Summary
The speaker of the poem "Wife" begins by saying she isn't comfortable with the word "wife." Lines 2-3 describe the word's sound: the short, quick, airy quality of it, comparing it to the word "life." The speaker then offers an anecdote in lines 3-7: at dinner, some younger, unmarried women were rolling their eyes in judgment about a vacation that a friend is going on. The younger women say with a derisive tone that the trip isn't approved by this friend's wife.
This gets the speaker wondering why being a wife often sounds like a job. In lines 8-11 quotes from the 1971 satirical essay "I Want A Wife" by Judy Brady, in which Brady described how she wanted a wife, someone who would clean and maintain all her clothes for her. The speaker reflects on how being a traditional "wife" is similar to being a maid: someone who has innumerable domestic duties and must always obey and honor the man of the house.
Lines 13-14 begin a very long, run-on sentence that spans the rest of the poem, starting with a list of ways to describe a wife: "Housewife, / fishwife, bad wife, good wife." The speaker asks if there is a word for someone like her, who doesn't fit neatly into any of these prescribed categories. In lines 15-20 the speaker describes herself as a distracted, melancholy person who spends long hours each morning staring into space or crying, who sometimes can't bring herself to make tea as she lets the tea kettle whistle endlessly. She describes the sensation of tearing a hole in the earth with grief.
Then the sentence transitions in lines 21-24 to describe the speaker's love for her husband. She says she "wants" to love him but often doesn't feel like she's very good at it. But nonetheless, she doesn't want to be "diminished"—put into restrictive boxes or stereotypes—by how deeply she wants to be his.
Analysis
The first line of "Wife" immediately refers back to the title, indicating that this poem will be a critical reflection on the identity of "wife": "I'm not yet comfortable with the word." The speaker foreshadows the poem's feminist themes.
She then offers an intriguing analysis of its sound:
its short clean woosh that sounds like
life.
Here is the poem's only onomatopoeia, "woosh," which together with "short" and "clean" creates an image of a wife as a simple, clean, polished thing. Subtly, Limón invokes the superficial, artificial idea of wifehood that she intends to critique. The enjambment "like / life" allows a moment of suspense, and for the word "life" to land with particular emphasis. The conflation of "wife" and "life" is striking, critiquing the notion that once a woman becomes a wife, that is her whole life, i.e. her whole identity. The sudden finality of the period following "life" almost seems to say: "This is your life now, case closed." The speaker is not ready to accept this closing of possibility.
The following lines branch into narrative with a dinner anecdote:
At dinner last night my single girls
said in admonition, It's not wife-approved
about a friend's upcoming trip. Their
eyes rolled up and over and out of their
pretty young heads. Wife, why does it
sound like a job?
Limón introduces other characters—younger, unmarried women—as a foil to the speaker. Their relation is ambiguous. We are made to feel the distance between the speaker and the "single girls" in a few ways: first, their singleness, second, the phrase "pretty young heads." Is this said with admiration? Jealousy? Bitterness? Condescension? We can only speculate. But the speaker isn't solely dismissive of the girls, since she calls them "my single girls." Perhaps she is protective of them and their innocence. Perhaps it is poignant to the speaker that they can react with such casual detachment to a friend's marriage because they are not yet married, while the speaker is already grappling with the complexities of marriage.
The situation being described is complex, too: the girls are poking fun at the notion that their friend's trip has to be "approved" by a wife. This implies that the wife has power over the friend, but within the feminist critique of the poem this is not a positive power: it is reflective of the disproportionate burden on wives to manage all the logistical affairs of their household. (This is one of the many inequalities satirized in the Judy Brady piece that Limón quotes). The speaker laments this inequity with a question: "Wife, why does it / sound like a job?" She points out that wives are expected to be both subservient to, and the dutiful planners for, their husbands.
Then, Limón introduces a quotation to be in conversation with, as she is in conversation with the younger women. In lines 8-11:
I want a wife, the famous
feminist wrote, a wife who will keep my
clothes clean, ironed, mended, replaced
when need be.
As many readers will be unfamiliar with this quote, Limón uses anonymity and enjambment to add layers of surprise to its inclusion. Her choice not to name the author indicates that the ideas in the quote, and the broader feminist tradition, take precedence over the individual's identity. For a quote beginning "I want a wife," we may not expect the writer to be a feminist, so the enjambment of "famous / feminist" adds a momentary surprise twist. A wife who will do what? The line break from line 9 into 10 also keeps us waiting, and then surprises us with a very patriarchal, domestic labor-oriented list of chores. Readers may be surprised why a feminist wrote this, until we look it up or realize on our own that it is satirical. As satire, the purpose of the quoted passage is to show how wives become synonymous with servants. If a "wife" is that useful and docile of a housekeeper, it's implied, everyone would want a wife! The quoted passage critiques the privilege of married men to rely on their wives' extensive, uncompensated, often invisible labor, while women have nobody on whom they can offload their chores.
A search will reveal that the quote belongs to Judy Brady from a 1971 satirical speech-turned-article in Ms. Magazine, "I Want a Wife." It is short and worth reading to deepen our understanding of Limón's poem: Brady skewers the impossible sexist expectations placed on wives. Brady's portrait of a wife is someone who has no needs of her own, a perfect cook, cleaner, parent, planner, secretary, sexual partner, never faltering in total obedience to her spouse's demands.
Ada Limón introduces Judy Brady's quote to demonstrate how wives are valued for their actions and subservience, not their ideas or identities. Lines 11-13 build on this critique of a "wife" as someone defined only by her actions, using wordplay and a litany of verbs:
A word that could be made
easily into maid. A wife that does, fixes,
soothes, honors, obeys.
See Quotes for a close reading of these lines. The homophones "made" and "maid" establish an ironic parallel, and the list of verbs in the following sentence nods to the perpetual motion and deference required of wives. Limón's speaker makes it clear in the second half of the poem that she breaks the rules of this rubric.
The end of line 13 begins a lengthy run-on sentence that covers the second half of the poem. Limón has explored the constraints and judgments of traditional wifehood, her short sentences in lines 1-13 acting as tense containers for the speaker's roiling discomfort and discontent, which unseals itself in line 13 into a much more freely flowing syntax in which the speaker finally expresses her own identity:
Housewife,
fishwife, bad wife, good wife, what's
the word for someone who stares long
into the morning, unable to even fix tea
some days, the kettle steaming over
loud like a train whistle,
This sentence begins with a litany similar to lines 12-13, a list of descriptors and compound nouns for wives. "Housewife" echoes the domestic chores in the previous lines, and shows how a woman's identity is melted into this category. "Fishwife" means a woman who is harsh and abrasive, sometimes a woman who is not a "housewife" and is thus seen as a misfit; it also dehumanizes the wife, linking her to an animal status. "Bad" and "good," furthermore, indicate the black-and-white judgments placed on wives, based on how poorly or well they meet their husband's criteria. The speaker of the poem is barraging her readers (and herself!) with these categories until we all may feel overwhelmed by them. There is no room in these stereotypes for nuance, individuality, and the reality of each woman's life.
The speaker cannot constrain herself anymore and her true self-expression floods out in a run-on question. The first image we get of the speaker herself—"someone who stares long / into the morning"—is striking in how inactive she is. The previous lines have defined a wife entirely by what she "does" (line 12). Standing and staring off into space is a direct refusal of this expectation of perpetual motion. It also implies thought, an inner realm that wives have traditionally been denied.
The speaker is sometimes "unable to even fix tea," an intentional callback to "fixes." Limón systematically rebuts the same verbs she used earlier. Her speaker fails to fit the prescribed boxes. This failure is a double-edged sword, full of sadness alongside self-expression. Thinking of the double meaning of "fix" as both "prepare" and "mend," the speaker's refusal to "fix" is an embrace of brokenness and messiness as resistance, a rejection of the "short clean woosh" of wifehood.
The sound of the kettle intrudes into the poem, which has until now lacked strong sensory imagery, and stands out for being the only simile. This, too, echoes the speaker's mental journey in the poem: the kettle steams over its lid just as the speaker spills out over the edges of stereotypes; the "train whistle" sound evokes the speaker's own train of thought screaming its way through the poem.
Lines 18-20 dive more deeply into melancholy and grief:
she who cries
in the mornings, she who tears a hole
in the earth and cannot stop grieving,
A close reading of these lines brings up many possible interpretations. It is clear that the speaker feels deep, dark emotions, and though she holds no devotion to the rigid stereotypes of wifehood, she worries that her melancholy makes her somehow unsuitable as a wife. Tearing a hole in the earth is about as far from "fixing" as you can get, and someone who "cannot stop grieving" cannot fulfill the perfect self-control and meticulousness of the idealized wife.
The last four lines turn toward the speaker's love for her partner:
the one who wants to love you, but often
isn't good at even that, the one who
doesn't want to be diminished
by how much she wants to be yours.
The emotional ride of the poem's second half ends at a strikingly vulnerable, tender place, far from the biting satire quoted earlier. The speaker addresses the second person "you" for the first time, who we can assume to be Limón's husband. She worries that she isn't "good" at loving him, a poignant uncertainty that can really only be assuaged by the husband himself.
Limón's speaker articulates the paradox she is in: she doesn't want to be "diminished," crammed into the inhuman stereotypes, but she loves and desires her husband almost to the point of desperation. The poem's feminism takes a turn from the socio-political to the personal. It does not quite arrive at, but envisions, a feminism in which the speaker can be emotional, sometimes incapacitated by sorrow, and devoted to her husband (i.e. a real complex human being) without these traits making her less of a person.
The poem's first half dwells in the realm of impersonal social criticism and could have stayed there as an outward-focused feminist battle cry that admits none of the speaker's own weaknesses or desires. But Limón takes her poem in a decidedly more authentic direction towards vulnerability and uncertainty. In doing so, she empowers readers of all genders to soften our defenses and recognize that our vulnerabilities need not "diminish" us.
