The Teacher by Sherwood Anderson, 1919
The magic trick:
Making the reader feel Kate’s desperately repressed desires
This is the first story that truly links to its preceding story in the Winesburg, Ohio collection. The timeline here intersects with events in “The Strength Of God.” We’re simply seeing things from a different perspective. It also recalls the previous Winesburg story, “The Thinker,” as we see another young man too lost in his own thoughts to understand what a woman is trying to say to him.
Mostly, I think this story is notable as the sexual peak of what is a very sexual story cycle. So many of these stories deal with repressed desire. The feelings Kate Swift has in this story are nearly tangible for the reader, so overwhelmingly is her need. That George, the target of her aggressive affections, is oblivious or unable to receive their meaning only makes us feel her frustrations all the more acutely.
And that’s quite a trick on Anderson’s part.
The selection:
Kate Swift’s mind was ablaze with thoughts of George Willard. In something he had written as a school boy she thought she had recognized the spark of genius and wanted to blow on the spark. One day in the summer she had gone to the Eagle office and finding the boy unoccupied had taken him out Main Street to the Fair Ground, where the two sat on a grassy bank and talked. The school teacher tried to bring home to the mind of the boy some conception of the difficulties he would have to face as a writer. “You will have to know life,” she declared, and her voice trembled with earnestness. She took hold of George Willard’s shoulders and turned him about so that she could look into his eyes. A passer-by might have thought them about to embrace. “If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words,” she explained. “It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now it’s time to be living. I don’t want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.”
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