Death in the Woods: Summary

The narrator of ‘‘Death in the Woods’’ introduces the central character of the story: an anonymous old
woman who periodically comes to town to sell a few eggs and buy a few supplies. The woman is known only
by her last name, Grimes.

The story is the narrator’s fictionalized account of her life and death, focusing on one fateful trip into town.

The narrator recounts what he knows of Mrs. Grimes’s background, things that ‘‘must have stuck in my
mind from small-town tales when I was a boy.’’ The old woman’s husband, Jake Grimes, was a known
horse thief. He came from a family that had once been prosperous, but Jake and his father had squandered
their money.

Jake met his wife when she was a young ‘‘bound girl,’’ an orphan working for a German farmer in
exchange for her room and board. There were rumors that the farmer sexually harassed and perhaps even
raped the girl. Jake came to work for the farmer and began to take the girl out. The farmer caught them, and
he and Jake fought. The girl confided in Jake about the farmer’s abuse.

Jake married the girl out of defiance toward the farmer. They had a son and a daughter, but only the son
survived. She settled into a life of caring for the animals on their impoverished farmstead and making sure
there was food for her husband and son.

Jake’s threshing business failed because of his dishonest reputation, so he resorted to cutting firewood at a
small profit. Jake and his son went on trips and got drunk together while the woman tried to manage the small
farm. She no longer was intimate with her husband or even spoke to him. Not yet forty years of age, she had
begun to look old.

One winter day, Mrs. Grimes went into town with a few eggs to trade in exchange for some supplies. She
went to the butcher to beg for some meat scraps for the family dogs that accompanied her. The butcher was
kind to her and expressed anger at her husband and son for letting her go out on such a cold and snowy day. It
was the first time anyone had spoken to her warmly in a long time.

The woman set out for home with the heavy grain bag of food on her back. She decided to take a shortcut
through some woods in the hope of getting home before dark. Part of the way through, she stopped to rest in a
small clearing and fell asleep under a tree. She would never wake up from that sleep.

The four dogs that accompanied the old woman were used to foraging for food, so they killed a few rabbits
while she slept. Excited, they began to play and circle the woman, beating a track in the snow around her in a
‘‘kind of death ceremony.’’ One at a time they came up to the woman and stuck their noses into her face,

Death in the Woods: Sherwood Anderson Biography


waiting for her to die.

When she eventually died there in her sleep, the dogs dragged the woman out of the clearing by the grain bag
tied to her back—tearing her dress but leaving her body intact—and took the food out of the bag.

The narrator recounts hearing that a local hunter had found a dead body in the woods. The narrator and his
brother accompany the town marshal and a party of men as they go out and investigate. They know that they
will be late for supper but choose to go because ‘‘we would have something to tell.’’ The hunter reports
that the body belonged to a beautiful young girl.

When they get there they view the body—the first naked woman the narrator has ever seen. Frozen in the
snow, the old woman looks young and lovely. The boys return home, and the narrator’s brother tells the
dramatic story of the body in the woods. The narrator isn’t satisfied with his brother’s account, but says
nothing.

Mrs. Grimes’s body is not identified until the next day. The narrator hears fragments of her life story around
town. He says that the story was something he had to pick up slowly over time, ‘‘like music heard from far
off.’’ Years later he remembers and recounts the story of her death.

Death in the Woods: Characters

The Butcher

The butcher is the last person to talk to Mrs. Grimes before she dies. Taking pity on her, he gives her a
generous portion of meat that makes her pack too heavy and causes her to stop and rest in the cold.

The German Farmer

The German farmer once hired Mrs. Grimes as a ‘‘bound girl,’’ which meant that she lived on his farm,
cooked for him, and fed his animals. She suffered from his unwanted sexual advances until she married Jack
Grimes.

Jake Grimes

Jake Grimes is married to Mrs. Grimes. He is a profligate, a drunk, and a known horse thief. Jake counts on
his wife to make ends meet at their small farm, and does not contribute to the family economy. He expects her
to provide for him and treats her with indifference or cruelty; the marriage is a loveless one. After Mrs.
Grimes dies, the townspeople suspect Jake and his son of wrongdoing. Though they have alibis, they are
banished from the town.

Mrs. Grimes

‘‘Death in the Woods’’ chronicles the story of a woman, known as Mrs. Grimes, who lives on the outskirts
of town. The narrator recounts her sad history as a ‘‘bound girl’’ and an abused wife as a background to the
story’s central drama—the events surrounding her freezing to death in the woods and the ensuing discovery of
her body.

The old woman is the story’s central character, but she remains an enigma because her life experiences are
filtered through the narrator’s consciousness; therefore we know that the narrator has filled in the gaps with
experiences from his own life.

Anderson is known for creating characters based on the concept of the ‘‘grotesque.’’ While the word
grotesque—meaning something that is outlandishly or incongruously distorted—normally has a negative
connotation, Anderson viewed such distortion or imbalance sympathetically, as part of the human condition.

Death in the Woods: Summary


In some ways, the old woman is a grotesque. Her life—as the narrator views it—revolves around the feeding of
animal life. With other people, she is uncommunicative and isolated. However, in her death she becomes a
mythic figure that represents womanhood.

The Hunter

The hunter discovers the old woman’s dead body in the woods. He reports that the body belonged to a
‘‘beautiful young girl.’’

The Marshal

The marshal leads a party of men to the site in the woods where the hunter found the body. He questions the
hunter and initially suspects murder.

The Narrator

The narrator is a boy growing up in the town near where Mrs. Grimes lived. He did not know her personally
but reports the facts of her life and death. He passes along information that he has heard, as well as recounting
a few experiences as a direct observer—most notably, the discovery of the woman’s body in the woods.

Viewing the body has a strong impact on him: it is the first naked woman’s body that he has ever seen and
he, like the others, perceives her as beautiful and young. When he and his brother return home that night, it is
his brother who reports what happened.

The narrator is dissatisfied with his brother’s rendering of the story, and this is his motivation for retelling the
story in its current form years later, when he is an adult. The narrator admits that he added details from his
own experience until Mrs. Grimes’s story becomes something ‘‘complete’’ and thus beautiful.

The Narrator’s Brother

The narrator’s brother is delivering papers when word reaches town about a woman’s body found in the
woods. He joins the party rather than finishing his task and knows that this will make him late for supper.
When the narrator and his brother return home, it is the brother who recounts the remarkable events.

Old Woman

See Mrs. Grimes

Old Woman’s Son

The old woman’s son is nameless throughout the story. Like his father, he gets drunk and treats the old
woman like a servant. The son has a sexual relationship with a ‘‘rough’’ woman that he conducts under his
mother’s nose. She is not particularly offended, having ‘‘got past being shocked early in life.’’

Death in the Woods: Themes

Human vs. Animal

The main theme of the story, as described by the narrator, concerns Mrs. Grimes’s aim to ‘‘feed animal
life’’—including both humans and animals. She spends her life trying to sustain other life forms.

In other words, she feeds the German farmer and his wife, her husband and son, and the animals on their farm,
making no particular distinction between them. The men in her life are crude, selfabsorbed, abusive, not
significantly different from animals.

Mrs. Grimes is an outsider in the town; therefore it seems natural that she dies in the woods, surrounded by
dogs. In turn, the dogs are endowed with civilized, almost human qualities. Anderson even assigns dialogue to

Death in the Woods: Characters


them: ‘‘Now we are no longer wolves. We are dogs, the servants of men. Keep alive, man! When man dies
we become wolves again.’’ Moreover, the dogs do not eat the woman’s body when she dies, which
preserves the human/ animal distinction.

In life, the woman goes unnoticed by the townspeople. In death, she becomes an object of fascination for the
narrator as he grows up and remembers and reconstructs her story. The events of her simple life take on
mystery and beauty as the narrator crafts them into art, a high expression of humanity.

Sex Roles

The old woman’s role as a provider of food is closely tied to her gender role. Feeding is conventionally seen
as woman’s work. There is no emotional, nurturing quality to her constant feeding of others; in fact, she
views this role as a duty and a burden.

Nevertheless, the fact that she provides sustenance is closely associated with femininity and women’s
biological role in gestating and nursing babies. Some critics have interpreted the woman as an ‘‘earth
mother,’’ representing the sustenance offered by a feminized nature. However, this is a dark portrait of
Mother Nature as a powerless, passive woman forced to endure the abuse of men.

The theme of woman’s role as a provider of food is echoed by her role as an object of sexual desire. Feeding
even becomes a metaphor for sex: ‘‘Thank heaven, she did not have to feed her husband— in a certain way.
That hadn’t lasted long after their marriage and after the babies came.’’ Sex is another form of providing for
the physical needs of the men around her. The woman’s sexuality is prematurely depleted, as her hard life
and loveless marriage render her old before her time.

In death it is restored. Her slight, frozen body looks young again, and both the hunter and the narrator see her
as a beautiful object of desire. In this sense, she can be understood as representing an idea or prototype of
Woman in all of the phases of her life cycle.

Since this was the first naked woman’s body that the narrator had ever seen, her representation of
womanhood is crucial to the development of his own adolescent sexuality. As Jon S. Lawry writes in PMLA,
viewing her body in the snow is, for the narrator, ‘‘no mere event, but rather definition for him of the
mystery and beauty of woman.’’

Truth and Fiction

‘‘Death in the Woods’’ is a story within a story that comments upon the creative process. The narrator
recounts Mrs. Grimes’s life; yet he also reflects on his status and qualifications as a narrator, telling, in effect,
the story of how he came to understand and relate the story in its present form.

The narrator is both a witness and participant in some of the events of the story—most notably, the discovery
of the body—but he makes it clear that the old woman’s tale is closer to fiction than truth. Most of the story he
has either heard secondhand or extrapolated from his own experiences. Interrupting his narration of the old
woman’s past, he interjects, ‘‘I wonder how I know all of this. It must have stuck in my mind from
small-town tales when I was a boy.’’

He initially claims that he has little knowledge of the woman, and he admits that details of the story were
‘‘picked up slowly, long afterwards,’’ from his own experiences. Yet as he relates the story years later, he
deems it ‘‘the real story‘‘—more complete and satisfying than the version his brother told on the night the
body was discovered. His story— crafted and fictionalized—transcends anecdote and becomes a thing of
beauty, mystery, and meaning.

Death in the Woods: Themes


Death in the Woods: Style

Point of View

Point of view is probably the most striking and significant stylistic feature of ‘‘Death in the Woods.’’ The
story is narrated in the first person by a man looking back on an event that happened in his hometown when
he was a youth.

At first his qualifications for telling the old woman’s story seem somewhat dubious. The narrator is limited in
his view of events—a fact that he frequently calls to his readers’ attention. To him, the old woman was
‘‘nothing special. She was one of the nameless ones that hardly anyone knows, but she got into my thoughts.
I have just suddenly now, after all these years, remembered her and what happened.’’ He initially describes
the old woman only as a type, not an individual, and admits that his sources of information are not particularly
reliable.

Much of the old woman’s past he recounts based on anecdotes and gossip and experiences of his own that he
later merges with her story. For example, he recalls seeing Jake Grimes at the local livery barn and quotes his
speech, only to admit, ‘‘He did not say anything, actually. ‘I’d like to bust one of you on the jaw,’ was
about what his eyes said. I remember how the look in his eyes made me shiver.’’

The narrator feels a need to understand the woman’s life and death. Eventually, he finds beauty in the
‘‘completion’’ he is finally able to bring to the story as a story, without regard to its factual accuracy. Just
as important as this thematic ‘‘completion’’ is the mystery and resonance the story gains through the
narrator’s own personal investment in its symbolic significance.

The narration of ‘‘Death in the Woods’’ shows how a formative moment in the narrator’s personal
experience acquires meaning over time. Anderson’s subtle manipulation of point of view highlights the
fiction-making process and illustrates how an active imagination can create mystery and beauty.

Structure

‘‘Death in the Woods’’ does not just tell the old woman’s tale, but re-tells it. Thus its structure is based on
repetition, which may begin to explain why several critics have described the story as being similar in form to
a poem.

At the first telling of the story, the narrator’s brother gives an unsatisfactory version of the story while the
narrator remained silent. Thus the whole text can be understood as the narrator’s retelling of that initial,
formative, unprocessed experience that he could not articulate. ‘‘The whole thing, the story of the old
woman’s death, was to me as I grew older like music heard from far off. The notes had to be picked up
slowly one at a time. Something had to be understood,’’ reads the narrator’s famous reflection on the his
impulse to retell.

Lawry suggests that ‘‘Death in the Woods’’ is structured by ‘‘the narrator’s progress from recorder to
creator.’’ It opens with the narrator’s account of a certain type of old woman, describing trips into town and
characterizing her as ‘‘nothing special.’’ This is the first and most brief telling of the old woman’s tale,
from which little meaning is derived.

His authority to tell the story grows as he describes climactic scene of her death. ‘‘I knew about it all
afterward, when I grew to be a man, because once in the woods in Illinois, on another winter night, I saw a
pack of dogs act just like that.’’ As he adds scenes and parallels from his own life to Mrs. Grimes’s story he
becomes a creator of her story.

Death in the Woods: Style


Death in the Woods: Historical Context

Anderson’s Midwest

When Anderson wrote ‘‘Death in the Woods,’’ the modernist literary movement was raging; many
American writers took up explicitly modern themes— such as the disenfranchisement of the middle-class
during the Industrial Revolution and effect of technological change on human existence—to explore the
distinctive experiences, mores, and sensibilities of the early twentieth century.

Anderson is unique because his writing style is decidedly modern—his pared-down style is often compared to
that of modernist giants Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway—but his subject matter is not. To the contrary,
Anderson’s stories appear to take place in something of a historical vacuum. While many modernists
gathered in and wrote about the world’s cosmopolitan cities—Paris, London, New York—Anderson wrote
about life in the American Midwest.

‘‘Death in the Woods’’ takes place in a Midwestern town, likely based on Anderson’s childhood home of
Clyde, Ohio. In the 1890s, Clyde was a town of a few thousand people on the brink of expansion and
modernization. It had its own respectable institutions and cultural events, but its streets weren’t paved and
had no electric streetlights. It was, in the words of biographer Kim Townsend, ‘‘still a frontier town.’’

Anderson recalled it as a warm and intimate community where people knew and looked after each other.
These qualities were becoming scarce by the time Anderson began to write about his Midwestern childhood,
and his representations are always tinged with nostalgia for a way of life on the verge of extinction.

Autobiographical Connections

A different version of ‘‘Death in the Woods’’ appeared as part of Anderson’s autobiography, Tar: A
Midwest Childhood. Beside the story’s smalltown setting, there are other significant autobiographical
elements to the story.

In many of Anderson’s writings he expresses hostility toward his good-for-nothing father and sympathy for
his long-suffering mother. In ‘‘Death in the Woods,’’ the Grimes marriage can be seen as an exaggeration
of the dynamics between Anderson’s parents: Anderson’s father, Irwin, was unable to hold a steady job; he
drank too much; cheated on his wife; and would disappear for days on end. During these times, his mother
Emma kept the impoverished family warm and fed. ‘‘Emma was continually providing,’’ Townsend writes.
She died of tuberculosis when Anderson was eighteen.

Another parallel between the woman in ‘‘Death in the Woods’’ and Emma Anderson is Anderson’s
description of his mother as having been a ‘‘bound girl,’’ rejected by her own mother and sent to work to
support herself until adulthood. His account of his mother’s youth (which may not be factually accurate) has
striking similarities to the history of the woman in the story.

‘‘Our mother had been so bound out, to some farming family somewhere in the southern part of the state of
Ohio, and my father, no doubt then a young dandy, had found her there and married her,’’ Anderson writes
in his Memoirs.

He describes his mother’s life:

She must have worked, all her life, even from childhood, for others, a childhood and young
girlhood of washing dishes, swilling cows, of waiting at table, a kind of half-servant in a
house of strangers to her own blood, only after marriage and children to become a wash
woman.

Death in the Woods: Historical Context


Townsend considers Anderson’s lifelong interest in working women and his attitude toward women in
general as a direct result of his unresolved feelings toward his mother. ‘‘He would always think of her as
Woman, a figure who inspired him to do good, to write,’’ Townsend writes. ‘‘If he could not approach her
when she was alive, he would approach her through his works.’’

Death in the Woods: Critical Overview

A prolific writer, Anderson published eight novels, four collections of short stories, autobiographical works,
poems, plays, and essays. Critics agree that his reputation rests on his influential short fiction, although his
stories seem to range greatly in quality.

Anderson published his most important and influential work, Winesburg, Ohio, when he was forty-three years
of age. By 1926, after two novels were panned by the critics, his critical reputation suffered. Although
Anderson’s style is modernist, his themes and subject matter are not, which led him to be considered as
old-fashioned or irrelevant before his time.

Soon after Anderson’s death, there was a renewed critical interest in his work. In the 1940s several
anthologies of his fiction appeared and the first two biographies of Anderson were published. In his critical
study Sherwood Anderson, Rex Burbank asserted, ‘‘No other writer has portrayed so movingly the emerging
consciousness of the culturally underprivileged Midwesterner with neither condescension nor satiric
caricature.’’

The fact that Anderson’s reputation was in decline may have influenced the early reviews of 1933’s Death in
the Woods and Other Stories. Reviewers of the book were tepid in their praise. ‘‘This collection of short
stories neither augment nor diminish the affection with which America regards Sherwood Anderson,’’
maintained T. S. Matthews of the New Republic.

Matthews continued: ‘‘The almost childish unevenness of his performance, shown in most of his earlier
books, is echoed in Death in the Woods; but as almost always there are compensating high spots.’’

Many critics singled out the title story as one such ‘‘high spot.’’ As Louis Kronenberger contended: ‘‘In a
few of the short stories here there are a simplicity and tenderness, there are evocations of phrases and
moments in American life which, as things go, are the real thing.’’

In the opinion of Ray Lewis White, editor of The Achievement of Sherwood Anderson:

In only one case were critics of Anderson’s later work seriously wrong in their judgment.
Death in the Woods (1933), Anderson’s last collection of short stories, contains works that
are among our finest short fiction. . . . Perhaps because these were stories and not extended
writing, Anderson recaptured the tender charm of Winesburg, Ohio, The Triumph of the Egg,
and Horses and Men.

Other critics also consider this volume as one of Anderson’s best, and singled out ‘‘Death in the Woods’’
for special praise. Writing in the introduction to the Portable Sherwood Anderson, Horace Gregory described
the story as a ‘‘masterpiece’’:

Beyond any other story that Anderson wrote,’’ Gregory opines, [‘‘Death in the Woods’’]
‘‘was the summing up of a lifetime’s experience, and in its final version it became
Anderson’s last look backward into the Middle West of his childhood.’’

Death in the Woods: Critical Overview


Recent Anderson criticism has explored the themes and mechanics of the story, with special attention to the
narrator’s point of view. Writing in PMLA, Jon S. Lawry offered an extended interpretation of the narrator’s
complex relation to his subject:

The creative narrator is not, as is usually the case with narrators in Anderson’s stories,
involved with his subject through personal concerns, familial relation, or friendship. The
distance between them, however, serves to enhance their sympathetic contact; they have only
disinterested humanity in common.

David R. Mesher also focused on the underlying importance of the ‘‘narrator-turned-creator,’’ who openly
admits that he has ‘‘fabricated the most important elements of the story he is telling’’ and ‘‘projects the
reality of his own psychology onto the history of his subject.’’

Death in the Woods: Essays and Criticism

Commonality and Beauty in Death in the Woods

‘‘Death in the Woods’’ opens with a description of its central character, the old woman, as a familiar type
that anyone from a small town would recognize. She is a common and simple woman who lives on the
outskirts of town, coming there only occasionally to beg and barter for a few supplies.

The narrator initially characterizes Mrs. Grimes as ‘‘nothing special.’’ She is not known personally to
anyone in the community, and, being such a familiar figure, she is easy to ignore. ‘‘People drive right down
a road and never notice a woman like that.’’

Having emphasized her anonymity, the narrator then goes on to tell and retell her tale, which, by the end of
the story, has taken on mythic proportion. The imagined scene of her death is full of solemn mystery, and the
meaning of her life is revealed as transcendent.

In his introduction to The Portable Sherwood Anderson, Horace Gregory calls the story ‘‘universal,’’
praising Anderson’s skill in ‘‘giving the socalled common experiences of familiar, everyday life an aura of
internal meaning.’’ Through reconstructing her tale over time, the narrator transforms an old woman’s life
and death into a piece of art. In his work Anderson focused on the lives of simple and downtrodden people as
his subjects, often representing them as the embodiment of a kind of purity and integrity that he saw as
becoming increasingly rare in modern American life. He is praised by critics for a deceptively simple,
declarative writing style that had a great influence on Ernest Hemingway the modernist writer most famous
for simple, spare prose.

As opposed to his worldly contemporaries, who also wrote in this modern style, Anderson considered himself
provincial and unsophisticated. In his most famous book, Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson uses a youthful,
autobiographical narrator who denies his own artistry in statements such as, ‘‘It needs the poet here,’’
implying that his own descriptions are nothing special.

‘‘Death in the Woods’’ shares with Winesburg a plain-speaking narrative voice and descriptions that are
short, direct, and free of figurative language. However, in this story the narrator has become confident in his
storytelling capabilities— someone who knows what a powerful story is and how to tell it beautifully.

Like his narrator, Anderson came back to the story again and again over a period of many years. He first
drafted a version of ‘‘Death in the Woods’’ on the back of the manuscript to Winesburg, Ohio, which was
published in 1919. He published signifi- cantly different versions of the story in A Story-Teller’s Story and

Death in the Woods: Essays and Criticism


Tar: A Midwest Childhood, where it was presented as a sketch and an autobiographical anecdote respectively.

Neither of these versions is equal the artistry of the final version. In the final version, which was published as
a short story in a volume of the same name, the mature narrator reflects on the artist’s role in giving form and
meaning to his commonplace subject matter.

So how does such a modest character as the old woman acquire such mythic stature? And how does a mere
anecdote come to be retold as something ‘‘complete,’’ with meaning that transcends its specific place and
time? One can fruitfully explore these questions by focusing on Anderson’s description of the recovery of the
old woman’s body from the woods clearing where she died. ‘‘The scene in the forest had become for me,
without my knowing it, the foundation for the real story I am now trying to tell,’’ the narrator says.

This scene is transformational to the narrator as a man, in terms of the development of his idea of
womanhood. It is also transformational to him as an artist, in terms of the development of his ideas of what
makes a powerful story. Both of these issues involve questions of aesthetics—that is, questions about what is
defined as beautiful. Thus there is an implicit parallel between the narrator’s struggle to understand female
and literary beauty.

Important to Anderson’s complex idea of womanhood is the issue of sexuality. Though it may be hard for
contemporary readers to believe, in his time Anderson was known for his shockingly direct discussions of sex.

In ‘‘Death in the Woods,’’ Anderson demystifies sexuality through his narrator’s descriptions of the
woman’s difficult life. He frankly describes how the woman, as a young ‘‘bound girl,’’ was nearly raped
by her employer. ‘‘He tore her dress down the front. The German, she said, might have got her that time if
he hadn’t heard his old woman drive in at the gate.’’ He is matter of fact about her son’s disrespectfully
flagrant affair with a ‘‘rough enough woman, a tough one.’’ Also he describes her relief at no longer having
to be intimate with her husband.

Here, sexuality is base and ugly. It is represented as nothing more than an inevitable part of the cycle of
‘‘animal life’’ in which the woman is trapped. Beauty, it would seem, has nothing to do with it.

Furthermore, the woman herself is characterized as so negligible that it is not even necessary to describe her
appearance or to say that she isn’t beautiful. From the start, she is described as old and, implicitly, sexually
irrelevant, despite the fact that she is barely middle-aged.

However, later in the story the woman undergoes a strange transformation that renders her young, beautiful,
and eerily alluring—she dies. The narrator and his brother join a party of men who go out into the woods
clearing where a hunter has discovered the body of an unidentified woman, which he describes as that of a
‘‘beautiful young girl.’’ When they arrive, they see her naked body and he, along with the others in the
party, also perceives her as beautiful. This is the first time he has ever seen a woman’s naked body.

In death, which usually corrupts the body, the woman is instead restored to youthful perfection— at least in the
collective imagination of the town’s men. ‘‘It may have been the snow, clinging to the frozen flesh, that
made it look so white and lovely, so like marble.’’

Whiteness is associated with purity, and marble suggests the idealized nudes of ancient sculpture. She has
become an aesthetic object, transformed by the projected ideas and desires of the community of men as much
as by the cold and snow.

The old woman is unknown when she trudges into town on her thankless chore, and she is equally unknown
when her youthful-looking body is reverentially carried back to town. Yet she has been completely

Commonality and Beauty in Death in the Woods


transformed from a base and sexless beast of burden into a tragic and mysterious beauty. These are two
crucial and opposing ways that men see women that the narrator must try hard to piece together as he grows
into a man.

The woman’s transformation in turn transforms the young narrator. ‘‘She did not look old, lying there in
that light, frozen and still. One of the men turned her over in the snow and I saw everything.’’ In viewing
her, the narrator glimpses two of life’s darkest and most essential secrets—that of sexuality and that of death.

This startling vision has the quality of a revelation. He sees ‘‘everything’’—which makes sense both as a
boy’s embarrassed way of describing her nudity and as a statement about how the scene marked the end of
his childish innocence, forever altering his outlook on the world.

He goes on, ‘‘My body trembled with some strange mystical feeling and so did my brother’s. It might have
been the cold,’’ which has a similar effect of mixing literal-minded and transcendental interpretations of the
experience. Throughout the story, Anderson offers such a dual perspective— romanticizing his plain subject
matter and de-romanticizing it at once.

Like the woman, the narrator’s rendition of her story is transformed from something simple and crude into
something transcendent and beautiful. He recognizes right off that the experience has the makings of a good
story—‘‘something to tell. A boy did not get such a chance very often.’’

However, he also cannot tell it completely—in a way he considers authentic and therefore beautiful— until he
has matured. And this, like the woman’s transformation, is not a matter of uncovering objective truth, but of
seeing in the crude and commonplace glimpses of beauty.

The narrator needed to wait to tell her story in order to reconstruct it, ‘‘like music hear from far off,’’ from
a combination of observation, hearsay, and empathetic conjecture. In his viewing of her dead body and his
retelling of her story, the ‘‘real’’ beauty that is found is not objective, but created in the eye and
imagination of the beholder.

While Anderson has sometimes been denigrated as a ‘‘primitive’’ artist—vivid but naive in his
representations of simple subject matter—‘‘Death in the Woods’’ reveals his degree of self-consciousness
and artistic control. In this story, one of the strongest works of his later career, he can be seen as reflecting on
his artistic process.

Through his narrator—a mature man fictionalizing a formative experience from his youth— Anderson reveals
something about his own relationship to the simple people who populate his fiction. Amidst the crude and
commonplace Anderson perceives mystery, and uses his art to transform the life stories of those who are
‘‘nothing special’’ into things of beauty.

Source: Sarah Madsen Hardy, Short Stories for Students, Gale, 2000.

The Reader as Voyeur: Complicitous Transformations in
"Death in the Woods"

Like most writers Sherwood Anderson was vitally concerned with the workings of the imagination and the
creation of art. For Anderson, these concerns were also inextricably linked to questions of personal salvation.
In letters to his son John, himself a painter, Anderson asserted that ‘‘The object of art . . . is to save
yourself’’: ‘‘Self is the grand disease. It is what we are all trying to lose’’ (Letters). Given Anderson’s
faith in the redemptive possibilities of art, it is not surprising that the writer frequently compared ‘‘literary

The Reader as Voyeur: Complicitous Transformations in "Death in the Woods"


[and nonliterary] composition to the experience of pregnancy and deliverance, and also to the poles of
maleness and femaleness in life’’ (Letters). One letter composed three years before the author’s death well
illustrates Anderson’s understanding of the problematic nature of such ‘‘deliverance’’:

The trouble with the creative impulse . . . is that it tends to lift you up too high into a sort of
drunkenness and then drop you down too low. There is an artist lurking in every man. The
high spots for the creative man come too seldom. He is like a woman who has been put on her
back and made pregnant, but even after he gets the seed in him, he has to carry it a long time
before anything comes out. (Letters)

If, as Anderson claims, ‘‘There is an artist lurking in every man,’’ so, also, did the writer believe that there
is a woman ‘‘lurking’’ in every artist. Indeed, the image of the male artist whose ‘‘lurking’’ burden is the
female within is depicted repeatedly in the correspondence, perhaps nowhere more explicitly than in a letter
Anderson sent late in life to his mother-in-law, Laura Lou Copenhaver: ‘‘There is a woman hidden away in
every artist. Like the woman he becomes pregnant. He gives birth. When the children of his world are spoken
of rudely or, through stupidity, not understood, there is a hurt that anyone who has not been pregnant, who has
not given birth, will never understand’’ (Letters).

The assumptions ‘‘hidden away’’ within such assertions are easily gleaned from letters in which Anderson
frankly acknowledges his ‘‘old-fashioned’’ views about men and women. In another letter to his son John,
Anderson admitted, ‘‘I do not believe that, at bottom, they [women] have the least interest in art. What their
lover gives to work they cannot get’’ (Letters). As a result, the writer held that the sole ‘‘high spot’’
available for women to experience in life is childbirth. To be sure, Anderson understood that the biological
impulse also moves man, but, as he makes clear in letters to his male friends, the love of woman ‘‘isn’t
enough for an eager man’’: ‘‘No woman could ever be in herself what we want or think we want’’
(Letters). Thus, whereas woman’s destiny is circumscribed by biology, man’s destiny transcends the purely
physical and finds consummate expression only in the creation of art. As Anderson explained to Dwight
MacDonald in 1929:

There is no purpose other than the artist’s purpose and the purpose of the woman. The artist
purposes to bring to life, out of the . . . hidden form in lives, nature, things, the living form as
women purpose doing that out of their lovely bodies.

The artist there[fore] is your only true male. . . . (Letters)

The ‘‘tru[ly] male’’ quality of Anderson’s artistic imagination and of his polarized worldview is forcefully
represented in his short stories and novels, as well as in his letters and memoirs. Indeed, to speak of woman’s
destiny in the context of Anderson’s fiction is to call to mind what is undoubtedly one of the master
storyteller’s most disturbing tales, ‘‘Death in the Woods.’’ Written at the ‘‘peak of his [creative]
powers’’ (Howe), ‘‘Death in the Woods’’ has provoked a varied critical response, ranging from
interpretations that see the tale much as Anderson claims he did, as a biological allegory depicting woman as
feeder, to more recent interpretations that focus less upon the plight of the old farm woman and more upon the
narrative consciousness that constructs her story. This shift of focus has led several critics to conclude that
‘‘Death in the Woods’’ is ‘‘a story about the creation of a story’’ (Joselyn; see also Robinson), hence
Anderson’s many attempts to unveil the mechanics of the creative process through the workings of the tale’s
narrative center, an older man who looks back to one scene from his childhood out of which he will spin his
yarn. To borrow from the title Anderson gave to his first published memoir, ‘‘Death in the Woods’’ has
been increasingly viewed as ‘‘a story teller’s story.’’ As Wilfred Guerin argues, ‘‘It is a story about how
fragments become a whole and have meaning, partly through the workings of the unconscious, partly through
the conscious memory.’’

The Reader as Voyeur: Complicitous Transformations in "Death in the Woods"


That there exists an intricate bond connecting the ‘‘real story’’ (‘‘Death’’) of an old woman’s life and
death and the ‘‘creating’’ consciousness who narrates her tale has long been acknowledged. Critics have
also observed that the relationship between narrator and reader is similarly complex. As early as 1959, Jon
Lawry astutely perceived that the narrator’s tortuous labors to give meaning to the death he describes are
offered as both an interpretative and experiential model for the reader of ‘‘Death in the Woods’’ to follow:
‘‘The audience is invited to enter as individuals into a process almost identical with that of the narrator. . . .
to share directly not only the narrator’s responses but his act of discovering and creating those responses.’’
What few critics have since examined, although both Lawry and William Scheick point toward the issue, are
the implicatory bonds that result when the reader blindly accepts this enticing invitation; for if the reader
succumbs to the narrator’s interpretative wiles, he becomes enmeshed in a web of guilt that connects him not
only with the ‘‘I’’/eye of the tale but also with the other men and boys in the woods who pruriently feed
upon the body of a dead woman. By further exploring the peculiar design of this web, I hope to illumine the
obsessive concern evidenced in this short story with the process of reading and making meaning. This is of
course the very experience that Anderson’s reader must also enact if the story is to be grasped, as the narrator
himself claims to have done, as an aesthetic whole: ‘‘A thing so complete has its own beauty.’’

Several critics have noted the somewhat unorthodox alternation of tenses that operates throughout ‘‘Death in
the Woods,’’ as in the first paragraph of the story: ‘‘She was an old woman and lived on a farm near the
town in which I lived. All country and small-town people have seen such old women, but no one knows much
about them. Such an old woman comes into town driving an old worn-out horse or she comes afoot carrying a
basket.’’ Although critics differ as to the effects of such shifts, many would agree with Guerin’s explanation
that ‘‘In this and in the second paragraph of the story the historical present tense of the verbs makes clear the
timeless quality of the regularity of such old women and their doings.’’ Diverting the reader’s attention from
the particular to the general, from the life of one old woman to the experience of ‘‘such old women,’’ the
narrator strives to ‘‘universalize’’ his story in a timeless setting by removing the ‘‘she’’ of his opening
description from history and by granting himself the authority to speak of ‘‘all country and small-town
people’’ in categorical terms. Such ahistorical maneuvering complements another effect of this passage that
no critic has yet observed: ‘‘Death in the Woods’’ begins much like a fairy tale. Further, any reader who
reflects upon the tales passed on in childhood may note a slight echo here with one of our culture’s most
famous allegories of female feeding, the Mother Goose story of the old woman who lived in a shoe. In
addition, the reader may come to see Anderson’s narrative as cautionary, particularly if other tales of wolves,
women, and dark woods come to mind. From this initial description then the reader comes to two important
realizations. First, the frame in which the ‘‘Death in the Woods’’ occurs is both fanciful and remote, a
timeless realm that suggestively resonates with the surreal landscape of children’s stories. Second, the reader
learns that the tale is not to be interpreted simply as the narrative of an isolated farm woman but rather as a
fiction that has universal implications. After all, one of the first statements the narrator makes about the old
woman is that she is ‘‘nothing special.’’

Having been thus directed toward the ostensible subject of the story, the reader soon finds that the
interpretative process is effectively impeded by obtrusive references the narrator makes concerning his own
past. Indeed, in the opening section of ‘‘Death in the Woods,’’ the reader learns almost as much about the
narrator’s childhood as about the plight of old country women. Interestingly, the narrator’s allusions to his
past closely resemble the boyhood recollections set forth in Anderson’s memoirs; yet, despite the similarities
that seem to link the storyteller with his tale, Anderson himself ‘‘persistent[ ly]’’ interpreted the narrative
of Mrs. Jake Grimes in thematic, not autobiographical, terms:

In a note for an anthology Anderson wrote that ‘‘the theme of the story is the persistent
animal hunger of man. There are these women who spend their whole lives, rather dumbly,
feeding this hunger. . . . [The story’s aim] is to retain the sense of mystery in life while
showing at the same time, at what cost our ordinary animal hungers are sometimes fed.’’
(Howe)

The Reader as Voyeur: Complicitous Transformations in "Death in the Woods"


Anderson’s reading is a superb illustration of what John Berger calls critical mystification—‘‘the process of
explaining away what might otherwise be evident’’—for as Irving Howe noted more than thirty years ago,
this interpretation is ‘‘apt, though limited. . . . Anderson could hardly have failed to notice that the story may
be read as an oblique rendering of what he believed to be the central facts about his mother’s life: a silent
drudgery in the service of men, an obliteration of self to feed their ‘persistent animal hunger,’ and then
death.’’ Regardless of the limits of Anderson’s analysis, one fact is clear: Anderson, like his narrator, is
trying to steer critics of ‘‘Death in the Woods’’ away from the realm of history—from the varying records of
a writer’s conflicted relationship with his mother—to the hallowed domain of myth. Having fastened upon a
presumably ‘‘safe’’ and unalterable interpreD tation of his story, Anderson thereby avoids public
confrontation with painful memories of his childhood.

How painful those memories were is suggested in several of Anderson’s more revealing letters. Of these,
perhaps none more poignantly illustrates the writer’s anguished ties to his past than one addressed but never
mailed to Paul Rosenfeld. Given the highly personal nature of its contents, it is easy to see why Anderson
chose not to post it; for far more than a simple communication to a friend, this lengthy letter represents an
aging artist’s ‘‘effort to justify’’ his politics and clarify his ‘‘obligation’’ as a writer (Letters). Of
primary importance to Anderson in 1936 was his relationship with the proletariat, a relationship that led the
writer to remember the tedious ‘‘hopelessness’’ of his mother’s struggles to support her family:

You must remember that I saw my own mother sicken and die from overwork. I have myself been through the
mill. I have worked month after month in factories, for long hours daily, have known the hopelessness of
trying to escape. I have seen my own mother stand all day over a washtub, washing the dirty linen of
pretentious middle-class women not fit to tie her shoelaces, this just to get her sons enough food to keep them
alive, and I presume I shall never in my life see a working woman without identifying her with my mother.
(Letters)

Several points immediately emerge from this passage. First, Anderson sees a significant portion of his own
adult experience as closely resembling his mother’s. As members of the working class, they have both
‘‘been through the mill.’’ Second, this excerpt obliquely suggests how much their lives diverged, for,
unlike his mother, Anderson ‘‘escaped’’ and rose out of his class to enjoy a successful career as a writer.
That he did so, he implies, is in some part a testament to his mother’s decision to sacrifice herself ‘‘just to
get her sons enough food to keep them alive.’’ Not surprisingly, a legacy of unresolved guilt still haunts the
writer. Anderson avoided his mother’s fate, it seems, precisely because he chose another course; for
Anderson, self came first. Indeed, the proliferation of I’s in this passage points toward the egocentric nature
of his interests. In short, Anderson as artist is evidently more enthralled by his own vision of martyred
motherhood than by the grim particulars of his mother’s impoverished existence, hence the heavy reliance
upon varying forms of the verb ‘‘to see’’ in the passage above: ‘‘I saw,’’ ‘‘I have seen,’’ ‘‘I shall
never . . . see.’’

This shift of focus away from the mother and toward the artist parallels the narrative stratagems employed in
the opening section of ‘‘Death in the Woods.’’ Here the narrator also moves quickly to guide the reader’s
attention away from his apparent subject, an old farm woman, to what is ultimately his larger
concern—himself. Particularly jarring is the narrator’s first substantial digression concerning the liver he was
forced to eat as a child, a digression that interrupts his account of what old women do when they come to
town:

Such an old woman . . . takes [eggs] to a grocer. There she trades them in. . . .

Afterwards she goes to the butcher’s and asks for some dog-meat. Formerly the butchers
gave liver to anyone who wanted to carry it away. In our family we were always having it.
Once one of my brothers got a whole cow’s liver at the slaughterhouse near the fair grounds

The Reader as Voyeur: Complicitous Transformations in "Death in the Woods"


in our town. We had it until we were sick of it. It never cost a cent. I have hated the thought
of it ever since.

Clearly, this is a narrator who needs close watch, for as such digressions multiply, the reader becomes
increasingly fascinated not with the ‘‘real story’’ of an old woman’s death but rather with the peculiar
manner in which her story is told. This first digression is peculiar enough, suggesting as it does a puerile
hostility on the narrator’s part toward his past as well as the bonds of poverty and sickness that bridge the
narrator’s memories of his childhood with the experience of ‘‘nameless’’ country women. At this juncture,
the narrator also reveals that when he first noticed the woman he soon identifies as Mrs. Jake Grimes, he
himself was literally sick in bed with ‘‘inflammatory rheumatism,’’ a statement that takes on added
significance when he subsequently remarks that Mrs. Grimes had journeyed to town even though ‘‘she
hadn’t been feeling very well for several days . . . .’’ Given the vehemence of these boyhood reflections, the
reader might justifi- ably wonder at this point if the ‘‘inflammatory’’ child has ever fully recovered, for as
the unpredictable narrator continues to weave his tale, the reader begins to sense that this man is still none too
well.

Following this unsettling digression, the narrator sketches the rough outlines of Mrs. Grimes’s life. Through
him we learn that in her youth she worked as a ‘‘bound girl’’ for a German farming couple: ‘‘At the
German’s place she . . . cooked the food for the German and his wife. . . . She fed them and fed the cows in
the barn, fed the pigs, the horses and the chickens. Every moment of everyday, as a young girl, was spent
feeding something.’’ That her life was neither one of ease nor happiness becomes plain when the narrator
discloses that the ‘‘young thing’’ was sexually abused, perhaps raped, by her employer. Interestingly,
however, the reader’s knowledge of the bound girl’s life is unstable, for the narrator evidences uncertainty
concerning the particulars of her story. Thus, in the opening section of ‘‘Death in the Woods,’’ the narrator
first hesitantly supposes that the young girl was ‘‘bound’’—‘‘You see, the farmer was up to something
with the girl— she was, I think, a bound girl . . .’’—whereas only shortly afterwards he claims that he knows
the woman was so: ‘‘I remember now that she was a bound girl and did not know where her father and
mother were.’’ Such wavering causes the reader to question the narrator’s confidence in the truth of the tale
he says he has only ‘‘suddenly’’ remembered: ‘‘I have just suddenly now, after all these years,
remembered her and what happened. It is a story.’’ By calling attention in this way to the manipulative
possibilities of narration, Anderson directs his audience to larger questions concerning the nature of
‘‘story’’ telling. As Mary Joselyn observes, ‘‘the fact that [Anderson] goes out of his way several times to
tell us that the story might have been told . . . differently is important, for these statements emphasize that the
process of creation is essentially one of choice and of selection.’’

The role that choice plays in the shaping of fiction is stressed on several occasions in ‘‘Death in the
Woods’’ when the narrator returns to scenes or conversations that he has previously described. In the
opening section of the story, the narrator records two conversations that take place between the bound girl and
Jake Grimes, another employee on the German couple’s farm. Although the conversations are not identical,
the subject of these talks is: both focus upon the sexual abuse that the young girl allegedly suffered on the
farm. The narrator first recounts that before Jake became the bound girl’s lover, she confided in him that
‘‘when the wife had to go off to town for supplies, the farmer got after her. She told young Jake that nothing
really ever happened, but he didn’t know whether to believe it or not.’’ Between this and a later dialogue
occurs a fight involving the German and his hired hand, which the narrator delightfully describes: ‘‘They
had it out all right! The German was a tough one. Maybe he didn’t care whether his wife knew or not.’’ In
the midst of this passage, the reader gradually realizes that the narrator could not possibly know all the details
he provides of the scene, for there were no witnesses to the brawl. Indeed, the narrator himself seems aware of
this problem when he parenthetically inserts: ‘‘(I wonder how I know all this. It must have stuck in my mind
from smalltown tales when I was a boy).’’ Following this admission, the reader learns of the conversation
that takes place after the fight when Jake finds his lover ‘‘huddled up . . . crying, [and] scared to death.’’
Now, however, the narrator’s phrasing suggests that the bound girl’s ‘‘stories’’ are not to be believed:

The Reader as Voyeur: Complicitous Transformations in "Death in the Woods"


‘‘She told Jake a lot of stuff, how the German had tried to get her, how he chased her once into the barn, how
another time . . . he tore her dress open clear down the front.’’ The narrator’s unwillingness to grant the
woman any degree of credibility in either of these confessions is further emphasized when he reveals that Jake
Grimes ‘‘got her pretty easy himself, the first time he was out with her,’’ an assertion that may once again
lead the reader to wonder how the narrator can possibly ‘‘know all this.’’

What Anderson himself knows of course is how to construct a story, a story that, as its narrative voice
becomes increasingly assured, causes the reader to question any interpretation offered concerning the meaning
of the life and death of Mrs. Jake Grimes. Indeed, as the description of the fight scene suggests, the narrator
identifies himself less with the plight of the ‘‘young thing’’ who is ‘‘scared to death’’ than with the men
who are able to bind such women to their will. This is, moreover, not the only occasion in which the narrator
reveals his sympathy with brutal forms of masculine expression, as is evident in the second section of the
story when Mrs. Grimes makes her last trip to the butcher’s:

she went to the butcher and he gave her some liver and dog-meat.

It was the first time anyone had spoken to her in a friendly way for a long time. The butcher
was alone in his shop when she came in and was annoyed by the thought of such a
sick-looking old woman out on such a day. . . . [He] said something about her husband and
her son, swore at them, and the old woman stared at him, a look of mild surprise in her eyes
as he talked. He said that if either the husband or the son were going to get any of the liver or
the heavy bones with scraps of meat hanging to them that he had put into the grain bag, he’d
seen him [ sic ] starve first.

In spite of the narrator’s tacit assumption that his audience will see this interchange as positive, many readers
imagining this encounter might question how ‘‘friendly’’ such a conversation would appear to a woman
grown accustomed to ‘‘the habit of silence’’ who suddenly finds her family being sworn at and threatened
by a man she hardly knows.

Immediately following this passage, the narrator depicts the death that has been anticipated since the opening
lines of the story. In this middle section of the narrative, the old woman starts her journey home. Laden with a
sack of provisions too heavy for her, Mrs. Grimes decides to take ‘‘a short cut over a hill and through the
woods. . . . She was afraid she couldn’t make it’’ otherwise. In the midst of her ‘‘struggle’’ home, the old
woman ‘‘foolish[ly]’’ allows herself to rest against a tree and ‘‘quietly’’ falls into a sleep from which she
never completely awakes. The interest in the ‘‘strange picture’’ her death presents lies with the several dogs
that are ‘‘running in circles. . . . round and round’’ her sleeping form: ‘‘In the clearing, under the
snow-laden tree and under the wintry moon they made a strange picture, running thus silently in a circle their
running had beaten in the soft snow.’’ At this point, the narrator shocks the reader by disclosing that he also
has been part of a similarly ‘‘strange picture’’: ‘‘I knew all about it afterward, when I grew to be a man,
because once in the woods in Illinois, on another winter night, I saw a pack of dogs act just like that. The dogs
were waiting for me to die as they had waited for the old woman that night when I was a child . . . .’’ Like
most critics, Jon Lawry dismisses this revelation as fictive, suggesting that Anderson is striving to unveil the
‘‘negative capability’’ necessary to the artist. According to Lawry, even the narrator knows that at this
moment he is telling tales. Evidence in the memoirs, however, suggests that the adventure in the Illinois
forests may be interpreted less figuratively; for the experience the narrator records seems modeled on a
‘‘strange performance’’ Anderson himself claims to have witnessed when, as a young man, he awoke to
find himself encircled by a pack of dogs:

In the forest on the winter night dogs kept leaving the mysterious circle in which they ran and
coming to me. Other dogs ran up the log to put their forelegs on my chest and stare into my
face. It seemed to me, that night, that they were caught by something. They had become a

The Reader as Voyeur: Complicitous Transformations in "Death in the Woods"


wolf pack. . . .

That there was such a thing as man, that they were the servants of man, that they were really
dogs not wolves in a primitive world. That night I stood the strange performance as long as I
could and then I arose and ran. . . . I shouted. I . . . picked up a s