Dark Laughter

Dark Laughter is a 1925 novel by American author Sherwood Anderson. Set in the early 1920s, a decade of unprecedented socioeconomic mobility and sexual freedom, it follows reporter John Stockton who changes his name to Bruce Dudley to flee his marriage and resettle in a small town in Indiana. There, he has an affair with Aline, the wife of Fred Grey, a wealthy factory owner and his employer. Bruce and Aline’s affair happens in plain sight, and they belittle Fred behind his back for his obliviousness. Ultimately, Bruce and Aline escape with their passions, devastating Fred and leaving ambiguous the question of whether the new couple is satisfied. In his novella, The Torrents of Spring, Anderson’s protégé Ernest Hemingway parodied the self-seriousness of the novel.

The novel begins in Chicago. John Stockton has tired of his life in the Midwest, working for a Chicago newspaper, and in a loveless marriage with his colleague, Bernice. Bernice wants to work on a magazine and is skeptical of John’s actual commitment to her. John admits that he has a dream of returning to his childhood town, Old Harbor, Indiana. He breaks off with her, taking only a few hundred dollars and leaving life as he knows it to start anew. Adopting the name Bruce Dudley, he travels down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. For about half a year, Bruce stays in an old house in an African-American neighborhood. He spends his time watching his African-American neighbors go about their lives, which are mostly joyful and full of music within their close-knit community. While observing them, he first hears the “dark laughter” that becomes the motif of the novel. Bruce perceives the dark laughter as a sign of the African-Americans’ childlike innocence; however, elsewhere, dark laughter takes on a more ominous and ironic meaning, representing the African-American’s knowing of whiteness and its failures.

After New Orleans, Bruce makes his way to Old Harbor. He finds work polishing car wheels at the Grey Wheel Company, owned by Fred Grey. In the factory, Bruce meets an old coworker, Sponge Martin. Sponge lives a very simple life, which intrigues Bruce and compels him to befriend him. Sponge tells him that on calm summer nights, he and his wife make a picnic and go down to the river to fish. They fish by the light of the moon and drink moonshine, reliving their childhoods. Bruce yearns to have a meaningful routine like Sponge’s.



One evening, while Fred’s wife, Arline, waits to pick him up outside the factory, she spots Bruce. She finds his demeanor uncannily similar to that of a man in Paris with whom she was once in love. Though she later married Fred, she remained attached to her idealization of the man in Paris. Soon after, Aline sees Bruce pass by her home. They stare at each other as if frozen in time. Both decide then that they will find each other. Aline puts out an ad for a gardener, hoping that it will draw in Bruce. It does, and shortly thereafter, he quits his factory job to work full-time for the family. Their first interactions are brief and hesitant as both of them restrain their intense feelings for each other. Fred asks his wife why Bruce now works at their house, and she downplays its significance, saying that she knows little about him. For months, Arline and Bruce grow closer, evading Fred’s scrutiny. Two black servants in Aline’s house see the affair develop, and burst out frequently in dark laughter. Bruce perceives their laughter as mocking their lives’ needless complexity.

One summer day, during the veterans’ parade, Aline and Bruce have sex while Fred is out of the house. Two months later, Aline announces her pregnancy, telling Fred nothing of the affair. That fall, Bruce and Aline break the news cruelly: they await Fred in the garden when he returns home from work. Aline tells Fred that she is leaving. Fred begs her to stay, as much out of concern for her financial and mental well-being as out of his desire for self-preservation. They leave anyway. Fred pursues them with a revolver, straining to decide whether it is justified to kill the man who took his wife. He considers suicide, then loses Fred and Aline along the dark road by the river. He fires his gun aimlessly at the river, then collapses, sobbing. When he returns home, from his bedroom he hears the dark laughter of one of his servants. She exclaims that she saw this tragic outcome coming all along. The novel ends with a final description of her haunting laugh.