Response to "Tandy"

            Last week during class, we had lit circles about various stories in Winesburg, Ohio. However, due to a lack of students, we were unable to have a lit circle on the story "Tandy". Though this is one of the shortest stories in this short story circle, Anderson manages to provide a compelling commentary on the role of woman within its four pages.
           In the story, the stranger defines tandy as "the quality of being strong to be loved. It is something men need from women and that they do not get". Throughout history, women have been treated as weak and subordinate to men. However this definition of tandy, "something men need from women", gives power to woman by stating that tandy is a feminine trait that men need. Although men need women who are tandy, being tandy isn't a trait that is universal to all women. The stranger tells to the girl, "Be Tandy, little one. Dare to be strong and courageous...Be brave enough to dare to be loved". Since the girl must "Dare to be strong" and "brave", it implies that being tandy is trait that she must work for; that being tandy isn't a trait that all women innately possess, but is a quality that they must strive to achieve. The condition of being tandy is also described as "something more than man or woman", which gives it a divine or transcendent quality. At the very end of the story when the girl insists on being tandy, she is accepting the responsibility to achieve the divine quality of being tandy.
           The story of "Tandy" was especially relevant during the time period that Anderson wrote Winesburg, Ohio. 1919 was during the heart of the feminist movement. Possibly Anderson believed being tandy was the "new quality in women" that women needed in order to revolutionize how they were treated in society and their perceived roles in society.
           The stranger who names the girl Tandy is portrayed as a prophet like figure. Out of all men, he is the only one who knows the difficulties of being a woman and even says "Perhaps of all men I alone understand." At the end of the story, he is also described as bestowing a "vision of words" that the girl grasps on to as truth. It is ironic that Tandy's dad pays very little attention to her while the stranger views her as the next generation of tandy women. The girl's father embodies the old view of women in which they were mistreated and neglected in society.
            The narrator never says the name of the stranger or the name of the girl before she was named Tandy. By not stating the girl's name, it further emphasizes the importance of her new name and that her role before being named Tandy was insignificant. Now the word Tandy literally defines her. By not stating the name of the stranger, it underscores his irrelevance as an individual. He is not important as an individual; he is just the medium in which the girl discover tandy. At the end of the story, the stranger simply wakes up one morning and boards a train back to his home town in Cleveland.