In my previous paper, I presented an analysis of the poem “The Young Housewife” claiming the reduction of the poem to a single

EN 203 Guy Tiphane
Prof. A. Davaran February 20, 2002

Reinterpreting William Carlos Williams’ The Young Housewife

In my previous paper, I presented an analysis of the poem The Young Housewife claiming the reduction of the poem to a single theme of birth and decay of new ideas. The attractive intellectualization of the poet’s intent may have resulted from a frenetic search for meaning through its structure. In this paper, I would like to review the process that generated this idea in order to see what other meanings we could attach to the poem.

John Ciardi warned us in his essay “How Does a Poem Mean?”[1] that while looking for what the poem means we tend to “interpret the poem rather than to experience it” and “forgetting in the process that it was originally a poem.” The present paper will attempt to identify and correct the rigidity of my previous interpretation and let the poem be.

Reducing the poem to a three-part structure helped understanding the forces in play. The first stanza was reduced to the formulation of an idea in the speaker’s mind, the second stanza contradicted that idea by realizing it into a less attractive object, and the third and final stanza had the speaker pack the idea with the many others he had had. Reinterpreting the structure could lead to not only a multitude of new meanings but also to a multitude of new poems that have nothing to do with housewives. But if we keep the poem in mind with its image of the young housewife, the reduced structure allows us to ask new questions about how the poem evolves. How is the reader to experience the transitions between the stanzas? With the cool indifference of an observer, the anger of a jealous husband or lover, or the sympathy of a friend? Each one of these can lead to a new reading of the poem, but other ingredients should be added to the recipe before it can take the flavor of a poem.

This poem was written in the early part of the 1900’s. American women of the time were likely to be confined to their house under the control of their husbands. Their only sexual experience was likely to be with that husband. WCW was a physician (a pediatrician) who had some contact with that reality, a witness to scenes similar to those we imagine while reading The Young Housewife. His profession may identify him more definitely as the speaker, someone who drives around visiting patients and an observer of people from his car. Moreover, he is described in biographical notes[2] as sympathetic to women, an argument which may help us see the speaker under a less aggressive light. He may have been an early suburban anthropologist observing young housewives in their search for satisfaction in the ice-man and the fish-man.

My previous analysis paid an almost exclusive attention to the speaker: it was all about his idea and perception of the housewife from his solitary vantage point. In a closer reading of the first stanza, the word “solitary” could also apply to the housewife inside the house, a house deserted at ten A.M. by the working husband. The expression “in negligee” also suggests neglect, perhaps sexual, which in turn has overtones of solitude. The feeling of solitude is reinforced as she “moves about” the house, in a manner reminiscent of a tiger in a cage. A reader’s reaction to the speaker’s announcement of his own solitary state may vary widely: is it still to emphasize the speaker’s voyeurish stance or could it be a comparison? I believe we could defer the meaning of this to the following stanzas.

Starting with the pivotal “Then again,” the second stanza announces a different view of the young housewife, one who comes out to experience life beyond the limits of the husband’s domain, but still in a relatively new environment where she recently moved. The “ice-man, fish-man” do not come to her, she calls them, and the stanza takes a sense of urgency for which she is new and unprepared (“shy, uncorseted, tucking in / stray ends of hair”). It is hardly debatable that this is a sexual overture as I had already pointed out, but the speaker may not be as quick to judgment as I previously thought. Reading “I compare her / to a fallen leaf” I had concluded that the speaker had signaled the death of an ideal, in a harsh judgment of inadmissible behavior by the young housewife. But that reading of the word “compare” assumed it meant “liken” while it could also mean “to examine the character or qualities of in order to discover similarities and differences.” It then becomes possible that Williams wanted to leave that ambiguity in the poem and that readers would be left with at least two very different meanings. The second stanza concludes in a way similar to the first stanza, where the shadow of a comparison between the two solitudes is felt.

This new reading of the second stanza weakens my assertion that it symbolized the speaker’s loss of an ideal because the speaker may have deferred judgment on the young housewife’s behavior on the street. The comparison to a fallen leaf may even be a trick, an ironical twist to an expected puritanical (and sexist) reaction, should the fallen leaf retain its meaning of death and disgrace. But a different reading of what the fallen leaf symbolizes could result from reading the final stanza.

Neglecting the verb “rush” in the third stanza’s introductory “The noiseless wheels of my car / rush with a crackling sound over / dried leaves,” we would suggest that the speaker is crushing dried leaves in an almost aggressive but detached manner. He would be in control, as I previously suggested. But centering the phrase on the verb would give a different picture: is the speaker fleeing from the scene? Such a reading would explain the “noiseless wheels” better than as an instrument of cool control, and the crackling sound of the dried leaves would be making his escape noticeable to the people on the street. It would also make the final “as I bow and pass smiling” a necessary but perhaps embarrassing moment for someone who knows he has been observing the scene in the second stanza but does not want to be a witness. The dried leaves in the third stanza give a hint of a final maturation from the fallen leaf of the second stanza, which itself was compared to a maturing housewife. Here we join the physician-poet, a man who sees everyone, housewives and husbands, as patients but who does not want to judge their individual behavior and how they choose to live. He is a witness to the passing of generations.

The ambiguities found in this paper demonstrate the limitations of a formalist analysis, in the spirit of Fish’s Interpreting the Variorum[3]: there can be as many meanings to this poem as there are interpreters. We have also touched the surface of Derrida’s différance[4] in discovering new meanings in the poem facilitated by a delay in interpretation. By questioning the position taken in the previous paper, we have discovered new and richer possibilities of meaning.

[1] John Ciardi, “How Does a Poem Mean?” (missing reference)

[2] biographical notes from http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/williams/bio.htm extracted from The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English and American National Biography Online

[3] Stanley Fish, “Interpreting the Variorum” in Davis, C., Schleifer, R. and Schleifer, R., Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Oklahoma 1998.

[4] Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in Kaplan, C. and Anderson, W.D., Criticism: Major Statements, fourth ed., Bedford St Martin’s Press, 2000.