Winter Dreams

“Winter Dreams” reminds me a lot of Zitkala Sa’s “Impressions of an Indian Childhood”. Both stories really question our pursuit of the “American Dream”. Dexter and Zitkala Sa both are successful people who have worked hard to earn their way, yet none of this gives them satisfaction or the happiness they are longing for.

Dexter and Judy are young, rich and beautiful. According to our world’s standards, that should make them two very happy people. However, that’s just not the case. Instead, they’re both wandering around blindly in life trying to find happiness.

Judy’s identity is wrapped up in her beauty and ability to get and string along any man she wants. In fact, she strings along multiple men. “He was, as he found before the summer ended, one of a dozen, a varying dozen, who circulated about her. Each of them had at one time been favored above all the others—about half of them still basked in the solace of occasional sentimental revivals. Whenever one showed signs of dropping out through long neglect she granted him a brief honeyed hour which encouraged him to tag along for a year or so longer.” Although Judy is beautiful and pursued, near the end she finally breaks down and admits none of this brings her happiness. “‘I’m more beautiful than anybody else,’ she said brokenly, ‘why can’t I be happy?’”

For all of Dexter’s success, he’s still a very insecure man. He’s worked so hard to get to wear he is, but now he’s not sure where he belongs. On one hand, he’s proud that he’s worked hard to gain his wealth. But on the other hand, he likes to deny his more humble beginnings in an effort to fit into the upper society’s way of life. “He remembered the last time he had seen her father, and found he was glad the parents were not to be here tonight. They would wonder who he was. He had been born in Keeble, a Minnesota village fifty miles farther north and he always gave Keeble as his home instead of Dillard. Country towns were well enough to come from if they weren’t inconveniently in sight and used as footstools by fashionable lakes.” Near the end, Dexter ends up going to war “welcoming the liberation from webs of tangled emotion”.

The story ends with Dexter & Judy still lost and searching for happiness. Dexter finds out Judy’s husband is running around on her, and that she’s no longer considered a “great beauty”. Dexter finally wakes up and realizes that Judy, his ideal woman he’s longed for, is not really an ideal woman at all. “‘Long ago,’ he said, ‘long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.’”