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.
Themes
Alienation and Isolation in a Post-Industrial World
Sherwood Anderson began writing at a time when the effects of the Industrial Revolution were in full swing. Cities across the country grew denser as more people moved to take advantage of job opportunities. Meanwhile, there were those that were slowly being left behind, primarily in smaller towns all over America. The Dust Bowl had decimated the financial stronghold of once-lucrative farming families. The people in these communities struggled to find their place in this new world. Stuck between the slow-paced life of traditions and the fast-paced world of economic growth, coupled with the dearth of jobs in these areas between the Great Depression and the New Deal, people of rural 1930s America struggled to find their footing.
Mrs. Grimes, the old woman in “Death in the Woods,” is a grotesque of pre-Industrial, small-town tradition, and while the rest of the world is becoming more progressive, she is mired in past traditional roles of domestication and subservience. While she is “sickly” with stooped shoulders, she treks long distances every day to serve the needs of those in her care, implying that the weight of all the men relying on her is too much for the woman to bear. Even the dogs she cares for treat her body as an object of sustenance after her death, and they comment that she has been the only thing keeping them domesticated by feeding them. Without her, they revert to their wolf-like nature.
Orphaned and treated as an object her whole life, Mrs. Grimes dies alone in the woods, and the only reason she is found is because a hunter rushes to help assuming she is “a beautiful young girl” (Part 4, Paragraph 9). Men gather for what they assume is a nude maiden with “white bare young-looking shoulders” (Part 5, Paragraph 1). Their reaction to her actual age is repeatedly described as “mystified,” as though the woman’s identity and utility could not possibly embody the maiden and crone at once. The men’s ambivalence to Mrs. Grime’s death, and the fact that it takes days to both discover her body and identify who she is, shows her isolation and the difficult, dangerous predicament of rural women in industrial America.
Animals Versus Humans
Humans are considered the top of the food chain when it comes to evolution, but society is often reminded of the primitive behaviors in which humanity engages. In “Death in the Woods,” animals have elevated importance over humans. To Mrs. Grimes, her own role is to feed those around her, and she does this consistently throughout her life. When her husband comes home from being away and demands food, she must immediately take care of his needs by killing a chicken and using it for a meal. She also realizes the economics of the issue, that food today may mean no food tomorrow, as she has one less hen to lay eggs in this case. When confronted by the lack of care others treat her, her only concern is to feed others, to which she lists all the farm animals’ needs before that of men. She may be subservient to her husband, but she still values the animals more than him, because at least they provide sustenance while the men in her life simply take from her.
Readers also see a respect for the animal world during the old woman’s death. The dogs that have been subservient to her and the family begin to circle around in front of her in a sort of ritualistic death ceremony. Here, the animals are respectful, and they wait until she passes on to steal her food from her. As she dies, they beg her to remain alive, implying that she is the bastion that keeps them civilized and without her they will revert to their baser instincts.
The dog’s response to Mrs. Grimes’s death contrasts with the way she is treated by the men in her life, who seem to embody their baser instincts even while she is alive. She is expected to have food on the table for her husband, and when she doesn’t, he gives “his old woman a cut over the head” (Part 2, Paragraph 8). She is therefore forced to scramble for food, having to slaughter an animal that she was preserving for potential food in the future, disrupting the natural order.
The Writer’s Process
Readers are given a glimpse of the writer’s process through the inner dialogues the narrator shares during his retelling of the story of the old woman’s death. Anderson does this in two ways, one through the narrator’s story and one through the way he tells the story himself.
Through first-person narration we learn about the old woman in a Midwestern small town and a little about the people who live there. Throughout the story, the narrator tells us what he wants us to know about first rather than in the chronological order of many stories, and this includes his own boyhood memories. In this way, the narrator elevates his own experience of Mrs. Grimes’s death above her experience, further objectifying her as a vessel for the use of men.
Readers are led through the town in which the narrator grew up. The narrator shares what he has learned about it through his experience seeing the old woman’s corpse. There are many portions of the story that he could not possibly know about, such as what the old woman was thinking as she was dying, or the actions of the dogs as they circled in front of her, or much of her past. Instead, he gives us hints that he is intentionally filling in the spaces to tell a form of the story: He points out to the reader that it’s a story, and as such is a pastiche of truth and fiction. He has created a story out of some facts he learned over time, and has exaggerated or even fabricated some details to emphasize his point that the “naked girlish-looking figure” was “destined to feed animal life” (Part 5, Paragraphs 8, 13), even after death, offering a bleak outlook that women have gone underappreciated and may remain so.
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