Gilman takes on the voice of a housewife, initially forming the home as a “dear-loved dwelling place,” declaring “Why should I ever weary for aught that I find not here?” (lines 3-4). She argues that within the house is her “lord and [her] love” and “[her] children dear,” the people for whom she labors (line 2). However, this optimistic view of her role within the home breaks down by the second stanza, unable to sustain itself for long. She soon finds herself “bound with the bands of Duty, rivetted tight” and unable to escape the role she has been wedged into (line 6). Rather than seeing her labor as enjoyable, she characterizes herself as a “serving squaw,” comparing her plight to the oppression of Native American women pressed into servitude (line 8). She despairs in the seemingly endless routine of the same tasks, saying that she oversees the “soiling and cleaning of things… Soil them and clean them and soil them — soil them and clean them again” (lines 11-12). This cycle is inescapable and mundane, a repetition that is observable in the quatrains of the poem. Much like the housewife, the poem is stuck in a repetitive cycle of four lines. She desperately attempts to maintain the cycle, her only hope “a possible love and praise” from those for whom she performs the labor (line 16). There seems to be an undercurrent of despair, acknowledging that the likelihood of this “love and praise” will not come, as she performs “invisible labor” which is often overlooked (line 16).
Consistent with the Realism and Naturalism period, Gilman takes advantage of the “pronounced sense of poetry’s potential as a cultural force of critique and expressive empowerment” in order to argue for the liberation of women(American Women’s Poetry 14). By displaying the negative side of mother and wifehood, she brings to light the struggles of women confined to the home. Gilman is far from the only feminist interacting with poetry in this way: “Poetry’s engagement with the eruptive force of feminism… [emerged] most visibly and vocally during two iterations of feminist movements in the 1900s and 1910s… linking the political to the personal” (American Women’s Poetry 17). This poem takes the “personal,” the experiences of nearly every woman of the period, and invokes a political stance condemning the gender norms this system is rooted in. In her final stanza, Gilman invokes the strength of women in her characterization of the housewife as “the Mother of Nations!”– subverting the existing power dynamic and imagining a future which grants women agency over their labor (line 19).
