English 596
Literary Criticism
A Formalistic Analysis of Sherwood Anderson’s “Hands”
The narrator of “Hands” is a detached and omniscient observer. He has a simple, direct voice that suits his homey view. He describes in a forthright tone a specific rural scene. But there is the sound of myth or of times long past or of some larger meaning in his use of the words “youths and maidens” (275) for the leaping and screaming boys and girls.
The harshness of a “thin girlish voice” (275) taunts old Wing Biddlebaum. The speaker knows Wing’s mind. He knows that Wing is frightened, and he tells us that Wing feels apart from his neighbors. Wing has one almost-friend, though, and this day he “was hoping that George Willard would come and spend the evening with him” (275).
The speaker explains, and we are made to want George to arrive, to help free this “shadowy personality” (276) who is isolated by fear and “submerged in a sea of doubts” (276). Wing is animated and expressive with George, “like a fish returned to the brook by the fisherman” (276). He talks excitedly with his hands, which become “like piston rods” (276) and “like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird” (276). “The hands alarmed their owner” (276). They begin to alarm us, too.
The narrator has set up contrasts, images, a certain tone, and certain relationships which will reveal the meaning of the story. Wing Biddlebaum is a lone man who lives in a “small” house “near the edge of a ravine” (275), which is on the outskirts of town. He is old, watching a group of lively people pass by. He keeps his distance, though one of the girls makes at least verbal contact from afar. He has been nervous. When the wagon passed, he “peered anxiously” (276) after it, moved a bit closer to watch it go, but then retreated to the safety of his porch. It all bespeaks part-ness, with sounds of the past in the present, and age vs. youth.
Wing is alone, frightened, and “a mystery.” The narrator refers to him in dehumanizing terms, in animal and machine analogues. Then we are told directly, “The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands” (276). We see deeper meaning in the non-human comparisons. Wing’s fluttering, pounding, gesticulating hands are his trademark, but they make him different from the others. They are “the source of his fame” (276), but “they made more grotesque an already grotesque and elusive individuality” (276).
The narrator, however, is sympathetic to Wing. He even goes so far as to express regret that perhaps he, the narrator, has not a sufficiently poetic sensibility to do justice to the story. He says that not because he truly feels inadequate, but to underscore what he feels is Wing’s worth as a sensitive human being. Soon after, there is another loud contrast: Wing is grotesque again, “beating like a giant woodpecker” (277). But he is humanly and poetically a dreamer, too.
From a dream, Wing Biddlebaum has made a picture in which “men lived again in a kind of pastoral golden age” (277). It is an echo of the myth-sound in the first paragraph. In that first scene, the young people are moving away from wing. But in his dream, “in crowds the young men came to gather about the feet of an old man” (277). Wing was once a part of his world; now he is separated from it.
It is important to note that up to this point in the story, Wing has been shown in two actual scenes: on his porch in the present, and on a hillside with George in the past, and in one imagined place, “in a tiny garden” (277). But still, he has not actually moved from off his “decayed veranda” (275), and still he is alone. The effect of allowing an all-knowing speaker to reveal Wing to us is to increase the impact of Wing’s loneliness. And by keeping us out of Wing’s mind, the implied author emphasizes Wing’s separateness. Though Wing is in a specific time and place, he is also out of time and out of place.
Once again, the narrator sounds a mythic and timeless tone. He might “arouse the poet who will tell the hidden wonder” (278) of his story. The speaker’s version is “but crudely stated” (278), says the narrator. The author chooses not to editorialize, nor to turn his folktale into a philosophical harangue, so he skillfully weds these phrases of regret—”It needs the poet there” (278)—with the narrator’s personality and style, causing us to accept the suggestion of something larger and deeper without distress. And he keeps his main character suspended while he moves us back and forth in time, guiding our sympathies.
In the scene from Wing’s youth, we hear of “hands” and “dreams,” children seeming like “insects,” and Wing being called a “beast.” Later, his figure is “small, white, and pitiful” (279). Even his name is not his own, but “taken from a box of goods seen at a freight station” (279). He is reduced, useless, and even anonymous being.
There was a time in his life when Wing wanted only to love his fellow man and to teach. He was once part of a sublime scheme. Driven off and terrified, he fades into anonymity. His new reality has been harsh. He cannot even bring himself to ask why, in order to free himself. In a limited sense, he is merely one of many different (“grotesque”) people who feel separated from mankind. In a larger way, Wing is a classical dreamer, a representative of brotherly love, and sensitivity trammeled by a grosser world.
His impassioned plea to George is not to conform, not “to be too much influenced by the people about him” (277). Wing urges George to dream, not to give it up out of fear and because of public pressure, as he, Wing, has done. In the end, the hands that have mysteriously caused his isolation are busily giving him a bit of sustenance in what resembles an act of prayer. Wing is only one man, but he is every lonely soul passing “through decade after decade” (279) of penance.
The story of Wing Biddlebaum is meant to “tap many strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men” (276), and all its elements, of particular point of view, style and tone, and emotional sympathies, combine to achieve that effect.
Source
David Hayman and Eric S. Rabkin, Form in Fiction, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1974.