Death in the Woods
Sherwood Anderson
The narrative voice is a key feature of Anderson’s strange tale of the old
Grimes woman and her death. He repeatedly says that she is a typical old
woman, most people would know ‘such old women’ and that she ‘was
nothing special’. Yet he tells her story in such a close and detailed way that
it goes beyond what the storyteller could possibly know. In life as in death,
the old woman exists in a bleak, hard world, the deprived world of rural
America which the narrator remembers from his boyhood.
A Life of Abuse
Her entire history is recalled as one of use and abuse, first a ‘bound girl’,
essentially an unpaid servant, to a German farmer. As the narrator says,
‘bound children were often enough cruelly treated… slaves really’. The
farmer also subjects her to sexual advances. Though she escapes with
Jake Grimes, the narrator’s language presents her as a commodity – Jake
‘got his wife off a German farmer’, as if she is some kind of goods, and ‘He
got her pretty easy himself’, as if her sex too is just something to be
gained. The first part of the narrative ends with two men fighting for their
claims over her. The picture emerges of a very male-dominated world
where women are chattels.
Although freed form the German farmer, the second section shows that
life has not improved enormously for her. This part focuses on her role as
a supplier of food – if her drunken husband comes home and finds there is
no food in the house, he ‘gave his old woman a cut over the head’. She has
had a life of feeding; she ‘fed the pigs, the horses and the chickens’ and
now Jake Grimes ‘had to be fed.’ At the end of the section, the narrator
emphasises this in a paragraph comprising just a telling single sentence
fragment: ‘Horses, cows, pigs, dogs, men.’ Though a male narrator, and a
male author, this list plainly equates men with animals and puts them last.
It is, though, the butcher who takes pity on her, speaking to her in ‘a
friendly way’ and slipping some extras into her bag, explicitly for her rather
than her husband or son.
The Death Ceremony
It is in the third, central part that the narrator describes the old woman’s
death, which he narrates in detail despite there being no witnesses. There
is something soft and almost dreamlike about the scene as she sits to rest
by a tree, ‘closed her eyes’ and ‘slept for a time’ while snow falls and the
moon emerges. While dangerous, the language choices suggest
tranquillity, though there is a tone of ominousness in the dogs which have
followed her, as ‘some old instinct, down from the time when they were
wolves and ranged the woods in packs on Winter nights, comes back to
them.’ But in the narrator’s telling, or his imagination, the dogs are no
threat to her. They are the dogs she has spent her time feeding and in a
bizarre ritual, they ‘run in circles’ around her ‘under the snow-laden trees
and under the wintry moon’, making ‘no sound’. In the paragraph, ‘circle’ is
repeated three times, and ‘round’ or ‘around’ four times, the patterns of
repetition in Anderson’s language mimetic of the movement of the dogs.
He describes this movement as a ‘death ceremony’. The style of this
section is interesting, as the narrator mixes certain, detailed narration with
assumptions and guesswork, with phrases like ‘It may have been…’ and
‘Her dreams couldn’t have been…’ and he claims he has his own
understanding about the behaviour of dogs in such a situation, having
once witnessed dogs ‘waiting for me to die’. He does not elaborate, but it
gives some grounds for his ability to reconstruct the scene of the old
woman’s death. Her death is described using the same soft language as
the scene-setting; she ‘died softly and quietly.’ The stripped-back style
returns, however, with the acknowledgment that the butcher’s gift made
her pack ‘a big haul for the old woman’ and again an isolated sentence: ‘It
was a big haul for the dogs now.’
It is men who find the body in the fourth section, including the narrator
and his brother. The woman has been transformed, seen as ‘the body of
some charming young girl’ and ‘a beautiful young girl’ by the man who
stumbles across her first. In death she has been paradoxically
transformed. The narrator too has ‘some strange mystical feeling’ and
comments that the ‘frozen flesh’ made her ‘look so white and lovely’.
Telling a Story
The story’s final section is about story-telling; it questions the narrative,
pieces it together and tries to determine the point of it. This part is mainly
made up of short paragraphs as the narrator examines his own experience
and the old woman’s story – the short paragraphs are rather like the
‘fragments’ of the story he puts together. It seems his reconstruction has
come partly from such ‘fragments’ and ‘notes’ and partly from his own
experiences, not only of dogs, but of meeting a girl on a farm owned by a
German, and a visit to Mrs Grimes’ derelict house. Some of the elements
of the story have come from the narrator’s own imagination and the ‘real
story I am now trying to tell’ is therefore as much about himself as it is
about the old woman. Even in the final paragraph, where he acknowledges
again his dissatisfaction with his brother’s version of the story years ago, it
is still not quite clear what it means to him, though he is ‘impelled to try to
tell the simple story over again.’
Narrative methods to consider:
First person narration
Self-conscious narrative
Unreliable narrator
Structure