This post was originally written as a discussion post in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a graduate environmental literature course. 

Reading:

Sherwood Anderson. Death in the Woods. 1933. https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400491h.html#ss01

I feel like a central message of this story is about the woman and her feeding of animals. At the end of the story, the narrator said that “The woman who died was one destined to feed animal life…She was feeding animal life before she was born, as a child, as a young woman…after she married, when she grew old, and when she died.”

In the story, we have several examples of her feeding the animals. She is always “feeding the stock,” “she settled down to feed stock,” “fed the cows in the barn, fed the pigs, the horses, and the chickens.” Not only did she feed animals to keep them alive for their utility, but she fed them to feed herself. The old woman “had a few chickens of her own and had to kill one of them in a hurry. When they were all killed she wouldn’t have any eggs to sell.” The woman also had to get “the pigs fed so they would grow fat and could be butchered in the fall,” and then “her husband took most of the meat off to town and sold it.” In addition to feeding the farm animals, she also fed the dogs. The animals depended on her to feed them: the stock “cried to her hungrily” and “the dogs followed her about.”

There’s really no mention of her feeding herself, but to feed the others, she went to the butcher. “She would get a little meat in exchange for the eggs and some salt pork…the butcher would give her a piece of liver.” On the day she died, the butcher “gave her some liver and some dog meat” He did not want Jake or the son “to get any of the liver or the heavy bones with scraps of meat hanging to them.”

Even though she was exhausted, she continues on her way home because “things had to be fed”– “Horses, cows, pigs, dogs, men.”

When she sits down to rest, there’s a really interesting passage about the dogs. The dogs “had been chasing rabbits in the woods” and “had picked up three other farm dogs.” Reminiscent of London, the narrator says that “Some old instinct, come down from the time when they were wolves…comes back into them.” They catch rabbits, and then they play. They make no sound. The dogs check on the woman, and the narrator speculates it “may have been a kind of death ceremony.” The dogs say,“’Now we are no longer wolves. We are dogs, the servants of men…when man dies we become wolves again.’” It isn’t clear if this is good or bad, but, in the end, the dogs respect her body in death. Even though they “Began worrying the pack on the old woman’s back” and “they dragged the old woman’s body out into the open clearing,” “…the dogs had not touched her body. They had got the meat out of the bag.”

Interestingly, it’s a hunter also out hunting rabbits who finds her.

Part 2: Derrida

I read through the reading for this week in one sitting, starting with Derrida. As I was reading the story, even though I was highlighting everything that had to do with animals, some of the lines about the woman stood out to me because they reminded me of things Derrida had said about animals.

Derrida says that “the animal is without language. Or more precisely unable to response, to respond with a response that could be precisely and rigorously distinguished from a reaction, the animal is without the right and power to ‘respond’ and hence without many other things that would be the property of man” (400).

In this story, the woman, also, is without language, particularly without the ability to respond. She is “one of the nameless ones that hardly anyone knows.” Even though she supposedly tells Jake about the German in the beginning, we don’t ever hear her speak for herself. “She had got the habit of silence” but she “went around the house and the barnyard muttering to herself.” Muttering is not intelligible language—it’s not understandable to others. When the butcher “said something about her husband and son, swore at them,” “the old woman stared at him, a look of mild surprise in her eyes as he talked”—she’s mute, she has no response.

Derrida frames his speech with this story of him being seen naked by his cat and being ashamed of that. The question of nakedness is important because, as he says in the very beginning, “words that are…naked, quite simply, [are] words from the heart” (369). So nakedness implies a truth about who or what something is. He says that “the property unique to animals and what in the final analysis distinguishes them from man, is their being naked without knowing it. Not being naked therefore, not having knowledge of their nudity, in short without consciousness of good and evil” (373).

In the story, the woman’s nakedness is exposed twice. Once by the German and once in death by the dogs. “The worn-out dress was quickly torn from her shoulders. When she was found, a day or two later, the dress had been torn from her body clear to her hips, but the dogs had not touched her body.” In death, she is naked without knowing it.

I feel like these observations might be part of our further discussion, so I’m going to just leave them here.

Follow Up:

One of my primary takeaways from this discussion is the focus on voice and how voice reflects agency. In the story, we have a woman without a voice. Though she once (supposedly) told Jake about how the German treated her, readers never actually hear her voice. In the second part to my initial response, I said:

Derrida says that “the animal is without language. Or more precisely unable to response, to respond with a response that could be precisely and rigorously distinguished from a reaction, the animal is without the right and power to ‘respond’ and hence without many other things that would be the property of man” (400).

In this story, the woman, also, is without language, particularly without the ability to respond. She is “one of the nameless ones that hardly anyone knows.” Even though she supposedly tells Jake about the German in the beginning, we don’t ever hear her speak for herself. “She had got the habit of silence” but she “went around the house and the barnyard muttering to herself.” Muttering is not intelligible language—it’s not understandable to others. When the butcher “said something about her husband and son, swore at them,” “the old woman stared at him, a look of mild surprise in her eyes as he talked”—she’s mute, she has no response.

The woman is portrayed as having the ability to react, but not the ability to respond. Just as humans often use the pathetic fallacy to provide observations about what animals are thinking and why they do the things they do, the narrator also provides observations about the woman. In essence, she is treated as an animal who can’t speak for herself. She is on the same level as an animal—unable to respond, without a name or a voice, usually unnoticed, and abused when she doesn’t do as she is supposed to.

Everndon observed that  “…once we engage in the extension of the boundary of the self into the ‘environment,’ then of course we imbue it with life and can quite properly regard it as animate…” In this story, the narrator is only able to imbue the woman with life once he has put himself into her environment. Again, this provides a parallel between the woman and animals. (And perhaps all women, as none of the women in the story actually have a voice, except through the male narrator.)

Not only is the woman only given a voice through the speculations of the male narrator, but she is living in a man’s world. This man’s world is one that is represented by the “manly” attributes of hunting and eating meat. The woman’s role as the feeder, rather than the hunter, reflects her subordination to the males in the story, including her own son. While the woman’s position as one who feeds in the story does connect to the position of animals as a source of food, it is also a break from that position. The role as feeder also differentiates her from the animals in the story because the animals are there to be food and to be fed so that they can be food, not to be the feeders of others. She functions as the intermediary between the men and animals she feeds and the source of the food. So the female human is presented as lower than the male human, closer to animal than human, but also not animal.

Hunting and eating meat is such a central part of this story. It’s a clear indication of who is in power here—not animals and not the woman, both of which are there to serve the males and their desires. I think that the inclination of so many of us to look at this story through a feminist lens makes sense because it ties in so well to the idea of carnophallogocentrism. Though I don’t think we can assume that the woman doesn’t eat meat, as well, the focus is on the men and their ability to hunt for and their need to eat meat. The woman provides meat only indirectly, by trading animal products (made by female animals…) for meat, which she gets from the male butcher.  Even in her role as feeder, the woman is portrayed as dependent on the male for meat.