Respectability: An Overview
In Winesburg, Ohio, the character of Wash Williams is both revolting and immensely pitiable. At the very beginning of the story, Wash is compared to an ugly, dirty, grotesque monkey in a cage. He was the telegraph operator of Winesburg, and “the ugliest thing in town.” We are told that everything about him looked unclean and dirty…except for his hands. He meticulously cleaned and took care of his hands. In addition to that, Wash was also a loner and simply didn’t like people. And oh, he hated women. He openly called them “bitches”: “Does not every man let his life be managed for him by some bitch or another?”
Now, although nobody really liked Wash, the narrator tells us that many men in the town secretly respected him: “When Wash talked though the streets such a one had an instinct to pay him homage, to raise his hat or to bow before him.” In fact, when the banker’s wife wrote a letter to the superintendent of the telegraph operators, complaining about Wash’s dirtiness, we are told that the superintendent simply laughed and ripped up the letter…and thought of his own wife as he was doing it. The reason for Wash’s hatred toward women is hinted early on in the story. He used to be married, and he loved his wife “with a love as absorbing as the hatred he later felt for all women.”
Before we get to the story of Wash’s marriage, though, we are told that Wash took an interest in George Willard, because George had been “getting cozy” with a girl in town named Belle Carpenter. He wasn’t in love with her, and she already had a suitor, but occasionally, they would go off together to make out a bit. George had always been curious as to why Wash hated women so much, so one day he asked Wash if he had ever been married, and if he had been married, was his wife dead…and that is how Wash’s story begins.
Wash’s immediate answer is shocking: “Yes, she is dead. She is dead as all women are dead. She is a living-dead thing, walking in the sight of men and making the earth foul by her presence.” After rambling on a bit more, Wash then said, “The sight of a woman sickens me. Why I don’t kill every woman I see I don’t know.”
Wash then proceeded to tell George his story. He decided to do so because he had seen George with Belle and didn’t want what happened to him to happen to George: “What happened to me may next happen to you. I want to put you on your guard. Already you may be having dreams in your head. I want to destroy them.”
Basically, Wash had remained a virgin until he married a beautiful young woman. He was madly in love with her. It turned out, though, that within the first two years of their marriage she had had three other lovers. They would come over to their house when Wash was at work. Wash was devastated and “cried like a silly boy.” He decided to just give her all the money he had in the bank and divorce her. He later sold the house and sent her all the money from that too.
A short time later, his ex-wife’s mother wrote him a letter and asked him to come to their house in Dayton. He was hoping his ex-wife would ask for forgiveness. He wanted to forgive and forget: “I hated the men I thought had wronged her. I was sick of living alone and I wanted her back.”
When he got to the house, he waited in the parlor for two hours. Then finally, at her mother’s coaxing, his ex-wife came into the room…naked. She wasn’t going to ask for forgiveness. She was basically trying to seduce him to get him back. Wash ended his story with the following words: “I didn’t get the mother killed. I struck her once with a chair and then the neighbors came in and took it away. She screamed so loud you see. I won’t ever have a chance to kill her now. She died of a fever a month after that happened.”
Respectability: My Thoughts
So, what was it that made Wash Williams hate all women? It wasn’t just that his wife cheated on him. It wasn’t just that she had cheated on him with three lovers who came to their own house when Wash was away. It was that even after that was over, that his wife, at her mother’s urging, tried to get him back, not by expressing remorse and asking for forgiveness, but by seducing him, just like she obviously had done with her lovers.
Young Wash was clearly an idealistic and romantic guy, saving himself for marriage, and clearly head over heels in love. If anyone has been in love before, only to find the one you love has been shamelessly cheating on you—that experience is absolutely soul-crushing. Perhaps that’s why Wash simply gave her all his money and left. He didn’t have any strength left because the unfaithfulness had been so devastating.
Another thing in the story that shows just how naïve and tender-hearted Wash originally was, was the fact that he was angry with the lovers, not with his wife. He desperately wanted to believe that she had been wronged by them. He didn’t want to believe that she—the girl he was madly in love with—was really the aggressive temptress. In addition, the fact that he was ready to forgive her and take her back is both admirable and pitiable. Of course, his forgiveness of her and his taking her back was contingent on her actually asking for forgiveness. But I’m sorry, if your wife (or husband) cheats on you three times within your few couple years of marriage—that’s a big red flag. The best you can do is admit your mistake of marrying such a person, chalk it up to a hard lesson learned, and move on. To open yourself up again to that kind of person is to open yourself up to the destruction of your own soul.
And that is what we see happened with Wash Williams.
A final thing to notice is that it is fairly clear that his ex-wife’s unfaithfulness didn’t spring up out of nowhere. The fact that his mother-in-law was goading his ex-wife to “re-seduce” him tells us that the girl had obviously been taught by her mother to do this. In any case, such behavior is narcissistic at its core. It preys upon the good will of people—especially the naïve—convinces them that the narcissist’s interest and love is genuine, and then proceeds to hurt them and abuse them, all the while somehow convincing the one who is cheated on and abused that the narcissist is the victim.
Wash learned the hard way, at it cost him his soul and any chance of healing. The irony of his name “Wash” Williams shouldn’t be lost–he was never able to wash away the hurt and betrayal of his wife. Hence, his physical ugliness and dirtiness becomes symbolic to the ugliness and dirtiness of his soul. He had been a naive and idealistic young man who feel deeply in love. And the hurt his cheating wife inflicted on him, and the crassness and further humiliation of her trying to seduce him back into a relationship instead of asking for forgiveness, irrevocably dirtied his soul. Those who have gone through similar deception and unfaithfulness in marriage or any relationship can probably look back and see how easy it would have been in their own circumstances to have let themselves turn into someone like Wash Williams. Many, in fact, have.
It is very easy to let the unfaithfulness and cruelty of someone to whom you have given your love make you so jaded that that tragic experience ends up being the thing that defines your life, and you, in fact, become a pitiful grotesque.
