Pedagogy of the undressed: Sherwood Anderson's Kate Swift

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1999 by Belinda Bruner

   I want you to do something, I don't know what. Perhaps it is none of my
   business. I want you to try to be different from other women. You see the
   point. It's none of my business I tell you. I want you to be a beautiful
   woman. You see what I want. (236-37)

In the cycle of good teaching, Helen, now, must miss what George is trying to tell her. It is probable that Helen does not see what George wants and she must discover it for herself. George's sharing with Helen is a part of Kate's legacy. Kate Swift offers herself to George and allows him to grasp what he needs.

Kate intuitively reveals enough of herself to aid the instruction of each student who is ready to learn. She exposes nothing extraordinary as she teaches young children, guarding her body and keeping a barrier between it and the bodies of the students. She does not touch her young students as Wing Biddlebaum does, and she does not have to; her presence is so commanding that the students sit back in their seats and look at her. She is not accountable for the Reverend's voyeurism because she is in her apartment, where it is appropriate to indulge in the private behavior of unbinding her body. She does not invite eroticization but she has some sense of its possibility, exhibited in the fact that she makes a conscious decision to touch George but not her current students. In fact, Kate does not touch anyone but George, though her body, dressed and undressed, is an erotic focal point for many who observe it.

George had never really looked at Kate until she made the move to touch him. When he did look, he found her to be very beautiful. Anderson makes it clear that it is the passion of her teaching that beautifies Kate, but never suggests that Kate is a desperate old maid. She has known passion and she has had adventures:

   Although no one in Winesburg would have expected it, her life had been very
   adventurous. It was still adventurous ... the people of the town thought of
   her as a confirmed old maid and because she spoke sharply and went her own
   way thought her lacking in all the human feeling that did so much to make
   and mar their lives. In reality she was the most eagerly passionate soul
   among them. (162)

This passion becomes physical as her intense desire to have George understand life sweeps over her. It is emotional eagerness and a trick of light--"in the lamplight George Willard looked no longer a boy, but a man ready to play the part of a man"--(165) that causes Kate to become aroused by George. But with the Reverend Hartman it is entirely the essence of Kate that teaches, and Kate-in-the-flesh cannot respond. The Reverend sees Kate's body undressed, and lusts for her, but she has not provoked it; she does not even know he is looking at her. The Reverend never describes Kate's body as beautiful but as a spiritual diversion, as God in the body of a woman. In Hartman's case, Kate's body teaches without her knowledge, serving as a kind of blank page upon which the Reverend writes his own text. Kate's body becomes a spectacle as she appears to the Reverend as a holy vision leading him out of spiritual despair. She unconsciously teaches him that sexual desire and intellectual desire often come together. The Reverend also learns to acknowledge that the truth may set him free, even if that truth is something he considers sinful. Kate's nude body first incites lust but then leads the Reverend to pray. As with George, lust is followed by a yearning for truth.