L. Miller Minutes

To continue this series of commentaries on American Short Stories, I’m investigating another Sherwood Anderson story: Unlighted Lamps from 1921. Unlighted Lamps comes from Anderson’s collection of short stories called The Triumph of the Egg: A Book of Impressions from American Life in Tales and Poems (1921).

I’ve mentioned before that Sherwood Anderson is considered an early writer of modernist literature mainly due to his plain style and emphasis on psychological insight into characters. Literary modernism’s rise is in part due to the times from which it was spawned; gaining popularity most notably after World War I, the technological changes at the start of the 20th century, and societal shifts from rural to urban environments. Britannica summarizes a key part of modernism:

“Modernists felt a growing alienation incompatible with Victorian morality, optimism, and convention. New ideas in psychology, philosophy, and political theory kindled a search for new modes of expression.”

Modernist themes tend to center on more introspective and self-aware topics, and common literary tools of modernism include using multiple points of view, interior monologues, and a blurring of genres between story and poetical prose.

The selected reading for this commentary, Unlighted Lamps, follows the modernist style with heavy use of both interior monologue and multiple points of view in the story of its two main characters Mary and her father, Dr. Cochran. Let’s dig in.

Background: Unlighted Lamps comes from Anderson’s collection of short stories called The Triumph of the Egg: A Book of Impressions from American Life in Tales and Poems (1921). The story takes place in 1908 in (what my amateur research has determined to be) a small fictional town, Huntersburg, Illinois.

Length: 8.5 pages, 1 hour if focused

Themes:

Affection: longing to show and receive affection, guarded personality

Loneliness: pride, unresolved feelings, trauma, lack of trust, critical

Crude Plot Summary:

1) Mary Cochran is an 18 year old who lives with her father, Dr. Lester Cochran. They live together in the upstairs of Dr. Cochran’s practice. Anderson begins Unlighted Lamps with Mary leaving her and her father’s building on a Sunday evening to go on a walk to reflect on the evening prior where Dr. Cochran informed his daughter that he is a victim of heart disease and may die at any moment.

• To Mary, her father’s announcement of his illness was cold and brief, which was a quality he has held through most of her life.
• After telling the news of his illness, he leave the office. Mary is left standing looking down to the street in the evening.

2) The next day on Sunday evening, Mary begins her walk towards the edge of town by passing through a working-class area not usually passed through by a girl her age, let alone alone. She was proud of this boldness, but also thought her boldness was due out of spite and embarrassment – she did not want to walk where girls who knew her would be able to recognize her because of views she believed the town had of her mother, who supposedly left her and her father at a young age for an apparent younger man.

3) Mary walks to the end of town and finds a place she would frequently visit to think – on a stone in bushes beneath a tree along an orchard. She thought about how her town felt stuffy, and that people had looked at her with pitying eyes when she was younger, and now that she is growing up, townspeople would view her as growing up to be like her mother (to be bad).

• Mary thought the situation of her and her father along with the perception of the townspeople should have brought them closer together, but her and her father’s relationship remained cold.
• For a moment, she thought the prospect of her father’s death could offer a new phase in her life to leave town. She began to feel mellow at this prospect as she sat quietly.

4) A local boy, Duke Yetter, followed Mary to the orchard and spoke up, startling Mary and making her angry.

• Her anger was in part from being startled, but also in part that she didn’t want to be seen with the young man and to be viewed in the same light as her mother.
• Mary threatens Duke that if he continued to follow her or speak to her, she’d get someone to kill him, and that her father just wants the chance to kill some such fellow [as Duke]. At the impulse of saying this, Mary felt instantly ashamed and walked rapidly to return home.
• Duke was apologetic and that he didn’t mean any harm to Mary.

5) On Mary’s return trip home, she sees two boys fishing along a river as she crosses over a bridge. She stops to watch them. As she watched them, a man passes by Mary and recognizes her as Dr. Cochran’s daughter.

• The man, who comes to identify himself as a laborer and the father of the two boys fishing, discusses his affection for Dr. Cochran as a noble man who cared for the laborer’s sons when one of the sons fell out of barn loft while the man happened to be out of work due to illness. The man said Dr. Cochran gave them money for food to help them out.
• At hearing this story, Mary was filled with a new love for her father as she left and headed home.

6) Anderson shifts the story to Dr. Cochran who sat in his office while Mary went out on her walk. Dr. Cochran thought to himself how his life ended up being how it was – he saw himself as cold and ostensibly as a failure in terms of a father figure and family man.

• He reflected on his marriage to Mary’s mother. Her mother was an actress and got stranded in town by her company. She became ill and met the doctor. He ended up marrying her despite town-chatter expecting the marriage to fail. Once married and after Mary was born, Dr. Cochran’s wife found herself unable to live with such a cold man. He knew this, and took her to Chicago, gave her money to start a new life, and left her there. They never spoke again.
• After thinking of his wife, he hears someone begin to enter the room, and imagines if it’s his wife, then becomes confused if it’s Mary. He then becomes unable to distinguish the two. Finally, the person enters the room: it’s a farmer who is inquiring the doctor to come to his home and birth his child.
• The Doctor heads to the farmer’s home and births the child. Impassioned from birthing the child, Dr. Cochran becomes renewed in his desire to show affection to Mary and to open up to her about his feelings as her father.
• Dr. Cochran heads home.

7) Mary sat waiting at her and her father’s home waiting for her father to return. She sat and reconciled her view of her father, and was eager to make amends with him, she waits.

• As she waited, she could hear banter from outside the building as her father could be heard joking with some other men outside. This was out of character for the doctor and Mary thought it could have been someone else.

8) Dr. Cochran makes his way upstairs speaking to himself, questioning who had the baby he just birthed – the farmer’s wife, his own wife, or Mary. He was hysterical as he couldn’t distinguish between them. His feet went numb and cold. Finally, Dr. Cochran falls, stumbling down the stairs into the street – he died.

Thoughts:

Sherwood Anderson presents characters bathing in loneliness, regret, and unaddressed feelings in the tragedy of Unlighted Lamps. We see Dr. Cochran, a dying father who is considered cold and unemotional; he views himself as a failure in terms of his marriage and family because of his coldness. His inability to show emotion to his wife ultimately results in her leaving. That inability to show emotion leaves an impact on his daughter Mary, who, in my opinion, suffers from trauma from the unresolved feelings of her father and the mystery of her mother leaving. Those unresolved feelings compound for Mary and ultimately impact how she sees herself; in her own community she sees herself as an outsider and wants to leave. Anderson wrote of Mary:

“The antagonism was not due to anything in her own character. She was sure of that. She had kept so much to herself that she was in fact but little known. ‘It is because I am the daughter of my mother,’ she told herself and did not walk often in the part of town where other girls of her class lived.”

Sherwood Anderson uses the father’s heart disease and nearing death as an ultimatum for the father and daughter to reconcile their feelings once and for all. Unfortunately, death comes before they could see it through – what I think are the unlighted lamps: the feelings not expressed between the two.

It is difficult not to try and psychoanalyze the characters while reading Unlighted Lamps (although I think Sherwood Anderson would permit and expect this type reading of this story) – the internal monologues the characters have with themselves as they realize there is only a matter of time to make their emotions known to each other is one of the key highlights of the story. We see the characters transform from despair to excitement and renewal at the prospect of telling their feelings to each other. At her renewed sense of love for her father after hearing of how great of a man his is from the laborer on the bridge, Anderson writes of Mary:

“As a child she had continually dreamed of caresses received at her father’s hands and now the dream came back. For a long time she stood looking at the stream and she resolved that the night should not pass without an effort on her part to make the old dream come true.”

One noteworthy point I think worth raising and investigating further is the mental state of Dr. Cochran prior to his death. As he was approaching the room to where Mary was and where he was going to finally express his feelings to her – he was in a state of confusion (disarray and decay, really). I think Dr. Cochran was teetering on the edge of not actually expressing his feelings and was succumbing to his own anxiety and shortcomings that he saw in himself. By Sherwood Anderson including this confusion on the part of the father, he introduced an additional layer of tragedy to the story: despite the father recognizing what he needed (and wanted) to do to reconcile his relationship with his daughter, he was going to fail.

Anderson does well to capture the nuanced emotions of the Cochran’s (something I admit is difficult to summarize without quoting large portions of the text verbatim), as well as does well to depict the ordinary scenes around them – making Unlighted Lamps feel relatable and sad but at the same time, warm. (See: Hopper). Anderson writes in Unlighted Lamps,

“The light of the summer evening had begun to fall and the faces of the people made soft little ovals of light as they stood grouped under dark porches or by the fences in Wilmott Street.”

I think Unlighted Lamps, as with other Sherwood Anderson works, presents more than enough complexity for multiple conclusions to be drawn – making it an enjoyable read.

If you’d like to read along and join the discussion, the Unlighted Lamps is available here. You can also follow along in the same anthology of 100 short stories I am reading from (found here).

Next Up:

• The Untold Lie (1919) by Sherwood Anderson
• Paper Pills (1919) by Sherwood Anderson
• A Night Among the Horses (1918) by Djuna Barnes
• The Damned Thing (1898) by Ambrose Bierce

Series Progress:

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Cheers.