Sherwood Anderson (post 5) Winesburg, Ohio (post 2): From This Book of Short Stories, Two Tales Related to Children, Multiple Personality, and Fiction Writers

“Tandy”

What would happen if a young child were neglected, and did not think much of herself, since nobody else did, and then she suddenly is given the idea that she could be somebody, somebody else, someone who counts, someone who is so real that she has a name, Tandy? This tale seems like a story about how a little girl acquired an alternate personality named Tandy.

“Until she was seven years old she lived in an old unpainted house on an unused road…Her father gave her but little attention and her mother was dead…

“A stranger came to Winesburg and saw in the child what the father did not see…

“He looked hard at the child and began to address her, paying no more attention to the father. ‘There is a woman coming,’ he said…‘I have missed her, you see. She did not come in my time. You may be the woman…

“ ‘I know about her…I know about her struggles and her defeats. It is because of her defeats that she is to me the lovely one. Out of her defeats has been born a new quality in woman. I have a name for it. I call it Tandy…It is the quality of being strong to be loved…

“ ‘Dare to be strong and courageous…Be brave enough to dare to be loved…Be Tandy’…

[Her father, Tom Hard] “spoke his daughter’s [real] name [which is never mentioned in the story] and she began to weep. ‘I don’t want to be called that,’ she declared…‘I want to be Tandy. I want to be Tandy. I want to be Tandy Hard,’ she cried, shaking her head and sobbing…’ ” (1, pp. 78-80).

“Loneliness”

This is the story of an artist who develops multiple personality to deal with the loneliness of not being understood. It is not a realistic story in that the multiple personality starts in adulthood, whereas real multiple personality starts in childhood, like in the above story about “Tandy.” Nevertheless, this story is relevant, because the narrator equates multiple personality with the minds of writers…

“…Enoch Robinson…stopped inviting people into his room and presently got into the habit of locking the door. He began to think that enough people had visited him, that he did not need people any more. With quick imagination he began to invent his own people to whom he could really talk and to whom he explained the things he had been unable to explain to living people. His room began to be inhabited by the spirits of men and women among whom he went, in his turn saying words. It was as though every one Enoch Robinson had ever seen had left with him some essence of himself, something he could mould and change to suit his own fancy…

“They might talk, to be sure, and even have opinions of their own, but always he talked last and best. He was like a writer busy among the figures of his brain…” (1, pp. 93-94).

1. Sherwood Anderson. Winesburg, Ohio. A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Charles E. Modlin and Ray Lewis White. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1996.