wife and lover

Winesburg, Ohio- Paper Pills, Death- Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson visits Doctor Reefy’s love life twice in Winesburg, Ohio. He first explores Doctor Reefy’s relationship with his wife in the story “Paper Pills.” Later on in the book, in the story “Death,” Anderson describes the love affair Doctor Reefy had with Elizabeth even before he had met his wife. Each relationship is unique with its own beginning and consequence, yet both are significant events in the life of Doctor Reefy and the two girls he was in love with. But what exactly did these relationships mean to each of them?

For the tall dark girl, Doctor Reefy’s wife, her relationship with the doctor seemed to be an escape. Their first meeting itself was the result of an attempt to escape a mistake. She was “in the family way and had become frightened,” leading her to visit Doctor Reefy to find a solution to her unplanned pregnancy. Afterwards, however, it was not his treatment, but Doctor Reefy himself that seemed to be the girl’s escape. From her relationship with her two suitors, the white-handed boy and the black-haired boy, it seemed that she was frightened of purity. The white-handed boy who spoke of virginity scared her, almost as if the perfection he was obsessed with was too much for her to bear. However, she more readily accepted the black-haired boy, symbolic of darkness and secrets, despite the fact that he at times did the very things that she feared the white-handed boy would do, like biting her. Having endured the consequence of such a decision, Doctor Reefy provided her with the escape to purity without the perfection that the white-handed boy forced on her. Although Doctor Reefy was surrounded by white and purity (white horse, white beard), he still possessed the lovable grotesqueness that allowed the tall girl to fall in love with him. He was compared to the “sweetness of the twisted apples.” He was imperfect, like the twisted apple, but that was exactly what caused the addicting sweetness that kept her with him. Because she was able to find in Doctor Reefy this sweetness that perfectly matched her, he was able to become her refuge.

Like Doctor Reefy’s wife, Elizabeth also sought out Doctor Reefy as an escape, but an escape from the loneliness of marriage. Doctor Reefy and Elizabeth “were a good deal alike.” It was precisely because of this that Elizabeth found herself able to communicate so easily with Doctor Reefy. Compared to her husband Tom who barely knew what she was thinking, being able to have someone that could simply understand her was a respite from her normal world and brought her even closer to Doctor Reefy. However, one of the main differences between Doctor Reefy’s relationship with his wife and with Elizabeth was one of the main reasons for the success of the former and failure of the latter. Elizabeth was already married. This caused her entire relationship with Doctor Reefy to become a secretive affair. She was unable to freely build the communication between the two of them. Instead she was only able use the snatches of understanding Doctor Reefy gave her to keep her going during her normal life with her husband. The love that brought Doctor Reefy and his wife together is what drove him and Elizabeth apart. Knowing that they were in love made their relationship forbidden and therefore robbed the relationship of the free exchange it had. At the same time, Doctor Reefy still served the purpose he was meant to in Elizabeth’s life. He was not a refuge to her, but a release. As Anderson describes, it was a “release that after all came to her but twice in her life, in the moments when her lovers Death and Doctor Reefy held her in their arms.”