Unit 7 · Topic 7.2

7.2 Characters, groups and outside forces

Characters don't only clash with other individuals. They also deal with groups and forces, like a family, a town, a social club or society itself, and a group can act almost like a character. Whether a character is welcomed or shut out tells you how the group sees them, and often how they see the group.

Key terms

character vs. society
group as a character
inclusion and exclusion
outsider
external force

A group can act like a character

A town, a club, a family or a crowd can have its own attitudes, rules and reactions, and it can push characters around the way a single antagonist would. When a story keeps referring to "they" or "the people," or describes a group reacting as one, treat that group as a force in the conflict.

Groups also have unwritten rules. Some of the most important pressure in a story comes from expectations nobody states out loud: who belongs, how to behave, what counts as respectable.

Inclusion and exclusion reveal attitudes

Watch how a group treats a character. Being welcomed, tolerated, mocked or shut out reveals the group's values. The character's response, wanting in, rejecting the group or quietly enduring, reveals theirs.

Outsiders are especially useful. Because they don't share the group's assumptions, they make those assumptions visible. Sherwood Anderson's story "Hands," from Winesburg, Ohio (1919), centers on a lonely man who was driven out of an earlier town by a mob that wrongly suspected him, and who still hides his own hands in fear of the town's judgment.

Chesnutt's Blue Veins

Charles W. Chesnutt's "The Wife of His Youth" (1898) is built around a group. The "Blue Vein Society" is a social club of light-skinned Black Americans in a Northern city after the Civil War. Officially, it claims that "character and culture were the only things considered" for membership. The narrator, with dry irony, lets you see that skin color and a free-born background matter more than anyone admits.

The narrator adds that critics who attacked the society as prejudiced, once "on the inside," defended it with zeal. That one detail shows how belonging changes a person's perspective.

Mr. Ryder, the society's leader, plans to propose to a cultured, light-skinned widow. Then an elderly, dark-skinned woman arrives looking for the husband she married in slavery and hasn't seen in twenty-five years. At his ball, Ryder tells her story as a hypothetical and asks his guests what the man should do. The guests echo, "he should have acknowledged her." Ryder then brings her out and introduces her to the society.

Groups inside groups

Sometimes the most important group is a small one that forms during the story. In Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers" (1917), the short-story version of her play Trifles, a sheriff and a county attorney search a farmhouse for evidence that a woman killed her husband. The two women who came along stay in the kitchen, which the men dismiss as a place of unimportant things. There the women notice clues the men miss and slowly come to understand the lonely, harsh life the wife led. By the end they quietly hide what they found. The men never realize that a second "jury" has met and reached its own verdict.

Ask who belongs to which group, which group has power, and whether any character's loyalty shifts from one group to another. A shift in loyalty is often the story's turning point.

Worked examples

Try each one yourself first, then open the solution.

Example 1
Explaining how a group shapes a character's choice
At the end of "The Wife of His Youth," Mr. Ryder asks his guests whether the man in his story should acknowledge his wife. They answer, "he should have acknowledged her," and he presents her as "the wife of my youth." Explain how the Blue Vein Society functions as a force in the story's conflict.
Show the solutionHide the solution
1. Step 1: Identify the group's stated values: "character and culture."
2. Step 2: Identify its unspoken values: color and free birth, which the narrator gently exposes.
3. Step 3: Identify Ryder's conflict: his loyalty to his past and to his wife versus his place among the Blue Veins and his planned marriage.
4. Step 4: Explain the ending: Ryder makes the group judge his choice before they know it's his, so their stated values are put to the test in public.
Answer: Sample answer: The Blue Vein Society works almost like a second antagonist in Ryder's conflict, because its unspoken rules are what make acknowledging his wife so costly. Chesnutt has Ryder turn this pressure around: by asking the group to judge an anonymous case, he gets them to endorse "character" over color before they realize what they are endorsing. When they agree that the man "should have acknowledged her," the society's professed values are forced to meet its real ones. Ryder's choice defines him, and it also tests whether the group means what it says.

Common mistakes

Treating conflict as only person-against-person. Look for groups and social forces too.
Describing a group's rules without explaining what the character's response reveals about the character.
Taking a group's stated values at face value. Check what the group actually rewards or punishes.

On the exam

Multiple-choice questions may ask how a group's reaction characterizes a main character, or what a passage suggests about a community's values. Look for collective words (they, everyone, the town) and how the narrator describes them.
In essays, explaining how a society or group pressures a character is a good way to connect a passage to a broader context, which can support sophistication.

Connected topics

Videos

"What is Conflict in Literature?": A Literary Guide for English Students and Teachers
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Character actions in stories | Reading | Khan Academy
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Check yourself

4 questions on 7.2 Characters, groups and outside forces. Pick an answer to see if you got it, and why.

Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walked nervously up and down. Across a long field that had been seeded for clover but that had produced only a dense crop of yellow mustard weeds, he could see the public highway along which went a wagon filled with berry pickers returning from the fields. The berry pickers, youths and maidens, laughed and shouted boisterously. A boy clad in a blue shirt leaped from the wagon and attempted to drag after him one of the maidens, who screamed and protested shrilly. The feet of the boy in the road kicked up a cloud of dust that floated across the face of the departing sun. Over the long field came a thin girlish voice. “Oh, you Wing Biddlebaum, comb your hair, it’s falling into your eyes,” commanded the voice to the man, who was bald and whose nervous little hands fiddled about the bare white forehead as though arranging a mass of tangled locks.

Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts, did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the town where he had lived for twenty years. Among all the people of Winesburg but one had come close to him. With George Willard, son of Tom Willard, the proprietor of the New Willard House, he had formed something like a friendship. George Willard was the reporter on the Winesburg Eagle and sometimes in the evenings he walked out along the highway to Wing Biddlebaum’s house. Now as the old man walked up and down on the veranda, his hands moving nervously about, he was hoping that George Willard would come and spend the evening with him. After the wagon containing the berry pickers had passed, he went across the field through the tall mustard weeds and climbing a rail fence peered anxiously along the road to the town. For a moment he stood thus, rubbing his hands together and looking up and down the road, and then, fear overcoming him, ran back to walk again upon the porch on his own house.

In the presence of George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum, who for twenty years had been the town mystery, lost something of his timidity, and his shadowy personality, submerged in a sea of doubts, came forth to look at the world. With the young reporter at his side, he ventured in the light of day into Main Street or strode up and down on the rickety front porch of his own house, talking excitedly. The voice that had been low and trembling became shrill and loud. The bent figure straightened. With a kind of wriggle, like a fish returned to the brook by the fisherman, Biddlebaum the silent began to talk, striving to put into words the ideas that had been accumulated by his mind during long years of silence.

Wing Biddlebaum talked much with his hands. The slender expressive fingers, forever active, forever striving to conceal themselves in his pockets or behind his back, came forth and became the piston rods of his machinery of expression.

The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands. Their restless activity, like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird, had given him his name. Some obscure poet of the town had thought of it. The hands alarmed their owner. He wanted to keep them hidden away and looked with amazement at the quiet inexpressive hands of other men who worked beside him in the fields, or passed, driving sleepy teams on country roads.

When he talked to George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum closed his fists and beat with them upon a table or on the walls of his house. The action made him more comfortable. If the desire to talk came to him when the two were walking in the fields, he sought out a stump or the top board of a fence and with his hands pounding busily talked with renewed ease.

The story of Wing Biddlebaum’s hands is worth a book in itself. Sympathetically set forth it would tap many strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men. It is a job for a poet. In Winesburg the hands had attracted attention merely because of their activity. With them Wing Biddlebaum had picked as high as a hundred and forty quarts of strawberries in a day. They became his distinguishing feature, the source of his fame. Also they made more grotesque an already grotesque and elusive individuality. Winesburg was proud of the hands of Wing Biddlebaum in the same spirit in which it was proud of Banker White’s new stone house and Wesley Moyer’s bay stallion, Tony Tip, that had won the two-fifteen trot at the fall races in Cleveland.

Sherwood Anderson, "Hands," Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Question 1 of 4

The episode with the berry pickers in paragraph 1 chiefly reveals

Question 2 of 4

In paragraph 7, the narrator says Winesburg was proud of Wing’s hands “in the same spirit in which it was proud of Banker White’s new stone house” and a prize-winning horse. This comparison suggests that the town

Question 3 of 4

The narrator’s comments in paragraph 7 that the story of the hands “is worth a book in itself” and “is a job for a poet” chiefly

At home in Moscow everything was in its winter routine; the stoves were heated, and in the morning it was still dark when the children were having breakfast and getting ready for school, and the nurse would light the lamp for a short time. The frosts had begun already. When the first snow has fallen, on the first day of sledge-driving it is pleasant to see the white earth, the white roofs, to draw soft, delicious breath, and the season brings back the days of one's youth. The old limes and birches, white with hoar-frost, have a good-natured expression; they are nearer to one's heart than cypresses and palms, and near them one doesn't want to be thinking of the sea and the mountains.

Gurov was Moscow born; he arrived in Moscow on a fine frosty day, and when he put on his fur coat and warm gloves, and walked along Petrovka, and when on Saturday evening he heard the ringing of the bells, his recent trip and the places he had seen lost all charm for him. Little by little he became absorbed in Moscow life, greedily read three newspapers a day, and declared he did not read the Moscow papers on principle! He already felt a longing to go to restaurants, clubs, dinner-parties, anniversary celebrations, and he felt flattered at entertaining distinguished lawyers and artists, and at playing cards with a professor at the doctors' club. He could already eat a whole plateful of salt fish and cabbage.

In another month, he fancied, the image of Anna Sergeyevna would be shrouded in a mist in his memory, and only from time to time would visit him in his dreams with a touching smile as others did. But more than a month passed, real winter had come, and everything was still clear in his memory as though he had parted with Anna Sergeyevna only the day before. And his memories glowed more and more vividly. When in the evening stillness he heard from his study the voices of his children, preparing their lessons, or when he listened to a song or the organ at the restaurant, or the storm howled in the chimney, suddenly everything would rise up in his memory: what had happened on the groyne, and the early morning with the mist on the mountains, and the steamer coming from Theodosia, and the kisses. He would pace a long time about his room, remembering it all and smiling; then his memories passed into dreams, and in his fancy the past was mingled with what was to come. Anna Sergeyevna did not visit him in dreams, but followed him about everywhere like a shadow and haunted him. When he shut his eyes he saw her as though she were living before him, and she seemed to him lovelier, younger, tenderer than she was; and he imagined himself finer than he had been in Yalta. In the evenings she peeped out at him from the bookcase, from the fireplace, from the corner—he heard her breathing, the caressing rustle of her dress. In the street he watched the women, looking for some one like her.

He was tormented by an intense desire to confide his memories to some one. But in his home it was impossible to talk of his love, and he had no one outside; he could not talk to his tenants nor to any one at the bank. And what had he to talk of? Had he been in love, then? Had there been anything beautiful, poetical, or edifying or simply interesting in his relations with Anna Sergeyevna? And there was nothing for him but to talk vaguely of love, of woman, and no one guessed what it meant; only his wife twitched her black eyebrows, and said:

"The part of a lady-killer does not suit you at all, Dimitri."

One evening, coming out of the doctors' club with an official with whom he had been playing cards, he could not resist saying:

"If only you knew what a fascinating woman I made the acquaintance of in Yalta!"

The official got into his sledge and was driving away, but turned suddenly and shouted:

"Dmitri Dmitritch!"

"What?"

"You were right this evening: the sturgeon was a bit too strong!"

These words, so ordinary, for some reason moved Gurov to indignation, and struck him as degrading and unclean. What savage manners, what people! What senseless nights, what uninteresting, uneventful days! The rage for card-playing, the gluttony, the drunkenness, the continual talk always about the same thing. Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or a prison.

Gurov did not sleep all night, and was filled with indignation. And he had a headache all next day. And the next night he slept badly; he sat up in bed, thinking, or paced up and down his room. He was sick of his children, sick of the bank; he had no desire to go anywhere or to talk of anything.

In the holidays in December he prepared for a journey, and told his wife he was going to Petersburg to do something in the interests of a young friend—and he set off for S——. What for? He did not very well know himself. He wanted to see Anna Sergeyevna and to talk with her—to arrange a meeting, if possible.

Anton Chekhov, "The Lady with the Dog" (1899), Part III, translated by Constance Garnett (1917)

Question 4 of 4

The official’s reply in paragraph 11, “the sturgeon was a bit too strong!”, matters to the passage chiefly because it shows that

0 of 4 answered