Housewife (1962). Content and Description

“Housewife” appears in Sexton’s second collection, All My Pretty Ones, in which, she later said, she was trying to convey the causes of madness. The short poem represents a meditation on the way a traditional role can affect a woman who accepts it. The housewife that the narrator describes is married literally to a house. The house is a body; it is alive and has organs that allow it to function.

Sexton draws attention to the kneeling posture of women who are wedded to their homes. In the lines “See how she sits on her knees all day, / faithfully washing herself down,” the narrator appeals to the reader to look at what happens to a housewife: She becomes the house; it is her own organs that she must spend her day cleaning, as a domesticated animal does. This endless cleaning, however, is fruitless; the dirt is incapable of being permanently removed.

Men do not have entree into the house/wife; they must “enter by force,” and for them the wife is a “fleshy mother,” to whom they are “drawn back like Jonah.” The final twist gives the woman yet another role: not house, not wife, but mother: “A woman is her mother. / That’s the main thing.” In the conversational phrase “That’s the main thing,” Sexton reveals that both the man and the house are ultimately irrelevant. The woman’s fate is determined long before either one of them has entered her life; the woman’s mother is her identity, her inescapable destiny.

Domestic imagery yields to biological imagery in this poem. The woman is enclosed by a structure, a house, but this house is her body, with skin, “a heart, / a mouth, a liver, and bowel movements.” It is fleshy, with pink, permanent walls. The house, to which the role of wife confines her, is her, and this is a truth she has learned from her mother, who also is her. The narrator clearly feels trapped by the demands of these living, breathing, needy enclosures—not just her house but also her body— just as she feels about her original enveloping, fleshy enclosure, her mother. Raised and trained by her mother, she sees herself as a product of her mother, unable to stop duplicating the behavior that has made her mad.

Sexton employs no formal rhyme scheme in “Housewife.” One image fades into the next, leading us away from house and into mother.

Sexton’s personal development and constant questioning of her roles paralleled the feminist movement of the 1960s. Betty Friedan’s work The Feminine Mystique had been published in 1963 and started a national conversation about women’s happiness. It questioned a woman’s fulfillment in the housewife role that Sexton had been attempting to play to satisfy both her mother’s expectations and her own. Friedan’s book suggested that women’s mental health was in jeopardy from dutifully accepting a role that gave little outlet to their creativity.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. What is the significance of the biblical allusion Sexton makes in referencing Jonah? How does knowing the Bible story contribute to your understanding Sexton’s suggestion about men’s relationships to their houses?

2. Read the first chapter of Betty Friedan’s controversial book The Feminine Mystique (available online) and compare the ideas she presents with those in Sexton’s poem.

3. Compare Sexton’s tone in the phrase “That’s the main thing” with the narrator’s commentary sprinkled through “Cinderella,” published in Transformations (1970).