Hands

Written in a single sitting one snowy night in Chicago, Anderson claims in his memoir that “Hands” emerged from his subconsciousness fully formed: “No word of it ever changed” (Anderson 279). Evidence from the original draft demonstrates that this is an exaggeration, although it is true that Anderson revised the story very little. Two minor changes to the manuscript, however, had a profound effect.

The first edit makes a subtle but poignant difference to a single word in the text: “He raised his hands to caress the boy” becomes “He raised the hands to caress the boy” (6). The phrase “the hands” appears in the place of “his hands” 12 times. Biddlebaum’s physical alienation from his hands and what they might have done is directly analogous to his alienation from other people in the story, with the exception of George Willard, who finds Biddlebaum’s hands “strange” and “beautiful” (5). The story’s emphasis on the psychological distance between Biddlebaum and the hands, rather than on plot, is one of the first indicators that “Hands” belongs in the Modernism canon.

The second change made to the first draft of “Hands” is that Anderson inserted surnames for each character every time they appear. Wing Biddlebaum is never just “Wing,” but always “Wing Biddlebaum.” The same can be said of George Willard and Biddlebaum’s original name of Adolph Myers: Names are written out in full each time. Anderson likely learned the technique from reading Gertrude Stein. Stein referred to this element of her style as “insistence” rather than “repetition,” particularly regarding the famous line “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” from her 1913 poem “Sacred Emily” (Stein, Gertrude. “Sacred Emily.” Electronic Poetry Center Digital Library. 1913. Line 15). The insistence of full names, like in “Hands,” is important in Stein’s story “Melanctha” in Three Lives (1909).

Stein, now taught as one of the “core” Modernist writers, directly influenced Anderson’s plainspoken prose style. He was introduced to Three Lives and her unusual book of poetry, Tender Buttons (1914), just prior to writing Winesburg, Ohio. Literary critic Irving Howe writes that Stein “was the best kind of influence” on Anderson: “[S]he did not bend Anderson to her style, she liberated him from his own” (Howe, Irving. Sherwood Anderson. New York: Sloane, 1951, p. 96).

Rather than trying to write in the “literary” language that had failed him in previous attempts at writing—the naturalism and sentimentalism of his contemporaries—Anderson’s style throughout Winesburg, Ohio, and during his career thereafter developed the stripped-down, expressionistic quality famously associated with Ernest Hemingway and other members of the Lost Generation. The Lost Generation is loosely defined as the cohort that came of age during World War I, making Anderson almost 10 years too old to be included. However, his style, often called “New Realism,” shares more in common with Lost Generation writers like Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Henry Miller than with the sentimental, prudish Victorians.

Anderson’s realism may not seem particularly radical to contemporary readers, but Winesburg, Ohio was a marvel at the time. Fundamentally, the book plays with form by connecting a series of character sketches into an experimental “novel,” lacking an overall plot in favor of unconnected slice-of-life stories that fragmented, disorienting, and intensely psychological. The interiority of each of the town’s “grotesques” forms an integral part of their portrait, but their thoughts are filtered through the notoriously unreliable third-person narrator of George Willard.

Like many other works associated with Modernism, Anderson’s stories are often unflattering and sexually frank. In his memoir, Anderson notes that the reaction to the publication of Winesburg, Ohio was immediate “public abuse” and condemnation in the press. The book was called “a sewer,” and Anderson was denounced as “sex-obsessed” for daring to suggest that sexual desire might be an integral part of the American psyche (Anderson 294-96). “Hands” was considered particularly shocking and even disgusting. Other stories in the collection are more explicitly sexual, such as when George Willard loses his virginity to Louise Trunnion in “Nobody Knows,” but “Hands” drew ire specifically for its suggestion of pedophilia and/or homosexuality.

One might compare “Hands” to Joyce’s short story “An Encounter” in Dubliners (1914), in which two boys playing truant have a confusing conversation with a “queer old josser” who, at the end of the story, does something unmentionable, generally interpreted as public masturbation. The subtext throughout “Hands” is that Wing Biddlebaum is somehow “grotesque,” but Anderson’s unreliable narrator makes it impossible to “prove” which sin he has committed: the crime of which he is accused (pedophilia) or the crime of a sexual orientation that today would be unremarkable.