SOURCE: Kramer, David S. “Sherwood Anderson's Beyond Desire: Femininity and Masculinity in a Southern Mill Town.” Southern Studies 5, nos. 1-2 (spring-summer 1994): 73-79.

In the following essay, Kramer examines the role of traditional Southern structures of masculinity and femininity and the changing industrial landscape in Beyond Desire.

From 1927 to 1931 Sherwood Anderson was the publisher and editor of two newspapers in Marion, Georgia, a period of labor unrest in mining towns and textile mills following the southern industrialization of the previous decades. In his novel Beyond Desire (1932) Anderson took an old theme of his—the destructive impact of the machine age on men and women—and developed it within the context of the new South of his observations.

Changing conditions were precipitating a cultural crisis. In broadest terms, traditional ideologies glorifying the sanctity of white womanhood and the chivalry of the southern gentleman were collapsing in the wake of new...