardener, Bruce finds his identity as a man and a poet, in the garden that is the interface of nature and civilization, of primal vitality and symbolic order, of the female and male principles, of silence and poetry.9 However natural and appropriate it may be for Bruce to become a gardener, he still has to learn how to become one. During his job interview, he makes the following statement not commendable to job applicants in general: “As for my being a gardener, it is, of course, absurd, but I would like trying it if you wouldn’t

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mind helping me. . . . As a matter of fact I am quite stupid with my hands and if you take me you will have to tell me everything” (219). Here the poet-figure actually submits to nature and to Woman. In order to realize his identity as man and poet, Bruce must learn to relate to the Other as a whole human being, that is, in a concrete, hands-on manner, and he knows this self-realization can only occur in a self-surrendering engagement and interaction with the Other: “She had got him. . . . It was flattering to think that he could do it, that he could surrender like that” (215). Hands are important here because they are humans’ best sacramental tools: in them lies tangibly concentrated the mystery of the Self. They are tangible expressions of the Self ’s larger presence, metonymical emblems. Thus Aline teaches her gardener the art of sacramental expression with her hands: “There was a caress in Aline’s hands when, as occasionally happened, she touched one of the plants Bruce had been handling awkwardly. ‘You do it like this,’ the quick deft fingers seemed to be saying to his fingers. ‘Keep yourself out of it. Let the rest of your person sleep. Center everything now upon the fingers that are being directed by her fingers,’ Bruce whispered to himself ” (226). It is the art of caress: the centering of the Self in a concrete gesture, abstraction and the larger scheme of things being left far behind, the Self finding its fullest expression in the concretely delimited and concentrated, i.e., in the poetic. Bruce can learn this caressing, poetic, sacramental self-expression only by relinquishing his larger consciousness to the concreteness of Aline, by surrendering to her and simultaneously to concreteness, which here is expressed in racist terms of the instinctuality associated with animals and African Americans: “There was a way in which he felt like a horse or a slave being bought by [his employer Aline] and he liked the feeling” (219). In finding salvation in limitation,10 Bruce is following the example of Sponge Martin, his coworker at the Grey Wheel Factory and a former carriage painter and thus a craftsman. Sponge has the craftsman’s touch, a caress in every brushstroke, and commensurately, he is also a poet of sorts: “Sponge talked and talked, enjoying his own words, and Bruce listened, hearing every word while he kept right on having his own thoughts too. How many times had he heard Sponge’s story and how delightful it was to keep on hearing it” (28). The story tells how Sponge put Fred Grey’s father Tom in his place, not allowing himself to be disrespected by the wealthier man—in his concrete life as a craftsman, Sponge has learned to see beyond artificial, conventional categories and into the human equality of every individual. The way he tells the story betrays the poet as much as the perspective of it does: he savors his own words, understanding their richness,



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mystery, and suggestiveness rather than treating them as mechanical vehicles of categorical information. A vital aspect of Sponge’s fully realized and, in a sense, poetic identity is his acceptance of limitation: “There was a thing worth doing [Sponge] could do better than most other men. He rested in that fact and his wife rested in him. The man and woman had stayed within the limits of their powers, had moved freely within a small but clear circle of life” (117). In concentrating the Self concretely in one craft and in one relationship, and in achieving the perfection in a limitation symbolized by the circle, the Self is essentially bowing to the sacramental nature of life in this world: the larger mysteries must be presenced, incarnated in the definite, in the limited, in order to be expressed at all. It is a movement away from grand abstractions to concrete poetic expression. Thus Bruce thinks to himself that “[a] man must at some time in his life focus all the strength of his being upon some one thing, the doing of some job of work, utter absorption in that or in some other human being, for a time anyway” (215). Through such limitation, Bruce has become part of nature’s larger sacrament: “[H]e had occasionally the exciting feeling of being a part of what was going on. He was a painter at work on a vast canvas on which others were also at work. In the ground where he was digging, red, blue and yellow blossoms would presently appear” (225). Bruce, in learning to surrender concretely to an Other, concentrating his Self in his hands, expressing it sacramentally in physically concentrated form, and participating in a larger concrete sacrament, has learned how to let the silent mysteries of life flower into a sacramental and thus poetic expression of sorts. By surrendering to Silence/Nature, he is on his way to becoming a man, a poet, a lover. Or, at least, such is Anderson’s implied message. As readers, we may have our doubts concerning Bruce’s maturation into a self-surrendered, self-giving, but definite man, a man of not only vision but also of action, who has learned to channel and express through himself the larger creative life forces: after all, Bruce’s meditative and dreamy little act of planting seeds in the garden to let them flower is fairly the pinnacle of activeness for him in the entire novel. Otherwise, he primarily knows how to run away, to escape uncomfortable situations, and how to muse and observe; additionally, he writes one meandering, freely associative poem of questionable quality. As Burbank (whose critique of the protagonist’s passivity has already been noted) remarks, “Dudley is a dreamer and cannot . . . act upon his impulses. . . . This weakness in the character of Dudley comprises the chief weakness of the book; for, lacking indirect expression through action, his reflections are obvious and affected and in fact represent an escape from rather than a movement toward the desired response to the natural impulses” (114). One

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must only compare D. H. Lawrence’s primitive gardener Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) to this earlier prototype in Anderson’s fiction to distinguish by stark contrast the brimming-over creativity, passion, and courage of the one and the fairly passive blandness of the other. And yet, as is virtually always the case, Anderson does employ a certain degree of artistry, even in his weaker works or passages; here, in typical fashion, every word is carefully chosen and resonates with ideas and imagery pervasive throughout the entire Anderson oeuvre. The passage’s details, as shall be shown, reflect Anderson’s antiromanticism, which is closely linked to his sacramentalism. It is important to Anderson to stress his vision’s divergence from romanticism by viewing the positive artist/gardener figure as communally oriented and genuinely communicative rather than glorying in individual autonomy, in selfgenerated meaning or beauty. Ciancio points out that grotesquery in Winesburg tends to grow out of characters’ “self-aggrandizing visions that estrange them from the brotherhood of man” (995). Also commenting on Winesburg, Lindsay observes that the novel’s “stories reveal a remarkable range of romantic selfhoods existing in small-town middle America. I call these selfhoods ‘romantic’ because characters’ truths (or narratives . . . ) construct the self as a privileged singularity defined in relation to larger social configurations. . . . These narratives . . . act as estranging rhetorics dramatizing the romantic self ’s imperious isolation” (xv). The romantic self is “imperious” because superior in its uniqueness, its “singularity.” Discussing how Anderson’s fiction suggests that grotesquery be overcome by combining masculine and feminine traits, Rigsbee explains the significance of feminine qualities in overcoming the artistic individual’s isolation and making his or her art fruitful: “Through the character of Elizabeth Willard, Anderson shows that the urge for creative self-expression is an extension of the basic feminine instinct for intimacy. Restless and energetic, Elizabeth dreams of becoming an actress in a big city. Her fantasy is a symbolic expression of her need to develop the full range of her personality and to achieve the artistic expression that would bring her into intimate communion with the world” (237). In other words, for Anderson, art exists dynamically, relationally, as process, or, one might say, ritualistically, as a symbolic sharing of experience that builds bridges between individuals, breaking up their isolation, conferring understanding, “grace,” creating communion. In the indirect mode of artistic communication, in its “silence,” that is, its reliance on nonliteralistic signs, on non-linguistic means, genuine “presence” and “being” can unfold themselves without being reduced or falsified and can be shared without imprisoning the Other in a reductive definitional



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narration of reality. And that which is expressed can be authentic and substantive only if it shares in, concentrates, the given presence of the world external to the self; in other words, art, in all its subjectivity and intuitiveness, still needs to embody given, preexisting, objective realities. In this way, Anderson’s notion of art is sacramental: it is symbolic in the full sense of the word, nonliteralistic but expressive of actually present realities, communal, life-giving. This entire artistic credo is summarized in Anderson’s 1926 Notebook, and it is, in many ways, summarized in the passage describing Bruce’s gardening as well. The Notebook passage reads as follows: “The relation you seek always exists. The rhythm you are seeking in any of the arts lies just below the surface of things in nature. To get below the surface, to get the lower rhythm into your hands, your body, your mind, is what you seek but having achieved it you are soon exhausted. It is necessary to come back to the surface, to be like a tree or a field. Men who can work at any time in any art have no relation to their art at all. Their relation to their work has no more reality than the giving of her body by a prostitute has to do with the reality of love” (185). Anderson’s gardener, Bruce, fulfills the artistic process described here in several ways. First of all, he is not an isolated artist, but is working on a communal space, a garden, and derives his inspiration from being part of a larger process in which all of nature and much of humanity is involved. He is “a part of what was going on” in the sense that, like other cultivators of the earth, other “painters” on the “vast canvas” that is the earth, he is involved in building a pastoral symbiosis between humans and the nonhuman natural world, and, he is part of nature’s own artistic process as well, for it is primarily she who brings forth the red, blue, and yellow blossoms he sows. It would be contrary to a sacramental understanding of art if artists were to inscribe their own inner visions onto a blank canvas of reality; rather, the world is given, and “artists” may dig beneath its surface to connect with its mysterious life and let that life blossom. The process is essentially sexual, in that larger spiritual sense in which Anderson always conceived of sex: Bruce’s gardening, his seed-planting, with its obvious sexual overtones, is a dynamic process, a relational artistic act, engaged with given, objective external realities and occurring within a communal context. Its taking place outside language links this artistic, ritualistic activity to the theme of silence. And so, Aline appreciates in Bruce most of all his ability to exit language, to fall back into preverbal—and pre-individualistic—mysteries, and communicate artistically in a self-surrendering manner that invites her relationally, relates to her naturally, rather than scripting or inscribing her: “What she told herself was that he was one who could, at moments, become blind, let go all holds, drop back

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into nature from which he came, be the man to her woman, for the moment at least” (250). The potentially just momentary quality of this connectedness contrasts with culturally Protestant perfectionism and systematicity, and Aline is prepared to allow for the quiet, organic process of flowering and withering, for the cyclical rhythm of natural things—in part, analogously, perhaps, to how medieval sacramentalism allows for the cycle of sin and repentance. Regardless of how basically pallid, from an aesthetic standpoint, the gardening scene might be, it, nonetheless, contains rich thematic resonances that advance Anderson’s careful development of his theme of sacramental silence. As Bruce’s participation in nature’s processes attunes him to the life within nature, he becomes excited about his interaction with it. As spring drives out winter, he can hardly wait for farmers to plow the earth that is now ready: “The soil is growing warm! Begin plowing! Plow and plant!” (227). Very soon, Bruce plows his own field, physically consummating his love with the waiting Aline, who rests in his decisiveness: “He had not hesitated at the door. What was to happen now would happen. There was nothing to be done about it. She was glad of that” (265). The language in this brief passage reveals a vital aspect of Bruce’s new state of mind: he lets be that which is, follows his natural inclinations, and does not worry about social restrictions and conventional labels such as “adultery.” Aline, longing for a natural unfolding of her identity, is glad to submit to the irresistible: “What was to happen now would happen.” Again, Sponge Martin has served as inspiration to Bruce in his new approach to life. Wondering about Sponge’s seeming contentment with life, Bruce concludes that with Sponge, “being satisfied or not satisfied did not count” (117). His wife, to him, for instance, is “like the river, like the sky overhead, like the trees on a distant river-shore. Was she to him like a fact in nature, something about which you asked no questions—something like birth or death?” (117). He sees Sponge and his wife as “two unmoral, unchristian people, . . . enjoying the moment, enjoying each other, being part of the night, of the sky sprinkled with stars, of the earth” (290). As the adjectives “unmoral” and “unchristian” indicate, the Martins enjoy the wholeness they have because they have not subscribed to abstractions, to convention, to systems, to cultural literalism. They have escaped the following cultural fallacy: “There is a thing men do not accept. . . . They are proud, exacting, sure of themselves and their own little systems. All about is life but they have put themselves above life. What they do not dare accept is the fact, the mystery, life itself ” (252). Life as a mystery equates life as a fact—one does not question a mystery, or explain or judge it or put oneself above it. Just as one cannot question the bio-



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logical processes of one’s body but must accept them as a given, as that which constitutes reality, so the mystery and inexplicability of reality is a given and cannot be altered by our pretending that things are lucid to our human intellect. The mystery at the heart of life is a fact with which we just simply have to live and to which we must adjust ourselves if we wish to be in tune with reality. And just as nature herself cannot be subjected to ethical interrogation because nature just mysteriously is, because she exists as a sheer given—in like manner, human identity’s natural unfolding should be accepted as a mysterious given and not be held to any standard other than that of “naturalness.” Anderson moves in a dangerous direction here, one appropriable by Social Darwinism or one of the more ruthless popular versions of Nietzscheanism: “There was a simple natural cruel thing called nature. One could think of that, feel part of that. . . . A tree having got a better start than another threw its shadow down, choking the sunlight out from a smaller tree. . . . A tree was a tree. One did not question it. Could a woman be just a woman, for a time? [Aline] had to be that to be a woman at all” (249). The reflection is followed by a line with obvious, ominous meaning: “Bruce was going about the garden plucking out of the ground the weaker plants” (249). Here, Irving Howe’s perceptive assessment of Anderson’s intellectual cogency and artistic achievement in his later novels seems very relevant: “In Anderson the call to primitivism was tinged with a feckless irresponsibility, hardly a quality sufficient for a prophetic reconstruction of human life” (193). In Anderson’s universe, however, Bruce and Aline make the right decision: in order to realize their personal identities, they must renounce the social rhetoric that would stifle nature and instead must grow like the trees, participating in the organic, silent vitality of nature, choking out the stifled and weak tree that is Fred. This attitude is not seen as anti-communal as Fred’s weakness is due to his own self-stifling unnaturalness—yet, ultimately, how a human identification with the amorality of nature could be anything but anti-communal is a problem not worked out by Anderson, whose 1923 novel Many Marriages Howe sees as a “stubborn and as it were, principled refusal to think,” a dictum that could not be justly applied to Dark Laughter as a whole but certainly to the amoral premise Anderson establishes for his protagonists’ eloping.11 One must grant Anderson that if his narrator’s attitude toward Fred is rather brutal, he nonetheless does portray Fred’s complicated feelings fairly extensively, not glossing over them and acknowledging, for instance, his war trauma as a marring factor in his personality. However, Fred’s feelings ultimately only amount to a fairly pathetic denial of reality: hearing Bruce’s and Aline’s voices in the house,

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Fred wants to eschew confrontation but accidentally makes a noise that forces him to face the lovers rather than sneaking away unnoticed. When Aline announces her intention to leave, Fred feels plunged back into the ugliness of war, which he has been trying to forget rather than facing it, as is made abundantly evident throughout the novel in the narrator’s observations such as the following: “Fred had thought, he had believed, that when he came home to America, when he had married Aline, the war was over. ‘The war to end war’” (305). When Aline’s words hit him “like bullets” (302), Fred keeps “saying the same two or three words over and over. It was like firing a rifle in a battle—firing and then firing again. ‘Don’t do it! You can’t! Don’t do it! You can’t!’” (305) Once more, World War I functions as an example of language gone awry: in a rhetorical scheme that people wish to impose on reality, in which abstractions such as “America” and “marriage” take the place of real people, reality and real people become the target for eradication and words become killing bullets rather than presencing sacramental symbols. There is a brief interval between Aline having sex with Bruce and her leaving with Bruce during which she feels a new tenderness and compassion for Fred. Having “banged” against her “tree,” having at the deepest physical and spiritual level encountered the reality of an Other, Aline apprehends some of the concrete human reality behind the deadening mask of Fred: “Such tenderness! It was as though he had been ill or hurt or something of that sort” (282). What Fred does not realize is that in his human reality, his pain and brokenness, he can be dear to Aline—what leaves her cold is the abstractions, the linguistically defined, artificial wholeness of the “man of affairs” and loyal husband. When Fred says, “You can’t!,” he is insisting on imposing a scheme on reality—to the last, he refuses to allow for reality, to face it squarely, to become real himself. Bruce’s and Aline’s experience is the opposite—they become “definite,” delve into reality: “Bruce took a deep breath and then accepted the fact. ‘Oh, Lord, I’ll have to work now. I’ll have to be definite’” (291). Aline has similar thoughts, knowing she must bravely face poverty: “‘I would be a fool if I said I did not need money. I need it terribly, but what is to be done? I need you more,’ Aline said. To her it seemed that at last she also was to become something definite” (292). Fred turns from verbal firing to an actual desire to kill—the lovers having taken off, he longs to kill the African American domestic servants who obviously did not intervene in the adulterous affair and failed to alert him to it: “For a moment he wished that one of the negro servants in his house would come into the room. He would raise the revolver and fire. Someone would be killed. His manhood would have asserted itself. Negroes are such people! ‘They have no moral sense!’” (313) In



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longing to kill an African American, Fred, of course, is longing to kill the symbolic representative of the vital, instinctual, holistic, concrete, and natural life, killing a flesh-and-blood human being to assert via technological prowess (a revolver) an abstract conception of manhood. Following the lovers but not finding them, Fred fires at the Ohio River, shooting at another symbol of life: he “fire[s] at the silent dark river,” which, however, “flow[s] on in the darkness” (316). The flux of the river, its silent movement, is emblematic of nature’s quiet, organic vitality, of growth, of ever-elusive concreteness resisting the static impositions of human abstraction—as the river flows on, so the lovers Bruce and Aline have refused to be deadened by the demands of social convention or of Fred, its perfect representative. The triumph of poetry, silence, laughter over the literalist, debased language of Western civilization is illustrated once more in the novel’s final moment: “Why couldn’t Fred laugh? He kept trying but failed. In the road before the house one of the negro women tried to quiet the younger, blacker woman, but she kept laughing the high shrill laughter of the negress. ‘I knowed it, I knowed it all the time, all the time I knowed it,’ she cried, and the high shrill laughter ran through the garden and into the room where Fred sat upright and rigid in bed” (319). Dark laughter returns as the novel’s final motif—as Fred sits in dead, rigid silence, the African Americans’ supposed free, concrete, full-bodied response to the world, and their intuitive, concrete knowledge of life ring triumphant. The silence and laughter that ring through this novel are essentially synonymous: when nature takes its course unimpeded, the result is a biological, spiritual, emotional, and relational flourishing that manifests itself in ways more holistic and tangible than the abstract world of verbal constructs. Neither silence nor laughter partakes of this detached verbal world—both express and participate in a mysterious presence that eludes words. Those living in the world of words, those of whom it may be said that “the world is too much with them,” end up in a silence terrible, deathlike, and utterly unlike the sacramental, mysterious silence of being that nature exemplifies—Fred, rigid in his bed, a living ghost, exemplifies the spiritual death and ultimate nothingness faced by those who do not move beyond abstract or conventional categories into the realm of natural sacramental experience.

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6 “Fleshly but beyond just flesh” The Salvific Sacramental Meaning of the Land in Poor White and Beyond Desire

“Huh, it’s marriage, every one is seeking marriage, that’s what they are up to, seeking marriages,” he told himself. —from Many Marriages by Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson is a writer whose artistic and spiritual vision did not change much once he reached his great artistic breakthrough, Winesburg, Ohio. Certainly, some shifts occurred, but they did not affect the core of Anderson’s vision of the world and particularly his vision of nature, and especially of Midwestern nature’s role in spiritually resisting an artificially imposed, highly inorganic, post-Puritan and industrial culture. While formally he experimented with Joycean modernism, employing, without his model’s skill, such techniques as stream-of-consciousness, and while he became more didactic and increasingly interested in Marxism and the Southern mill workers’ plight, he, nonetheless, retained from Winesburg to his last novels and stories the same powerfully motivating hope that is perhaps the very soul of his fiction and reflects the concerns of his place and time: it is the hope that materialism and literalism would give way to a new poetic, holistic, natural, and sacramental view of the world, and that communion between people might grow deeper as a result of such a new sacramental attitude. Thus, even the Marxist leanings of his later years hardly seem political, as many critics have noted: ultimately, Anderson’s concern is with spiritual regeneration from which then flows whatever social regeneration is needed. Irving Howe notes Anderson’s focus on human beings rather than ideological schemes, stating that – 178 –



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“to Anderson [the] inarticulate and inexperienced strikers [in Southern mills] could never be subsumed under some abstraction of potential social power; unlike so many of the intellectuals then turning to radicalism he had no need to romanticize or idealize workers—he saw them as they were and as they were he valued them” (217). And David Anderson, for instance, notes that “if being fine and brave means to be Communist, then [Beyond Desire’s protagonist] Oliver is willing to be so named. . . . It is significant that the emphasis here is not on economic or political beliefs but on relationships to people and to an ideal” (127). Even toward the end of his career, in the increasingly Marxist intellectual climate of the 1930s, Anderson’s concern ultimately remains communion rather than communism—his deep-level vision of humanity’s sacramental, communal bond remains intact, as does his understanding of nature as the site of human culture’s sacramental restoration. Anderson offers virtually the same vision of spiritual salvation in his early novel Poor White (1920) as he does in his second-to-last novel Beyond Desire (1932).1 “Spiritual salvation” is not to be understood in any specifically Christian sense, and, as applied to Anderson, the term also does not refer to any expectation of the soul’s immortality. After all, the epitaph on Anderson’s tombstone reads “Life, not Death, is the Great Adventure”; Anderson, indeed, sought the redemption of human earthly life, not necessarily an individual redeemed afterlife. Though his view of nature was mystical and he did believe in some eternal life force in nature, his primary concern was always with spiritual wholeness in this life, and the achievement of such wholeness is what in the context of Anderson’s writings is meant by “salvation.” In both his 1920 and his 1932 novels, the themes discussed in previous chapters all contribute to the spiritual dilemma that creates the need for salvation, and in both the early and later work, the salvific vision is essentially the same, though outwardly the sexual consummation of marriage (Poor White) and a striker’s martyrdom (Beyond Desire) may bear little resemblance. In both cases, however, a concrete but spiritually significant surrender to the mystery contained in a concrete, tangible Other characterize the protagonists. In both cases, this surrender is triggered by what has been called in this discussion “sacramental resistance”: imposed meanings have yielded no spiritual satisfactions, and it is only in a full-bodied, complete personal engagement with a concrete, spiritually elusive Other that the Self can find transcendence, be it the transcendence of sexual communion or of a meaningful sacrifice of one’s life for others. One of Anderson’s more succinct evocations of a salvation based on a self-surrendering engagement with the concrete is the following verse from “Testament—Four

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Songs,” a poem proclaiming Anderson’s personal gospel: “I grope my way toward you in the darkness. / I feel my way along the face of a wall. / I gather little stones and lay them along the face of the wall” (20). This physical, tangible manner of feeling oneself toward the Other is Anderson’s testament of salvation. The tension between such a sacramental humility, which is capable of relationship, and the technological self-aggrandizement of “Man,”2 pervades Poor White, and it is a tension that is succinctly depicted in an intentionally paired set of poems, taken like the one above from Anderson’s 1927 collection A New Testament. In the poem “Half-Gods,” the “little half-gods are whining in the street” because the “strong medicine of life has burned their bellies and their skins are wrinkled” (37). In an only pseudo-successful attempt to transcend life, these “half-gods” have been hollowed out and burned by the realities of life—they have encountered life’s concrete resistance to their ambitions. From their lips drop “words without meaning”; life does not back up what they purport concerning it (37). They have attempted “to walk on the rim of life” and “have made themselves engines of steel” (37). Through the machinery that was to put them into a pseudo-divine control of things, the half-gods have “befouled” the air, the basic life-giving element in which they live. Their children have to pay: “The children of men choke in the streets” (37). Thus, we have a picture of human self-deification, of the will to impose a certain self-serving reality, resulting in spiritual death and even physical disaster. In the next poem, “Ambition,” the speaker’s “ambition” precisely does not tend toward self-deification (or its vehicle, urban civilization and industrialism) but leads in a very different direction: “I am one who has walked out of a tall building into the streets of a city and over plains into a forest that fringes a river” (38). Here, in nature, the speaker finds none other than God: “God lies on the ground in the forest with his head at the base of a tree. / The fingers of God flutter like the wings of a gnat. / A little leaf in the forest, touched by the finger of God, whirls and twists in an agony of delight. / I have bathed in a stream and walked up and down on prairies. / I have been lying at full length in Illinois. / I have put my hands into Iowa, into Kentucky, into Indiana, Kansas, Ohio, Nebraska, the Dakotas” (39). Whatever may be said concerning Anderson’s deficiencies as a poet, there rings a moving sincerity in the simple phrases and images with which he evokes a very tactile encounter with God and nature, Creator and Creation, that involves plenty of being touched and touching and incorporates the flutter and the profound relaxation of sexual union. True transcendence lies not in mastery, but in touching and being touched, delighting in an Other and trembling at the Other’s touch, being fully physical and fully part of Creation, and, thus,



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fully human, and accepting oneself as but a small part of something larger, as a leaf on a tree. The fully human speaker of this poem will not be burned out by the “medicine of life” as the “half-gods” are since he approaches transcendence humbly in and through concrete creation. This sensitivity to nature does not imply an inactive sinking into primitivism, for the speaker states, in a manner that is anything but hypersensitive, “I double my fists and strike the ground a sharp blow. / Ridges of land squirt out through my fingers. / I have remade the land of my fathers. / I have come out of my house to remake the land. / I have made a flat place with the palms of my hands” (39). The sexual tension between love and rape in Americans’ relation to their land so thoroughly analyzed in Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land is here solved by Anderson in that the main point remains concrete engagement: as long as the approach to the land is not guided by rigid abstract impositions but by a fully personal (i.e., relational) involvement, the results will be pastoral and balanced rather than industrial and deadening. Husbandry is healthy—industrial exploitation is a form of rape. As the speaker of “Ambition” goes to the river for spiritual regeneration, so Hugh McVey, the protagonist of Poor White, experiences nature’s regenerative powers as he grows up as a Huck Finn figure on the banks of the Mississippi River, on the fringes of the small community of Mudcat3 Landing, Missouri. And like the speaker of the poem “Ambition,” Hugh finds in nature, precisely with his “head at the base of a tree,” something life-giving and sustaining, something like the presence of God: “On the Sunday afternoons in the woods south of Mudcat Landing Hugh had lain perfectly still in the grass for hours. . . . Above his head a breeze played through the branches of the trees, and insects sang in the grass. Everything about him was clean. A lovely stillness pervaded the river and the woods. He lay on his belly and gazed down over the river out of sleep-heavy eyes into hazy distances” (27). Lying perfectly still for hours, Hugh leaves behind him mechanical time and finds rest and stillness, merging with a natural world outside of humanly imposed time structures and outside of humanly organized activity (which is closely linked to mechanical time). Instead, he partakes of nature’s pervasive stillness, which, as has been noted in the discussion of Dark Laughter, is symbolized by rivers with their unhurried flow and is associated with organic growth and the gradual unfolding of life in a natural, uncoerced, and unhurried sequence. It is the rhythm of Creation, of God. The fact of the Sunday setting points to the Creation story, for on the seventh day, God rested and pronounced His works good. Hugh, on these Sabbath days, is resting in the goodness of Creation, in the spiritually healthy stillness of its uncoerced vitality,

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which unfolds according to its own primordial laws. The breeze playing in the trees connotes among other things a lightness and playfulness in nature that profoundly differs from the stern purpose-drivenness characteristic of post-Puritan American culture. The song of the insects is a motif recurring numerous times throughout every novel Anderson wrote and frequently functioning symbolically in his short stories as well. It stands for a beautiful, nonliteral, poetic, i.e., musical language to be found in nature, a spontaneous expression of natural being and uninhibited life. Its connotations further extend to the notion of unalienated organic labor and to the sexual realm as insects fulfill a fructifying function. Thus, in this brief evocation of Hugh’s relationship with nature is condensed much of the grand American cultural myth of the unalienated life in nature.4 However, the scene is problematized in various ways. First of all, there is a filthy, physically revolting way of living in nature that is referred to in this scene and lends special significance to the observation that “[e]verything about him was clean.” This reference, omitted above, goes as follows: “The smell of dead fish that had always been present about the shack where he spent his boyhood, was gone and there were no swarms of flies” (27). Via the motif of swarming flies, the passage connects with Hugh’s recollection of his father later in the story: “With a shudder of disgust he saw himself again a boy in ragged clothes that smelled of fish, lying stupid and half asleep in the grass beside the Mississippi River. He forgot the majesty of the dreams that sometimes came to him, and only remembered the swarms of flies that, attracted by the filth of their clothes, hovered over him and over the drunken father who lay sleeping beside him” (255). Growing up with a father whose life revolves around drinking and sleeping and in a culturally Southern community that tends toward indolence and squalor, Hugh experiences nature’s resistance to a simply passive symbiosis with it.5 Hugh’s native Missouri rivertown culture is described as derived from people of “Southern origin” who “[l]iving originally in a land where all physical labor was performed by slaves . . . had come to have a deep aversion to physical labor” (18). Living in the infertile parts of the South—the hills—they were dissociated from the land and “grew up long and gaunt and yellow like badly nourished plants” (18). Here emerges a paradox as old as the European settlement of the New World. Leo Marx notes that, for instance, in British settler Robert Beverley’s 1705 History and Present State of Virginia, the author simultaneously celebrates the Virginian garden where people “enjoy all the benefits of a warm sun, and by their shady Groves, are protected from its Inconvenience,” where “all th[e] senses are entertain’d with an endless succession of Native Pleasures” (qtd. in



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Marx 82), but also laments that his countrymen “spunge upon the Blessings of a warm Sun, and a fruitful Soil. . . . I should be ashamed to publish this slothful Indolence of my Countrymen, but that I hope it will rouse them out of their Lethargy, and excite them to make the most of all the happy Advantages which Nature has given them” (qtd. in Marx 86). Marx comments that [h]aving begun with Nature’s garden as his controlling metaphor, Beverley discovers in mid-career that he cannot accept what it implies.

. . . He was looking for a conception of life which would combine (to use the

language of Freud) the Indians’ high level of instinctual gratification with those refinements of civilization based on performance—work—hence a degree of repression. In other words, he wanted nothing less than the ideal reconciliation of nature and art which had been depicted by writers of pastoral since Virgil’s time. (86–87)

Anderson’s thoughts run in this same vein: a complete rejection of work, of the human organizing and cultivating agency, and even a complete rejection of repression, results not in a union with nature but, as in the case of the Southern hill people, in an undernourished dissociation from it. For the soil needs the husbandman as a woman needs a man if she is to bear fruit, that is, children, such fertility being in Anderson always a sign of human fulfillment. Thus, the speaker in “Ambition” does not content himself with lying in the forest by the river and shivering with delight like a leaf touched by the hand of God. No, he goes out and “remakes” the land, thrusting himself into it (the sexual subtext implying an analogy between sexual intercourse and agricultural husbandry is to be found throughout Anderson’s oeuvre). Glen A. Love is correct in observing that Anderson’s writings are “for the most part, uncharacteristic of doctrinaire primitivism, in which the key element is a total rejection of or escape from civilization. Rather, Anderson’s representative note is one of struggle toward resolution between the character and the threatening society. . . . The essential tone in Anderson is reconciliatory, and in this sense, his work may be seen as a contemporary version of pastoral” (236). What could be more instinctual than sex, and what could be more civilizing than the responsibility for the consequence of sex, children? It is not surprising that marriage emerges as the central problem of Hugh’s life. The idyllic scene of Hugh’s Sunday afternoon nature retreats is firmly contextualized not only in the problematic, instinctually indulgent, Southern indolence of his

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own youth and of his community but also in its opposite, the just as problematic New England–derived, post-Puritan work ethic and success-driven character of the nation at large and also of the Upper Midwest, an ethic brought to Mudcat Landing by the New England–born and Michigan-raised wife of the town’s new stationmaster. This brings us to the poem paired with “Ambition,” namely, “HalfGods.” When Hugh recollects with disgust the squalor of his father, the smell of fish, and the swarms of flies, it is in the context of a grotesque self-deification, a destructive and negative “half-godness” that forms a reaction against the other extreme of animalism, a mode of living in which the people of Mudcat Landing “slee[p] their lives away and awake[n] out of their stupor only at long intervals and at the call of hunger” (19). Hugh, inspired by the Mudcat Landing stationmaster’s New England wife, Sarah Shepard, who mentors and employs him, seeks to escape the “curse of indolence” (19) by going east to northern Ohio and working hard and becoming a celebrated inventor of farm machinery; in the process, he turns into a self-deifying egotist. While he gears up for his departure to the North, his Sunday retreats into nature described above are his only break from the constant and furious work to which Sarah puts him as she imbibes in him the spirit of New England. To her, work has taken on a spiritual value in and of itself and will find its just reward in a secularized version of heaven called “the future.” Thus, she drives him to tasks that in terms of tangible results seem utterly purposeless: “For hours he plodded straight ahead, doing over and over some appointed task. He forgot the purpose of the job he had been given to do and did it because it was a job and would keep him awake” (7). This senseless work drive instilled into Hugh illustrates how his mentor Sarah is the product of the New England pioneer spirit in which the land (or life) cannot currently be enjoyed because mastery has to precede enjoyment: “The [Michigan] land [of Sarah’s childhood] was deep and rich and the people who settled upon it were poor but hopeful. They felt that every day of hard work done in clearing the land was like laying up treasure against the future” (9).6 Hugh pursues this “future,” practicing a surprising asceticism, rooming in the same humble abode after his success as an inventor in Bidwell, Ohio, as he did before. Where before he gave himself over to an indulgent stupor, he now, accepting a Puritan-derived (though secularized) worldview, denies himself any natural unfolding of his human identity and instead lives under the tyranny of a merciless, idealistic system of thought. When Bidwell is overtaken by “the future” it so desires, by an urban, industrial boom, Hugh realizes that he should feel a sense of fulfillment, and in the dark, repeating the town’s official rhetoric, delivers a celebratory, congratulatory speech



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to himself: “He spoke of the swift growth that had come to the town of Bidwell as though it were an unmixed blessing, the factories, the homes of happy, contented people, the coming of industrial development as something akin to a visit of the gods. Rising to the height of egotism he shouted, ‘I have done it. I have done it’” (251). One is reminded by Hugh’s exclamation of the following remark in Genesis: “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good” (1.31). Yet Hugh’s imposed and self-aggrandizing interpretation shatters in the face of reality as the inventor overhears a conversation of exploited factory workers deploring their plight and longing for the days of rural labor, the harsh but only seasonal demands of nature being more survivable than the merciless mechanism and commodified time structure of a capitalistic culture: “In the country I worked like a dog a few weeks a year, but here I’ll probably have to work like that all the time” (257). The promise of “factory work being so easy” has not been fulfilled. The speaker here is the son of Ezra French, a cabbage farmer who has railed against the illusion that humans can reach some sort of industrial Eden and escape the curse that was issued upon the expulsion from Eden: “Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. . . . In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, til thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Gen. 3.17–19). Ezra French asks, “Don’t it say in the Bible men shall work and labor by the sweat of their brows? . . . Can a machine like that sweat? . . . No, siree. Men’ve got to do it. That’s the way things have been since Cain killed Abel in the Garden of Eden. God intended it so and there can’t be [no one] . . . set themselves up before me to change the workings of God’s laws. It can’t be done, and if it could be done it would be wicked and ungodly to try” (120). Neither the Eden of indolence nor the Eden of complete human control and mastery are viable options in a fallen world: it is only in the acceptance of “sweat,” in the acceptance of the given world’s resistance to both the unreasonable and self-centered expectations inherent in human indolence and the unreasonable pride inherent in human attempts at mastery, it is only in the willingness to be personally, physically, fully engaged and responsive, in the acceptance of both human agency and human limitation, that humans can live out their true identity as more than animals and less than gods.7 Hugh is crestfallen when he hears the son of Ezra reveal the inhuman shadow side of industrialism. He has staked his identity on something not humanly fulfilling, on a vision that has proven destructive. This novel sums up all the themes discussed in the previous chapters. These include the negative impact of post-Puritan culture’s abstract approach to reality,

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the problem of not understanding the sexual reciprocity that is at the base of human fulfillment and is revealed in nature, and the problem of rhetoric and literalistic language (Puritan, industrialist-commercial) blocking the lessons to be learned from nature’s silent organicism. The answer lies in a sexually intimate relationship that moves beyond linguistic abstractions, beyond cultural ideology, and into a realm of natural, organic, concrete and yet spiritually significant, i.e., “sacramental” reciprocity. As long as Hugh regards himself purely in materialistic/physical and ideological terms, he is barred from achieving a relationship with Clara Butterworth, the farmer’s daughter in whom he is romantically interested. As his inventor’s vanity falls from him, Hugh feels “naked and sad,” looking “with critical eyes at his long, bony body” (254). He also remembers Sarah Shepard’s contempt for his poor white community and realizes that “[b]y struggle and work he ha[s] conquered [his own person] but could not conquer his ancestry, nor change the fact that he was at bottom poor white trash” (254). Seeing himself purely in terms of bodily proportion and in terms of cultural categories is the flipside of his seeing himself as an industrial god: in either case, Hugh denounces his sacramental humanity as a concrete, limited creature whose body, nonetheless, manifests a spiritual reality held in common with others and thus larger than the self, a spiritual reality the fundamental design of which requires reciprocity. He fails to understand that Clara, who is “shapely” and “beautiful” and of a higher class, i.e., a “lady” (254), is also a spiritual being in need of reciprocity and sharing in the same desires as himself, part of the same spiritual reality. He does not read her sacramentally but reads her in the same terms as himself, i.e., in material terms as physically superior and in cultural terms as socially superior. The marriage between Hugh and Clara begins in a problematic manner: there is gossip about a supposed affair Clara has had, and Hugh realizes she is in trouble, thinking, “[H]ere’s my chance” (268). He goes ahead and proposes, and Clara, having been interested in him already and understanding her precarious social situation, accepts; she drives him to the county courthouse immediately to make sure he will indeed be hers. She understands that she is taking advantage of Hugh, and this understanding saves her from destroying their relationship from the outset: “I’ll have to wait until he’s ready. Already I’ve taken things too much into my own hands. I’ll put through this marriage, but when it comes to anything else he’ll have to begin” (275). Ultimately, she understands the need for reciprocity. She also understands Hugh’s humanity, the spiritual core of his identity, and the need for a communion that is both physical and spiritual. When she first thinks about Hugh, she decides that his eyes are “nice”: “They were somewhat small, but there was something gray and cloudy in them, and the



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gray cloudiness gave her confidence in the person behind the eyes. She could, she felt, trust him. There was something in his eyes that was like the things most grateful to her own nature, the sky seen across an open stretch of country or over a river that ran straight away into the distance” (248). It is precisely the obscurity of Hugh’s eyes that appeals to her, and it reminds her of nature, particularly of the sky: she can sense behind his physical being as behind nature a mystery, a sort of transcendence as is often associated with the sky, which veils the throne of God. There is no hardness in his eyes: it is precisely their mystery that attracts her. Her thoughts continue: “Hugh’s hair was coarse like the mane of a horse, and his nose was like the nose of a horse. He was, she decided, very like a horse; an honest, powerful horse, a horse that was humanized by the mysterious, hungering thing that expressed itself through his eyes” (248). Clara clearly appreciates Hugh’s humanity, its animal aspect, the concrete simplicity of a horse, combined with the transcendent spark, the spiritual rather than merely physical hunger for the Other that makes him more than an animal. And again, the quality of mystery is emphasized: precisely because Hugh is grasping and uncertain and not one of the rhetoric-spouting industrialists (thankfully, Clara has not witnessed Hugh’s secret oratorical exercises), he, in his very inarticulateness, is a full sacramental presence, a vessel of spiritual truth unreduced by false certainties. It is his simplicity and concreteness that causes his spiritual presence to be forceful to her. Clara knows she must enter through such concreteness to access transcendence—she recalls that her friend Kate told her that “we have to . . . live with [another animal] . . . before we can begin being humans” (248). It is through our animal senses, our physical being, through the mysterious given of nature, that we enter into the mystery of being, of life. In our quest for insight, we cannot start from the mental plane, as though our spirits looked down upon the natural world without our being part of that world—our spirits can only distill real insight from concrete experience in the world. And that is sacramentalism—the mystery inheres in the concrete manifestation and cannot be captured categorically, from a purely mental standpoint, but only relationally, beginning with concrete experience. When Clara’s father catches wind of the elopement and throws a late-night wedding party for the returning newlyweds, the vulgarity of the feast with its gross, animalistic eating and coarse sexual humor, deeply offends the bride. For what she longs for is not coarse, animalistic pleasure but spiritual communion with Hugh.8 When Hugh panics before the sexual encounter and runs off, Clara is somewhat grateful—she realizes that sex to Hugh is not a coarse feast but something deeply meaningful (and thus threatening). The couple falls into a pattern of Clara waiting for Hugh to initiate intimacy and him not daring to, sleeping in

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a separate room. He does not understand that “Clara . . . expect[s] him to come to her, and kn[eels] on the floor just inside the door, waiting, hoping for, and fearing the coming of the man” (308).9 Instead of seeing her sacramentally, as a physical being with spiritual needs, he is still affected by old notions of female purity and class superiority, seeing women as “chaste white thing[s] to be worshiped from afar and not to be approached, at least not by himself ” (230).10 He essentially sees them as goddesses, literalizing and categorizing their spiritual nature until it becomes material as though they were stone statues, frozen, the signified become a material essence perfectly one with it and thus not physically approachable by a mere mortal. Yet nature comes to the rescue, revealing to Hugh the humanity and concreteness of women as well as his own transcendence, helping him to see the conflation of the tangible and the mysterious in himself and the Other and thus being able to perceive reality sacramentally: on the significantly named Medina Road11 leading to the Butterworth residence where Hugh now lives, “[a] male bird pursue[s] a female among the bushes beside the road. The two feathered, living creatures, vividly colored, alive with life, pit[ch] and swoo[p] through the air. They [are] like moving balls of light going in and out of the dark green of foliage. There [is] in them a madness, a riot of life” (311). The intense physicality of the birds, expressed, for instance, in their vivid coloring, is combined with a sense of energy, of “light,” of a powerful life force within them that is more than just physical. The pitching and swooping is physical and yet aerial and intensely expressive of desire; Hugh is profoundly disturbed though he cannot articulate what this tangible experience signifies. The answer comes to him when that evening Clara gently encourages him to drop all inhibitions. As Clara gently touches him, “coming swiftly as a bird flies to him,” he is filled with purely tactile thought (“My flesh must be white and cold”) and then ceases to think. Since this chapter revolves around Anderson’s salvific visions, the ensuing vision of salvation shall be quoted in full despite its length: Gladness took hold of him, a gladness that came up out of the inner parts of himself as she had come up to him out of the chair. For days, weeks, he had been thinking of his problem as a man’s problem, his defeat had been a man’s defeat.

Now there was no defeat, no problem, no victory. In himself he did not ex-

ist. Within himself something new had been born or another something that had always lived with him had stirred to life. It was not awkward. It was not afraid. It was a thing as swift and as sure as the flight of the male bird through



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the branches of trees and it was in pursuit of something that would fly through light and darkness but fly not too swiftly, something of which he need not be afraid, something that without the need of understanding he could understand as one understands the need of breath in a close place.

With a laugh as soft and sure as her own Hugh took Clara into his arms. (318)

The two lovers go upstairs to the bedroom, and Hugh stumbles twice, but it does not matter since “the new thing he had found, the thing inside himself that responded to the thing inside the shell that was Clara his wife, did not stumble. It flew like a bird out of darkness into the light” (319). Hugh’s problems, in this classic moment of ecstatic Andersonian epiphany, are swept away not by a rational working out but by an existential coming to life: his problems fall from him because, like a close space, they have taught him the need to breathe—so he breathes. It is an experiential understanding, not a rational one, that comes to him. It is the understanding that in himself is a spiritual core that exists not in itself but only in communion with another, and it is the realization that this same spirit lives in the Other and can be touched by him. As Hugh recognizes this reality, physical obstacles no longer matter much: carried by a new spiritual energy, Hugh’s body becomes an awkward but usable vehicle for his spirit, and he is ready for sex. His laughter indicates the new language Hugh has found—the recognition of his own spirit and that of the Other enables Hugh to achieve a full-bodied, organic, natural response to the Other outside of literal language. As in Dark Laughter, laughter here is akin to a more poetic and sacramental form of communication in which the suggestive rather than literalized expression accomplishes a deeper level of understanding. Thus, Hugh and Clara step out of post-Puritan and industrialist materialism and literalism, out of a gender discourse that is isolating, out of the pre-sexual solipsistic stupor as originally lived by Hugh, and out of an unpoetic mode of perception and communication into nature, mystery, poetry, and communion. All the spiritual tensions characteristic of the Anderson oeuvre are resolved in this scene, and, as is usual with Anderson, overcoming Midwestern culture’s skewed relation to nature via close contact with that nature has been significant in finding salvation. This salvation is also far removed from a political program; it has everything to do with the personal regeneration of individuals. The same tensions and the same apolitical vision of salvation characterize even a work with such Marxist overtones as Beyond Desire, and in this late novel as in the earlier ones, the land (here both Midwestern and Southern) is important in defining both the culture’s dilemma and the promise of salvation, the hope of

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a way out of the dilemma, and overall, Anderson’s vision remains constant. Appropriately enough, the novel’s title derives from the statement of a Kansan farmer who in his sexual relations with a Kansas City schoolteacher and in his agricultural relations with the rich Kansas soil encounters the world sacramentally, trying to formulate for himself a new religion, the post-theological sacramental “natural” religion Anderson wrestles to evoke in most of his fiction. This Kansan farmer is Neil Bradley, a college friend and baseball teammate of Red Oliver, the book’s main protagonist. The novel opens with the description of and partial quotations from a letter that Neil has written to Red as they are both in their respective home states for the summer, in Kansas and Georgia, the one working on his father’s farm, the other in an exploitive Southern textile mill. Neil’s letter does not mince words but reaches straight to the heart of existential matters: Neil spoke in his letter of God. . . .” We can’t hear His voice or feel Him in the land,” he said. . . . The early New Englanders, who had been so intellectually dominant and who had influenced so much the thought of the whole country must have thought they had God really. If they had, what they had, it had come down to Neil and Red in some way pretty much weakened and washed out. . . . Religion, he said, was now an old gown, grown thin and with all the colors washed out of it. People still wore the old gown but it did not warm them any more. People needed warmth. (3)

In these words, the old explanation of America’s spiritual dilemma is contained as fully and as programmatically as anywhere in Anderson’s oeuvre: God’s voice cannot be felt, that is, it cannot be truly and experientially encountered, not concretely known. The phrase “in the land” is significant, for, of course, nature, “the land,” is a sacramental embodiment of those realities that can be experientially known and lead to fulfillment, namely, the concrete yet spiritually suffused encounter between human individuals, that is, between one mysteriously alive organism and another. Conversely, the reference to New England paired with the phrase “intellectually dominant” points precisely to the forces that veer American culture away from nature and sacrament and to a worldview consisting of abstract, intellectual impositions upon reality and substance, metaphysical abstractions intended to dominate and mold in their own image the concrete phenomenal world and the spiritual realities inherent in it. Using the “gown” as his controlling metaphor, Neil emphasizes the tactile, experiential need for “warmth,” for that which, for instance, makes plants grow. Thus, he vaguely and implicitly outlines



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the familiar Andersonian spiritual spectrum from secularized, Puritan-derived metaphysics and abstractionism (which, in its originally unsecularized lived and fully believed form, did lend itself to some experiential comfort) to natural, organic, experientially fulfilling sacramentalism. Neil’s new consuming sacramental experience is the sexual relation into which he has entered with a schoolteacher, the kind who was set up to be the very icon of post-Puritan American convention, being “from a respectable church-going family of a little Kansas town” and having gone through the mill of the American educational system of which she has now become a part; yet, spiritually dissatisfied, this schoolteacher has insisted on shattering convention and iconicity, refusing to marry Neil and engaging with him in nonmarital sexual intimacy. She is too “alert and intense” (5) to give in to the dullness surrounding her. On the premises of the respectable couple with whom she boards, she practices her liberation from convention: “‘If they knew that, after they went to bed, sometimes . . . on the porch of the house or inside, on a couch.’ She sits on the edge of the low porch and I kneel on the grass at the edge of the porch. . . . She is like a flower opening” (6). Organic realities unfold in the realm of respectability, and the language is reminiscent of Anderson’s “‘Unused,’” in which story May Edgely lives, both literally and figuratively, at the “edge” of her respectable town, and where she “opens like a flower” to Jerome Hadley in defiance of convention, only to be crushed by the unnaturalness of both her lover and the town. Though Neil enters into much physical detail regarding his sexual relations, the point he is trying to make is spiritual: “Neil’s letters made [Red] also hungry for some relationship with life that was sensual and fleshly but beyond just flesh. Neil was trying to express that in the letters he wrote to his friend” (6). This spiritual purpose, of sacramentally approaching the spiritual through the sensual, is elaborated upon explicitly by Neil’s lover whose words he reports in his letter. She does not want to marry Neil for fear that such a solemnization of their relationship will lead to spiritual dullness and materialistic complacency; she is afraid that “settled down” and in secure possession of her, Neil “might become contented with being just a fairly prosperous Middle-Western farmer . . . no better than a merchant . . . no better than a banker or any money-hungry man” (8). The externally imposed social meaning of marriage as the foundation for a materially secure and prosperous existence devoid of spiritual purpose threatens her. It is her mission to move beyond both externally imposed social norms and a spiritually deficient satisfaction with external, material, or physical comforts: “She had become a sincere Red. She thought there was something beyond desire, but that you had

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to satisfy desire and understand and appreciate the wonders of desire first. You had to see whether or not it could conquer you, make you forget everything else” (9).12 Succinctly, the novel’s various themes are concentrated in this reported statement. Of course, the novel’s protagonist is named “Red,” and his foremost character trait is sincerity: his is a genuine communal orientation for which communism provides merely an external label. For he is not a literal Red but a “sincere Red,” communally oriented in a substantive and spiritual rather than rhetorical, ideological, and external manner. And getting “beyond desire” has everything to do with that sincere communalism: it is about letting go of one’s isolated individuality, which prioritizes egotistic desires and power, and to experience oneness with an Other, prioritizing the common good and “love.” However, this transcendence of egotism can only occur if the self concretely experiences the gratification of its lusts and then experiences the meaning of letting go in all its concreteness. Accordingly, in Neil’s and his lover’s relationship, complete sexual possession is coupled with a lack of institutional possession, thus enacting a precarious balance between attaining and letting go, keeping “love” free from the aura of power or domination. But there is also a further reference beyond the individual relationship: the relationship is not institutionally finalized because human oneness extends beyond just two people to all of humanity, and clinging to individualized oneness can be a form of egotism. Only if an individual relationship sacramentally refers to the larger oneness of humanity does it have a true and full-fledged communal meaning. Yet “free love” is not the ultimate answer: “When their bodies were quiet they talked. ‘I guess we’ll marry,’ Neil said in a letter to Red Oliver. . . . The revolution was coming. When it came it was going to demand strong and quiet people willing to work, not just noisy ill-prepared people. He thought that every woman ought to begin by finding her man, at any cost, and that every man ought to make the search for his woman” (9). Once the large-scale communal reference of a relationship is secured, once a relationship contains a trans-individualized significance “beyond desire,” it is capable of becoming a social institution, but of a new kind of society: this society is a communal world “made sweet again” by love and identification of Self with Other (9). When physical concreteness has been traversed (i.e., the lovers’ bodies are quieted after sex), a new language born of sacramental silence, new institutions, a new society, and a new kind of marriage can take shape (the lovers begin to talk and tend to grow more affirming of marriage). The central paradox here is somewhat similar to that of Christianity: the “new people” to bring about the “new world” would have to be “like lovers who would throw even life itself



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into the game” (10). That is, the Self must be so strongly identified with a larger, communal, spiritual Other that for the sake of the concrete life of this Other, the Self concretely throws away his or her individual life. The concrete life of the Other is worth this sacrifice because it is the sacramental expression of a spiritual reality; both the object of the sacrifice and the sacrificial act itself are “sensual and yet beyond just flesh.” Thus, spiritually, concrete self-sacrifice leads to a kind of paradoxical spiritual reincorporation into the physical. Even as the body is sacrificed, it becomes the physical means of an inward grace that establishes fully real communion with others. As the body is reabsorbed into the earth, joined to it, so the spirit, as well, is joined into a larger oneness. The kind of martyrdom advocated by the communism in this novel certainly does not revolve around individual souls’ immortality or a heaven beyond this world. As Anderson states in his poem “Death,” his desire is more for a sacramental reabsorption into the world than for individualized spiritual transcendence: “My desire is not to ascend but to go down. My soul does not hunger to float. I do not wish to pass out of the animal kingdom and into the kingdom of birds . . . When springs come and strength surges into my body I would creep beneath the roots of grasses far out into the fields. I would creep under fields that are plowed. I would go down under the black fields. I would go softly touching and feeling my way. I would be little brother to a kernel of corn that is to feed the bodies of men” (26). The idea of spiritually meaningful physical reabsorption into the world finds a striking image in the body becoming part of the agricultural soil and thereby being physically absorbed into other bodies. The vernal “strength” that “surges” through the dead body is nature’s larger life force, capable of physically resurrecting a dead organism—in a sense. Of this larger life force, of “nature,” the individual sees himself a part of to begin with, so there is no true demise as long as nature continues. However, this poem does not evoke just any kind of natural continuity; rather, the dead organism is made fertile by being part of the soil that is “plowed,” that is, in the tradition of pastoral symbiosis, conscious human will and primordial natural unselfconsciousness form the ideal combination. Thus, the communalist/communist martyrdom in Beyond Desire, though physical in itself and performed for the sake of the physical conditions of men and women’s existence, nonetheless, has a less tangible dimension, a spiritual legacy that must be cultivated by conscious and concretely active successors, by future generations of “farmers,” so to speak. And so we return to the issue of Neil Bradley being a farmer, and of the sacramental function of the land in a Midwestern cultural context. As Red reflects

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on Neil’s life, he realizes that though “[f]armers, such as Neil’s father had been and as Neil would be, didn’t make much money . . . they lived well” (6). Seeing the Bradleys’ contentment when he works on their farm for a few weeks, Red asks his young communist friend, “Would you give up ownership of this?” (7). Neil answers on a very philosophical note: “I’d give it up because I can’t give it up. . . . Men can never go away from the land. . . . What difference will it make to such men as myself if the land finally belongs to the state? They will need such men as I intend to make of myself ” (8). Willing to give up his technical, external possession of the land, Neil realizes that his real and substantive engagement with the land could still persist under state ownership. He knows there will be a place for farmers in any new society that comes about because the land is humanity’s source of food, of life, and can never be done without. Concretely, the land will still be his, and concretely, the new society will still depend on the land; there is no moving away from concrete substance, for only through this connection with substance can any social construct be supported; only when their bodies are quiet can people begin to talk. Our basic dependence on the land, our primordial connection to it, along with our need to cultivate it, act upon it and use conscious, civilized human artifice in the land’s cultivation, functions as a sacramentally significant phenomenal reality embodying our profound physical/ spiritual human interconnection. When Red returns to his hometown of Langdon, Georgia, having been away at a New England college and having worked a few weeks on the Bradley farm in Kansas, it is precisely his being set loose from Southern social conditioning and his having engaged with the land, having physically and spiritually wrestled with substance, that makes him so attractive to the main heroine of the novel, Ethel Long: “He seemed puzzled. And how physically strong he looked! He had been on a Western farm for some weeks. He was brown and healthy-looking. He had come home to Langdon to spend some time with his mother before going off to school. ‘It may be I am interested in him because I am myself a little stale,’ Ethel thought. ‘I am a little greedy. He is like firm fresh fruit I want to bite into’” (109). It is Red’s spiritually puzzled look along with his pronounced physicality that make him tempting for Ethel. For he has not been trapped in the superficial, abstract, and imposed mental certainties of his culture (and, therefore, is puzzled) and has engaged with concreteness and become very physically defined himself. In this manner, he has become a walking, talking sacrament: through this highly defined physicality dimly shines a mysterious spiritual meaning to which this concreteness refers. Thus, Red is like the land in his mysterious, sacramental function.



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Disturbingly, Ethel’s response to Red mirrors the traditional destructive American response to the land: it is one of greed, of wanting to consume, preferably immediately, with the mouth watering. She is what the Jeffersonian agricultural theorist Wendell Berry would classify as an “exploiter”: those who ask what they can drain from the environment without asking how they can care for it and live in interdependence with it for the long term. Berry (much as Anderson) sees the exploiter mentality as American history’s dominant force: “Generation after generation, those who intended to remain and prosper where they were [thus aiming for a long-term symbiotic relationship with the land] have been dispossessed and driven out or subverted and exploited where they were, by those who were carrying out some version of the search for El Dorado” (4). Contrasting these “gold-seeking” exploiters with pastorally minded settlers, Berry observes, The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter’s goal is money, profit; the nurturer’s goal is health—his land’s health, his own, his family’s, his community’s, his country’s. . . . The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order—a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. (718)

Seeing the evidence of hard work in Red’s body and seeing his relation to mystery in his eyes, Ethel ironically responds with a highly definite (and thus nonmysterious), unsubtle, and self-centered, consumptive (and thus labor-averse, efficiency-oriented, and greedy) impulse, and, to further deepen the irony, she believes that such externally derived satisfaction will somehow alter her own internal state of staleness. She is the representative of an “organization,” namely, of a local Southern as well as national American culture that has turned from mystery, relationship, and the spiritual to abstraction, efficiency, materialism, consumption, and a despiritualized, externalized literalism that refuses to read deeper and subtler meanings but sees all in terms of a rigidly defined, inflexible system of signification that remains superficial. Conversely, Red is responsive to a larger spiritual order that he senses as mysteriously present in the world even though it is not realized by human society. He senses the originary Eden, an originary wholeness, beneath his fragmented

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world, whereas Ethel is the Eve who wants to bite into the forbidden fruit in order to selfishly realize her own transcendence above a limiting communal or social order, in order to “become like God.” Needless to say, in an Andersonian world, self-deification is not the proper venue for escaping the fallenness of the world, as can be perfectly seen in that grand parable of the terrors of selfdeification, “Godliness,” at the center of the Winesburg cycle, and as is seen in the story of Hugh McVey. Hugh lets go of definition, of self-protective fears, of self-aggrandizement, and physically and spiritually surrenders trustingly to his wife, Clara, and to the common humanity they both share. The sexual encounter in Beyond Desire is of a very different nature; when Ethel seizes her forbidden fruit, she betrays the Garden of Eden, and things fall apart because she does not accept her human limitations, her concrete entanglement in a concrete and fallen world. It is precisely her rejection of her fallenness that removes her even further from Eden. She wants to be “like God.” After having very aggressively seduced Red at the library where she works, Ethel reflects on how “there was a kind of sweetness in him, even a kind of cleanness. He had not been soiled as she had. . . . She must have wanted his sweetness, his cleanness, had grabbed at it. ‘Did I only succeed in soiling him, too? I know this. I grabbed, but I didn’t get what I grabbed for’” (219). The use of the word “soiling” here is ironic, for it is precisely Ethel’s unnaturalness, her removal from the soil, from nature, that has “soiled” her, or rather, that has made her incapable of understanding the true, positive meaning of the word “soil.” The unnaturalness of her act lies in the fact that she has wanted to force immediate intimacy for the sake of her own spiritual gratification, doing so graspingly and possessively, without surrendering herself to the Other and without being willing to engage in a long process of gradual relational growth and, thus, submitting herself to the reality of time and of other concrete human limitations. In other words, she has taken the approach of “transcendence now!” and, consequently, has been barred from sacramental fulfillment. In her spiritual impatience, she resembles Jesse Bentley, who instead of seeking God’s will demands in a “harsh and insistent voice” that God send him a sign of divine approval, a divine stamp of approval for his own personal self-aggrandizing plans, demanding glory but not finding it because the Self and not the Other is ultimately sought after (85–86). As a result of her inevitable spiritual frustration, Ethel sends Red away, her lover feeling baffled and humiliated. Just as Jesse Bentley sees the land as a symbol of his own grandeur and, thus, does not feel spiritually nourished by the farming work he does, a work normally



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capable of sacramental qualities, so Ethel has a broken relationship with the soil. Her particular disconnection from it is both Southern and Midwestern in nature, as well as generally American. It is Southern in that, as a white, middle-class Georgia woman, she has always been isolated from a natural and open, physical relation to the world but has been forced to conform to abstract, ideal notions of “womanhood.” To blame for this Southern abstract imposition on reality are, surprisingly, the New England Puritans whose legacy, as we learn elsewhere in Anderson’s fiction, also corrupted the Edenic potential of the Midwest: “[P]uritanism had, after the Civil War, moved south. ‘The Bible belt,’ Henry Mencken called it in his Mercury. It involved all sorts of ugliness, poor whites, Negroes, upper-class whites, gone a little crazy, trying to hang onto something lost” (106). The Puritan legacy, materialism, literalism, thinking in terms of literal types and rigid categories, combined with the hankering after an idealized past: all of this has fostered a highly prejudiced, class-conscious, and severely divided society in which the split between concrete, physical reality and abstract, ideal reality has become quite radical, as emblematized in the sexual behavior of Southern men: “It’s pretty easy for them to talk about spotless white womanhood, getting what they want all the time, the way they do get it, usually from the browns, taking few enough risks” (105). Though Ethel has early on in life exploded Southern Puritan-derived categories of thinking, she has not learned how to formulate a positive approach to life, feeling mainly cynicism toward fake and empty Southern notions while vaguely hungering to give herself: “Ethel was twenty-nine. You get into the thirties and then the forties. Women who do not give themselves utterly dry up. They get dry-lipped, dry inside. If they give they get sufficiently punished. ‘But perhaps we want punishment’” (107). Though she realizes the existential need to give herself, Ethel cannot conceive of any such thing as reciprocity or of an open-hearted symbiosis of Self and Other; giving oneself is synonymous with deferring to the violence and domination of the Other: “Beat me. Beat me. Make me nice. Make me beautiful, for a moment, anyway. Make me blossom. Make me flower” (107). Unlike Neil Bradley’s lover who “opens up like a flower” at his caresses and who is capable of sex, Ethel can only think of violence (the flipside of sex) and falsely associates growth, naturalness, and organically achieved fruition with violence, expecting purely external coercion to make her flourish, just as in relation to Red she expects a disengaged and, thus, external consumption of sex to shatter her staleness. These unnatural misconceptions are reinforced in Chicago, that archetypal Midwestern city, where Ethel studies library science, and where she is surrounded by urbanites who, though not in any peculiarly Southern way, still

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participate in the latter-day American alienation from nature and in a Gnostic split between concreteness and abstract signification.13 Thus, Ethel dates the significantly named professor Harold Grey,14 who incessantly reads “nature books” rather than engaging with nature, who constantly psychoanalyzes her rather than engaging with her, and who has a physique thoroughly expressive of effeminacy and scholarly effeteness: “He . . . had rather watery blue eyes, hidden behind thick glasses, rather thin hair carefully combed, narrow shoulders, not too strong legs” (161). He writes her letters in which he is “much bolder than when he [is] with her” (162), and, in a most painful scene, Ethel tortures him by not letting him get away from her on a ride in the country when she can tell that nature is urgently calling him though he is too “modest” to admit it; first, he annoys her by “talking as he did about nature, going on and on about it, about trees and fields and rivers and flowers. And ants and caterpillars. . . . And then being so damned modest about a simple matter” (163). Though Grey exclaims about the “magnificence” of trees, he is unable to admit himself part of nature and prefers the linguistic, abstract category of it to the concrete and substantive reality of it, just as he prefers letters to real interpersonal intimacy. A very different outgrowth of the post-Puritan materialist-literalist American alienation from nature is Fred Wells, who faces Ethel with her own ugly cynicism. His philosophy is that “life’s a game,” and money, the material, is all anyone can hope for as ideals are not borne out by substantive reality. Ethel is interested in him because, like her, he has transcended the abstractionism of a Harold Grey; however, like her, he has no positive formulation of an approach to life and sees it all as a mere amoral exercise in self-assertion. Visiting him at his apartment, Ethel realizes that “[h]e wanted to conquer her. He did not want her as a normal man wanted a woman. He got them drunk and assaulted them when they were helpless or he got them through terror” (179–80). She knows Fred is married and, as part of his social game, conforms to social notions of what the role of husband entails: “He would have tried to create, in his wife’s mind, the impression of being something he knew he couldn’t be and perhaps didn’t want to be . . . ‘an honorable man,’ a man of a sort he was always courting and at the same time despising. . . . Taking it out on other women” (180).15 With Fred Wells, abstract literalism has led to a kind of postmodernism, a centeredness on selfish desire as a last resort in a world devoid of truth. A connection between signifier and signified seems no longer evident, and, thus, reality is the will’s for the making.16 Back in Langdon, Ethel sees in Red a substantive kind of man, one in whom concreteness and transcendence seem intimately connected, their sacramental



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symbiosis not having completely broken down; yet she seeks to access what Red has much in the same manner as Fred Wells does, exploitatively, graspingly, as a conqueror, and we are reminded at that later point in the novel of her own earlier shocked realization of her similarity to Wells: “Am I like that? God help me, am I like that?” (172). Realizing she has failed to connect with Red, Ethel immediately marries her other suitor, Tom Riddle, who is, like Fred Wells, characterized as a “realist”; with him she endures a marriage devoid of false ideals but also devoid of positive meaning, and in one of the last scenes of the novel, we see her recklessly driving through a rainy night on slick Georgia back roads, not caring whether she lives or dies.17 In her native Georgia, as well as in the nature-detached Midwestern metropolis of Chicago, Ethel has been tragically severed from nature and, so, she fails relationally, sexually, spiritually. It has been stated above that Ethel’s alienation from nature has Southern as well as Midwestern and national American roots. The American roots are synonymous with the New England Puritan heritage, which after the war “moved south,” and as Neil Bradley observes early on in the novel, this heritage has formed the character of the whole country. The Midwestern roots of her alienation from nature relate not only to Chicago but also to the Midwestern conditions befalling her native South in the form of industrialism: just as the fertile Midwest has passed from an agricultural to an industrial mode of life, so the once-fertile South, decades later, is now also moving into the industrial age: Industrialism in its ugliest form coming in . . . all that mixed up in people with religion . . . pretensions, stupidity . . . just the same it was physically a gorgeous land. The whites and the blacks in an almost impossible relation to each other . . . men and women lying to themselves. All of this warm sweet land. Ethel wasn’t particularly, not consciously, aware of nature in the South . . . the red sand clay roads, the piney woods, the Georgia peach orchards in bloom in the spring. She knew clearly that it might have been the sweetest land in all America, and wasn’t. The rarest opportunity white men had missed in all their missing fire in America . . . the South . . . how gorgeous it might have been! (106)

Immediately after this passage, we find Ethel debunking old Southern civilization—for the industrialization of the South and that of the Midwest are different in that the old agrarian Bidwell, Ohio, was an egalitarian pastoral garden whereas the corruption of the South, though intensified by industrialism, predates it, as is evident in the town of Syntax, North Carolina, where the “country roads [are]

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red and yellow as in Red Oliver’s Georgia country” (340) and near which Red finds his “red” bloody death in his native realm of the red Southern soil. The young man who kills Red is a member of an old Southern family, the emblem of Southern civilization, and is named Ned Sawyer. The name “Syntax” stands for structure, hierarchy, and subordination framed within the abstract, linguistic mindset despised by Anderson: the reference is, of course, to the class and racial differentiations so heavily thematized in the book and born of a capitalistic system that in the South involved slavery and thus prevented from the start any semblance to the egalitarian pastoral vision so cherished by Anderson and other Midwestern writers. Furthermore, the family name “Sawyer” refers to Tom Sawyer, the archetypal Southern male whose chivalric fantasies are far out of tune with reality, e.g., the primeval reality of the river, and who is such a contrast to the natural, uncivilized Huck Finn. Tellingly, Ned Sawyer is an officer of a local volunteer battalion because, like Tom, he “like[s] commanding” for its own sake and because as an officer “[y]ou had a nice uniform to wear” (332–33). He looks down on the Ku Klux Klan for containing too many mill-hand members: “The military company was a lot better than that. In the South—you understand—it isn’t the tradition for the first-class white men to work with their hands. Firstclass white men don’t work with their hands” (334). It is this aversion to working, this exploitive substratum of Southern culture, this unwillingness to engage concretely with life, that makes the industrial Fall of the Southern Eden less profound than that of the Midwest, for the Southern soil was already betrayed a long time ago. Now that industrialism, however, has undermined the old exploitive structures, supplanting them with new and less established ones, all is in flux, or as Ned’s sister Louise puts it, “Something is cracking. . . . Something going. . . . It’s capitalism” (335). This “cracking,” this end to old Southern aristocratic pretenses, has brought the South closer to a Midwestern experience in which there is a glaring disjunction between nature and the civilization planted upon it: in the South now too, nature and abstraction stand so nakedly contrasted, without any cloak of history or tradition to ameliorate the stark clash, that amidst the spreading social unrest, a return to the soil, to nature, seems more likely than before. And at this juncture it is that the protagonist’s name Red becomes vastly significant—for it is associated with the betrayed and corrupted red Southern soil as well as with communism, thus linking the communist impulse among the Southern poor with an impulse to spiritually return to the soil, to end the corruption that has planted on the rich, sweet Southern soil an abstractly based, inhumane system of which hunger, misery, and artificial social divisions are an integral part.



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The breakdown of an artificially conceived society is symbolized by the tent city of striking workers in which the aimlessly wandering Red arrives; here, in Birchfield, North Carolina, during a textile mill strike, and on a plain on the outskirts of town, the workers’ families, outcast from company-owned houses and from American civilization, are living in tents and makeshift homes, the rudiments of a new society. This outcast community finds the compassion of the surrounding rural culture: “Many poor small farmers from the hills about Birchfield, not understanding about communism, came into the camp at night with provisions. They brought beans and pork. They divided what they had” (276). It is the poverty-stricken farm people, close to nature and at a remove from the frills of urban life, who understand the striking workers not in terms of abstract labels (“communists!”) but in terms of human identity and human need, thus, providing the workers, out of their own poverty, with the essentials of life. The spiritually ironic nature of this situation is reminiscent of the biblical account of a widow giving two small copper coins out of her poverty. “Of a truth I say unto you,” remarks Jesus on this occurrence, “this poor widow hath cast in more than they all: For all these have of their abundance cast in unto offerings of God: but she of her penury hath cast in all the living that she had” (Luke 21.3–4). True giving comes, in Birchfield, North Carolina, from those outside of the unnatural materialistic structures of a money-based society removed from nature and from the essentials of existence and human life. Real sacrifice occurs when money and social ideology no longer determines one’s sense of what matters. It is from this spiritually more substantive rural background that Red emerges onto the scene due to an incident that has helped to shape his identity in a more definite way. He is sought by the police because he scared and threatened a man with whom he has hitchhiked, a fat wealthy man railing against communism and bragging of an odiously manipulative and coercive sexual conquest, and thus representing the ethic of capitalism, materialism, power, and domination. Appalled at all that the man represents, Red impulsively identifies with the communists and thus frightens the man. It is significant that he does not positively identify with communism as such but rather just resents the callous dehumanization of the striking workers. In this respect, he somewhat resembles the farmers who do not understand communism but see the humanity of the workers. He wants to be a communist if it “is something brave and fine. . . . I want that: to be something brave and fine. There is too much ugliness in life and people. I don’t want to be ugly” (250). The point is not communism but a fully realized humanity. However, Red at times does see ugliness in this ideology and its practice and has his doubts about it in spite of his hope that communism might represent or

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bring out the best in human beings: “The communists . . . were unscrupulous, too. They didn’t seem to mind sending people out to be killed. They were in the South leading a strike. It was a chance for them. They were snatching at it. There was something in them harder, more unscrupulous, more determined . . . they were something quite different from the old leaders of labor in America” (270). In other words, communism frequently turns abstract and inhuman itself, like the capitalist enemy it is combating; as a determined and systematic mode of thought, it loses sight of concrete human lives, of actual people, of substance. Its language becomes much like that of the conventional middle-class society it opposes: “There were new words, new ideas, striking on the consciousness of people. The words themselves bothered Red. ‘Communism, socialism, the bourgeoisie, capitalism, Karl Marx’” (271). Concepts, rhetoric, take on a life of their own and tyrannize and dominate human life rather than fruitfully expressing it and deriving themselves from it.18 Therefore, Red’s impulse is to “stay standing . . . to one side” and “watch, look and listen” (271). However, given real social pressures, such a noncommittal attitude is impossible, and Red acknowledges that “war is war” and that “[m]en must quit being soft” (271). Only a definite fight will help bring about change, and one has to commit, choose a side. When Red lashes out at the fat representative of capitalism, he chooses the side of the oppressed.19 And what follows is an immersion in nature: “He had left the little road he was following and had gone into a wood, loitering there for perhaps an hour, lying on his back under a tree and afterwards he had found a deep place in the creek, in a field of laurel bushes, and taking off his clothes had bathed in the cold water” (265). The loitering under a tree for an uncertain amount of time seems to indicate an escape from artificial, abstract, mechanical time constructs; the laurel harks back to Greek mythology, to a vision of a spiritually animated natural world, and of course, the laurel wreath is the symbol of victory; very importantly, though, the bath in the water seems to figure as a baptism of sorts, a physical and spiritual cleansing, a literal and figurative immersion in nature, transformative in its effects. Red has now clearly rejected the world of civilized abstraction and ideological imposition, committing himself to a substantive closeness to nature, a full appreciation of others as fellow human beings, a more primary, natural vision of people and the world than is possible to see through the lens of ideological rhetoric. His victory is much like that of Hugh McVey in Poor White, moving beyond idealizations and abstractions; he takes off his clothes and becomes real. As in Poor White, becoming “real” involves the real woman, an Other with whom authentic relationship is possible. And Red does find the “real Ethel”:



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moving on from his bath, wearing a “clean shirt,” he climbs up a hillside, where he finds a mountain farmer’s daughter, Molly Seabright. Before learning in a narrative flashback of Red’s experiences with Molly in the country, we encounter her in Red’s dream vision as he lies in the “land between sleeping and waking” in the strikers’ camp near Birchfield, where he and this woman have arrived the night before: “But no . . . it was not Ethel. . . . It was Ethel Long, beaten by life, defeated by life. See . . . she had lost some of her upright proud beauty and had become humble. This woman would be glad for love—any love that came to her. Her eyes were saying that now. It was Ethel Long, no longer fighting against life, not even wanting to be victorious in life” (245–46). This vision of a broken Ethel, of course, hearkens back to the Messianic vision of “Tandy” evoked in one of the central stories of Winesburg, Ohio, a vision already quoted in an earlier chapter but worth reiterating: “There is a woman coming. . . . It is because of her defeats that she is to me the lovely one. Out of her defeats has been born a new quality in woman. I have a name for it. I call it Tandy. . . . It is the quality of being strong to be loved” (145). Brokenness, realizing one’s human limitations, one’s human concreteness and all the vulnerability that that implies, opens up humans to an acknowledgement of their need of others—only in this surrender of control and profound acknowledgment of need do love and relationship become possible and can the cycle be escaped from which Ethel longs to come out earlier in the novel: “It would be nice to know whether it had always to be so, the woman either dominating the man or the man the woman” (146). Molly has “none of Ethel’s style,” but what she lacks in external formal design, she possesses in substance (247). Shaped by a rural upbringing that has given her an intense awareness of life’s concreteness (“she remembered the surprise and pain of a bee stinging her,” 282), Molly has been a worker in the Birchfield mills while still spending weekends at her parents’ financially failing farm. Her natural rural understanding, coupled with the lessons taught her by her socially underprivileged status, has given her an eye for human reality over social rhetoric: “The woman with the cow on the hill in the wood in North Carolina on a Sunday evening in November had accepted Red Oliver. He wasn’t what ‘the law,’ that had just driven up to the house below, had said he was—a dangerous madman, running about the country, wanting to kill people” (275). Kindly, she nourishes him, hides him, and believing him a communist, leads him to the strikers’ camp, walking with him through “moonlit places,” a world of potential romance (249). When he watches her in her parents’ barn after first having met her, Red is set longing for her, experiencing the height of sexual desire: “[A] woman’s form . . .

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her hands . . . the swelling of her breast—firm and round . . . her hands milking the cow . . . warm nice milk . . . swift thoughts in Red. . . . ‘Suppose, after all, [a woman] is all I want . . . all any man really wants . . . How do I know that I give a damn for people in general, the generality of people . . . their suffering . . . it may be all bunk?” (312). Having found an Other so natural that she is truly capable of love, Red is in crisis: he does not want to sacrifice himself to some rhetorical abstraction, “people in general,” in the presence of a potential concrete lover. And yet, he does sacrifice himself in an ideological battle. Red knows that by placing himself in the strikers’ camp, he is putting himself in the path of danger, and he reflects that there is “still a chance to leave—to light out” (315). The phrase “light out” is, of course, associated with Huck Finn, with a refusal to face civilization, with a society-shirking flight into nature. Yet Red realizes that society and nature must go hand in hand, that humans cannot choose one over the other, and this realization is rendered in the image of a pregnant woman: “He had got to the place toward which he had been going for a long time. It wasn’t just a place. Was it a chance, at last, to motivate his own life? Men wanting pregnancy as well as women, eh? Something like that” (315). Women’s most profound organic bond, that with their child, is also a social bond—responsibility, care, self-sacrifice, and placing the Other first, thus civilized “repression,” are all part of motherhood. Given this socially responsible nature of human relationships, Red realizes in relation to Molly what his friend Neil Bradley has realized in relation to his schoolteacher lover: that an individual relationship can only have meaning if it is sacramental, that is, if it in limited and concrete form points to a larger human communal interrelation. Only then can a relationship truly be about giving rather than gratifying oneself, and so Red realizes about his relationship with Ethel that they never found true understanding of each other “because he was always excited when he was with her . . . wanting, wanting, wanting” (317). Red now has waded through desire and gotten beyond it. Ned Sawyer’s troops confront the strikers on a bridge, Sawyer bluffing them by saying, “The first one who tries to come out of the bridge . . . I’ll shoot him like a dog” (353). Molly Seabright and other women clutch a young leader who wants to call Ned’s bluff; they value his individual life, seeing the situation not just in political but also in concrete human terms. Red fails miserably in this situation—driven by a sense of guilt over past failures to stand by workers and driven by a desire to impress Molly, he steps forward, thinking, “I’m a silly ass.” Ned Sawyer, who had counted on his bluff to work, now sees himself put in an atrocious position, says to himself as Red is saying, “I’m a silly ass,” and fires a



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fatal shot (356). Tragically, in his last moment, Red does something unnatural and without substance; he is self-focused, focused on self-justification and looking good. Thus, he merges with Ned, the representative of conventional Southern society, who also acts out of a desire to look good and cut an impressive figure in the eyes of his society. The bitter summary of Red’s heroism’s effect is that “[a] week later the mill at Birchfield was running again. There was no trouble getting plenty of [scab] workers” (357). And yet, Red’s journey has not been without its redemptive qualities. For instance, he is sincerely mourned by two women, Molly and Ethel, having touched them in an authentic way and thus, in a sense, having found communion with an Other. In some ways, Red has attained a kind of salvation, phrased by him in a manner remarkably similar to the way it is imaged in Poor White: “Live as a bird flies. Die as a male bee dies—in nuptial flight with life, eh?” (315). Just as Hugh McVey recognizes in a pair of mating birds a deep vital current rushing out to meet the inner life of an Other and through this experience realizes the greater spiritual communion inherent in physical union, so Red Oliver has come to realize his inner connection to others and has, however imperfectly, lent it physical expression, escaping a life of spiritual complacency such as is endured in the end by Ethel. Just as Hugh slips back into being a poor husband after his transcendent moment of finding intimacy with Clara, so Red, after his profound spiritual realizations, does not manage to exercise his martyrdom in a truly meaningful manner; however, just as Hugh is capable of renewed spiritual awareness even amidst a troubled marriage, so Red has lived a life more spiritually satisfying than the dull, deadening, conventional hell his Langdon survivors endure. In spilling his blood, he has become truly Red—one with the red Southern soil, one with nature, and forever removed from the tyranny of a corrupt civilization, having carried sacramental resistance to American culture’s false rhetoric to the point of death.20

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7 “I’m a good Catholic, but I think I could get along with caring for trees” Nature and Sacramental Community in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and My Ántonia Grey wolf lying in the snow, Lie low, Lie low. Soft lips clinging in the night, God’s challenge to all in the bitter night, low in the darkness there. —from “Forgotten Song” by Sherwood Anderson In my breast the sap of spring In my brain grey winter, bleak and hard, Through my whole being, surging strong and sure, The call of gods, The forward push of mystery and of life. —from “Song to the Sap” by Sherwood Anderson

It is a moonlit night in the wide-open Nebraska countryside. Driving his Ford through his lovely surroundings without perceiving them, Doctor Ed, as he is called by everyone, has his mind “on other things” until he reaches the rural graveyard where one of his favorite former patients, old Rosicky, lies buried. Here, at this site of death, redolent of both human mortality and immortality, of physical passing and spiritual endurance, the doctor is jarred from his oblivious mindset and, as he “shuts off the engine” of his car, awakens to the deeper reality of the landscape surrounding him: “A sudden hush had fallen on his soul. – 206 –



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Everything here seemed strangely moving and significant, though signifying what, he did not know” (70). Though the meaning of the landscape and of the graveyard ultimately remains elusive, Doctor Ed does approach their mystery more closely as his reflections wind their way. He is struck by how different this country graveyard feels from urban cemeteries; the two key differences between these being that, for one, in the city cemetery, all is “arranged and lonely and unlike anything in the living world,” and secondly, that city cemeteries are “cities of the forgotten, of the ‘put away’” (70–71). Thus, urban civilization’s treatment of death is inorganic and anti-communal, and somehow, the lack of “naturalness” and the lack of “relationship” or “community” are interlinked. We, therefore, find in “Neighbour Rosicky” (1932) a story that in many ways epitomizes Cather’s art and worldview, the same critique of the non-sacramental nature of an increasingly urban American civilization that is so strongly present in Anderson and other Midwestern modernists. In their worldview, nature testifies to the communal structure of the universe and points to a more spiritual, relational attitude toward the physical world, toward one another’s bodily reality, and toward one another’s spiritual reality. The Catholic Nebraska graveyard found in “Neighbour Rosicky” may stand as an emblem for the kind of traditional sacramental community envisioned in much of Cather’s oeuvre, a community antithetical to Protestantism-derived culture. It is also an emblem of a Nietzschean vision of the individual’s organic participation in a larger natural whole, and the civilized orderliness of the carefully “arranged” city cemeteries, with its emphasis on a compartmentalization of death (the dead are “forgotten” and “put away”), speaks of a death-defying and, hence, unnatural and implicitly life-denying Apollonian culture. Such a culture is built on illusions of safety that isolate individuals by cutting them off from larger meanings and making them supposedly mortality-free and, consequently, autonomous entities who are not firmly anchored in the generational cycle of life and who do not occupy their natural place in the universe. An ambiguous sacramental as well as NietzscheanDionysian double reading can be applied to this graveyard. It is indeed very different from the city cemeteries with which its observer contrasts it. It is “open and free,” a “little square of long grass which the wind for ever stir[s].” Rosicky’s boys do their mowing along its edge, and “the horses worked here in summer; the neighbours passed on their way to town; and over yonder, in the cornfield, Rosicky’s own cattle would be eating fodder as winter came on. Nothing could be more undeathlike than this place” (71). The fact that Rosicky is not forgotten, not stowed away, but that his grave is “out in the open,” so to speak, and, thus,

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integrated into a natural, organic, as well as a family and communal context, is what makes his death “undeathlike.” Whereas urban death is an extension of urban living-in-death, the rural Catholic graveyard where Rosicky is buried expresses an existence so close to and integrated with the forces of life that this existence appears in its mortal culmination “complete and beautiful.” The idea of “completeness” present here leaves open the issue of an individualized immortality, but what is clear is that Rosicky participated in “life” so fully that his death is more of a culmination than a termination.1 The particular, the individually conscious, is wedded to the preconscious primordial, and to a transcendent life force that is superhuman. Individual people, consisting of individual bodies animated by individual consciousness, such as his family and neighbors, have made Neighbour Rosicky truly alive, and yet, there is also his relation to the land, to Creation, and to a larger existential context that goes hand in hand with the more individualized communal context that proves so life-giving to Rosicky. This larger physico-spiritual context is expressed, as it is in many other works of Cather, through a mingling of Earth and sky: at the gravesite, there is “nothing but the sky overhead, and the many-coloured fields running on until they me[et] that sky” (71). In the country, the interfusion, the meeting of the material and the spiritual, becomes evident, as exemplified by the interaction of Earth and sky, an ultimately fertile interaction that finds its consummate particularized expression in the physico-spiritual, life-giving, sexual communion of human individuals; and one defining fact about Rosicky is that he is a happily married man and the father of many sons. Thus, though Cather has often been criticized for the relationally debilitating fear of sexuality that is frequently expressed in her works, she does not merely surrender to these fears but, in the final analysis, allies herself with a sacramental understanding of the body and of the land, and with the Midwestern modernist critique of an “unnatural,” abstractionist, and essentially anti-particularist and anti-corporeal modern culture imposed upon the American land. Therefore, when John H. Randall III observes that Cather “too often ignored the fact that monklike devotion to a calling exacts a terrible toll” and “that artistic creativity cannot be indefinitely substituted for human relations without grave psychic consequences,” he is observing a real problem in Cather’s life and work. Yet he does not consider the degree to which Cather, like the unmarried, forever midwiving but never fathering intellectual Doctor Ed, acknowledges the ultimate beauty of human sexuality and relationality, and its sacramental significance and power. With relative consistency, Cather acknowledges human relationships’ profound importance and the failure of art to provide a substitute. We see this



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prioritizing of the concrete and human over the sublimated and abstract in the character of Rosicky, who leaves the operas he loves and the art scene of New York City for family-life in the country. And Doctor Ed recognizes that Rosicky’s flight from the “great cities” to this rural Catholic graveyard was well worth it. Unlike Anderson, who paints his characters in unmistakable broad strokes as either fulfilled or unfulfilled and who makes the misery of his unmarried or sexually deprived characters abundantly clear, Cather is more ambiguous and subtle but ultimately concedes that happiness hinges on relationships; despite her focus on artistically inclined characters, Cather, nonetheless, makes it clear that humans need the spiritual-physical communion with a committed Other. Attempts at such communion may frequently fail, and Cather is infamous for rarely depicting marital happiness; yet, fundamentally, though unmarried herself and clearly troubled by the idea of marriage, Cather, nonetheless, endorses the institution as at least having the potential for being a sacramental way of living. Both Anderson and Cather link sterility to an exclusive confinement within the realms of intellect and culture and link the full realization of our humanity to a pastoral participation in both nature and culture, and the achievement of relationships that are both spiritual and physical. It is in her two most prominent “prairie novels,” O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), that Cather most strikingly links her Nietzsche-imbued sacramental vision of human relations to a particular spiritual vision of the land, one that involves the land’s tangible and spiritual resistance to imposed idealistic schemes. Regardless of whether one emphasizes a more Nietzschean or more Catholic sacramental reading of Cather’s Midwestern nature passages, such as the one describing Rosicky’s graveyard, it is, in any case, clear that nature is sacred, spiritually meaningful, and that a disconnection from nature implies an empty, soulless civilization in which community has broken down. The strong emphasis on community in many nature passages tends in the direction of Catholic sacramentalism, with its personal God binding all individuals in a relationally based communion modeled on the Trinity; the frequent emphasis on nature itself, on Creation rather than the Creator, seems more Nietzschean and smacks of life-force pantheism. Modernism’s classic uncertainty in its quest for cultural renewal, its hovering between pagan primitivism and Catholic sacramentalism, is clearly in evidence in Cather’s writing. And yet, I would argue that she frequently privileges a sacramental over a pagan-primitivist perspective. Many critics have explored the mythical aspect of Nature in Cather’s prairie novels, and its implications for human life, particularly communal life. Thus,

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Richard Giannone states that “the idea Willa Cather sees behind prairie life is that the pioneer venture in a corner of Nebraska bears the great responsibility of civilization, and this idea unifies her themes . . . The great human story, of course, is the founding of culture” (69–70). Giannone links this concern for the origins of culture with Cather’s emphasis on nature as the origin of all life: “The significance of the prairie . . . resides in the power it has over those who strive to cultivate it; the land is the great enigmatic fact of life. . . . What accounts for the philosophical importance of the prairie in O Pioneers! is the attitude the settlers adopt toward it. These attitudes range from mystical to profane depending on the person’s awareness of the mysterious, immutable spirit beneath the physical properties or his exclusive concern for the fruit it may bear” (70–71). In other words, a sacramental sensitivity to nature informs the beginnings of culture quite differently (and as Giannone’s later analysis makes clear, more healthily) than an unrelational, exploitive, results-oriented mindset. Similarly linking Cather’s sacramental vision of nature with her concern for wholesome culture-building, Catherine M. McLay observes that “in her early novels O Pioneers! and My Ántonia Cather finds a centre of order and meaning in nature and the land, which generate a sense of religious fulfilment” (127). James Woodress links Cather’s vision of nature in her prairie novels to the tradition of romantic idealism, which, much like modernism, sought a spiritual renewal of a materialistic Western culture: “Cather is no nineteenth-century positivist; her world view derives . . . from Emerson: ‘Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact’” (242). Prior to any of these critics, John H. Randall III, in his groundbreaking 1960 study The Landscape and the Looking Glass: Willa Cather’s Search for Value, saw Cather’s prairie novels along similar lines, but made an important distinction. After describing her prairie fiction as mystically centered on the “vegetative myth,” the “age-old mystery” of death and rebirth, in which “the individual dies but the community lives on,” Randall observes the following: Never once is a pregnancy or birth directly presented in Willa Cather’s novels; what we do see is the corn growing. This implies that she only half understood the vegetation myth; she understood the cycle of the seasons but did not understand its application to the life of human beings and to their recurrent crises of birth, love, and death. She substituted in its stead, as we shall see in her later novels, an almost Platonic belief in essences, and the desire to freeze the world in the grip of form once the ideal is achieved. (149)



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While Cather longs to find in nature a mysterious wholeness containing sex, life, and death, the many and the one, bound in intricate spiritual unity, she does, nonetheless, appear to gravitate almost in spite of her own spiritual vision, toward a Platonic idealism in which the spiritual no longer works itself out in frequently painful and precarious physical definiteness, but in which a transcendent ideal reality existing above the physical world invites the human heart to enter its detached stasis. Such an idealistic proclivity is already suggested by Woodress’s linking of Cather’s spiritual vision of the land with Emersonianism. For shortly after the statement from Emerson’s Nature, quoted by Woodress, the romantic philosopher elaborates on his meaning: “Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine or thine or his, but we are its” (14). Reality, according to romantic philosophy, which is essentially Platonic, becomes reduced to abstract universal categories in which all individual being is subsumed. Emerson invites us to see “through” Nature and access ideal visions, which constitute ultimate reality; the physical becomes a pale reflection of the spiritual. In light of all this, we must ask whether Cather’s imagination and vision is sacramental at all: Is she inviting us to see through Rosicky’s life and his landscape- and community-integrated graveyard to an ultimate spiritual reality that is static and impersonal, or does Rosicky’s life and the natural and communal graveyard setting express a wholeness that exists in and through the definite, through individual beings, and is fully personal and concrete while also being transcendent, inviting the individual into community rather than subsuming him or her in a monistic universe? The answer I would suggest is that Cather is continually exploring answers for Western culture, possible answers about which she always feels ambivalent; on the one hand, she is a romantic Platonist who looks beyond the concrete world toward a luminous ideality that is “safe” in its very impersonality (a haven from the complexity of relationship and personal interdependence); on the other hand, she is keenly aware of the limitations, sterility, and falsity of such idealism, and her novels abound with characters whom author and reader alike both admire and find disturbing, characters with whom the author clearly identifies at some level and whose sterility or grotesquery she, nonetheless, has the courage to make perfectly obvious. In fact, I would argue that many of Cather’s novels involve a complex self-indictment, an acknowledgment of personal spiritual failings, which, though perceived, cannot be entirely resolved. Thus, McLay observes that

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faith “is a gift that Cather herself seems to have lacked” even as she pursued and admired it: “She found it ‘difficult to believe,’ Bennett tells us and quotes Cather’s admission to Carrie Miner Sherwood that ‘even her Catholic books were written out of admiration for a faith she could not quite accept’” (137). Catholicism and, by extension, sacramentalism, become a standard by which Cather measured her culture’s and her own ability to relate to nature, the world, and other human beings wholesomely, or “holily.” While critics have frequently discussed Cather’s obvious attraction to Catholicism and her spiritual understanding of nature, none have fully identified the rigorously and specifically sacramental perspective from which Cather allows her characters to be seen, even as she simultaneously displays divergent or even contradictory philosophical impulses. Cather is very much a romantic, but she is an extremely self-critical one who emphatically highlights the shortcomings of individualistic, idealizing, evasive, and spiritually rebellious approaches to life: instead, she offers for serious consideration the possibilities of long-suffering patience, a genuinely communal orientation, and a physical working out of definite and painful spiritual truths. And many of these lessons are connected to the experience of the Midwestern land on which her characters would like to project their dreams freely, but which resists them. In Cather’s prairie novels, it is rural Catholics who find a sacramental relation to the Nebraska land, and who find real community. As McLay observes, “Consistently, the characters are divided into two groups, the life-affirming Catholic characters with their warmth, simplicity, love of beauty and art, and the Protestant characters, life-denying, cold, sterile, ascetic” (130). Unlike their Protestant Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian counterparts who are largely barred from truly communal or sacramental identities and who, in spite of the rural setting, often display a deep-level detachment from the land, the French and Bohemian Catholic Nebraska characters at least at times succeed in finding a degree of real human fulfillment. This is the case even in a novel so full of tragic death as O Pioneers! Though this novel precedes the main period of Midwestern modernism by several years, it, nonetheless, firmly belongs to this genre; in fact, it is one of the earliest instances of a truly modernist Midwestern novel, one that aesthetically and in terms of its content goes beyond the naturalism of, for instance, a Hamlin Garland. Its modernist aesthetic is closely linked to the theme of sacramentalism that would so dominate Midwestern literature of the 1920s and 1930s. For instance, one may note the following commentary on Cather’s modernist style by Kathleen Wheeler, a critique that seems to fit perfectly Wil-



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liam Lynch’s call for a sacramental aesthetic in which the passage through the definite cannot be omitted on one’s journey to the transcendent: [Cather] reject[s] realism, its cataloguing and recording of detail, its “props” and “furnishings,” and her [writing evinces a] commitment to something she saw was greater than such rational description, namely the aesthetic experience of unity and the imaginative creation of it. Nevertheless, there is a definite suggestion that this stage of detailed enumeration and intense familiarity with concrete particulars is a stage of experience that must be gone through, not skipped out. (164)

Thus, in Cather’s prairie novels, we sense the author’s familiarity with her setting and can sense a wealth of historical background detail; yet in the actual scenes with which the reader is presented, we sense a careful selection and arrangement of detail, the artistically distilled and symbolically charged picture, in which the selected sensory details express with succinct poetic density a wealth of spiritual realities. This symbolic suggestiveness is what is meant when Van Ghent speaks of Cather’s “frieze-like entablatures” (5), and Phyllis Rose of the “sculptural and abstract forms throughout Cather’s work” (118). In this artistic tension between the mythic, spiritual, eternal, and universal on the one hand and its particular, historical, detailed manifestation on the other lies part of the sacramental aspect of Cather’s work. For frequently, Cather creates characters that reenact Eden’s fall by disregarding the particular in a leap at the cosmic, just as Eve and Adam disregard the highly concrete injunction not to eat the forbidden fruit in their grandiose reaching after godlike knowledge. Both the cosmic and the particular are real, but only in a regarding of particularity can a grander, larger truth and fulfillment be attained, just as the preservation of cosmic wholeness depended on so small and particular an act as not eating the fruit of one particular tree. Once more, a similarity to Anderson may be noted: Anderson’s grotesques, with their highly individual quirks and very particular small-town Ohio circumstances nonetheless engage in mythically striking gestures, as when the sexually frustrated Alice Hindman in “Adventure” runs naked through the rainy streets of Winesburg in an act at once highly particular in motivation and circumstance but also mythical in its ritualistic expression of a universal human longing. Such literary art is sacramental in that the universal, the whole, nature, expresses itself in the individual without obliterating particularity. Where Anderson crosses

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over into heavy-handed allegory, where the mythic depletes the reality of the particular, he is at his artistic worst, a problem afflicting his novels more than his short stories. Cather rarely fails in this regard. From the richly concrete world of pioneer and early post-pioneer Nebraska Cather takes a series of subtextually mythic, stringently crafted scenes that paint a picture of the creatures of a fallen Eden seeking to impose their will on the land and on their own relational identity and being punished spiritually and at times physically whenever they disregard the objective limits set for them in a sacramental world whose mysterious structure is not arbitrary but meaningful. Form and content go hand in hand: as the mythical blends with realistic detail in Cather’s art, so the cosmos in which her characters find themselves rewards neither the unnatural suppression of desire nor its uninhibited heaven-storming exercise: a pastoral symbiosis of healthful containment and proper channeling is called for. This pastoral balance is not fully achieved by the successful pioneer farmer Alexandra Bergson, the main protagonist of O Pioneers! When she decides in her early forties to marry her childhood friend Carl Linstrum, a failed and worn-out artist, there is a sense of sad serenity about this couple. Neither one has led a truly fulfilling life up to this point, with Alexandra having sacrificed her personal life to her love of the land and the creation of her Nebraska farm and with Carl having cultivated his personal, artistic self-realization in a sterile and isolating fashion that has left him shuddering at his own personal state. Thus, Alexandra admits to Carl that she has been lonely (290) and that she has worked so that Emil (and perhaps the younger generation in general) could have a life different from hers (198). Carl admits, in his turn, that the likes of him, pursuing self-realization in art, “have no house, no place, no people of our own. . . . We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder” (198). While both face a more positive future, there is a sense that much of their lives has been too one-sided and that something precious has been forfeited. As Maynard Fox observes in “Symbolic Representation in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!” their final conversation in the novel involves “an admission that life is to be neutral for them,” with friendship to contain somewhat the essential emptiness of their lives (196). The union of this farmer-artist couple represents, on the one hand, an ideal bringing together of the primordial and the individual, of the merely naturally vital and of the mentally conscious; on the other hand, it does not feel like a real marriage to either one of the characters, with Alexandra stating that her dream vision of love will never come true, and Carl observing that it is not himself



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who has the primary claim on Alexandra, but rather, her farm: “You belong to the land,” he murmurs, “as you have always said. Now more than ever” (289). The perfect fusion between the individualized, conscious, relational aspects of existence on the one hand, and of the organic, preconscious, primordially vital aspects on the other, seems not to have taken place. Commenting on this lack of personal fulfillment in Carl and Alexandra’s union, Susan J. Rosowski, in “The Comic Form of Willa Cather’s Art: An Ecocritical Reading,” remarks that “though Alexandra and Carl will marry, the greening of a new world in O Pioneers! does not concern their generativity (they marry as friends in middle age, presumably to remain childless). Instead, the new world of Cather’s comedy has to do with the interconnectedness of all of life by which atoms pass from one life form to another in ongoing, everlasting renewal” (109). Rosowski then quotes the final words of the novel, concerning the “fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra’s into its bosom, to give them out again, in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth” (290) and then summarily observes that the comic aspect of Cather’s pastoral novel lies in “the narrative return to the opening poem’s celebration of youth in the cyclic manner of comedy” (109). In other words, rather than cosmic goodness being realized in the personalized happy ending of a presumably fruitful wedding, an individualized participation in Creation, it is realized, despite the wedding at novel’s end, in an impersonal manner, in the flux of atoms between life forms, in the endless generativity of nature as such rather than of individuals. In spite of a basic comic structure, the novel ends on a note of loss, resignation, and melancholy, with hints at a tragic conception of the individual phenomenon in its relation to an impersonal universe. It is in the context of this spiritual uneasiness with an impersonal Nietzschean life force mysticism that Cather’s allusions to Catholicism throughout O Pioneers! and throughout her larger literary corpus seem to take on a new significance. For what, of course, is distinctive about the various immigrant groups’ Catholic faith that so contrasts with the Anglo-American and Scandinavian-American Protestantism is its emphasis on sacramentalism, which involves the fusion of the spiritual and the physical, with the spiritual realm existing in the form of people, of individual consciousness, be it divine, angelic, demonic, or human consciousness. Individually conscious forces are, thus, present everywhere. In Cather’s fiction, the person who misses this inextricable interpenetration of the spiritual and the physical, an interpenetration that is personal in nature (not necessarily sexual, though sexuality is the perfect emblem and expression of this personal spiritual reality), in other words, the

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person who does not apprehend the world sacramentally, is subject to a tragic incompleteness and to a life lost in the crevices of the Cartesian split. The positive model that the novel presents is that of the French Catholic community: here is found a life lived in light of a theistic and sacramentally infused cosmos. At the heart of this cosmos is a personal theistic consciousness, and, thus, if individuals are embedded in larger primary realities, these primary realities have a Person at their core, namely, the Creator, God. For this reason, relating to nature as if it were some amorphous impersonal force, and living as though this force could satisfy one’s need of relationship and identity, is ultimately unfulfilling; nature is personal at its heart, and being part of a community of people is necessary to find one’s true place within the larger cosmic reality, since that cosmic reality ultimately is also individually conscious and personal. Thus marriage is of great importance, and around this sacrament the French community in the novel to a great degree revolves: in marriage, physical union and spiritual communion go hand in hand, and this physico-spiritual relation in all its individuality bears a higher reference, namely to the union of God with His Church. Human identity is fully formed when the larger cosmic relationship is experienced in terms of an individual relationship, and this individual relationship, in turn, draws its viability and satisfactoriness from its sacramental reference to the larger human community and ultimately to the God-centered cosmos. Where either the individual relationship or the communal and cosmic identity are lacking, a person remains cut off from a full existential realization of his or her place and meaning. Alexandra Bergson and Marie Shabata, the two main female protagonists in the novel, both wrestle with achieving that sacramental balance and both fail in their own separate ways. Since it is Marie who in the novel is most closely associated with Catholicism and with the French Catholic community, this discussion shall mainly revolve around her, though the relevance of Marie’s experience for Alexandra shall also be addressed briefly. The first time we encounter Marie as an adult, her future lover Emil Bergson, Alexandra’s brother, is mowing the Norwegian graveyard with a scythe. The surrounding landscape is emblematic of the imposition of human consciousness upon nature: “From the Norwegian graveyard gate one looks out over a vast checkerboard, marked off in squares of wheat and corn; light and dark, dark and light. Telephone wires hum along the white roads, which always run at right angles” (174). This highly symmetrical landscape speaks of the pioneer’s rejection of individuality, of a certain abstraction in his or her approach to life, an abstraction that is ironic as it is so very tangible and concrete. This pioneer



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relationship with the land is sexualized in Cather’s description: “The brown earth, with such a strong, clean smell, and such a power of growth and fertility in it, yields itself eagerly to the plow; rolls away from the shear, not even dimming the brightness of the metal, with a soft, deep sigh of happiness” (174). Here we find sex and fertility itself, not individualized but as an enduring natural principle or dynamic, as the amorphous, impersonal life principle itself. The individuals buried amidst this vibrant soil, the “tired pioneers over which [Emil’s] blade glitter[s]” have been “forgotten in the brighter pattern life weaves today”—individual tragedy, broken hearts, and failed struggle underlie this happy landscape. These individual fates are just as real as the larger pattern, and thus it becomes explicable that Emil, embedded in the splendor of June and in the “all-suffusing brightness of twenty-one” can still be tortured and full of frowns that suggest that “even twenty-one might have its problems” (175). For Emil, like the buried pioneers beneath him, is an individual: he is not youth personified, not one with the principle of brightness, and he is not simply all that the age of twenty-one might generally stand for. The larger eternal impersonal patterns embodied in the land cannot satisfy Emil, who longs for another individual, for communion with Marie, who is the wife of another man, namely the Bohemian farmer Frank Shabata. The Nebraska surrounding Emil is like “the plains of Lombardy, [seeming] to rise a little to meet the sun. The air and the earth are curiously mated and intermingled, as if the one were the breath of the other” (174–75). In like manner, Emil longs for his own meeting of Earth and sky, of body and spirit; he longs for sexual communion with Marie. Lost in an impersonal landscape, moving upon the graves of dead individuals, Emil longs for a personal encounter. Just as these thought processes are unfolding, Marie Shabata comes by in a horse-driven cart. She stops her cart, and, as her conversation with Emil unfolds, she becomes more clearly identified both as a Catholic and as intimately associated with the local French Catholic community; though her heritage is Bohemian, the Bohemians around Hanover, Nebraska, have formed essentially one group with their French fellow Catholics. One of the first indications of Marie’s strong association with Catholicism is her remark that the Bohemian Kourdna family, buried in the Norwegian graveyard, was excommunicated from the Catholic graveyard because they were freethinkers. She then proudly tells Emil that the Bohemians fought against the spread of the Hussite heresy and that they also saved Europe from Islamic invasion and thus from becoming heathen (176). With these words, Marie is clearly marked as a Catholic. Significantly, Marie also tells Emil that she was in town in order to look at the wedding clothes of

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Angélique, the fiancée of Emil’s best friend Amédée, who, as his name betrays, is French (and who, as his name also betrays, is “beloved by God”). Angélique’s angelic name and her presumably white wedding clothes indicate the realm of the spiritual, of transcendence; and yet, in the same breath as she mentions the bride and bridal gown, Marie also notes the wedding feast itself to which she greatly looks forward: there will be an abundance of food, “barrels of beer,” and lots of dancing. Thus, the wedding of Angélique and Amédée brings together the transcendent and the sensual in good Catholic fashion, for, as mentioned earlier, marriage is a sacrament, the very physical and tangible embodiment of a spiritual reality, and it is the individualized expression in physical and biological form of the larger mystery of God’s communion with His Church. As relationally meaningful sex, the coming together of the physical and the spiritual functions as a salvific2 vision in Anderson’s works, e.g., in Poor White, so it does in Cather—it is the ultimate pastoral, the perfect symbiosis of the transcendent and the concrete. In imagery found throughout Holy Scripture, the Church is pictured as the bride of Christ, Who has become flesh in order to meet her. Now the Church as the bride of Christ is simultaneously the Body of Christ, for bride and bridegroom shall be one flesh. In its function as the Body of Christ, the Church is the fundamental sacramental reality in this world, the incarnation of the Logos. Thus Catholic theologian Karl Rahner observes: “The grace of God no longer comes (when it does come) steeply down from on high, from a God absolutely transcending the world, and in a manner that is without history, purely episodic; it is permanently in the world in tangible historical form [i.e., the Church], established in the flesh of Christ as a part of the world, of humanity and of its very history” (15). Marie, in her conversation with Emil, very much identifies herself as part of the Church. For instance, she looks forward to the wedding feast and asks Emil to “dance with all the French girls” rather than keeping aloof, that is, she wishes herself as well as Emil to be integrated into the community of the Church, which is a sacramental community in which transcendence and feasting merge into one (177). At a later point in the book, Emil will accuse Marie of loving everybody in the Church and not being exclusively enough obsessed with him (177). As a non-Catholic, brooding, educated, and “freethinking” Scandinavian, he is not able to relate to Marie’s communal identity. Tragically, neither does Marie’s husband Frank understand her communal orientation. Self-absorbed and seeing the rest of the world as his natural enemy, Frank feels betrayed by his wife’s associating with other people. This tension between Marie and Frank already comes to the



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fore when Marie tells Emil at the Norwegian graveyard that she will have a hard time dragging Frank to the wedding feast of Angélique and Amédée (177). The figure of Amédée mirrors Marie’s sacramental communalism, for instance, when he slaps Emil on the back and reprimands him for being single and scorning the beautiful French girls who would be glad to have him: “See . . . there is Séverine, and Alphonsen, and Joséphine, and Hectorine, and Louise, and Malvina—why, I could love any of them girls! Why don’t you get after them? Are you stuck up, Emil, or is anything the matter with you?” (215). Amédée’s view of love is less individualistic than Emil’s; he sees both the natural and the spiritual in communal terms and sees the meeting of individual consciousness and of individual bodies in terms of larger communal realities to which these individual unions refer. Thus he sees his own marriage as integrally part of the Catholic Church’s incarnation of spiritual mystery in the world: “I bring many good Catholics into this world, I hope, and that’s a way I help the Church” (216). Sexual union and a communal spiritual mission are intimately merged in Amédée’s worldview; in his eyes, Emil is “stuck up,” that is, anti-communal in his very individualistic attitude toward love. For to Emil, there is a fundamental split between the individually conscious and the larger impersonal pattern. For him, the educated freethinker, it holds true what Cather’s poem “Prairie Spring” preceding the novel proclaims: in this poem, “Youth,” with its “sharp desire,” sings “out of the earthy dusk” against “the eternal, unresponsive sky.” Because for Amédée there precisely is a personal, responsive consciousness behind the sky and incarnated in all nature, he can let go of individualism and find in the sacramental interfusion of the individual manifestation with the larger pattern a salvation not available for Emil. Thus Amédée’s love is proud and public, as Emil reflects, while his own is hidden, shameful, and outside of the bounds of the larger community (217).3 Emil’s spiritual failure combines with that of Marie, hers being effectively summarized in a crucial statement she makes while talking to Emil in her orchard: “I’m a good Catholic, but I think I could get along with caring for trees, if I hadn’t anything else” (212). This statement is uttered in a context in which Marie seems to contradict her earlier boasting about the Bohemians having saved Europe from heathenism,4 for she asks Emil about Sweden’s pre-Christian religion and then tells him of ancient Bohemian tree-worship. What attracts her about trees is that they “seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do” (212). Marie feels as though her favorite tree in her orchard “knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of

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anything; I begin just where I left off ” (212). In this description of trees in general and of her favorite tree in particular, Marie tries to find in nature both a knowing consciousness to whom she can pour out her own torturous passions triggered by her growing love for Emil and simultaneously a restful spirit of resignation and inaction. God does not fulfill this need of Marie’s because He is too personal and both has and requires too much agency; unlike vegetative nature in and of itself, a personal God would demand of Marie a level of active engagement with the sacramental community of which she is a part, and this is precisely not what Marie wants as she gives herself over to a passion for Emil. Instead of accepting her youthful mistake of marrying Frank Shabata against the will of both her family and her Catholic educators, that is, instead of being willing to deal with the consequences of her youthful, romantic, anti-communal individualism, she chooses to opt for an equally anti-communal stoicism, which, of course, eventually breaks down under the pressure of desire.5 Again and again in the novel, the suggestion occurs that Marie could work on her stifling marriage with Frank if she were willing to practice a high degree of humility, the repentance called for in the wake of individualistic willfulness; however, Marie rejects this demand of the personal God and of her sacramental community. Instead, she eventually decides to embody the Cartesian split: she will externally be true to Frank but spend her days dreaming of Emil (261). But life does not allow her to live out this anti-sacramental split; Emil finds Marie dreaming in her orchard, their love turns from dream to tangible reality, and Frank, finding them there, under the tree that Marie has idolatrously deified, kills them. Neither the notion of individuals completely separate from the larger cosmos nor of a larger cosmos devoid of the personal and individual has been validated in Emil and Marie’s experience; only the sacramental worldview of the French community with its individually infused and yet mystically communal cosmos seems to point toward happiness. One may detect an interesting difference here between Cather and Anderson: Cather seems to uphold a notion of personal responsibility toward not only that which is “natural,” as Anderson does, but also toward social commitments that may run counter to our natural impulses; these social commitments, however, paradoxically still reflect nature even when they contradict our natural desires. Both writers emphasize the need to manifest sacramentally in our lives naturally given realities as best we can, yet, while both Anderson and Cather look toward nature for ethical guidance, Cather appears more theistic and ultimately more ethically responsible than Anderson in her moral interpretation of nature. For Marie to uphold and invest herself in her marriage with Frank would have been



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“natural” only in a complex and indirect sense: respecting the communal laws governing the cosmos, Marie could have realized the unbreachable nature of relationship by continuing in her marriage while simultaneously repenting of her willful choice of having entered into a relationship for which she was not naturally destined. In following one law of nature she would have still been cut off from part of her natural destiny: this is an insoluble dilemma, calling for an analogical vision of human relationships that can transfigure a difficult marriage into an image of a transcendent communion between humans and God. Taking the sacramental view of nature this far does depend on a theistic orientation that Anderson lacks,6 but which Cather, albeit ambiguously, does seem to express again and again in her works. What, then, is the implication for Carl and Alexandra? I would argue that Alexandra’s famous recurring erotic dream of being carried by a godlike male figure smelling of corn points to a crucial lack in her life, a blind spot; namely, a lack of awareness of how the communion between human individuals points to an individual consciousness at the heart of nature, at the core of the cosmos, and that without sacramental human community one’s ties to larger, cosmic mysteries must also remain incomplete. Randall’s reading of the passage is consonant with my own, emphasizing Alexandra’s repressed fundamental need for personal, human fellowship: “This fantasy of desire, of wishing to be taken, is another instance of the power of spontaneity. It suggests that something is missing in Alexandra’s life; this is as close as she ever comes to consciously formulated desire for human love” (90). Randall notes the change, over time, in Alexandra’s fantasy: “It is now less erotic and becomes more of a longing to shift her burdens to someone else and rest for a while. Desire becomes transmuted into surrender; passion gives place to yearning for peace and for freedom from pain” (90). Finally, he sees Alexandra’s lover as a Death figure and sums up the vision’s meaning as a warning against unrestrained personal, sexual desire: “This change from desire to surrender and to a final longing for death is another comment of Willa Cather’s on the terrible destruction that can be wrought by unbridled spontaneity, even if only by secondary involvement” (91). There is no genuinely positive vision here; Alexandra’s dream seems to bespeak not so much a missed yet entirely possible human fulfillment, but, rather, seems to indicate a tragic view of human life: since humans are incapable of the content resignation of the vegetative world so envied by Marie when she wishes she were a tree, they can only face destruction or a series of ultimately unfulfilling substitutions for personal communion eventuating in a tired wish for release from individual

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existence. While Nietzschean philosophy again provides an important subtext— individual existence is fundamentally tragic, indeed, and must result in a resigned metaphysical comfort drawn from the contemplation of one’s reabsorption into the impersonal life force—still, the text, even as it points to a Nietzschean tragic but edifying vision, also clearly resists this vision. For there is something helpless, blind, and even pathetic in the life of the superwoman so epically named Alexandra, and her defeated, tired, childless marriage to a failed artist adds to a sense of “metaphysical nausea” pervasive at the novel’s end (Randall 87). Why, one might ask, do only two alternatives seem possible within the novel: either unbridled passion running headlong into a consuming fire or a resignation that is the equivalent of a death wish? Why does there not appear the promise and possibility of a proper channeling of nature and passion so that it achieves its proper function within a beneficent order supporting holistic community? Why, in other words, is there so little emphasis on the possibility of a happy marriage, the joyful and fruitful fusion of spiritual relationship and physical passion? Partly, the answer surely lies in Cather’s own fear of relationships and sexuality, or in her own failures and frustrations in this area, as has been generally obvious to critics.7 Another answer lies in Cather’s idealistic mindset, as captured succinctly in Randall’s analysis: “Because for Willa Cather spontaneity is a total reaction, completely in favor of a thing or against it, she is unable to conceive of her characters as making the compromises necessary in everyday living. They either triumph completely or else, if balked, are powerless to adjust themselves to the new situation and try again; they are the victims of their own all-or-none emotional responses” (85). Alexandra chooses “none” and ends up not with premature dying, but with a death wish, with Death as her only true lover. For the land can teach about life and passion; yet it cannot be the end of life and passion, but must also point beyond itself, as an analogue of more personal realities, a personal God. By locating God pantheistically within the impersonal land, and by investing herself only in this impersonal “lover,” Alexandra can only hope for release from individual identity and consciousness, not for a fulfillment of these: “[My dream] will never come true, now, in the way I thought it might” (290).8 The entire novel makes it clear that nature will not yield true sustenance if we make it our end, whether it be in terms of passionate primitivism, or in terms of a Nietzschean dissolution of self, nor can we ever succeed in any attempt at denying or compartmentalizing nature, as Marie’s unsuccessful attempt at compartmentalizing her passion illustrates. Genuine happiness does seem to lie only in the direction of a sacramental intertwining of body and spirit, self and other, without the



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dissolution of self—a relational vision of the universe centered in a personal God. This vision is strikingly presented in the Knight of Faith, Amédée Chevalier, but it is a vision to which Cather cannot quite commit herself; as John J. Murphy, in “A Comprehensive View of Cather’s O Pioneers!” points out, “Amédée and Angélique are indeed enviable, balance passion and spiritual sharing, and find expression in a boy child. The relationship is perhaps too perfect to survive in this world; the names even suggest otherworldliness, as does Cather’s restriction of the couple to Sainte Agnes church activities” (123). Rosowski similarly, in The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism (1986), emphasizes Cather’s doubts as to the reality of the sacramental order represented by the happy Catholic couple: “Cather follows her own description of a Golden Age with the death of Amédée, like [Virgil’s] Daphnis the ideal leader of a race of New World Arcadians. Similarly, desire for the perfect happiness in love ends in death and disillusionment” (48). And yet, the “Golden Age” represented by Amédée does not entirely end in death and disillusionment. After all, Amédée leaves behind a healthy son and heir; his funeral is followed the next day by a “confirmation” service in preparation of which a horde of new Catholic knights, new chevaliers, rides out to meet the visiting bishop (262–63); in death, as he was in life, Amédée rests in communion with the Church; and the doctor ministering to him at the hour of his death is named Paradis, this appellation hinting at the redemption available to Amédée even in death. If prior to Amédée’s death, Angélique feels “secure in good fortune,” believing that “only good things could happen to a rich, energetic, handsome young man like Amédée” (256), she now has the opportunity to understand the paradoxical meaning of the cross, that the paradise she thought was hers on Earth is still hers in heaven, that the Church, nature, and marriage are sacramental earthly types by which we participate in a larger transcendent reality, a reality rising above the frailty of human bodies and relationships and yet expressed in them and resembling them—a spiritual reality that is expressed in marriage and which also is a marriage. Just as the Church of Sainte Agnes sits dramatically on its hill as a beacon to the surrounding countryside, so the sacramental vision of nature appears as the only truly fulfilling one in the novel and functions as a foil for all other approaches to life. If Cather cannot fully commit herself to this vision—if she suspects it of being too good to be true—she, nonetheless, appears to evoke it as a standard, as the most holistic and holy approach to culture-building the world, or at least the Western world, has yet seen. Alexandra’s meaning within the novel’s visionary context is complex, indeed. As I have sought to suggest, much of this complexity and ambiguity seems to stem from tensions within Cather that she does not quite resolve, with a sacramental

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vision of nature and culture emerging as the option most attractive to her. Of course, the novel has been read from radically different perspectives, including William Conlogue’s, which aligns O Pioneers! with the progressive ideology of industrial agriculture. Since it is hard to imagine a more anti-sacramental vision than that of Gilded Age agribusiness, it seems called for to engage Conlogue’s reading of the text and relate it to the sacramental analysis presented above. Conlogue uncovers in the novella a systematic contrasting of inefficient and even rather stupid “mossback” characters who cling to traditional farming ways (particularly Alexandra’s brothers, Lou and Oscar, but also, to a lesser extent, the Linstrum family) and the efficient entrepreneurial and managerial figure of Alexandra, who is a shrewd speculator, implements a hierarchical division and specialization of labor, and tends not to get her own hands dirty (68–73). One of Conlogue’s many apt illustrations of this contrasting pattern is the following: The text legitimizes management as work most directly in Alexandra’s confrontation with Oscar and Lou over her involvement with Carl. The brothers interrupt her when she is “busy with her account-books” to insist that they have claim to Alexandra’s land because they have done the physical labor that has made it prosper. Alexandra replies by distinguishing between physical work and mental work (management). Claiming that her work “puts in the crop, and it sometimes keeps the fields for corn to grow in,” Alexandra defies her brothers’ natural rights logic. (73)

Conlogue also comments that “just as twentieth-century industrialism masks the connection between labor and labor’s product, the text masks the Bergsons’ work by skipping the sixteen years when their hardest labors are expended. Readers see only the result, the bottom line, a profitable landscape” (70). Furthermore, Conlogue points out how Alexandra’s farm does not represent a harmonious “organic” symbiosis of civilization and nature, does not, in any way, represent the ideal of the “garden,” but is a purely production-oriented, inhuman, geometrical space; the “wild land’s ‘shaggy coat’ [is replaced] with a ‘vast checkerboard’ of neighboring fields” (174). As William Barillas, in The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland (2006) has pointed out, the rectangular grid character of Midwestern landscapes is a visual sign of American culture’s profoundly troubling abstract relation to the land: “The survey is entirely unnatural, imposing as it does a rigid geometry across widely varying terrain. . . . The Jeffersonian [grid survey system’s] imposition of the square con-



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figures land into space—impersonal, interchangeable, and profane—rather than place—intimate, unique, even sacred” (27). Considering that Alexandra does not directly engage with the land, sees intellectual labor as more vital than the investment of personal physical labor, and subjects the landscape to an abstract, purely large-scale production-oriented grid system, all of which is apparently validated as a great achievement in the novel, how can one still speak of a text with a sacramental vision? Especially striking is what Conlogue has to say concerning the novel’s central sacramental figure, Amédée: “Unlike Alexandra, Amédée has inexpertly managed his purchases. He is the only one who can run both pieces of equipment, so ‘he has to be everywhere at once.’ . . . The stress of [his mismanagement and unwise overinvestments] contributes as much to his death as his appendicitis. . . . The machine in this novel’s garden is a positive, creative force, not the interrupter of a rural pastoral moment. It is not the machine that kills the happy Amédée; his mismanagement of it kills him” (78). Does Amédée’s death signify his failure to live up to a glorious new machine age? Is the sacramental culture for which he stands not suited for survival due to some inner deficiency? Robert J. Nelson has read Amédée’s death in an exactly opposed fashion, interpreting Amédée’s death as the result of a spiritually misguided concession the lifeloving Frenchman makes to the non-sacramental modern machine culture, which goes against all for which Amédée and his community stand: “Amédée’s death is . . . a signifier of the dissonance between the language of French joie de vivre and the language of industrial expansion and mechanical modernism. Amédée dies from ‘an awful pain . . . inside’ that he does not heed because he is too busy using and supervising use of his new farm equipment” (81). French joie de vivre here stands for an integrated, holistic experience of life in which there is a sacramental consonance between the spiritual and the physical, the individual and the communal. “Mechanical modernism” implies the utter separation between an objectified external world and an internal spiritual/emotional realm, a split exemplified by Emil’s highly individualistic and romantic passion for Marie, which runs counter to all social structures and obligations. One could, thus, read Amédée’s death as precisely an indictment of what the industrial age does to the body and the soul. And yet, Conlogue’s extensive textual evidence for a validation of industrial progressivism in the novel cannot be dismissed easily. However, perhaps it is not necessary to choose one interpretive perspective to the exclusion of another. As has already been stated, it appears that Cather absorbed multiple discourses and ideologies and tended to produce paradoxical texts full of ambiguity and profound spiritual tension. When Cather celebrates

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Alexandra’s business savvy and knack for speculation, she does so in vividly poetic, romantic terms. For instance, after one of her boldest speculative maneuvers, right after signing mortgage papers in order to buy up land from failing farms even as her own is struggling in the drought-ridden 1890s, Alexandra revels in mystical feelings: That night she had a new consciousness of the country, felt almost a new relation to it. . . . She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. (47)

Here, there very much is a sense of intimacy, sacredness, of place, of love for the smallest parts of nature. Barillas seems accurate when he designates Alexandra’s ordering of the landscape as an artistic endeavor (67), and the passage to which he points in this context is very significant: “There was something individual about the great farm” (178). Alexandra’s business savvy is, again and again, equated with a romantic idea of “imagination.” While Cather clearly is the product of an industrialized society and seems imbued with this society’s images, rhetoric, and values, she, nonetheless, seems to also be reacting against its utilitarian and abstractionist impulses and does seem to carefully depict her heroine as a sacramental lover of Creation. In her love of Creation, however, Alexandra does clearly fail to achieve personal fulfillment due to an absence of personal communion. She pays a high price for her role as artist as well as for her role as manager. In the end, Amédée’s life stands out as the one with the greatest redemptive possibilities in the novel; though industrialism impinges on his life tragically, he remains embosomed in personal communion even in death, a goal unreachable for any of the Protestant characters. Thus, the text does not ultimately seem to validate Alexandra, even though it frequently tends toward celebrating and idealizing her: her connection to the land has soothed her spirit, but full comfort is withheld since she does, in the final analysis, stop short of being able to comprehend it sacramentally.9 And, thus, as Rosowski has pointed out, the novel seems more tragic despite the traditionally comic marriage ending. The figure of Alexandra has elicited a complex, critical response with emphases varying from that on her imperialistic and nature-suppressing aspect to an emphasis on her intimacy with the land and Earth-mother function. The



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first strand of criticism emphasizes the checkered geometry of the landscape she subdues and its implication of an abstracted impersonal life, of which Alexandra’s childlessness is another expression;10 the other strand has emphasized Alexandra’s almost erotic closeness to the land, one that seems to suggest that fulfillment, creativity, and fertility are not contingent upon “having a man.”11 Of course, many critics, as for instance John H. Randall III, Robert J. Nelson, and Demaree C. Peck, see Alexandra ambiguously as a positive artist figure giving herself creatively to the land, which she is shaping, and on the other hand, as a figure who in spite of a spiritually significant “artistic” fulfillment is humanly deprived of spontaneity and a relationality for which the role of earth-cultivator is a dubious substitute. In My Ántonia, the roles of sterile imperialist/sublimating artist/Emersonian ego and relational, fecund Earth mother are actually split between the childless, idealistic, and scholarly narrator Jim Burden and the exceedingly fertile farm-woman Ántonia Shimerda Cuzak, although some ambiguity remains as to just how ideal a figure Ántonia is in the final analysis.12 Yet, a general critical consensus seems to have emerged, at least in relation to Burden; he is, indeed, afraid of sex, incapable of relationship, caught up in a life-denying, self-protective idealism; he is the very epitome of the kind of secularized, post-Protestant “abstractionist” whose lack of sacramental relationality the Midwestern modernists so strongly decried. Throughout the novel, Jim fails to learn from the land and from the people who are genuinely close to it, particularly Ántonia. Yet, the attentive reader is clearly shown just how and where Jim fails, and, once more, as in “Neighbour Rosicky” and O Pioneers!, a Catholic sacramental subtext is intimately associated with the vision of fulfillment that so strongly contrasts the narrator’s—and the puritanical town of Black Hawk’s—sterility. In her discussion of “Creative Fertility and the National Romance in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and My Ántonia,” Mary Paniccia Carden associates Jim Burden with the frontier masculinity defined by the influential nineteenth-century historian Frederick Jackson Turner and adopted by numerous historians in Turner’s wake. She quotes Richard Slotkin’s observation that Turner sees America as a “wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, selfreliant individual to thrust his way to the top” (qtd. in Carden 276; Slotkin 5). After pointing out Turner’s familiar “virgin soil” image, Carden evokes the “‘thrusting’ male pioneer enact[ing] the violent heroics of masculine creativity that expand national borders” (276). To this pioneer, in his “manly exertion,” the wild Western landscape “appear[s] . . . as a fair, blank page on which to write a new chapter in

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the story of man’s struggle for a higher type of society” (qtd. in Carden 276; Turner 261). This violent, imposing sexuality is the very opposite of the sacramental, relational sexuality seen by Midwestern modernists as expressive of a proper and fulfilled identity. The difference here is that between the brutal deflowerer Jerome Hadley of “‘Unused’” and Dark Laughter’s relational gardener Bruce Dudley. In this context, it is significant that the orphaned Virginian child Jim Burden, as he arrives in Nebraska, where his grandparents live, sees the country there as “nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made” (718). Rather than being seen as a concrete Other, a force and reality to be reckoned with, the Midwestern land here is seen as primarily malleable, as a realm to be conquered, subdued, and shaped according to human will. And yet, the orphaned Jim fears the land’s immensity, fears losing himself in a land that seems to call for a powerful act of self-definition. Thus, he imposes upon the landscape not some proactive pioneer scheme but takes the approach that Robert Beverley deplores in his history of colonial Virginia when he speaks of indolent settlers sponging on the blessings of the land (Kolodny 15): Jim defines the land as “mother,” as a realm of enveloping gratification in which the differentiation, tension, and struggle of adult life are excluded. Young, exposed, and unable to define himself in the terms of power for which the malleable but massive landscape seems to call, Jim instead defines the landscape in such a way that he can avoid the necessity of self-definition. This definitional act, of course, is merely the negative converse of a pseudo-Nietzschean proactive pioneer will, for it ultimately submerges the Other in the Self and thus is closely allied to the imperialism of nineteenth-century American culture; in any case, it represents the abstract ordering of the world into a rigid system that lacks openness, that ultimately lacks the full presence of an Other and thus preempts relational identities. Demaree C. Peck has pointed out the profound Emersonianism of Jim’s stance toward the Nebraska vastitude—she sees his first wagon ride over the prairie, from the Black Hawk train station to his grandparents’ homestead, as “the greatest escape of all, for he symbolically escapes from the world of reality into the world of disembodied spirit” (136). Quoting Jim’s statement that he “had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction” (718), Peck notes that “Jim occupies instead ‘the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it’” (136). She adds that “in this void that predates creation, Jim seems to be the only inhabitant,” as he does not feel that his dead parents are there (136). Jim’s heaven, according to Peck, “bears a resemblance not to the Christian dwelling place for the dead in the afterlife, but



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to the psychological dwelling place for the soul in its life before birth. He ‘did not say my prayers that night,’ for he inhabits a primitive world where God does not yet rule, and where he himself does not yet ‘exist’; he is an undifferentiated being who has not yet fallen into self-awareness” (136). In other words, Jim partakes of the undifferentiated, monistic Emersonian Over-Soul and seems to apprehend what Wordsworth communicates in his ode “Intimations of Immortality”: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: / The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, / Hath had elsewhere its setting, / And cometh from afar / . . . trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home. / Heaven lies about us in our infancy” (V, 1–9). The world is set and static, a Platonic world of fixed essences but without the personal, mysterious, dynamic God of sacramental theology. The human Self too is fundamentally static, and it is necessary for human beings to continually return to their originary childhood Self or even infant Self, a Self as yet uncorrupted by time, space, decay, distraction. One can easily recognize the resemblance between the young Jim Burden and Anderson’s young Tom Edwards in “An Ohio Pagan” or his Hugh McVey in Poor White, who are one with nature but socially inept and unprepared for two important human realities: struggle and relationship. At stake in both Cather’s and Anderson’s fiction is whether America’s fall from a mythical, ahistorical, and therefore not really feasible Edenic pastoral vision can be translated into the positive terms of relationship, of a relational restoration of the unity of self and world, self and other. Hugh McVey and Tom Edwards succeed, whereas, like Anderson’s May Edgley, Cather’s Jim Burden fails. Jim’s Self is identified with “Nature” in the Emersonian sense, that is, “the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind” (17), a fleeting, symbolic expression of the divine Spirit of which the human spirit is but a particle and microcosm. Thus, in Wordsworth’s words, “The Youth, who daily farther from the east / Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest” (V, 15–16). Jim Burden’s goal in life, as an adult narrator, is to travel back to the “east” of his childhood, which in his biographical context happens to be the West: Peck notes that whereas Ántonia, who arrives with her family in Nebraska on the same night as Jim, marries and has children and works a farm, and thus “travels the road of experience,” Jim travels “the road of desire . . . home to his original self ”; Ántonia, and, one might add, nature itself, function as a mere “facilitating signpost” toward that mystical goal (157). As Emerson argues in “Nature” that friends, like nature, are mere physical symbols of an overarching ideality and can thus be dismissed or left behind once they have brought us closer to such ideality (24), thus Jim uses Ántonia and

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the Nebraska of his childhood as symbols restoring him to an ideality in which nothing offers resistance to his ideal Self.13 For twenty years, Jim avoids visiting Ántonia for fear that her actual, aging presence might disturb the nostalgic ideal he cherishes, and when he finally does visit her, it is only to wallow in the past and to romanticize her every gesture. Jim really does use Ántonia for his own needs and deservedly meets with incredulity when he intimates to her sons that he at one time truly loved their mother. Though Jim relentlessly pursues his idealizing self-gratification, the novel is full of indications that the narrator’s idealizing project fails to yield fulfillment and that the world sacramentally resists his categorical and anti-relational impositions, just as Ántonia—because he has never loved but only idealized her—has become another man’s wife and leaves him a lonely man with memories rather than present fulfillment. Jim’s lack of fulfillment is mirrored in other figures’ similar lack, and it is interesting to note that Jim tends to have a fascination with these figures. Namely, Mr. Shimerda and the Russian immigrants Peter and Pavel are tragic figures who hold a certain appeal for Jim, and their fate is intimately connected with the novel’s sacramental subtext. Firstly, there is the oft-debated, seemingly disconnected episode related by the Russian immigrants Pavel and Peter, a gruesome story of a bridal couple being fed to wolves. This story is associated with excommunication from the Russian Orthodox community. Secondly, there is Jim’s persistent idealization of Mr. Shimerda, Ántonia’s father, who is cultured, sensitive, and ill-prepared for the Nebraska wilderness to which he immigrates in midlife and who commits suicide during the family’s first winter in Nebraska. The Shimerdas are Catholic and respond to the father’s death in a pronouncedly Catholic manner; Mr. Shimerda’s suicide is marked as a clearly non-Catholic act that, in more than one way, excommunicates him. It is thus telling that Jim would find him an attractive icon. The story of Pavel and Peter, which results in religious and social excommunication and in their concomitant physical and spiritual degradation, is shockingly stark; it is one of those disturbing, traumatic episodes so often found in Cather’s fiction that break the cool, clear, picturesque tone of the larger narrative and stand out gruesomely vivid and resistant to idealization or amelioration. Thus, the gross, foul-smelling, rattlesnake-eating tramp who maliciously drowns himself in Moonstone, Colorado’s watertank, thereby poisoning the water and killing many children, causes one of the central psychological crises of Thea, the romantic, musically gifted heroine of The Song of the Lark (1915); the evil and revolting occurrence can hardly be assimilated into Thea’s psyche and seems to



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resist the larger tone and current of her story. In a similar manner, the story of Peter and Pavel stands out traumatically among the childhood memories of Jim Burden. That he is able to assimilate successfully both this story and Mr. Shimerda’s suicide into his nostalgic consciousness is a disturbing fact that warns the reader to resist Jim’s perspective.14 The story, told by Pavel on his deathbed at his and Peter’s Nebraska homestead, begins with a pronounced image of community. In their native Ukraine, the two friends are groomsmen, their friendship for the groom honored by his assigning them a distinguished position at his wedding feast. The feast is held at a neighboring village, and the groom and his friends and kin have to travel through the woods on sleighs. As in O Pioneers! a wedding feast expresses the sacramental, physico-spiritual communion that is at the heart of Cather’s vision of fulfillment. The feast follows the church ceremony as a natural progression and suspends the usual workaday schedule of life: “The dinner lasted all afternoon; then it became a supper and continued far into the night” (748). Of course, unlike many Protestant American weddings of that era, it involves “much dancing and drinking” (748). Spiritual, sacred community as expressed in the church ritual and the physical, bodily community expressed by feasting and dancing are not separate; body and soul are a unity, sex, a communal act both physical and spiritual, looms in the background, and Pavel and Peter are integrated into this communal setting via the bonds of friendship. The feast’s suspension of time is significant; communal sacramental realities are not fragmented, segmented, compartmentalized but form the whole and complete pattern in which life is to organize itself. And yet, Peter and Pavel are about to exit this communal pattern permanently by suspending it for one horrible moment. It is the privilege of Pavel and Peter to drive the sleigh of the bridal couple (“our Pavel and Peter!” proudly exclaims Jim at this part of the story), a further mark of their meaningful integration into the community, of their special relationship with the groom. And here follows the introduction of what will test the two friends’ communal belonging: “The wolves were bad that winter, and every one knew it, yet when they heard the first wolf-cry, the drivers were not much alarmed. They had too much good food and drink in them” (748). The presence of real, actual danger in nature is theoretical to the merrymakers; the more immediate sense of well-being blinds them to the actuality of danger and death. Only in the previous chapter, a similar observation has been made about a snake that Jim slays: “My big rattler was old, and had led too easy a life; there was not much fight in him. He had probably lived there for years, with a

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fat prairie dog for breakfast whenever he felt like it, a sheltered home, even an owl-feather bed, perhaps, and he had forgot that the world doesn’t owe rattlers a living” (743).15 The first fault in the tragic story is that of all the wedding party; they fail to see the Otherness of the world, that their own present ease does not translate into a world of ease. The Self ’s boundaries are overextended and the brokenness and, here, the literal hunger of the Other go unacknowledged. Yet nature sobers up the unaware, and before too long, packs of wolves are chasing the sledges, more and more of which overturn, their occupants and the horses pulling them shrieking in the throes of death. Pavel and Peter’s sledge, containing the bridal couple, is the foremost sleigh and escapes the wolves the longest, but finally, all the sleighs behind them have overturned, and a pack of wolves begins to catch up with them. Panicking, Pavel “call[s] to the groom that they must lighten—and point[s] to the bride. The young man curse[s] him and h[o]ld[s] her tighter. Pavel trie[s] to drag her away. In the struggle, the groom [rises]. Pavel knock[s] him over the side of the sledge and thr[ows] the girl after him” (750). At this point, repression sets in; Pavel cannot remember anything following his horrible deed, and his memory resumes, significantly, only at the point when monastery bells, the emblems of a sacred, sacramental community, bring him and Peter back to their senses: “The first thing either of them noticed was a new sound that broke into the clear air, louder than they had ever heard it before—the bell of the monastery of their own village, ringing for early prayers” (750). The excommunication that follows is swift and thorough; Pavel’s mother refuses to look at her son, and the two men are driven from their village: as their grisly story spreads throughout Russia, Pavel and Peter feel compelled to emigrate to America, where they work in several Midwestern cities, “always unfortunate” (750). Eventually, because of a decline in Pavel’s health, the two men “try farming” near Black Hawk, Nebraska. Interpretations of the tragic characters’ story have generally followed in the vein of Blanche Gelfant’s groundbreaking critique, in which she emphasizes the tale’s connection to Jim’s fear of sex, fear of the Other, and fear of all that resists the expansive romantic Ego. She detects a misogynistic subtext throughout the novel, the male Self ’s fear of women, of an Other not easily dealt with, an Other requiring engagement; thus, she links the feeding of the bride to the wolves to another potentially misogynistic image in the novel: “[The vignette’s] gruesome meaning focuses the apparently disjunct parts of the novel. . . . The art of My Ántonia lies in the subtle and inevitable relevance of its details, even the most trivial, like the picture Jim chooses to decorate a Christmas book for Ántonia’s



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little sister: ‘I took “Napoleon Announcing the Divorce to Josephine” for my frontispiece’ . . . In one way or another, the woman must go” (75). Gelfant notes further Jim’s idealizing appropriation of Pavel and Peter as a subsumption of resistant material into his self-serving romantic vision: “Peter and Pavel, dreadful to any ordinary mind for their murderous deed, ostracized by everyone, now disease-ridden and mindless, are to Jim picturesque outcasts” (81). Gelfant could well have cited in this context one of the most shocking statements in the entire novel, one that is clearly meant to raise a red flag for the reader as to the narrator’s reliability: “For Ántonia and me, the story of the wedding party was never at an end. We did not tell Pavel’s secret to any one, but guarded it jealously—as if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that night long ago, and the wedding party had been sacrificed, to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure” (751). What is disturbing is the narrator’s omission of any qualifying statement; it is uncertain whether he has grown to understand the full actuality of the story. Since his whole narrative is focused on an aesthetic consumption of the past, it appears that he continues fairly oblivious to the real suffering of others and seems to see the world as a mere artistic canvas for him to pleasurably absorb into his hedonistically perceiving Self. He thus violates a key concern of modernist Midwestern writers’ storytelling, such as thematized explicitly by Anderson: namely, storytelling is to be a concrete, aesthetic evocation and exploration of the Other, a partaking in and intuitive, emphatic meeting of that Other whose story is being narrated. This sentiment is expressed by both the narrator of Winesburg, Ohio and of “‘Unused,’” and it is evident throughout Anderson’s oeuvre. Storytelling becomes a means of experiencing in concrete form the mysterious spiritual reality of another being and therefore functions as a sacrament. Jim’s superficial consumption of Pavel’s spiritually content-rich tale shows his lack of true connection with others, his a-sacramental approach to the Other, and his expansive selfishness, which sees others and the phenomenal world in general not as fully real beings or presences but as sensory material to pleasurably ignite and be molded by the imaginative activity of the Self. At this point in the critical conversation, there is little controversy over this one central aspect of the novel: Jim subsumes reality in a self-centered ideality that is to protect and insulate him from the mature struggles of life experience, of living with other people in a world of friction and differentiation. Though I fully agree with Gelfant and subsequent critics on all the points mentioned, I would expand the discussion by considering what Peter and Pavel’s remarkable story has to say about the Self ’s sacramental relation to the world, and

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finally, how the story relates to the Midwestern landscape in which the reader finds the two ostracized Ukrainian characters after their eerie misadventure. As has been noted, the story sets up a sacramental, communal context for Pavel and Peter, one reinforced by their apostolic names: Paul, the great missionary to the Gentiles who contributed like hardly any other apostle to the building of the Church; and Peter, the other preeminent apostle whose name means “rock” and was given to him by Christ Himself: “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16.18). Of course, the gates of hell did, in a sense, overpower Russian Peter because he and Pavel forgot what the Apostle Paul says: “Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph. 6.11–12). As has already been noted, the wedding party has precisely not been girded to resist evil, its apprehension of danger being merely theoretical: when evil befalls them in physical form,16 it also presents for Peter and Pavel a particular spiritual crisis in which they, apparently ill-prepared, succumb to evil, to the “gates of hell,” even as they outrun the pack of wolves. The crucial spiritual myopia at work is precisely the two men’s failure to see that the “church,” the “community,” has not been overrun by the “gates of Hades,” for though they suffer a horrible physical destruction, the bridal couple, representing the larger sacramental community, cling to and fight for each other up to the last moment; spiritually, they continue in a communion from which, the Christian believes, Death himself has no power to sunder. Pavel and Peter, however, completely focused on the mere physical aspect of their situation, lose sight of its still-present spiritual realities, and thus, they lose sight of relationship and communion, instantly turning life into a struggle in which the physically fittest survives, in which mere physical survival is all. It is as though the Church had indeed been overpowered, as though they were indeed merely battling against creatures of flesh and blood. By being spiritually ill-prepared, by failing to realize the presence of an evil, resisting Other in the world, and by failing to view the world sacramentally as a physico-spiritual rather than merely as a physical drama, Pavel and Peter gain physical life only to awaken to a nightmarish living death. The monastery bell that awakens them to their new death-in-life is the bell of community. The monks presumably inhabiting this monastery are outside of the possibility of earthly marriage, much as Pavel and Peter now will be due to their crime; but in tragic contrast



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to the two miserable bachelors, the religious community is a living communal manifestation of a higher marriage, namely of Christ to His bride, the Church. Conversely, Pavel and Peter do not even find communion betwixt each other (we learn that Pavel despises his docile companion) and are living manifestations of a profound spiritual and social divorce (747). Though Peter sometimes comes to the Protestant church “at the sod schoolhouse” in Nebraska, he sits by the door “apologetically” and does not understand the language nor find connection with anyone there (734). The morning chimes of the Ukraine monastery have been his and Pavel’s death knell. Though the tale is Ukrainian, it, of course, has universal implications, and the novel ties it in specifically with the American Midwest, in which setting it is told. Pavel and Peter have come to America in order to escape their story, in order to erase the past. They are thus allied with America’s national self-concept as a new beginning for humanity, as a place where ideality may be possible. And they are peculiarly allied with the blank, unwritten quality of the Nebraska landscape. Pavel’s health having declined in the urban environments in which the “friends” have worked, they move out to Nebraska, hoping that Pavel’s health may be restored. Having been challenged and defeated by nature in the Ukraine, they are now attempting to reconnect with nature, hoping to partake of nature’s vitality. What they do not realize is that the story from which they are fleeing is not confined to a particular local setting but forms part of a larger, more encompassing reality, a reality extending to the New World, and even to the empty Nebraska prairie; they have violated laws that are a part of Creation, and they cannot escape their guilt nor can they escape the brokenness of all Creation, as their farming misfortunes demonstrate. Mere physical relocation does not change the basic spiritual realities of this world, a lesson with which America as a nation has been confronted. Thus Pavel dies a miserable death and, in a last attempt at sacramentally reconciling himself to humanity, makes a deathbed confession of his past guilt to his one friend, Mr. Shimerda (with Ántonia and Jim accompanying). Even on his deathbed, however, he curses his enemies and displays contempt for the fat, helpless Peter; bitterness has taken over his soul. He is buried in the “Norwegian graveyard”—in Cather’s fiction, a non-Protestant being buried among Norwegians is code for excommunication, as is made explicit, for instance, in O Pioneers! Pavel dies not merely a Russian isolato; his failure in the New World, and particularly his failure in a Midwestern pastoral context, bespeak the fundamental spiritual tensions of the world, its evil, anti-communal, and good, communal realities that cannot be disregarded

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without severe spiritual consequences. And from these tensions, from the order of Creation and the history of the world, neither America nor the supposedly rejuvenating West or Midwest are exempt. Like Pavel, so Mr. Shimerda cannot be buried in a sacramentally significant graveyard,17 such as functions as the central symbol of spiritual wholeness in “Neighbour Rosicky.” His suicide during the Shimerdas’ and Jim’s first winter in Nebraska is the deed that, like Peter and Pavel’s atrocious act, excommunicates him not just physically but spiritually. His suicide partakes of many of the same characteristics of the Russians’ crime; lost in his immediate experience of a cold, dreadful wasteland barren of all that he loves about life, Shimerda is unable to see beyond the moment, to see the larger patterns, to truly know that seasons change and that the prairie will grow warm and verdant again. In his reductive, self-absorbed immediacy, he misses the larger pattern that could give him hope.18 An at least vague recognition of this fact seems implied in Ántonia’s lament, “I wish my papa live to see this summer” (802), and also in her question, “What would anybody want to kill themselves in summer for?” (827). In this context, Jim’s own experience of winter is rather significant: “The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify—it was like the light of truth itself ” (823). With “a kind of bitter song” the wind springs up and says, “‘This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.’ It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer” (823). Identifying verdure and life as a “mask,” seeing life and loveliness as “frivolous,” and seeing Death as the truth—all of this is, of course, a misperception of the natural world. For nature does not lose its viability in winter; winter is but the prelude to another cycle of life, a life already contained in, and part and parcel of, the winter Earth, the winter trees. Winter is, indeed, the occasion for nature’s renewal in spring. Thus the narrator in O Pioneers! explicitly notes winter’s vital function for nature (a function akin to that of sleep in human life): “Winter has settled down over the Divide again; the season in which Nature recuperates, in which she sinks to sleep between the fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring” (229). The sexual subtext is clear: spring’s passion leads to the conception of what will come to fruition in the fall, and death is a necessary stage in this generational cycle. The narrator implies an admonition to faith in the following statement: “It is like an iron country, and the spirit is oppressed by its rigor and melancholy. One could easily believe that in that dead landscape the germs of life and fruitfulness were extinct forever” (229); but, of course, they are not.



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Jim’s consciousness has failed to accommodate death into his understanding of life; as a man to whom youth and the original self are all, as a man who will never have children, he is incapable of taking a comforting view of the cycle of the generations and incapable of seeing himself as part of a larger communal reality. His own immediate experience of youth’s loss, of aging, of his romantic Self being assailed, leaves him with a foreshortened and depressive view of life. He elevates death, a distorted Platonic idea of ultimate stasis, to the position of cosmic essence: rather than seeing the dynamic, cyclical spirit animating nature as the fundamental principle of reality, he sees stasis as its core, with fleeting shadows shimmering briefly and occasionally before the grand, mute, unmoving screen of eternity. The personal logos of Christianity does not inhabit this universe: the liturgical year is as absurd as the natural one, and sacramentality gives way to a frozen cosmos of death and nothingness. Thus, the Church’s persisting life, its prayer meetings and choir practices and the accompanying glow of the stained-glass window, draw Jim but do not give any new direction to his thoughts. Christmas, the incarnation of Christ amidst the bleak of winter, becomes seasonally and spatially dislocated; sitting with the Harling family in their kitchen, with Ántonia baking cookies, “old Christmases and weddings in Bohemia” are the topic of conversation, and Nina Harling “cherishe[s] a belief that Christ was born in Bohemia a short time before the Shimerdas left that country” (they left it in summer) (825). Jim’s vision of winter uses the stained-glass church window as a foil without understanding the full sacramental significance of its “crude reds and greens and blues”: his vision denies the continuance of life as expressed by the Church, and it denies Christmas, upholding instead a fundamental nihilism. Shimerda, similarly, does not find an anchoring other in a stark wintry world that denies his Self the expansion and sublimated boundlessness that alone create significance for him; in a spirit similar to that of the childless man Jim’s isolated sense of self, Shimerda does not think of his children when he kills himself and does not see a possibility for his own life’s renewal in a new season; fixed and static in a self-enclosed world of despair, he fails to grasp his part in a larger life. Neither Jim nor Mr. Shimerda really understand Christmas, as is evinced in the Christmas scenes that the narrator presents, scenes in which the precedence of comfort and “culture” obscures any theological meaning. For instance, when Mr. Shimerda visits the Burdens on Christmas Day, he “enjoy[s] the atmosphere of comfort and security in . . . the house. . . . [I]n the crowded clutter of their cave, the old man had come to believe that peace and order had vanished from the earth, or existed only in the old world he had left so far behind” (768). When the Christmas tree is lighted, Shimerda kneels down before it, before “peace and

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order,” before the European culture that used to support his life and which he now finds present in the Burdens’ comfortable, civilized household (768). The Apollonian connotations of the order-loving Shimerda are readily apparent: his Apollonian faith depends on an elaborate cultural security blanket and is based on not having to confront fallen nature, or nature at all (hence he kneels before a heavily decorated tree severed from its roots). He does not use the Christmas tree sacramentally; it imparts no grace because it stands for that which is out of reach rather than imparting the presence of that which is actually present. Christ could be present to him always; European culture, for now, is generally out of his reach. Therefore, the Christmas tree does not save him; in the immediate absence of comforting circumstances, Mr. Shimerda loses faith and cannot see the larger whole of reality. Pointing to a link between the Christmas scene and Shimerda’s suicide, John J. Murphy observes, in My Ántonia: The Road Home (1989), that “Mr. Shimerda’s stiffened body is juxtaposed with the stiff paper Christ Child Jim hangs on the tree to remind us of the promise of resurrection, hinted at later in the coming of spring at the end of the first book and the explosion of children from the cave in the last” (40). Mr. Shimerda fails to see the living promise in the symbols before him, but rather literalistically identifies their material stasis with “peace” and eerily emulates this stasis when he takes his own life. Both Jim and Mr. Shimerda are self-absorbed; they abstract reality into static categories without seeing its dynamic nature, and they fail to subsume their own Selves in the sacramental mystery inherent in the world around them. Both commit a form of suicide while still in life: they resemble Mrs. Webster in Anderson’s Many Marriages, who, frozen in a static “respectable” conception of life, commits actual suicide when life assaults her stable, ideal framework; her suicide merely confirms her already existing life-in-death. One of the primary factors that drives Mr. Shimerda’s deepening depression is his profound attachment to culture, which is foiled by the Nebraska landscape’s stark, uncultured wilderness character. Not only must he confront unmitigated nature, he must also squarely confront his family, an involvement he has heretofore avoided. At several points in the novel that conjure up Mr. Shimerda’s Bohemian past, we learn of a particular trombone-playing friend, who appears to have been a more meaningful companion to Mr. Shimerda than his feisty, pushy, and materialistic wife, who holds little in common with her sensitive husband. On an outing to the nearby river bluffs during elder-blossom time, Ántonia reminisces, in conversation with Jim: “It makes me homesick, Jimmy, this flower, this smell. . . . We have this flower very much at home, in the old country. It always grew in



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our yard and my papa had a green bench and a table under the bushes. In summer, when they were in bloom, he used to sit there with his friend that played the trombone. When I was little, I used to go down there to hear them talk—beautiful talk, like what I never hear in this country . . . [a]bout music, and the woods, and about God, and when they were young” (860). The pastoral, safe, garden world that this scene evokes is a natural world replete with comfortable green benches that are part and parcel of it, as the color green signifies; this scene is inhabited by Shimerda and a musical friend, a friend sharing in a communion based on artistic sublimation. With him, Shimerda used to play what is his central symbol in the novel, the violin. Having indulged the crasser side of his nature, that is, having gotten a servant girl with whom he had no spiritual bond pregnant, Shimerda has committed himself to a loveless marriage and has found comfort in music, conversation, sublimation, and pastoral nature—in other words, in culture. It is his wife who has dragged him to a world of stark nature, just as she once tempted him into fleshly indulgence, and here, in this realm of stark realities, he is forced to face, without the ability to sublimate, the primary facts of his life. In this situation, rather than choosing struggle, community, and a substantive engagement with his difficult spouse, he chooses death, the ultimate form of the escapism he has already been practicing. He is unable to discern the sacramental significance of the struggles descending upon him; in his romantic, sublimated Self-expansion, he fails to understand his own part in fallenness and brokenness, the necessity for humility and the mysterious spiritual communion that awaits those who, as Lynch puts it, go “through the definite,” through that which is narrow and trying and resistant.19 His lack of faith in his marriage and his lack of faith in Nebraska are one: only if we patiently engage the concretely resistant Other, believing in its mysterious spiritual possibilities, do we see fruition and communion. As Pavel and Peter, at their crucial moment of decision, needed to walk in faith through the valley of the shadow of death in order to receive full life, so Mr. Shimerda needed to live in faith through a Nebraska winter and a difficult marriage to eventually see that which Ántonia, having chosen the route of faith, finds at novel’s end: a happy household full of children, and another, more hard-earned garden, an orchard where there is “the deepest peace,” and “full of sun, like a cup,” and full of the smell of ripe apples, the smell of fruition (920). The connection between the garden image at the novel’s end and Mr. Shimerda’s failure of hope is also observed by Ed Kleiman: “The underground hovel in which the Shimerdas at first sheltered in a grotesque existence that was itself a living death is later

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transformed into a fruit cave, and from it bursts forth the golden treasure of life itself [i.e., Ántonia’s golden- and brown-haired children, described as a ‘veritable explosion of life’]. . . . Here, from this matrix of life, emerges the prodigality of nature, the golden promise of America that Coronado was blind to. Like Mr. Shimerda . . . Coronado has died of a ‘broken heart’—a heart that has perished, in one way or another, of self-inflicted wounds” (151–52). Of course, it would have taken resolute action for Mr. Shimerda to emerge from the cave of his life’s chaos and squalor into a true garden of peace, but he is a man who lives only in his idealizing imagination and does not engage with the fallen world, does not, to speak in religious metaphors, bear the cross and, therefore, does not enter into life, into the paradoxical Christian life-in-death. Browbeaten and allowing himself to be determined externally every step along the way, Shimerda is largely responsible for his own fate: “He is not a man of action, and any other kind of man is lost on the frontier. Unable to use force against the external world, he finally raises his hand against himself,” an act that signals “an abdication of responsibility” and which causes all the more consternation in light of his Catholic faith (Randall 24). Faith without deeds is dead; Mr. Shimerda does not translate his rich imagination into patient actions motivated by ultimate hopes. Instead of meeting the challenges of fallen nature squarely and accepting its conditions, he chooses immediate transcendence and makes Death his cold garden. When Mr. Shimerda dies, Ambrosch, the surly, pushy son who clearly takes more after his mother than after his father, surprises those who thought him unfeeling: Ambrosch, Jake said, showed more human feeling than he would have supposed him capable of; but he was chiefly concerned about getting a priest, and about his father’s soul, which he believed was in a place of torment and would remain there until his family and the priest had prayed a good deal for him. “As I understood it,” Jake concluded, “it will be a matter of years to pray his soul out of Purgatory, and right now he’s in torment.” (780)

Ambrosch, here, in spite of his many personal flaws, demonstrates a fundamental awareness of his father’s embeddedness in a spiritual community and of the struggle and hard work it will take to restore his father’s severed ties to that community. Willing to struggle, willing to do definite and concrete relational work for years to come by praying his father out of purgatory, Ambrosch exemplifies what his father has lacked; and though the Anglo-American Protestant farmhand Jake



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cannot relate to the theological specificity of Ambrosch’s expression of “human feeling,” he nonetheless recognizes the substance of love evinced in Ambrosch’s physico-spiritual sacramental labor. This casts a new light on Ambrosch’s general work-drivenness; perhaps his relentless struggle with the Nebraska land is also deeply motivated by a sense of communal family responsibility. Jim, the romantic narrator, of course resents Ambrosch’s sacramental perspective; particularly, he cannot believe in the idea of purgatory, for Mr. Shimerda, in his view, owns nothing that would require expurgation: “Mr. Shimerda had not been rich and selfish [like the parable figure Dives]; he had only been so unhappy that he could not live any longer” (780). Jim, as he is thinking these thoughts, is still under the spell of a mystical experience in his grandmother’s kitchen, where he has been left alone while all the adults have gone over to help the Shimerdas. He feels as though the ghost of Mr. Shimerda has sought refuge from the “wind singing over hundreds of miles of snow,” from the “tormenting winter,” in the “quiet house,” in “the kitchen . . . tucked away so snugly underground” (779). The underground kitchen here becomes a snug grave, or a womb-like sphere, especially since it has maternal associations with warmth and nourishment. Jim is not mistaken when he believes this kitchen to be Shimerda’s spiritual home; like Jim, Shimerda refuses the struggle represented by the harsh Nebraska wilderness and refuses to exit the womb, refuses differentiation and relationship, refuses engagement with the Other. Jim dreams of Mr. Shimerda’s soul making its way back to the Bohemian homeland, back to the glorious days of youth, and it is a comforting vision; the man’s gruesome disembodiment is transfigured into an ethereal journey back to the Platonic, original Self, to its origins, to a kind of spiritual womb. Ultimately, bodily existence, the physical, does not matter; the soul must seek to keep itself extricated from it. What Lynch calls the “potencies of being in the flesh” are omitted; true insight, which can be arrived at only in and through the definite, is sought via a Platonic leap, a leap of which Shimerda’s suicide is the best emblem. Ironically, Shimerda’s solitary grave will remain one of only few patches of wilderness, of tall red prairie grass, in the area; his lack of sacramental engagement with life has precluded him from participating in any fruitful symbiosis of human labor and natural fertility, and thus, by clinging to a vision of pastoral perfection, of blissful sponging on life, he precisely is excluded from participation in pastoral actualities. When at middle age Jim, an urban railroad representative, childless and unhappily married, visits Ántonia’s farm, he finds in Ántonia’s life that happy symbiosis, a deeply wholesome pastoralism that does not exclude

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the realities of time, death, fallenness, or, most importantly, the Otherness of the world and the Self ’s subordinate, relational role in the larger scheme. Jim, who has never embraced experience, time, or mortality, can only cling to a static vision of the past: though he realizes he has missed something, he holds on to the dubious comfort of “possessing together [with Ántonia] the precious, the incommunicable past” (937).20 Jim’s lonely Platonic nostalgia; Shimerda’s isolated grave; Pavel and Peter’s living death; Alexandra Bergson and Carl Linstrum’s somewhat sterile and belated marriage; the violent end to Marie Shabata and Emil Bergson’s illicit, romantically reckless passion: all of these stand, to a greater or lesser degree, in dreary contrast to Ántonia Cuzak’s loving household, to the Ukrainian monastery, to the joyful communal spirit of the French Catholic community, to Catholic and Orthodox wedding feasts, and to that emblem of sacramental community contemplated by the lonely and childless Doctor Ed: the rural Catholic cemetery where lies the family man and neighbor Rosicky, a man who rejected the artistic sublimation available to him in New York to find community with other people and an integration into a primal reality that is communal at its core.



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8 “A Story of the West, After All” The Sacramental and Midwestern Pastoral Subtext of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

In the rain in the streets of my city I stood. My clothes were foul. In the woven cloth that covered my body the dust of my city had lodged. The dust of my civilization was in my soul. I was a murderer—a weeping prostitute standing by a wall. —from “Song of Theodore” by Sherwood Anderson I am of the West, the long West of the sunsets. I am of the deep fields where the corn grows. The sweat of apples is in me. I am the beginning of things and the end of things. —from “Manhattan” by Sherwood Anderson

To include F. Scott Fitzgerald in a discussion of Midwestern authors and their sacramental view of the Midwestern land may seem strange and tenuous from a variety of angles. First of all, Fitzgerald spent his later youth primarily at Eastern preparatory schools and then settled in New York and France as an adult. In his works, while often his characters do have a Midwestern background, they nonetheless live, like their author, on the Eastern Seaboard or in Europe, and occasionally in the Southern homeland of Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda. The bulk of the novels’ and stories’ action takes place in these non-Midwestern settings. Secondly, Fitzgerald, throughout his life, was a city- and suburb-dweller, not a Midwestern small-town resident like so many other authors from his region, such as Anderson, Lewis, Suckow, Dell, Wescott, and Cather. Whenever he writes about the Midwest, it is primarily in reference to the large urban centers of Minneapolis – 243 –

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or Chicago, which are at a significant remove from the Midwestern land, and his character Nick Carraway remarks that “not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns” constitute his “middle-west,” but rather, the trains bearing him back to Minneapolis from his East Coast prep school, and the Christmas decorations and family traditions and middle-class smugness of a distinctly urban setting. And finally, the sacramentality of the ex-Catholic Fitzgerald’s worldview is doubtful when one considers the following observation by critic Bryce J. Christensen, one echoed by others: .

The mystery of which Fitzgerald wrote to Jamieson was the secular mystery of the romantic ideal struggling (but inevitably failing) to find adequate embodiment in the harsh truth of reality. However, because Fitzgerald alludes to and employs the language of the Christian mystery of the Incarnation in elucidating the mystery surrounding Jay Gatsby, the effect ultimately is to call into question the very possibility of any genuine intersection between the ideal and the real, any truly valid incarnation. (16)

In other words, the possibility of the phenomenal world bearing actual reference to and expressing a whole and satisfying spiritual reality, a belief central to Anderson, does not seem to be present in the same way in Fitzgerald’s works where human dreams seem to encounter nothingness. These dreams bump up against a material world emptied of and inherently devoid of spiritual significance, such as powerfully expressed in Nick’s description of Jay Gatsby’s final disillusionment: “He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about” (169). And yet, we must take note of the complexity of this disillusioned vision—for example, Nick states that Gatsby is in his desperate state because he is paying “a high price for living too long with a single dream”; in other words, he has reduced the fullness of reality, has abstracted reality, imposed an arbitrary, limited vision upon it. Here we may recognize a parallel to Anderson’s view of human rhetoric, reductive ideology, and ungrounded dreams occluding the path to substantive experience and spiritual fulfillment—to a sacramental apprehension of the world, an apprehension that must begin not in rigid, exclusive dreams but in an openness to concrete, tangible reality. Furthermore, despite the urban setting of the novel, it is the relationship of human beings to nature that seems to be spiritually central,



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such as, for example, in the vision cited above, in which nature imagery abounds (sky, leaves, grass, rose, etc.); and upon close investigation of The Great Gatsby as well as others of Fitzgerald’s works, one finds that significant references to the natural realm form a vital subtext to the urban plot superstructure of the text. And finally, as to Fitzgerald’s Midwesternness, it would be glib to dismiss all too readily the carefully referenced Midwestern background of many of his characters, as well as his narrator’s problematic but important observation in The Great Gatsby that “this has been a story of the West, after all” (184). It seems that it is a particularly Midwestern historical and cultural experience that often shapes Fitzgerald’s characters’ vision of America as a whole and even of the world, and this experience does seems to relate to fertile and exuberant Midwestern nature and the spiritually significant sacramental resistance offered by it to a detached, abstract, and in many ways anti-sacramental, materialist-literalist American culture and ideology. The clash between a potentially significant natural realm of Midwestern fertility and a deathly civilization detached from it occurs throughout Fitzgerald’s oeuvre. One may consider, for instance, the vision of America offered by Henry Clay1 Marston in Fitzgerald’s “The Swimmers” (1929). Marston here is reflecting on America in general, and hailing from Virginia, he is likely to have drawn his vision of American nature from the experience of his Southern home state. However, his reflections are not very locally grounded and enter the dimension of national myth. His very home state of Virginia, in this nationally mythic context, takes on the connotation of Jeffersonianism, the pastoral philosophy expressed in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1787). This myth is in The Great Gatsby contrasted with the aristocratic character Tom Buchanan’s Southern-planter mentality, a mentality linked through the idyllic Versailles tapestry designs of Buchanan’s Manhattan apartment to the exploitive pseudopastoralism of feudal Europe. Jeffersonianism, betrayed by its originator, the Southern slaveholder Jefferson himself, and undermined by the aristocratic, oppressive nature of the Southern plantation idyll in general, becomes, in The Great Gatsby, dissociated from the South and instead associated with “that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night” (189). It is this realm into which the narrator, Nick Carraway, retreats because as a “Westerner,” he is “subtly unadaptable to Eastern life”; reminiscing, he becomes, at least momentarily, aware of the great fields of Minnesota, with which he feels an “identity” that is “unutterable” (188). We can, therefore, apply Marston’s nationally mythic vision to the nation’s mythically pastoral Midwestern heartland, though this vision is uttered by a Virginian character:

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Watching the fading city [of New York], the fading shore, from the deck of the Majestic, he had a sense of overwhelming gratitude and gladness that America was there, that under the ugly debris of industry the rich land still pushed up, incorrigibly lavish and fertile, and that in the heart of the leaderless people the old generosities and devotions fought on, breaking out sometimes in fanaticism and excess, but indomitable and undefeated. There was a lost generation in the saddle at the moment, but it seemed to him that the men coming on, the men of war, were better; and all his old feeling that America was a bizarre accident, a sort of historical sport, had gone forever. The best of America was the best of the world. (512)

As in Anderson’s works, modern American civilization here is equated with industrialism, pictured as the excretor of “ugly debris,” an excessive consumer and exploiter of the land, which nonetheless cannot undo the land whose life and vitality continue as a lasting, enduring substratum beneath the artificial wasteland that is the human superstructure.2 The nation’s hope lies in this powerful, enduring vitality of nature, in a larger-than-human life force often evoked by Anderson in the emblem of the river; it also lies in the new generation coming into power, a generation disillusioned with the false ideological rhetoric of World War I, which disregarded substantive, concrete human experience and imposed detached, abstract, conceptual structures upon real human suffering. Traumatized by such falsehood and discrepancy between abstraction and reality, the new generation is likely to return to the concrete, natural approach to life buried beneath the “ugly débris” of a discredited and shattered civilization. The truer American virtues buried beneath the industrial age are “generosities and devotions,” that is, an openhearted, Other-directed approach rather than one of competition and domination: this approach must not congeal into “fanaticism” or “excess,” for that would lead to the imposition of new abstractions and rigid structures. Nature’s concrete life and luxuriance admonishes human beings to broadmindedness and a concrete orientation and to abstain from what seems essentially to be equivalent to the Andersonian grotesque: narrow-mindedness, obsession, determination, a striving for domination, and operating within an abstractly conceived framework. Why is America not merely a historical aberrance? Why is its best “the best of the world”? It seems that America’s powerfully fertile nature, and its substratum of Jeffersonian virtues acquired in a more pastoral stage of its existence, provide the nation with an underlying living spiritual core not to be surpassed. In The Great Gatsby, this vision of nature’s healing potential takes on an anti-Eastern, anti-Southern, and distinctly (Mid)Western dimension.



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By various means, Fitzgerald transfers to the novel’s New York setting the common vision of the Midwestern land as inexhaustively alive, luxuriant, and promising, with the concomitant view of Midwestern society being tragically detached from it. Particularly, he transposes this vision upon Long Island, and even more particularly upon the village of West Egg, where the narrator Nick Carraway and the protagonist Jay Gatsby live. Thus Nick, supposedly seeking to flee the Midwest in moving to New York, selects his neighborhood based on its similarity to the pastoral neighborhoods back home: “The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea” (8). The spacious, green, pastoral community is beautiful but shares with the Midwest not just its natural benefits but also its social problems: the wide lawns do not mirror a corresponding breadth in people’s mindset. Unfortunately, Nick, the narrator, himself participates in a provincial, limited perspective and functions as its representative: “I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded’ man. This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all” (9). As in his Princeton novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), so Fitzgerald in his references to Yale throughout The Great Gatsby presents a largely negative image of Ivy League education; the machinery of the educational system produces graduates whose knowledge remains at the surface (“obvious”) level and whose very “wellroundedness” consists of a carefully framed outlook on the world, the product of a careful and thorough instruction in how to fit all of reality into a particular cultural mode of perception. The underlying goal of such education is pragmatic; a limited, insubstantial, but clear compass in life will lead to “success,” and though the structure giving one one’s bearings is purely external and fabricated, it will still help one avoid any confused floundering and will ensure one’s social prestige. The deeper emotional, spiritual, or even physical realities of life are not allowed to interfere with an externalized, socially visible integrity that is based on a thorough display of wealth and power, which are seen as ends in themselves and as the hallmarks of human worth. All of the major characters in The Great Gatsby fall prey to this sort of spiritually emptied, reductive education, an education Eastern and Puritan in origin, though deeply secularized, the Calvinistic evidences of election being detached from metaphysical priorities. An example of the externally clear

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compass in perception, which this sort of “success”-oriented education fosters, is Yale-educated Chicagoan Tom Buchanan, who spouts off racist pseudo-science and assumes his wealth and the white race’s prosperity and power to be a sign of natural supremacy. Similarly, Daisy spends her “white girlhood” in a romantic “twilight universe” in Louisville, the music, flowers, and freshness of which are prosaically supported by material wealth, and she consequently completely defines herself by ideas of class—her class status, which supports her artificial, purely external romantic aura, actually defeats romance in her life as she chooses the wealthy suitor Tom over her poor lover Gatsby. With Tom, she continues to be able to play a highly visible charade of romance and home life, while in truth she is miserable. Her highly unromantic, class-bound identity is illustrated when Daisy calls her white-clad daughter Pamela “blessed precious” in unconscious reference to the post-Calvinistic equation of wealth (“precious”) with election (“blessed”) (123). And joining the idolatry of signs of election, onetime Dakota farm boy Jay Gatsby pretends to an Oxford education and criminally accumulates a great external show of wealth in order to attain what essentially is his “silver idol,” as hinted at one point in the book (122), the “golden girl” Daisy, not the real perishable and limited woman but the external symbol of an integrated, beautiful, and whole reality (127). All of these characters, in various ways, impose a rigidly literal, external, and materialistic vision upon life, a vision drained of its original metaphysical reference. They cling to signs of election, of “success,” that no longer have anything to do with substantial integrity or wholeness but are a purely material, visual enactment of such wholeness. Class, wealth, and power with no longer any humility before God—this is the cultural-educational legacy bequeathed to the Midwestern characters from the Eastern past, and they are deeply out of tune with the lessons of the natural world, the education the Midwestern land might have provided them, the education that may have ameliorated the reductive spirit that Anderson would designate as “grotesquery.” For nature, in Fitzgerald’s world, is still ultimately sacramental, animated by a force of life by which all coheres not merely mechanistically but organically, in its deeper as well as its surface life. Carole Moses has beautifully summed up just how the various characters in Gatsby flagrantly ignore the enduring realities of the natural, or what Moses terms “the persistence of the natural,” yet, in doing so, she reads nature nihilistically as the grand indifference that teaches humans their own insignificance and fleetingness. While Moses’s findings are analytically useful, it does appear, however, that Fitzgerald is much more celebratory of nature’s “vitality” than mere nihilism would



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allow. In Fitzgerald’s world, after all, there is a kind of sacramental suggestiveness about nature, a deeper core of wholeness within the natural realm that is inspiring and can have meaning for human culture. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald’s characters are severed from this wholeness, and that is what constitutes their tragedy. One of the examples of the characters’ disregard for nature pointed out by Moses is the description of the Buchanan house. Here, a “rosy-colored space” has its windows “gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seem[s] to grow a little way into the house” with a “breeze . . . rippl[ing] over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea” (12). Nature pervades the Buchanan home, forming a pleasant, pastoral synthesis with its civilized amenities. Yet, as Moses points out, “The inhabitants of this house . . . are indifferent to this pastoralism. Tom’s imagery used to describe his theories of civilization contrasts with the nature imagery used to describe his home” (25). Furthermore, when Tom shows off his property to Daisy’s visiting distant cousin Nick, he equates roses and motorboats as just so many prestigious possessions: “While the motorboat may seem out of place among the garden images, this catalogue accurately defines the character of Tom, who thinks of roses and motor boats in the same way: as property with which to impress a visitor” (25). Gatsby’s showing off of “swimming-pool,” “hydroplanes,” and “mid-summer flowers” functions in a similar manner to illustrate his materialistically proprietary, detached attitude toward nature (26). About Daisy, Moses makes the following incisive observation: “Daisy’s name is perhaps the most ironic thing about her: though associated with a field flower, she is very much a hothouse plant. Her youth ‘was redolent of orchids,’” and as a dancing upper-crust socialite, Daisy figures as a massive orchid-killer, wearing the dying blossoms to dances and discarding them once they have fulfilled their social function (27). She, like the others, perceives nature as a phenomenon to be mastered, as a “resource” whose spoils are to be displayed for prestige purposes, as badges of mastery and wealth, rather than as wonders of life that one ought to interact with caringly. Nature constantly seems to be reasserting itself throughout the novel: the rain threatens to ruin Gatsby’s rendezvous with Daisy, and, on the day of their meeting at Nick’s cottage, it reverts Nick’s garden to a primeval landscape of “small muddy swamps and prehistoric marshes” (93). Gatsby’s own lawn, wellmanicured during Gatsby’s lifetime, luxuriates and grows unruly and tall when Gatsby is dead and the house is empty; nature more than survives its supposed master (Moses 28). On the day that brings death upon Myrtle Wilson, and subsequently George Wilson and Gatsby, the oppressive heat of the last hot day of

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the year makes even the Buchanan palace a scarcely bearable place to live despite electric ceiling fans and windows open to the sea; heat, on this day, controls the characters’ tempers and drives them toward fatal actions (Moses 28). Thus Moses’s thesis: “By examining [a] wide spectrum of meanings for nature—the garden, the wilderness, the cosmos—Fitzgerald shows that in each instance man appears only as an insignificant part of a larger panorama over which he ultimately has no control. Fitzgerald’s vision, then, is simultaneously frightening and reassuring: if nature does not care about man, it also cannot be despoiled by him” (25). Though Moses does acknowledge a positive aspect in Fitzgerald’s vision of nature, its sheer permanence, her assessment still seems too bleak. There does shine through the wasteland of the characters’ blighted lives a pastoral vision that, while betrayed by these characters, nonetheless holds a potential guiding vision for them. It is a vision easily perverted, as in the green light that, as an abstraction of the pastoral dream, guides Gatsby to his doom; it is precisely in non-abstraction, in substantive rather than romanticized “naturalness,” in true relationality, that something of nature’s real vitality and wholeness can be experienced. Gatsby’s “blue lawn” needs to be green, and his green light needs to be actual grass and trees. And the woman he loves needs to be an actual woman whom he is tangibly able to approach and who reciprocates his love from the depths of her heart. That is life, the true pastoral, and the opposite of Gatsby’s fatal romanticism, the opposite of his make-believe, neo-Tudor, West Egg idyll. If one perceives the sacramental value of nature in Fitzgerald’s writing (its particular sacramental resistance of American materialism rather than just its sheer resistance of human endeavor in general), then Moses’s thesis seems somewhat incomplete; while there can be no doubt that Anderson’s view of the world is downright cheerful compared to Fitzgerald’s much more nihilistically inclined perspective, one might nonetheless trace even in Fitzgerald a promise of human spiritual fulfillment that can be apprehended in a proper sacramental perception of the natural world: if the narrow minds expand over the wide lawns, if they forget their Eastern education and learn from the land, a happiness of sorts may be attainable. While examples of characters learning from the land are hard to come by in this novel, the implications inherent in their failure to learn from the land do perhaps tell the story of how nature might function redemptively in their lives. This failure not only to look toward nature but to participate in the reality that nature exemplifies is the theme of Fitzgerald’s story “Absolution” (1924), which was originally meant to tell the tale of Gatsby’s childhood but was eventually ex-



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cised from the novel in order to leave Gatsby’s Dakota past more of a “mystery” (Christensen 15). This story opens an interesting window on Gatsby’s relation to nature, to Catholicism, and to sacramentalism. When the Gatsby figure, renamed Rudolph Miller, sees the local priest, Father Schwartz, to confess to him that he has told a lie during a previous confession, he does not receive the spiritual admonition expected. Rather, Father Schwartz bursts out with a confession of his own: he only pretends to be a Catholic, but really, the tenets of the Church mean nothing to him. Flower imagery pervades the scene where the bizarre conversation takes place, and there is a sense that it is this imagery that triggers in Father Schwartz his own confession that he yearns for a beauty and a life that have nothing to do with any of the official doctrines that are supposed to inform his advice to Rudolph. The priest contemplates “the beautiful little boy with eyes like blue stones, and lashes that sprayed open from them like flower-petals,” and then his eyes fix “upon the carpet pattern on which the sun had brought out the swastikas and the flat bloomless vines and the pale echoes of flowers” (269). The room becomes intensely ugly to the priest and “the beads of his rosary were crawling and squirming like snakes upon the green felt of his table top” (169). From out of the boy’s eyes, nature, symbolized by flowers, looks up at the priest—and in his room, he sees faint, ugly echoes of nature, artificial representations of flowers and the abstract life symbol of the swastika. The green felt of his tabletop is another abstraction from the green of nature, and the beads of his rosary, representing his religious belief system, have become snakes, the evil presence that has caused his fall from nature and his confinement in a realm of ugly, failed imitation nature. Impassioned, the priest begins to express to Rudolph his yearning for a “glimmering” life away from the restrictions of his current vocation. He tells the boy to go to an amusement park at night where “everything will twinkle. But it won’t remind you of anything, you see. It will just hang out there in the night like a colored balloon—like a big yellow lantern on a pole” (271). The imagery of artificial objects used here—balloon, lantern—is enhanced in its artificiality by Schwartz’s exclamation that modern electrical lights are an impressive substitute for stars. The artificiality of this sort of “glimmering” contrasts with the nature imagery evoked during the earlier part of the priest and boy’s conversation. Finally, Schwartz further demonstrates his vision’s disconnection from nature when he tells Rudolph not to “get up close” to the glimmering carnival because “if you do you’ll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life” (271). At this point, two significant events occur: Rudolph decides to live in his fancy and is now free to adopt the new identity of his imaginary alter ego with the exotic name Blatchford

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Sarnemington (this identity switch prefigures James Gatz becoming Jay Gatsby), and Father Schwartz suffers a nervous breakdown, which causes Rudolph to run away “in a panic” (272). It seems that neither the priest nor the boy, in their romantic idealism, detached from concrete human finitude, are aware of the lessons suggested in the nature imagery that has troubled the priest’s mind earlier. Lest the reader should miss this lesson, the story ends with the following pastoral vision: Outside the window the blue sirocco trembled over the wheat, and girls with yellow hair walked sensuously along roads that bounded the fields, calling innocent, exciting things to the young men who were working the lines between the grain. Legs were shaped under starchless gingham, and rims of the necks of dresses were warm and damp. For five hours now hot fertile life had burned in the afternoon. It would be night in three hours, and all along the land there would be these blonde Northern girls and the tall young men from the farms lying out beside the wheat, under the moon. (272)

The innocent sensuality of the rural lovers in this passage differs profoundly from the romanticism of which the priest cultivates a tortured and the boy an exuberant version. As Christensen explains, the priest and boy, because idolatrous, are both doomed to unfulfillment: Romantic idealism must grow increasingly pessimistic about finding meaning in the world of facts. No one committed to a self-created imaginative ideal would ever look for salvation in the Truth which revealed Himself as a Carpenter in Galilee—nor could he ever be satisfied with any incarnation whatever. For the man (or boy) persuaded that the creations of his own imagination, even when mendacious, are more valuable than factual truth, the Christian Incarnation is simply impertinent, and any other incarnation is finally impossible. . . . In the priest’s madness, though, Fitzgerald does depict the inevitable consequence of repudiating the Christian Incarnation in favor of romantic idealism. (22)

Yet the lovers in the Dakota wheatfields, close to nature’s “hot fertile life” and most likely sexually participating in that fertility, do not gaze from a distance at imaginary substitutes for existing things. Their “warm and damp” bodies, echoing the “heat and sweat” so dreaded by Schwartz, lie close together, and they look up at a real moon and not the substitute stars of Schwartz’s carnival



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vision. They are carnal, do not shy away from the incarnate world and enjoy in and through their bodily being a life-giving closeness that is more than bodily. Because they affirm and participate in nature, sacramental reality is theirs—as is the moonlit night of romance, lit by a real Dakota moon. For neither Schwartz’s nor Gatsby’s romanticism actually yields romance—when concrete reality is avoided, even romance ultimately falls by the wayside. It takes a real moon and a real physically present Other for that. Like “Absolution,” The Great Gatsby ends with a pastoral scene evoked by Nick Carraway, who, significantly, has decided to return to his native Middle West. But we do not actually see him back home, and his vision is complicated and involves a good deal of sadly defeated romanticism. Thus, The Great Gatsby does not provide us with the same kind of positive pastoral model of fulfillment that the end of “Absolution” conjures up. However, the various depictions of spiritual failure in the novel point toward a contrasting vision of pastoral wholeness that, while not directly evoked, is implied and functions as a foil for the novel’s grimness. The starkest emblem of American society’s not learning from the land is the degraded landscape of the “valley of ashes,” a landscape with strong Midwestern connotations, one more piece of evidence as to how the novel’s Long Island bears symbolic references to the Middle West, which, in some sense, do transform the narrative into “a story of the West” (though also of America as a whole): “This is the valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air” (27). What might have been a real rather than a fantastic farm, the site of dead matter feeding new life in regenerative cycles, is instead a surreal imitation of life, one whose insubstantiality is immediately revealed as its human phantoms crumble before our eyes. The dead matter here does not feed new life; it is grotesquely extracted from the natural organic cycle of agriculture in which “waste” is a blessing and an immediate actor in birthing forth the new. Industrial, urban waste creates a wasteland profoundly different from the fallow field covered with manure; the connection with life and regeneration, with nature, has been severed; the “life force” is absent. If in The Great Gatsby nature cannot in any ultimate way be despoiled by man, as Moses persuasively suggests, it does seem nonetheless possible for society to place itself far apart from the life-giving aspects of nature and create for itself a living hell, a surreal world in which a mere imitation of life is lived; thus, the novel does seem to want to arouse its readers to an awareness of a positive possibility of

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living with nature and being nourished by it, of escaping the humanly created wasteland. And in this implied pastoral counter-vision to the urban wasteland, the novel appears to provide a more positive message than mere awe before the ultimate potency of nature and insignificance of humankind. The explicit Jeffersonian message incorporated in the novel is analyzed insightfully by John Rohrkemper, who uses as one of his starting points a basic observation by previous critics related to the famous optometrist’s advertisement hovering over the valley of ashes: Presiding over this wasteland, in fading paint on a weathered billboard, are the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. . . . Lottie Crim and Neal B. Houston have pointed out the doctor’s name might be taken from two German words: ekel, meaning loathsome, and burg, meaning town. John H. Kuhnle has taken this a step further to suggest that the doctor’s initials are meant to evoke Thomas Jefferson. Thus, Dr. T. J. Eckleburg becomes an anagram for “Dr. Thomas Jefferson’s Disgusting City.” (159)

Acknowledging that such speculation could appear far-fetched at first sight, Rohrkemper proceeds to provide evidence of Fitzgerald’s explicit veneration of Jefferson, of the already mentioned explicit farm references in the description of the valley of ashes, which hark back to Jeffersonian agrarianism, and of the systematic agrarian idealist subtext in the novel, exemplified, for instance, by Gatsby’s pivotal life-changing decision consisting of his turning his back on the Midwestern agrarian dream by rejecting the Dakota farm life of his parents. One of the chief Jeffersonian indictments of urbanism, of course, as Rohrkemper points out, was its breeding of the evil of dependence: “Dependence,” says Jefferson, “begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition” (qtd. in Rohrkemper 159). Not elaborately explored by Rohrkemper, this moral issue of the “dependence” fostered by urbanism is discussed more extensively by John F. Callahan in his study of the clash between American myth and history in The Great Gatsby. At this juncture, we find a striking parallel between Anderson’s Beyond Desire and Fitzgerald’s novel: in both, the Southern slavery-based agricultural system is identified with the modern industrial degradation of the mythic American pastoral. Both involve the lack of direct engagement with the land, an abstract idea of ownership, an objectification of others and of, essentially, the entire phenomenal world, rather than an intersubjective relation with the concrete world of the Other.



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Callahan sees Tom Buchanan as the most solid, most damning representative of [a Mammon-worshipping] postbellum America . . . whose racism and manner of the plantation owner revolts even Daisy and Jordan, whose “white girlhoods” were passed in Louisville. One recalls that his presidential namesake, James Buchanan, owed his 1856 election to fourteen slave states, only five free, and that in his inaugural he called for an end to agitation against slavery and supported the policy of noninterference with slavery in the states and “popular sovereignty” in the territories. (51)

Tom’s racist proclamations, his proud display of land-as-one-more-possession, his sumptuous mansion clearly intended for ostentation, his physical compulsion of others (he is constantly grabbing Nick’s arm, for example), his view of Daisy as his property—all of these details, elaborately worked out by Fitzgerald, bespeak a completely detached, mastery-minded attitude, an imposition of abstract ownership rights imagined as real. What makes Tom’s supremacy particularly abstract is the fact that, as Paul Giles notes, “The novel, like Daisy’s voice, is ‘full of money,’ but it is bereft of the industry which produces money. As a result, the book enters an ambiguous cultural area; for, by celebrating American wealth but not the moral basis usually associated with the development of such wealth, The Great Gatsby veers toward becoming a parody of those traditional American narratives of economic success” (5). We know that Tom’s fantastically immense wealth is inherited and that he does not have to work; his wealth is thus completely free of any value connotation such as having worked hard, but it is a morally neutral, merely material fact. Yet, in the logic of secularized Calvinism in which the material sign becomes a moral value in and of itself, that is, in a profoundly non-sacramental worldview, Tom’s wealth creates a real, substantial superiority over and right to dispose of his environment. Being by birth and family heritage a Midwesterner but having no relationship with place or land, being profoundly and fundamentally detached from any concrete Other, Tom drifts all over the world, from Chicago to California to the South Seas to France and Long Island, and, at the end of the novel, to an unknown location summed up in spiritual terms by Nick as a “vast carelessness.” In the meantime, he preys on the valley of ashes, the land degraded by the nonrelational and exploitive attitude so fully embodied by Tom. Here lives a garage owner, George Wilson, whose wife with the organic plant name Myrtle, Tom takes for a mistress with what Callahan describes as “the sexual schizophrenia

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associated with the white owner in the American South” (51), a schizophrenia also thematized at length by Anderson in Beyond Desire: Tom keeps Myrtle compartmentalized in a lower-class world that he exploits for the needs of his body whereas he keeps Daisy as his official status symbol, not really loving her but considering her an adequate symbolic “appendage of his ego,” much like his home, which is not a true home but once more a symbol utilized for selfrepresentation. Thus Tom has objectified both women, one as a sign of his elect status, and one as flesh drained of spirit: a secularized version of Calvinism and deadening materialism once more go hand in hand, as they do so often in American modernist texts. Though tragically despiritualized, Myrtle still, to some degree, does justice to her plant name. She is an organic “plant-woman” of sorts and at times bears a bucolic aura that is clearly out of place in the valley of ashes. When we first meet her, we are immediately struck, with Nick, by her luxuriant sensuality: “She was in the middle thirties and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crêpe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering” (30). The natural life force is particularly strong in this woman of abundant but not flabby flesh and of burningly alert nerves, and yet beauty is missing, she lacks a “gleam,” as she subscribes to her objectification by Tom and, unappreciated, becomes a mere material vessel, consumed as just so much more material to be “wasted.” She is the organic life force drained of higher reference just as Daisy is pure symbolic beauty and “higher reference” channeled into subservience to the ultimate American signified, “wealth.” The Manhattan apartment that serves as Myrtle’s and Tom’s trysting place reveals further the subservience of “Myrtle as natural pastoral” to wealth, and the artificial, unnatural channel into which her vitality has been poured: here, “scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles” adorn the walls (33). Versailles, of course, associated intimately with the much-decried decadent figure of Queen Marie Antoinette (later we learn that Gatsby’s mansion contains “Marie Antoinette” period rooms), is synonymous with a highly artificial rococo pastoral built on the backs of the brutally exploited masses, a situation that eventually erupted in a revolution inspired by and initially based on the same principles as the American Revolution; thus, one may realize how artfully Fitzgerald inserts images of contemporary America’s corruption of the Early Republic’s idealistic, egalitarian pastoralism. Rococo aesthetics, with their strictly trimmed and controlled gardens, with the ladies’ extravagant gray-powdered wigs and tight



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corsets, further reinforce the theme of “nature subservient.” When Myrtle asserts herself by daring to pronounce Daisy’s name against Tom’s remonstrance, Tom breaks her nose, thus assuring the continued “keeping in check” of nature: when Myrtle protects—with debased gossip magazines—the Versailles scenes from her profusely flowing blood, which symbolizes her vitality, it is clear that power-dominated, highly artificial, and exploitive versions of nature are being protected by a linguistically, rhetorically, symbolically debased culture against the visible, accusatory stain of bleeding nature (41–42). This staging of Tom’s corruption of the American pastoral does seem to imply its opposite: authentic relationship, substantive human community, and spiritual fulfillment are possible if only the Other is valued as a person of equal worth, as an intrinsically valuable, beautiful person rather than as a utilitarian instrument or cog. Not respecting nature and humanity, utilizing rather than relating to people and the world, seeing all things and people materially rather than sacramentally, leads to a debased social as well as natural wasteland. Who can forget the striking glimpse Nick catches of Myrtle when he is driving to the city with Gatsby: “Then the valley of ashes opened out on both sides of us, and I had a glimpse of Mrs. Wilson straining at the garage pump with panting vitality as we went by” (72). Her wild thirst goes utterly unquenched, for there is no water in sight; here her wild pumping is directed at gasoline, the indirect agent of her destruction in a car accident, and the lifeblood of capitalist America. When Myrtle is found after being run over by Daisy in Gatsby’s car, her “left breast [is] swinging loose” and her “mouth [is] wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long” (144)—stored because there was no real channel for its expenditure. Michael Breitwieser has noted Myrtle’s horrible dehumanization even in death: “The horror of the scene, perhaps, is not only the actual disfiguration, but also the cultural economics: the vehicle wavers, briefly, the power-source, the breast, is torn loose from its holder, the life-energy, which Myrtle had stored, or hoarded, behind the breast, is relinquished, or released—to gas the car?” (38). Obviously, industrial civilization’s abstract categorization and utilization of creation and creature has caused spiritual stifling, a choking on one’s own life/vitality and is largely to blame for Myrtle’s unfulfilled life and grotesque death. Myrtle’s husband George, the novel’s other prominent inhabitant of the ravaged valley of ashes, is another example of degraded humanity. Though he used to be physically handsome and spiritually alive, and though, as we learn from his sister-in-law Catherine, Myrtle once was crazy about him, he is now completely

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washed out: “He was a blonde, spiritless man, anaemic and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes” (29). Faint and damp, subdued remnants of a former humanity linger tragically in this ruined man through whom Myrtle walks “as if he were a ghost” (30). Tom, though dumbly enough, makes the book’s crucial observation about George: “He’s so dumb he doesn’t even know he’s alive” (30). On the one hand, George’s Myrtle intensely cries, “You can’t live forever” and then proceeds to plunge into materialistic hedonism with Tom (40), thus misdirecting her vitality toward a spiritually drained and a-sacramental attempt at moment-by-moment frenetic fulfillment that misses the larger pattern of things; yet her husband, on the other hand, virtually lets go of life altogether, numbed into borderline nonexistence by the brutally life-denying wasteland of which he is a part, failing to struggle against it any longer. The reason for George’s downfall becomes clear toward the end of the novel when Nick learns that George and Myrtle used to plan on going west, to find a better life far from the valley of ashes. However, this potentially healthful escape to a region associated in the novel with a certain pastoral promise never happens because George wants to make money first. He thus allows the promise of capitalism to defer a substantive change that would have possibly preserved his manhood and saved his marriage. The abstract capitalistic economy in which a man no longer draws direct sustenance from his labor leaves George an exploited instrument drained of energy and devoid of real nourishment. A lonely cog in an abstract system, George never seeks out community; when his Greek neighbor Michaelis, after Myrtle’s tragic death, would like to contact friends or a spiritual caregiver, we learn that George has been completely detached from any human fellowship and has neglected his soul and human identity until his humanity washed away, until “there was not enough of him for his wife” (167). When George finds evidence of Myrtle’s cheating, he takes action too late; locking Myrtle up, he plans on forcing her to move west with him. What used to be a plan hatched in relationship now becomes a desperate assertion of power as the spiritual capacity for relationship has vanished. Myrtle’s flight from this coercion to what she imagines is freedom (she thinks Tom is driving Gatsby’s car) proves delusional: she flees from imprisonment to death, both literally and symbolically, for Tom is part of the same abstract, lifeless order as George, just in the upper reaches of its hierarchy. It is George who draws the reader’s attention to the great symbol of this deadening, abstract, power-based social order, namely, the already mentioned T. J. Eckleburg advertisement. First he tells Michaelis what he said to his wife upon



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having detected her adultery: “God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me but you can’t fool God!” Then, to Michaelis’s shock, he points to the advertisement and says, “God sees everything” (167). In imagining God as an instance of power who will assert the laws George himself is unable to assert, the drained and broken man clings to an icon of abstract literalism, of marriage law, without realizing that he has substantially abandoned his wife, that he himself has betrayed the substance if not the letter of his marriage covenant: again, he is a mirror image of Tom here, who feels that his reserving the publicly visible position of wife for Daisy, that his material provision for her, and his continual return to her after every act of adultery, mean that he is fulfilling his marital duties, not realizing that Daisy is continually hurt and feels unloved. Thus, the God representative of George and Tom is an icon of literalism: as an optometrist’s advertisement, he is representative of literal rather than spiritual sight, and in their pure, unsouled physicality, these painted, partially faded, and thus grossly material eyes are absolutely blind; no soul is looking out from them. The dread image of Eckleburg above the wasteland with its thwarted lives implies its opposite. This opposite of the soulless, blind billboard-god representing materialism and literalism would be constituted by an acknowledgement of the soul’s reality and a movement away from purely material and literal understandings to an acknowledgement of spiritual reference in everything. This movement away from literalism and toward sacramentalism would imply that nature and the Other are worthwhile in themselves and not to be instrumentalized. Nature is not to be exploited by urban, industrial culture, and women are not to be objectified by men. And all of this is associated with a Midwestern Jeffersonian pastoral, which functions as a subtextual myth and is contrasted with the feudal European Versailles pastoral of the wallpaper, with Buchanan-style modern American feudalism, and with the modern American industrial wasteland of the valley of ashes, which is a grotesque anti-pastoral. The true pastoral envisioned by Jefferson and associated with the Great Plains’ fields of wheat shines through as a positive, sacramental reality, an actual wholeness the possibility of which underlies all the sordidness that dominates the surface of the novel. Nick, at novel’s end, makes the trip to the West that George never got around to, returning to his native Minneapolis. As Moses notes, Nick’s return to the Midwest does not constitute a simple flight to the restorative arms of nature: His retreat is not to an Edenic pastoral ideal; as he admits, “That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns,” but memories of

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“the thrilling returning trains” of his school days. Although the rides home [from Eastern prep schools] did make him “unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour,” this awareness was, after all, short-lived and soon gave way to feelings of smug complacency “from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called by a family’s name.” Furthermore, Daisy’s frivolous Midwestern youth, as recounted by Jordan, hardly suggests the “sort of moral attention” that Nick hopes to regain. (30)3

As do Anderson, Bromfield, Suckow, Masters, Cather, and countless other Mid­ western writers, Fitzgerald sees Midwestern culture as dissociated from the marvelously potent land upon which it sits. If he provides us with hints of how problematic the outcome of Nick’s Midwestern retreat will likely be, he is merely reminding the reader of the fallen state of the world, warning the reader of the idolatry of Gatsby, who turned Daisy into a green and golden abstraction from which she differed profoundly in actuality. And yet, despite the social fallenness of the world, the “dark fields of the republic” that Nick evokes at the end of the novel do serve a function: they are the best of America, the best of the world, and in them are contained visions of wholeness that may guide us beyond the deadening utilization of our energies in an exploitive, power-driven system, to a relational appreciation of a kind of deeper beauty less crass than the “meretricious” one blindly served by Gatsby.



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9 The Return to “Hard, Natural Things” From Pastoral Delusion to Rock-Bottom Reality in Ruth Suckow’s The Folks

There was a pain in the palm of her right hand. Something hurt her and the sense of hurting was refreshing. It brought life back. There was consciousness of self in the realization of bodily pain. One’s mind could start back along the road from some dark place to which it had run crazily off. One’s mind could take hold of the thought of the little hurt place in the soft flesh of the palm of the hand. There was something there, something hard and sharp that cut into the flesh of the palm when one’s finger pressed down rigid and tense upon it. —from Many Marriages by Sherwood Anderson

Toward the end of Ruth Suckow’s epic The Folks (1934),1 which describes the evolution of three generations of a small-town Iowa family, a kind of small but significant miracle occurs: Fred Ferguson, the stern, hard-working, highly principled, Scottish-descended, Calvinistic family patriarch, realizes not only that he has made many mistakes and that there is more to life than the virtues he has always represented, but also that his prosperity is essentially unearned and is, in fact, a gracious gift for which to feel humble gratitude. Struck by this new insight, Fred indulges in the following uncharacteristically humble reflection: Fred had always thought of himself as a worker, and scorned slacker men. If a man was willing to work, so he had always said, he and his need never want. But now it had begun to seem to him that, as things went, he and Annie had been let off pretty easy. What had happened to [the impoverished and grotesquely – 261 –

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distorted spinster] Essie might have happened to anyone. . . . It no longer seemed to him just and inevitable that some should have and others not. He and mama ought to be willing to help out where they could. (725)

What has happened here is the conversion of the secularized American postPuritan type2 to a more sacramental worldview in which that individual feels his or her way toward truth more concretely, as is vaguely evident in the closing gesture of the novel: “Simplicities were shifting into complexities,3 and in the darkening twilight that he and Annie faced, along with the others that were left [in the declining small-town of Belmond], he couldn’t see what was beyond. He reached over and felt for Annie’s hand, and drew her up to him. ‘Well, mama . . . ’” (727). A marriage threatened by sterility has received a new impulse toward intimacy as the clear, abstract, superimposed certainties fade; in the twilight, Fred feels for his wife’s hand and draws her toward him in a symbolic gesture densely concrete and productive of essentially wordless communion, a gesture of the kind that frequently carries crucial significance in Anderson’s fiction. Thus, for instance, the inventor Hugh McVey in Poor White first becomes an icon of the gospel of success but dies inside, only to find life when he clumsily makes love to his accepting and forgiving wife Clara. Beneath all the celebratory rhetoric concerning his success, Hugh was dead: in physical touch, beneath the level of words, in indirect communication, does he find salvation. The ellipses in which The Folks ends emblematize the new openness where before all was clear and conclusive. Examples of such formerly held clear-cut notions are the belief that in America, the land of opportunity, and in the Midwest, where the fertile soil promises peace and plenty for all, prosperity directly reflects personal worth and that external markers of success in life are a full and complete expression of the human interior and of spiritual merit, and furthermore, that this merit is constituted by a clearly circumscribed set of duties, all other aspects of being human possessing only trifling importance. As life resists Fred’s proto-Calvinistic schematic perception, he ironically comes to appreciate more deeply the very thing on which his false preconceptions have been based, the Midwestern land and the promises it holds. Loosening his grip on many long-cherished notions, Fred comes to bask more deeply in the land, which he, as a banker and leasing owner dealing with the land largely in financial terms, has so frequently ignored. This new appreciation of the land involves a sense of its peacefulness, its vitality, and its aesthetic, unquantifiable beauty and poetry, its “song”: “The smell of the cultivated earth held peace. There ought to be peace



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and plenty for everyone. Wasn’t that what had been meant from the start? . . . The ground smelled good where he had disturbed it. He felt the rich growth all around him. There was almost a song of growth in the summer air. Well, anyway, it was good land” (720). In the land resides the primal goodness of Creation distorted by human culture; it is culture, not primal reality, that has thwarted human well-being. Thus the land becomes a complex, concrete symbol that in its very failure to sustain the cherished promised-land vision of Midwestern culture nonetheless becomes the sacramentally restorative site of its deepest hopes amidst disillusionment. For it is not the land’s lack of significance that has led to Midwestern culture’s chaotic disintegration, but rather, that culture’s Calvinistic-materialistic misinterpretation of the land. Suckow’s novel is divided into lengthy sections devoted to, in turn, each one of Fred and Annie Ferguson’s four children, Carl, Margaret, Dorothy, and “Bunny.” All four chase their particular dreams of fulfillment but are defeated in various ways, arriving at a paradoxically more blurred and yet clearer and deeper vision than before. In other words, colliding with the rock of reality, or, as Anderson put it in Dark Laughter, “banging up against a tree,” they for the first time truly discover “trees,” for the first time find real meaning. The characters’ spiritual breakthrough, less melodramatic in Suckow’s work than it usually is in Anderson’s, is the result of concrete sacramental resistance. Furthermore, this sacramental resistance is closely linked to nature in general and, in subtle ways, to the Midwestern land in close proximity to which all of the Fergusons were raised. In fact, Grandma and Grandpa Ferguson’s farm outside their hometown of Belmond provides a key touchstone of every Ferguson child’s life experience; the other important center of their formative family identity is the little Presbyterian church, which functions as the family’s primary social affiliation in the town. Church and farm are the two poles of a paradigmatically Midwestern and yet also proto-American experience in which the clash between a materialistliteralist post-Calvinism and the organic realm of Nature is concretely dramatized. However, to speak of “two poles” is somewhat misleading, for both church and farm simultaneously contain elements of the abstractly imposed as well as the authentically sacramental, just with the proportions of the mixture differing in each realm, nature and authenticity exerting themselves far more strongly at the farm. As the eldest of the Ferguson children, Carl is most deeply bound to both the church and the farm experience, growing up before the ties to both have loosened considerably in the course of the changing times of which his siblings are more thoroughly a part. It is thus with Carl that this chapter shall primarily

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concern itself, mentioning the other parts of this seven-hundred-plus–page epic only in relation to this particular representative section. One aspect of Carl Ferguson that is particularly striking at the beginning of the novel is that he is curiously “elect,” to use the Puritan phrase that subtextually underlies Carl’s and the whole Ferguson family’s, and ultimately, the Midwestern and American experience.4 The other striking characteristic of Carl is his extremely external definition of himself as well as of values such as justice; to him, social approval and literal, external fulfillments of parental or social precepts is the touchstone of identity.5 These two aspects of Carl’s identity are, of course, related; if “election,” in its secularized post-Puritan sense, is a visible, material salvation, a self-justification via “success” and popularity, then the spectators, the witnesses of that success are crucial, and externally visible virtue recognizable to a materialistic audience rather than easily misunderstood nuanced substance is of prime importance. Two early episodes in the novel particularly highlight these interrelated aspects of Carl’s identity: his disruption of his sister’s friendship with a lower-class girl and his pep rally-illustrated command of school popularity as a football hero. As to the first episode: one day, Carl tells on his sister Margaret when she joins social outcast Irene Jackson for after-school play, Irene being a “white trash” girl from a dubious family of drifters. Margaret herself is an outcast of sorts because in her family’s and community’s eyes, her dark complexion compares unfavorably with her sister’s fair one. Highly serious and deeply sensitive, the girl takes the perpetual outspoken as well as subtle rejection of her appearance to heart and severs herself internally from those around her until she discovers fellow-sufferer Irene. When Carl reveals Margaret’s association with Irene, Mrs. Ferguson sends him for his sister and forbids Margaret any further contact with her only friend. This little episode involves multiple layers of meaning; Carl, with “that virtuous look on his face,” interrupts Margaret and Irene as they are acting out a fantasy of a duchess and countess going to a ball. Both of them socially disapproved of for being different, they dream of high status and aristocratic detachment: “Come, countess,” says Irene, “let us get into our coach and drive away from this rabble” (30). What binds the two girls together is the experience of their community’s prejudice—neither is fooled by the narrow, unjustly appearance-oriented, and conventional perspective of the town because both are excluded from full community membership; looking in from the outside, they see the pretension and falseness around them and delight in calling others “rabble,” indulging in their own aristocratic pretensions. Carl bursts into this imaginative bubble as an emissary of the town’s reality: “Mama wants you to come home” (30).



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Implicit in this simple statement is all of the prejudice and appearance orientation of the town: the respectable, prosperous, “elect” family orders its black-sheep daughter to dissociate from another human being, from her only real friend, solely because this friend is poor, not firmly anchored and established in society (one is tempted to say, in the covenant community of Belmond), and thus does not bear the external signs of “election”—discipline and hard work rewarded by prosperity and further evinced by the external markers of solidity, such as a primly neat apparel and a neat-as-a-pin home of that “New England snowiness” favored in Belmond (268). It is clear that this schematic, superficial reading of Irene as necessarily damnable and excommunicate reflects the kind of materialistic literalism so deeply opposed to modern Midwestern writers’ sacramental vision of the world in which only a real personal engagement with the concrete can yield up its mysteriously and tangibly apprehended but not abstractly explicable significance. Carl, with an external display of virtue, “that look of virtue,” and with the town’s prejudice and Mama’s approval on his side, exemplifies the elect and literalistic ethic of his community. It is no coincidence that what Carl interrupts is a kind of poetry, an imaginative, symbolic assertion of significance by two girls “misread” by the community; their leaving for the ball hearkens back to the Cinderella story in which the lowly and humble stepdaughter is chosen as the prince’s beloved above all the others, her significance revealed by a merciful fairy godmother who thwarts the human literalism that dictates that the absence of literal blood ties must entail a cruel family excommunication. Thus Margaret’s black hair seems to her parents and the town a sign of her not truly belonging to the fair and blond Ferguson family, and, loved too little, she feels like the fairy-tale stepdaughter: “She had felt her darkness like a disgrace—and yet she was proud of it, because it made her different. Perhaps after all she was adopted” (32). A physical fact of difference becomes for her, as for Cinderella, grounds for being excommunicated within the cruel surface orientation of her family: when she asserts her substantively lovable nature in symbolic nonliteral play, Carl, the literalist, comes to deny her this venue of expressing her suppressed substance, denies her her human role as the beloved. What happens between brother and sister here is thus very analogous to what happens between Jerome Hadley and May Edgley in Anderson’s “‘Unused’”; the analogy becomes more powerful in the course of the novel as various women, suppressed and unloved, their natural flourishing prohibited by a literalistic culture, are, like May, compared to tender flowers who are not allowed to bloom. Carl is thus, like Jerome Hadley, the classic Puritan slayer of poetry, of nature, of sacrament, of Margaret’s feminine flower.

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In his reaction to the incident, Carl displays his literalistic, thoroughly abstracted notion of right and wrong and his own sense of elect identity, which dehumanizes him: “Margaret was the one who had done all the disobeying. He had only done what Mama wanted. Mama was the one who had sent him, but now that Margaret was making such a fuss, she seemed to be distracted and not to know where the blame lay. ‘I didn’t tell. I just said I knew where you were. Didn’t I, mama?’” (33). Dismissing Margaret’s feelings and perspective as a “distraction,” Carl wishes his mother would remember what the literal parental precept had been and would remember what he had literally said and not said, as well as who had, in literal terms, strayed from parental injunctions—in other words, the emotional and relational side of the situation, the subtle implications and nuances of all that has transpired, are not valid, but only the clearly pronounced and legally defined surface of it all. Carl reflects further that he “despise[s] Margaret for crying, but [that] he [is] always frightened and made to feel unequal by the display of such passionate woe. . . . Carl’s ideal of himself was so high. It didn’t include hurting anybody’s feelings, and so it never seemed as if it could be himself who had done that. He just had to find excuses” (36). Remembering a past incident when his dog, trained by him to chase Margaret’s cat, actually killed his sister’s pet, Carl recalls a feeling that parallels his current one at Margaret once more crying and proclaiming her injury: He wouldn’t live in the same house any more with Margaret Ferguson! The folks would have to choose this very night. Margaret was always somehow putting him in the wrong. His bright confidence, fostered everywhere else, at school and in church and out at Grandpa’s, seemed to falter before her big, black, scornful eyes and drooping underlip. He would go out and stay with Grandma and Grandpa, and come in and sit with them in their pew in church. (36)

As the supposed literal embodiment of an ideal rather than a real person, Carl is unable to accept the guilt and failure that is inevitably part of the complex, ambiguous web of human relationships; reading himself not as an irreducible, complex, and concrete reality whose significance cannot easily be summed up, he instead sees himself in terms of a mathematically pure and transcendent formula in which all is either/or and in which scheme of ideal relations the substance of reality cannot be dealt with. Thus arises Carl’s preposterous idea of making his parents choose between him and his sister; his identity as the chosen one, the elect one, the emblem of “salvation” and ideality, causes him to insist on the



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rejection, the expulsion, of the “big, black” Other who threatens and questions that status, who seeks to undermine it, and whose passion beats against the walls of abstraction. The church and his grandparents’ farm already appear as a central motif in the above passage, as places where Carl’s “bright confidence” in his ideal identity are “fostered,” yet both are also sites that will ultimately resist that very ideal falsification of reality as is only very vaguely intimated in Carl’s dream of being at the farm, which follows his bitter thoughts about Margaret: Now, out on the farm, the darkness was spreading all around. Cattle stood in the big pasture. Tiny pools of water lay dark and still in the hollows their hooves had left among the black, moss-filmed hummocks in that swampy place. . . . And then, through the open window in his own little room [at his grandparents’ home] would come the chorus of frogs from that low place across the road in the meadow that was swathed in mist—“Hmmmmmmm . . . hmmmmmmmmmmmm,” always the same, just on two notes, up . . . down, a low vibrating sorrowful music that seemed as if it was the night singing to itself, the dark blind roads, the dark wide pastures, the black fir trees out in the grove. (36–37)

Through her use of indirect speech, Suckow is able to present her characters’ thoughts in more poetic and evocative diction than that of which Carl himself would probably be capable—and yet, it is all these concrete details that he is thinking of, enchanted by darkness, mist, and the unintelligible but emotionally significant music of the frogs. It is a moist, swampy, nocturnal landscape enveloped in a vast, tangible obscurity of night, a landscape rich and rank with life, this “life” symbolized by the land’s moisture, of which the frogs are yet another sign; it is a landscape in which sound and mist and darkness and life suffuse all and create an intense, indistinct connectedness that does not lend itself to easy abstractions; it is a “big, black” landscape that speaks to Carl of sorrow despite his inability to accept fully that aspect of reality. Though his thoughts of the farm include a vision of his grandfather reading his evening newspaper, that symbol of empty word-slinging,6 of the conventional, reductive, and manipulative, it is the “darkness spreading all around” the farmhouse and the invasive sorrowful frog music that atmospherically dominate Carl’s reverie. A poetic, musical, densely concrete, and obscure counter-realm to Carl’s “bright confidence” becomes apparent, a counterworld of “dark blind roads” whose outlines are unclear and which do not lead to a clearly defined destination, and Carl, paradoxically, associates this other

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world with a kind of peace and refuge, though it does make him shiver: “Carl shivered. A cold little breeze ruffled the berry bushes” (37). It seems as though subconsciously, Carl is craving more than the affirmation of the ideal self-concept that his doting grandparents may provide: he seems to be craving a containment of his self within the moist and sorrowful yet peaceful obscurity of the night, within a realm of harmonious natural unfolding untortured by idealistic determination. Another early episode from Carl’s life that illumines the basic spiritual pattern operative in his own person and in the larger community of Belmond is his rise as a local football hero, the popularity attendant upon which leads him into the temptation of choosing a morally dubious girl over his official Presbyterian sweetheart Lillian White. Once more, Carl’s spiritual literalism, his thoroughly externalized and abstracted values, and their connection to a secularized, postPuritan sense of election become obvious. Part Two of The Folks, titled “The Good Son” and dedicated to the life of Carl, begins with a pep rally for Belmond High School’s new football team of which senior Carl Ferguson is the captain, a striking allusion to his dog Captain, who killed Margaret’s kitten Black One. Characteristically, Carl, in his address to the student body, asks for the one thing nearest his heart: “I guess I can speak for the new team and say that if there’s anything we fellows ask for, why, it’s for the rest of the school to get together and give us their support this fall” (73). Essentially, football functions as a communal ritual in which a display of manly athleticism accomplished through hard work (Carl emphasizes the team’s hard work over and over again) becomes an outward sign of the glorious virtue possessed by the community and by its individual representatives. Appearances, approval (“support”) and a representative tangible glorification of the community are at the heart of Belmond athletics. The nearness of this profound post-Calvinistic concern for visible glory to pre-World War I America’s jingoism is vocalized by the fight song that is rendered by a student crowd with gleaming eyes set in tense, shouting faces, and whose ending rhyme possesses a telling connotation: “Slingo! Bingo! Any old thing-go! / Belmond High School! / YES by jingo!” (74). This blind, self-aggrandizing passion for communal glory and prestige is further accentuated by Belmond High School’s absurd self-association with Princeton University: “Now, folks, we’ve got the same tune as the Princeton song exactly . . . only remember, where the song says Princeton we substitute Belmond. That’s all” (75). Once more, as at most important moments in Carl’s life, Midwestern nature enters into the picture: “He could look over the heads of the assembly and see, through the long windows at the back, the trees leafy and full against the warm blue



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sky of fall” (74). This motif is conspicuously repeated: “And in the joyous roar that followed [the fight song], his eyes shone, his body became a hot push of energy, and a shout followed his motions that seemed to shake all the long windows behind which stood those leafy trees . . .” (75). The “hot push of energy” that shatters the windows and leads to an entrance into the heart of a full and abundant natural world (“leafy . . . full . . . warm”) bears fairly obvious sexual connotations, and we are reminded of Kolodny’s important thesis about the metaphorical feminization of the American land, “America’s oldest and most cherished fantasy: a daily reality of harmony between man and nature based on an experience of the land as essentially feminine—that is, not simply the land as mother, but the land as woman, the total female principle of gratification—enclosing the individual in an environment of receptivity, repose, and painless and integral satisfaction” (4). The aggressive associations of football, of the fight song, and of the male sexual thrust introduce just that troubling tension into Belmond’s serene autumn day that Kolodny sees as being central to the American pastoral mythology: [F]orced into at least symbolic consciousness is the inevitable conflict locked into the heart of American pastoral: that which is contained within the matrix of the feminine, however attractive as “a Beautiful green Tree,” or as nurturing as a mother robin, must inevitably fall helpless victim to masculine activity. . . . The pastoral stasis, the moment of “full radiance in a serene air” or of pleasure at an exploit, cannot be maintained; its components are apparently too volatile. (24)

Carl, placed squarely amidst lush Midwestern abundance and prosperity, chooses not a natural, integrative, reciprocal relationship with his feminized surroundings but rather becomes a sort of aggressive, jingoistic, phallic symbol for a community bent on showing its mastery and grandeur. Aggressive possession rather than gratitude and appreciation mark the imagery of his hot push into leafy nature, which is backed up by his shouting high school community. Thus Jerome Hadley, in Anderson’s “‘Unused,’” spurred on by the other young men of Bidwell, takes May Edgley, possessing her but not entering into relationship with her, turning the idyllic woods that was to be a lovers’ bower into a site of desecration; and thus Fred Grey in Dark Laughter, cheered on by the town of Old Harbor, parades in his World War I military uniform, asserting a masculinity that amidst lush and pastoral surroundings has become cold and mechanical—so much so, that his wife Aline finally elopes with the gardener Bruce whose gentle hands caress the plants he tends as well as the woman he loves. The type of male associated with

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Adams’s dynamo, aggressively opposed to the Virgin, to nature, is a familiar trope in Anderson’s oeuvre and throughout Midwestern modernism, and Suckow’s Carl Ferguson clearly fits this pattern. Carl “marche[s]” out of the assembly room with “happy self-consciousness,” being called “just grand” by the girls and being congratulated for his “good work” by the boys—with his grandeur based on “good work,” he is a symbol of success based on merit, the American success myth that is a corruption of the Calvinist focus on outward signs of election. His self-consciousness bespeaks the lack of an Other- or God-centeredness that may have caused humble gratitude (ironically, the next section revolves around a Thanksgiving family gathering). Rather, his orgasmic entrance into the natural world surrounding him as he exits the high school seems to involve a massive inflation of self rather than anything resembling relationship: “He grinned modestly at [his peers’] compliments; but as soon as he reached the open air, something seemed to explode in him” (76). His external modesty is here contrasted with an inner explosion of self in the open air; reading his symbolic, communal, elect identity too literally, he fills nature rather than being capable of recognizing the concrete limits of his self. To use the already mentioned Andersonian phrase again, he has failed to bang against his tree but has subsumed Belmond’s leafy trees in his own imagined and communally acknowledged glory. His essential romanticism is still relatively untempered by concrete “sacramental resistance.” Different forms of such resistance become evident in the wake of the glorious pep rally. It is, of course, nature that offers this resistance, but nature in a more personalized, individualized form, namely, in the form of women and in the form of family blood ties. First of all, Carl’s “dark,” outcast sister Margaret, disillusioned with the scripted, purely external vision of glory that the town has, sees through Carl’s fame; she knows that when popular, buxom Mildred Summers tells her after the pep rally that she has “the grandest brother,” that is true only superficially as her brother, with his real human flaws, has wronged her again and again (78). Going to the Presbyterian evening church social for young people, she also reflects on how she resents “the way Carl let himself be made a little tin god by all the girls . . . at the church” (82). She clearly differentiates between Carl as the grand idol, as the revered symbol of something actually unworthy to be worshiped, as the external “tin” image mistaken for the breathing, living substance on the one hand, and Carl as he really is on the other hand, a self-absorbed, guilty, all-toohuman individual. In portraying Carl as an icon of Midwestern idolatry, Suckow participates in a discourse common among the Midwestern modernists: again



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and again, in his fiction as well as his poetry, Anderson discusses American idolatry, the worship of false heroes, of purely external success, of the impressive surface of things. Of course, idolatry is a vital concern in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, with Daisy specifically referred to as a “silver idol.” References to idolatry throughout Midwestern literature generally indicate a worship of external signs of the secularized form of Calvinist “election” known as “success.” However, at the Presbyterian church social that evening, Carl’s inauthenticity is somewhat exposed and at least momentarily, to his shock, costs him his idolized status among the women of the church whose opinion matters to him. This tension begins when Carl forgets to unlock and prepare the church for the social because he is distracted by football practice. When he arrives at the church, Essie Bartlett reprimands him for having had her and Lillian locked out of the church so that they had to get his father. Carl is seriously bothered by her disappointment in him. Essie is an important symbol in the novel: since her father has died long ago, her bedridden mother has only her to look after her. Thus Essie is cut off from any socializing and has never been able to get married: her only outlet is the Presbyterian Young People, where she has lingered into middle age due to never having married and thus not fitting in with the church women of her own age. Living a grotesque, thwarted, relationally unfulfilled existence, Essie is criticized behind her back and made fun of, yet, interestingly, both Carl and his father Fred eventually find compassion and esteem for her. As Fred reflects at the end of the novel in a passage already partially quoted earlier: What had happened to Essie might have happened to anyone. He might have died, as John Bartlett had died, before he had been given time to make provision. . . . It no longer seemed to him just and inevitable that some should have and others not. . . . The memory of Essie troubled him now in the midst of his own peace and comfort. It seemed to him that he hadn’t given her the consolation he might. . . . [W]hat comfort had he been able to muster, when they had stared together at the abyss? He thought of her life of starved devotion—he wasn’t willing to admit that this could be the end. (725)

The abyss mentioned here is earlier labeled “something more irrevocable than he had ever known” (706). It is not merely Essie’s possible death but her life itself, a living death that is now too late to redeem into true life, an existence of continual emotional and spiritual starvation. The full reality of her tragedy is palpably imparted to Fred in the “terrible clutch of Essie’s hands” (705); he bumps up against

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concrete suffering and realizes that his “old optimism and trust have come to the edge of an abyss” (706). Essie’s hands, expressing all the desperation of her life, are strongly reminiscent of the hands of Anderson’s grotesques, for instance, Wing Biddlebaum’s; hands function in Anderson’s as well as here in Suckow’s fiction as means of a tangible expression of a character’s spirit, an expression that speaks louder than words. Essie’s hands here become a sacramental sign that imparts her presence, her experience, her life, and no easy categorization of her and her plight will hold up. The simple post-Calvinistic formula of hard work breeding success and failure indicating spiritual laxness gives way: “What lay there, in those awful mists [of the abyss]? He didn’t know. He never had known” (706). Essie, devout and committed and of severe integrity, yet not reaping rewards according to her merit but suffering to the utmost with piercingly real pain, does not fit into Fred’s easy explanations of the universe and rouses him to a deeply relational compassion and understanding in the face of an unmasterable mystery to which both are humanly subjected. Carl, similarly, feels Essie’s resistance to his literalistic view of things, both when he disappoints her at the Presbyterian social, but also still in middle age. Still as a well-established family father and principal of a Wisconsin school, Carl deeply feels the censure of an Essie-like figure, the old, highly moral spinster Miss Chisholm, who is a long-time teacher at his institution. This dreaded censure occurs in the context of a teacher-related scandal in the midst of which Carl takes a public stand against what he sees as narrow-minded provincial moralism—and yet, despite his liberal convictions, he cannot escape the guilt that the old Essie figure’s judgment elicits in him: “Miss Chisholm reminded him in some ways of Essie Bartlett at home. . . . Now what hurt Carl so dreadfully was the knowledge that in her eyes he had failed her. He had gone over to the side of the devil. She was disappointed in her good opinion. In spite of the years that he had been superintendent of schools, Carl couldn’t take that kind of thing easily.” (150)

In the flush of his confidence, both as a hometown football hero and as a respectable, popular superintendent of schools, Carl bumps up against the judgment and disappointment of a moralistic spinster—and cannot dismiss it. Partly, this vulnerability of his is due to the reality of relationship; both Essie and Miss Chisholm trust Carl, and he cannot easily shake off something as substantive as actual human trust. A more superficial popularity cannot compensate for the loss of real faith in him. For him, as for his father, things are not in reality as simple



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as they look when contemplated at a more literalistic level. When scanned at the surface, what has caused Carl’s fall in the eyes of Miss Chisholm may seem like a just cause: he has stood up for and refused to fire two young teachers who were caught smoking in a hotel lobby in another town, not seeing how narrow moral legalism should be allowed to ruin the women’s careers (151). However, once one digs deeper to the level of motive, Miss Chisholm’s assessment begins to seem more reasonable, even accurate: “Miss Chisholm’s severe faded eyes and her tight mouth gave her verdict: that those two girls had got around Mr. Ferguson with their wiles, that it was just because they were pretty young fools that he had taken their part. Oh, he was no better than other people! Just another disappointment” (150). It is at this level that Miss Chisholm judges Carl, at the level of motives. As a spinster, she perhaps has had plenty of experience with the superficial, external focus of men, and she sees the same in Carl; he has been taken in by a manipulative, charming beauty and has tossed integrity out the window. In the privacy of his office, Carl can admit to himself his “secret guilt”: “How much was Miss Chisholm right, and how much did Gladys Gibbs have to do with it?” (153). Gladys, the pretty one of the two teachers in trouble, stops by Carl’s office the last day of the school year, and Carl “kn[ows] that he would have been secretly embarrassed and impatient . . . if it had been the other girl, Marian Stuart, who was a thin, homely, dark little thing with big glasses” (154). She comes to thank Carl for what he has done for her, and Carl notices that she, the daughter of a dairy farmer, “look[s] as if she had been brought up on Wisconsin strawberries and Jersey cream!” (155). Gladys is thus associated with the lush, physical abundance of the Midwestern countryside, with the pastoral vision of voluptuous physical gratification. Significantly, Carl notes that as an individual, Gladys means nothing to him: “Carl hadn’t really known anything about Gladys, or cared anything, except for the warm physical attraction that she possessed” (155). It becomes apparent that Carl’s lack of integrity runs deeper than a mere disagreement with provincial narrow-mindedness: he has objectified Woman as a pleasure principle rather than seeing the real, delimited person. The implied reference to the American land—read immediately as a symbol rather than engaged with concretely and relationally, and read as a pleasure-giving object—becomes even more clear as the Wisconsin dairy farmer’s daughter continues to be described in pastoral terms: Carl took her hand. It was soft, plump, warm, unresisting, and seemed to confide itself to his. A delicate delight came thrilling that flattered him all through. . . . He felt with a shock the appeal of her warmth, her roundness, her living freshness

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with the slight dew of perspiration on her round white forehead just where the golden, stiffly-waved hair was brushed back—the humid brightness of her large eyes with the gray and golden irises in the almost super-healthy, pearly blueness of the eyeballs. The red freshness of her lips glistened through the lipstick. There was a slight trembling of her full red mouth. (155–56)

The extreme sensuality of this passage—warm, unresisting, plump softness, lips so freshly red that their natural color bursts through the lipstick, the lush Midwestern connotation of the word “humid,” the crowning adjective “super-healthy”—all of this intense evocation of sensual superabundance, easily accessible, spread out before one like a feast, echoes precisely the representation of the American land, as discussed in Kolodny and Marx, and of the Midwestern land in particular, as summed up by Scott Russell Sanders in his discussion of the Midwest’s cultural and literary image: “More than any other region, the Midwest has fulfilled our vision of America as the land of plenty. Here is the mouth of the cornucopia, overflowing with abundant fruits. Here are the deep soils, thick timber, rich deposits of coal and oil and ore, the slow-moving, navigable rivers, the level terrain so easily traversed” (38). And it is a land that in its bodily pliancy and invitation kindles illusions of mastery: “Of all the regions in America, the Midwest is the one most easily—if superficially—subdued” (49) and “[t]he same qualities that made the Heartland ideal for farming and the founding of towns—rich soils, broad rivers, ample rainfall, level terrain—also made it fertile ground for illusions of mastery” (Sanders 44). Bearing in his Midwestern psyche his region’s misunderstanding of the land as a gratifying body to be mastered and transferring that literalized ideal vision to the iconic pastoral figure Gladys, Carl reaches for the mouth of cornucopia, almost kissing the girl and snapping back into his professional role only because he “hear[s] someone come into the outer office” (156). He is particularly tempted by the pliant vision of Gladys because during the previous night, he has experienced “bleak failure . . . to wrest from [his wife] Lillian the kind of response he needed” (156). Attempting mastery of both Gladys and Lillian, Carl displays his continuing spiritual literalism in which physical realities, iconic actions and appearances, are supposed to automatically contain spiritual substance (such substantive fulfillment misunderstood as complete personal gratification). It is the sex act reduced to mere physics, and this intimately personal problem mirrors an entire culture’s inability to come to terms with its own limits and its need for a relational appreciation of its land as genuinely and fully Other and of a concomitant understanding of the unmasterable Otherness of the entire cosmic scheme in which this society is



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placed. An important difference between Suckow and Anderson emerges here, one, however, that is still contained within a fundamental similarity. While Anderson, in work after work, resents the idealization of women as icons of purity, he nonetheless occasionally does tend to idealize women as Venus/Virgin figures representing the life force or Nature (this happens more frequently in theoretical statements such as in A Story-Teller’s Story or Perhaps Women [1931] than in his fiction). Suckow, on the other hand, particularly debunks the idealization of women as pastoral nature, as sex itself, or as maternal gratifiers. Both authors ultimately are possessed of the same aim: to allow nature to undermine idealistic categories and thus open up human beings to substantive reality, to mystery. Suckow more consistently than Anderson avoids the trap of turning the sacramental force of nature into an ideal in its own turn. Carl’s experience of being spiritually and significantly torn between craving Miss Chisholm’s approval and yearning for all that Gladys represents to him is foreshadowed at the aforementioned Presbyterian church social. On this occasion, Carl not only experiences the pangs of having disappointed Essie’s trust but also experiences the guilt and loneliness of betraying his sweetheart Lillian’s trust by blatantly flirting with the Gladys-like figure of Mildred Summers, who in spite of previously uttered contempt for Presbyterians now crashes their social since Carl is a football hero. Mildred is described as having “soft charm” (77), she is a blonde, and her last name alludes to the lushness and humid fertility and earth smells of Midwestern summers, as her first name does to the mildness and mythical pliancy of the Midwestern pastoral landscape. Carl, later, explicitly states that Gladys reminds him of Mildred, just as Miss Chisholm reminds him of Essie (154). Thus, the pattern remains for much of Carl’s life: perceived by others as an icon, he himself is drawn to pastorally iconic girls and thus neglects to cultivate substantive relationships, such as would require the acceptance of highly individual limits and concreteness in another rather than the essentially impersonal, merely symbolic fullness of complete, superabundant gratification. After Essie and Lillian’s distance following the disastrous social, Carl fe[els] sickeningly that he ha[s] failed all round. Always before he had been the chief of the snug little company working in the kitchen together after the socials were over. The strength of his ties with the church, and with Lillian, seemed to rise up and oppress him now in the empty room where the familiar chairs, the familiar long windows, were reproaching him for the way he had acted with Mildred Summers, an outsider. (87)

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Carl is meeting individual resistance to his literalized pastoral idolatry—he cannot elude the web of relationship but has to face the fact that real, concrete limitations come with any sort of relational identity, and that commitment to either Lillian or Mildred requires sacrifice. Thus he has refrained from actually kissing Mildred, not knowing “to what solemn meaning [a kiss] might commit him” (88). A “solemn meaning” has dawned on him, the reality of the Other, the reality of life and pain; before he becomes too personal with Mildred, he takes a step back, for suddenly substance emerges where before was a literalized myth, an idolized symbol. Unfortunately, as has already been discussed in terms of his later fascination with Gladys Gibbs, Carl’s post-Puritan spiritual literalism, and his strong sense of election, continue to haunt him during his middle-aged married years as a Wisconsin superintendent of schools. Always sensing in himself untapped powers and insisting on an Emersonian promised land of unbounded self-realization, Carl is impatient with the limits placed on him by the big Other in his life, Lillian, especially since she has grown up in the strictest of households and has never learned self-expression but only knows to follow ingrained principles.7 Ironically, she and Carl are inversions of each other grown from the same root. While Carl’s elect reading of himself, his literalized typology, turns him into an egocentric Transcendentalist Self impatient with the Other, which he cannot subsume in himself, Lillian, in an equally literalized typology, has lost herself, has lost even language, so thoroughly has she been subdued by the constant legalistic and religious impositions of her tyrannical grandfather. She has become a lily, the flower of death as well as resurrection, pale and white, a religious icon of purity. The personal, substantive life that continues buried within her is primarily evident in the frequently evoked “tea-rose flush” or “pink sea-shell blush” that delicately brightens her pallid countenance in moments of delight, love, or other strong feelings. It is a sign of Carl’s superficiality and fatal lack of sensitivity that he is generally unresponsive to this special blush, and it is emblematic of the state of the Ferguson marriage that Lillian feels the need to resort to rouge in order to compete for Carl’s attention (159). Ignoring or misinterpreting people’s subtle physical signs is indicative of a lack of sacramental understanding in much of Midwestern writing: thus in Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Wing Biddlebaum’s hands are crudely misinterpreted by latter-day Puritans and in Poor White, only Clara Butterworth notices Hugh’s mysterious eyes, which humanize him to her and change him from an icon of industry to a real presence. Carl’s failure to appreciate Lillian’s delicate, beautiful blush thus speaks volumes. Lillian senses her husband’s disregard for her; she does not know about Carl’s attraction to



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Gladys but feels that she is competing with Katherine Brinsley, a neighbor in their Wisconsin town who has taken an interest in Carl since he has become a controversial figure in the smoking scandal at the school. The Brinsleys are from Philadelphia, practice a lavishly hedonistic lifestyle, and look down on the provincialism of their Wisconsin surroundings. To Carl, they represent worldliness, a freedom from inhibition, and a sphere of unlimited possibility beyond the narrowly circumscribed tasks he can perform in Salisbury, Wisconsin, of which he observes: “He saw all of a sudden that there was nothing more to be done here in Salisbury. He had built the new schoolhouse. He had been going up—and now it would be simply standing still. He wanted to get away” (157). The inorganic quality of Carl’s restlessness is obvious; it is unbearable to him to stand still, to grow roots, to plumb depths. Erecting an external structure has become an end in itself; tending the life within that structure in patient and faithful servanthood does not seem worthwhile. Thus, when Katherine, in her flippant manner, decides to make Carl her pet project and influences her rich Uncle Phin of Philadelphia to offer Carl a philanthropy position in that city, Carl is eager to accept an open door to new experiences and possibilities. It is this event that triggers Carl’s and Lillian’s definitive marital crisis. They are spending the summer in Belmond at Carl’s parents’ when Katherine’s letter reaches them, informing them that Uncle Phin is indeed offering Carl the position. Lillian has felt threatened by the idea from its very inception: “[Carl] didn’t know what he thought of Katherine’s idea, but its novelty excited a kind of restlessness that Lillian had always fearfully felt in him. . . . Lillian was trembling with the fear of rupture from all her early convictions. . . . It was as if she stood tied, weighted and helpless in some race, and had to see Carl running ahead beyond her” (169). She knows that the more Carl places himself in new, challenging, and cosmopolitan environments, the less she, firmly tied to an old rural way of life and to old principles, will be able to remain part of his life. She is Carl’s past, which he longs to shed; she is his roots and his ties, which he longs to sever: she represents the concrete circumstances and boundaries that infuriate Carl’s transcendent Self. In other words, she becomes the agent of “sacramental resistance” in Carl’s life, a resistance closely parallel and allied with that of the American land to the literalized pastoral Utopian scheme imposed upon it. When Katherine’s letter arrives in Belmond, the marriage’s crucial quarrel erupts. In the course of it, it becomes clear that in terms of personal rectitude and maturity, Lillian has fared better than Carl under the influence of a Puritan legacy. Disallowed to express herself, she has never learned the flippant use of words and

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is aware of substantive realities that remain unexpressed beneath the surface of articulated reality. She is thus aware that types and symbols do not capture reality, that there are depths to be sensitively plumbed in people. Carl chooses not to know this truth: “Carl knew how much was being ignored [in what he said], and he rejoiced in it” (202). He works himself up into a consciously produced “virtuous indignation” at Lillian’s supposedly unreasonable fear of change and her clinging to provincialism; and yet, he is “half-guiltily” aware of how such arguments are mere power trips since “it [is] so hard for [Lillian] to talk, to have any give-and-take” (204). Lillian is fully aware of Carl’s mere exercise of verbal power, of how he abuses language to produce an articulated surface that willfully ignores the underlying truth: “Lillian couldn’t say anything to that. How could she?—for it was all pent up in her, smothered by her reticence, what Carl knew and yet slid over with his fine-sounding reasons and arguments, what her silence was begging him to understand—begging not to be taken at its own value” (204). The image of words gliding over the surface of reality, of failing to take root in substance, is, of course, familiar in many works of Midwestern modernism, e.g., very prominently in Anderson’s Dark Laughter. Unfortunately, the “value” at which Carl takes Lillian’s words is the literal value of word symbols—Lillian’s helpless “I can’t” would speak volumes to one interested in patiently teasing out her heart’s concerns. These concerns revolve around the possibility of losing her husband to a strange modern culture in which she does not belong and to a constant restless pursuit of some ill-defined promised land. Yet Carl is not interested in real opposition to his vision of self-realization: “Carl must understand and help her out. He wasn’t admitting her side. He was making her seem smaller than she was, in order to make his point. That shamed her with its falsity” (205). Ruthlessly, Carl clings to the rhetoric of limitless possibilities versus a narrow-minded imposition of limitations, a rhetoric that ignores real concrete limits: “And then . . . she just couldn’t go there. All the words Carl said were thrown away beside that fact” (206). Already in Salisbury, Lillian has “strained herself beyond the mold in which she was cast” and has reached “the limits of possible change” (206). Carl insists on rhetoric being able to mold reality; he cannot accept the powerful mold of life experience that cannot be simply overcome at will. He refuses to see the substantive, concrete breeding ground of language, of symbols; instead, he seeks to impose symbols, language, upon life and thus have his way. In this manner, his attitude reflects the anchorless, post-Puritan, egocentric typological literalism of Jesse Bentley in Anderson’s “Godliness.” And Carl is “godly” in the same false sense as Bentley; rather than



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being submissive to an Other, he burns with the flame of self-righteousness: “He felt himself innocent . . . and bitterly angry in that innocence” (205). Carl’s literalist, legalistic, rhetorical overlooking of Lillian’s reality finds an abrupt and horrifying end when his pregnant wife attempts to take poison before his eyes, and, upon his snatching the poison away from her, suffers a severe mental and physical breakdown that ultimately results in the loss of the unborn child. The juxtaposition of aggressive rhetoric-flinging, city-oriented male with inarticulate, country-oriented mother close to the great primal realities of birth and death is no accident: in Lillian, Carl, the representative post-theological modern-day Puritan imposing an anchorless, anti-relational, mastery-oriented scheme on reality has to face up to nature, to the primordial realm, to the Other, to concreteness and limitation. Seeing the miserable Lillian in her hospital bed, Carl immediately loses his “carefully guarded buoyancy” and feels a “strange physical sensation of pain in his heart” (220). It is a nonverbal gesture, Lillian’s head turning slowly toward him, the “deep dull suffering that look[s] out at him from the very depths of her eyes” that “shocks” Carl and “undermines” him: “Instantly, in shame, all the false, easy consolation that Carl had gathered was gone, and he was down on a bedrock of pain” (220). Finally, Carl has banged up against his tree; slapped in the face by Lillian’s profound, undeniable suffering, he finally gains access to her soul by going beyond rhetoric to the not easily quantifiable, the richly suggestive, nonliteral and yet piercingly real language of her body and her eyes. The “bedrock of pain” is a hard, tangible reality that sweeps away the all-too-handy symbols called words. Lillian recognizes her own share of guilt in the sad issue of her and Carl’s life together: “I should never, never have married you . . . I married you when I knew you didn’t really love me . . . I forfeited my soul” (224). Realizing Carl’s lack of understanding of her, she has consented to a very external, spiritually bankrupt union—she too has fallen into the trap of literalism, grasping at marriage, the symbol of love, and finding that it did not automatically contain its denoted reality. Awed by the “completeness of Lillian’s misery,” Carl is stunned to realize that he has been the cause of it (225); he has now entered “the humiliation of a sinner” (219) and has come to a “knowledge of his limitations” (232). He realizes that it is no longer in him to disregard Lillian’s feelings and to be consumed by his own plans: “He felt it with wonder. That something actually wasn’t in him. Always before he had thought of it as circumstance. The knowledge shook him with a sense of profound insignificance. . . . To disregard [the ones he loved] was like trampling on himself ” (235). In the self ’s realization of the Other’s reality and significance and of the limits of the Self, a fusion of Self and Other, a new expansion, love, becomes possible.

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These latter reflections, significantly, occur at the old Ferguson farm, which Carl visits. He has yearned for the city as a world of endless possibility. Now his bedrock of pain points him back to the country life of his ancestors. Dreaming of moving his family to the farm, he longs for a lost simplicity: He was homesick for the summer heat of the hayfield—for hard, natural things, the ring of the axe in the woods on a smoky winter day, his old task of driving the big horses in from the field, even the stream of yellow animal urine beating down into the trampled muddy ground around the tank and sending up its sensual ammonia smell. He wanted the boys to know this place that he loved. (239)

In “the country loneliness, away from the influence of other people, he could have the simple, bare, hard chance to work out his own salvation” (238). Away from rhetoric, from fast-paced cultural change and from cultural ideological impositions, in a realm of “hard, natural things” that offer concrete resistance to the self, and starkly confronted with bodily reality, Carl sees a chance of return to the essentials of life, to truth. In a world of unspoken being and of profound physical limitations and resistance, the soul can reach deeper than in a context of highly developed civilization, that realm of human mastery. For now it is in limitation that Carl sees salvation, as symbolized by the pink seashell that functions as a doorstop in his grandparents’ now abandoned house, and which is associated with Lillian’s oft-ignored delicate “pink sea-shell flush”: “It gleamed in the musty dimness of the room. It brought back a faint return of his old feeling for Lillian. It lay cool and smooth and chill and pink-flushed white, an entity, small and what it was, enclosing itself. Limited as she might be, her truth was deeper and simpler than his, and he still needed it” (239). The seashell is what it is; it has an identity. And in that identity lies beauty. Its identity is bound up with something larger, with nature, of which it concretely is a part and in which it plays its own limited role. It is not nature itself, just a self-enclosed small part of the larger phenomenon. And yet, in it is found the beauty of nature. Thus Carl dismisses the memory of Gladys, who promised the very fullness of nature, personified it: “The sensual joy of life was all around him. . . . But the need for Gladys was beaten out of him. . . . He was with Lillian. Her suffering had sunk into him too deeply” (236). Real belonging, real relationship, even if it is painful, is now what nourishes Carl. The pastoral myth has given way to a knowledge of limits, of a real Self, a real Other, and of Love. It is thus as a concrete, limited sacrament that the Midwestern land can be spiritually nourishing and lead through limits



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to fullness, whereas its pastoral ideal, exemplified by Gladys, promises all and leaves the Self lonely and anchorless, in a deathlike, spiritual void. Carl’s reflections on his grandparents’ farm, which occur near the end of the novel’s second book, mirror the family patriarch Fred Ferguson’s reflections in the same location near the end of the novel, the reflections that show his conversion from a post-Calvinistic attitude to a compassionate, understanding, sacramental one. Parallel to his son’s experience, Fred dreams of living on the old Ferguson farm, which he, in his day, abandoned for a banking career in town: The clover wasn’t in bloom yet, but it was getting rich and green. There were small green apples in the orchard where the grass was long. . . . He caught the smell of the hot rich earth overturned by the cultivator. He looked down the rows of young green corn. Old feelings long buried stirred. There was no smell on earth so good to him as this, now that he had been away and come back. He felt that he almost envied [his renter] Rolfe. Now, after all these years, was he going to turn around and wish that he had stayed a farmer? (718)

Touched by the natural, organic world with its primal vitality and its simple, basic pleasures, its smells, tastes, and colors, Fred feels drawn back to what he has striven to leave behind for the sake of success and wealth; he realizes that he has lived out his life in artificial structures rather than in a world that in its concreteness is uncorrupted and bears a spiritual significance of wholeness: “The smell of the cultivated earth held peace. There ought to be peace and plenty for everyone. Wasn’t that what had been meant at the start?” (720). The peaceful, organic unfolding of life, its richness and bounty, speak of a holistic natural reality that has been clouded by human corruption, such as the capitalist system that has made it hard for Fred’s renters to make a living off the farm and that has allowed poverty to exist in America, the naturally bounteous land of milk and honey. As Fred listens to the harmony in nature, so different from human strife, its “song of growth in the summer air,” he realizes that “it [is] good land” and that “[t]his belief in the goodness of his native soil lay underneath the tottering structure of business faith, religious faith, everything. Whatever folks might do with it, the land was here. That was good. If folks treated it right, it would never let them starve” (720). The presence of abundance, goodness, provision, peace, and plenty in the form of the rich Midwestern land has been a key factor in Fred’s sense of election, and in the sense of election of the whole culture; yet, this sense of election, drained of its theism and humble gratitude, has turned

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into an exploitive sense of entitlement that has led to inequality, struggle, and a society based on power and domination. It has furthermore functioned as an excuse to blame those who are unsuccessful for their own plight since the Canaan myth is literalized and not seen in its complex framework of a modern capitalist economy. Recognizing cultural injustices and submitting to the land, “treating it right,” seeking sharing and balance rather than the fullness of maximum self-gratification, is the crucial neglected factor in a successful relation to the American land. Fred even briefly flirts with the idea of socialism when he realizes his disgust with American culture’s betrayal of the land, but he quickly realizes, as does Anderson’s Red Oliver, that socialism can easily turn into a detached, abstract power structure as well (719). The answer is not a superficial political change but a profound spiritual change, such as Carl experiences in relation to Lillian and such as Fred experiences in relation to Essie and in a more crucial way, toward his wife: a patient, concrete engagement that recognizes the limited Self and limited Other as caught up in the same mysterious whole and that acts caringly within its limits and without presuming to know all the answers.



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10 Sacramentalism in a Postmodern Farm Novel Ginny Smith’s Spiritual Journey in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres I am of the West—out of the land—out of the velvety creeping and straining. I have resolved. I have been born like a wind. I came sweating and steaming out of the cornrows. Deep in the corn I lay—ages and ages—folded and broken—old and benumbed. My mother the black ground suckled me. —from “Song of Stephen the Westerner” by Sherwood Anderson Do you remember when you crept close to me, wanting to touch my body? What a night—how it rained. How could you know, how could you know in me there was oblivion? The terrible poison of my body has laid waste the land. I embrace Hell for you, go to my damnation for my love of you. —from “Song of Cedric the Silent” by Sherwood Anderson

In some sense, this book concerns itself with the spiritual history of the Midwest as interpreted by Midwestern authors. The object is not necessarily to attain maximum historical accuracy but to gain a deeper understanding of what this region’s history has meant to some of its spiritually sensitive daughters and sons, what lessons they have drawn from that history, and how they have reconfigured the meaning of the Midwestern land in an effort to inspire the future historical course of the region. One would suspect that Midwestern authors of our own postmodern era would perceive that history and meaning dramatically differently from the early – 283 –

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twentieth-century modernist generation of writers. After all, modernist literature tends to still be imbued with that Victorian quest for new meta-narratives, new foundational truths upon which to rebuild a culture that has lost its Christian as well as rationalistic certainties, and which also no longer is able to abide fully by the ideals of romanticism. In other words, modernism seeks fundamental answers to all of the great human questions; disillusioned with the never ultimately satisfactory, at times even horrifying, outcomes of this large-scale cultural quest (e.g., the National Socialist movement was very much an outgrowth of the modernist search for new frameworks, new meanings), the post-World War II generations have turned decidedly in a more pragmatic direction. It has become commonplace for literary critics and authors alike to focus on the political, on power dynamics, particularly in order to expose abuses of power. While such deconstructive texts imply certain bedrock values, such as the value of individual freedom and the immorality of violence (i.e., the Self ’s impositions on the Other), they do not frequently essay with the same spiritual intensity and confidence as modernist works to set forth large-scale, encompassing spiritual visions of the universe and humans’ place in it. Thus, one would not necessarily expect postmodern Midwestern writers to continue in the neo-sacramental vein of their modernist predecessors. However, in spite of expected differences, postmodernism and modernist neo-sacramentalism do share significant common ground: both seek whatever “truth” may be found not in Platonic abstraction or idealism, but in the sphere of the concretely natural, human, and experiential. And both adamantly seek to resist stifling rhetorical impositions upon the complex world, upon “reality.” The important remaining difference is that modernist writers might not need to place the word “reality” in quotation marks; what they hope to unearth in the world of natural concreteness is nothing short of the true nature of the world and the path to full-fledged mystical “salvation,” however much their notion of salvation might diverge from traditional orthodox understandings. Postmodern fiction, on the other hand, tends to stop short of such metaphysical optimism, emphasizing instead the empowerment of the individual to define his or her own functional, workable, “whole” reality.1 At first glance, Jane Smiley’s Iowa farm novel A Thousand Acres (1991), one of the most celebrated and consistently acclaimed American novels of the 1990s and surely one of the conspicuous pinnacles of post-World War II Midwestern writing, appears fully postmodern, uncovering sordid power structures within a farm family and within American society at large, and carefully avoiding the creation of any hopeful vision at the novel’s end. In fact, while the novel’s narrator and main character, Ginny Cook Smith, learns various devastating truths about



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her family’s past, she does not find any way to apply these truths constructively to her future: “What was transformed now was the past, not the future. The future seemed to clamp down upon me like an iron lid” (308). The word “seems” qualifies the bitterness of the new life Ginny acquires at the end of the novel, but her life situation is certainly anything but fulfilled; there is a tragic sense of life having been wasted, of Ginny having to live forever with profound regrets that cannot be compensated. In the relative bitterness of its ending, the novel resembles King Lear, the Shakespearean tragedy, which it rewrites and which is often regarded as Shakespeare’s most bitter.2 However, my contention is that, like Lear, the novel opens up ambiguously to sacramental truth, to positive mysteries that are considered at least a possibility. Even in this postmodern Midwestern novel, it appears that Protestantism-derived cultural literalism is opposed to a deeper and truer way of reading the world and of inhabiting it, a way of living that can still be called “sacramental,” though perhaps in a more reduced sense than in many modernist texts. The novel points toward the possibility of participating in a spiritual-physical symbiotic wholeness based on a kind of “grace” that is available even in and through brokenness, fallenness, corruption, pollution, and death. The world’s “brokenness,” its chaotic and confusing condition, and the difficulty of anchoring oneself in truth constitute a major theme not only in Smiley’s novel but also in the Shakespearean drama from which she draws. One of the most disconcerting aspects of Shakespeare’s tragedies is that their heroes, admirable as they are, are also repulsive, even sickening, in their prideful delusion, and that they see only part of their folly once they reach the epiphany that precedes their violent deaths. A classic example is Othello, who mourns having groundlessly murdered his innocent wife, Desdemona, but, nonetheless, gives a pre-suicide speech, wishing to be remembered for his brutal slaying of a Turk whose offense did probably not warrant such fatal vindictiveness: “Set you down this; / And say besides that in Aleppo once, / Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk / Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, / I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog / And smote him, thus” (5.2.361–66). The “thus” marks the moment when Othello stabs himself, relating his earlier unjustified killing of a Turk, for which he wishes to be remembered as a “servant of the state,” to his also spiritually and ethically problematic killing of himself. Tragically, even though Othello has realized a particular wrong he has done, that is, the murder of his unjustly suspected, faithful wife, Desdemona, he still does not see clearly in spiritual or ethical terms. His suicide and his violent final speech form a “bloody period” to his life, a phrase used by the onlooker Lodovico (5.2.367). Similarly, King Lear’s end is not all grace and love; though he

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has been reconciled with Cordelia, the daughter he rejected because she would not flatter him, he, nonetheless, boasts having slain the executioner sent to hang her: “I killed the slave that was a-hanging thee” (5.3.272).3 He also curses his and Cordelia’s enemies and fails to recognize his most loyal friend, Kent, stating quite correctly, “Mine eyes are not o’ the best” (5.3.277). Then he sinks into incoherence and mental darkness and dies without that clarity of spiritual vision that would lend the play a more strongly redemptive character. In the end, Lear is still dominated by pride, anger, and vindictiveness, his reason overridden by dark passions. The play, thus, does not offer an easy moral lesson at its end, but, rather, leaves us with a sense that the universe is highly ambiguous and that the existence of a redemptive providential order seems uncertain. This inevitable concern of the play’s audience is given voice within the play by the wise and faithful Kent: “Is this the promised end?” (5.3.262). And yet, the play does very clearly point to its opposite: as we witness the havoc wrought by pride, we come to see how all human community depends on forgiveness, pity, humility, and grace; as we see reason devoid of feeling going awry (Cordelia, in her stubborn rational literalism, which attitude is echoed by Caroline Cook in A Thousand Acres),4 and as we see the distortion that occurs through the takeover of passion in Lear, we see the need for a sacramental balance between the mental/spiritual and instinctive/animal parts of our human nature; and as we see Edgar’s well-intentioned dishonesty toward his father kill that father in the end, we learn of the importance even of painful honesty. While the workings of the universe cannot easily be schematized, and while they always retain a mystery that instills humility in us, we, nonetheless, see that there are rules, that there is an order, and not a purely mechanistic one, that pity, grace, and love form part of that order, and that it is in forsaking these virtues that the characters fail and trigger or exacerbate tragedy. This is the crucial realization of the villain Edmund; he who first proclaimed a ruthless version of nature as his goddess (1.2.1) is in his dying moved to do one good deed “[d]espite of mine own nature,” in the process, of course, obeying the “moving” impulse of his true, originary, uncorrupted nature, a nature precisely not amoral and ruthless (5.3.241–44). Similarly, the seeming nihilism of A Thousand Acres’ end can be seen in a more positive light if one considers the implied and frequently evoked and alluded to wholeness that functions as the wrenching story’s foil and subtext, and particularly if one looks to the promise of wholeness expressed in the superabundant (though much-abused) Midwestern land. The hard, objective, and yet fluid and mysterious quality of this land is not merely a matter of some idyllic or pastoral discourse providing a rhetorical foil for other narratives—instead, the land, nature,



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and human nature are powerful “real presences” demanding to be understood and related to correctly. In a way, the novel depicts a struggle between a Midwestern farmer who represents the official “story” of the Midwest and of America, on the one hand, and on the other, the land, nature, the Midwest an sich, “America” taken concretely. Ultimately, as does all good regionalist literature, the novel reaches far beyond regional and national themes, depicting humans’ struggle against nature, objective reality, “the rules” of the universe, perhaps even God (though the novel is not [pan]theistically inclined, in contrast to most modernist texts). Larry Cook is a third-generation family farmer in Zebulon County,5 Iowa, who enjoys being boss over his two eldest daughters, Rose and Ginny, and their respective husbands, Pete and Ty, who work the farm with him. Strangely enough, one day, in spite of still being vigorous and loving his work, he decides to retire and turn his farm into an “incorporation” run by his daughters and sons-in-law. As Marina Leslie points out, “Larry Cook’s suffocating and controlling ‘incorporation’ is in no way a concession to age, nor does he seem to imagine this legal maneuver as a relinquishing of power. Not only does this suggest a fascinating reading of Lear’s ‘darker purpose’ in giving away his kingdom, it performs a grotesque literalization of Cook’s annexation of his two older daughters. . . . [I]ncorporation for Cook represents a complete melding of identities” (36). Tensions rise as the inheritors of the farm refuse to cater to Larry’s increasingly violent outbursts and erratic whims. These tensions escalate as Larry’s younger daughter, the Des Moines lawyer Caroline, leads a lawsuit against her siblings on her father’s behalf, with Larry, all the while declining into complete insanity. Throughout this process, Ginny begins to remember being sexually abused by her father during her teens, a memory she has previously suppressed. For her, the falling apart of farm and family initiates a painful process of seeing reality ever more clearly and fully, of exiting a false reality defined for her by others and exposing the truth. That she deeply upsets her father in the process is no surprise; for Larry is used to defining reality, a mindset succinctly described by his eldest daughter, Rose: “Daddy thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction” (216). Poignantly, Rose calls her father “Laurence Cook, the great I AM” (211). This God-like sense of self has often been noted by critics. For instance, Carl D. Malmgren provides the following typical characterization of Larry: What Larry Cook really has in common with God is an inscrutable power, and he wields it by ruling his thousand-acre fiefdom like an absolute monarch, one

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whose word is Law. . . . His overweening sense of self reduces other opinions to insignificance or nonexistence. Indeed, it finally converts people into objects for him to own and use, no different from the land and its crops. . . . Larry Cook epitomizes both archetypal Farmer and Father, in fact, just because he treats his family and his land in much the same way. (439)

As Larry’s daughters begin to resist him, his narrative of reality collapses, and insanity ensues, a process that mirrors Lear’s loss of power, leading him to a profound mental crisis. What is resisting him and the whole tyrannically patriarchal conception of the world for which he stands is not merely his daughters, however; as indicated by Malmgren, the novel presents a conflation of fatherhood and farmerhood, and the Cook women’s resistance to their father is intimately associated with nature striking back at its would-be dominator. The women, the land, nature in every sense of the word, including human nature, the entire physical and spiritual world, constitute an actually present “reality,” the real genuine Other faced by every Self, and these other presences will not nourish and bring life and fulfillment to him who does not respect their Otherness, who seeks merely to incorporate them into his own self. In his self-deification, Larry has misunderstood the true order of things and his own place within that order. And this order is not a mechanistic, merely materialistic one; as we shall see upon further examination, relationship, community, love, are the fundamentals of the order of creation, and submitting the Self to a concrete relational encounter with the world of the Other is the key to spiritual and physical health. Before turning to the deconstruction of Larry’s narrative, we might observe more closely what this narrative is and note its specific representative Midwesternness and Americanness. For, as do the modern texts investigated in preceding chapters, so does this postmodern novel associate the cultural “fall” of the Midwest with a Protestant and, especially, a Calvinistic heritage. First, it is, perhaps, significant to note that the narrator herself points to the northern European, thoroughly Protestant cultural background in which the story unfolds, indicating that the land was settled by Northern and Central European Protestant ethnic groups (199). One of the central community values in Zebulon County, a value that smacks of a Protestant concern with “signs of election,” is the emphasis on visibly projecting success and character: Most issues on a farm return to the issue of keeping up appearances. Farmers extrapolate quickly from the farm to the farmer. . . . A poor-looking farm



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diagrams the farmer’s personal failures. Most farmers see farming as an unforgiving way of life, and they are themselves less than indulgent about weedy fields, dirty equipment, delinquent children, badly cared for animals, a farmhouse that looks like the barn. It may be different elsewhere in the country, but in Zebulon County, which was settled mostly by English, Germans, and Scandinavians, a good appearance was the source and the sign of all other good things. (199)

The ethnic, and, by implication, Protestant heritage is linked to a classic Protestant work ethic, and the phrase “sign of all other good things” clearly bears religious connotations: an unforgiving, relentless demand is placed on the Self to be ever-vigilant, unfailingly virtuous, systematically good, even perfect, in order to maintain the identity of goodness, blessedness, election. It is this lesson that the people of Zebulon County read in the land, which will produce as abundantly as necessary only if it is continuously managed with the utmost care. That this lesson, however, does not simply spring from an experience of the land but is culturally predisposed is a point the narrator is careful to make at the end of her passage. Larry Cook’s abusive, self-deifying behavior, ironically, derives from a culturally Protestant sense of election and blessedness; his forebears’ and his own highly visible success instills in Larry a sense of self-righteousness that becomes tyrannical. Thus, rather than feeling compassion for failing fellow farmers, Larry emphasizes the rightness of his acquiring their land: The story of how my father and his father came to possess a thousand contiguous acres taught us lessons, and though we didn’t hear it often, we remembered it perfectly. It was easily told—Sam and John and later my father had saved their money and kept their eyes open, and when their neighbors had no money, they had some, and bought what their neighbors couldn’t keep. Our ownership spread slowly over the landscape, but it spread as inevitably as ink along the threads of a linen napkin, as inevitably and, we were led to know, as ineradicably. It was a satisfying story. (132)

The mention of ink, with its association of writing, and the bracketing of this account by the word “story” emphasize the fictionality, the artificiality, of what is “easily told”; the word “ineradicably” expresses Larry’s sense of the story as Holy Writ—eternal truth—and of the very land as the permanent mark of irrevocable “salvation.” Victimizing one’s neighbors, taking advantage of their vulnerability, becomes part of an “inevitable,” virtually God-decreed process,

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confirming one’s superior goodness. Possession becomes a right, an expression of the Self ’s integrity and core identity of righteousness. We are reminded of Winesburg, Ohio’s spiritually deluded farmer Jesse Bentley: “Into Jesse’s mind came the conviction that all of the Ohio farmers who owned land in the valley of Wine Creek were Philistines and enemies of God. . . . ‘Jehovah of Hosts,’ he cried, . . . ‘Let Thy grace alight upon me. Send me a son to be called David who shall help me to pluck at last all of these lands out of the hands of the Philistines and turn them to Thy service and to the building of Thy kingdom on earth” (72–73). While Anderson’s Jesse is a nineteenth-century farmer full of explicit religious zeal, Smiley’s twentieth-century farmer is of a more secularized, merely moralizing strain; however, the basic cultural and spiritual impulse is the same, with a sense of election masking greed and lust for power as a godly enterprise. In the culturally Protestant ethic displayed in the farmers of Winesburg and Zebulon County, there is no room for sin, no room for imperfection;6 where goodness and salvation are externalized and defeats or mistakes are unforgivable, no flaws or wrongdoing can be acknowledged. Thus, the shadier of the land deals that made Larry the proud owner of a thousand acres must be blocked out of his mind, such as his acquisition of Mel Scott’s farm: The Stanley brothers were furious. Said my father had engineered it all, to get a whole farm for the taxes and something over, a fee, you might call it, for the disposal of the encumbering family. It was a transaction my father never spoke of, knowledge that came to me through gossip thirty years later. . . . I now wonder if there was an element of shame to Daddy’s refusal ever to speak of it. I wonder if it had really landed in his lap, or if there were moments of planning, of manipulation and using a man’s incompetence and poverty against him that soured the whole transaction. On the other hand, one of my father’s favorite remarks about things in general was, “Less said about that, the better.” (135)

Larry’s own sense of righteousness and the repression of his shame here is linked with the glorious history of the farm; just as he must be untainted, so must be the story with which he identifies, of which he forms a part. And hence, what begins to emerge is the intimate connection between Larry’s relation to his and his farm’s history and the nation’s relation to its past. This sense of history is really quite paradoxical: on the one hand, a celebration of a glorious and righteous past, on the other hand, a dismissal of history, a sense of history beginning anew every moment. This paradox is produced by the culturally conditioned need to



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be entirely pure, free from sin, blessed; what rears its head here is the myth of America as being beyond history, Edenic, of its history being a kind of antihistory, an overcoming of history. Manifest destiny is working itself out, and the beacon on the hill shines ever brighter. If we may refer Larry to another Anderson figure, he resembles Tom Edwards in “An Ohio Pagan”; like him, he fits the archetype of the American Adam as delineated by critic R. B. W. Lewis: “Adam was the first, the archetypal man. His moral position was prior to experience, and in his very newness he was fundamentally innocent. The world and history lay all before him” (5). As part of a highly artificial history of “righteousness” working itself out and spreading its kingdom across the land, Larry has to continually suppress the real history, conforming it to his “moral position prior to experience” and living in an eternal self-identical moment. The history he celebrates is really identical with his own image of himself, and his Self is particularly imposing in how it contains and expresses a grand history of timeless validity. Much like the orphaned and unsocialized “Ohio Pagan” Tom, and much like the power-spoiled Lear, fixed in a state of childlike immaturity, Larry’s ahistorical Self is incapable of distinguishing between Self and Other and incapable of engaging relationally with the world around him; and, consequently, in absence of relationality, he resorts to power. This morbid immaturity in Larry is poignantly described by Mary Paniccia Carden: “[Ginny’s] first recollection of her father’s abuse emerges as an image of him as a kind of monstrous baby. She remembers that he ‘had lain with me on that bed, that I had looked at the top of his head, at his balding spot in the brown grizzled hair, while feeling him suck my breasts’ [228]. In her father’s economy of ownership, her body serves to nourish him; he claims sites associated with her potential maternity as resources that satisfy his needs” (196). This monstrous babyhood appears closely bound up with the a-sacramental perfectionist culture implanted on the fertile plains of the Midwest. Even aside from the mixture of infantilism and ruthlessness characterizing the sexual abuse, Larry, stunted by culturally Protestant perfectionism, continually acts toward his daughters like a childish tyrant, irrational, emotive, arbitrary, and utterly transcendent and unaccountable. In this manner, he parodies grotesquely the transcendent God-conception of Calvinism,7 and many of the descriptions of Larry have religious overtones that echo the distorted Calvinism of figures such as Jesse Bentley. For instance, as God moves in mysterious ways (Rom. 11.33) and predestines people according to an inexplicable will, so Larry “only act[s], and never reveal[s] his motives” (155). Earlier, Ginny describes the basic content of their minister’s sermons: “Finally, though, the ministers would admit, even

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glory in the fact that things didn’t add up, that the reality was incomprehensible, and furthermore the failure of our understandings was the greatest proof of all, not of goodness or omniscience or whatever the subject of the day was, but of power. And talk of power made Dr. Fremont’s voice deepen and his gestures widen and his eyes light up” (20). Here, inscrutability is proclaimed a virtue in terms of sheer transcendence and power, and Larry has not so much learned the lesson at church but from his entire cultural context, of which Dr. Fremont’s sermon excerpt is merely a symptom. Another pseudo-divine attribute of Larry’s, closely related to inscrutability, is that one cannot gain perspective on him. Just as one cannot look on God, so Larry’s daughters cannot view him from any angle other than that immediate one of sheer awe: “My father had no minister, no one to make him gel for us even momentarily. My mother died before she could present him to us as only a man, with habits and quirks and preferences, before she could diminish him in our eyes enough for us to understand him. I wish we had understood him. That, I see now, was our only hope” (20). As a result of living under the dominion of a false God, in the shadow of their father’s sheer, inscrutable, transcendent power, Rose and Ginny are spiritually stunted in different ways: Rose embarks on a life of indirect and direct, albeit impotent, vengefulness and is consumed by her hatred, which on her deathbed she calls her life’s only accomplishment, while Ginny lacks a self and lives as a non-entity, governed by the men around her. While Rose remains imprisoned in her bitterness, Ginny, the narrator, does experience growth. As do the protagonists of so much of twentieth-century Midwestern literature, so, too, does Ginny contend with the cultural forces of a Protestant heritage, crystallized in her distortedly God-like father, learning from the land on which her culture was violently, abruptly installed and absorbing a sacramental vision that, for reasons to be addressed, however, does not truly save her at the end. Ginny is a pleasant, uncomplaining wife and daughter, obedient, quiet, caring. When the reader, along with Ginny, learns of the fears her late mother had for her, we can see that those fears were justified. “She was most worried about you,” Mary Livingstone informs Ginny one day at the Pike, Iowa, public pool: “She used to say, ‘Ginny won’t stand up to him,’ but if you’re happy, then it’s all worked out. I’ll say one thing, and that is that you’re a good girl, and unselfish, and you will be rewarded. I believe that” (92). “Unselfish” here means literally “selfless,” and what Ginny reaps is not love but sham relationships in which she is merely used by her father, husband, and sister, appreciated or even just tolerated as long as she remains in her subservient and accommodating role. In a scheme of



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power, Ginny can merely have instrumental meaning. For selfhood, personhood is a mystery, something inaccessible to the externalized and, therefore, abstract spirituality at the core of the culturally Protestant ethic as portrayed in this and many other Midwestern texts. Since Ginny’s “God,” Larry, is not personal but entirely self-contained (or rather, self-absorbed), and since he is entirely transcendent and exists in no real relation to anything else, Ginny has no means of achieving personhood through relationship, of realizing her inherent personal value in an affirming and responsive communal context. A few early lessons in life, however, enable Ginny to grow, eventually, and virtually all of these have to do with the superabundant Midwestern land that is to Larry the sign of his own power and goodness. As Glynis Carr points out, “Ginny’s vision is never completely dominated by Daddy’s; she has always seen, however dimly, a fecund realm, including aspects of her own body, outside of Daddy’s control and governed by an altogether different economy than his system can comprehend” (126). One of Ginny’s regularly occurring and formative childhood encounters with nature consists of her hovering over the farm’s drainage wells: One of my earliest memories, in fact, is of myself in a red and green plaid pinafore, which must mean I was about three, and Ruthie in a pink shirt, probably not yet three, squatting on one of those drainage-well covers, dropping pebbles and bits of sticks through the grate. The sound of water trickling in the blackness must have drawn us, and even now the memory gives me an eerie feeling, and not because of danger to our infant selves. What I think of is our babyhoods perched thoughtlessly on the filmiest net of the modern world, over layers of rock, Wisconsin till, Mississippian carbonate, Devonian limestone, layers of dark epochs, and me seen not so much in danger (my father checked the grates often) as fleeting, as if our lives simply passed then, and this memory is the only photograph of some nameless and unknown children who may have lived and may have died, but at any rate have vanished into the black well of time. (46–47)

What first stands out, on a visceral level, upon reading this passage is its sheer beauty and evocative lyricism, a splendor breaking through the sparse, selfeffacing realistic style Ginny so frequently employs.8 Clearly this is a liberated voice, one freed from the unadorned dogmatism of Larry’s rhetoric, a selfexpressive voice conveying authentically experienced human meaning with a certain sensory, descriptive fullness (note, for instance, the specification of colors of the children’s clothes) and dynamic quality (note the abundance of verbs).

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In remembering her encounter with nature, Ginny seems to become one with her own self, seems to become “natural,” as is the case when she recalls other encounters with special natural sites that have escaped the march of corn and soybean monoculture; for example, her descriptions of a quarry and the “dump” are equally sensuous and poetic. Not incidentally, the passage quoted above is followed immediately by Ginny’s memory of “the sudden appearance of my mother, in an apron with a yellow Mexican9 hat appliquéd onto it” (47)—the drainage well passage has much to do with aesthetics, with beauty, and with her own overall rather repressed mother’s connection with an aesthetic sensibility, such as revealed by certain little details of her apparel. Beauty in and of itself implies a set of values resistant to the culturally Protestant ethic that has so systematically reduced the land and its people to instrumental status, as vehicles for an abstract righteousness categorically different from physical beauty. For beauty, while intimately connected to fruitfulness, is larger than that fruitfulness, and its very fruitfulness is larger than literal material productivity:10 beauty implies a wholeness and proportion and harmony, both physical and spiritual, that involves a complex relational interconnectedness on every level and, thus, is closely related to the mystery of love, and, consequently, to the reality of inherent, immanent value, a full sense of which has been denied to Ginny. But besides being beautiful, the passage also indicates a literal and figurative depth of experience and perception that opens up a larger and more mysterious vista than that conveyed by the flat, rationalistic, Franklinesque narrative dominating Larry’s consciousness, a transcendence over, or, rather, a penetration beneath the bland, detached, methodically precise surface panorama presented in the novel’s opening: “At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road”—and so forth (3). What Ginny and Ruthie see is the suppressed, erased original Iowa landscape, the vast underground sea that speaks of the “big wet prairie” Iowa used to be (16). The importance of looking into the land’s history is observed by Sinead McDermott in “Memory, Nostalgia, and Gender in A Thousand Acres”: “Ginny’s nostalgia . . . links into the larger project of cultural memory in which the novel is engaged. By providing a longer historical perspective, the land is reimagined outside of the terms of Larry’s ownership of it, and the inevitability and ‘rightness’ of that ownership is called into question” (398). How exactly Ginny’s experience of the drainage well enables her to see beyond her father’s clichéd and self-enclosed reality is laid out persuasively by Carr: “In this vision of place, Daddy’s buildings and fields, even the Cartesian



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grid he’s invented to mark his metaphysical mastery of it all, are indeed flimsy and ‘fleeting.’ From Ginny’s point of view, which discerns both the visible and ‘what is below the level of the visible,’ the farm is a chimera, a mere appearance, and highly unstable despite Daddy’s pronouncements about ‘discipline’ and ‘history’” (127). The “ineradicable” farm is a highly artificial construct, and, as such, not part of the eternal, lasting order of things; while nature will remain, the farm will not, just as the little girls “perched thoughtlessly on the filmiest net of the modern world” are inevitably bound to vanish, and in many ways, at the point the incident is remembered, have already vanished into “the black well of time” (417). Whereas Larry speaks with “pleasure and reverence” of the “magic lines of [drainage] tile” that have “created” his farmland and communicates to his daughters that they will “always have a floor to walk on” (15), Ginny, being “always aware . . . of the water in the soil,” sees the reality of flux as fundamental, meditating on “the way [water] travels from particle to particle, molecules adhering, clustering, evaporating, heating, cooling, freezing, rising upward to the surface and fogging the cool air or sinking downward, dissolving this nutrient and that, quick in everything it does, endlessly working and flowing, a river sometimes, a lake sometimes. When I was very young, I imagined it ready at any time to rise and cover the earth again, except for the tile lines” (16). Ginny’s intuitive understanding of mortality, time, the circle of life, and of the harsh but also life-renewing reality of history places her in a profoundly different relation to the world than does the Protestant-derived American narrative forced upon the land and grotesquely expressed in the thousand-acre tyrant Larry.11 In some ways, it brings Ginny into what could be termed a sacramental relation to the world, if we apply the characteristics of such a relation outlined by Lynch and developed throughout this book: a willingness to accept limitation and to see limitation as the very requisite for “being,” for identity; to understand one’s relation to Creation communally, seeing oneself as part of a fallen but ultimately good and life-giving order to which one responds with a full recognition of that inherent goodness, i.e., with love; to understand the mystery of the Self and the Other and respect that which one can never comprehend; to understand the Self as existing only in relation to the Other without, however, being simply identical to the Other; and to appreciate oneself and all of Creation as being whole only through the intimate interconnection and interfusion of the spiritual and physical (hence, the sense of mystery hovering over all things). This complex sensibility, so different from her father’s, is fostered in Ginny by her half-conscious understanding of the grandeur of a mysterious natural order and of the humbling but

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interconnected place that she, and everyone, including her father as well as the American nation he in so many ways represents, occupy within it. Her childhood fancy of the water rising, asserting itself again, recalls the biblical story of the flood, a story centered on two crucial concepts: first, that human pride cannot withstand the might of God (and nature); and secondly, that God will not flood the world again out of sheer pity and grace (Gen. 6–9). Thus, what Ginny learns from her awareness of nature is a lesson about the proper place and identity of humans, which is a communal one, a vulnerable and dependent-receptive one, and not one of righteousness, pride, or perfectibility. The passage describing Ginny perched upon the well grates does provide many clues as to what nature comes to mean to her, but one frequently cited passage conveys the positive, as opposed to the primarily humbling, aspects of Ginny’s nature experience more fully. Again, Ginny’s vision of nature is rendered lyrically, and it is worth quoting in full: For millennia, water lay over the land. Untold generations of water plants, birds, animals, insects, lived, shed bits of themselves, and died. I used to like to imagine how it all drifted down, lazily, in the warm, soupy water—leaves, seeds, feathers, scales, flesh, bones, petals, pollen—then mixed with the saturated soil below and became, itself, soil. I used to like to imagine the millions of birds darkening the sunset, settling the sloughs for a night, or a breeding season, the riot of their cries and chirps, the rushing hough-shhh of their twiglike legs or paddling feet in the water, sounds barely audible until multiplied by millions. And the sloughs would be teeming with fish: shiners, suckers, pumpkinseeds, sunfish, minnows, nothing special, but millions or billions of them. I liked to imagine them because they were the soil, and the soil was the treasure, thicker, richer, more alive with a past and future abundance of life than any soil anywhere. (131–32)

Once again, we have an overawing perspective of time—“millennia.” And, added to that temporal vastness is the inconceivable, uncountable, unquantifiable abundance of “millions or billions.” And again, the reality of a natural order in which the individual entity finds its wholesome place is foregrounded: all multiplies, becomes fruitful, and then subsides, becoming part of an abundant life-filled and life-giving soil. As Mary Paniccia Carden points out, “While her father ‘always spoke of the land his grandparents found with distaste,’ Ginny remembers it as the source of a more desirable production—its teeming life is what makes the soil a ‘treasure.’ Ginny envisions the swampy prairie as self-nourishing and



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maintaining, and she imagines gradual and natural shifts in the living land that contrast dramatically with the methods celebrated in Daddy’s stories of farming triumph: tiles, machinery, chemicals” (191). The passage’s portrayal of natural history as slow organic process amounts to a rejection of the artificially imposed structures of a rationalist modern culture and an affirmation of a deeper, given12 order that is appropriate to the natural structure of being and which accepts death and mortality as part of reality rather than allowing the Self delusions of power and transcendent autonomy. Again, the very beauty and lyricism of the passage conveys the reality of inherent goodness, inherent value; as Strehle notes, “The passage discovers and celebrates a surprising power hidden in the small, the weak, the overlooked, and the insignificant,” of entities considered “nothing special.” Strehle also notes that “these reflections are twice placed in the past—‘I used to like to imagine’—to mark the depth, resistance, and hope in Ginny’s consciousness, even as a silent child and an obedient daughter/wife” (222). The depth of nature’s impact on Ginny’s view and experience of the world is reiterated again and again throughout the novel and qualifies Ginny for telling her family’s story from a truly “outside” perspective, a perspective that can be described as sacramental in its communalism, attunement to beauty, mystery, and spiritual value, its submission to a given natural order, its orientation toward organic process, and its concreteness and rejection of the “treasure of plots and schemes,” which the soil yields to its modern, capitalist, culturally Protestant settlers. The clash between the fecund land and a sterile, abruptly imposed Midwestern civilization, which Ronald Weber notes as a hallmark of Midwestern fiction, is present in this 1991 novel as clearly as it is in pre-World War II modernist literature. If Ginny and her visions of nature seem less clearly surrounded by explicitly sacramental symbolism than do corresponding protagonists in modernist texts, such is certainly the case, and therein do we see an important difference between modernist and postmodern fiction in general: the former somewhat optimistically, though often anxiously, embarked on a traditional spiritual quest, the latter more disillusioned with such quests, more carefully evading symbolism of a too high-flown or intensely religious character. Nonetheless, Adams’s Virgin does make her appearance in this novel, as she does in so many modernist Midwestern texts—for, as Ginny herself does not fail to point out, her name, of course, is a diminutive form of Virginia (90).13 In a novel where layers of cultural allusion run deep and where names tend to be significant, the name Virginia certainly holds symbolic meaning; and in a novel about sexual abuse, of course, a name containing the word “virgin” will be interpretively relevant. The emotionally

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“virginal”/asexual aspects of Ginny stand out clearly: due to having been sexually abused, she is alienated from her own body and does not enjoy sex, lacking fully realized womanhood, fully realized adult sexuality. She is frequently referred to as “girl” and even “girlie,” acts like a younger sister toward Rose and in her very pleasantness and inoffensiveness seems to lack the self-consciousness and “edge” associated with adult sexuality. Then, also, and in this one can already begin to associate Ginny with a more iconic-religious sense of virginity, she also seems truly innocent—until she commits adultery and attempts to murder her sister, that is. Yet, at the novel’s outset, we see a sincere person, trying earnestly to be “good,” loving her sister and nieces quite tenderly, displaying real fondness for her husband, and enduring her father with at times remarkable patience, albeit, admittedly, a patience linked to lack of self-esteem. Only her growing disillusionment with the grasping selfishness in others gradually destroys what does at first seem like real innocence. Adding to the initial virginal iconicity is the fact that Ginny is deeply centered on motherhood. Toward her nieces, she is the affectionate, understanding mother figure that the actual mother, Rose, is not; and though she suffers multiple miscarriages, she keeps, secretly, against Ty’s wishes, trying to become pregnant once again, hoping for a baby whose anticipated effect on her life could be described as salvific, messianic: “I also wasn’t ready to give up. At thirty-six, I had five years left, maybe two or three more chances to come out of my bedroom one morning and say, ‘Here, Ty, here’s our baby’” (26). The dramatic fantasy of just suddenly coming out of the bedroom with a baby hints at the feelings Ginny has about giving birth: it would be a new morning in life, an apocalyptic event to make all things right. The word “here” is powerfully annunciatory; it announces the full and actual presence of what has been longed for in vain for so long. The Marialogical and messianic allusions of Ginny’s name are further underscored by her sexual encounter with Jess, the returned, formerly draft-dodging son of neighboring farmer Harold Clark. He explains to her that pesticide-poisoned well water is to blame for her miscarriages, thus, giving her the hope-inspiring knowledge that may allow her to conceive successfully (164)—and, of course, the Messiah comes from “Jesse’s lineage.”14 Jess and Ginny meet at “the dump,” a neglected place on the farm where native prairie plants, such as big bluestem, are still allowed to flourish unsuppressed, where nature is allowed to remain commercially unproductive.15 Hence, beauty bursts forth in this place, for instance, in the form of roses: “For a moment everything seemed remote and not very important. I wondered if maybe that wasn’t the right way to look at things after all, standing in the dump, smelling the wild



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roses, and taking the long perspective” (128). Beauty and love, as symbolized by the roses, lead Ginny to a kind of transcendence, as is also expressed through the Great Plains breeze: I was breathing hard and trembling. I felt very afraid, but the fear also seemed unusually distant. I inhaled deeply. Jess went poking with his stick. I could hear a rhythmic tchocking punctuate the soughing of the breeze. The breeze in Zebulon County is eternal, and life there is marked by those times when you notice it. I noticed it. I noticed that there was a nest in the honey locust tree, too, but the birds were gone, and the nest was possibly an old one. From off in the distance, just under the sound of the breeze, came the zip of a tractor starting up. (125)

In this passage, which is heavily laden with subtle meanings, the eternal wind seems to represent what it frequently does in other Midwestern literature as well, notably in Cather’s O Pioneers!, and what it frequently meant to the romantic poets:16 an everlasting, never-ceasing life force, the breath of the universe, the mysterious, eternal, living spirit in nature. Here, the soughing of the breeze, punctuated by Jess’s poking, quite obviously represents female sexual receptivity, such as is experienced by Ginny, and what ensues is her and Jess’s sexual encounter. This encounter is connected for Ginny with eternity; really, she is delving into a natural identity, connecting to her real being, which participates in larger natural mysteries—hence, the “long perspective.” The chapter ends with a profound awakening that involves both a realization of vulnerability and mortality, and, paradoxically, a realization of fulfillment, a plunging into life: “It scared me to death, but still I discovered how much I had been waiting for it” (128). It is “here”—the longed-for salvific event has arrived. To return to Ginny’s sacramental Marian qualities: at the moment of her sexual encounter with Jess, Ginny is associated with transcendence, with a mysterious messianic fulfillment, and the roses that fill the scene with their breath are traditional Marian symbols, expressing the suffering, love, and beauty of Mary via their thorns and glorious blossoms. Unloved by Ty, who married her largely to inherit Larry’s farm, Ginny, the Virgin, is now experiencing true love for the first time and is entering into nature’s mysteries. However, the scene is ironic, for Jess, a pacifist draft-dodging “dove,” provides no worthy parallel to the Holy Ghost descending on Mary, since he faithlessly leaves Ginny for her sister Rose, whose name highlights the irony of the wild roses in the love scene at the dump. Jesse “dumps” Ginny, as he will later dump Rose; Ginny, however, sincerely loves

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him and, in a later scene, makes herself vulnerable by confessing her love, only to be humiliated and feel the thorns of love. We are prepared for this outcome by the empty nest that Ginny notices in the honey locust tree: her love will not bear fruit, her life remain barren, the Marialogical, messianic, sacramental possibilities unrealized.17 The fact that Ginny hears, beneath the breeze, “the zip of a tractor starting up” functions as a further ominous detail; not only are tractors associated with the oppressive anti-sacramental industrial agriculture portrayed in the novel, but the word “zip” recurs a few pages later in an image of Larry on his tractor “monotonously unzipping the crusted soil” (136), an oddly lifeless and mechanistic sexual image that hints not only at Larry’s rape of the soil but also of his other loveless “unzipping” of his teenage daughters, an abuse as yet unremembered by Ginny. In the moment we see Virginia flowering, we also already see the impossibility of the fulfillment she is approaching. For she cannot escape the pain of history; beneath the eternal breeze, the forces of her historical moment are at work. Not only does Ginny’s name point to the sacramental identity she intuits and to the truth-bringing role she will play, but Rose’s name as well points to a reality sadly rejected by Rose, yet, nonetheless, a reality and a true originary identity, though not in a categorical sense. For A Thousand Acres is not an allegory in which people represent abstractions, but a text that resists the easy labeling of its characters; nonetheless, despite avoiding a too definite categorization of its fictional world, the text still affirms, quite poetically, “real presence,” wholeness, good mysteries, objective “structures” that exist over and against the arbitrary categorization of reality, the land, and people by a modern, post-sacramental, power-oriented society.18 And, so, the suggestive poetry of Rose’s name and the complex charisma of her character point to a deeper spiritual order that is entirely real and can only be violated at great cost to the violator. One of Rose’s utterances reveals allusively how we might read her name. It is a statement made in reply to Ginny’s question, “Do we know what we are?” In this context, Rose asserts a rather negative form of self-knowledge: “We know we aren’t [our father]. We know that to that degree we don’t deserve the lowest circle of Hell” (216). Rose’s allusion here to Dante’s Inferno opens up intriguing possibilities for interpreting her statement as well as her name and for understanding the place she occupies in the novel’s conflict between sacramental and anti-sacramental approaches to the world. Significantly, Dante’s epic is to a large degree about self-knowledge: the pilgrim has strayed from the right path and can be redeemed only by the heaven-appointed Virgil leading him through hell so that he may confront his



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own sin. Instead of seeing the suffering sinners as others with whom he has nothing in common, the pilgrim is frequently ashamed to recognize himself in them. Finally, after Virgil has also led him through purgatory, the pilgrim is led by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux through heaven. The heavenly realm is largely associated with music and the poetry is more focused on aural delights than visual imagery. One of the central heavenly images, however, is a majestic rose in whose petals abide the blessed, as here described in the first four stanzas of Canto XXXI of Mark Musa’s translation of the Paradiso: So now, appearing to me in the form

of a white rose was Heaven’s sacred host,



those whom with His own blood Christ made His bride

while the other host—that soaring see and sing

the glory of the One who stirs their love,



the goodness which made them great as they are,

like bees that in a single motion swarm

and dip into the flowers, then return



to heaven’s hive where their toil turns to joy—

descended all at once on that great bloom

of precious petals, and then flew back up



to where its source of love forever dwells.

Here, the blessed commune at the heavenly honey-sweet “nuptial feast,” and God’s light pervades all, fulfillment and joy reigning in this Kingdom of Love. The pilgrim is prepared for this vision because he has repented of his own sin, recognizing his own evil in the sins of others. Contrastively, in the statement about Larry, Rose focuses on distancing herself from a fellow-sinner, defining herself as “other” from her father, even though, ironically, she continually reveals herself to be much like him, as observed at the novel’s end by Ginny’s now ex-husband Ty: “She’s as grim as death about [keeping the farm together], and she goes around like some queen. . . . You should see her. Frankly, she’s your dad all over” (340). The kingdom Rose seeks is most certainly of this world,19 in every literal and allegorical sense of the word, and her spirit is grim and lifeless as she devotes herself to power and possession rather than to the values of love and beauty implied in her name. “I

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guess you want everything for yourself, huh,” asks Ginny when she learns how Rose has been sexually roping in Jess despite knowing what happened between him and Ginny. Rose’s reply leaves little doubt: “Well, shit, yeah. I always have” (304). She seizes “love” ruthlessly and possessively, driving her husband Peter to suicide and causing Jess to betray Ginny, the one person she has been close to all her life—hearing Rose claim, preposterously, that she has found true love with Jess is not only chilling for Ginny, but for the reader as well (299–303). Rose’s husband, Peter, loves her desperately, and his name associates him with the saint who holds the keys of heaven. Furthermore, he is a musician, and, as mentioned, Dante’s vision of heaven is dominated by music; and music is the traditional symbol, in Shakespeare as well as Dante, of harmony, of sacramental communion, of the many coming together in just the right proportion and interrelation to form a beautiful, dynamic, endlessly various and yet orderly whole.20 In her self-absorption, Rose does not enter through the door of heaven but ends up alone and bitter, with hatred her only legacy, in spite of her love-signifying name: I have no accomplishments. I didn’t teach long enough to know what I was doing. I didn’t make a good life with Pete. I didn’t shepherd my daughters into adulthood. I didn’t win Jess Clark. I didn’t work the farm successfully. . . . So all I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn’t forgive the unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can’t stand what you know. I resisted that reflex. That’s my sole, solitary, lonely accomplishment. (355–56)

Rose’s anti-communal life is the exact opposite of what the Rose represents in the Divine Comedy to which Rose herself, in her hatred, negatively and indirectly alludes without understanding the ironies of that allusion; she does not understand how her Inferno allusion points to her own failure of surrendering herself to suffering and limitation and to the painful but redemptive path of self-knowledge that Dante’s pilgrim takes through hell. Trapped in bed, alienated from everyone in her life, the fire of hatred still blazing within her and consuming her, the dying Rose resembles the Satan figure in the Inferno. Dante depicts the evil one as pathetically trapped in ice, helplessly flailing his hands in windmill-like fashion: The king of the vast kingdom of all grief stuck out with half his chest above the ice;

...



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Beneath each face two mighty wings stretched out,



the size you might expect of this huge bird



(I never saw a ship with larger sails):



not feathered wings but rather like the ones



a bat would have. He flapped them constantly,



keeping three winds continuously in motion



to lock Cocytus eternally in ice.



He wept from his six eyes, and down three chins

were dripping tears all mixed with blood and slaver. (XXXIV.28–29; 46–54)

This picture of slavering, arm-flapping impotence, which makes evil look ridiculous rather than intriguing or mysterious, captures Rose’s condition as she, figuratively, descends to the last circle of hell, facing the final tally of a life devoted to anger, even in her helpless bedridden condition holding on to hard and unforgiving pride. At one point, Rose says that Ginny can now trust her because she is too frail to deceive and plot against her any longer: “‘Well, there you are then. Except that what is there about me not to trust? I’m stuck here.’ She stretched out her spiderweb hands and spread her skinny arms wide. Tears prickled in my eyes” (354). Like Satan’s featherless bat wings, Rose’s arms are skinny, and her gesture of stretching them out suggests a helpless attempt at flight. In death, she is “stuck” in the coldness of her life, a coldness produced precisely by her imagined superiority over everyone and everything, by her false transcendence over everything. Ginny is capable of compassion and tears; but Rose’s eyes never waiver from the hatred she has chosen. In ridiculing forgiveness, Rose is denying grace, symbolically rejecting salvation, even in death insisting on the primacy of Self, much like the fallen angel Lucifer, later called Satan, who wished to take the throne of God, and in whose selfishness originates all evil, according to Christian doctrine. While Rose chooses evil, rebellion, hatred, selfishness, and hardness, Ginny’s values tend in a different direction: “You were immovably selfish, and that’s bad. I mean, if we don’t know that being selfish is bad, then what did we learn as children?” (354). Despite having been hurt and abused in her childhood, Ginny refuses to discard all of its lessons; she sees beyond her own pain to an objective spiritual-ethical order that persists amidst many disillusionments. After Rose’s death, Ginny finds in Rose’s cellar “jams and pickles, tomatoes,

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dilled beans, tomato juice, beets, applesauce, peach butter, Rose’s bounty, years of farm summers” (366). She also inherits Rose’s daughters; we are reminded of the fullness with which nature provided Rose though she was not ultimately able to receive that bounty. Her name, associated both with sacramental pilgrimage and with nature, reminds us of the realities Rose has failed to find, and we are also made to think of Ginny’s own fleeting finding of those realities, among the wild roses of the dump—although her tapping into these mysteries will not bear the desired fruit, the consequences of evil being too destructive and stark, the deception and betrayal too encompassing. And, thus, the question arises: What becomes of Ginny as she, in her own words, becomes “drenched with insight” (305), and what does the muted gloom at the novel’s end mean for our interpretation of the book as a whole? In reflecting on what becomes of Ginny, it is relevant to consider the most striking act she performs in the novel: her attempted murder of Rose after Rose callously claims Jess Clark for herself. Partly, her murderous intentions can be explained simply due to the fact that she is being abused and triumphed over once more, as she has been all her life, and this time from the quarter of the two people she really trusted and loved. While Rose and Jess seek to display kindness and delicacy, Ginny is now alert and perceptive enough, has gained enough insight, not to be fooled; speaking of Rose, for example, she says, “I saw that the delicacy and concern were necessary to her, because they were a thrilling reminder of everything new and delicious.” However, it is Jess’s overdone, eager, “open, happy kindness that approached tenderness” that “galls” her most of all (308). Trying to numb herself throughout the day, Ginny wakes up at night “deeply surprised, amazed at the day’s accumulation of bitterness and calculation” (308). Her bitterness has closed her off to a loving relationship to the world, and her full realization of the abuse she has suffered has stunned her so deeply as to make it unbearable to submit anymore. She seems to turn to the same ruthless vision of nature that the alienated bastard son of Gloucester, Edmund, displays in King Lear: “It was clear that the fields abounded with plenty of poisons”—and what follows is a long inventory of poisonous plants (311).21 She will use natural poison to commit an act that to her, at this point, feels natural. The poisonous plant on which she settles is “water hemlock,” the literary allusiveness of which is explained by Leslie: “Hemlock . . . is described, appropriately enough, in King Lear as one of the ‘idle weeds that grow / In our sustaining corn,’ and it is among the plants with which Lear is ‘crowned’ in his madness” (41). Ginny, here, is linked herself to the oppressive patriarch Larry/Lear in the madness she herself has now entered, an indication that the



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text is not morally relativistic on this point, despite Ginny’s chillingly objective narration, which involves a clinical distancing of herself from her own sordid actions, a narrative distancing amounting to repression. In light of the repentant tone at the novel’s end, I read this detached account of the murderous preparations as a recreation of Ginny’s numbed state of mind during this process. Water hemlock, of course, is associated with the primeval, natural realm of water, and, thus, with the largely female-associated world that has been victimized in the course of the story. By working the poison into sausages, Ginny is associating Rose with phallic oppressiveness and abuse. The place where Ginny finds the water hemlock is the Zebulon River slough “where, in the spring, I had seen that flock of pelicans and thought they portended something good” (312). Here, we have another important clue as to how Ginny’s surprising murderousness has come about and how it fits into her sacramental sensibility, the growth of which her narration has been tracing. For the pelican is a particularly celebrated and important example of the medieval sacramental view of all nature, as explained by Peter Harrison, who quotes the early medieval Physiologus: “If the Pelican brings forth young and the little ones grow, they take to striking their parents in the face. The parents, however, hitting back kill their young ones and then, moved by compassion, they weep over them for three days, lamenting over those whom they have killed. On the third day, their mother strikes her side and spills her own blood over their dead bodies . . . and the blood itself awakens them from death” (Physiologus vi, pp. 9f). On the basis of this brief account, the pelican was to become an enduring symbol of Christ’s atonement. This story, along with its accompanying interpretation, was rehearsed endlessly with minor variations in the medieval bestiaries, and the pelican became a central symbol in the iconography and sculpture of the Middle Ages. (24–25)

The pelican also appears in King Lear, and Smiley’s use of the symbol in relation to its use in the play is explained thus by Leslie: “A Thousand Acres’s metaphor of incorporation serves to reverse the play’s persistent imagery of cannibalism associated with Lear’s ‘pelican daughters’ (3.4.73)” (37). For, in the novel, it is Larry/Lear who is exposed as preying and feeding on his daughters, even as he claims that they are feeding on him: “I gave you everything, and I get nothing in return, just some orders about doing this and being that and seeing points of view” (182). What the pelicans heralded for Ginny is ambiguous: beautiful, white, natural, associated with purity and a lack of pollution, associated with

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the positive nourishing realm of water, they have spoken to Ginny of a good order, a kind and beautiful mystery that will become visible, erupt to the surface: The surface of the earth dipped below the surface of the sea within it, and blue water sparkled in the still limpid sunlight of midspring. And there was a flock of pelicans, maybe twenty-five birds, cloud white against the shine of the water. Ninety years ago, when my grandparents settled in Zebulon County and the whole county was wet, marshy, glistening like this, hundreds of thousands of pelicans nested in the cattails, but I hadn’t seen even one since the early sixties. I watched them. The view along the Scenic, I thought, taught me a lesson about what is below the level of the visible. (9)

What Ginny senses in this scene, right before the return home of Jess Clark and Larry’s “incorporation” of the Cook farm change her world, is that her repressed life will well up, that a good and natural force will reassert itself in her life, that something denied and invisible will be freed and restored, brought back to view. However, what truth and life welling up have brought her is pain, loss, even horror. Perhaps, what has happened to her as she prepares to kill Rose is similar to what happened to Europeans as the sacramental worldview of the Middle Ages collapsed, as described by Harrison: “Critical humanists [of the sixteenth century] have begun to question the emblematic functions of natural objects. How could the pelican represent Christ if . . . it did not exhibit those behaviours on which the [allegorical] similitudes were based?” (92). No longer possessing a sense of the meaning of nature, or the meaning of anything, Ginny is prepared to fling the natural order, which has been so grossly violated by her family on every level, aside herself and commit a family murder. Her world, and all of nature, has become disenchanted for her. However, Rose does not die of the poisoned sausages; under the influence of Jess, she has become a vegetarian. Rather, the well water, poisoned by her father’s ecologically unsound farming practices, kills her in the form of breast cancer. At this point, Jess has left her, too, and we see a life devoted to grasping happiness selfishly dissolve into complete futility and nothingness. At one point, Rose complains to Ginny, “There’s got to be something, order, rightness. Justice, for God’s sake” (235). By this, she means that Larry and his crony Harold Clark ought to suffer for their sins. She fails to perceive that the rules apply to her as well, and that these rules are less about hard, categorical justice than about love. Rose’s lack of love, her commitment to hatred, revenge, and selfishness does not go unpunished.



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Ginny, on the other hand, does overcome her bitterness and understands her own failings. She is happy to pay off farm-related debt on a monthly basis since doing so enables her to undergo a secular version of the sacrament of penance: “I pay two hundred dollars a month, every month, and I think of it as my ‘regret money,’ and though what I am regretful for mutates and evolves, I am glad to pay it, the only mortgage I will ever be given. . . . Regret is part of my inheritance” (368). In a passage that recalls the “Book of the Grotesques” section of Winesburg, Ohio, Ginny explains her new insight into the people in her life, people whom she can now know, precisely because she refuses to abstract them, to label them: The strongest feeling was that now I knew them all. . . . I didn’t have to label them as Rose had labeled herself and Pete: “selfish,” “mean,” “jealous.” Labeling them, in fact, prevented knowing them. All I had to do was to imagine them, and how I “knew” them would shimmer around them and through them, a light, an odor, a sound, a taste, a palpability that was all there was to understand about each and every one of them. In a way that I had never felt when all of us were connected by history and habit and duty, or the “love” I had felt for Rose and Ty, I now felt that they were mine. (305–06)

Her concrete manner of knowing others, her awareness of identity as a palpable mystery rather than something abstract, shows what she has learned from the violations and the revelations she has experienced. In addition to knowing others in a fuller, more concrete way, she also embraces her own history in its entire complexity, seeing herself as inextricable from her concrete formation process: Lodged in my every cell, along with the DNA, are molecules of topsoil and atrazine and paraquat and anhydrous ammonia and diesel fuel and plant dust, and also molecules of memory: the bracing summer chill of floating on my back in Mel’s pond, staring at the sky; the exotic redolence of the dresses in my mother’s closet; the sharp odor of wet tomato vines; the stripes of pain my father’s belt laid across my skin; the deep chill of waiting for the school bus in the blue of a winter’s dawn. All of it is present now, here; each particle weighs some fraction of the hundred and thirty-six pounds that attach me to the earth, perhaps as much as the print weighs in other sorts of histories. (369)

Her concrete physical and experiential history is compared at the end of this passage to more abstract, typed, literary histories, to histories printed; she is asserting

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her palpable journey as being a rival to these other more “official” narratives and emphasizes her attachment to “the earth” via the weight of her spiritual and physical body, a gesture of validating her formerly abused and negated body. The history she has found has the concrete reality possessed by the Earth, the land itself; she no longer inhabits a myth imposed upon the Earth. Others and herself, and the world around her in general, are now knowable to her in a deeper way that bears the marks of a sacramental, process-oriented approach to knowing. Her life in the city is in some ways a non-life, and she misses nothing more than the liturgical procession of the seasons that marks the passage of time, the more intimate connection with nature she once had: “There was nothing timebound, and little that was seasonal about the highway or the restaurant. . . . Snow and rain were reduced to scenery nearly as much as any other kind of weather, something to look out the window at but nothing that hindered you” (334). And in the very last paragraph of the novel, Ginny links via juxtaposition the act she committed in a state of bitterness with her father’s crimes: And when I remember that world, I remember my dead young self, who left me something, too, which is her canning jar of poisoned sausage and the ability it confers, of remembering what you can’t imagine. I can’t say I forgive my father, but now I can imagine what he probably chose never to remember—the goad of an unthinkable urge, pricking him, pressing him, wrapping him in an impenetrable fog of self that must have seemed, when he wandered around the house late at night after working and drinking, like the very darkness. This is the gleaming obsidian shard I safeguard above all the others. (370–71)

This “gleaming obsidian shard” with its hard, palpable objectivity, its derivation from nature, its brokenness and sharpness, and its mysterious glow shines forth as a final symbol of the spiritual depth Ginny has reached, a positive, even precious gift, amidst the very real consequences and maiming scars of her experience.22



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Epilogue

Rain is pouring down on our somewhat pallid lawn. It is mid-January in northern Indiana, and so far, this winter has been virtually snowless. In fact, it is hard to imagine right now that Upper Midwestern winters have ever had a reputation for fierce cold and abundant snowfall. When I look at one of my favorite Sherwood Anderson photographs—of him and Cornelia and their children riding through Elyria, Ohio, in a one-horse open sleigh, dressed in thick furs, snow piled high along the sides of the street—it is as though I am gazing not only into another time period but also at a different geographical location, a different clime. Growing up in Germany in the 1980s, I heard my Illinoisan mother tell of snow accumulating for months, of lakes and rivers freezing over, of Christmasy wonderlands and epic blizzards, and I was awed, longing to experience these wondrous realities for myself. Now that I am living in the Upper Midwest, the winters here are milder than the ones I knew as a child in Germany. I have come too late: things here have changed, as they have everywhere else. Though some of my Midwestern friends dispute the reality of global warming, to me it is a tangible, palpable fact. As I gaze out at the winter rain, I hold my two-month-old son—my Indiana-born son, our little Hoosier—and I wonder what kind of a Midwest he will grow up in. Will he be able to play in the snow at all? Will there be brilliant fall foliage for him, and crisp October days? But not only the weather is changing—everything else is as well. These days, even the Amish of our area frequent Walmart and talk on their cell phones, buying foods made of genetically modified corn and plastic toys made in China. My students at the university inhabit their portable iPhone universes continually and hardly notice the grandeur of the Midwestern sky or the beauty of the pines and maples surrounding them as they walk across campus, fixated on their little screens. The pop music on the radio seems unbelievably crass and juvenile: Katy Perry singing about a ménage à trois pushes me over the edge, and I switch back to my CD player, to the playful velvety crooning of the 1930s, a safe world for me. Is my memory mistaken, or was pop music not nearly as decadent in the 1980s as it is today, at least generally – 309 –

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speaking? Can I forbid my son to ever listen to the radio? How can I prevent our media culture from turning his soul into a trash heap? And how can I keep him from getting absorbed by the world of virtual realities and teach him instead to want to be outdoors? How do I instill in him a sense of rootedness and history in a place where most old buildings are rotting away? What does it mean for Timotei to grow up in today’s Fort Wayne, Indiana? My Romanian wife, Maria, and I, both of us from 1980s European villages, are nervous. The answer to our concerns is probably that while we can do quite a lot for him, there also are definite limits as to what we can give him and how we can help him become a wholesome person. One of the worst things we could do would be to try to isolate him from the real place and real people around him, to try to create an artificial, highly sheltered, highly manipulated alternative reality for him. The process of raising him will be what Sherwood Anderson would call “a beautiful adventure”: a concrete, step-by-step process of indeterminate outcome in which there is much to lose but also much to gain. No matter what happens, it is important not to try to transcend brokenness but to find redemption in the midst of the mess that is this world, in the mess that is the human condition. Loving, rather than attempting too much control, is the key. And so, despite the brokenness of Fort Wayne, of the Midwest, of the United States of America, and of the entire world, we will do our best to teach Timotei to love his city, his region, his country(s), his world, to care, appreciate, enjoy, and sacrifice for all these. This caring, loving spirit is, essentially, what characterizes the literary works discussed in this book. Anderson, Cather, Fitzgerald, Suckow, Smiley, Bromfield, Dell, Wescott, and many other Midwestern writers, are profoundly disillusioned with what humans have made of a lovely and abundant land. And yet, they love and keep hoping and seek to embody in their fiction a vision for change, for a kind of “repentance,” for a new spiritual perspective, a new approach to living. Perhaps because they are Midwesterners, and because they have imbibed the spirit of sacramentalism, they are modest and down-to-earth in their role as visionaries. Anderson is the most recklessly Whitmanesque and prophetic of the lot, but even he, in his best work, frequently adopts a consciously tentative and careful, even ambiguous tone, evoking glimpses of a kind of redemption but avoiding large-scale apocalyptic formulas. And always Anderson emphasizes the fragile humanity of us all: “First there are the broken things—myself and the others” (“Song of Industrial America”). Change must begin at the individual level, and the first priority of most rurally focused Midwestern modernists is the spiritual renewal of individual people. And this spiritual renewal is communally focused,



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not an individualistic spirituality of the kind that would be tailor-made for our era of consumerism. It is a rooted spirituality that enters into the harshness of the Other that is the world in all its aspects, and among the rough edges of the Other that is, specifically, other individual people. In every one of the Midwestern writers touched upon in this book, there is a genuine struggle of the soul for a positive movement toward the Other—in other words, there is the impulse of love. Seeing the different forms this love takes for different writers is deeply enriching, and it is my hope that this book has done its part in exploring and explaining the visions, struggles, and different ways of loving and surrendering, of entering into and relating to the world, that can be found in Midwestern modernist literature.

Notes

Introduction 1. Smith here is discussing early Kentucky; Smith’s discussion, however, transcends Kentucky, since his book is concerned with American “virgin land” in general, the Kentucky frontier being merely one historical example. 2. What distinguishes the kind of “sacramental” pastoral envisioned by Midwestern modernists from a standard literary pastoral is the emphasis on coming at wholeness through brokenness. In other words, Midwestern authors believe that a falsely optimistic ideology has, essentially, led to the mismanagement of their entire region. This optimistic ideology saw no connection between technological and industrial “progress” and the destruction of wholesome ways of living. However, in eliminating the hard manual toil of the early settlers, “progress” has also eliminated people’s contact with nature and has prevented an authentic, organically grown folk culture from emerging, the kind of culture that could have given Midwesterners a sense of rootedness, home, identity, community, beauty, and meaning. Poverty, hard toil, limitation, “backwardness” would have actually been preferable to modern machine culture. Inhabiting our mortal, physical flesh and concrete, limiting world fully, and realizing that redemption grows out of suffering would be a sacramental manner of approaching pastoral, would constitute an acceptance of the “flesh” and all of the brokenness that that entails. This stance, of course, begs the question as to how industrialization and the modernization of American life could possibly have been prevented. To this question, most Midwestern modernist authors do not provide clear answers. Their mode of writing is not particularly political; it is much more in a mythical mode. In their writing, spiritual values and attitudes are contrasted with one another, and every aspect of life takes on a symbolic significance; it is not so much a political program they are advocating as a particular kind of awareness and sensibility that they are fostering. In Anderson’s case, he passionately pleads for a national change of heart, from which then, hopefully, concrete results would ensue. 3. One notable exception is the Society of Friends, also known as “Quakers”; this Protestant denomination does not practice communion. 4. See Rev. 19:7–10, which prophesies the coming wedding between Christ, the Lamb, and His Church. – 312 –



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5. St. Augustine, in his Confessions (398), offers several reflections on this topic. See, for instance, the first three sections of Book V, and various sections in Book VII, including the following passage from Section 11: Also, I considered all the other things that are of a lower order than yourself, and I saw that they have not absolute being in themselves, nor are they entirely without being. They are real only in so far as they have their being from you, but unreal in the sense that they are not what you are. For it is only that which remains in being without change that truly is. As for me, I know no other content but clinging to God, because unless my being remains in him, it cannot remain in me. But himself ever unchanged, he makes all things new. I own him as my God; he has no need of aught that is mine. (147) e edition used is R. S. Pine-Coffin’s translation. Th 6. In Platonism, the spiritual forms are eternal, unchangeable spiritual realities of which all earthly phenomena are merely shadowy reflections. The goal of a Platonist is to achieve such a degree of enlightenment that these spiritual forms can be apprehended by the individual’s spirit clearly. All that is individual is ephemeral, but the impersonal “forms” are eternal. Connecting with them involves a kind of participation in immortality. Here, Socrates, in Plato’s Symposium, defines what he means by the ideal form of beauty, and he describes how to use the things of this world in order to transcend them and behold the ideal form: What [the enlightened person will] see is, in the first place eternal; it doesn’t come to be or cease to be, and it doesn’t increase or diminish. In the second place, it isn’t attractive in one respect and repulsive in another, or attractive at one time but not at another, or attractive in one setting but repulsive in another, or attractive here and repulsive elsewhere, depending on how people find it. Then again, he won’t perceive beauty as a face or hands or any other physical feature, or as a piece of reasoning or knowledge, and he won’t perceive it as being anywhere else either—in something like a creature or the earth or the heavens. No, he’ll perceive it in itself and by itself, constant and eternal, and he’ll see that every other beautiful object somehow partakes of it, but in such a way that their coming to be and ceasing to be don’t increase or diminish it at all, and it remains entirely unaffected. . . . You should use the things of this world as rungs in a ladder. You start by loving one attractive body and step up to two; from there you move on to physical beauty in general, from there to the beauty of intellectual endeavor, which is no more and no less than the study of that beauty, so that you finally recognize true beauty. (54–55) The passage is quoted from Robin Waterfield’s translation of the Symposium.

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7. In dense, brilliantly precise language, Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar has described this sacramental way of relating to the world: Only the apprehension of an expressive form in the thing can give it that depth-dimension between its ground and its manifestation which, as the real locus of beauty, now also opens up the ontological locus of the truth of being, and frees the striver, allowing him to achieve the spiritual distance that makes a beauty rich in form desirable in its being-in-itself (and not only in its being-for-me), and only thus worth striving after. This is what Kant somewhat misleadingly calls the “disinterestedness of the beautiful”: the evidence that here an essential depth has risen up into appearance, has appeared to me, and that I can neither reduce this appearing form theoretically into a mere fact or a ruling principle—and thus gain control over it—, nor can I through my efforts acquire it for personal use. In the luminous form of the beautiful the being of the existent becomes perceivable as nowhere else, and this is why an aesthetic element must be associated with all spiritual perception as with all spiritual striving. The quality of “being-in-itself ” which belongs to the beautiful, the demand the beautiful itself makes to be allowed to be what it is, the demand, therefore, that we renounce our attempts to control and manipulate it, in order truly to be able to be happy by enjoying it: all of this is, in the natural realm, the foundation and foreshadowing of what in the realm of revelation and grace will be the attitude of faith. (Seeing the Form, 152–53) Relating to the world as inherently valuable—that is, as “being-in-itself ” rather than “being-for-me,” seeing an expressive form in Creation that speaks to me, and which I cannot manipulate or control without destroying it, that truly enjoying something involves a prior renunciation of controlling it—all of these aspects of Balthasar’s statement on the beautiful are deeply relevant to the discussion in this book. See Balthasar, Seeing the Form. 8. For the Inferno’s depiction of popes burning in hell, see Canto XIX; for a good example of Boccaccio’s simultaneous acknowledgment of the Church’s corruption and affirmation of the Church as the Body of Christ, see the second story of the first day of The Decameron, in which the Jew Abraham converts to Christianity after a trip to Rome, not because he was impressed by the Church’s leadership, but precisely because he was not: Nobody [in Rome] who was connected with the Church seemed to me to display the slightest sign of holiness, piety, charity, moral rectitude or any other virtue. On the contrary, it seemed to me that they were all so steeped in lust, greed, avarice, envy, pride and other like sins and worse . . . that I regard the place as a hotbed for diabolical rather than devotional activities. As far as I can judge, it seems to me that your pontiff and all of the others too, are



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doing their level best to reduce the Christian religion to nought and drive it from the face of the earth, whereas they are the very people who should be its best foundation and support. But since it is evident to me that their attempts are unavailing, and that your religion continues to grow in popularity, and become more splendid and illustrious, I can only conclude that being a more holy and genuine religion than any of the others, it deservedly has the Holy Ghost as its foundation and support. So whereas I stood firm and unyielding against your entreaties and refused to turn Christian, I now tell you quite plainly that nothing in the world could prevent me from becoming a Christian. Let us therefore go to the church where, in accordance with the traditional rite of your holy faith, you shall have me baptized. (The Decameron, 41) Other stories in The Decameron contain a similar frankness, but, remarkably, none of them convey actual disillusionment with the faith. See Boccaccio, The Decameron. 9. Henri de Lubac sums up the communal character of salvation, and, hence, the importance of the Church for the individual believer, as follows: Thus, just as the Jews put all their trust for so long not in an individual reward beyond the grave but in their common destiny as a race and in the glory of their earthly Jerusalem, so for the Christian all his hopes must be bent on the coming of the Kingdom and the glory of the one Jerusalem; and as Yahweh bestowed adoption on no individual as such, but only insofar as he bestowed universal adoption on the people of the Jews, so the Christian obtains adoption only in proportion as he is a member of that social structure brought to life by the Spirit of Christ. Seen like this, Jewish nationalism, which taken by itself would stand for so narrow and incomplete a doctrine, finds its full meaning in an anticipatory symbolism. It was not merely of service, as is generally admitted, for the upholding of the chosen people, a necessary condition for maintenance of their religion. The national character of the kingdom of God, in apparent contradiction with its world-wide character, was an antidote to all attempts at interpretation in an individualist sense. Made spiritual and worldwide, as the prophets had indeed foretold, Judaism passed on to Christianity its concept of salvation as essentially social. (Catholicism, 60–61) For the medieval Western European believer, salvation depended upon incorporation in the Roman Catholic Church; the terror of excommunication becomes clear to moderns only in light of the social character of salvation as medieval believers understood it. Only in the context of this theology is the radical rupture that the Reformation represents understandable.

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1. An American Venus and Virgin: The Sacramental Dynamic of the Middle West 1. “Teleology” derives from Greek telos, meaning “purpose, end.” A teleological culture would be one with deep meaning and purpose; usually the term is used to refer to an orientation toward profound spiritual goals. 2. Henry Adams, in “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” directly states Puritanism’s supposed rejection of sex: “The trait was notorious, and often humorous, but anyone brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength” (The Education of Henry Adams, 364). This denial of sex is, according to Adams, a detriment to American art: “American art, like the American language and American education was as far as possible sexless. Society regarded this victory over sex as its greatest triumph” (366). Adams grants this sense of triumph, but only in terms of cultural efficiency, not in terms of art (366–67). 3. In A Story-Teller’s Story, Anderson frequently elaborates the opposition between intellectualism and life. Thus in the following passage: Could it be that force, all power was disease, that man on his way up from savagery and having discovered the mind and its uses had gone a little off his head in using his new toy? I had always been drawn toward horses, dogs and other animals and among people had cared most for simple folk who made no pretense of having intellect, workmen who in spite of the handicaps put in their way by modern life still loved the materials in which they worked, who loved the play of hands over materials, who followed instinctively a force outside themselves, for materials in which they worked, for people other than themselves, things over which they made no claim of ownership. (269) The “force outside [one]self ” is the larger life of which one is a part and from which one is severed when one’s intellect becomes a tool for power and for imposing oneself upon reality. Craftsmanship here, as elsewhere in Anderson, is portrayed as a sacramental activity that via the instinctive life takes one outside oneself and merges one with the larger mystery of life. 4. Anderson states in his posthumously published Memoirs that he identified with a movement in American literature that brought a new honesty: “We have all got a new freedom, a new license to look more directly at life. I think the new freedom, here in America, has added immeasurably to our American health” (22). 5. Whether Anderson’s view of Emerson is entirely just is debatable. For instance, Emerson frequently makes statements concerning nature such as this one, from his 1836 essay “Nature”: “All things with which we deal preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel?” (22). Clearly, he values nature greatly and sees profound spiritual meaning in all manifestations of the physical world. However, what Anderson and other intellectuals of his time criticize is Emerson’s definition of nature as merely a reductive symbol, pointing to something other, rather than as a full-fledged real-



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ity in its own right. An example of a statement in which Emerson abstracts nature into a spiritual illustration would be the following: “Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of Reason and reflect conscience. All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature” (21). “Reason” here implies a universal soul that manifests itself in individual entities, which, in themselves, however, are nothing (6, 14). According to Emerson, everything in nature has an abstract reference and exists as the manifestation of an impersonal spiritual form, an “Idea” (18). Ultimately, nature reflects rational laws, but it has no real substance of its own. Hence, Emerson’s idealistic reading of nature seems, in a sense, to dissolve nature’s reality. Furthermore, he explains away the flaws in nature as a failure of human perception, therefore, participating in an idealistic elimination of reality (37). One of the most important premises of sacramentalism is that it takes the actuality of the Other very seriously; it is not monistic, that is, it does not see all things as ultimately being one. Rather, it seeks for relational communion between all things: not union, but communion. 6. Joyce and Felix are two names with a similar meaning—“joy” and “happiness” respectively. In their relationship, the issue of how humans can become truly joyful is central, and their names hint at how what plays out in their relationships is paradigmatic for all humans’ fulfillment. 7. On a literal level, I use the terms “communion” and “Eucharist” interchangeably. However, both terms have different connotations: “communion” emphasizes the community that occurs within the Church and between the Church and Christ, while “Eucharist” emphasizes the elements of bread and wine themselves, as well as the sacrificed body of Christ itself, into which these elements are transubstantiated. 2. Protestantism, Literalism, and the Sacramental Body of the Midwest 1. The Middle West relevant for the literary tradition under discussion is very much the Middle West of fertile farmland, the Middle West of the pastoral myth. Therefore, the northern woods of such states as Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan do not figure, nor does the Ozark region of southern Missouri or far southern Illinois. Within the farm belt, however, there are still many subregional distinctions: along the Ohio River and in much of Missouri and Indiana, the cultural influence of the South is more strongly felt than that of New England; east of the Mississippi, industrialization and urbanization took hold more rapidly and more firmly than west of that river; the ethnic composition of, e.g., Nebraska, is significantly different from that of, e.g., Central Illinois; and the farther west one goes on the Great Plains, the less lush the landscape becomes, though in the traditionally Midwestern-designated states, crucially for their Midwestern regional affiliation, the land still adheres, in its intense agricultural productivity, to the breadbasket image and pastoral ideal at the core of the region’s identity.

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2. For a particularly good discussion of Cooper’s complex evocation of the American landscape in The Pioneers, see D. Anderson, “Cooper’s Improbable Pictures.” Anderson notes, for instance, that in the winter landscape that opens the novel, “there is . . . a great deal here to challenge and disturb the reader’s imagination with intimations of a formidable machine culture and its economic and imperial values” (39). 3. Peter Harrison vividly details the search for the literal physical location of paradise that began to obsess European civilization as it shifted from a sacramental to a scientific worldview: “Whereas for medieval and patristic exegetes the Garden of Eden had been a potent idea, laden with psychological or allegorical meanings— paradise was thus placed in the third heaven, the orb of the moon, or in the human mind—now considerable efforts were expended on attempts to identify the earthly location of Eden and in describing its physical features” (The Bible, Protestantism, 126–27). Naturally, the emergence of this mindset, coinciding with the discovery and early colonization of America, had a profound effect on the literalist pastoralism applied to the American context. 4. Already before the ascent of Midwestern modernism, the region’s naturalists, such as Joseph Kirkland, Edgar Watson Howe, and Hamlin Garland, sought to thwart pastoral idealism, portraying the harsh facts of rural life. At the core of this literature is a call for a reconciliation with reality, a call for an acknowledgment of the real fallen condition of America—an acknowledgment that would form the first step in any effort at bringing about more social justice. A model story in this regard is Garland’s “Up the Coolly” (Main-Travelled Roads) in which a New York actor returns to the Wisconsin farm where he was born and bred only to have his nostalgic feelings crushed by the harsh and embittering circumstances of his mother’s and brother’s life. Only after he lets go of his idealizing predisposition and furthermore faces his guilt in having neglected his economically struggling kin does he achieve a reconciliation of sorts with his brother, Grant. Garland and his fellow Midwestern naturalists, while eschewing the mythic and strongly religious overtones of the modernist tradition, nonetheless pave the way for the modernists in that pastoral idealism is starkly debunked. 5. By “idolatry” I mean attributing supreme power and worth to one thing even though they really belong to another. In this case, the verbal category supersedes in importance the concrete reality to which it refers. 6. The term “logocentrism,” made famous by French deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida, designates a belief in the ability of words (Greek logos = word) to capture and define reality precisely and definitively, as though words and things/ beings were somehow identical. 7. The theological term “incarnational” derives from Christ’s Incarnation, that is, from His “becoming flesh” (Latin carne = flesh). An incarnational cosmos is one in which the physical world in some way expresses and reflects its Creator, a world in which God, therefore, is expressed physically “in the flesh.” 8. For a detailed description of the intellectuals involved in these editing and scientific activities, see Chapter 3, “The Two Reformations,” in Harrison, The Bible,



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Protestantism, 64–120. Here he discusses the contributions of such medieval and Early Modern figures as Albert the Great, William of Ockham, William Turner, Leonard Fuchs, Konrad Gesner, Guillaume Rondelet, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Edward Wotton, Levinus Lemnius, Wolfgang Franzius, Edward Topsell, and Hieronymus Bock. 9. The “thing called Puritanism” is, once more, something far beyond any one specific theology—it is a vast cultural force in Western civilization that “kills life,” all that is literalist, abstract, stifling, “unnatural.” 10. As do all traditions, so that of Midwestern modernism displays a considerable degree of complexity. For instance, in Giants in the Earth (1927) by Norwegian immigrant Ole Edvart Rölvaag, the typical pattern of the Midwestern modernist text is, in some respects, inverted. Here, the gutsy protagonist Per Hansa can weather any resistance Dakota nature puts up to his vision of a successful farm, his own little “kingdom”—he understands nature well, has no false expectations, and proves himself a fabulous husbandman. Yet he does not necessarily always prove himself a good husband—it is the spiritual limitations of his wife Beret that he overlooks, and though her religious mentality is clearly morbid, Hansa needed to be relationally considerate of her rather than enthusiastically dragging her into a pioneering situation for which she was not prepared. Thus, Per’s exploring of the “mysteries of the Midwestern ‘body’” is precisely his guilt because it causes him to ignore another concrete, sacramental reality, namely, the constitution of his wife. This is the area of his life where he experiences true “sacramental resistance”—his engagement with his wife rather than his engagement with the Midwestern land. During a harsh winter, forced to rest from his engagement with nature, Per “remained idle and had nothing to do but look at his wife. He looked and looked, until he had to face the hard fact that something was wrong.” Beret, not Dakota, is the “hard fact” Per has to face. The quotation is from Colcord and Rölvaag, trans., Giants in the Earth, 241. 11. A good illustration of Lynch’s criticism of an a-sacramental literary imagination is his critique of expressionist playwright Eugene O’Neill. In a section of Chapter 3 titled “The Infinite of O’Neill,” Lynch delivers the following critique: For O’Neill, as for so many of his contemporaries, God, in whatever form, is a reality completely external to man. Man must leap to God by unfounded faith, by sudden, unrooted ecstasy, or even by hysterics, in order to escape from the self. His plays in general turn from despair to hope and faith with brilliant, melodramatic ease. The search for man and the search for God remain totally disconnected. This is a kind of theology, a kind of faith, a kind of leaping, which leaves the human situation untouched and in terms of which God is only being used as an escape. But all such escape is purely mythical. We cannot jump out of our skins, and if God cannot enter into the inmost part of us and our human reality, then all theology is farce, a bit of magic which will never work or solve anything. All leaping is futile because leaping out of the human concrete is impossible. But in O’Neill’s theological search, there is nothing but leaping.

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For example, there is Lazarus Laughed, that notable attempt on the part of the dramatist to say something positive about the final nature of human life. In sum, the play is filled with laughter and the demand that men indulge in laughter, yes, happy laughter, as the key and the end of things. But the laughter is utterly mysterious, the result of a vision by Lazarus who is risen from the dead; the play does not grow toward happiness; the whole process is a miracle that does not relate itself to human life in any way whatsoever. (Christ and Apollo, 85) Other writers seen by Lynch as exemplary “leapers” include George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Dreiser, Maxwell Anderson, Irwin Shaw, and Clifford Odets. 3. Winesburg Under the Sway of “New Englanders’ Gods”: Puritanism, Industrialism, Materialism, and the Midwestern Fall 1. The spectre of Native Americans, associated with white guilt and undermining the Utopian pretensions of American nationalism, haunts much of American fiction. Particularly prominent literary examples of this phenomenon are Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799), where the protagonist sleepwalks into a remnant of American wilderness only to encounter, upon waking, all the nightmarish realities gnawing at the American psyche. For instance, he encounters Native Americans and finds himself, before too long, a killer, reflecting and reenacting his nation’s guilt (797). Of course, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales continually pose the question of white guilt, and European culture’s attempts at carving a “civilized” landscape out of the American wilderness is depicted in a dubious light, as involving violence, destructiveness, exploitation, wastefulness, and hypocrisy—this morally complex depiction is perhaps most elaborately realized in The Pioneers (1823). Cooper’s Native Americans are frequently portrayed as either noble or at least as living with integrity according to their own code, which before the Creator is equal to the European cultural code, an observation frequently reiterated by Leatherstocking, especially in The Last of the Mohicans (1826). In Melville’s Pierre, or The Ambiguities (1852), a highly stereotyped American pastoral, the lush and idyllic Glendinning estate in New York State, is undermined by various dark suppressed forms of guilt. References to the Indian past and to genocide form part of the complex of this guilt. And, of course, Twain’s “Injun Joe” haunts the picturesque Petersburg world of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) with the threat of Native vengeance. Midwestern modernists, in their critique of America’s Utopian ideology, frequently refer to the Native American past and the realities of genocide and violence in order to expose the dark underside of superficially idealistic discourses. For a succinct discussion of this aspect of a major Midwestern author’s work, see Tellefsen, “Blood in the Wheat.” 2. In this sentence, I use both the terms “originary” and “original.” By “originary,” I mean “primitive,” “close to original causes, i.e., origination”; by “original” I mean “related to ultimate essence or cause.”



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3. This phrase of Anderson’s is quoted in Whalan, “Dreams of Manhood.” Whalan discusses Anderson’s emerging view of modern warfare as reductive of manhood (and humanity) in its systematic commodification of soldiers, which reflects Western culture’s underlying ethos of capitalism: Rather than making a romantic escape from the merchandised modes of production of industrial capitalism, the soldiers now find themselves at the mercy of its military counterpart: in [his November 1916] letter [to Paul Rosenfeld], Anderson calls the war “industrialism gone mad.” Indeed, Anderson himself had “escaped” from working in a factory to enlist in the Spanish American war, and in 1924 would complain that instead of the “democracy” of that conflict the Great War involved the “standardization of men” and the ethos that “everything must be made as machine-like and impersonal as possible.” (234) 4. Epifanio San Juan, Jr., describes the characters’ nature experience in “The Untold Lie” similarly when he notes that “the open spacious fields stimulat[e] in [Ray Pearson] a desire to ‘shout or scream,’ to do something ‘unexpected and terrifying,’ resisting the claims of the identity that Winesburg society has forced upon him on account of his past, his habitual failings, utterly ignoring the qualitative worth of his infinite cravings, his endless dreams” (148). However, San Juan seems to detract from the sacramental presence the land possesses when he sees landscape descriptions in Winesburg as “tactfully placed amplifications of a given mood or tone” (148). I would argue that the land is more than a contrived poetic figure for a spiritual reality—nature, in Anderson, seems to actually contain and express this spiritual reality, its “emotional suggestiveness,” which San Juan acknowledges, arising from its visible embodiment of invisible truths. See San Juan, “Vision and Reality.” 5. In Western literature, blue is traditionally considered the color of romanticism. It became such due to the fame of the mysterious “blue flower” in German romantic writer Novalis’s 1799 novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, in which the flower represents the goal of all transcendent yearning. Given Anderson’s pastoral genre allusions in this scene, it seems fairly likely that he is also making other allusions to literary and cultural history, in this instance, to romanticism. The fact that Wing is German and that his bird name signifies yearning are further clues to Anderson’s intentional association of the youth in his pastoral scene with romanticism, romantic Sehnsucht. German national identity, as well as international reputation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was firmly bound up with notions of a people steeped in romanticism. For a brief discussion of the blue flower, see Stenzel, Die Deutschen Romantiker, 57–58. 6. Dionysianism is a concept introduced by the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) in his debut work, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1871). Nietzsche is concerned with authenticity in modern culture and draws on Greek myth to define the authentic, natural life. He advocates a Dionysian spirit, that is, a spirit that strives toward breaking the spell of individuation. All things individual are seen as impermanent manifestations of an eternal life force (also called the “eternal

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will”). This life force is creative, and because it expresses itself in creativity, it must also destroy, in order to make room for new creations. The destruction of all things individual is tragic, but, on the other hand, the individual who embraces life and death fully will fully participate in an eternal force and will, thus, experience a kind of immortality by being part of something larger than himself or herself. The Dionysian authentic life is characterized by an attunement to nature, to one’s instincts, to passion, and losing oneself in the ecstasy of sex is equivalent to an epiphanic experience. Ultimately, the goal is transcending one’s individual self and connecting to the larger natural force of which one forms a part (1000–02). All that restricts human nature, human creativity, and human passion is defined as “Apollonian,” a deadening of human vitality in the name of abstract ideals (954–55, 966–69). Literary Modernism, with its concern for renewing Western culture, with its concern of ridding Western culture of sham ideals, was deeply influenced by Nietzschean philosophy, and Anderson himself makes multiple references to Nietzsche; for instance, Robert Dunne discusses Anderson’s explicit explorations of Nietzscheanism in Marching Men (1918) and the unpublished “Talbot Whittingham” (Dunne, A New Book, 13–41). The following passage sums up Nietzsche’s concept of the creative as well as destructive Will and gives a sense of what he means by a Dionysian spirit: That striving for the infinite, the beating wings of longing accompanying the highest delight in the clearly perceived reality [of nature], remind us that . . . we must recognize a Dionysian phenomenon, which reveals to us again and again the playful construction and demolishing of the world of individuals as the overflow of a primitive delight, just as Heraclitus the Obscure compares the world-building power to a playing child which places stones here and there and builds sandhills only to overthrow them again. (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 1085) In “The New Englander,” Elsie Leander’s dishevelment and “letting go,” her running into nature, her facing of her repressed desires, her recklessness in the storm, her being covered with pollen, her falling down with its connotations of both sex and death, fits into the scheme of a Dionysian awakening to real life. The translation quoted is from Fadiman, The Philosophy of Nietzsche, 1085. 7. For Nietzsche, individuation is the root of all evil, “the origin and prime cause of all suffering” (The Birth of Tragedy, 1001); individuation makes us ephemeral and incomplete, and deep down, we have a death wish, a longing to be reabsorbed into the life force whence we came (1002). However, Apollonianism is a mindset typical of the modern Western world in which the individual is all-important. Hence, there is a belief in an individual afterlife and a morality that restricts the individual’s natural unfolding in this life as a precondition for the individual to achieve fulfillment in the next. Apollonianism defies death by dictating eternal abstract ideals to humans, by spawning plastic arts that seek to perpetuate individual beauty and that seek to gloss over the creative chaos of nature with illusions of order, and by creating systems of



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control over nature that are meant to maximize individual safety and convenience while isolating modern people from the natural sphere (952–54). In the following passage from The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche sums up what he means by Apollonianism, contrasting its values with those of Dionysianism: This apotheosis of individuation knows but one law—the individual, i.e., the delimiting of the boundaries of the individual, measure in the Hellenic sense. Apollo, as ethical deity, exacts measure of his disciples, and, . . . to this end, he requires self-knowledge. And so, side by side with the esthetic necessity for beauty, there occur the demands “know thyself ” and “nothing overmuch”; consequently pride and excess are regarded as the truly inimical demons of the non-Apollonian sphere, hence as characteristics of the pre-Apollonian age— that of the Titans; and of the extra-Apollonian world—that of the barbarians. . . . And now let us take this artistically limited world, based on appearance and moderation; let us imagine how into it there penetrated, in tones ever more bewitching and alluring, the ecstatic sound of the Dionysian festival; let us remember that in these strains all of Nature’s excess in joy, sorrow, and knowledge become audible, even in piercing shrieks; and finally, let us ask ourselves what significance remains to the psalmodizing artist of Apollo, with his phantom harp-sound, once it is compared with this demonic folk-song! The muses of the arts of “appearance” paled before an art which, in its intoxication, spoke the truth. The wisdom of Silenus cried “Woe! woe!” to the serene Olympians. The individual, with all his restraint and proportion, succumbed to the self-oblivion of the Dionysian state, forgetting the precepts of Apollo. Excess revealed itself as truth. Contradiction, the bliss born of pain, spoke out from the very heart of Nature. (966–68) 8. For an extensive discussion of the “tangled locks” image, see Lindsay, Such a Rare Thing, 31–32. 9. One Bible verse that expresses the Christian doctrine of the human body being the temple of the Holy Ghost is 1 Corinthians 6:19: “What? Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?” 10. Anderson frequently borrowed from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and in his depiction of the lynching mob in “Hands,” he may have been inspired by Twain’s depiction of such mobs’ stupidity and herd mentality in chapters XXI and XXII of Huckleberry Finn. An in-depth comparison of Twain’s and Anderson’s mobs would be worthwhile, but is beyond the scope of this chapter. 11. Anderson expresses his pity for those suffering from the supposed defect of homosexuality in his posthumously published Memoirs. When approached by a homosexual, Anderson responds the following way: “I was not angry and am quite sure that, when this happened, I felt even a kind of pity. There was a kind of door

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opened, as though I looked down through the door into a kind of dark pit, a place of monstrous shapes, a world of strange unhealth” (340). 12. Lindsay comments insightfully on the nuances of the narrator’s phrasing at this point: What does “finer sort of women” mean? Is it a class distinction? Or does “finer” imply some sort of scale of sexual appetites where “finer” is at one end and “grosser” or “coarser” is at the other? And does “finer” mean the absence of those gross appetites or simply the careful, elegant masking of those hungers? If the narrator means to imply the absence of the grosser physical appetites, why does he choose to have the love be for men? It seems more logical, then, to assume that this love of finer women for men is physical but expressed in some way that is not physical, some way that is fine, masked, as opposed to gross or mean. . . . We think we are assenting to something . . . without reading the fine print, so to speak. We have actually affirmed the analogy and deemed proper that a man should have feelings for boys in the same way that a particular type of woman has feelings for men. (Such a Rare Thing, 49) 13. See Lindsay, Such a Rare Thing, 54. 14. Interestingly, the word Faust in German means “fist”; Wing is German and tends to pound his fists, and his story is called “Hands.” Perhaps, there is an indirect allusion to the Faustus legend and to the Faustian practice of self-deceiving indulgence in beautiful dreams. Though, at first glance, such a connection between “Hands” and the Faustus story may seem far-fetched, upon closer examination of the novel as a whole one discovers that Anderson weaves dense allusive webs that run across stories, so that the relatively clear Faustus allusion in “Drink” might very well have an echo in “Hands.” 15. Since in Anderson’s text, a Bradford represents Puritan materialism, it is perhaps relevant to point out one striking feature of William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation: much of the book is preoccupied by lengthy accounts of business transactions, and the book abounds with exact financial figures. For an excellent edition of the work, see Samuel Eliot Morison’s. 16. The word “rosary,” deriving from “rose,” contains an important symbolic image that recurs frequently in Anderson’s works. Roses, for Anderson as for most writers, mean “love.” Additionally, the opening words of the rosary, “Hail Mary, full of grace” point to the important value of grace in Anderson’s fiction. Living in a state of grace, for Anderson, means not trying to be perfect, not being self-righteous, but accepting one’s own fallibility, as well as others’. Such grace, for Anderson, is the foundation for authentic relating between people, and for a natural life undistorted by false idealisms. 17. San Juan has summed up this open, sacramental attitude beautifully, expressing its humble rather than merely agnostic nature—objective reality’s fullness can be perceived in fragments, but in fragments only: a person’s truths should, if he or she does not stick to any one formulation of them, ideally lead to a more intense enlarge-



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ment of life and not to a constricted compass of response and possibilities for the qualification of motives; the person should ideally initiate a greater intensity of critical self-awareness, cognizant of the fact that to any one point of view there exist horizons and landscapes that are closed to it; hence, he or she has imperative need for constant inquiry, perpetual examination of principles, and endless pursuit of other modes, more organic and integrative, of self-expression (“Vision and Reality,” 138–39). Obviously, hard-working nineteenth-century Ohio farmers are not likely to pursue a perpetual self-examination (that notion is more relevant for twentieth-century Ohioans or for townspeople), but their vague truths’ agency in amplifying and intensifying these farmers’ lives makes San Juan’s observation about Winesburg in general applicable to “Godliness.” Far from causing the farmers to be “narrow,” these open-ended, blurry truths lend a mysterious, spiritual quality to all phenomena and open up new possibilities for insight. A lack of systematicity preserves the ability to respond flexibly to concrete actualities and to adjust to new vantage points and horizons. 18. The anti-relational, isolation-prone direction of Jesse’s thinking becomes apparent not just in his stance toward his neighbors but also in the way he thinks of his father and brothers. When his father, “old and twisted with toil,” leaves the ownership of the farm to Jesse and is of no more practical use, Jesse “shrug[s] his shoulders and dismisse[s] the old man from his mind” (69). He regards his father as a mere instrument, to be cast off when it is worn and blunted. Similarly, he thinks of his brothers merely as instruments serving his scheme: “He thought of his dead brothers and blamed them that they had not worked harder and achieved more” (72). Jesse, thus, essentially has no family: the people closest to him in his mind hardly possess real human presence. 4. “The fields fell into the forms of women”: Sexual and Gendered Associations of the Land in Horses and Men 1. There is an interesting tension concerning women in Anderson’s works. On the one hand, women are valued as individuals, as highly particular, sacramental beings pointing to the larger reality of womanhood, humanity, nature, and life without being swallowed up by these larger realities. On the other hand, as Anderson counters idealistic constructions of women as pure or angelic, or sordid constructions of women as prostitutes or animal-like feeders, he falls into the trap of inadvertently countering one mode of iconicity with another one, an iconicity of women as female Messiah, as Earth Mother, as nature. Thus, there are certain works, most prominently the novels Many Marriages and Dark Laughter, where one cannot deny that there is at least some truth to the following critique of Herbert Gold: “Except for the poetic school teacher and a few others, women are not women in Anderson’s stories. . . . For Anderson women have a strange holy power; they are earth-mothers, ectoplasmic spirits, sometimes succubi, rarely individual living creatures” (qtd. in Miller, “Earth Mothers, Succubi,” 64).

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I disagree with Gold about most women characters in Anderson’s short fiction; it does not seem that their particular personhood and fate becomes obliterated by their connection to womanhood at large or nature at large; rather, there appears to be a complex interplay between the One and the Many where the One exists only in the Many and expresses itself only in the Many. Complex symbolic and sacramental analogy rather than flat allegorization seem to be at work, and ambiguity and poetic evocative density rather than facile didacticism characterize most of Winesburg and Anderson’s other short story cycles. Some of Anderson’s novels, on the other hand, are artistic failures in which didactic allegory undermines the sacramental message that is being proclaimed. 2. The girl’s age being the magical (and biblical) number of seven is significant in refuting the insignificance her lowly surroundings would betoken. 3. Luther S. Luedtke sees the name of Tom Hard as an allusion to Thomas Hardy and points out many illuminating possible allusions within “Tandy” to Hardy’s oeuvre, especially to Jude the Obscure (1899). For instance, Luedtke relates the vision of the stranger in “Tandy” of a female Messiah to “Jude’s faith in the perfected beauty of Sue’s body and spirit” (“Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Hardy,” 534). However, using Jude the Obscure as a foil for “Tandy” not only sheds light on parallels but also on crucial divergences. Thus Tom Hard in “Tandy” is a grotesque because he is obsessed with atheism, and “the stranger,” representing Jude, will not lose the faith that Tom Hard (or Hardy) asks him to abandon. It is as though Anderson is inciting Hardy’s character to rebel against his author: “The stranger is a projection of both the desperate Jude and of Sherwood Anderson, an interested observer of humanity with a mind, problems, and faiths of his own. Although the stranger befriends Tom Hard and spends much time with him, Anderson apparently found the relentless fatality of Jude’s life a needlessly hard one and criticizes Thomas Hardy for being blind to possibilities of new life beyond the momentary grotesquerie” (534). Interpreting the “stranger’s” ideal of “Tandy” more critically, Robert Dunne states that “as nearly every other tale in the book illustrates, people become grotesques when they consciously shape their lives around prescriptive ideals. . . . However enticing and reassuring the stranger’s ideal may be and however assured his claim of understanding the girl, the story nevertheless provides the scenario of a grotesque in the making. In ‘Tandy’ we encounter someone who chooses to mold her identity based on another’s ideal” (A New Book, 63). It seems that the narrator, in this story, is doing what he does throughout the Winesburg, Ohio story cycle, namely, establishing truths while also undercutting them, in order to escape grotesquery. Similarly, the old author whose text inspires the book’s narrator writes his “Book of the Grotesque” without ever publishing it, for fear that frozen in print, his own perspectives and graspings at the truth will become too totalizing and absurd, in other words, grotesque. Anderson, thus, is always warning us not to turn anything into universal maxims and formulae. What his narrative art seeks to accomplish is a rich world of suggestion that leads to the doors of mystery without tearing them open. Still, the stories are not content-free; the vision in “Tandy” is vague and sug-



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gestive enough, the label “Tandy” itself an indefinite poetic metaphor ready to be filled with many different nuances of meaning. Even though the issue of becoming a grotesque remains a concern for the girl who adopts the name “Tandy,” there still is hope that she will use the “truth” revealed to her as an impetus for allowing a positive identity to take shape rather than as a distorting, highly prescriptive ideal. The vision of a female Messiah presented in this story is to be taken only as a poetic vision, an inspiration that symbolically captures a truth without delimiting it too gravely. This is where my interpretation of Anderson differs significantly from Dunne’s: I believe Anderson’s deconstructive strategies end in an affirmation of sacramental mystery and meaningful symbolism, while Dunne’s deconstructive critique is more radical in portraying Anderson as enacting the fundamental failure of language. It seems to me that Anderson believes in poetry and symbolism, and that he does believe that language, used in that spirit, can lead us to truth, though not categorical Truth. 4. Judy Jo Small, in Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson, acknowledges that “there are no extended critical analyses of ‘The New Englander,’” but points to a few brief but illuminating critical comments in, for instance, Welford Dunaway Taylor’s Sherwood Anderson and Brom Weber’s “Anderson and the ‘Essence of Things.’” 5. For more information on the original novel from which these stories were taken, see Small’s Reader’s Guide as well as the fifth chapter in John E. Bassett’s Sherwood Anderson: An American Career, in which the author, in a section titled “‘Ohio Pagans’ and ‘Father Abraham’” (85–87), provides a relatively detailed summary of the aborted novel’s plot. One interesting feature is that May Edgley of “‘Unused’” lives a futile, frustrated long life rather than dying tragically. She suffers at the novel’s midpoint from an unfulfilled passion for “An Ohio Pagans’” protagonist Tom Edwards, and, later, from a profound disillusionment with love and life in general. 6. Critics have not been too favorable in their assessment of this story; it is generally acknowledged to be among the weaker ones in a story collection that contains other excellent material. A recurring observation is that Anderson’s art flowers chiefly when he evokes intensely personal, poetically charged moments of awakening rather than attempting narrative breadth. So N. Bryllion Fagin notes, in The Phenomenon of Sherwood Anderson, one of the earliest book-length studies of Anderson: “Again the distinctive stories are the frankly subjective ones. Where Anderson attempts to project characters objectively he fails to rise above the level of other story-tellers. ‘Unused’ is far too long and too ordinary—except for the little subjective betrayals of the author. There is nothing in May Edgley’s life to warrant describing it in one hundred and four pages. Only where Anderson’s Bidwell creeps in, where his symbolism, his hatred of ugliness and love of beauty quicken the pulse of the story does it become animate” (90). Making much the same point, Irving Howe notes that the longer stories of Horses and Men (among which he explicitly includes “‘Unused’”), the stories portraying unlived lives, fail to live themselves: “They create an unprovisioned and unlimned world, a neither-nor area suspended between reality and symbol. . . . Having abandoned or rather having never fully accepted realism, [Anderson] could

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not find, in these stories, another method for perceiving the objective world. He was trapped in a halfway house: he could neither build realistic structures nor find an adequate means of transcending the need for them” (Sherwood Anderson, 172). Similarly, Rex Burbank points out the weakness of the longer, more rambling tales in Horses and Men, naming “‘Unused’” as an example; as do virtually all other critics, he values much more highly the shorter, more focused, condensed, and subjectively narrated, epiphanic tales, which he believes possess “the rich intensity of poetry” (Sherwood Anderson, 91). Employing a kindlier tone but essentially concurring with the larger critical consensus, David D. Anderson remarks that none of the stories in Horses and Men “is a complete failure, although some, like ‘Unused,’ would have profited from a clearer focus on motivation and the meaning of symbols” (Sherwood Anderson: An Introduction, 78). Finally, in an assessment focused more purely on the psychological content, Frederick J. Hoffman states that “had a psychologist come upon May Edgley before the coroner was yet needed, he might have heard her story and interpreted it in much the same way as Anderson did” (Freudianism, 187). Certainly, if nothing else, “‘Unused’” provides us with a case study that illustrates very clearly Anderson’s spiritual themes as well as his critique of American cultural history. The story possesses interest for this, if for no other, reason. Yet, I would contend that “‘Unused’” does have moving symbolic as well as realistic touches that make reading the story a worthwhile experience, even if it does not compare to the poetic brilliance of “The Man Who Became a Woman” or “I’m a Fool.” The story does ramble and is not as densely woven as one might wish; however, various scenes and images, such as the interactions and thought processes in the berry-picking scene or the image of May clutching the long white ostrich feather on her hat when she drowns, are memorable and expressive. Because the story has been dismissed readily by critics in the past, it is virtually uncharted territory in terms of an in-depth analysis, with Robert Allen Papinchak’s one-and-a-half-page psychological discussion representing the greatest amount of attention the story has received. Since the story forms part of a major unfinished novel by Anderson, since it stands out for being one of his longest tales, since it has been ignored conspicuously by scholars, since it has much to say concerning the interlinked sacramentality of both human sexuality and nature in general, and since it is, ultimately, despite its flaws, a content-rich and moving story, I have chosen to pay to it the tribute of a longer investigation. 7. Luedtke points out that “plowing” imagery is employed similarly in Anderson’s works as in Hardy’s: The new age destroyed the organic life of rural communities and radically altered consciousness of man’s place in time and space. The old order that it replaces was rooted in an animistic conception of nature that assumed a primitive trinity of earth, woman, and man. In his writings, Anderson did not describe the earth with the same sexual topography that Hardy used, notably in Tess of the D’Urbervilles; yet like Hardy, he considered woman as essentially



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one with the earth and accepted her natural sexual tyranny as a cohesive force, corresponding to the fecundity of the land and the flux of the seasons. In this mystical and primitive system, man—himself non-reproducing—was assigned by nature the subordinate role of tiller of the land and husband of woman. (“Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Hardy,” 535) It is particularly noteworthy that Luedtke observes Anderson’s identification of Earth and woman, which was so crucial to Anderson’s sacramentalism. 8. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Cor. 13:12). 9. Of course, May Edgley does at the story’s end kill herself (her death is ambiguous but seems suicidal)—ultimately, her killing herself results from her not being protected by money and thus being an outcast from respectable middle-class society. 10. This utterance has multiple layers, one of which is a sexual innuendo. 11. Escapist romanticism is frequently the bane of the protagonists of Midwestern fiction. Examples are, among others, Cather’s Jim Burden and Niel Herbert, Fitzgerald’s Minnesotan Amory Blaine and Dakotan Jay Gatsby, Floyd Dell’s Felix Fay, Glenway Wescott’s Jim Towers, and Josephine W. Johnson’s Kerrin Haldemarne. Even Sinclair Lewis’s prosaic George F. Babbitt is troubled by elfin fancies that compensate him for not really living. In virtually every case, this romanticism is a negative symptom of an unwillingness or inability to engage with objective spiritual and physical realities. 12. Note that May Edgley’s “tower” of fancy is a citadel image, an image of selfprotection, of defense against others’ attacks and attempts at mastery. The field by May’s house, in contrast, is vulnerable, frequently exposed to floodwaters due to its low-lying location. This vulnerable location, however, leads to life: the moisture of this floodplain causes it to be rank with vegetation. Where attempts at mastery necessitate self-protection, fertile nature gives way to an artificial bulwark and love dies. 13. “An Ohio Pagan” has not really received any more in-depth critical attention than “‘Unused,’” but the brief mentions accorded it in various books on Anderson are generally more positive than mentions of its sister story. Fagin emphasizes the acuity and accuracy with which Anderson evokes the male adolescent experience in the story (The Phenomenon of Sherwood Anderson, 120, 144), and Cleveland B. Chase, also writing in 1927, remarks that though the story is less successful than Anderson’s famous “I Want to Know Why,” it, nonetheless, possesses the same “real quality,” a deeply moving Keatsian “lyric note,” an inarticulate eloquence (Sherwood Anderson, 42). Burbank labels the story an “admirable effort” (Sherwood Anderson 96), and Irving Howe categorizes the story as one of Anderson’s more successful ones, belonging to the category of Anderson tales written in a style evocative of oral storytelling. Although “An Ohio Pagan” is technically written in the third person, “one clearly feels the presence of a narrator’s voice” (Sherwood Anderson, 173). The story is, indeed, vividly, lyrically told, and its rambling quality lends it charm and the aura of leisure rather than exceeding the reader’s patience, as is, to some degree,

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the case with “‘Unused.’” The story certainly is one of Anderson’s best, though it may not rank with his very best (and only Anderson’s very best short fiction has received scholarly attention). A further incentive for analyzing the story, besides its high quality and unfortunate scholarly neglect, is the fact that in it, Anderson develops his pagan neo-sacramental nature mysticism more directly than in most other tales. 14. The meaning of horses in Anderson’s work has been discussed by various critics, especially in relation to “The Man Who Became a Woman” and “I Want to Know Why.” Significantly for this chapter on Anderson’s exploration of nature as feminine Other resisting masculinist power- and control-oriented practices and discourses, Christopher MacGowan, in “The Heritage of the Fathers in Sherwood Anderson’s ‘The Man Who Became a Woman,’” sees Anderson as identifying horses in “The Man Who Became a Woman” with “feminine qualities,” such as a fleshliness suffused with spiritual presence, mystery, and eroticism (31). When the story’s protagonist, Herman Dudley, falls into a horse’s skeleton discarded by small-towners who have skinned an old worn-out horse in order to get $2 for its hide, MacGowan interprets the symbolism of the event as follows: “The climax—and supposed resolution—of Herman’s narrative, the fall into the horse skeleton, involves the negation of flesh and femininity, a skeletal male embrace, with breasts reduced to ribs” (31). It is the masculine world of commercialism, of a utilitarianism that kills long-serving animals once they become useless, a world of power and ruthlessness, that reduces the sacramental erotic mystery to, here literally, bare-boned structure that turns living presence into lifeless materiality. Similarly, James Ellis argues that horses in “The Man Who Became a Woman” and “I Want to Know Why” represent a vision of purity that is betrayed by the impurity of men. Regarding the moment at which the unnamed protagonist of “I Want to Know Why” shares a moment of appreciation for the horse Sunstreak with a jockey whom he admires, Ellis comments as follows: In this scene the boy describes the stallion in both spiritual and physical terms. First he describes the horse as “like a girl you think about sometimes but never see” (10). In this context Sunstreak represents the embodiment of perfection of the flesh, which can be arrived at in the animal world of the horse because the powerful sexuality of the horse is natural and therefore does not detract from its amoral being. The idealized girl, if she were to be realized in the flesh, would evoke a sexuality in man that would debase and destroy the beauty she achieves in his ideal world of thought. (“Sherwood Anderson’s Fear of Sexuality,” 600) Later, the boy witnesses the jockey enter a brothel and is traumatized by the juxtaposition of a shared mystical moment and a sordid scene. The brothel clearly represents commercialized, loveless, power-oriented male sexuality, which is contrasted with the innocent power, vitality, and sexuality represented by the stallion. Similarly to the horse, Woman also represents purity in the boy’s mind, but in the brothel scene he sees a woman corrupted and objectified, defiled by masculine lust. In his



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mythical corruption of ideal Femininity, Anderson may have been influenced by Henry Adams’s celebration of the Virgin Mary’s powerful femininity at the core of medieval European civilization (see Chapter 1 of this book for a more thorough discussion of Adams’s Virgin). How problematic Anderson’s gender essentialism can be is discussed succinctly by Ellis in the opening pages of his article (“Sherwood Anderson’s Fear of Sexuality,” 595–97). Despite their problematic aspects, Anderson’s mythical notions of femininity do contain some positive ethical aspects as well, namely because the author uses this symbolism to envision a relational approach to the social and natural world, a vision that actually counters the very essentialism Anderson at times himself practices. What further breaks up Anderson’s sexual essentialism is his insistence on spiritual health necessitating the living out of a full natural humanity beyond proscribed gender roles. Thus, Lonna M. Malmsheimer, in “Sexual Metaphor and Social Criticism in Anderson’s ‘The Man Who Became a Woman,’” observes that what Herman, the protagonist of “The Man Who Became a Woman,” really “wanted was to be totally human and to carry into adulthood all the attributes of his humanity, even those regarded as stereotypically female. . . . His society insisted that it was more important for him to be male than for him to be fully human” (23). Along similar lines, one may note that Bucephalus, in “An Ohio Pagan,” shows signs both of stereotypically feminine tenderness and relationality as well as stereotypically masculine power and self-assertion. Horses, in other words, are closely linked to Anderson’s notion of a natural innocence that resists the sordidness of male aggression and objectifying lust, a purity that is mythically associated with a feminine principle in nature. 15. Throughout his writing, Anderson uses certain words and images in recurring ways, associating them with certain values, aspects of human nature, character traits, and so forth. The word “thin” is one of these highly connotative words. For a thorough discussion of what this word signals in Anderson’s writing, see the discussion of the story “Hands” in Chapter 3. Generally, the word points to a life-denying spirit and is associated with abstraction rather than sensualism or sacramentality. 16. Tom’s shrugging off Bucephalus’s lashing out is reminiscent of “Godliness,” where John Bentley ignores his son Enoch’s near-fatal physical backlash against him. In both cases, a deeper substantive relationship easily survives individual, merely momentary transgressions against that relation. In neither case is there a judgmental, perfectionist, “literal” reading of the transgression that would view a surface-level breach of a relationship as a permanent, substantive one. 17. It is a vital part of the American pastoral tradition to view the sensual education provided by nature as fundamentally formative for human consciousness. Leo Marx details how colonial American writers such as Robert Beverley are deeply influenced by John Locke’s “new sensational psychology” set forth in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which, at least in its particular interpretation, holds that what humans see constitutes their knowledge, that epistemology runs primarily through visual and, more secondarily, through other sensual channels (Marx, Machine in the Garden, 82). Unspoiled and abundant American nature thus held forth a promise for

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a new kind of sensory education and consequently for a spiritual renewal of humankind. This prevalent theme in the American pastoral tradition forms an important subtext in much of Anderson’s fiction—his characters frequently become sensually educated by nature in such a manner that they learn to reject their unnatural, spiritually stifling civilization. 18. The religious sensibility described here is reminiscent of the Midwestern pagan spirituality of Jamie Ferguson in Louis Bromfield’s The Farm as I discuss it in Chapter 1. 19. Thomas Wetzel makes a similar observation regarding Tom’s quest for God: The churches are filled with religious talk that only seems to impede the religious quest, and Tom for a time is caught in this trap. But as he renews his quest, it is his very place in the world—his own Midwestern homeland—whose beauty and simplicity direct and motivate his search for God. And as Kierkegaard repeatedly notes, this quest is a personal and nonrational quest; there is no clear and abstracted approach to God, but the individual must come to faith through the prosaic and seemingly minor experiences of life, recognizing that the God one seeks is an elusive and playful God, the understanding of whose very hiddenness is part of the religious quest. And finally, in this encounter with the hidden God, Tom witnesses over the entire countryside a natural refashioning of the “jewel of life” metaphor [he] has used in other stories to describe the authentic life. Given all this, it is no wonder that when Tom leaves the threshing company at the story’s end, he may not have the final answers for life, but his quest has turned the entire Midwest—even the dank and hardened cities—into “places for beautifully satisfying adventures, for all such fellows as himself.” The story may not offer us a picture of the resolution of Tom’s quest, but its ending note of optimism surely suggests the religious quest has given to him a new and better understanding of life and a better relationship to the land and people about him. (“A Graveyard for the Midwest,” 247–48) 20. Anderson frequently alludes to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) in his works (for example, Hugh McVey, the protagonist of Poor White, and Bruce Dudley, the protagonist of Dark Laughter, are quite explicitly Huck Finn characters). In “An Ohio Pagan,” Anderson also appears to be inspired by Twain’s archetypal American boy-hero. Not only does Tom bear the name of Huck’s close friend Tom Sawyer, but he also is an orphan who grows up untutored by society, who resists having to go to school, and who flees town when society closes in on him. Besides these general parallels, we have a more specific one in how both Tom Edwards and Huck Finn experience prayer. Thus, Huck, in Chapter III, also tries to use prayer as a form of control-oriented magic, and he is similarly disillusioned by it: “Then Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn’t so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn’t any good to me without



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hooks. I tried for hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn’t make it work. By-and-by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She never told me why, and I couldn’t make it out no way” (Cardwell and Budd, eds., Mark Twain: Huck Finn . . . , 19). Of course, Twain, like Anderson, is dealing with serious spiritual issues here, despite the comic tone; throughout the novel, he contrasts mechanistic with “natural” ways of thinking, and here, in the figure of Miss Watson, who is explicitly a double-predestination Calvinist, Twain is also assessing the Puritan Calvinistic legacy in American culture. 21. The phrase “effects itself ” here, borrowed from William Lynch’s theological vocabulary, means something very similar to “realizes itself.” An ultimate general reality, such as the very real phenomenon of “humanity,” has no existence outside of its individual manifestations, in this case, individual human beings. In other words, the larger, general, abstract reality takes all of its reality, becomes “realized” only in its “effects,” namely, in its concrete individual manifestations. While we have no humankind without individual human beings, we also do not simply have individual human beings who have no relation to one another as human beings; rather, humans do have a common bond and do partake, individually, of the same general reality— which, however, does not exist, does not “become effective,” apart from individuals. 5. Laughing at “Fake Talk”: The Guttural Silence of the Midwestern Land in Dark Laughter 1. Barnett Guttenberg, quoting a letter collected in Howard Mumford Jones’s and Walter B. Rideout’s Letters of Sherwood Anderson, sums up this philosophy succinctly: “For Anderson, language and even thought are obstacles shaping the walls of form: ‘What we have got to do is feel into things. To do that we only need to learn from people that what they say and think isn’t of very much importance’” (“Sherwood Anderson’s Dialogue,” 51). 2. Of course, Jacques Derrida argues that the signified is essentially deferred rather than referred, as he reads language’s inability to actually capture reality from an agnostic rather than sacramental perspective. 3. As briefly alluded to, Midwestern modernists’ neo-sacramental critique of literalism echoes the teachings of Augustine, for instance, when he states that “no one uses words except for the purpose of signifying something. From this may be understood what we call ‘signs’; they are things used to signify something” (On Christian Doctrine, 8–9). Augustine admonishes believers not to focus upon the temporal signs themselves but on that to which they refer—it is at this point that he uses his famous image of God being our native country and all temporal things mere means of transportation designed to convey us there (9–10)—one must not become focused on “the amenities of the journey and the motion of the vehicles” (9) but stay fixed on the ultimate goal. This goal is a person, a presence—language can only point to but not capture Being: “Although [God] is not recognized in the

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noise that th[e] two syllables [of Deus] make, all those who know the Latin language, when this sound reaches their ears, are moved to think of a certain most excellent immortal nature” (11). Though Anderson’s sacramental epistemology does not point to God, it does point to spiritual presence in all beings, a presence merely suggested by words, never defined or captured. 4. The term “apologetic” here is meant in the sense of “apologetics,” a philosophical justification of something. Mere being is a direct, tangible expression of reality—a given, a fact, a part of life itself. It therefore has nothing to do with “apologetics.” 5. “Repressed muteness” is a qualitatively negative form of silence that differs fundamentally from the wholesome stillness of nature. It involves not a quiet, natural unfolding unimpeded by artificial mental constructs; rather, it involves mental constructs freezing any stirring of life or natural unfolding, imprisoning the individual in their paralyzing and deadening grip. A falsely conceived, imposed identity shuts down any stirring of natural identity. It is the silence of suffocation rather than of growing. 6. In Anderson’s works, it again and again becomes clear that he believes in something like the soul, that is, in an essential spiritual identity, a core of one’s being, that animates one’s body and contains all the basic potential of what one ought to become as a person. 7. George C. Matthews notes that “the central problem in [Anderson’s] delineation of black characters was his impression that the essence of black life was summed up and could be discovered in its ‘dance’ and ‘song’” (“Ohio’s Beulah Land,” 411). Matthews quotes Darwin T. Turner, who observes Anderson’s “myopic focus on the form and color of black life and [his] suspicion that, beneath the form and color, lay a sensuality best known only to the darkest of races” (Matthews, “Ohio’s Beulah Land,” 411). Matthews sees this mythification of African Americans as part of Anderson’s inadvertently dehumanizing discourse. In this context, Matthews quotes a letter that Anderson wrote to his publisher Horace Liveright concerning Dark Laughter, a letter addressing his novel’s mythical association of African Americans with nature and the land: “You see what I am trying to give you now, Horace, is something of the orchestration of the book. The neuroticism, the hurry and self-consciousness of modern life, and back of it the easy, strange laughter of the blacks. There is your dark, earthy laughter—the Negro, the earth and the river—that suggests the title” (qtd. in Matthews, “Ohio’s Beulah Land,” 412). 8. Fred is clearly marked as a Midwesterner corrupted by the New England tradition when it is made known that his head is filled with the names of the following representatives of that tradition, as well as with the patriotic rhetoric inspired by that tradition: “Names floated before his mind—names of men who stood for something in American life. Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, W. D. Howells—‘The better aspects of our American life’—Roosevelt, the poet Longfellow. ‘Truth, liberty—the freedom of man. America, mankind’s greatest experiment in Liberty” (198). 9. Frustrated with his first wife, Bernice, for being a pretentious intellectual rather than a relational woman, Bruce utters the following: “You get in line and be a



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working-man’s wife. I’ll plow you like a field. I’ll harrow you” (60). Bruce here defines his wife and himself as two potentially symbiotic primal realities, the earth and its husbandman, that together can produce a fruitful pastoral, the ideal symbiosis envisioned in the pastoral myth of the “middle landscape” that is neither wilderness nor city. By denying who she has been primordially encoded to be, Bernice is rejecting nature and any sort of fruition of either spouse’s natural identity. 10. Dissatisfaction with human limitations is, of course, a major theme in the literature of a country whose resources and potential seemed boundless and Utopian to its early settlers and whose identity has ever since involved the notion of an earthly paradise of freedom, success, and superabundance. In Midwestern literature, this theme plays out in the context of the struggle between, on the one hand, the old American pastoral idealism and its sordid capitalistic corruption vs. on the other hand, a return to sacramentalism, mystery, and a humble awareness of human limits and the fallenness of the world. Such a pattern is evident, for instance, in the development of Dell’s character Felix Fay, who struggles to confine himself in a substantive relationship with a real woman rather than clinging to ultimately deadening ideals of freedom; the pattern also pervades Suckow’s Iowa Interiors (1926), where the characters learn to accept the constraints placed upon them by family or relational obligations; and Rölvaag’s Dakota pioneer Per Hansa realizes that he followed his dreams without accepting the limitations placed upon him by his wife’s frail nature, and he must suffer bitter consequences for his reckless, romantic, pioneering enthusiasm. And, as the seventh chapter shall discuss at more length, Cather’s Jim Burden is unable to commit himself relationally to Ántonia so that he leads a sterile, unhappy life and has her as muse rather than as wife. And the same pattern of characters paying a heavy price for ignoring their limitations, of characters meeting sacramental resistance to their romantic overreaching, shows throughout Midwestern literature. 11. Rolf Lundén compares Anderson’s and John Updike’s respective protagonists’ indulgence in instinctive behavior, starkly contrasting Anderson’s confident primitivism with Updike’s keen awareness that “if you have the guts to be yourself . . . other people’ll pay your prices” (qtd. in Lundén, “Dark Laughter and Rabbit, Run,” 64). Despite the protagonists of both novels experiencing a measure of “liberation” and authenticity, Lundén nonetheless observes a key philosophical divergence. Unlike the morally problematized portrayal of instinctive behavior in Rabbit, Run, in “Dark Laughter responding to one’s primal emotions means a consummation of what man was meant for. Bruce, Aline, Sponge and his wife—all the ‘primitive’ people—become constant and get peace of mind. They become liberated from materialism, convention, and standardization. Those who suffer from the naturalness of others, people like Bernice and Fred, are belittled, almost ridiculed; Anderson is surely not on their side” (Lundén, “Dark Laughter and Rabbit, Run,” 67).

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6. Fleshly But Beyond Just Flesh”: The Salvific Sacramental Meaning of the Land in Poor White and Beyond Desire 1. I chose to discuss Beyond Desire rather than Anderson’s final novel, Kit Brandon (1936), due to its strong and explicit wrestling with theological/spiritual issues. Kit Brandon also deals with spiritual issues and is akin to all other Anderson works in its basic message; however, its foregrounds spiritual issues less pronouncedly than does Beyond Desire. 2. The gendered term “Man” here seems appropriate since Anderson saw the industrial ethic as essentially masculinist (see, for instance, his quasi-mythical, as well as sociological, discussion of gender and industrial culture in Perhaps Women [1931]). A relevant passage from Anderson’s 1924 autobiography A Story Teller’s Story, already quoted in a different context in a previous chapter, is the following: “They built the cathedral of Chartres to the glory of God and we really intended building here a land to the glory of Man, and thought we were doing it too. That was our intention and the affair only blew up in the process or got perverted, because Man, even the brave and free Man, is somewhat a less worthy object of glorification than God” (301). Influenced by Henry Adams, Anderson associates the cathedral of Chartres not only with God, but with the Virgin, and sees it as reflecting an organic, feminine spirit that contrasts with the mechanical, masculine spirit of modern mechanics (A Story Teller’s Story, 378–79). 3. Mud is a frequently used image in Anderson’s texts, for instance, in the Winesburg tale “Hands” and in Dark Laughter. Primitivism, defilement, the goodness and fertility of nature, the cycle of life, human mortality, Darwinian evolution from low-level organisms to higher life-forms, all of this and more is part of the associative web connoted by “mud” in an Andersonian context. Literally, a “mudcat” is a catfish, which, as a bottom-feeder, suggests low-level animality and, as a fish, Darwinian evolution. 4. Hugh’s indolent life in nature has been evaluated with some ambivalence by critics. Burbank speaks of “Hugh’s inherent poetic desire to live in accord with nature,” but also of his “diffused, undirected natural state” (Sherwood Anderson, 82). In other words, while Hugh’s early mode of life has an unalienated, harmonious, “natural” aspect to it, it is also an “undirected,” diffusive existence in which Hugh is not articulated as an individual, in which a purposeful human identity is not fully realized. Stephen C. Enniss similarly acknowledges the “dreamy” and “undisturbed” nature of Hugh’s early existence and its lack of self-repression (“Alienation and Affirmation,” 86), but also speaks of it as an “animal-like existence” (87), pointing, like Burbank, to an unrealized human articulation of identity. Again, it is clear that Anderson does not intend a primitivist message, but, rather, exemplifies a pastoral, as well as sacramental, ethos in which nature and civilization, the physical and the spiritual, must be linked intimately for humans to achieve wholeness. 5. If the description of Hugh’s father and the whole unsupervised and self-sufficient condition of Hugh’s life on the river remind one of Mark Twain’s Pa and Huck Finn, this is no coincidence. As David D. Anderson, Burbank, Gelfant, Enniss, and others



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have noted, Hugh is a mythical Huckleberry Finn figure (note the similar spelling of “Huck” and “Hugh”), and just as Huck’s and his Pa’s state of nature in Twain’s novel is highly ambiguous, so is the case in Anderson’s novel. 6. The extent to which Sarah’s Puritan work ethic resembles the “Protestant ethic” described by Max Weber is striking. For instance, Sarah’s emphasis on work as a value in itself, stressed by Weber as a hallmark of the culturally Protestant mindset, her detachment of work from its original primary purpose of meeting basic needs, has been remarked by Enniss: “Sarah Shepard’s circular work ethic . . . rewards work well done with a new job to be well done once more. . . . [It] offers only receding rewards” (“Alienation and Affirmation,” 87). Enniss also points out that Hugh’s later obsessive solving of mathematical problems has this same circular aspect, reflecting Hugh’s need to prove a certain spiritual character in himself, in a sense, his “elect” status: “[T]hese exercises are only another form of idleness. While he goes through the motions of work, his calculations are as removed from any application as his sweeping of the already clean station platform had been back in Mudcat Landing. In each case, work is an act of self-justification rather than a step toward any external goal” (89). Another parallel with Weber’s argument appears in the following observation by Burbank: “[Sarah Shepard’s] Yankee Puritan brand of training has two effects upon Hugh: by fixing his attention upon practical matters, Sarah sets his hitherto inactive mind in motion and directs his efforts toward understanding nature in order to conquer it. . . . Sarah Shepard’s Eastern materialism raises him to a stage of civilization above his raw natural stage and helps equip him to mature and use nature” (Sherwood Anderson, 82). Since Protestantism, and, especially, Calvinism, see nature as entirely corrupt and cannot avail themselves in the same way as Catholicism of the concrete sacramental cycles of sin, confession, and penance, cultures steeped in Protestant thought tend toward an emphasis on control and suppression of nature, on a systematic perfecting of one’s whole being and life (M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic). Furthermore, Protestantism’s less sacramental theology, and its greater animosity toward nature, leads to a greater splitting of flesh and spirit, of which process materialism is an unintended cultural consequence, according to Weber and other cultural critics who argue in the same vein, such as Van Wyck Brooks and Waldo Frank. Within this Puritan-derived mentality, authentic human meaning cannot easily emerge, as Hugh realizes when his work ethic brings surprising fruit. 7. Speculators and investors, such as the character of Steve Hunter, are even further removed from “natural” labor than are the factory workers. Discussing Steve Hunter’s early betrayal of small investors in the novel, Enniss comments on Anderson’s critique of their capitalistic concept of work as follows: “What Anderson dramatizes here is a shift in value from the work that the machine performs to a profit unrelated to any work” (“Alienation and Affirmation,” 92). 8. Blanche Housman Gelfant interprets this wedding feast scene primarily positively, in spite of the bride character’s reservation: “One of the most memorable folk scenes is the wedding celebration for Hugh and his wife. The union of man and woman calls for elemental joy—for dancing, eating, drinking, and love-making. Jim Priest dominates the scene as the animated (and slightly inebriated) spirit of the folk. Here, in its

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color, gay action, and crowdedness is a verbal equivalent to a Breughel genre painting” (“Sherwood Anderson, Edith Wharton,” 104). Gelfant’s perception of this scene as being, essentially, sacramental (an animated, truly vital feast giving rise to physicospiritual communion) does not necessarily negate the mere animalism perceived by Clara. After all, it is Jim Priest who represents actual joy in this scene, rather than the other revelers; hence, his name is “priest,” for he is capable of true, holistic enjoyment and fulfills the sacramental intent of the party in his own person, on behalf of the other attendant characters. Apart from him, the party is coarse and uninspiring. 9. Thomas Reed West explains the link between industrialism and Hugh’s sexual impotence by pointing out how Hugh’s imagination becomes structured mechanically, its instinctual and relational impulses stifled: Yet despite the benefits that a training in technology brings to the hero in giving structure to his imagination, the effect of the training is to imprison whatever imaginative impulses do not bear directly upon mechanical invention. McVey succeeds in smothering not only a wandering habit of mind but instinct and spontaneity as well. Much of the novel is occupied with a married life in which, on McVey’s part, attention has been settled so rigidly upon technological matters, desire has been so clogged and suppressed, that much time is to pass before the final barriers between husband and wife are broken down. (Flesh of Steel, 26–27) Similarly, Gelfant explains Hugh’s sexual failure via the “inner state of dissociation” produced by the rise of industrialism (“Sherwood Anderson, Edith Wharton,” 105). This “dissociation” is seen by Gelfant as the consequence of an estrangement from nature “in the world of machines” (100). 10. Note the similarity between Hugh’s attitude toward his bride, Clara, and that of Fred Grey toward his bride, Aline, in Dark Laughter: “Fred Grey talking one night in a little park in Paris. At night on the roof of Notre Dame angels may be seen walking up into the sky—white-clad woman—stepping up to God. . . . [Aline] cried. Fred clung to her. He did not kiss her, did not want that. ‘I want you to marry me—live with me in America.’ When he raised his head he could see the white-stone women—angels— walking up into the sky, on the roof of the cathedral” (200). 11. Medina is a holy city of Islam, second only to Mecca in terms of its importance as an Islamic pilgrimage site. Hence, the name “Medina Road” connotes pilgrimage. It also connotes “revelation” since parts of the Quran were revealed to Muhammad in the vicinity of Medina. 12. Concerning these statements in Neil’s letter, Barnett Guttenberg observes, “In Beyond Desire, Anderson articulates the view, perhaps implicit as early as Winesburg, that desire is no more than a way station or avenue; the journey toward the realization of humanity, he suggests, requires that sexual energies be sublimated, that they find a higher expression than mere sexuality” (“Sherwood Anderson’s Dialogue,” 58). Guttenberg sees Beyond Desire as the text in which Anderson for the first time categorically rejects D. H. Lawrence’s “sexual doctrine.” The simple repudiation of Lawrence’s



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redemptive view of sex seems, according to Guttenberg, one of the chief reasons for the novel’s weakness. In Guttenberg’s view, Anderson fails whenever he becomes didactic, whether it be in endorsing Lawrence’s vision or rejecting it. However, though Anderson “could not represent sexual desire directly in overt forms, what he could do brilliantly . . . was to present desire as latent, blocked, and in counterpoise with an equally compelling vision of innocence” (58). I would argue that Beyond Desire is not an ascetic book repudiating desire in any Buddhistic sense, but, rather, that Anderson and his characters seek to place sexuality within a transcendent context in which it is wholesome rather than disproportionate and grotesque. Sexuality, understood rightly, can function as a medium for achieving a wholesome, connected, non-egotistical identity in that it opens one up to an Other and, in a sense, to all “others.” Against the backdrop of various sordid forms of sexuality, represented by sexually “sophisticated” characters like Blanche and Fred, Red’s, Neil’s, and, later, Molly’s sexuality does contain a striving for love, for genuine communion; and in their pursuit of love, these characters do display a kind of confused, muddled innocence. 13. David D. Anderson points out how, in direct contradistinction to Sherwood Anderson himself, Ethel “rejects the substance of much modern literature—the ‘lowgrade people’ of Dreiser and Lewis, the tedious stories of life in Midwestern towns, the hired men in them who she knows would smell, people like the mill hands she remembered in Langdon” (“Sherwood Anderson’s Midwest,” 110). Not only is she caught up in circles that write, that reflect on life more than they delve into it, but she even rejects the very subject of their reflections. 14. The last name Grey, of course, recalls Fred Grey, another literature-minded character prone to a colorless, lifeless idealism and out of tune with human nature. 15. The phrase “taking it out on other women” is reminiscent of the sex orgy at the Four Arts Ball in Dark Laughter, where disillusioned World War I veterans use women sexually in order to avenge themselves for a deceptive sentimental war rhetoric, which they blame on women. Both Fred Wells and these veterans in Dark Laughter punish women through sexual dominance for believing that women have forced them into false, idealized roles. 16. Roger Lundin has posited that postmodernism’s origins lie with Cartesianism, in which philosophy the “isolated, unaided self had the power to discover truth through its own rationcination” (The Culture of Interpretation, 40). Once rationalism lost credibility, the autonomous self lost its connection with objective reality and truth and became, in a sense, solipsistic. Postmodernism, thus, emerged as a “therapeutic culture” that “seeks to promote the efforts of the autonomous self to discover fulfillment independent of the restraints of precedent and community,” with “construction of reality ha[ving] come to replace discovery as the basic metaphor of the mind’s activity. In a world where all truth is made rather than found, thought has no task except that of constructing interpretations that may help us live contentedly in a world where nothing is at stake beyond the therapist’s ‘manipulative sense of well-being’” (40–41). In such a therapeutic culture, a “sense of well-being” is the only available “truth,” and selfish desire rather than an orientation toward objective truth beyond the self becomes the determining factor in individuals’ choices.

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17. In his second volume of Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America Walter B. Rideout points out the similarities between Ethel’s reckless country drive and the even more reckless carriage ride of Louise Bentley in the Winesburg tale “Godliness”: For the brief closure of the novel, a page and a half on the response of Ethel to Red’s death, Anderson seems to have drawn on the second part of “Godliness” in Winesburg, Ohio, the composite form of which he had felt he was following. Ethel, now married to Tom Riddle, did not attend Red’s funeral; but one evening the following summer during a violent storm, she suddenly leaves her home and, in a “wild, reckless mood” like Louise Bentley in the second part of “Godliness,” drives about furiously and dangerously for hours before returning to her separate bedroom in the Riddle house. She and her husband never speak of her outburst again, but the reader realizes that she will never understand, much less get to, what may be “beyond desire.” Red had at least been “groping,” as Anderson might have said, toward that end. (2:153) Like Louise, Ethel has been turned into a grotesque whose physical/social existence and spiritual need are hopelessly split apart, out of balance. 18. In a letter Anderson wrote to Theodore Dreiser in 1931, he draws explicit parallels between communism and that symbol of all deadening systematicity and literalism, “Puritanism”: “I am puzzled about Communism, as I am sure you may be. It may be the answer, and then it may only be a new sort of Puritanism, more deadly than the old moral Puritanism, a new kind of Puritanism at last got power in one place to push its rigid Puritanism home” (Jones and Rideout, eds., Letters, 256). 19. Burbank criticizes the novel harshly, but, perhaps, justly, concerning Red’s ultimate inability to position himself concretely in the struggles at hand in a meaningful way: Beyond Desire is proof, among other things, of the inadequacy of awareness without guidelines to political and economic implementation. . . . Red Oliver is a compound of vague feelings which lead him into situations with which he cannot cope because his inability to sort out and to articulate his feelings paralyzes all action. All the characters, in fact, seem defeated and ineffectual; but their defeat—which Anderson attempts to prove is a social thing—is really a result of the fact that their feelings have been almost completely untouched by cerebration or by anything resembling imaginative insight. . . . [E]ach time he is given an opportunity to act effectively in identifying himself with others, he fails to perform at the crucial moment, partly because he cannot accept the ‘cruelly logical’ doctrines of the Communists. Yet we never see him try to formulate any intelligent collectivist substitute for communism; he is guided simply by his sympathy for the workers. (Sherwood Anderson, 130–31) It can hardly be denied that Anderson’s novels in general suffer from a lack of meaningfully motivated, truly dramatic action. His protagonists’ passivity, emotiveness,



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confusion, and intellectual vagueness do weaken the dramatic effectiveness of his longer works. However, the following observation by David D. Anderson is helpful for considering the novel fairly: Beyond Desire is not a novel about communism nor is it a call to revolution. Rather, it is a portrayal of a time, place, and combination of circumstances that gave rise to more indecision and self-interrogation than has any other time in American history except the Civil War. Anderson has attempted to cram all this atmosphere and background into his novel, giving rise to the charges of formlessness, meandering, and irrelevancies that have been leveled against it. But if the novel is formless and confused, so were the times that produced a novel that, like Poor White, is a social document accurately reflecting the spirit of the age. (Sherwood Anderson, 128) It is Anderson’s and his characters’ sincere and candid spiritual wrestling with the times that gives the book its deeper interest. In his avoidance of pat solutions, and in his avoidance of depicting the protagonist heroically, Anderson refuses to take any easy way out of the cultural dilemma; he is, thereby, avoiding the trap of ideological literalism and narrowness, remaining true, in his own way, to a sacramental sensibility. For Anderson, a change of heart, a spiritual transformation, must precede any lasting and substantive cultural changes, and the compassion and spiritual insight pervading the book are its true treasure. 20. Critics generally see the manner of Red’s death as a weak point in the novel. Charles Child Walcutt’s assessment is representative: “Red Oliver’s death is a grisly mistake, for Red acts in confusion and anger. It accomplishes nothing; it does not serve to focus a revolutionary spirit” (American Literary Naturalism, 236). What Anderson does manage to do in his portrayal of Red’s death is to acknowledge squarely its wastefulness and silliness and to indict society’s spiritual failings in creating a wasteful and unnecessary dilemma that victimizes both killer and killed. 7. “I’m a good Catholic, but I could get along with caring for trees”: Nature and Sacramental Community in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and My ántonia 1. A similar sentiment is expressed in the epitaph Anderson chose for his own tombstone: “Life not death is the great adventure.” 2. The term “salvific,” here as elsewhere in the book, is not intended to convey a narrow religious meaning. Rather, the word “salvation,” which, via salvatare (Latin: “to save”), derives ultimately from Latin salus, i.e., “health,” indicates a state of wholeness. This state of “health” or “wholeness” as designated by the term “salvation” is not merely of a physical nature but, primarily, of a spiritual nature. “Salvation” and all of its related adverbs and adjectives are, therefore, meant to point loosely to different

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writers’ notions of spiritual wholeness rather than implying a strongly Christian or other religious understanding of ” being saved.” 3. While Amédée is an exceedingly positive figure in the novel, his death, as Robert J. Nelson has pointed out, is due to a concession the life-loving French boy makes to the non-sacramental modern machine culture that goes against what he spiritually stands for: “Amédée’s death is . . . a signifier of the dissonance between the language of French joie de vivre and the language of industrial expansion and mechanical modernism. Amédée dies from ‘an awful pain . . . inside’ that he does not tend because he is too busy using and supervising use of his new farm equipment” (Willa Cather and France, 81). French joie de vivre here stands for an integrated, holistic experience of life in which there is a sacramental consonance between the spiritual and the physical, the individual and the communal, etc. “Mechanical modernism” implies the utter separation between an objectified external world and an internal spritiual/ emotional realm, a split exemplified by Emil’s highly individualistic and romantic passion for Marie, which runs counter to all social structures and obligations. 4. Nelson notes the irony of Marie dying beneath a tree in the wake of her proclaiming that she could live exclusively for trees. This ironic situation seems to arise from Marie’s misreading of “the sacramental signifiers of the lost language, speaking through, if not, in fact, as the mulberry tree” (Willa Cather and France, 83). The “lost language” here is the perfect consonance of signifier and signified: Nelson sees the mulberry tree as “a very signifier of the [Catholic] religious faith [Marie] implicitly disavows” in stating she could, essentially, revert to tree worship (82). In dying beneath the tree, Marie is thus “punished not only for her adultery but also for her heathenism; her adultery is itself but an expression of that heathenism” (83). Where the tree as a part of nature points to an organically integrated, communal cosmos, Marie chooses one individual manifestation of that natural whole and disavows nature’s center to which the tree points, i.e., God; likewise, she chooses one man and disavows her obligations in the larger communal scheme of things. 5. Evelyn Helmick Hively cites Emil’s thoughts at Amédée’s funeral as evidence for his pagan rejection of the notion of sin: “As Emil, an unbeliever, sits through the mass for his dead friend, he responds to the singing of Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’ by thinking of his own Marie: ‘He seemed to discover that there was a kind of rapture in which he could lover forever without faltering and without sin. . . . The rapture was for those who could feel it; for people who could not, it was non-existent.’ Both the denial of sin and the exclusiveness of the experience of rapture differentiate the attitudes of the initiates into the [pagan Great Mother] mysteries from those of the Christian communicants” (Sacred Fire, 46). Emil, thus, in his denial of sin, has chosen pagan ecstasy over Christian communion. In this manner, he has theologically removed any limitations on his desire. Ironically, it is Catholic sacramental art that inspires Emil’s denial of fallenness—he misreads the transcendent implications of this art and excises from it the part that acknowledges sin and limitation. The song “Ave Maria,” which inspires Emil, concerns the incarnation of Christ, which eventually leads to a bloody atonement for sin as Bethlehem gives way to Calvary. Emil himself will soon



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die a bloody death that, however, is not redemptive since he has rejected, in essence, the cross and all it stands for. 6. In A Story Teller’s Story, Anderson describes his atheism, which is painful to him because he longs for God: I had suddenly an odd, and to my own seeming a ridiculous desire to abase myself before something not human and so stepping into the moonlit road I knelt in the dust. Having no God, the gods having been taken from me by the life about me, as a personal God has been taken from all modern men by a force within that man himself does not understand but that is called intellect, I kept smiling at the figure I cut in my own eyes as I knelt in the road. . . . There was no God in the sky, no God in myself, no conviction in myself that I had the power to believe in God, and so I merely knelt in the dust in the silence and no words came to my lips. (270) Anderson does attribute many seemingly divine qualities to nature—but a personal God does not seem to have been part of his vision. 7. Regarding Cather’s fear of sexuality, Randall observes, “She could accept fertility in crops more easily than in human beings, the reason being her fear of physical passion and the dependence upon others which it entails” (The Landscape and the Looking Glass, 149). 8. Susan J. Rosowski addresses the sadness at novel’s end by seeing it as part of a pastoral vision of timelessness, in which the individual is ephemeral but can take comfort in being part of a larger unity of all life: The anxiety and ecstasy . . . have been replaced by “exalted serenity”’ [308], for Alexandra has reconciled a human relationship to pastoral vision. She accepts that possession is impossible, of people and of the land. Others have an integrity of their own—Marie is not just a married woman and Emil not simply her brother—and we may possess nature only by loving it, for we live in it as sojourner. . . . The overwhelming effect of the concluding scene is one of timelessness. The narrator, drawing back, joins age and youth, life and death, the present and the universal: “They went into the house together, leaving the Divide behind them, under the evening star. Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra’s into its bosom, to give them out again in yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!” [309]. Here, the narrator brings together the two parts of Cather’s pastoral, much as Virgil’s poet unifies the parts of the Eclogues. Both narrators are sophisticated artists, distinct from the relatively simple characters they speak of. Unlike Alexandra, who has little imagination and less verbal skill, Cather’s narrator writes with full imaginative and poetic power . . . While the characters present specific responses . . . the narrator is universal and shows how art unifies.

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. . . Appropriately, it is this narrator who tells of the marriage of Alexandra and Carl. Like the ritual unions of pastoral romance, theirs is a highly stylized resolution made effective by the narrator’s calm, contemplative tone. (The Voyage Perilous, 60–61) lexandra, of course, in her own way is an artist, ordering the landscape into a new A pattern. However, the sterility of her art is made clear again and again in the novel, and the highly stylized ending, calling attention to its own self-conscious artistry through its heightened visionary diction and static pictorial quality, is sterile as well; the novel’s all too stylized ending reflects the sterility of the marriage of two artist figures paying the price of a childless and passionless relationship because of having devoted their youth to a sublimated love. Whereas the passion of Marie and Emil is sterile in its own way, due to its immoderation and poor channeling, Alexandra and Carl have channeled their passions poorly in a different manner and have ended with cold impersonal comforts that can only be redeemed through a highly artificial sublimation of what actually amounts to heartbreaking regret and resignation. Alexandra’s own honesty about her cherished secret dreams remaining unfulfilled is a moment of truth that is not erased but, rather, ironically highlighted by the narrator’s strikingly contrastive glowing mythic vision. 9. Paul Borgman sees Alexandra’s dream as a promise of “perpetuation”—while she will presumably not have children, nonetheless, she has left her imprint in the land and has impacted future generations in this manner: “A life of hope is rescued by a dream of faith. Alexandra’s youthful impetuosity and painful struggles have been rewarded, in the end, by the promise of perpetuation” (“The Dialectic of Willa Cather’s Moral Vision,” 151). I would argue that while Alexandra does find a fulfillment of sorts through her pioneering role and through her “perpetuation” in the land evoked in the closing sentence of the novel, she nonetheless also experiences a sense of incompleteness. Her erotic “corn god” dream expresses both her fulfilling bond with the land and her desire for a more individual, personalized bond—in other words, her simultaneous fulfillment and unfulfillment. The emphasis seems to lie in the dream not having come true the way Alexandra had hoped—on her sexual and relational frustration. Nelson contrasts Alexandra’s ambiguous, incomplete fulfillment at the end of the novel with the subtext of sacramental wholeness found in Catholic community, a sacramental subtext that creates a jarring dissonance to Alexandra’s relatively lonely and incomplete life and thus reveals her lack: “The reader senses that however much of the lost language [of wholeness] Alexandra may have recovered, she has not recovered all of it. There is still too much distance between text and subtext in the novel, a distance that marks the dissonant role of la francité and the Bohemian in the novel” (Willa Cather and France, 84). 10. See, e.g., Melissa Ryan, “The Enclosure of America: Civilization and Confinement in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!”; Mary Paniccia Carden, “Creative Fertility and the National Romance in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and My Ántonia”; and Guy Reynolds, “Modernist Space: Willa Cather’s Environmental Imagination in Context.”



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11. See, e.g., Evelyn Helmick Hively, Paul Borgman, and Maire Mullins, “‘I Bequeath Myself to the Dirt to Grow from the Grass I Love’: The Whitman-Cather Connection in O Pioneers!”; Susan J. Rosowski, “The Comic Form of Willa Cather’s Art: An Ecocritical Reading”; and William M. Curtin, “Willa Cather and The Varieties of Religious Experience.” 12. Hively notes that the characters of Jim and Ántonia are drawn in a kind of counterpoint, effectively contrasting the consequences of their differences in social status, education, behavior, and gender. The denouement that brings them together after many years emphasizes the almost relentless use of irony that is evident in O Pioneers! and that touches nearly every human destiny in My Ántonia. Ántonia, who has had little education and many struggles, is a happy, fulfilled woman; Jim, who has had every advantage, is a disappointed, lonely man. (65) I would argue that it is precisely because Ántonia has had to face the land, physical struggle, family obligations, and many other forms of what is essentially sacramental resistance, she has evolved more happily than Jim, whose privileged social status has allowed him to eschew the objective reality that would have pointed the way to a more authentic identity achievement. 13. Ann Fisher-Wirth has incisively described the irreality and rootlessness with which Jim is left at the end of the novel due to his lack of real engagement with the world: Sleeping in the hay with Leo and Ambrosch, eating Ántonia’s kolaches, Jim seems to regain his own childhood and to become another of Ántonia’s children—a magically timeless boy who will play alongside the children whose names echo names from the novel’s beginning: Ambrosch, Nina, Yulka. . . . . Though he may believe he has come home, the bittersweet truth is that, except for art, he has no home. The loft he sleeps in, the fields he walks, the orchard he stands in, rich with fruit in its triple enclosure, are not his own but Ántonia’s. After the initial reunion that ends the novel, Jim’s retrieval of Ántonia takes place most truly not in his life but in his language. (“Out of the Mother,” 42) The split between language and substance here is complete: Jim’s art is not sacramental in that it does not serve as a venue to real presence but as a compensation for the lack of such presence. 14. There is an intriguing tension in the novel between, on the one hand, Jim’s aesthetic consumption of his and others’ remembered life, and, on the other hand, his faithfulness to realistic details. Jim seems aware of the aesthetic power possessed by the full wealth of life’s details, and he avoids reducing these details into the ridiculously idyllic scheme of genteel fiction. His own apparently uprooted and sterile life precisely lacks this harsh but thrilling fullness, and so he does not reduce it in his recollections. And yet, he seeks to throw over it all a net of significance that is resisted by the details of the story. Thus the novel is absolutely charged with the tension of “sacramental resistance.” 15. The inability of this rattlesnake to put up a real fight is perhaps indicative of

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his undifferentiated, infantile identity—food virtually drops into his mouth. This snake is thus living enveloped in easy, effortless gratification, a kind of maternal principle, which, of course, is at the heart of the Utopian American pastoral—the snake is literally sponging on the superabundance of the unspoiled American land and is therefore ill-prepared for a broken world of struggle and strife. Marilyn Berg Callander explains how Jim’s role in the rattlesnake-slaying has regressive, infantile overtones of a similar nature. She sees Jim as “kill[ing] the great phallus. . . . The sexual undertones are clear here. Jim’s dilemma is the age-old Freudian one—that in winning the princess, Ántonia, he is winning his mother, a guilt that he resolves at the conclusion by regressing to a prepubertal self which is innocent of sexual temptation” (Willa Cather and the Fairy Tale, 27). Of course, this Oedipal regressiveness can be linked to the aforementioned issues inherent in American pastoralism. 16. The wolves are “evil” not in and of themselves, of course; rather, they are the instruments and products of evil, that is, of a fallen world in which the lamb does not lie down with the lion. The drama presented by Cather here is certainly a spiritual drama—while the wolves themselves may not possess spiritual agency, they are nonetheless manifestations of the world’s fallen condition, amidst which we at times must choose spiritual community over physical survival. The spiritual more than the physical assault upon Peter and Pavel in this situation is their wrestling with their “gates of hell.” 17. Catholic graveyards connote sacramental community in Cather; being excluded from burial in one is a sign of being outside of community. 18. The descriptions of the Shimerdas’ dreadfully destitute life and of the Nebraska winter’s harshness make it quite understandable that Mr. Shimerda would lose courage. Doubtlessly, the reader is to feel empathy and compassion. This reading, however, emphasizes the spiritual responsibility still residing with Mr. Shimerda. 19. It is interesting to note the connection between Cather’s philosophical vision of life and her theory of artistic form: she advocated an acceptance of limitations and constraints as vital to both. In Jo Ann Middleton’s discussion of Cather’s modernist style, the author notes that “working within strictly defined limits of subject matter and technique, [Cather] came to develop the pure style that we can identify but cannot wholly or adequately define.” She quotes Cather’s comparison of “the art of writing” with “the game of playing tennis”: “One must hit the ball as hard as possible, but . . . be sure to keep it within predetermined lines or boundaries to make a success of it” (Willa Cather’s Modernism, 28). 20. Fisher-Wirth sees Jim’s Wordsworthian journey toward the past as exemplifying an “Oedipal logic” in which the “‘sense of an ending’ is inseparable from the memory of loss and the recapturing of time.” Interestingly, Fisher-Wirth, in describing Jim’s Oedipal logic, employs an image that appears in Chesterton’s Orthodoxy as the very emblem of a-theological, a-sacramental rationalism: a snake eating its own tale. Fisher-Wirth states, “The snake has its tail in its mouth. [Proust’s] narrative quite frankly does not lead to a world outside itself. . . . Like [Proust’s], [Jim Burden’s] narrative leads not to the world outside but always to a rereading” (“Out of the Mother,” 47). Chesterton contrasts such circularity with the cross, at the center of which is



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pain and death, but also new life: “The cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox at its centre [e.g., limitation as true freedom, death as new life] it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms” (Orthodoxy, 33). 8. “A Story of the West, After All”: The Sacramental Nature and the Midwestern Pastoral Subtext of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby 1. The middle name “Clay” here indicates the character’s ability to perceive the spiritual significance and vitality of the American soil, of American nature. 2. Unlike critics such as Carole Moses, who has noted the many images in The Great Gatsby of nature’s vitality unflaggingly “pushing up,” Jeffrey Steinbrink believes that Fitzgerald subscribes to an entropic view of the universe: “The truth seemed to be [in 1920s intellectuals’ eyes] that history itself subscribed to the theory of entropy which was rapidly gaining currency in the early twentieth century. Writers and philosophers joined men of science in the discovery that the operant energy within any closed system tends to diminish in the course of time” (“‘Boats against the Current,’” 158). Steinbrink sees The Great Gatsby as “exhort[ing] those of us who would be reconciled with the future to see the past truly, to acknowledge its irrecoverability, and to chasten our expectations in view of our slight stature in the world of time and our ever-diminishing store of vitality” (159). It seems that Steinbrink’s point mainly applies to Western culture as Fitzgerald sees it: that culture, in The Great Gatsby, indeed seems to be exhausting itself more and more because of its increasing detachment from nature. Nature herself, however, as shall be discussed at a later point in this chapter, is painted as surviving and flourishing, as a self-regenerating source of life. 3. Erik S. Lunde argues that Nick’s “return to Minnesota after his journey in modern Hades . . . is not just a retreat, but it also is an affirmation of an America which still offers possibilities. It resembles a cleansing process, a ritual of renewal and purification. After all, like Ishmael in Moby Dick, Nick survives to tell the tale, and there is justification, I think, in the view that Nick achieves a redemption at the end which some critics may have overlooked” (“Return to Innocence?,” 16). Lunde emphasizes that the Midwestern perspective offers an “internal distance” from modern culture, that the region’s pastoral dreams, tempered by a knowledge of human finitude (as expressed in Nick’s experience of aging, of turning thirty), can give one critical resistance to the industrial civilization exemplified by New York (17, 22). Steinbrink sees Nick’s return to the Midwest as a positive acknowledgment of human finitude, of not being able to reverse history—an attempted reversal of history having been symbolized by the novel’s characters moving east rather than west (“‘Boats against the Current,’” 167). Nick’s return to the Midwest is certainly ambiguous—while it is not a reconnection with a wholesome pastoral world, it is nonetheless a gesture of

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distancing oneself from the wasteland that is New York and is a gesture of seeking a place of perspective, one from which modern industrial civilization can be evaluated critically, and one from which Gatsby’s story can be told accurately. 9. The Return to “Hard, Natural Things”: From Pastoral Delusion to Rock-Bottom Reality in Ruth Suckow’s The Folks 1. The Folks is the masterpiece, celebrated in its time, of one of America’s once widely acclaimed but now largely forgotten authors. Leedice McAnelly Kissane summarizes the history of Suckow’s critical reception as follows: In the 1930’s, when regional writing was under scrutiny, Miss Suckow’s works were often noted as exemplars. As Sinclair Lewis put it, they were “genuinely native.” . . . Though Ruth Suckow was justly classified as a Realist and as a regionalist, she was something more. That “something more” has never been adequately assessed. Most of her early critics were satisfied to exclaim over her scrupulous fidelity to her chosen locale and its people; later, as her books and stories appeared less frequently, commentators failed to analyze them in depth. Scholarly appraisals of her works are rare, and are confined for the most part to brief (though laudatory) mentions in general studies of fiction of the period. Aside from one unpublished doctoral dissertation, no full-length study of her work in its entirety has appeared. It is a regrettable fact that at the time of her death in 1960, Ruth Suckow and her works were not as well known as they had been thirty years earlier at the height of her career. Yet her books are not period pieces or local-color oddities. Though they reflect their region and their era, they have universality. They deserve a place in the chronicle of American literary achievement. (Ruth Suckow, 5–6) Kissane herself offers a broad overview of Suckow’s life and works but does not deal with any individual work in depth. Three years after Kissane’s study, a book-length discussion of Suckow’s works did appear, namely Margaret Stewart Omrcanin’s Ruth Suckow: A Critical Study of Her Fiction. Omrcanin’s discussion of Suckow’s fiction is more substantive than Kissane’s, but due to the fact that her book also aims at a general overview of the author’s works, its analysis of individual works and characters is not of any sustained length. To my knowledge, my own discussion of the character of Carl Ferguson in The Folks is the most thorough investigation ever undertaken of this character, and probably constitutes the most extensive scholarly analysis of the novel as well. This chapter is intended to help remedy, in a small way, the scholarly neglect suffered by a worthy author. 2. Fred Ferguson represents secular modern Americans who despite a lack of actual Christian doctrinal commitments are still deeply influenced by a Calvinistic mindset in that they believe in “principles,” often not being attuned to the more subtle, dynamic, relational aspects of life.



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3. Kissane describes the changes to which this phrase refers in the following manner: Though the complications in The Folks are varied, all are dominated by a central theme of change which controls the structure of the novel. Change is at work in the world Miss Suckow shows us—natural, inevitable change that is part of the cosmic plan; historic change, reflected in the fading of pioneer patterns and the introduction of urban ways; and cataclysmic changes in the intellectual climate, the most startling and painful of all as new ideas disrupt the settled thinking of the folks. She records some of the most significant of these innovations in The Folks: the introduction of Freudian concepts, ideological revolts by “new” poets and fiction writers, Bohemianism and hedonism fostered by intellectual groups, increased credit buying and hazardous financing, Socialistic and Marxian thought. (Ruth Suckow, 97) The “fading of pioneer patterns” also implies the diminution of pastoral possibilities; as technology and capitalism remove people from direct engagement with the soil and from a solid embeddedness in family and local community, a sense of rootlessness, imbalance, and instability emerges that forces people to seek a new grounding for themselves in a conscious and proactive manner. 4. Omrcanin notes that “the New England influence actually dominates the Iowa scene and affects any group Miss Suckow depicts. . . . Particularly Miss Suckow notes this New England influence in the religious heritage of Puritanism” (Ruth Suckow, 57). Omrcanin does not systematically explain or explore this topic, but it is significant that she, as one of only two scholars who have published books on Suckow, makes this observation. Puritan religion indeed looms in the background of Suckow’s characters’ mindset, e.g., in their secularized notion of “election.” 5. Omrcanin points out that this need for approval is the primary cause of his adult struggles: “Carl is a victim of his own compulsion to deny desires and impulses that threaten the stabilities of his life and to cling to the easy familiar certainties. He felt bound to marry Lillian White—meagre, narrow, provincial—or everything would be thrown into confusion. The tragedy of Carl’s life comes from his efforts to avoid confusion and complexities in any departure from the pattern of his youth. His inability to restore these certainties results in his disillusionment and defeat” (Ruth Suckow, 84). In a later chapter, Omrcanin provides this related assessment of Carl’s life struggles: Carl Ferguson . . . is the victim of a mistaken parental love that unwittingly prepares the way for tragedy. Carl’s strongest motivation as a boy and later as a man is to be well-liked and to have approval of friends and associates, but particularly of his parents. The approval and popularity that were so rewarding to him as a boy become thwarting and frustrating to his development. . . . [He] was bred in the standards of conformity and could not break their bonds for any self-assertion or gratification. From childhood he suppressed any impulses that might incur disfavor. (135–36)

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What Omrcanin does not investigate is the link of Carl’s approval-seeking mindset with the family’s (and Iowa culture’s) Calvinistic heritage, though she does, as mentioned in a previous endnote, acknowledge that Suckow stresses the town’s New England Puritan-derived culture (57). 6. The newspaper is, as has already been discussed in previous chapters, a favorite symbol of Anderson’s. Those associated with the newspaper world are debased, out of touch with substantive reality—therefore, John Stockton of Dark Laughter leaves his journalism job in Chicago and drifts down the Mississippi River to find new meaning in a Huck Finn–like existence. In Floyd Dell’s Moon-Calf, Felix Fay has a journalistic phase (he works for an Iowa newspaper) that he must overcome in order to mature. 7. Omrcanin offers the following helpful analysis of Lillian: Lillian White, the wife of Carl Ferguson, illustrates Ruth Suckow’s most pointed treatment of a Freudian theme with an analysis that is almost clinical. Conditioned from childhood to the habit of reserve under suffering, Lillian even as a wife and mother is unable to free herself from her inhibiting reticences. In her fears, her sense of inferiority, her powerlessness to communicate, and her sexual unresponsiveness, she suggests the distorted and tormented grotesques of Sherwood Anderson’s stories. Her love of Carl is sincere, but she is sensitive to her own inadequacy and is instinctively aware of his unacknowledged attraction to more sensual and more worldly girls and women. In hurt silences she buries the knowledge that he married her without loving her. Sensitive to misinterpretation and neglect, in any crisis she is seized by a powerlessness and inactivity. In moments of tension her helplessness and distress are manifest in her breathless struggle for words to release all that is bound and aching within her and in the spasmodic jerkings and almost convulsive movements of her body. (Ruth Suckow, 120) 10. Sacramentalism in a Postmodern Farm Novel: Ginny Smith’s Spiritual Journey in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres 1. A good illustration of this postmodern belief in constructing empowering realities discursively is Catherine Rainwater’s description of Native American storytelling as “world-making”; she makes the following observation about Native writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony: Pointedly raising doubts in the reader about which interpretive rules or frame of reference to engage, Silko’s text poses questions about origination and legitimation of knowledge. It also exposes the “constructedness” of reality by revealing its origins in imagination and semiotic practices. Silko highlights the semiotic practices that govern meaning in contexts, and she challenges the authority of western assumptions before taking the next, more politically charged step of inviting the reader to help change the rules not only of storytelling, but also



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of world-making. Stories “aren’t just entertainment,” Silko reminds us; they are “all we have to fight off / illness and death.’” (Dreams of Fiery Stars, 15) Storytelling is perceived as therapeutic and political, engaged in making a world that serves individual and communal well-being. The focus is not on the discovery of preexisting given truths and realities; construction, “world-making,” has replaced discovery, and well-being is the central value rather than truth. 2. For a vivid and insightful discussion of the depths of pain the characters have to enter, see James L. Calderwood’s “Creative Uncreation in King Lear.” Calderwood argues that the play leaves the audience with an intense awareness of even more suffering awaiting them in the real world: Despite the intensity of his concern with immediacy in King Lear, his play remains unavoidably a saying—not the agonizing “it is” itself but a mediated representation of the worst. Perhaps, in reminding us of this, Shakespeare offers a kind of catharsis in which our anxiety is relieved by his placement of fictional brackets around our suffering. If so, would that not mean that this painful play is in the last analysis merely a play and thus unreal? Precisely. Reality is worse. From one perspective Shakespeare has done all he can do to us: the worst is over, we are released from his theatrical rack. From another, however, the worst he can do to us is to inform us that this is not the worst after all, only a saying of the worst. By this time we should know what that entails. There are other racks. (18) 3. Cordelia represents a problematic Christ figure in the play (see, for instance, Peter L. Rudnytsky’s “‘The Darke and Vicious Place’”). When Lear kills one of the servants charged with her execution, his action echoes the following incident related in the Gospel According to Luke, an incident occurring in the garden of Gethsemane, where Christ is arrested prior to His execution: “And one of [Christ’s followers] smote the servant of the high priest, and cut off his right ear. / And Jesus answered and said, Suffer ye thus far. And he touched his ear and healed him” (Luke 22:50–51). In Matthew 26:52, Jesus chides his violent defender with these words: “Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” If Cordelia, at some level, stands for Christ-like virtues, it is clear that Lear has not understood those virtues, just as Christ’s follower, in the biblical account, does not understand the kind of Kingdom Christ intends to bring, a Kingdom not of this world and not achieved by the power-means of this world but by self-sacrifice. 4. Caroline’s literalism is almost programmatically stated when she says to Ginny, “I told Frank last night . . . ‘They don’t see what’s there—they see beyond that to something terrible, and it’s like they’re finally happy when they see that!’ . . . I think things generally are what they seem to be!” (362). Caroline then cites Daddy as an example of someone who is what he seems to be, that is, basically good, and she tells Ginny that he had been loving and repentant toward her in his final days. Ginny exposes Caroline’s sentimentality by pointing out that Larry, in his final days, had spoken of

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Caroline as dead, had not been aware of her identity at all: “He thought you were dead” (362). Caroline wishes to see only what is right in front of her and not probe into secrets or uncomfortable depths; she wants to be guided by face value reality and not doubt. As a result, she distorts reality, portraying her father in an idealized light and calling Ginny “evil” (363). 5. “Zebulon” is the name of one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Its use here bears “promised land” connotations and points to the cultural and religion-derived lens through which the original settlers of this land perceived their new home, a cultural vision that still affects their descendants’ perceptions and attitudes. Since Israel, according to Judeo-Christian tradition, is God’s chosen people, the name of one of the Israelite tribes hints at a sense of election. 6. Here, I am reiterating concepts drawn from Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to which I refer throughout the book. Note, for instance, the following analysis of Protestant-derived moral perfectionism: “Only one of the elect really has the effective faith, only he is able by virtue of his rebirth and the resulting sanctification of his whole life, to augment the glory of God by real, and not merely apparent, good works. . . . Thus, however useless good works might be as a means of attaining salvation, . . . nevertheless, they are indispensable as a sign of election” (47). Further on, Weber adds, “In practice this means that God helps those who help themselves. Thus the Calvinist, as it is sometimes put, himself creates his own salvation, or, as would be more correct, the conviction of it. But this creation cannot, as in Catholicism, consist in a gradual accumulation of individual good works to one’s credit, but rather in a systematic self-control which at every moment stands before the inexorable alternative, chosen or damned” (47–48). Under such spiritual pressure, admission of guilt and of flawed humanity becomes very difficult. Smiley’s Larry Cook, of course, is no actual Calvinistic believer; however, his inherited mindset is of a decidedly Protestant cast, and, in a secular manner, he is continually trying to prove to others and himself his “elect” status, his upstanding, respectable, and virtuous character from which, supposedly, his economic success is derived. 7. William Conlogue relates Larry’s self-conception as “God” to the mentality of industrial agriculture: “Lording over his paradise is Larry Cook. Ginny’s childhood memories of her father imagine a man rivaling God in her universe. . . . Larry’s godlike qualities fit industrial agriculture’s faith in a bigger-is-better philosophy, reflected in the fact that the Cooks’ farm was ‘the biggest farm farmed by the biggest farmer’” (Working the Garden, 164). 8. Susan Strehle describes Ginny’s narrative style as follows: “Questions of style grow to be implicated in questions of value, meaning, and power, and Ginny’s unremarkable style comes to appear central to Smiley’s goals and vital to her achievement. Ginny Cook’s narrative is realistic—which, by common agreement, means that it refers to particulars of the external world rather than universals; that it seeks objectivity of judgment and clear, unbiased observation rather than the expression of personal feelings; and that



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it minimizes its linguistic artistry in order to focus on those things to which language refers.” (“The Daughter’s Subversion,” 217–18) ater on, Strehle continues her insightful analysis of Ginny’s style, observing that L she “begins her narrative in a style of assent,” that she “often uses the collective ‘we’ to speak for the family—to speak for her father,” that her “conversational style is neutral, bland, and unremarkable,” and that “the simple ‘see spot run’ syntax, virtually stripped of modifiers, makes her invisible” (220). This subdued narrative voice artfully conveys the degree to which Ginny’s natural voice and self have been suppressed and erased by her family. 9. The Mexican detail points to Latin Catholic cultures and, hence, to a more sacramental perspective. 10. For Larry, beauty is strikingly abstract; it is of a purely symbolic nature, but not in the full sense of symbolism: the sensory details that together constitute a beautiful form have no true existence for him other than being immediate and literal indicators of his own power, wealth, and goodness. In other words, beautiful things point immediately to himself rather than being inherently delightful and presencing something beyond themselves through their very own powerfully delightful presence. This egocentric inability to experience beauty is evident in an early section of the novel in which Larry buys one of the few beautiful objects he will ever care to acquire: a luxurious 1951 Buick. While Ginny experiences the car in communal and sensory terms (leaning close to the sister she adores in the “hot musty velvet luxury of the car’s interior”), Larry sees it as “the exact measure of six hundred and forty acres compared to three hundred or five hundred.” For him, the car reduces “the farms passing every minute . . . from vastness to insignificance,” instilling a sense of transcendence, superiority, power. While it is Ginny reporting these thoughts and impressions, she makes it clear that she is indirectly reporting what she knew her parents felt: “Their tones of voice were unhurried and self-confident, complacent with the knowledge that the work at our place was farther along, the buildings at our place more imposing and better cared for” than on the farms they are passing. Ginny’s own more sensory and communal experience is signaled by the emphatic opening phrase “For me” (5). While Ginny is enjoying the car itself and being with her sister, her parents are clearly absorbed in sheer self-validation; the fact that Ginny calls their conversation a “duet” adds to the irony of how unappreciative of beauty her parents are (5). In the course of the novel, Ginny’s mother becomes more and more associated with beautiful objects; the reader realizes more and more that the duet she performs with Larry in the Buick is one arranged and demanded by her husband, more expressive of his spirit than of hers. The car is his fiefdom, just like his farm, and everyone either sits silently or sings his tune. Later in the novel, Larry again purchases beautiful objects: beautifully crafted solid oak cabinets. However, he lets them sit in front of the house and spoil in the rain, insists on not moving them into the house, to the great chagrin of his children. This action, probably an expression of stubbornness meant as a demonstration of his ability to do

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exactly as he wishes, is one of the first signs of his growing senility or insanity, but it also expresses who he has been all along: a complete disregarder of beauty. While Rose is mainly focused on the loss of money that the damaged furniture represents, she also shows some awareness of the ruination of craftsmanship: “A thousand dollars! I still can’t believe the waste. And it just makes me sick to see them out in the weather. I mean, somebody built those! It’s actually sad somehow” (84). 11. Ginny translates her sacramental insights about nature also into economic terms; she knows that empires rise and fall, and lands change owners: “But if I look past the buzzing machine monotonously unzipping the crusted soil, at the field itself and the fields around it, I remember that the seemingly stationary fields are always flowing toward one farmer and away from another. The lesson my father might say they prove is that a man gets what he deserves by creating his own good luck” (136–37). Ginny contrasts her own perspective directly with what Larry “sees” instead; she sees a world the individual cannot control, but Larry believes that he determines reality. 12. By “givenness” I mean something akin to objectivity. A world that is given to us is a world that we have not chosen, a world that we have not made, a world whose rules we do not get to make; it is a world to which we must adjust ourselves because we have no other, a world to the nature and structure of which we must, in a sense, submit because we cannot create an alternative reality for ourselves to inhabit—at least not a substantive alternative reality, though, of course, illusory alternative worlds abounds. 13. In the same passage we learn that Virginia’s mother’s name was Ann; traditionally, Ann is believed to have been the name of the Virgin Mary’s mother. 14. Isaiah, Chapter 9, speaks of the Messiah as being a descendant of David, and, therefore, also of David’s father, Jesse. The famous Christmas carol “Lo! How a Rose E’er-Blooming,” for instance, phrases the Messiah’s descent thus: “Of Jesse’s lineage coming / As men of old have sung.” 15. Conlogue interprets the native Iowa grasses growing through “the metal grid” of an old rusted “bedstead” as symbolic of wild Iowa nature “crack[ing] the grid’s surface,” i.e., the surface of the Land Ordinance grid imposing abstract geometrical divisions on the Midwestern landscape, a grid that turned natural landscapes into an agricultural checkerboard (Working the Garden, 167). For the history of the Land Ordinance of 1785, which shaped the eastern Midwest and became a formative model for the later-emerging western states of the region, see Barillas, The Midwestern Pastoral, 26–28. 16. See, for instance, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” (1819). 17. When Ginny and Jess venture into the dump, right after Ginny, in her narrator voice, mentions Zebulon County’s “eternal breeze,” she also mentions the following: “I noticed that there was a nest in the honey locust tree, too, but the birds were gone, and the nest was possibly an old one” (125). Very subtly, the honey locust image places the passage in a biblical context, namely that of Matthew, chapters 3 and 4. In Matthew 3:4, we learn that John the Baptist, preparing the way for Christ’s ministry, was living on “locusts and wild honey,” a detail to which the honey locust tree seen by Ginny alludes. In the previous verse, John is described as “the voice of one crying in



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the wilderness,” and, of course, Ginny and Jess have just entered the wilderness of the dump. What John is crying is the following: “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight”; in other words, he is announcing the coming of the Messiah. Ginny, Virginia, as a Virgin Mary figure, would be the mother of the Messiah, who is to come from Jesse’s lineage. But what she sees is an empty nest; even though it is the season for young birds to inhabit their nests, the nest she sees in the honey locust tree is devoid of such young life. What Ginny is trying to seize in her romantic encounter with Jess is a kind of salvation. Having recognized the deadness of her marriage to Ty, she now is hoping for true love. When Jess and Ginny meet at the dump again the next day for their first sexual encounter, Jess reveals to Ginny that the reason for her miscarriages is the poisoned well water (164). This knowledge gives Ginny the opportunity to plan and hope for a successful pregnancy, one that could be realized if she only avoids the well water. The notion of good, redeeming water, subtly suggested here, alludes to baptism. Since her relationship with Ty is moribund, she sees a possible new future dawning, a new life, one with Jess—and children, a new birth. Cut off from the cycle of life, from her own maternal nature, by the patriarchal rape of the land and the poisoning of the groundwater, Ginny hopes to be reincorporated into that cycle of life by Jess, who reveals to her his plans for an organic, unpolluted farm. However, the breaking dawn she perceives in her life is a false one, and she will end up without children, without a husband, broken and fairly alone. When Ginny reveals her miscarriages to Jess, he says, “Jesus. Oh, Ginny” (164). His utterance draws attention to the similarity between the names Jesus and Jess. He is an illusory Savior figure. The remainder of Matthew, Chapter 3 is an admonition to the Pharisees, the religious leaders of Israel, for their fruits are evil rather than good; they will face destruction and will be uprooted, a prophecy relevant to the Cook family patriarch, Larry, who has produced productive harvests, but, spiritually speaking, only evil fruit (later in the novel, Rose’s fatal cancer will be described as the “dark child” begotten unto her by Larry, 323). The next chapter in Matthew begins with another wilderness scene: “Then was Jesus led up of the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil” (Matt. 4:1). Similarly, Jess is tempting Ginny; he is a false savior, and his deception of her has destructive consequences (unlike Christ, Ginny does not resist the temptation in the wilderness). The association of Jess with the devil is hinted at in the novel by the fact that he tells Ginny of his favorite snakes as they are heading into the rose-bedecked Eden of the dump; Ginny is startled by his love of snakes: “I never thought of having favorite snakes” (123). 18. Glynis Carr’s description of the novel’s core concerns parallels my reading of it as containing positive, even slightly mystical, values, of it being not merely an exercise in decentering or deconstructing monopolizing and abusive discourses, but also a text that offers a new kind of anchoring and centering: Specifically, Smiley uses the Demeter-Persephone tale to deliver a critique of postmodern agriculture (capitalist agribusiness) that underscores its dangerous devaluation of women and nature in general, and reproduction in particular. The myth reflects on limits to patriarchal power. Smiley’s allusions to it sharpen

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her novel’s argument that ecofeminist politics must disrupt patriarchal values, and value mothers and “the feminine” equally with fathers and “the masculine,” leisure and pleasure as much as productivity and progress. To restate this in the theoretical terms of social ecofeminism: Smiley’s novel asserts that “the category of reproduction, rather than production, [must be made] central to the concept of a just, sustainable world.” (“Persephone’s Daughters,” 121) The final phrase, which Carr quotes from Merchant, Radical Ecology, 195, expresses Smiley’s postmodern value system as it coincides—somewhat—with sacramentalism. The words “just” and “sustainable” point in slightly different directions; while the concept of ecological sustainability has a more pragmatic meaning (namely, the practical need to care for our own long-term survival and quality of life), the concept of justice is certainly spiritual, having to do with good and evil, right and wrong. Thus, Smiley’s vision of a more “natural” life, of a culture in which capitalist values are not solely dominant, and a culture that values nature as the realm from which we draw life, as well as the realm to which we ethically owe good stewardship because it is just as real as ourselves, just as alive, and because we come from it, is a vision of both a pragmatic and a spiritual nature. The “mysticism” here is not as explicit as in most of the modernist texts discussed in this book; however, the spiritual reverence for nature, and a sense of its ultimate goodness, does form the background for all that the book relates to us. Nature has inherent value; and so do all of its branches, including animal life and silenced groups of human beings. 19. When Ty calls Rose both “as grim as death” and a “queen,” a mythical allusion emerges: she is the queen of the underworld, a Persephone figure. This allusion corroborates, to some degree, my reading, further along, of Rose as a Dantean devil figure, inhabiting the last circle of the underworld, presiding over a “vast kingdom of grief ” (Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, in Musa, trans. and ed., The Portable Dante, 187). 20. One might note the numerous examples of singing saints in the Purgatorio, or consider the passage in Canto XXIII of the Paradiso where the Virgin Mary speaks in “circling melodies” (The Divine Comedy, 109) that express “angelic love encompassing the joy supreme” (103–04). In Shakespeare, the rich musical imagery in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Tempest comes to mind. 21. See Edmund’s “Thou, Nature, art my goddess” speech (King Lear, I.ii.1–22) in which he commits himself to amoral ruthlessness in the name of amoral nature. 22. Ginny’s “obsidian shard” has a striking parallel in the “small green stone” that is clasped by Jane Webster in Sherwood Anderson’s Many Marriages. Jane, much like Ginny, has just learned to see her parents for who they really are; her mother has committed suicide, and her father has left her, and amidst the confusion, Jane clings to a stone her father gave her before he left: There was a pain in the palm of her right hand. Something hurt her and the sense of hurting was refreshing. It brought life back. There was consciousness of self in the realization of bodily pain. One’s mind could start back along the



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road from some dark far place to which it had run crazily off. One’s mind could take hold of the thought of the little hurt place in the soft flesh of the palm of the hand. There was something there, something hard and sharp that cut into the flesh of the palm when one’s finger pressed down rigid and tense upon it. . . . One could press the finger down hard upon it and feel in the soft palm of the hand this delicious and healing pain. (234–35) The “healing pain” here is the painfulness of truth, an objective reality Jane has had to face, and what this pain has given her is a real sense of herself, “consciousness of self,” and a true understanding of and connection to her own and others’ humanity, and to all of nature. Ginny’s obsidian shard stands for much the same thing, a reconnection to the world of hard, objective truth, a reconnection to her own self, to her own body, to her own nature and all nature. However, whereas Anderson’s novel, marred deeply by its visionary sentimentality, ends on a note of ecstatic liberation and hopefulness for both Jane and her father, an ecstatic leap that goes against the very objectivity the novel preaches, Smiley’s novel acknowledges the devastation Ginny has suffered for what it is. Thus, Smiley’s novel far more convincingly portrays life as it is, in all its obsidian opaqueness and hardness. Though there is a wide gap between both texts in terms of their respective effectiveness, it is interesting to note that they share the same concerns and use a very similar symbol to signify their common theme, which, ultimately, is a sacramental one.

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Index

“Absolution” (Fitzgerald), 250–53 Adams, Henry, 25–27, 30, 34, 38, 44, 60, 103, 164, 270, 297, 316, 331, 336 “Adventure” (Winesburg, Ohio), 101, 213 Alighieri, Dante, 17, 90, 300, 302, 356 Althaus, Paul, 18, 19 Anderson, David D., 179, 328, 336, 339, 341 Anderson, Douglas, 318 Anderson, Sherwood, 2–4, 10, 11, 21, 22, 25, 27–31, 33–35, 39, 42–44, 46, 48, 50, 59, 60, 62, 72–207, 209, 213, 218, 220, 221, 229, 233, 238, 243, 244, 246, 248, 250, 254, 256, 260–63, 265, 269–72, 275, 276, 278, 279, 282, 283, 290, 292, 309, 310, 312, 316, 320–41, 343, 350, 356, 357; Anderson’s concept of the grotesque, 29, 43, 44, 83, 86, 92, 95, 96, 98, 111, 118, 148, 149, 152, 153, 157, 160, 172, 184, 211, 213, 239, 246, 248, 272, 287, 291, 295, 307, 326, 327, 339, 340, 350; Anderson’s literary style, 74, 75, 81, 89, 143–45, 148, 149, 172, 326, 327; on androgyny, 121, 130, 131, 133, 168, 172; on art, 30, 31, 112, 115, 133, 149, 152, 166, 169–73, 183, 316, 326; on craftsmanship, 21, 22, 141, 149, 170–73, 316; direct discussion of Midwestern identity, 28, 29, 76, 77, 164; on femininity, womanhood, 10, 44, 60, 117–41, 159, 161, 164, 165, 168–70, 172, 192, 197, 203, 326–31; on masculinity, manhood, 31, 60, 78, 94, 95, 100, 101, 127, 128, 130, 132, 139, 141, 149, 158, 164, 165, 168, 169, 174, 185, 188, 189, 194, 204, 323, 324, 330, 331, 336. See also individual titles of Anderson’s works Apollo (Greek god; index listing includes the Nietzschean terms “Apollonian” and

“Apollonianism”), 70, 82, 137, 207, 238, 320, 322, 323 Ballinger, Philip A., 169 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 314 Barillas, William, 224, 226, 354 Bassett, John E., 327 Beverley, Robert, 49, 182, 228, 331 Beyond Desire (Anderson), 94, 178, 179, 189–205, 254, 256, 336, 338–41 Bidney, Martin, 44, 121 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 17, 314, 315 Borgman, Paul, 344, 345 Bradford, William (includes the William Bradford-derived Andersonian character named Henry Bradford), 96–99, 324 Breitwieser, Mitchell, 257 Bromfield, Louis, 33, 34, 39, 41, 48, 72, 260, 310, 332 Brooks, Van Wyck, 60, 62, 63, 69, 108, 129, 337 Brown, Charles Brockden, 320 Brown, Judith, 146, 153, 154, 157, 158 Burbank, Rex, 144, 171, 328, 329, 336, 337, 340 Calderwood, James L., 351 Callahan, John F., 254–56 Callander, Marilyn Berg, 346 Calvin, Jean, 23, 24, 56 Calvinism (including “Calvinist” and “Calvinistic”), 22–24, 28, 35, 36, 53, 57–59, 61–63, 67, 71, 74, 75, 84, 87, 105, 106, 163, 247, 248, 255, 256, 261–63, 268, 270–72, 281, 288, 291, 3333, 337, 350, 352 Carden, Mary Paniccia, 227, 228, 291, 296, 344

– 367 –

368

index

Carr, Glynis, 293, 294, 355, 356 Cartesian (e.g., Cartesian split, Cartesian grid, Cartesian clear ideas), 20, 21, 31, 63, 216, 220, 294, 339 Cather, Willa, 2–4, 9, 33, 34, 48, 49, 72, 206–43, 260, 299, 310, 329, 335, 341–47 Cayton, Andrew R. L., 46, 47 Chartres (French cathedral of great symbolic value to Adams, Anderson, and Cather), 10, 11, 26, 27, 30, 31, 336 Chase, Cleveland B., 329 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 138, 346 Christ (Jesus), 11–13, 18, 42, 51, 52, 55, 70, 80, 99, 100, 102, 121, 136–38, 201, 218, 234, 235, 237, 238, 301, 305, 306, 312, 314, 315, 317, 318, 320, 342, 351, 354, 355; Body of Christ, 12–14, 18, 19, 23, 42, 54, 193, 218, 314, 317; Bride of Christ (including any major wedding references that symbolically point to the Church as the Bride of Christ), 12, 187, 188, 217, 218, 231–35, 301, 337, 338; incarnation (including the terms “incarnate” and “incarnational”), 18, 19, 44, 54, 65, 67, 70, 86, 90, 108, 109, 125, 126, 169, 171, 218, 219, 237, 244, 252, 253, 318, 342 Christendom, 18 Christensen, Bryce J., 244, 251, 252 Christian (includes the plural noun “Christians”), 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 23, 54, 69, 99, 104, 121, 139, 171, 179, 219, 228, 234, 240, 244, 252, 284, 303, 315, 323, 333, 342, 348, 352 Christianity, 54, 192, 237, 314, 315 Christological, 99, 100, 121 Ciancio, Ralph, 91–93, 95, 172 Conlogue, William, 8–10, 224, 225, 352, 354 Conner, Marc C., 44 Cooke, Bernard, 13 Cooper, James Fenimore, 49, 128, 318, 320 Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de, 50, 51, 65, 119 Curtin, William M., 345 Dark Laughter (Anderson), 94, 142–77, 181, 189, 228, 263, 269, 278, 325, 332–39 Dell, Floyd, 33, 34, 36, 243, 310, 329, 335, 350 Derrida, Jacques, 318, 333 Descartes, René, 19, 20, 123 Dewey, Joseph, 112 Dionysus (Greek god; index listing includes the Nietzschean terms “Dionysian” and “Dionysianism”), 82, 207, 321, 322, 323 Dreiser, Theodore, 48, 149, 320, 339, 340 “Drink” (Winesburg, Ohio), 97 Dunne, Robert, 90, 95, 146, 148, 149, 322, 326, 327

Dynamo (influential symbolic image used by Henry Adams), 25–27, 30, 39, 60, 270, 316 Eggleston, Edward, 47 Elledge, Jim, 90 Ellis, James, 330, 331 Emerson, Ralph Waldo (includes the terms “Emersonian” and “Emersonianism”), 15, 16, 28–30, 35, 63, 69, 104, 123, 163, 164, 210, 211, 227–29, 276, 316, 317, 334 Enniss, Stephen C., 336, 337 Fagin, N. Bryllion, 327, 329 Farm, The (Bromfield), 39, 41, 332 Faust (mythical figure, includes “Faustian” and “Faustus”), 97, 108, 117, 324 Fisher-Wirth, Ann, 345, 346 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 3, 4, 33, 34, 243–260, 271, 310, 329, 347, 348 Folks, The (Suckow), 261–82, 348–50 Frank, Waldo, 60–62, 69, 78, 108, 337 Frei, Hans, 104 Garland, Hamlin, 2, 47, 212, 318 Gelfant, Blanche Housman, 232, 233, 336–38 Giannone, Richard, 210 Gjerde, Jon, 46 “Godliness” (Winesburg, Ohio), 79, 103–16, 118, 124, 125, 136, 196, 197, 275, 278, 290, 291, 325, 331, 340 Gold, Herbert, 325 Goldsmith, Oliver, 5–7 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 243–60, 271, 329, 347–48 Green Bay Tree, The (Bromfield), 41, 72 Guttenberg, Barnett, 333, 338, 339 Hallwas, John, 35 “Hands” (Winesburg, Ohio), 79–103, 108, 118, 124, 131, 139, 272, 276, 323–25, 331, 336 Harrison, Peter, 53, 55, 56, 59, 66, 67, 104, 305, 306, 318 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 28, 164 Hemingway, Ernest, 33, 143 Hoffman, Frederick J., 144, 328 Howe, Edgar Watson, 47, 318 Howe, Irving, 134, 135, 143, 175, 178, 327, 329 Jefferson, Thomas (including “Jeffersonian” and “Jeffersonianism”), 4, 49–51, 65, 140, 149, 195, 224, 245, 246, 254, 259 Jeffrey, David Lyle, 54 Jesus. See Christ (Jesus)



index 369

Johnson, Josephine W., 34, 329 Jones, Howard Mumford, 145, 333, 340 Hively, Evelyn Helmick, 342, 345 Kierkegaard, Soren, 42–44, 151, 332 Kirkland, Joseph, 47, 318 Kissane, Leedice McAnelly, 348, 349 Kit Brandon (Anderson), 336 Kleiman, Ed, 239, 240 Kolodny, Annette, 7, 49–51, 118, 119, 128, 131, 140, 141, 181, 228, 269, 274 Lawrence, D. H., 172, 338, 339 Lears, T. Jackson, 144 Leslie, Marina, 287, 304, 305 Lewis, R. B. W., 291 Lewis, Sinclair, 2, 33, 36, 48, 72, 91, 149, 329, 339, 348 Lindsay, Clarence, 80, 81, 86, 89, 93–97, 100, 172, 323, 324 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 28, 163, 164, 334 Love, Glen A., 149, 151, 152, 183 Luedtke, Luther S., 326, 328, 329 Lunde, Erik S., 347 Lundén, Rolf, 334 Lundìn, Roger, 104, 339 Luther, Martin (includes “Lutheran” and “Lutheranism”), 17, 18, 22, 37, 57 Lynch, William, 70–72, 77, 113, 123, 125, 139, 140, 213, 239, 241, 295, 319, 320, 333 MacGowan, Christopher, 330 Malmgren, Carl D., 287, 288 Malmsheimer, Lonna M., 331 Many Marriages (Anderson), 25, 33, 73, 142, 144, 145, 175, 178, 238, 261, 325, 356 Marching Men (Anderson), 148, 322 Marx, Leo, 5, 50, 51, 67, 83, 87, 182, 183, 274, 331 Masters, Edgar Lee, 33–36, 260 Matthews, George C., 334 McAuliffe, Clarence, 79 McDermott, Sinead, 294 McFague, Sallie, 14–16 McLay, Catherine M., 210, 211, 212 Melville, Herman, 320 Mencken, Henry Louis, 63, 197 Mid-American Chants (Anderson), 46, 75–77, 46, 152, 206, 243, 283 Middleton, Jo Ann, 346 Miller, William V., 325 Modernism (includes “modernist”), 3, 9, 11, 17, 21, 22–25, 27, 33, 34, 39, 41–43, 45, 51, 52,

69, 70, 108, 142, 143, 145, 147, 148, 164, 178, 207–10, 212, 225, 227, 228, 233, 256, 270, 278, 284, 285, 287, 297, 310–12, 318–20, 322, 333, 342, 344, 346, 356; defining characteristics of Midwestern modernism, 9, 10, 17, 21–27, 31, 33, 34, 39, 42, 43, 45, 51, 60–70, 212, 213, 233, 270, 271283–85, 288, 297, 312, 318, 320, 333; modernism’s quest for a renewal of Western culture, 9–11, 17, 21–27, 31, 33, 34, 39, 42, 43, 45, 60, 69, 209, 210, 246, 283–84, 297, 312, 322 Moon-Calf (Dell), 36–39 Moses, Carole, 247–50, 253, 259, 260 Mullins, Maire, 345 Murphy, George D., 91, 95 Murphy, John J., 223, 238 My Άntonia (Cather), 49, 72, 209–14, 227–42, 344–47 “Neighbour Rosicky” (Cather), 206–11, 227, 236, 242 Nelson, Robert J., 225, 227, 342, 344 “New Englander, The,” (Anderson), 31–33, 82, 322, 327 New Testament, A (Anderson), 168, 179–81 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (including “Nietzschean” and “Nietzscheanism”), 82, 175, 207, 209, 215, 222, 228, 321–23 Novalis, 321 “Ohio Pagan, An” (Anderson), 33, 122, 130–41, 150, 159, 168, 229, 291, 327–33 Omrcanin, Margaret Stewart, 348, 349, 350 O Pioneers! (Cather), 209–27, 231, 235, 236, 299, 341–45 “Out of Nowhere into Nothing” (Anderson), 147 Papinchak, Robert Allen, 128, 328 Pastoral (includes “pastoralism” and references to the “garden myth”), 4–11, 42–52, 63–68, 72, 74, 76, 79–96, 116, 119, 120, 128–34, 139–41, 162, 168, 173, 181, 183, 193, 195, 199, 200, 209, 214, 215, 218, 224, 225, 229, 235, 239, 241, 243, 245–47, 249, 250, 252–61, 269, 273–78, 280, 281, 286, 312, 317, 318, 320, 321, 331, 335, 336, 343, 344, 346–49, 354; concept of the “middle landscape,” 5, 44, 50, 67, 72, 119, 129, 335; definition of pastoral, 4–11, 48–51; pastoral as definitive of Midwestern identity, 4–5, 64–70, 317; pastoral as a mode of symbiotic relationality, 28, 44, 48, 72, 118, 129, 131, 133, 136, 140, 141, 168, 169, 173, 182, 193, 197, 198, 214, 218, 224, 241, 242, 285, 335 Peck, Demaree C., 227–29

370

index

Plato (including “Platonic,” “ Platonist,” and “Platonism”), 15, 16, 20, 29, 53, 70, 90, 94, 210, 211, 229, 237, 241, 242, 284, 313 Perhaps Women (Anderson), 275, 336 Poor White (Anderson), 50, 73, 94, 130, 178–89, 202, 203, 205, 218, 229, 262, 276, 332, 336–38, 341 Postmodernism (includes the therm “postmodern”), 145, 148, 198, 283, 284, 339 Puritan, 17, 22, 25–27, 29, 33, 39, 42, 43, 57–63, 75, 76, 79, 82, 83, 85, 86, 92, 93, 96, 98, 10006, 108, 110, 117, 119, 120, 129, 163, 165, 178, 182, 184, 185, 186, 189, 191, 197–99, 247, 262, 264, 265, 268, 276–79, 316, 324, 333, 337, 349, 350; connection between Puritanism and industrialism/materialism, 10, 11, 22, 24, 30, 31, 33, 39–41, 53, 57–63, 76, 77, 96, 107, 129, 336; doctrine of election, 23, 24, 58, 62, 63, 83, 84, 102, 103, 106, 107, 114, 247, 248, 256, 264–71, 276, 281, 282, 288–90, 337, 349, 352; work ethic, 24, 57–59, 84, 85, 107, 110, 116, 163, 184, 185, 289, 290, 294, 337, 352 Puritanical, 97, 227 Puritanism, 21, 27–29, 31, 41, 59, 60, 61–63, 73–75, 79, 88, 96, 102–05, 114, 116, 129, 316, 319, 320, 340, 349 Rahner, Karl, 77, 85, 218 Rainwater, Catherine, 350, 351 Randall, John H., III, 208, 210, 221, 222, 227, 240, 343 Reynolds, Guy, 344 Rideout, Walter, 143, 146, 147, 333, 340 Rigsbee, Sally Adair, 44, 118, 172 Rölvaag, Ole Edvart, 33, 319, 335 Rose, Phyllis, 213 Rosowski, Susan J., 215, 223, 226, 343, 345 Rudnytsky, Peter L., 351 Ryan, Melissa, 344 Sacrament, 11, 13, 18, 24, 27, 39, 42, 56, 59, 60, 77–79, 97, 110, 113, 117, 149, 157, 159, 171, 190, 194, 216, 218, 233, 265, 280, 307 Sacramental (The adjective “sacramental” and the adverb “sacramentally” occur on so many pages that listing these page numbers would be meaningless; however, here follow various subentries regarding the sacramental): definitions of sacrament and sacramentalism, 11–17, 41–44, 53–57, 70–72, 113, 123–25, 139–40, 295–97, 333; sacramentalism and language, 54–56, 84–86, 109, 111, 112, 149–54, 156–61, 167–69, 182,

198, 244, 278, 279, 326, 327, 333, 334, 342, 345; “sacramental resistance” (a theoretical term coined by the author of this book), 69–72, 74, 76, 108, 116, 150, 155–57, 166, 179, 205, 245, 250, 263, 270, 277, 288, 319, 335, 345, 346; sex as a sacrament, 27, 28, 32–33, 37–39, 45, 116, 117–32, 157–61, 164, 168, 169, 173, 175, 176, 186–89, 191–93, 196, 219, 221–22, 217–19, 252–53, 298–300 Sacramentalism, 11, 14, 15, 17, 21, 22, 24, 27–29, 31, 33, 34, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 56, 64, 72, 77, 79, 144, 145, 149, 172, 174, 187, 191, 209, 212, 215, 251, 259, 283, 284, 310, 317, 329, 335, 356 Sacramentality, 36, 42, 56, 61, 63, 75, 86, 97, 101, 117, 121, 127, 137, 153, 237, 244, 328, 331 St. Augustine of Hippo, 54, 313, 333, 334 Sandburg, Carl, 33, 52 Sanders, Scott Russell, 64, 68, 274 San Juan, Epifanio, Jr., 32, 324, 325 Shakespeare, William (including references to King Lear and Othello), 285–88, 291, 302, 304, 305, 351, 356 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 354 Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs, 94, 316, 323 Sherwood Anderson’s Notebook, 163, 173 Shortridge, James R., 4, 64–66 Slotkin, Richard, 227 Small, Judy Jo, 327 Smiley, Jane, 3, 4, 9, 283–308, 310, 350–57 Smith, Henry Nash, 7, 312 Spencer, Benjamin, 148, 149 Spoon River Anthology, The (Masters), 34–36 Steinbrink, Jeffrey, 347 Story Teller’s Story, A (Anderson), 10, 21, 27, 30, 31, 60, 141, 164, 275, 316, 336, 343 Stouck, David, 145, 147 Strehle, Susan, 297, 352, 353 Suckow, Ruth, 3, 4, 34, 48, 243, 260–82, 310, 335, 348–50 “Swimmers, The” (Fitzgerald), 245, 246 “Tandy” (Winesburg, Ohio), 120, 121, 203, 326, 327 Tebbetts, Terrel L., 44, 125, 86, 90, 108, 115 Tellefsen, Blythe, 320 Theocritus, 5 “Thinker, The” (Winesburg, Ohio), 115, 116 This Side of Paradise (Fitzgerald), 247 Thompson, Maurice, 47 Thousand Acres, A (Smiley), 3, 283–308, 350–57 Trilling, Lionel, 144 Twain, Mark (includes any references to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), 87, 131, 155, 181, 200, 204, 320, 323, 332, 333, 336, 337, 350



index 371

“Untold Lie, The” (Winesburg, Ohio), 78, 79, 321 “‘Unused’” (Anderson), 122–32, 135, 141, 191, 228, 229, 233, 265, 269, 327–30 Van Ghent, Dorothy, 213 Verity, Anthony, 5 Virgil (includes the adjective “Virgilian”), 5, 6, 49, 51, 183, 223, 300, 301, 343, 344 Virgin (references to the Virgin Mary), 10, 25–43, 60, 79, 103, 164, 165, 227, 270, 275, 297–99, 316, 331, 336, 354–56 Vollert, Cyril, 18 Walcutt, Charles Child, 341 Weber, Max, 22, 24, 39, 53, 57–60, 62, 66, 74, 75, 84, 87, 88, 106, 107, 163, 337, 352

Weber, Ronald, 7, 67, 297 Wescott, Glenway, 33, 48, 51, 84, 243, 310, 329 West, Thomas Reed, 338 Wetzel, Thomas, 42, 43, 79, 152, 332 Whalan, Mark, 44, 142, 158, 321 Wheeler, Kathleen, 212, 213 Winesburg, Ohio (Anderson), 34, 44, 62, 72–118, 120, 139, 124, 125, 136, 145, 147–49, 151, 152, 158, 169, 172, 178, 196, 197, 203, 213, 233, 272, 275, 276, 290, 291, 307, 320–26, 331, 336, 338, 340. See also individual story titles Woodress, James, 210, 211 Wordsworth, William, 229, 346 Yingling, Thomas, 116