The Explicator, Vol. 70, No. 4, 283–290, 2012 C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Copyright  ISSN: 0014-4940 print / 1939-926X online DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2012.727899

S. SELINA JAMIL Prince George’s Community College

Wing Biddlebaum’s Grotesqueness Keywords: Sherwood Anderson, fragmented identity, grotesque, materialism, mechanical, patriarchy

Sherwood Anderson’s “Hands,” the first story in Winesburg, Ohio, depicts the plight of a nervous and alienated individual, Wing Biddlebaum, who now lives in Winesburg, Ohio, but who also lived in a town in Pennsylvania twenty years before as Adolph Myers. The man of the present, then, is the man of the past. But has not his identity changed so that Adolph Myers has become Wing Biddlebaum? Nevertheless, because his memories of a traumatizing event haunt him, as his nervous, trembling hands demonstrate, and because the suppressed attributes of Adolph Myers emerge occasionally, the man of the past and the man of the present are not two different individuals. As a “grotesque,” Wing Biddlebaum wishes to bottle or forget the past; but as his uncontrollably shaking hands betray, the past cannot be disconnected from the present (Anderson 10). I argue that the traumatized individual, who fragments his identity as he severs the past from the present, becomes a grotesque because he suppresses his androgynous individuality and surrenders to a mechanical world of materialism and patriarchy. Anderson depicts the protagonist’s fragmented identity through the suggestion of vulnerability from the beginning. Clearly, the protagonist, who walks nervously on “the half-decayed veranda of a small frame house that st[ands] near the edge of a ravine,” is half Wing Biddlebaum and half Adolph Myers (8). Just as the ravine symbolizes self-division, so does the “half-decayed” veranda. Further, the frame of the house represents Adolph Myers, the half which is covered and suppressed by the veneer, which represents the other half, Wing Biddlebaum. The alienated individual’s isolated house is small and fragile, for his human identity is on the point of

283

284

The Explicator

disintegration. Although, in Winesburg, Adolph Myers is the suppressed and “elusive” half (10), the protagonist has not completely “lost” this identity (11). But the symbolic sun is on the point of “departing,” and “a cloud of dust” is already obscuring it (8). For just as the precariously situated small and fragile house is in danger of collapsing into an abyss, so is the self-divided protagonist, who has become a grotesque. As Wing Biddlebaum, he is a “grotesque” who ignores his freedom of choice unthinkingly, and hence mechanically. Having escaped from his life in Pennsylvania, he has the freedom to make a fresh start in Winesburg. But as his house, which stands vertiginously near the edge of an abyss signifies, Wing Biddlebaum, who succumbs to anxiety and nervousness as he stands in dread of his freedom, reinforces Kierkegaard’s claim that “dread is the dizziness of freedom” (55). Choosing the name Biddlebaum from “a box of goods seen at a freight station” in Ohio (14), he boxes up his individuality and suppresses his “nature” (Anderson 12), thereby surrendering to the machine. As a grotesque, Wing Biddlebaum, who “go[es] timidly about and striv[es] to conceal his hands” in the presence of people, demonstrates Kierkegaard’s argument about guilty dread (14): “The individual in dread, not of becoming guilty, but of being regarded as guilty, becomes guilty” (67, emphasis in original). He is guilty of ignoring his freedom. Thus, “forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts,” he refuses to contemplate misperception (Anderson 9). If Adolph Myers, the suppressed half, emerges for a brief moment, “a look of horror swe[eps] over his face,” and he is reduced to “convuls[ion]” and “tears” (12). Indeed, the Wing has become boxed and biddlebaumed, just as the Adolph has become mired, for the trauma of the past spills into the present. Unable to control the trembling, Wing Biddlebaum, whom nobody forces to become “a day laborer in the fields,” allows his trembling hands, which engage in rapid movement and mechanical repetitiveness, to become machines (14): “With [ . . . his hands] Wing Biddlebaum had picked as high as a hundred and forty quarts of strawberries in a day” (10). In choosing to become Wing Biddlebaum in an effort to forget the past, the grotesque individual chooses the dominance of the machine. That is, with the machine has come self-suppression. For, as Wing Biddlebaum, he is stripped of his human identity. Clearly, he is synecdochically reduced to a pair of hands: “[The hands] made more grotesque an already grotesque and elusive individuality. Winesburg was proud of the hands of Wing Biddlebaum in the same spirit in which it was proud of Banker White’s new stone house and Wesley Moyer’s bay stallion,

Wing Biddlebaum’s Grotesqueness

285

Tony Tip” (10). Such is the dust-filled “cloud” of confusion that results from the absence of contemplativeness and compassion in this increasingly mechanical, dehumanizing world of modern materialism that, despite their crude condescension to Wing Biddlebaum, the people of Winesburg, as the ironic Anderson depicts their confused “spirit,” confer “fame” on him (10). They are so fascinated by his mechanical hands, which “attract[] attention merely because of their activity” but which play a curious role as one of Winesburg’s material possessions, that these hands become “his distinguishing feature” (10). In his fragmented condition, he has lost one of his wings to become, metonymically, a Wing. The “wings” meant for the individual’s unique creative flight of imagination and the celebration of freedom of choice now, ironically, are “beating [ . . . like] the wings of an imprisoned bird” (10). Hence he “beat[s]” the top board of a symbolic fence (with which he encloses himself) “like a giant woodpecker” and “shout[s]” at George (11). Indeed, as Anderson depicts the impact of industrialization early in the twentieth century, the only expression in this environment is that of the loud and harsh sounds associated with machines. These sounds reveal that a small Midwestern town is increasingly becoming industrialized and urbanized: “the rumble of the evening train that took away the express cars loaded with the day’s harvest of berries had passed and restored the silence” (15). Clearly, the train, which is equipped with “express cars,” represents mechanical “express[ion].” The silence, which is coupled with “darkness,” represents the absence of human self-expression; for the only “express[ion]” here is that of machines (15). Hence Wing Biddlebaum’s hands too have become “the piston rods of his machinery of expression” (10). And his fellow workers, who “laugh[] and shout[] boisterously,” find entertainment in the scene where a young man “attempt[s] to drag after him one of the maidens who scream[s] and protest[s] shrilly” (8). This curiously crude form of courtship, which is as insalubrious as the “cloud of dust” that crosses “the departing sun” and which reveals the patriarchal glorification of machismo, is followed by another example of crude entertainment: “Over the long field came a thin girlish voice. ‘Oh, you Wing Biddlebaum, comb your hair, it’s falling into your eyes,’ commanded the voice to the man, who was bald and whose nervous little hands fiddled about the bare white forehead as though arranging a mass of tangled locks” (8–9). In this “dust[y],” polluted physical world of crude jokes, humor is not expressive of wit but of the sarcasm of corporeal coarseness. In the coarse world of modern patriarchy and materialism, the impact of the machine is such that machismo, which leads to gross, crude prejudices,

286

The Explicator

becomes a virtue. The uniquely mild and “gentle” Adolph is dismissed as an effeminate man who must be reviled because he is rejected as unmanly (12). In the patriarchal culture of Winesburg, where courtship is understood as masculine control, a fellow worker ridicules Wing Biddlebaum for the latter’s demonstrative, emotionally charged hands because of the collective prejudice against him. But as Anderson ironically points out, the one who ridicules Wing Biddlebaum with his “thin, girlish voice” is himself emasculated. During his life in Pennsylvania, the men of his town, many of whom were the fathers of the male students he taught, take the words of a “halfwitted” homosexual child who misinterprets his teacher’s message of the individual’s need “to dream” and who thus wishes to realize his own literal dream, rush to condemn Adolph Myers because of their prejudice (13): “Hidden, shadowy doubts that had been in men’s minds concerning Adolph Myers were galvanized into beliefs” (13). So lethal is this prejudice that the men are ready to hang the schoolmaster. The culture values machismo so strongly that the men regard their “pit[y]” for Adolph as “their weakness,” and they “repent[]” letting him escape (14). Now, as Wing Biddlebaum, the protagonist who attempts to suppress his hands suppresses his individuality. But as Adolph Myers, Anderson’s protagonist is abundantly capable of nurturing self-expression. Hence he urges George Willard “to shut [ . . . his] ears to the roaring of the voices” and “to dream” so as to develop his human individuality: “You have the inclination to be alone and to dream and you are afraid of dreams. You want to be like the others in town here. You hear them talk and you try to imitate them” (11). Despite the ironic reference to Wing’s own fear of dreams, Anderson points out that such is the force of his spontaneous passion that “[o]ut of the dream Wing Biddlebaum ma[kes] a picture for George Willard. In the picture men live[] again in a kind of pastoral golden age” where “clean-limbed young men [.. .] gather about the feet of an old man” to hear his teachings (11). Earlier, as an exceptional schoolmaster, who “express[es] himself” through his soothing fingers, he inspires his pupils to rid themselves of “doubt and disbelief” (13). In Adolph Myers, whose idiosyncratic hands express his individuality, the spirit takes a concrete form: Here and there went his hands, caressing the shoulders of the boys, playing about the tousled heads. As he talked his voice became soft and musical. There was a caress in that also. In a way, the voice and the hands, the stroking of the shoulders and the touching

Wing Biddlebaum’s Grotesqueness

287

of the hair was a part of the schoolmaster’s effort to carry a dream into the young minds. (13) As a schoolmaster in the past, he shows his human identity, to borrow from Kierkegaard, as “a synthesis of the soulish and the bodily” (39). For, as a teacher, Anderson’s protagonist shows his human identity in his androgynous intuition. When his suppressed half emerges, his self-expression, which can even inspire George Willard into dreaming of the spiritual and emotional bliss that “clean-limbed young men” experience because of wise teachers, demonstrates an androgynous sensibility: “In their feeling for the boys under their charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men” (Anderson 12–13). Anderson’s image of men who resemble the “finer sort of women,” who do not confuse love with the sexual appetite and whose sensual proclivities are in tranquil conjunction with spiritual and emotional sensitivity, suggests the grounding of the human identity in a spiritual and emotional refinement that is expressive of an androgynous integrity. Anderson uses the idea of an androgynous integrity in other parts of Winesburg, Ohio as well. For instance, in “The Book of the Grotesque,” the writer, “like a pregnant woman,” carries a profoundly dynamic emotional and spiritual intuition inside him: “only that thing inside him was not a baby but a youth. No, it wasn’t a youth, it was a woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight” (4). Anderson also reinforces this theme of the androgynous disposition in “Tandy,” where the drunken stranger, who gives the name Tandy to “the quality of being strong to be loved” (129), a quality “men need from women,” and which the prologizing writer envisions as a knight-like female within him, urges Tom Hard’s little daughter, in whom the father “never” sees “God manifesting himself” (127), to “[b]e something more than man or woman” (130). To be “more than man or woman” is to develop the spiritual refinement that grows from an instinctive sense of the balance between masculine and feminine attributes, and thus to develop an androgynous individuality. But unlike the prologizing writer, who consciously nurtures his androgynous sensibility, Wing Biddlebaum suppresses it, while the stranger, who succumbs to alcohol, allows androgyny to elude him. In “The Strength of God,” Reverend Hartman, who is continually stirred by adulterous longings in his quest for God, and for whom Kate Swift’s “slim and strong” figure ultimately is like “the figure of the boy in the presence of the Christ on the leaded window” (139), claims that “God has manifested himself [ . . . ] in the body of a woman” (140). But just as the

288

The Explicator

drunken stranger’s words become “babbl[e]” (130), so Reverend Hartman’s words become “half incoherent[]” (139), for the androgynous disposition has no place in the corporeal world of patriarchy and materialism. In such a world, where machismo is a significant part of the culture, Wing/Adolph is tolerated only with condescension: “He was one of those rare, little-understood men who rule by a power so gentle that it passes as a lovable weakness” (12). Indeed, in the patriarchal society, where feminine qualities that Anderson identifies as subtle “power” are dismissed as “weak[],” Adolph Myers is wrongly accused of pedophilia. Here the saloon keeper celebrates his own masculinity by “roar[ing]” at his victim and by using his inflexible hands to beat out the schoolteacher’s distinctively androgynous self-expression (14): “As his hard knuckles beat down into the frightened face of the schoolmaster, his wrath became more and more terrible” (13–14). The saloon keeper’s corporeally conditioned hard knuckles are a clear contrast to Wing Biddlebaum’s “slender expressive fingers” that demonstrate the flexibility of the spiritually refined sensibility (10). The more he visualizes Adolph’s traumatized gentleness, the more he valorizes his own masculine fierceness; and the more he dehumanizes his victim, the more he dehumanizes himself, becoming increasingly mechanical. Not surprisingly, he reduces the children to the incoherence of dehumanization: “Screaming with dismay, the children ran here and there like disturbed insects” (14). Clearly, for the schoolteacher, whose mind is in harmony with his body, and whose hands reveal his androgynous individuality, the physical touch signifies the concretized emotional and spiritual touch. But for the saloon keeper, whose body dominates his mind and who consequently values machismo, the physical touch is the corporeal, sexual touch. As a member of the patriarchal society, where sexuality becomes a formidable weapon, he sees physical hands as the medium of control. But as Anderson depicts the culture of masculinity in this increasingly industrialized world of materialism, it is an expression of mechanical corporeality and crudity. Thus the saloon keeper mechanically, and hence mindlessly, beats the schoolmaster until he gets “tired of beating” (14). And thus Anderson vividly depicts the coarse corporeality of the patriarchal society, which frightens the androgynous individual into severing the connection between his masculine and feminine attributes, and thus into fragmenting his identity, as the impact of early-twentieth-century industrialization. Indeed, the brutal impact of this modern machismo on the individual is the grotesqueness of dehumanization. Thus, as a grotesque, the traumatized Wing Biddlebaum refuses to realize that to grasp the connection between the present and the past is to engage

Wing Biddlebaum’s Grotesqueness

289

in self-examination and self-knowledge. As Jean-Paul Sartre observes, “At its very source [ . . . the past] is bound to a certain present and to a certain future, to both of which it belongs” (163). But as Wing Biddlebaum stifles and bottles his androgynous identity, he tries to sever the connection between the past and the present. Consequently, he ignores, to borrow from Sartre, the “recollecting synthesis which stems from the present in order to maintain the contact with the past” (164). As he bottles Adolph Myers, his past identity, Wing Biddlebaum refuses to ponder and analyze the traumatic event of the past: “Although he did not understand what had happened he felt that the hands must be to blame” (14). Frightened by the saloon keeper’s violence, he accepts “blame” because he refuses to re-member the past, reinforcing Homi K. Bhabha’s claim that “[r]emembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present” (63). Thus he neglects his own potential, as the emblematic “yellow mustard weeds” suggest (Anderson 8). After the other berry pickers pass, Wing Biddlebaum, who goes “across the field through the tall mustard weeds” and “peer[s] anxiously along the road,” climbs the fence, but he dreads moving beyond that boundary (9). In refusing to overcome his “fear” and anxiety, and to take the symbolic “road,” he demonstrates that without self-examination and selfknowledge there is no self-awareness or self-discovery (9). In suppressing his past identity as a schoolteacher, Anderson’s protagonist suppresses selfawareness and self-discovery. Allowing himself to be “lost” in illusions, he refuses to “dream” toward a future (11). Hence, despite all his emotional, intellectual, and spiritual potential, Anderson’s protagonist is the grotesque who succumbs to defeatism, as the last scene demonstrates. The individual who is “meant by nature to be a teacher of youth” (12) and whose hands have the potential to “tap many strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men” (10), and who thus has the ability to nurture the “dream[er’s]” individuality and potential for self-discovery, irrevocably bows down to a mechanical society: “putting the lamp upon a low stool he began to pick up the crumbs, carrying them to his mouth one by one with unbelievable rapidity” (15). In denying his androgynous disposition he stifles his instinct and thus becomes unnatural and, consequently, mechanical. The mechanical hands are engaged in a warped attempt to clean up the mess in (and bring some order to) his life. He “clean[s]” only the tangible “floor” and “dishes” but not his intangible spirit (15). In swallowing the crumbs, he swallows the waste, which signifies the unjust accusations and harsh condescension. He thus wrongly and conclusively tolerates wrongdoing.

290

The Explicator

The “kneeling figure” that “look[s] like a priest engaged in some service of his church” has bowed down to the altar of the machine, which is the dominant feature of modern materialism and patriarchy (15). Anderson uses this striking image of ironic prayer to depict the curiously tragic distortion of spiritual, emotional, and intellectual potential: “The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well have been mistaken for the fingers of the devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his rosary” (15). The bread crumbs that Wing’s mechanical hands pick with “unbelievable rapidity” replace rosary beads, and the speechless mouth of the human is transformed into a trash can. The world of moral refinement and poetry is blurring and disintegrating into the world of mechanical corporeality. As Anderson suggests, “poet[ic] expression” (13) eludes the narrator because the “wonder” of the protagonist’s “influence” and his androgynous self-expression are “hidden” and silenced (12). The “promise” of moral and poetic refinement has given way to the mindlessness and monotonous repetitiveness of the machine (12). The individual who “hunger[s] for the presence of the boy, who [ . . . is] the medium through which he expresse[s] his love of man,” mechanically and irrevocably resigns himself to defeat, for he allows his “hunger” of human exchanges to be replaced by soiled crumbs, and he allows his poetic “love of man” to disintegrate into “his loneliness and his waiting” (15). In this world of modern patriarchy and materialism, where an individual becomes a “grotesque” because he surrenders his androgynous sensibility to a mechanical world of materialism and patriarchy that values machismo, which consequently produces dehumanization, “the poet” who eludes Wing Biddlebaum also eludes the narrator (13). Works Cited Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. New York: Bantam, 1995. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Dread. Trans. Walter Lowrie. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Print. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothing. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square, 1956. Print.

Copyright of Explicator is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.