Perhaps my favorite story in Winesburg, Ohio is “Paper Pills,” the story about one Dr. Reefy and the beautiful young woman he married who, died shortly with a year after their marriage. No, there was nothing sinister. But we’ll get to that soon enough. First, let’s look at the story.
Paper Pills: An Overview
The story “Paper Pills” begins with a look at the quirky person of Dr. Reefy. At the time of the writing of this story, Dr. Reefy is an old man with a white beard, and a huge nose and hands. We are told in the first paragraph that before he had become old, he was the town doctor who later “married a girl who had money.” She, we are told, was quiet, tall, and dark, and was considered very beautiful. Furthermore, “everyone in Winesburg wondered why she married the doctor.” And then we are told that she died within a year after they married. Naturally, as a reader, your curiosity is piqued. A peculiar marriage? An untimely death? What happened?
That that is how the story begins.
As we saw in “Hands,” and as is the case in every one of the stories in Winesburg, Ohio, there is always some major image (or two) that becomes the focus of the story. In “Hands,” it was Wing Biddlebaum’s hands. Here in “Paper Pills,” our attention is drawn to Dr. Reefy’s hands—more specifically, his knuckles. They were extremely large and looked like “clusters of unpainted wooden balls as large as walnuts fastened together by steel rods.” We are also told Dr. Reefy smoked a cob pipe, and that after his wife’s death, would just sit in his dirty doctor’s office.
The indication is that he became somewhat of a recluse. Although the town had largely forgotten about him in his old age, we are told that within Dr. Reefy “there were the seeds of something very fine.” He had an interesting habit of writing down his thoughts on little scraps of paper, balling them up, and then stuffing them inside his pockets. They would eventually become “little hard round balls,” and for fun, when he was talking with his particular sentimental-minded friend John Spaniard, he would grab a handful and throw them at his friend and say, “That is to confound you, you blathering old sentimentalist!”
That scene represented something about Dr. Reefy. The narrator says that when Dr. Reefy would write his thoughts down on the scraps of paper, what he was doing was erecting pyramids of truth that he would inevitably knock down, so that he would be able to take those truths to build more pyramids. More on that later.
Before we get to the story of his courtship with the young beautiful girl, there is one very important image we are called upon to recognize about Dr. Reefy. We are told, up front, that the story of the courtship is a very “delicious story”—delicious “like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of Winesburg.” Basically, the point is this: at harvest time, the harvesters go into the orchards to pick the nice-looking apples, so they can be sold in cities, where people living in apartments filled books, magazines, and furniture can eat them. What the harvesters leave behind in the orchards, though, are the gnarled apples that (obviously) don’t look good. There are two interesting things about these gnarled apples, though.
First, the narrator tells us that these gnarled apples look like the knuckles on Dr. Reefy’s hands. Secondly, the narrator tells us that the gnarled apples are actually sweetest apples. Only those who venture out into the orchards after the harvesters have left ever know “the sweetness of the twisted apples.” Clearly, the quirky, forgotten Dr. Reefy is equated with the twisted, gnarled apples of Winesburg that most people overlook, but are actually very sweet and delicious.
In any case, Dr. Reefy met the girl when he was 45-years old. He was already in the habit of writing his thoughts down and balling them up in his pockets, and there is one more thing emphasized about this:
“One by one the mind of Doctor Reefy had made the thoughts. Out of many of them he formed a truth that arose gigantic in his mind. The truth clouded the world. It became terrible and then faded away and the little thoughts began again.” As was introduced in “The Book of the Grotesque,” this represents the thing that makes people into grotesques. With Dr. Reefy, though, it should be obvious that although these truths threated to turn him into a grotesque, he never allowed to happen. Again, more on that later.
Finally, we get to introduced to the beautiful, dark girl. When her parents died, she had inherited rich acres of land, and obviously, because quite well off. And that inevitably led to a “train of suitors” who attempted to win her heart. Of all the suitors, two stood out. The first was a “slender young man with white hands, the son of a jeweler in Winesburg, [who] talked continually of virginity.” The second was a “black-haired boy with large ears [who] said nothing at all but always managed to get her into the darkness, where he began to kiss her.”
Obviously, on the surface, these two suitors seem like polar opposites: the first being almost vanilla-pure, and the second being a sex-obsessed lech. Because of that, initially the girl thought she’d marry the jeweler’s son. But something wasn’t right: “Beneath his talk of virginity, she began to think there was a lust greater than in all the others.” She felt that when he talked to her, he was always holding her body in his hands and staring at it. Then she the same dream three different times in which the jeweler’s son actually bit into her body and whose jaws were dripping with blood. Ironically, it was the other suitor who ended up biting her one time in a moment of passion. It was that injury that caused her to go see Doctor Reefy.
When she went to his office, he was in the middle of pulling a tooth from a woman. When he had pulled the tooth, both she and her husband screamed, and blood got on her white dress. Once they left, he attended to the girl and said he wanted to take her driving in the country.
The courtship took all of a few weeks. The beautiful dark girl, we are told, “was like one who has discovered the sweetness of the twisted apples,” and therefore, “she could not get her mind fixed again on the round perfect fruit that is eaten in the city apartments.”
They married that fall, and in the following spring, she died. We’re not told anything about what happened other than that. All we are told was that winter, when they were together, Doctor Reefy read to her all the odd and ends of his thoughts that he had scribbled on the bits of paper. The story ends with, “After he had read them, he laughed and stuffed them away in his pockets to become round hard balls.”
Paper Pills: My Thoughts
What are we to make of this strangely beautiful and frustrating story? There is so much that is left unanswered. Actually, I think having so much unanswered is partly the point, for there always is, in every life, much that happens that is never fully understood. There are always questions that remained unanswered. What we can do, though, is try to understand the story that we are given.
I, for one, love the character of Doctor Reefy. When I look at myself and my own personality, I feel somewhat of a kinship with Doctor Reefy. He is someone who is often overlooked, yet for those who take the time to get to know him, is a very sweet, although perhaps misunderstood, man. Of particular note is his practice of writing down his thoughts on scraps of paper, then occasionally chucking them at people in good natured fun. Along with that is the comments about how he erected “pyramids of truth” then knocked them down so he could build more.
As I briefly mentioned earlier, this goes back to the central idea of the old writer’s unpublished book, The Book of the Grotesque. Clearly, Doctor Reefy is a deep and thoughtful person. The danger with insightful and thoughtful people, though, is sometimes, in their attempt to make sense of the world, they construct their own “lens” through which they look at an analyze the world. In truth, everyone does this to a certain degree. Nevertheless, the danger (as expressed in the first story, “The Book of the Grotesque”) is that one ends up viewing the world through solely one, singular truth. The wide variety of life and all the people and events that make up this world are interpreted through one, singular, artificially-constructed “system of thought.”
Ironically, the “truth” about life is that it is so multifaceted and varied, you cannot truly understand it all through the lens of one, singular truth. The poet William Blake beautifully expresses this idea in his poem, “Eternity”:
“He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.”
What Blake’s poem, and what Doctor Reefy’s actions, tells me is that, yes, it is good to contemplate life and try to make sense of the world, obviously. Still, one should not grasp too tightly to artificially-constructed systems of thought, no matter how helpful they can be. Doctor Reefy understood that—and that is why he made sure to knock down those “pyramids of truth” he erected. He didn’t want to become enslaved to something that he, a mere mortal, constructed. And that is why, I believe, he did not become a “grotesque.”
What are we to make of his throwing those thoughts at his friend? I like to think that he was trying, in a sarcastic, crusty kind of way, to help his friend knock down his own “system of thought”—namely, seeing everything through a syrupy sentimentalism.
Then there is the topic of the two suitors. I find them fascinating. First there is the jeweler’s son who always spoke of virginity. To be honest, when I look back on my life, I think I probably have been seen more or less like the jeweler’s son: outwardly respectable and “pure,” if you will. But at the same time, to be honest, it is true that I, the jeweler’s son in the story, and probably everyone in life, harbor very real, powerful feelings of lust constantly. It’s human nature—lust and passion are interwoven in the very fabric of our humanity, and we all deal with it in different ways.
On the surface, it seems the jeweler’s son has it in check, but his obsession with virginity reveals that sex is always on his mind. I suppose it is similar to what we see in a lot of conservative Evangelical circles, especially the “purity culture” that really was a big thing after the book I Kissed Dating Goodbye came out in the 90s. Being so paranoid about “giving in” to your lusts that you are always obsessing over “staying pure” reveals that you are still very much enslaved to your lusts. It is not a healthy way to go about it.
On the other hand, neither is the way the second suitor dealt with his passions and lusts—namely, to just give into them and indulge whenever he could. The reason, though, why the girl came to fear the jeweler’s son more should be obvious with a little bit of reflection. With the second suitor, you know what you’re getting. With the jeweler’s son, though, his deep lusts are covered over with a hypocritical and childish attitude towards sex and intimacy. The very fact it was a jeweler’s son is important to realize, for when the girl imagined he was holding her body in her hands and inspecting it, that is what jeweler’s do with jewels. It is the ultimate form of objectification.
The point, obviously, is not that the second suitor was to be preferred over the jeweler’s son. The point is that both suitors represent two aspects to how our society tends to come to the topic of women, relationships, and intimacy: either base indulgence, or religious obsession with “purity.” Both attitudes end up make that person a “grotesque.” Sadly, though, both attitudes tend to be accepted and even praised in certain circles of our society. Both attitudes are like those supposedly nice, round apples from the orchard.
And this brings us back to Doctor Reefy at the end of the story. It is worth noting that the girl came to see him because she and indulged in a moment of passion with the second suitor and he bit her, and this came after her dream of the jewel’s son biting her and having blood on his jaws. When she comes to Doctor Reefy, what is he doing? He’s pulling a tooth, and that act ends up with the woman’s mouth bleeding and the blood getting on her white dress. Right there, the actions of Doctor Reefy are subtly contrasted with the actions of the two suitors. Their actions caused pain that ended up hurting the girl, whereas Doctor Reefy’s actions, though painful to the woman, nevertheless were to heal her.
And that is what drew the beautiful girl to Doctor Reefy. Unlike the two “respectable” suitors whose grotesque natures hurt the girl, Doctor Reefy was like those twisted, gnarled apples that everyone overlooks, but that are the sweetest kinds of apples. When she discovered him, she had no more interest in the kinds of “nice apples” that society says we should like…and settle for.
Her death at the end is sad and unexpected, but death almost always is. We as readers want to know how she died, or why she died, but we’re never told. We are not given an explanation. We want one because it is in our nature to want to “erect a pyramid of truth” to make sense of it. But the narrator won’t let us. We, like Doctor Reefy, have to accept that death is a part of life, even though we can’t understand it.
One more thing. Why is the title of the story “Paper Pills” when the actual word “pills” is never in the story? Well, Doctor Reefy is a doctor, and his thoughts (that become “round little balls”) are his “pills” that help people recover from their own “grotesque sicknesses” when they cling to one single truth and try to define their entire life by it. Nope—take that, you blathering old sentimentalist! (Trust me, it’s good for you).
