Here in my next installment of my look at Winesburg, Ohio, I’m going to cover two short stories. As you’ll see, they are intimately connected. And that is one of the things I love about Winesburg, Ohio—so many of the stories within the book turn out, in the end, to be connected in a way you don’t see coming. I think that is one of the things that makes the book so great. On one hand, each story shows the inner loneliness and struggles of individual people in Winesburg, but in the greater scope of the book, we realize just how much the lives intertwine with each other, often in ways the individual characters never realize.
The Strength of God: An Overview
“The Strength of God” is the story of the Reverend Curtis Hartman, the pastor of the Presbyterian church in Winesburg. He was middle-aged (40 years old), and was by nature a quiet, contemplative man. Still, he was well-liked and respected in the town. Yet, he never really liked to preach because he always felt he wasn’t dynamic enough. He was constantly praying for God to give him strength and courage for His work.
To prepare for his sermons, he would retreat to a small room up in the bell tower. It just so happened, though, that through the window of that room, he was able to see into the house next door—specifically, the bedroom of a woman named Kate Swift, a young teacher in town. She had travelled to Europe and then lived in New York City for a couple of years before settling in Winesburg. He’d see her smoking a cigarette while reading a book in bed. He’d notice her bare shoulders and white throat. To him she seemed alluring, exotic, and worldly.
By contrast, his own life had been exceedingly boring. He had worked his way through college, married a quiet daughter of the underwear manufacturer in Muncie, Indiana. They then settled down into a nice, pleasant, quiet life. He considered himself fortunate and wouldn’t even let himself think of other women. But now, he had started to become somewhat obsessed with Kate Swift.
Oftentimes, the next day in church, he found he had extra energy and preached with more dynamically…and he would wonder whether or not she could hear him. When winter came and the stained glass window of Christ blessing a small child had to remain closed, so that he couldn’t look into her room, he broke out a corner of the window so he could keep watching her in her bed. The first evening he did, when the shade went up, he saw only Kate’s mother, and he felt relief that God had saved him from the desire to lust.
That particular Sunday, he gave a rousing sermon about temptation and forgiveness. He also started paying more attention to his wife and being more romantic and affectionate with her. But soon, the temptation to look into Kate’s Swift room came again, and Curtis found himself struggling with temptation again. He kept creeping up into the bell tower, kept feeling the temptation, and eventually started to blame God for not taking the temptation away, because after all, he had always tried to stay on the right path and didn’t go around seeking to sin. And so, a certain routine developed. He’d go up in the bell tower, look at Kate Swift, then go out walking in the street to pray.
Over time, he became even more tempted and obsessed. He wanted to give in to his lusts: “I want to look at that woman and to think of kissing her shoulders and I am going to let myself think what I choose.” He told himself he’d leave the ministry, go into the city, get into business, and “If my nature is such that I cannot resist sin, I shall give myself over to sin.” He started to resent his own wife and complain to himself how she was too prudish and never let him express his deepest desires. He wanted to completely abandon his current life and just go after women. If anything, he felt at least he wouldn’t be a hypocrite.
Then one January night, Curtis went up in the bell tower to gaze at Kate Swift again. That night he saw her come into the room naked, throw herself down on the bed and weep and beat her fists onto her pillow. The image made him think of the boy in the stained-glass window who was being blessed by Christ. Curtis cried out, went out into the street, made his way to the door of the town’s newspaper office, The Winesburg Eagle, walked inside and started rambling to George Willard: “The ways of God are beyond human understanding. I have found the light. After ten years in this town, God has manifested himself to me in the body of a woman. I did not understand. What I took to be a trial of my soul was only a preparation for a new and more beautiful fervor of the spirit. God has appeared to me in the person of Kate Swift, the school teacher, kneeling naked on a bed. Do you know Kate Swift? Although she may not be aware of it, she is an instrument of God, bearing the message of truth.”
He then held up his fist and George saw that it was bleeding. Curtis proclaimed, “I am delivered. Have no fear. I smashed the glass of the window. Now it will have to be wholly replaced. The strength of God was in me and I broke it with my fist.”
So, what just happened? Before we get to that, let’s look at the next story, “The Teacher.”
The Teacher: An Overview
It turns out that during that winter, George Willard and Kate Swift had been spending time together, and he began to think she might have been flirting with him. He’d go home at night, lay on his bed, hug his pillow and think about her…and then sometimes his thoughts would change to another girl in town, Helen White.
In any case, this story takes place the very night that Reverend Curtis Hartman broke the window in his bell tower. At 10 pm, Kate Swift had left her house to go for a walk. She was 30 years old but wasn’t considered to be a pretty woman—not ugly, but still, not pretty. In addition, she was beginning to lose her hearing. For some reason, the people of the town felt “there was something biting and forbidding in the character of Kate Swift.” Even when she was happy, there was a certain coldness about her, and the people of the town considered her an old maid. Beneath that cold exterior, though, we are told that “she was the most eagerly passionate soul among them.”
She was particularly intrigued by George Willard. When he was her student, she saw something in his writing, and she was now trying to encourage George to go out and live his life, so that he would have something worth writing about: “Now is the time to be living. …I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of worlds. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.”
Then, on the night before Curtis Hartman had smashed the window, she and George shared an intimate, awkward embrace, but nothing more. And so, the next night, Kate went to see George in the office of the Winesburg Eagle. She found herself overcome with a tremendous passion for George, and before long they began to give in to their desires…but then Kate stopped, beat George back, and rushed out of the office back home. George, understandably, was incredibly confused and angry. He had no idea what was going on.
It was just at that moment when Curtis Hartman had come into the office of the Winesburg Eagle and had said what he said from the previous story.
This was even more confusing to George. He went home, hugged his pillow, thought of Kate Swift, and tried to understand what had happened. Obviously, though, he couldn’t. How could he? Finally, at 4 am, he fell asleep, saying to himself, “I have missed something. I have missed something Kate Swift was trying to tell me.”
The Strength of God/The Teacher: My Thoughts
What do we see going on in these two stories, particularly with the characters of Curtis Hartman, Kate Swift, and George Willard? Let’s briefly look at each one.
First, there is Curtis Hartman. By all accounts, he is a quiet, sensitive man, a hard worker, a devoted believer…and someone who simply has never taken any chances in his life. He’s never seen the world, and for the most part never has wanted to. He’s only been with one woman in his life, his wife, and that is a good thing. But inevitably, those like Curtis will at some point wonder what he has missed out on and will think, “What would it be like to travel the world and have an adventure? What would it be like to be with other women?” It’s human nature to wonder those things: “What if…?”
So, what we see with his story is his dealing with his personal “mid-life crisis.” Seemingly for the first time in his life, he is having to deal with real lustful feelings. And we shouldn’t condemn him. There is something—there should be something—exciting and exhilarating about sex and sexual desire. Ideally, one finds that within a healthy marriage. And sometimes, especially if the “spark” has gone out of the relationship, it’s easy to look in other directions and wrestle with the reality of the situation.
But what was it that night that gave Curtis Hartman the “strength of God” to smash the window? It was seeing Kate Swift, seemingly in prayer. Upon seeing the woman he had been lusting after weeping and obviously hurt in some way, I believe that Curtis snapped back into realty. Kate Swift wasn’t just an object of lust—she was a real human being, a real woman dealing with real hurt. With that realization, he found the strength to choose for himself to reject his lustful thoughts.
Most men—heck, most men and women—have passions and desires and lusts they deal with. Most of the time, though, those desires are directed toward sex objects, not real human beings. Yes, we lust after other people, but in our fantasy life, they aren’t real people. They are figments of our imagination who don’t really correspond to the actual person in question. That, I believe, is what Curtis Hartman realized: to indulge in a fantasy life, and to potentially ruin your own real life over it, is to indulge in just that—a fantasy that doesn’t correspond to reality. And so, when he saw Kate Swift as a real woman, with real hurts and with a real need for healing, he knew he couldn’t continue to view her solely as an object of his lust. And that was the “strength of God” he desired.
Second, there is Kate Swift. What are we to make of her? I see her as a woman who had begun to “see the world,” and who really was a passionate person inside. For some reason, though, she had chosen to settle in a quiet town and be a school teacher. Clearly, there was something missing in her life. We’re never really told what, but I think she simply felt unfulfilled. For whatever reason, she had never found someone and she clearly felt alone. Besides, who in a small town like Winesburg, who had never seen the world, really be able to connect with someone like Kate Swift? Having travelled myself, I can attest to the fact that it is hard to relate to those whose lives and experiences are very different than my own.
And, being a human being with longings and passions, when she saw a spark in George that she obviously felt she had lost in herself, she was drawn to him when he became a young man. It wasn’t love—but it was a desire to connect and a desire to share a part of herself with someone who might be able to understand…if, that is, that someone would dare go out and see the world as well. But in the end, she knew what she felt for George wasn’t really love, but only some faint longing for something she had lost. Hence, her storming out of the office of the Winesburg Eagle. And hence her weeping on her bed later that night. I’m sure she felt she had missed out on what her life could have been like. She had a taste of it, but now she felt trapped in a small town life, an “old maid” who couldn’t find a true soul connection.
Finally, there is George. What can we say about him? Talk about finding himself in a very confused situations, or rather, situations. Being a young man, he had feelings for Helen White, but also was trying to deal with this situation with his former teacher who couldn’t have been any more than 5-10 years older than him. There did seem to be some kind of connection with Kate Swift—but not all connections are meant to develop into a real relationship. And George found that out pretty quick that night when Kate stormed out after, from his point of view, was a pretty shameless tease on her part. And to top it off, a few minutes after that, to have a pastor run into the office, ranting about how God had spoken to him through the body of Kate Swift, and waving about a bloody fist and saying that he smashed a window? Although we as readers know that what he means, George has no freaking clue!
All George can figure out is that he was “missing something” in life, and that Kate Swift, with her strange behavior, was trying to tell him something. From what I can tell her confused message to George was this: “Go out and live your life, have experiences, and don’t end up like me.”
And so, such as often is true in life, what we end up with is a school teacher dealing with her own sense of loneliness and unfulfilled dreams, a young newspaper reporter trying to make sense of women and life in general, and their confused relationship. And all the while, unbeknownst to either of them, has been a middle-aged pastor who has been dealing with his own creeping sense of an unfulfilling life, and who is convinced that God had finally spoken to him, ironically through the pain of the woman he had been lusting after…Kate Swift, the source of George’s own confusion.
