Over Her Dead Body: Sherwood Anderson’s “The Man Who Became a Woman” and “Death in the Woods”

Year 2005, Issue: 21, 17 - 25, 01.04.2005

Nilsen Gökçen Nazmi Ağıl

Abstract

The most poetic of all subjects, according to Edgar Allan Poe, is “the death of a beautiful woman.” Likewise, in Sherwood Anderson's stories, “The Man Who Became a Woman” and “Death in the Woods,” the death of the female body provides the impetus for the young male artist's initiation. Both narrators in these stories perpetuate the patriarchal equation of art and culture with the male and present initiation into manhood and artistic creativity—storytelling in this case—not only as complementary and interchangeable but also as an epic quest. The “hero” faces two female archetypes to conquer: In “The Man Who Became a Woman” the sorceress, the lover, who bewitches and seduces men with her sexual prowess, has to be surmounted whereas in “Death in the Woods” the mother archetype has to be slain. The former story deals with a private experience; the narrator's quest is directed at purging the woman out of himself and joining the fraternity among men. To achieve this firstly, an externalization of the woman that resides in the male psyche is required. Secondly, once the woman has been made “the other,” she can easily be subordinated to the service of man-kind reducing her to her functions only as mother and feeder. In the latter story, a radical purgative act, however, has to follow; the mother must be expelled from the collective consciousness so that the social “umbilical cord” could be broken off completely. Thus, taken together, the two stories provide a pattern for the epic of man’s mastery over woman.

References

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