A Biological Allegory By Sherwood Anderson

A Biological Allegory By Sherwood Anderson

A Biological Allegory

In a letter recovered after his mother's death, Sherwood Anderson writes, "I have seen my own mother stand all day over a washtub, washing the dirty linen of the pretentious middle–class women not fit to tie her shoelaces, this just to get her sons enough food to keep them alive, and I presume I shall never in my life see a working woman without identifying her with my mother (Letters)" (Colquitt 19). Sherwood Anderson was born in 1876, but wrote this short story in the 1930s ("Sherwood Anderson" Dictionary 1). He grew up in poverty in Camden, Ohio. Growing up, his mother was the sole provider of the family; she sacrificed herself in order to keep her family afloat. Her life served as an inspiration for his short ... Show more content on Helpwriting.net ...She soons becomes the only source of income they have. "Then she settled down to feed stock. That was her job. At the German 's place she had cooked the food for the German and his wife. The wife was a strong woman with big hips and worked most of the time in the fields with her husband. She fed them and fed the cows in the barn, fed the pigs, the horses and the chickens. Every moment of every day, as a young girl, was spent feeding something" (Anderson 2). Her one and only job on this farm is to provide, feed the animals, feed the husband, feed the wife. She spends "every moment of every day" feeding others. The description of the German's wife implies that she provides for the husband as well, but in the form of giving birth. Her "big hips" show that she is responsible for bearing children. Both feeding and bearing children were a woman's sole responsibilities during this era. Although the wife's figure implies her burden of having children, the husband still wants the woman to provide for all of his physical and emotional needs. After being saved by Jake Grimes, the woman's future husband, she tells him of her time on the farm. "She told Jake a lot of stuff, how the German had tried to get her, how he chased her once into the barn, how another time, when they happened to be alone in the barn together, he tore

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