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.
Character Analysis
Mrs. Grimes / The Old Woman
As the protagonist of the story, Mrs. Grimes is the person to whom the title refers. She has been treated poorly all her life, and her death is as unceremonious as the beginning of her life. Abandoned by her mother in early age, and with no known father, she finds herself as chattel for the local German farmer. From there, she is “got” by Jake Grimes by fighting the farmer, as if she is nothing more than a commodity.
Her marriage with Jake is just a continuation of her experience with the farmer, in the sense that she is ordered about, even by her son once he is old enough. Her only chance to have some feminine communion is squashed after a daughter dies. With no seeming hopes for anything else, she becomes a silent person who doesn’t engage in any social behaviors, except for an occasional muttering to herself around the farm. She has no identity outside of being a nurturer for those around her. To her, animals hold a higher place than men, as is noted in Part 2 when a list of those she feeds is stated as such: “Horses, cows, pigs, dogs, men” (Part 2, Paragraph 15). Just like she is only a thing to feed the men around her, they are things “to be fed.”
By the day of her death, she is so conditioned to this lack of identity and her role as nothing but feeder of men and animals, when she is shown kindness by the local butcher, it doesn’t seem to faze her—she is aware that if she doesn’t fulfill this nurturing role, no one will. In fact, she is a feeder/nourisher even after her death, as the pack of dogs help themselves to the food tied to her back.
The Narrator
Since the story is told through the eyes of the narrator, the reader gets a glimpse into his mind. It is clear by the end of the story that he is retelling it later in life, as he has most likely done many times before. He openly admits that some of the story is only a fancy, and that he has been piecing parts of it together all his life. He takes the hard facts that he has learned over time to set the foundation for any details that may or may not have happened, which are obvious when one considers that no one could possibly know what was on the woman’s mind as she died, or why the dogs acted the way they did.
The narrator is very concerned with his inability to articulate the woman’s story with wholeness and accuracy, in no small part because he is a young man at the time of her death. His fascination with Mrs. Grimes is initially sexually motivated—a fascination with her unclothed body—and even as an older man, he struggles to tell the story with objectivity. This gives rise to the vacuum in literature of the era of authors who can give voice to the female experience, unmediated by men, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein being notable exceptions.
The Butcher
Although the butcher is only briefly mentioned, he plays an important role in the story. In a world of male domination and female mistreatment, the old woman encounters only one figure who acts as a foil to the norms in her life. Not only does he give her extra food, but he also offers his own opinion about her husband and son, saying, “he’d see [them] starve first” (Part 2, Paragraph 13) regarding where the extra food is going.
His role is small, but this part of the story does offer the only glimpse of male respect the old woman experienced during her life. There is some respect for her once her body is found, but this can be chalked up to curiosity, the loss of innocence for younger boys, and sexualization of her corpse (seen as a young woman by some of the men). She is not seen as an old woman forgotten by society, but rather a different kind of object to each man individually.
Jake Grimes
In contrast to the butcher, we see the character of Jake Grimes, the old woman’s husband, as one-dimensionally cruel. He is portrayed as ignoble, uncaring, and a dominant figure in her life who treats her almost as poorly as he treats the animals on the farm. She is a supplier and nurturer to all who live on the farm, but she is also a thing that he owns, something won from a fight with her previous employer. It can be inferred that her role as mother to two children is not much different, where she performs her maternal duty to raise them. She is a tool for producing offspring for Jake, and he considers himself fortunate that the only child who survived into adulthood is another male he can share his vices with.
Jake’s behavior is not particularly different from that of his father, who lost a successful business to drinking and womanizing. Jake continued the trend by losing anything left to him. Instead of normal means to earn a living, he turns to thievery to maintain a small farm. He is mostly disliked by everyone in town, including his son from time to time, and when his wife is found dead, the two of them are the first suspects. They are subsequently run out of town, despite having a valid alibi. Their reputations are enough to warrant this, due to their sordid history around town.
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By Sherwood Anderson
