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Reading Closely Not long ago I was teaching a graduate course called “Theory of the AvantGarde ,” 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 ideological 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 students 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, incidentally , 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. Introduction Differential Reading 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 comparable “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 “solitary 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 xii Introduction is behaving peculiarly indeed. More...

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