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Poetry 1

This document discusses student responses to analyzing William Carlos Williams' short poem "The Young Housewife". In the past, some students interpreted the poem as depicting a rape fantasy. More recently, other students misunderstood contextual details and thought the housewife was a prostitute. The author aims to provide a more accurate reading of the poem by highlighting details the students overlooked, such as the housewife calling delivery men and the polite behavior of the passing narrator.

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rahulvhiremath
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44 views

Poetry 1

This document discusses student responses to analyzing William Carlos Williams' short poem "The Young Housewife". In the past, some students interpreted the poem as depicting a rape fantasy. More recently, other students misunderstood contextual details and thought the housewife was a prostitute. The author aims to provide a more accurate reading of the poem by highlighting details the students overlooked, such as the housewife calling delivery men and the polite behavior of the passing narrator.

Uploaded by

rahulvhiremath
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Introduction

Differential Reading

Reading Closely

Not long ago I was teaching a graduate course called “Theory of the Avant-
Garde,” which covered such major movements as Futurism and Dada as well
as two individual American “avant-gardists”—Gertrude Stein and William
Carlos Williams. The course material was largely unfamiliar to the class: F. T.
Marinetti’s parole in libertà, Velimir Khlebnikov’s Tables of Destiny, Marcel
Duchamp’s Large Glass and the “notes” for its execution in the White Box,
Kurt Schwitters’s collages and sound poems, and Raoul Haussman’s political
satire. The students were remarkably astute on the larger aesthetic and ideo-
logical issues involved and especially perceptive about visual works. I was
therefore astonished when at semester’s end we came to what I took to be the
more familiar American modernist exemplars and found that the same stu-
dents who could discuss with great aplomb the relation of the Milky Way to
Bachelors in the Large Glass were largely at a loss when it came to Williams’s
short lyric poems like “Danse Russe” or “The Young Housewife”—both, in-
cidentally, well-known anthology pieces. Here is “The Young Housewife”:

At ten A.M. the young housewife


moves about in negligee behind
the wooden walls of her husband’s house.
I pass solitary in my car.

Then again she comes to the curb


to call the ice-man, ¤sh-man, and stands
shy, uncorseted, tucking in
stray ends of hair, and I compare her
to a fallen leaf.
xii Introduction
The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.1

In the self-consciously feminist eighties, readers often objected to what they


perceived as the rape fantasy in this poem: if the young housewife is compa-
rable “to a fallen leaf,” and the “noiseless wheels” of the poet’s car “rush with
a crackling sound over / dried leaves,” he is evidently longing to “ride over”
the young woman, to possess her. This analysis, I shall suggest later, is not
incorrect, but the reference to rape ignores the wry humor of the poem’s
tone, the delicacy of its irony.
In 2002 the response was much more bizarre. A number of students, for
example, took the young housewife to be a prostitute because she comes to
the curb and calls men. She is, moreover, in a state of undress—“in negligee”
and “uncorseted.” And the poet compares her to a “fallen leaf ”—that is, a
fallen woman. But, I asked these students, what about those men the young
housewife actually calls from the curb: “the ice-man” and “¤sh-man”—
which is to say, delivery men who bring daily domestic goods to the house?
And why is she doing these things, shyly “tucking in / stray ends of hair” at
10 a.m.? Again, why does the poet “bow” to this prostitute or call girl and
“pass smiling”? Why such respectful—and distant—behavior?
This last question prompted mere dismissal on the part of the class, for,
it was argued, there must be something funny going on here, because you
can’t bow in a car! In response I started driving in my chair and dof¤ng my
imaginary hat, as was the habit in early-twentieth-century America, so as to
show them that all “bows” are not Japanese deep bows of the kind they have
seen in the movies. Indeed, I’ve been practicing the Williams bow and smile
in my car ever since.
Another reading proffered by the class was that the poet-speaker has been
having an ongoing affair with the young housewife. Otherwise, how would
he know that she wears negligees in the morning? No doubt he is jealous of
the husband who owns her, the husband behind whose “wooden walls” she
is forced to perform her daily tasks. And he is bitter about being “solitary”
in his car and hence fantasizes about “crushing” her.
This reading is really not much more convincing than the ¤rst. One
doesn’t refer to one’s mistress as “the young housewife,” and a “shy” one at
that. If the speaker, who evidently doesn’t know her by name, is passing “soli-
tary in [his] car,” he can only surmise—or imagine—what she might be
wearing. When he does see her as he passes, she is outside the front door,
shyly calling the ice-man and ¤sh-man; so, if the two are indeed lovers, she

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