Confused about Tandy...

When I first read through Sherwood Anderson’s “Tandy”, I was so focused on the blatant presence of drunkenness and drinking that a large majority of the rest of the story flew straight over my head. It wasn’t until, actually, until my third read-through of the story that the rest of the symbolism started to flare up in front of my eyes.
“Tom Hard, the father” (Anderson 120).
“…in the struggle with an appetite that was destroying him” (Anderson 120).
“Perhaps of all men I alone understand” (122).
The cadence of the overall piece—the diction, syntax, and imagery—is distinctly biblical. It’s riddled with the words of a man who is angry at the world for falling to Christianity, of an anti-preacher of sorts. And he “never saw God himself manifesting in that little child” (120). The irony, though, doesn’t stop there. Not only does his daughter  have God manifesting within her, but he has a complete stranger tell her to be—what is essentially—more than human.
And she takes it. At five years old this young girl who remains nameless throughout the piece demands to have a different name—she is no longer the girl she was previously, but instead, Tandy Hard.
And that’s where I had to stop and look; there are exactly two named characters in this story, Tom Hard and George Willard. Granted, the story itself is on the shorter side (just over three pages in my copy of the novel), but even within a piece that short, names can be given. But neither the young girl (otherwise referred to as Tandy) nor the drunken stranger have a name.
Change in name symbolizes a rebirth of a person, a change in identity and morals and truths, as it were. But what does a name change mean when the first name is unknown? That is a question that I don’t have the answer to—either as a writer or a reader or an analyst. What do you do with a character who changes names, but doesn’t tell you what they change from?
(So far, all I can really come up with is staring blankly at the book and scribbling really aggressive annotations in my book.)
But if change in name is a rebirth, maybe this is more of an initial birth. Tandy is five years old, but her mother is dead and her father doesn’t pay her much attention—the story seems to give the feeling that the young girl gets what she physically needs but is depressingly lacking in what she could use emotionally. So, by taking hold of the Stranger’s words, of his truth, could it be a birth?
Or is it the turn to a grotesque? After all, it isn’t until someone takes a truth as their own that they become one—or at least, that’s how it works in the eyes of the writer.
Honestly, reading this story analytically almost left me with more questions than answers, and I’m not sure that it’s very helpful, but it’s here… and I don’t know how to explain it.

Swift to Give Instruction

I hereby apologize for the punny title—I couldn’t resist (and also couldn’t come up with anything distinctly better). Hopefully you chuckled a little.

But onward to the topic: Kate Swift.

A subject of Sherwood Anderson’s short story or novel or what have you, the schoolteacher is an interesting character from start to finish. She is introduced as nothing less than an object of sin—of want and sexual desire and passion, of something corruptible and corrupting—and yet becomes something of a Christ figure. (At least in the eyes of Reverend Curtis Hartman.) She is “not known in Winesburg as a pretty woman” (134-135) and yet proves to be viewed sexually by at least two men within the work—Reverend Harman, as previously stated, as well as George Willard. (“He began to  believe she must be in love with him… You wait and see” [132-133].)

Kate Swift, similar to Frankenstein’s Margaret Saville, seems to be a less-prominent female character with a lot of meaning to her existence—and despite all that, or maybe because of it, I found her conversation with George Willard to be the most intriguing part of her characterization.

In “The Teacher,” Swift is more than passionate with her former pupil as she talks with him about his potential future. “ ‘If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words,’ she explained. ‘It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now is the time to be living… You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they are saying’ ” (137).

I’ll go ahead and take a moment here to admit to extreme bias: I would consider myself a writer; maybe nothing particularly wonderful, but a writer all the same. This is the third year I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of AHS’s Literary Magazine staff and if I’ve learned one thing over the years (Thank you, Mr. Fortunato), it’s that writers write. Of course, there’s always the dreaded Writer’s Block and times that a break from writing is healthy—I know, I know, shocking—but to simply not write “until you are better prepared”? It’s a notion that I don’t understand.

Now maybe Kate Swift is trying to explain another phrase I’ve heard for countless years, in AHS 2013 Fortunatotion terms, “When you waste words, God kills a puppy.” Comparatively, I think Mr. Fortunato and Ms. Swift may be getting at the same thing—there’s a difference between writing and writing well.

But here’s my question for Kate Swift, and anyone else who wants to answer it: how do you get better at writing without practice? The quick-and-easy answer is you don’t. It’s like anything else, subjected to the age-old cliché “Practice makes perfect.”

I’ll wholeheartedly admit that this specific quote stood out to me because of who I am and what is important to me as such, but I still firmly believe that this passage is vital to the order of the story.

George Willard, the only constant character—and potential narrator (I’ll blog about that later)—is told to stop writing until he is older.

Did he take Ms. Swift’s advice?