The Young Housewife", by William Carlos Williams, when first read appears to be a simple description of a beautiful girl standing inside her house calling the 'ice-man' (perhaps), and coming out to meet him on the curb. However, after analyzing this description, it becomes obvious that seemingly ordinary ideas in the poem may very well be significantly symbolic. Barry Ahearn remarks in William Carlos Williams and Alerity: The Early Poetry that perhaps the continuous barriers presented in the poem are representative of the barriers which divide the married woman and the man in the car. The walls of the house may very well represent the walls of society, while the curb represents spacial division.
But then the question that comes to mind is-why should it matter if these seemingly non-related individuals have barriers between them? The most logical answer that comes to mind is that these barriers could be said to be preventing, or hindering the man and the woman from having an affair. It would be logical to assume that they have some sort of intense personal relation, as the man is able to describe what the woman does inside of her house. Either he is fantasizing about her actions behind the walls, or he is intimately aware of how she acts in her house.
Perhaps, as Marjorie Perloff suggests in The dance of the intellect: Studies in the poetry of the Pound tradition, this whole interlude is indeed based on fantasy, and the man does not actually know what occurs behind her walls. Perhaps the man in the car is merely looking at a stranger, and imagining this moment to be more significant than it is. Perhaps, in his odd fantasy, he longs to crush the leaf which he compares the woman to under the wheels of his car, and craves the oppression of females.
Whether or not the man in the car knows the woman standing on the curb, the fact remains that this poem is more than a beautiful description; Williams’ work is rife with symbolism and makes the reader truly stop and question his intent behind his work.
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Courtney,
You do an excellent job introducing the ideas of the critics you're citing in your post, contextualizing their observations by giving your reader the full name of critic and the original source. For your long essay, work on foregrounding your own ideas about the text you're analyzing. In this post you are responding to the critics, first to Ahearn and then to Perloff. It is difficult to tell what you actually think about the poem. Make sure you've clarified your own argument about the text and then use secondary sources to support your ideas or to offer a counterargument that allows you to make your argument more nuanced. The secondary sources should be subordinate to your argument.
Kelly
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