Death in the Woods

Sherwood Anderson is known for creating characters, especially those whom he considers “grotesques,” or exaggerations of particular stereotypes. In “Death in the Woods,” his character of the old woman is an example of a grotesque in the same way as his characters in other short stories, such as those found in Winesburg, Ohio and The Triumph of the Egg. Anderson’s grotesques are unique to his time period: those left behind as the Western world industrialized in the period between 1750 and 1900. Industrialization created materialism and consumerism that Anderson’s characters seem to have trouble assimilating, so they are stuck in a limbo between the romanticism of a pre-industrial world and the stark reality of a modern one.

Anderson begins the story describing Mrs. Grimes as noteworthy for being unnoteworthy. His narration spans five sections that don’t follow any chronology, but instead function as pieces of a disjointed, unreliable telling of her life and his connection to it. The whole story is recounted by the narrator years after the incident, as he grapples with the details of the retelling in contrast to his brother’s version: “I did not think he got the point. He was too young and so was I” (Part 5, Paragraph 15). The reader’s doubt of the veracity of the story grows when the narrator says, “the story of the old woman’s death, was to me as I grew older like music heard from far off” (Part 5, Paragraph 12). These descriptions add to the idea that Mrs. Grimes functions as a symbol of the female experience of being used and underappreciated even by “man’s best friend.” Yet her story is so underappreciated that it could be obfuscated and forgotten like distant music.

The old woman is a grotesque in the way she is isolated by society, tucked away from others, left alone to feed the animals and the men in her life on a small farm. She is alienated from the rest of town, and when one resident, the butcher, shows pity, she is taken aback. She feels it is her sole duty to feed those around her. Nothing is said about what she does in her off time, likely because there is no “off time,” which is in stark contrast to the activities of her husband and son, who indulge in the vices of society freely.

The theme of alienation is constant in the old woman’s life, as she is abandoned by her parents, left as an indentured servant, and then taken as a wife by Jake Grimes, another farmer. As an object, she is also an outsider to the world at large. She is relegated to little identity other than that of nurturer, or feeder, to those around her. The longer she is alienated from the rest of the world, the more she isolates herself, resorting to being silent and only muttering to herself.

The town that Mrs. Grimes lives near is small, just like the setting of many of Anderson’s other stories. These are the last places to be affected by modernization, as the cities, due to their larger and more diverse populations, generally are the first to embrace new ideas and new ways of doing things. Each of Anderson’s grotesqueries must maneuver this new world and figure out what their role is, some more successfully than others. The old woman is one of the unsuccessful ones, as she seems to wither away, and ultimately, resort back to nature in her death. Symbolically, as the Depression forced many women into the workforce, the role of women as solely a homemaker and nurturer was gradually fading and gender roles were becoming less rigid. Mrs. Grimes may be Anderson’s elegy to a way of life no longer available to men of the 1930s.

Due to her gender and age, Mrs. Grimes is trapped in the traditional role of womanhood, untouched by the progressive changes happening throughout the 20th century. The author does not give her a first name, indicating how little her contemporaries care about her individual dreams or desires. Her role is the feeder of those around her. Forced into this, she makes it her primary occupation in life, and is even willing to defend it to the butcher when he questions her treatment. Like Mother Nature herself, she has no choice but to care for those under her charge. Mrs. Grimes’s character calls into question the role of the “crone” in Modernist society, and whether the changing social strata has room, or an appetite, for aging women.

“Death in the Woods” has a secondary purpose, though. The narrator shares the artistic journey of the storyteller by admitting that he has been putting the story he is telling together over the years. He can’t possibly know all the details he shares, but his mind has filled in any gaps and blurred the lines of fact and fiction. To the narrator, this is important as he attempts to rationalize an important coming-of-age moment in his life. As a youth he is unable to wrap his mind around the experience he had in the woods that day and can only grasp it after time has passed. To him, “a thing so complete has its own beauty” and it is worth the time and effort he puts into it, even if some of it has been exaggerated (Part 5, Paragraph 15). His creation highlights the writer’s process as he blends what he has experienced personally with creative agency. Unfortunately, in this telling, Mrs. Grimes’s significance is again boiled down to her usefulness in other people’s narratives rather than her own, much as it was during her life.