Married and Lonely

While reading “The Young Housewife” Williams captured my imagination. It was one of the easiest poems that I read, but it has a deep subject matter that makes it all the more interesting. I actually saw this beautiful woman walking around her house after she has just woken up in the morning. The first thing that came to my mind was the loneliness the housewife was feeling. When Williams writes “moves about in negligee behind the wooden walls of her husbands house”, it shows that she is possibly a prisoner in her own home. It insinuates that she has had no freedom to make her house her own and add her own feminine touch to it.
The next line that caught my attention spoke of her walking out to the curb. I feel as if this showed she was only allowed out to perform meaningless tasks, and that a strange man saw her doing these tasks and felt her lonesomeness. Lastly, the fallen leaf could mean many things in the young housewife’s life. Because it is a “fallen leaf” it makes us believe she has been mentally injured in some way.
As I was looking at the website I came across a comment by Rachel Blau Duplessis. She addressed the fallen leaf metaphor as well as the “wooden walls of her husbands house” and I agree with her statements. She says, “This "leaf" metaphor also follows from "the wooden walls of her husband’s house," sympathetic lines suggesting her mild imprisonment and the husband’s clumsy stolidity.” Both of these lines as well as the rest of the poem really express a hollow loneliness that was captured greatly by William Carlos Williams.