Volume 24, Number 15 · September 29, 1977
Women at Home
By Richard Poirier
Robert Frost is often at his best as a poet when 'home' is at its worst, and it could not be much worse than in most of his poems about women in the country. In a peculiar way, his treatment of women recalls a nineteenth-century novelistic convention in which the repression of women, and the restriction on their active participation in the outdoor world, force them into exercises of imagination and fancy. Men can busy themselves with affairs outside the 'home,' and women are sometimes to be gratified with what is brought back to them, as in 'Flower-Gathering.' But when in Section V of 'The Hill Wife' the woman has an 'extra-vagant' impulse, it is not to bring back flowers but to escape altogether.
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