The Young Housewife

As I read through the short poem The Young Housewife by William Carlos Williams, the first question that popped into my head was: Who is the narrator? Since there is someone looking outside their car window watching this young housewive carry on with her daily activities. "At ten A.M. the young house wife moves about in negligee behind the wooden walls of her husband's house. I pass solitary in my car" (1007). Because the narrator gives a specific time I feel as though the person speaking knows or once knew the woman or is even perhaps a neighbor, and seeing her is a daily routine. Also I feel the car and the housewife in her house serve as counter parts. The car symbolizes freedom and the privilege to go wherever, while the house for the woman is sort of a cage and she is confined to the house with "wooden walls". Then as the person in the car is watching her, he/she sees her interacting with other man who aren't her husband "then again she comes to the curb to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands shy, uncorseted, tucking in stray ends of hair" (1007). To me, I think the woman calls upon the men not to restock on resources, but out of lonliness because her husband is away and since she is so young she calls upon men who are willing to come to the house and flirts with them. Only after the narrator witnesses this is when he/she compare her to a fallen leaf because she leaves her position as housewife and goes outside the house to interact with other men and then drives off. In a way, this story reminded of The Yellow Wallpaper and that back in the day women mostly worked as housewives and were confined to their homes that men owned. The same happens with the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper because her husband has a job as a doctor and bought a new house for them. He also keeps his wife in the house, believing outside made her sick when it was really what she needed.