The New Englander by Sherwood Anderson, 1921
The magic trick:
Using a literal storm as a storytelling device to show the storm within a woman’s soul
No one turns loneliness into sexual longing quite like Sherwood Anderson. We saw it over and over in Winesburg, Ohio, and here it takes the form of a 35-year-old woman who has moved with her parents from a farm in Vermont to a farm in Iowa
The sexual tension builds and builds throughout, finally blowing over in dramatic fashion in the form of a thunderstorm.
And that’s quite a trick on Anderson’s part.
The selection:
Elsie was filled with joy at the thought that the train was still going on into the West. She wanted to go on forever in a straight line into the unknown. She fancied herself no longer on a train and imagined she had become a winged thing flying through space. Her long years of sitting alone by the rock on the New England farm had got her into the habit of expressing her thoughts aloud. Her thin voice broke the silence that lay over the sleeping car and her father and mother, both also lying awake, sat up in their berth to listen.
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