Essay Questions

Discuss the relevance of ‘love’ in the poem.

Despite the poem’s topic of marriage, love play a very small role. The first time the speaker mentions love is in the second to last stanza, in which he realizes that he has forgotten all about love in his fantasy. Even then, love appears to be only an afterthought in his imagination. He claims to not be incapable of love, simply befuddled by romantic love. In the next line, he mentions first his mother, inferring that he indeed loves her, but not in a way that would conclude in marriage, and then Ingrid Bergman, an actress, who he loves in a distant, admiring way. Lastly, he finally admits that maybe somewhere there is a woman he would fall in love with, but that the time to find her has past, as she will inevitably already be married. With this, the speaker admits that his realization that he craves a traditional marriage and a wife have come too late in life to combine it with love.

Discuss the importance of having an audience for his conventional courtship to the speaker.

In the first six stanzas of the poem, the speaker imagines following through the typical steps of a very traditional courtship with a typical suburban girl next door. He mostly delights in subverting stereotypical markers of a traditional suburban lifestyle, though the judgmental reaction of the people around him make him feel self-conscious and out of place sometimes.

The fourth stanza however reveals that the speaker needs this audience, even if they disapprove of him. During their cliché honeymoon, the speaker realizes that he and his wife are just one of countless couples who are all viewed as exactly the same by the staff around them and that there is no one to witness his uniqueness. This stresses the speaker out immensely and he begins to desperately seek ways to make those strangers around him notice that he is only loosely pretending to conform to conventions.

His behavior shows that the speaker isn’t simply following through the motions of a conventional courtship to amuse himself (as he would not care about outer appearances then) but that there is a deeper reason for him to want this kind of a societally approved marriage that he subconsciously resents. In order to vindicate this desire with his own morals and values, the speaker thus openly mocks and subverts markers of a traditional courtship. This allows him to both experience it but at the same time pretend that he is not giving up his own opinions about marriage.

Contrast the three different types of women the speaker envisions to marry.

The first and most prominent woman the speaker imagines marrying is the typical suburban girl from next door, who he dubs as “Mary Lou”. She is innocent, easy to impress and appears to have few wants or needs of herself. She is part of a large, tight-knit family and group of friends. Once married, she aims to be the perfect wife, putting her husband’s needs in front of her own, idolizing him and essentially being incapable of living without him.

The second woman the speaker imagines is unflatteringly dubbed a ‘fat Reichian wife’ and though he believes this to be the most realistic fantasy, he clearly despises her. This wife is the only one who displays a mind of her own when she demands the speaker get a job. He reacts to this by stating that if this is his future, he refuses to marry at all. The last woman is described as a ‘beautiful, sophisticated woman’ that lives in a penthouse in New York and although she is very feminine, she smokes and drinks, which are both stereotypically masculine habits. While the speaker regards this fantasy as more pleasant than the second one, he still can’t see himself in it.