Ok, long story short, I had another "Paper Pills" moment...and it was with "Respectability." More than anything, this was a complete opposite of "Paper Pills" in its content. Everything goes so wrong with Wash Williams and his love life, and the damsel in distress is, in fact, Wash. Maybe it's because I'm a girl, or maybe I'm just underexposed to female antagonists, but reading this short story was like swallowing a very large, nasty pill. I knew situations like this happened all the time, where the woman is unfaithful and the man is over-emotionally attached, but the reality of it didn't really hit me until reading about Wash. His story is a representation of any man out there who had to deal with a broken, cheating marriage; the woman almost always escapes the situation as a victim, and the man is the one to blame. It's sad, it's pathetic, and it's so very real. And I can't believe it took me this long to realize the pain that not only women, but men feel in the effects of heartbreak.
However, first paragraph in, I wasn't completely sold on that belief. The correlation between the monkey and Wash already made me assume the worse for this hateful man. He's physically dirty and portrayed as this primal creature who can't even maintain his hygiene, let alone a marriage! Everything about him seemed dirty--"even the whites of his eyes looked soiled" (113). He was ugly, he was fat, he was smelly...need I go on? Basically, everything about him screamed slob--except his hands. This is important later (to be honest, when are hands not important in this book...?). Sherwood Anderson spends so much time elaborating on this man's uncleanliness and hatred of life, men, and women. By the end of the second page, there isn't a doubt left in your mind that would suggest Wash as an innocent victim of love. This is where I learned that you can never assume an outcome if Sherwood Anderson is writing what you're reading.
The line that first threw me off was an off-putting sentence about his hate for women, which is described as "a love as absorbing as the hatred he later felt" (115). Hold up, what? I thought Wash was just born with this hatred, and I'd be reading a sob story about how his mother left him as a child and he was brought up loveless and with an aloof father who never took care of him. That literally would be the background for a third of the characters in this book.
But this is different. He actually had a life. He was clean, once upon a time. He had a wife, a postcard-perfect house, a job, a garden. Such small details made me start to doubt Wash's backstory; what horrible thing happened that caused so much hate? And in a woman? In literary terms, hating a woman would symbolize everything from hating birth, hating life, hating comfort, understanding, softness, motherhood...that's a lot to hate. It's tiring to think about.
Go back a couple years to when Wash was a clean, aspiring man, precious, polite, and thoughtful. He was a gentleman, a far cry from his present slobbish self. He is one of the only male characters that is described as virginal, which takes a lot of self-control and faith in one central idea: true love. I hope you're beginning to think that this idea is his version of a truth, because you'd be right, in my opinion. He believed in this childish, naive love and poured all of this faith into a blonde, blue-eyed girl. They marry, buy a house together, have tons of sex (reading about the seeds was more uncomfortable than watching a sex scene with your parents...almost), and Wash is a pure, happy man.
But when he figures out that faith doesn't run both ways, he is devastated, and in turn I'm crushed and just a lump of metaphorical tears. The angelic girl with the golden hair and blue eyes is a cheater, and has been with at least two lovers while Wash was away at work. Wash's complete faith in true, pure love is ruined. This girl, who was his anchor and his ideal, his truth, was destroyed by reality: infidelity, lying, and cheating. But it doesn't end there.
It was the assumption of Wash as an indifferent animal--a beast--that really made me angry. Very angry. For when Wash left his wife and sold his house, the girl's mother called and asked to meet with them at her house. The mother gives Wash hope, and he "ached to forgive and forget" (119). What they really needed was to sit down and talk: communicate their problems and resolve the situation. But the mother didn't go about it this way. She assumed that Wash was an unthinking, unfeeling creature that wants nothing more than sex, and this is what she abhorrently offers him when he arrives in the home. The mother pushes her naked daughter in front of Wash and locks them together in a room, hoping that sex will ultimately solve everything. Her assumption of Wash's primal mindset really pushes my buttons, for some reason. To think that lowly of a human being, to assume that he doesn't understand any higher-order cognitive functions other than impregnating a woman--that to me is the most monstrous thing you can do.
'Unfortunately' for the mother, Wash's primal instincts do fire off--but not in the direction she had intended. Instead of having sex with his now ex-wife, man's violent streak sets in, and he bashes the mother's head with a chair before he is pulled away from instilling more harm. This event was what really sealed the deal on Wash's present attitude towards women; it wasn't just an unfaithful wife that shut down his empathy towards females, but the belief that all women think they can get away with anything because they are the smarter, more emotional sex.
So is the claim of Wash being the monkey out in the streets justifiable? Maybe, to an outsider looking in, sure. But remember that his hands are clean--in fact, they are the cleanest parts of his body. This says a lot about his innocence as a character, amidst all these sneaky and dirty people living around him. "His hands are clean" therefore apply to him literally and figuratively. Again, we shouldn't judge a character based on his overall presentation; the details will give you the most insight. Take, for instance, his ex-wife; she is the only woman in this book depicted as having blonde hair and blue eyes. You almost imagine her as an angelic figure, but in reality she is an unabashed cheater with a witch of a mother. Then you look at Wash, this unkept, primal-looking man, but his purity shines through his hands and his name. He put his heart into love, and this truth became his falsehood. He is innocent to infidelity and crime, but guilty to believing the impossibility of true love. Who really is to blame? I don't really know...but I understand a bit more of why the men of Winesburg respect Wash so much. He is the wounded soldier in battle, a traumatized human being who had to fight the most dangerous enemy of all: women. In war, there really is no one to blame.
When we were talking about writing for a timed essay, the teacher emphasized that we should always write in the present tense when analyzing a piece of literary fiction. For some reason, this rule of thumb reminds me of this story, and it makes my heart sink. In any regular novel, the prince will always end up getting the princess, every time you read it, in whatever language it's transposed in; the ending is still happy, still the same. But in "Respectability", you can't hope for anything like that; in whatever dimension Wash is living in, he will always hate women, he will always be wrongly compared to a dirty monkey, and he will always bear the pain of losing the girl he loved too much.
First of all, let me just say, I like the level of sass that’s present in your analysis—it’s kind of refreshing, to be honest. Voice isn’t the only thing that’s solid in this post though—the analysis is as well, though I would like to take it just a little bit further. Particularly, I want to look a little bit of the title of the story its self, “Respectability,” in reference to some of your ideas.
ReplyDelete“Respectability,” according to dictionary.com, is defined as “the state or quality of being proper, correct, and socially acceptable,” or, according to common sense, the quality of being something worthy of respect. However, despite the choice of this idea to be the title, the cornerstone of the short story, it’s mentioned a grand total of, wait for it, two major times. The first mention of it is in reference to Wash Williams himself, when it is noted that “here and there a man respected the operator,” though such men were few and far between (Anderson 69). The other mention of the idea of respect is near the end of the story, where Wash’s ex-wife and her mother are described as “what is called respectable people” (72). In these lines, Wash’s ex-wife is described as the one with the trait of “respectability” while Wash himself is characterized as someone unworthy of this respect and social acceptance (dirty and slovenly as he is). But then… why? As you stated, Wash is clearly the victim here, committing no wrong besides perhaps the crime of youthful naiveté in believing in true and perfect love (well, and attempted murder). Meanwhile, his wife and mother-in-law, who value physical sex over emotional relationships (as evident in the wife’s multiple affairs and nakedness upon meeting with Wash) and are thus the antithesis of this childish innocence present in Wash. What does it mean that they are the ones that are viewed as “respectable” by society?
In part, this goes back to something you mentioned—your pre-conceived notions upon beginning the story, expecting Wash to be the unfaithful one while his wife was the victim—not the other way around. I had the exact same expectation. After all, one of the first things we discover about him is that he hates all women and pities all men (thus putting them beneath himself)—how could a man like this ever be the victim? Still, we were both proven wrong when we discovered that these latent frustrations on the part of Wash are, just like the very idea of what is “respectable,” socially constructed. Anderson structured it this way on purpose, to challenge the reader’s initial perceptions and present an alternative view that explains his seemingly unforgivable attitude and self-neglect. In this way, the seemingly inappropriate association of “respectability” with the characters is a sort of social criticism, noting how quick society can be to place its value in the wrong people—the people of Winesburg did it in forming their opinions of respectability, and we did it as readers, in assuming that Wash, in all his pitiful nature, was actually to blame, instead of noting what he actually was, a monkey, physically trapped in a “cage” of societal expectations (not there by his own accord, mind you) and judged by passerby who show him little sympathy( 68). In fact, his only hope, and perhaps, in Anderson’s opinion, ours as well, is in the kindness of those few who still do respect him—who see beyond his situation and feel “a glowing resentment of something [they] [have]not the courage to resent”(69)—the very notion of this false respectability that drives our society.