Volu m e I - Purdue University Calumet

were being manipulated by the yellow journalism of newspaper greats like William Randolph Hearst and
Joseph Pulitzer, both of which used a combination of aggrandizement and hype to provoke Americans into
combat with Spain. It is a story meant as a reminder of the monstrosity of war and the dangers of agreeing
with the twisted minds of those trying to romanticize it.
The consequences of a distortion are not always dire. In the instance of Elizabeth Willard, there
appears to be only a minor ripple in the water of her life. The belief that perpetually drives her is connected
to the “secret bond” that she feels with her son. This protagonist of Sherwood Anderson’s “Mother” is a
deteriorating, washed up, wraith-like woman, haunting the hotel that she inherited from her father. As a
young woman, she was restless, a daydreamer, always searching for a change, some sort of movement
forward. As she grew older, she continued to look for a kind of self-metamorphoses in her sexual
relationships with men. After she married Tom Willard, she believed that that part of her stopped searching
and withered away. In reality, the restlessness was transformed and channeled into a strange and unhealthy
fixation on her son, George. She deludes herself into sensing this same need to wander in him, which
nurtures her fanatic obsession for him. When she overhears Tom telling her son to “wake up” from his
daydreaming, it’s as if her husband is speaking directly to her. She instantly believes that Tom wants the
special relationship between herself and her son to die. This causes her instinct to kick in. She decides she
will kill Tom in order to protect and maintain the invisible mother-son bond. Before she does so, she
decides that she wants to look as strong and beautiful as she feels. “No ghostly worn-out figure should
confront Tom Willard, but something quite unexpected and startling…As a tigress whose cub has been
threatened would she appear…holding the long wicked scissors in her hand” (1211). There is an
overwhelming, unsettling sense of Elizabeth working herself into a carnal frenzy that seems to speak of
untold, darker desires for her son.
At the very moment of her climax, she deflates. The action and the emotion are too much for her,
and she is unable to do more than sob. However, without knowing what has just taken place, George enters
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