Kate Swift Thesis

The “possessive” desire that takes hold of Louise also takes hold of Kate Swift in “The Teacher,” and in this instance, the desire completely controls the female character, but she does not “settle” for what George Willard offers her. Kate Swift proves that women can control their desire even if they do not completely understand their desire, so the narrator’s insistence that they are completely “possessed” is untrue. In “The Teacher,” the narrator also uses the word possession to describe Kate Swift’s desire: “Kate Swift turned and walked to the door. She was a teacher but she was also a woman. As she looked at George Willard, the passionate desire to be loved by a man, that had a thousand times before swept like a storm over her body, took

Even though the story “Hands” is about the man Wing Biddlebaum, the narrator described him like a female character, and the people of the town see his actions as a teacher as sexual after one of his student’s claim that the teacher touched him. Because of his accusation, the towns people see his actions as negative. Wing is “one of those rare, little-understood men who rule by a power so gentle that it passes as a lovable weakness. In their feeling for the boys under their charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men” (Anderson 8). These lines present Wing as a woman because the narrator presents women as desiring or loving other men since he acts in the same way as them. The implication that he was doing something wrong to the boys is true because the other women in the story so far wanted something from men, but there is no clarification that what they want is sexual. In the story, the narrator only describes Wing touching the boys with his hands, and these hands cause the boys to dream. “By the caress that was in his fingers he expressed himself. He was one of those men in whom the force that creates life is diffused, not centralized. Under the caress of his hands doubt and disbelief went out of the minds of the boys and they began also to dream” (Anderson