EN 203 Guy Tiphane
Prof. A. Davaran February 6, 2002

It Was Such a Good Idea:
A Reading of William Carlos Williams’ The Young Housewife

In a critical reading of the Young Housewife, we are led to believe that the poem is a tale where the author looks back at his or her past work, the young housewife being a symbolic point of departure from naïve, earlier versions of the many ideas we have but never pursue.

Who is the speaker? A few verses define the person directly, at first as a solitary and isolated observer, almost a voyeur, protected by the steel of his car. This car not only provides for a mobile, comfortable, and anonymous point of observation, it also defines a status for the speaker when compared to the young housewife who does not have such a privilege and is confined to a house with wooden walls, a house which does not even belong to her. In the speaker’s imagination, as the housewife is first observed behind opaque walls, she has an easy life where she can get up and dress as late as she wants. She is what perhaps every other husband would dream of: all she has to do is wait for him to return from work and be at his disposal. Symbolically, the young housewife represents a new idea, the beginning of the thought process, thoughts that are still wandering about our minds before further thoughts refine them or simply replace them. Confined in her husband’s house, the idea of the housewife is under the full control of the speaker, in the same way our unexpressed thoughts remain confined in our minds.

The young housewife comes out on the street and the speaker’s ideal vanishes. “Then again she comes to the curb,” the speaker says, as if these were the news on the first page of the town’s paper. We are now going to read what the young housewife really does! And yes, she is just another one of those young housewives, mixing out there with the common men on the street (“the ice-man, fish-man”) and displaying signs of young and immature sexual appetite:

…and stands
shy, uncorseted, tucking in
stray ends of hair…

The speaker comes to a quick judgment that she has fallen into disgrace by coming out in the open, real world, as he compares “her to a fallen leaf.” This fallen leaf symbolizes the death of the speaker’s idea of the young housewife, falling from a mind unable to sustain it any longer.

But this mind is ready to move on. Still in control of the car, our speaker steers it over dried leaves and they, not the car’s quiet wheels, make a crackling sound. Many leaves have fallen over a long period of time, they have dried and they crackle under the perfect wheels of the speaker’s car. Instead of mourning the fallen leaves, the speaker moves over them with his car as if it had become easier to forget about old ideas and move on to new ones.

Yet his final words are about himself and his relationship with the young housewife: “as I bow and pass smiling,” is here to remind us that the speaker is familiar with her. As any well-wishing neighbor of a suburban housewife he acknowledges her, but he sees her as a fallen leaf, as someone to whom he will say “no, thank you” without thinking twice. He has judged her undeserving of his attention, but he recognizes her, and he knows her.

This poem is about a good idea among other perfectly good ideas that one has but discards after thinking them thoroughly. A writer starts typing on a nice, clean sheet of paper, stops for a moment, reads it again, rolls it off the typewriter, crumples it and throws it behind his shoulder. Heaps of good ideas, inventions, book beginnings, completed books, even bridges and buildings are looked back at and discarded as we move on to the next ones, exclaiming: “It was such a good idea.”