Hands as an extension of ourselves

There is no concept of Gryffindor-like bravery or Slytherin-like malice in Winesburg, Ohio. The characters are not exceptionally honest or evil or tough, and it is impossible to assign a one-dimensional personality to any of them. This is not to say, however, that the characters are not exaggerated representations of ourselves. By magnifying the pitiable state of each story’s main character, Sherwood Anderson employs an unusual technique to show how the way we handle circumstances – both within and without of our control – shape our fate.

“Hands” for example, is a story about the fall of a once-enthusiastic and once-inspiring school teacher. The teacher, Adolph Myers, was banished from his own town on the charge that he molested one of his male students. Thrust out of his society, he was forced to assimilate into a new one – Winesburg, Ohio. Although Adolph was never obligated to tell the people of Winesburg about his life, he still suffered severe social consequences, because of his own confusion regarding his banishment. He is characterized as “forever frightened and best by a ghostly band of doubts” (19) and becomes a social outcast on this basis.

What I find particularly interesting about “Hands” is that the reader never knows if Adolph actually molested the child. Instead of definitively offering the reader the validity of the central conflict, the narrator leaves much of the story – and every story in the novel, for that matter – up to interpretation. On the other hand, the narrator has no problem with disclosing background details about the character. There is no hesitation in describing to the reader how Adolph’s hands were a fundamental part of his success as a school teacher.  “by the caress that was in his fingers he expressed himself….under the caress of his hands doubt and disbelief went out of the minds of the boys and they began also to dream” (23). In this way, Adolph used his hands as a means for inspiration; they helped him gather and fully-express his thoughts, thereby helping his students learn.

When Adolph leaves his town, he begins to fear his hands. If not for the fame of his communicative hands, the townspeople would not have been so quick to believe that Adolph was touching his students inappropriately.  After living in Winesburg for a year, Adolph is still uneasy with himself. He is described as “going timidly about and striving to conceal his hands. Although he did not understand what had happened he felt that the hands must be to blame” (24). As more years, and eventually decades, pass, Adolph’s discomfort increases. His hands are always in a frenzy, and they begin to develop a persona of his own. He even earns the name “Wing Biddlebaum” because of “[his hands’] restless activity, like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird” (20).

Instead of getting angry at this offensive name as one would expect, Adolph allows himself to become Wing Biddlebaum. He is still fearful of his hands, and this fear facilitates his newfound fear of humanity. Never again is he able to feel comfortable in society, because he is hyper-conscious of his hands and the history that accompanies them. When his hands betrayed him, his identity was lost. Biddlebaum’s hands had been his means for communication, and when he lost trust in his hands, he too lost trust in himself.    

How I fell into the trap of becoming a life-long reader

I was born in September - the month of sunset-colored leaves and mosquito bite-laden legs. The month that Green Day does not want to wake up from, and the month whose brisker winds assure us that Summer is truly over. All this being said, September is also the month that is one month too late for normal registration in this county’s school system.

When I was four years old, my mid-September birthday told administrators that I was two weeks too young to attend first grade with the other kids, who were almost, but not quite, my age. I was given a test on Vocab and Math skills to determine if I could simply skip Kindergarten and join the ranks of those who were within a year and two weeks older than me. Because my mom had taught me to read before I was four years old, and because my dad and I would practice adding and subtracting in the car at leisure, I passed both portions with flying colors.

Fast forward one school year, and I had completed the once-alien world of 1^st grade. I had learned to make friends with those in my grade, yet I could not shake this strange, perpetual fear of kids who were more than the standard one year and two weeks older than me. That summer, all changed when I met a girl named Ryan who I would one day call my best friend.  She lived across the street from me, and she had just graduated from 3rd grade. She was three years older than me, at least six inches taller (although it seemed like six feet at the time), and rode her bike around the neighborhood with elderly confidence. Although Ryan had never spoken a word to me, her age, height, and maturity left me absolutely terrified. It was actually my grandmother who forced me to talk to Ryan one day, when she noticed that I would run inside the house every time I saw the “girl on the bike.” At first, I had no idea what to say to someone so much older or wiser than myself. The pauses in our surface-level conversation were boundless, and I am sure that neither of us really wanted to talk to the other. It wasn’t until she mentioned her favorite book, Island of the Blue Dolphins, that our dialogue shifted from strained to slightly intrigued. I told her that I hadn’t read, or even heard of, the book, but that I loved to read. She (slightly snobbishly) informed me that the book is a Classic, and that it would be a disgrace if she did not let me borrow her copy.

From then on, our relationship grew. What began as a newly-graduated first grader borrowing books from her book-a-holic of a neighbor transformed into a friendship that is still going strong. If it were not for my mom who had planted the reading seed, or for Ryan who helped cultivate it by serving as a role model for my impressionable self, I doubt that my appreciation of books would have been so long-lasting. Because of these two women’s continued influence in my life, I have fostered a love of reading and the pursuit of knowledge. They are the reason why I have been able to find myself in words, and they are why I associate happiness with well-articulated emotions on a page. 

Why I'm the Creature's #1 Fan

From the winding words to the concentration of thought, emotion, and imagery on every page, Frankenstein was beautifully written.

But it was also a pain to read.

My copy consisted of 198 pages of small, neat print, and it took me two weeks to read. Two. Full. Weeks. By the time I had finished, it was ten minutes past midnight on a school night, and I was physically and emotionally drained. I read the last line and slammed my book shut. My pride at finally finishing the novel outweighed any desire I had to sit and think about the text once I was done. I didn’t so much as pick up another book to read for pleasure until five days after I had finished Frankenstein.

Later, I began to wonder why I was so willing to stop thinking about Victor, the Creature, and Captain Walton. It’s not that Mary Shelley did not relay powerful messages about the nature of mankind in the text; on the contrary, her words were a sobering and hard-hitting portrayal of loneliness and mankind’s obsession with beauty. The reason I found Frankenstein so excruciating to read is because it felt like Victor's accounts of his thoughts and feelings would never end. 

I did not, however, encounter the same problem with the Creature, which is why the book was not entirely lost on me. I pitied the Creature for six chapters as he told Victor of his life of abandonment, isolation, and unreciprocated violence; I smiled into the pages of my book when the Creature found Paradse Lost, Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter on the ground, because I knew that these books would teach the Creature to express his thoughts; I gasped aloud when Felix began beating the Creature, because I realized that this act could lead to a lifelong detestation of humanity on the Creature’s end. And it did.

I was extremely attached to the Creature throughout the entirety of the novel. By page 14, which was long before the Creature had even been mentioned, I was already contrasting the way society treats Victor with the way it would treat a “Monster.” Captain Walton’s description of Victor as “unequalled for clearness and precision… [and having] a facility of expression and a voice whose varied intonations are soul-subduing music” (14) infuriated me, because I knew Walton would never say the same about the Creature, regardless of the Creature’s eloquence or insight. The Creature would never be given the chance that Victor was entitled to, because of man’s inability to go beyond the surface it is unappealing enough to the eye.I realized later that the attachment I felt to the Creature was founded on the fact that he was still so new to the world; in a sense, the Creature was a blank slate, and his short-lived mind was never as contradictory or convoluted as Victor’s, who had been on the Earth for so much longer.

I think that I could have related with Victor a little bit more, if I had more of a sense of who he really was. My major issue with the writing of Frankenstein is that the reader rarely sees Victor’s raw interactions with the people around him. By this, I mean that there was not enough quotation mark-laden dialogue. When there is objective conversation, the reader is given more freedom to make an assumption of the character and walk away with her own assumption of who Victor was. I grew tired and felt stripped of my freedom as a reader when all I was given were Victor’s intimate thoughts and feelings. They reminded me of a secondary source – one that had been analyzed, modified, and blogged about (heh, heh) with a definite bias. Although I knew the details of Victor’s youth and the strong feelings that he associated with it, the story feels incomplete if I can’t read about Victor's surface-level reactions to the world and the people in it.

By the end of the book, I felt that what I knew about the two main characters, Victor and the Creature, was off-balance. I knew everything about the inside of Victor, but very little about how he projects himself to the world. I could deduct so much more about the Creature, because I knew how he thought, as well as how others perceived him. There’s a saying that no one is black or white and that we all consist of gray areas. There is no one on this world who is solidly good or bad, and the more you get to know a person, the harder it is to see them in one-dimension. If you start from the surface and dig your way down, you’re bound to find something you respect about them, or at least something you can relate to, even if you start out hating them. If all this is true, how can I help but take the Creature’s side?