27 pages • 54 minutes read
Sherwood AndersonDeath in the Woods
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1924A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Biographical Context: Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson is best known for his collection of short stories Winesburg, Ohio, in which each story centers around a character or characters from his fictional rural town. Many of the characters know each other and appear in multiple stories, sharing the intimate hopes and dreams of Winesburg’s inhabitants in a changing world. Anderson drew on his experiences of living in different parts of the Midwest, especially small towns, when he was younger. Many of his characters are variations of real people and real events, and their experiences serve as the foundation for his stories. The characters serve as an “Everymen,” intended to represent stock characters with whom the audience can identify. The bulk of the American population at the time of Anderson’s writing of “Death in the Woods” (1933) was white and not centralized in large urban areas. The Dust Bowl had just decimated much of the farmland to the west of Ohio, and the ramifications of that environmental disaster could be felt across the country.
Anderson grew up the youngest of seven children in a modest household in rural Ohio, and he worked odd jobs throughout his youth to help provide for the family. In his young adulthood, he proved a talented writer and sought lucrative work as an ad executive in Chicago, but he soon returned to Ohio to write literature. The narrator of “Death in the Woods” was inspired by his own perspective as a youth, including his distrust of his older brother’s perspective on the events that transpired.
Anderson was a modernist in the vein of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, his contemporaries in the period between World War I and World War II. His prose is economical but nearly entirely symbolic, and he explores the effects of the industrial revolution in the aftermath of the Great War.
Sociohistorical Context: Gender Roles in the Early 20th Century
The push for women’s rights had been an ongoing social reform movement for decades by the time Anderson published “Death in the Woods,” but the character of the “old woman” seems to exist in a part of America where those rights hadn’t quite reached. A significant historical moment for women’s rights was directly after World War I, when many women had to leave the jobs they took over for their spouses fighting overseas. This was clear evidence to a male-dominated society that women could do anything that a man could do. By the end of that decade, women would achieve the right to vote. Still, women had a long battle ahead for liberation.
The old woman, eventually named Mrs. Grimes, represents the “crone” part of the “maiden/mother/crone” trope in folklore and literature. Best represented by the three fates in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the crone is often the most mysterious and feared of the three sisters because she is the wisest and least subject to anyone’s control. Mrs. Grimes is forced into a safer and more familiar cast, treated as a lower-class citizen from the moment she is born, given up by her mother and treated as an indentured servant in her youth due to her status as an orphan. Her hand is taken for marriage by yet another male figure who will only continue to mistreat her. To these men, she is merely a tool that feeds the mouths of those around her. This lack of agency and self-identity is the same that will haunt women throughout the century, as Betty Friedan will highlight it in her 1960s examination of domestication in America, The Feminine Mystique. Friedan outlines how dissatisfying the feminine role was, which was simply to function as a support for the men in the family, much as Mrs. Grimes does in “Death in the Woods.”
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