Jensen | 1 Candice Celeste Jensen 6/01/2013 English 495 Brother Bailey Prospectus Final Draft Tandy: Gender Roles among the Grotesques In a haze, as in life, Grotesque people wander around “an American town”(130), lusting after truths which will satisfy them for a moment, but ultimately, they miss the big picture; they are unhappy and will remain that way until they can come to a realization. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio consists of stories about the problems of grotesque characters, but the central story, Tandy, seems to pinpoint the main solution. “A stranger came to Winesburg and saw in the child what the father did not see.”(Anderson 78) There is a noticeable struggle between the roles of man and woman, as well as a feminized, coveted notion of “Tandy”. The definition of “Grotesques” even concerns women and men offending each other, “The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering.”(Anderson, 6)
Transcript
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Candice Celeste Jensen6/01/2013
English 495Brother Bailey
Prospectus Final DraftTandy: Gender Roles among the Grotesques
In a haze, as in life, Grotesque people wander around “an American town”(130), lusting after
truths which will satisfy them for a moment, but ultimately, they miss the big picture; they are unhappy
and will remain that way until they can come to a realization. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio
consists of stories about the problems of grotesque characters, but the central story, Tandy, seems to
pinpoint the main solution. “A stranger came to Winesburg and saw in the child what the father did not
see.”(Anderson 78) There is a noticeable struggle between the roles of man and woman, as well as a
feminized, coveted notion of “Tandy”. The definition of “Grotesques” even concerns women and men
offending each other, “The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful,
and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he
made a noise like a small dog whimpering.”(Anderson, 6)
In “The Strength of God”, Kate Swift is both a temptation and revered for her gender several
times. However, the reverend confuses her gender sometimes, “In the lamplight her figure, slim and
strong, looked like the figure of the boy in the presence of the Christ on the leaded window.”(Anderson
85) In another story, “Respectability”, a man “purple with rage”, Wash Williams, views women and men
very differently. “First of all, he hated women. “Bitches,” he called them. His feeling toward men was
somewhat different. He pitied them. “Does not every man let his life be managed for him by some bitch
or another?” he asked.”(Anderson 65) He continues to explain that all women are dead. “She is a living
dead thing, walking in the sight of men and making the earth foul by her presence…they are sent to
prevent men making the world worthwhile. It is a trick in Nature.”(Anderson 66) Yet, in “Tandy”, a
stranger approaches a forgotten little blank girl and offers her the notion to “Dare to be strong and
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courageous. Be brave enough to dare to be loved. Be something more than man or woman. Be
Tandy.”(79) However, even with this stranger ordering the young girl to change her life in this way, he
seems to be taking a gender role, but the question is, which role is it? Is “Tandy” a religious hope for a
community, or is it instead simply another way for man to segregate woman, for better or ill?
The feminist ideals and hatred of misogyny are very clear when one considers Anderson’s
opinion about women and the time that this was written. 1919, when this book was published, was the
year just before Women’s Suffrage was legalized, and it would seem that Anderson reveres feminism. At
the same time, this was also just after World War I ended in 1918, and the sweep of modern technology
and commerce was extensively studied by Anderson. He seems to revere women in general, and the
women throughout his life were evidence of that. Judith Arcana, a theorist who studies Anderson, points
out that “He was a man who loved and honored his mother, married four women in what psychoanalysts
might consider a search for her replacement, took inspiration from his sister, and declared his own
creative powers, via metaphor, to be those of a pregnant and mothering woman.”(Arcana 68) Arcana goes
on to explain that Anderson believed that, with industrialization and urbanization, the role of men and
women had been destroyed. She states, “he thought that “more women than men retain the instincts that
can redeem everyone.”
Anderson actually served in the war, and Winesburg Ohio was written during it; one can imagine
a young Anderson bent over a scrap of paper while bombs fall around him. However, as much as
Anderson loved women, there is a distinct underlying misogyny shared by both genders. Whalan writes,
“Yet criticism engaging with the gender politics of Winesburg, Ohio has tended to ignore the fact that it
was written during the First World War- a war that provoked a period of what Kaja Silverman has called
“historical trauma” that problematized the “dominant fictions” of…gender identity.”(229). At the same
time, Anderson was trying to keep up with authors such as Thomas Hardy, Bennet, Wells, and Dreiser,
and the new idea of Fascism. Luther S. Luedtke points out that Anderson took away the most from Hardy,
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as he even perhaps put him into the story “Tandy” as “Tom Hard”, as Anderson took from Hardy’s works
the same theme of “disintegration of organic rural societies”.
Some critics have studied the gender roles and the idea of Tandy in Winesburg, Ohio. Mark
Whalan brings up the gender roles as three different things. First, he describes men and women desiring
different things. He points out that Anderson says in his memoirs, “In reality women have no desire to
DO. Doing is for them a substitute. Their desire is to BE. There was never a real woman lived who did
not hunger to be beautiful. The male desires not to be beautiful but to create beauty.”(4) Second, he
compares men as wanting logic and order while women are the opposite, pitting them against each other.
In Marching Men, Anderson writes, “In the hearts of all men lies sleeping the love of order” (9) Mark
Whalan talks about Fascism restoring anything pertaining to disease and disorder, “and commonly the
source of disease and disorder was represented as woman. The kind of imaginary violence that Anderson
indulges in here celebrates the fullness of a masculinity established through the wounding of an unnamed
and objectified other, a passive victim of a phallic assault….a distinctly feminized antagonist.”(232)
Third, he develops that men see this difference and, drunk with their own power, wish to shape women
into what they want. He states that in The Strength of God, the minister tries to turn Kate Swift’s naked
body into a symbol of God’s truth, seen as delusional, the “signing” of Kate’s body… as an “instrument
of god”, and Hartman both reads and writes her body into a narrative that re-establishes his sense of self-
control and masculine identity.
Lastly, Whalan explains that a male’s maturity is reflecting on his life and, reflecting against a
woman, makes him more masculine. In Departure, George leaves Winesburg and sees it as a
“background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood” (138), and Whalan explains that there is a
time in the life of every boy “when he for the first time takes a backward view of life. Perhaps that is the
moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The backward view of placing the self in an historical
perspective marks the beginning of George’s manhood.” Then Whalan says that this renewal is a mistake,
as masculinity is something George never possessed, but this is more of a theme of reflection, and
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Anderson’s image of reflection here evokes the tradition of feminist thought on the necessity of
femininity for the definition of boundaries of masculinity, a tradition that has often used the mirror as its
figure for this operation. Many reflection motifs are used, as in Sophistication, what he felt was reflected
in her, as well as their binary otherness. Virginia Woolf’s observation was that women have served all
these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of the
man at twice its natural size. Irigaray’s later description of masculine secularization, which makes women
serve as a mirror entrusted by the masculine ‘subject’ with the task of reflecting and redoubling himself.
It seems that Anderson is showing a sort of woman envy, showing that men wish to reflect a more
feminine view if not to make themselves appear more masculine. In this way, Whalan compares
Winesburg to a woman whom George leaves behind, and he tries to build himself up in a masculine way
by doing so, at the same time as revering it.
Luther S. Luedtke goes along with this theme of woman worship and takes it to a new extreme,
putting woman into the role of mother nature and perhaps approaching the worship in a more occult
fashion. He expresses that, in Tandy, “Central to understanding the female characters… [is] finding one’s
“thing to love”” (535) The genders are separated by males wanting to progress technologically and
females wishing to go with the natural order, female assumptions of generation, continuity, and renewal
rather than on masculine ideas of progress or the dubious effort to achieve a degree of personal
immortality by impressing man’s own material or intellectual designs on nature. Psychic and social
disintegration, the grotesque, followed inevitably when, under the pressure of modern ideas, man and
woman denied their dependence on the earth, disdained their child-bearing roles…and left behind the
social integrity of the family and clan. Marital infidelity was an inevitable result of the fundamental
violations of the natural order. However, only females and their naturalness could save men from their
fascination with machines. Therefore, Luedtke argues that the only hope for men is woman and her Tandy
qualities, or perhaps that the only hope for men is to fall back on God.
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Arcana views Tandy as a sort of imposing scene, where the burden or curse of one man’s
opinions are forced upon the little girl. She points out that in all of the other stories in Winesburg, the
grotesques become that way by embracing a truth that became a falsehood, and slowly regress into the
form that they are by their growth. However, in Tandy, it is different; “in this story one of the characters-
a young man already grotesque- passes his truth, and its fate, to another character- a five-year-old
girl.”(67) The other grotesques find their truths as they go along, but Tandy is possessed with the truths of
another. “This capture and possession not only serve to demonstrate Anderson’s theory of the grotesque,
but also express what he felt and believed to be the essential relationship between men and women.”(67)
She writes that “Tandy contains Winesburg’s most desire to own the qualities of women, wanting to make
women into “a thing to love”(67) She shows the relationship between genders is poignant, “His male
characters, despite disappointment and discouragement, seek what Anderson felt men should get from
women, a care-taking and nurturance that one critic has identified as “feeding”. Anderson’s women, the
feeders, have been described as “peculiarly circumscribed in their development,” but this is because they
do not need the depth or breadth of the male. They need only to fulfill their “responsibility for creating
harmonious relationships between the sexes.”(Arcana 67) She continues to explain that this role,
Anderson felt, was “instinctive and organic in women” (67) and not at all difficult. However, she switches
the genders by painting the girl as “open, empty,” vessel, which sounds feminine, but in Arcana’s
definition it’s almost in the role of the masculine, a very needy thing into which the stranger pours his
ideas into. “Though female, she needs feeding.”(68) Then “The drunkard sees in Tandy what Sherwood
Anderson sees in women- a vessel into which he can pour his desire, and out of which he may drink to
sustain himself.”(68) The stranger goes on to declare his “sympathetic bond with the female: “They think
it’s easy to be a woman, to be loved, but I know better.” His eyes return to the little girl again, offering
her his “understanding.” “Perhaps of all men I alone understand.”(68) There are sexual undertones, as
Arcana describes the stranger’s kisses on the girl’s hands as “near-Dionysian”, then describes the girl’s
shock, “She had received his gaze, his words, his passion, his truth. Into her small dry life, the drunkard
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has poured his wine…she is possessed by his prophesy; she too will become grotesque, in her inability to
bear his truth, to contain it.”(69)
Woman worship is also explained when the man “rises above himself as he kneels before
her.”(69) She explains that this ecstasy is repeated in “The Strength of God”, as well, when the naked
lady is kneeling down, releasing and relieving the Reverend, he cries out “God has manifested himself to
me in the body of a woman!”(155) In short, Arcana is trying to show that the roles are reversed, that at the
same time as the stranger is worshipping the little girl, he is also cursing her with this new ideal which
will cause her to become Grotesque, therefore putting woman in her place once again.
Through feminine worship motifs, Anderson illuminates that by sharing mutual respect, gender
roles are neutralized when man and woman become equal by reverting to a young, childlike way of
thinking and loving, an almost animalistic innocence. This is probably the true definition of Tandy, and
this theme can be seen with more potency in Tandy than in any other story. It would seem that the only
character who probably accomplishes Tandy is George Willard, but upon closer examination it would
seem that Helen White also gains it, but only because George issued her the same challenge that the
stranger issues to Tandy Hard. This is important to readers because Anderson is essentially showing us
that the key to a good relationship is to do what our hero, George, does.
Tandy introduces the reader to two characters without names; the stranger and the little girl, and
for this reason, one can’t immediately assume their genders. According to the aforementioned critics, the
stranger must be the feminine form and the girl must be the masculine form, for Anderson’s feminine
always gives to the masculine, and that is how this story is reversed; consequentially, it’s also the cure for
the Grotesques. As Anderson revered the feminine and compared himself to a pregnant woman, perhaps
due to his ability to invent and create lives, he perhaps goes into the role of the feminine stranger. We see
little hints of this everywhere, notwithstanding an obvious clue, when “As Tom talked, declaring there
could be no God, the stranger smiled and winked at the bystanders”, giving a cheeky nod at the idea that
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the stranger is his signature, and giving his obvious statement, that he knows that God exists, for woman
is his God. The young girl, upon whom he imposes his preachy opinion at the same time as worshiping, is
the child he never had; his audience, put into a masculine form of being a needy person wanting to have
their reality actualized. The girl also serves as the role of God found in the woman, with Anderson’s call
to worship women rather than hate them, as Wash Williams does. The girl is essentially a blank slate,
with no light, color, warmth, or love in her life. Her mother is dead and her father gives her “but little
attention”. They live in “an unpainted house on an unused road”, and the girl is a hungry little thing,
starving for some affirmation of her existence and role in life.
Her father, the agnostic, is so busy “destroying the ideas of God that had crept into the minds of
his neighbors he never saw God manifesting himself in the little child.” This father, Tom Hard, represents
the men in the town of Winesburg; he does not believe in God, where God is the woman. Perhaps he is
the very same character as Wash Williams, who despised all women, saying that they are dead.
It is the fact that the stranger retreated to the country to cure himself of drink and failed because
it was not his only addiction; he is also addicted to love, but he hasn’t yet found his object of love. In
other words, he is searching for something to worship; his faith is failing; he needs a “cure” from his
Grotesqueness, and he thinks that he can find that by passing it on to the child. The stranger is a “lover
and have not found my thing to love. That is a big point if you know enough to realize what I mean. It
makes my destruction inevitable, you see.”(79) Anderson is alerting our attention to the fact that without
someone to worship, life is not worth living. Like Reverend Curtis Hartman, spying on Kate Swift, the
stranger finds his religion, “God has manifested himself to me in the body of a woman!”(155) By
denoting the masculine God manifesting “himself in the body of a woman”, Anderson is showing that the
stranger’s conventions of worshiping his own masculinity have changed as there is this little girl in the
form of a masculine neediness, and therefore an object of worship. The story “Tandy” even begins with,
“A stranger came to Winesburg and saw in the child what the father did not see.”(78) This shows that the
stranger, or Anderson, discovered a form of what he wanted to be, God, in this child, or woman, where
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the men of Winesburg couldn’t. He presents himself as a stranger because he doesn’t want himself
associated with the “unbelievers”, those who don’t believe in respecting woman, for the grotesque men of
the town only wish to take from woman, not give.
However, in order to show the child her Tandy role, he must take the form of the feminine so that
she can be the masculine. He must be able to give rather than receive. “There is a woman coming,” he
said, and his voice was now sharp and earnest. “I have missed her, you see. She did not come in my time.
You may be the woman. It would be like fate to let me stand in her presence once, on such an evening as
this, when I have destroyed myself with drink and she is as yet only a child.”(79) The stranger is
explaining his grotesqueness, both in his addiction to drink and his addiction to his desire to worship and
love; this may be Anderson’s confession. The stranger again takes on the feminine role, and he
understands because Anderson has written the story of Alice and Elizabeth Willard, as well as all of the
grotesque women, and he can sympathize, “They think it’s easy to be a woman, to be loved, but I know
better,” he declared. Again he turned to the child. “I understand,” he cried. “Perhaps of all men I alone
understand. I know about her, although she has never crossed my path,” he said softly. “I know about her
struggles and her defeats. It is because of her defeats that she is to me the lovely one.”(79) By putting
women on a pedestal in front of this young girl, the stranger is forcing her to feel jealousy and envy for
this “woman”, and monkey see, monkey do; the girl automatically wants to become the lovely one. The
bait is set, so the stranger weaves more of the beautiful idea of what a woman should be, “Out of her
defeats has been born a new quality in woman. I have a name for it. I call it Tandy. I made up the name
when I was a true dreamer and before my body became vile.”(79) by hinting that his body became vile,
the stranger is hinting that the young child is pure and unfestered with the wounds of mortality; he is
grotesque, and by sharing this information with her, by shaping her ideals, he is just about to shove his
grotesqueness onto her. Through his attempt to raise her up, he does what so many men do in order to
actualize their masculinity; he is making her his doppelganger. He wishes to be as she is, looking back
and reflecting upon her, but he is accidentally putting down her femininity and forcing this new masculine
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role upon her. ““It is the quality of being strong to be loved. It is something men need from women and
that they do not get.”(79) Anderson voices the main concern of his grotesques; they are seeking strength,
which is masculine, in the love of a woman, which is feminine. They worship women for this strength,
and they do not get it because women are not strong; only when the grotesque man reverses their roles
will Tandy be achieved. In other words, once a man respects and reveres a woman, rather than hating her,
then he will get what he desires.
“He seemed about to fall, but instead he dropped to his knees on the sidewalk and raised the
hands of the little girl to his drunken lips. He kissed them ecstatically.”(79) The stranger is worshipping
the little girl, kneeling before her and, like the apostles did with Christ, kissing her hands. By doing this,
he fills in her the desire to do what he wishes; he fills her with his grotesqueness, yes, but he also instills
in her the masculine role of a relationship. ““Be Tandy, little one,” He plead. “Dare to be strong and
courageous. That is the road. Venture anything. Be brave enough to dare to be loved. Be something more
than man or woman. Be Tandy.”(79) Immediately after this, the stranger stands and staggers away,
leaving the child a flush with this new information, and new role. Although she is young, it is not set in
stone that this new role, the one of being given something, will turn the child Grotesque. Perhaps it is her
age that prevents this; she cries bitterly because she has been given a place in the world. “I don’t want to
be called that,” she declared. “I want to be called Tandy- Tandy Hard.” The child wept so bitterly that
Tom Hard was touched and tried to comfort her….With childish abandon she gave herself over to
grief.”(80) The role of woman is ecstatic because Anderson has given her a role; do not feed the men of
this town, he cautions, but rather be strong enough to be loved, as Anderson says in his memoirs,
“woman’s…desire is to BE.” Anderson, therefore, shows that the grotesque man’s desire will only be
sated when he allows the grotesque woman to be, when he reverses the roles and gives rather than
receives. Anderson declared, “every woman has the advantage of men because she has something I
cannot have- the machine cannot touch her mystery- but let her come over into my own male world, the
world of fancy, and surely I will lose her there.”(56)
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One may look at Winesburg, Ohio as a Bildungsroman (German for “coming of age story”, or
“growing up story”) for George Willard. George Willard is perhaps the one character who truly acquires
Tandy- and by effect, he infects Helen White with Tandiness. We see evidence of this in Sophistication as
well as Departure. George takes the first step toward acquiring Tandy by realizing that he is mortal.
Sophistication begins by telling how the Grotesques in Winesburg are lost to their lusts and childlike,
“children became lost and cried lustily, an American town worked terribly at the task of amusing
itself.”(130) This perhaps best illustrates that Winesburg is, like every town in America, full of people
who don’t know what they want. Then, George looks back on his life and seems to mature; “There is a
time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the
moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is
thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him.
Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name.”(131)
The ghosts spoken of now are referring to the grotesques, “Ghosts of old things creep into his
consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From
being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is
torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession
before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the
world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness.”(131) George has realized that the people
around him have lived their empty lives believing in truths that are not true, holding petty grudges and
dying with them. He has realized that these grotesque people around him who he sees and does not want
to become are his inevitable future unless he does something about it. “The sadness of sophistication has
come to the boy.”(131) He feels this sadness because he has realized something; that his life will end
soon, that mortality does not last forever, and that this fact is held by the cruel grip of destiny. “With a
little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows
that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the
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winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun. He shivers and looks eagerly about. The eighteen
years he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity. Already he hears
death calling.”(131)
Here George pinpoints his second step to gaining Tandy; the desire of companionship through
mutual respect- not through lust or self-fulfillment, but a simple desire to have someone be there for him.
“With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be
touched by the hand of another. If he prefers that the other be a woman, which is because he believes that
a woman will be gentle, that she will understand. He wants, most of all, understanding.”(131) This desire
for understanding and realization that a woman is gentle has given George a drive to acquire Tandy, the
courage to be loved. He does not want to have his lust be fulfilled, nor does he want to feel like a man by
putting a woman down, he merely wants a companion who will gently understand him, philia, Greek for
“brotherly love”.
George reaches the third step of reaching Tandy; he already knows who he wants to love and be
loved by. “When the moment of sophistication came to George Willard his mind turned to Helen White,
the Winesburg banker’s daughter. Always he had been conscious of the girl growing into womanhood as
he grew into manhood.”(131) It’s interesting that he has noticed that she’s been maturing as he has; he
sees her on equal ground as himself. He doesn’t put her below himself. Although he does admit that at
one point he wanted to impress her by boasting his manhood because he admired her femininity so much,
“…in her presence had given way to an impulse to boast, to make himself appear big and significant in
her eyes.”(131) This was the same road the other Grotesques had taken, the men, anyway, wanting to
belittle women by making themselves appear much more important. However, here is where George is
different; “Now he wanted to see her for another purpose. He wanted to tell her of the new impulses that
had come to him.”(131) George wants to share this realization of maturity with Helen, just as the stranger
in “Tandy” gave to the girl; he is reversing the roles, just as Winesburg intended for Tandy to be
accomplished. “He had tried to make her think of him as a man when he knew nothing of manhood and
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now he wanted to be with her and to try to make her feel the change he believed had taken place in his
nature.”(131)
However, this is not one-sided. Helen White “also had come to a period of change. What George
felt, she also felt, in her way. She was no longer a girl and hungered to reach into the grace and beauty of
womanhood.”(131) It discusses that she had returned from college and started to see a boy, who her
mother wanted her to date. It is said that “At the Fair she was glad to be seen in his company as he was
well dressed and a stranger. She knew that the fact of his presence would create an impression” (131)
Why is this? Perhaps she wants to be seen with a man who appears not to be from Winesburg; that is, she
wants to create the impression that she is not going to end up with a Grotesque man. She is searching for
a man who has Tandy, but right now all she can manage is to give that impression. He’s just a doll, the
fake Tandy. And although he was a smart instructor, he is described as “pedantic”, or unimaginative, and
“he would not do for her purpose” (131). Deep down, she knew that he was not really what she was
looking for. “During the day she was happy, but when night came on she began to grow restless. She
wanted to drive the instructor away, to get out of his presence.”(131) She thinks that he’s not Grotesque
because he’s not from Winesburg; however, he does not have Tandy. Even so, she remembers George and
sees something that is not Grotesque in him, “She also had begun to have memories” (131) and they both
think of each other, “Helen White was thinking of George Willard even as he wandered gloomily through
the crowds thinking of her.”(132) Indeed, she wants to share her maturity with George as well, “She
thought that the months she had spent in the city…had changed her profoundly. She wanted him to feel
and be conscious of the change in her nature.”(132) Through this way, she also wants to give to George,
and so wants to have Tandy; giving of mutual respect.
It is interesting to note, right here, that George was present on the porch in the story “Tandy”, and
so the idea of Tandy was planted into his brain. It says, “Beside him on the board sidewalk sat young
George Willard.”(78)Therefore, George gets the idea from the stranger to challenge girls with the idea of
Tandy. Moreover, it’s as if the challenge to be Tandy was not only directed at the girl, Tandy Hard, but at
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George, too. It would seem that this is where George gets the idea to be Tandy himself and to issue the
challenge to others.
Indeed, they both recall the night that they had spent together, and this seems to link them both to
the idea of “Tandy”, because that night was not one of lust, but of childlike innocence and mutual love,
perhaps a true accomplishment of Tandy. During that night, George takes off his coat and starts to brag,
“”Well, I’ve stayed here in Winesburg- yes- I’ve not yet gone away but I’m growing up,” he had said.
“I’ve been reading books and I’ve been thinking. I’m going to try to amount to something in life. Well,”
he explained, “that isn’t the point. Perhaps I’d better quit talking.”(132) but there he stopped himself and
explained that amounting to something wasn’t the point; it was growing up. “The confused boy put his
hand on the girl’s arm…In his desperation George boasted, “I’m going to be a big man, the biggest that
ever lived here in Winesburg,” he declared.”(132) Yes, he’s boasting, but he’s not putting Helen down;
he’s saying that he wants to be better, or bigger, than the men in Winesburg; he doesn’t want to be like
other men, he wants to be bigger than them. He wants to respect women, unlike the other men in
Winesburg. Sound familiar? This is exactly what the stranger from “Tandy” was like; he wanted to
respect women. Then, George tells her something very interesting, “I want you to do something, I don’t
know what. Perhaps it is none of my business. I want you to try to be different from other women. You
see the point. It’s none of my business I tell you. I want you to be a beautiful woman. You see what I
want.”(132) George here is acting parallel to the stranger in “Tandy”; he is telling Helen, this perpetual
child, to be Tandy. He is telling her to not be like other women; he wants her to be beautiful and like him,
he wants her to be bigger than the other women. He is issuing the challenge to her to be brave enough to
be loved. This is a very obvious parallel, and Anderson knows it; he put it in here so that we could realize
that this is the moment when George and Helen both decided that they were going to be Tandy, that they
were going to be different from the other people in Winesburg; that they were going to grow up to be
brave enough to love one another for reasons other than lust, but for understanding. After issuing this
challenge, George tries to insure that Helen, this girl he has challenged to become Tandy, will belong to
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nobody but himself. He asks Helen to promise not to marry anyone but him. He says, ““I thought- I used
to think- I had it in my mind you would marry Seth Richmond. Now I know you won’t,”” (132)
The parade of the Grotesques is not to be deterred; George takes one more look at the people
around him, seeing that he is now different from the other inhabitants of Winesburg, and he realizes why
he’d rather not join their ranks. He is “ashamed of the figure he had made of himself”, referring to the
challenge he had issued, as he watches the world go about their trapped, ignorant ways. It appears as a
sort of parade of Grotesques, “In the street the people surged up and down like cattle confined in a pen…
a band played and small boys raced along the sidewalk, diving between the legs of men.”(132) These
boys are more of the motif of the men of Winesburg who are so misogynistic that they are almost
homosexual in their desire for the reassurance of other men for their own masculinity. They do this by
proudly touting about women on their arms, “Young men with shining red faces walked awkwardly about
with girls on their arms.”(133) An orchestra tunes their instruments for a dance, perhaps referring to the
uncanny dance which the Grotesques go about, fooling themselves, “The broken sounds floated down
through an open window and out across the murmur of voices and the loud blare of the horns of the band.
The medley of sounds got on young Willard’s nerves. Everywhere, on all sides, the sense of crowding,
moving life closed in about him. He wanted to run away by himself and think.”(133) George has now
rejected the idea of joining these Grotesques; he will not be like them.
He thinks of Helen jealously, thinking that “if she wants to stay with that fellow she may, Why
should I care? What difference does it make to me?”(133), that if she wants to reject him in favor of a
Grotesque, she is breaking her promise that, in his mind, she made to him; since he issued the challenge
and turned her Tandy, like himself, he wants to be with only her. He walks past Wesley Moyer who is
boasting about his stallion. However, in this part, we can see that the stallion is symbolic of a woman;
Wesley is prancing around and boasting to the crowd about how he has won, “Wesley exclaimed, “I
wasn’t afraid, I knew I had ‘em beat all the time. I wasn’t afraid.””(133) by boasting of his masculinity
and having women ‘beat’ to this crowd, he is nervously denying his own fear and sense of hopelessness,
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even as he holds a whip and nervously taps it along the ground. He is boasting his masculinity; George,
filled with understanding, is disgusted with the man’s lack of respect for women and with man’s boasting
of masculinity. “Ordinarily George Willard would have been intensely interested in the boasting of
Moyer, the horseman. Now it made him angry. He turned and hurried away along the street. “Old wind-
bag,” he sputtered. “Why does he want to be bragging? Why don’t he shut up?””(133) He then begins to
run to Helen White’s house, a symbol that he is running away from his nature to join the other men of
Winesburg; he is turning instead to the comfort and understanding of the woman he loves, and that is how
he accomplishes Tandy.
Helen, restless and distraught, sits with the instructor, her suitor, who is actually a Grotesque in
disguise, as “Although he had also been raised in an Ohio town, the instructor began to put on the airs of
the city. He wanted to appear cosmopolitan.”(133) The instructor and Helen’s mother try to ensnare
Helen in their Grotesque web of delicate trickery, trying to turn her Grotesque by trying to run her life.
The instructor belittles women on a whole and also Helen personally, “I like the chance you have given
me to study the background out of which most of our girls come,” he declared…he turned to Helen and
laughed. “Your life is still bound up with the life of this town?” he asked. “There are people here in who
you are interested?” To the girl his voice sounded pompous and heavy.”(133) Helen realizes that he is
Grotesque and walks away. She hears her mother boasting about her and how there are no men who
match her, and in sad realization, she flees her mother’s obvious pushing. See, here she is different from
women like Wash William’s ex-wife, who listened to her mother’s plans for her and submitted to that
will. She is thinking for herself; she’s different from women, which makes her much more Tandy, “It
seemed to her that the world was full of meaningless people saying words. Afire with eagerness…” (134)
She is excited by this realization, and by running from her mother and the trap many grotesque women
fall into, she is rejecting the idea of becoming Grotesque herself. She has gained Tandy.
The two run away from the idea of becoming Grotesque and towards each other, towards their
twin soul. They run to the one other person in the town who is as Tandy as they, the one other person as
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mature and sophisticated as they. As romantic as it is, Helen even cries out, “George! Where are you,
George? She cried, filled with nervous excitement.”(134) Until, George comes running up the street, still
determining to himself to go in and demand to see her “As he came up to her he stopped and stared
stupidly. “Come on,” he said and took hold of her hand. With hanging heads they walked away along the
street under the trees. Dry leaves rustled under foot. Now that he had found her George wondered what he
had better do and say.”(134) The dry leaves made another appearance, as both of them have realized that
they are symbolic of leaves in the wind. They didn’t need to really say anything to each other; there was a
common understanding that they had found the person they could trust enough to be brave enough to
love. The two walk, and for George “The feeling of loneliness and isolation that had come to the young
man in the crowded streets of his town was both broken and intensified by the presence of Helen. What
he felt was reflected in her.”(134) Helen, too, feels that her loneliness is gone, because she has also found
the one most like her. It is interesting to note that in order to feel Tandy, the two must escape town and sit
on a hill overlooking town; they have to be symbolically apart from the mindset of others in the town, and
only when they are above it, they can be Tandy together.
As we know, the definition of Tandy is the courage to be loved. Yet, unless one grows up
wanting to be different from others and to have this, one does not gain a maturity that sophistication
brings. Here then, is the definition the sophistication of Tandy; “In youth there are always two forces
fighting in people. The warm unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and
remembers, and the older, the more sophisticated thing had possession of George Willard. Sensing his
mood, Helen walked beside him filled with respect.” Helen sees that George, the one who told her to be
Tandy, is also Tandy; she has respect for him. Therefore, the roles are again reversed, as to have Tandy is
to have respect for women, so is it the other way around; and now that there is mutual respect between
both genders, Tandy can occur. Another reason why Tandy can occur is, again, this motif of realizing that
life must end someday. Both of them look at the “fair”, this seeming circus, and they Grotesques are
described as ghosts, not of dead, but of living people. Farmers with their wives, young girls laughing,
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men with beards; overflowing with life, the place is now nighttime and life has fled. “The silence is
almost terrifying. One conceals oneself standing silently beside the trunk of a tree and what there is of a
reflective tendency in his nature is intensified. One shudders at the thought of the meaninglessness of life
while at the same instant, and if the people of the town are his people, one loves life so intensely that tears
come into the eyes.”(135)
George, sitting by Helen, “felt very keenly his own insignificance in the scheme of existence”
(135). Helen helped to quell his irritation with the Grotesques, with their meaningless scrambling to
acquire momentary satisfaction, “The presence of Helen renewed and refreshed him. It was as though her
woman’s hand was assisting him to make some minute readjustment of the machinery of his life.”(135)
this is a very motherly moment, as the very presence of her makes him reconsider his actions, and here is
another parallel from Tandy; George, like the stranger, is comparing woman to God, but not to the
obsessive extent that Reverend Hartman went to, “He began to think of the people in the town where she
had always lived with something like reverence. He had reverence for Helen. He wanted to love and to be
loved by her, but he did not want at the moment to be confused by her womanhood.”(135) Here George
resists the urge to compare his manhood to Helen’s womanhood, because many of the grotesques, in
doing that, belittle women; they see woman as a beautiful and confusing thing, and by not understanding
it, they decide to make it weak, a thing they can protect and demean. By denying his natural instinct to do
this, George keeps her on his same level; not above or below himself. He is strong enough to be loved by
her because of his respect for her. He holds her hand in companionship, trying to understand this new
feeling of two Tandy souls, equal and happy together, “With all his strength he tried to hold and
understand the mood that had come upon him. In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive
human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same though. “I have come
to this lonely place and here is the other,” was the substance of the thing felt.”(135)
Meanwhile, in the town below our two heroes, the inhabitants of Winesburg sweated and worked
feverishly to chase happiness, not knowing that it sat on yonder hill, dwelling in the hearts of the two
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fulfilled lovers. It is always on the edge of their subconscious, trying to push its way in, to reach them and
desperately trick them. It seems to work a little. “Now and then the spell that held them was broken and
they turned and tried in the dim light to see into each other’s eyes. They kissed but that impulse did not
last.”(135) By trying to see into each other’s souls, they are slipping back into their ways of trying to see
each other, trying to belittle and seek comfort in the physical way. The Tandy is slipping, as they kiss,
seeking physical benefaction, but it overcomes them again. The town desperately tries to get the attention
of the two, having men building a fire and heating kettles of water, trying to kindle lust in the two and
break the spell of Tandy. “when the wind blew the little flames of the fire danced crazily about.”(135)
Until finally, “For a moment during the walk back into town the spell that held them was broken.”(135)
They are walking back to town, that is, they have a moment of doubt wherein they both let the thoughts of
the town invade their minds; that they can never be different from these people, because they are trapped
here.
However, Tandy George soon squashes that idea when he puts his hands on Helen’s shoulders.
She accidentally falls into lust as “she embraced him eagerly and then again they drew quickly back from
that impulse. They stopped kissing and stood a little apart. Mutual respect grew big in them.”(136) Helen,
by denying her automatic rush to please and fulfill George, demands respect, and gives it, in turn, to
George. They are seeking to hold on to this love, to “Tandy”, by holding respect for one another. “They
were both embarrassed and to relieve their embarrassment dropped into the animalism of youth.”(136)
Like in the story Tandy, they are acting as the young girl did; full of youth. Then, they shuck their roles of
gender completely, man and woman, and become completely equal, “They laughed and began to pull and
haul at each other. In some way chastened and purified by the mood they had been in they became, not
man and woman, not boy and girl, but excited little animals.”(136) and when they go down the hill “in the
darkness they played like two splendid young things in a young world.”(136) George trips and falls, and
squirming and shouting, he realizes that this is okay; Helen is his equal, and he needn’t fear that she’ll
disrespect him. So he rolls the rest of the way down the hill. Helen runs after him, but she stops suddenly.
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“There is no way of knowing what woman’s thoughts went through her mind but, when the bottom of the
hill was reached and she came up to the boy, she took his arm and walked beside him in dignified
silence.”(136) This “woman’s” thought that flashes through her mind causes her to see in him a boy; the
same boy he always was to her, and perhaps to remember the challenge that boy issued to her. In her
moment of jouissance, she concludes that this boy is her equal; in reflecting his Tandy, she has become
Tandy, too. Through this mutual respect and realization that they are equal, they have both acquired
something. “For some reason they could not have explained they had both got from their silent evening
together the thing needed. Man or boy, woman or girl, they had for a moment taken hold of the thing that
makes the mature life of men and women in the modern world possible.”(136) This thing they speak of,
is, of course, Tandy.
Of course, to remain Tandy, they must escape Winesburg, Ohio; as it was shown before, the town
will always try to keep the two of them apart, would always try to make them put each other into roles, as
long as they were close to it. As they leave on the train, the Grotesques gather; some of them question
them and try to hold them back, while others watch enviously and wistfully. One grotesque, Gertrude
Wilmot, who had never spoken to George before, puts out her hand, “In two words she voiced what
everyone felt. “Good luck,” she said sharply and then turning went on her way.”(137) she is perhaps the
embodiment of all of Winesburg, or at least the abused idea of women in the town who had been
wronged, telling George to keep on being Tandy. Perhaps this is Anderson’s way of saying that the whole
town wishes him luck in his ventures, even as he is leaving. Perhaps this is a lonely idea; the town which
raised George seeing him leave, almost like a parent saying goodbye to those leaving the roost, at first
wished to hold him back, now only wishes him luck.
