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Sergio points out the possible gender bias in the poem; do you agree?
race--the dark woman:
Williams has quite a bit to say about primitives in the prose sections preceding the four-poem sequence of "The Red Wheelbarrow." Before examining those comments, though, we can look more closely at how the poem might relate to the larger thematic structuring of Spring and All in terms of race and gender. In a brilliant reading of Spring and All's final poem, "The Wildflower" or "Black eyed susan," Perloff reveals how the "Arab / Indian / dark woman" in all of her "'rich ... savagery' has been at the core of Spring and All from the beginning" (136). On a thematic level "Wildflower" is the final expression of a sexual desire for a "dark woman," that Perloff claims is "ubiquitous in Williams' text" (137). The discovery and promise of sexual union with the "dark woman" is what promises redemptive contact for the poetic consciousness trapped within the otherwise colorless landscape of contemporary life. On a metonymic level, "Wildflower" is connected to prior poems through the colors of the "Black eyed susan" that represent the "rich ... savagery" of the "dark woman" in contrast with the "white daisy" that represents the "Crowds" of white "farmers / who live poorly" (CPI 236). Perloff sees the coda poem's "white daisy" echoing the "white / chickens" found in "The Red Wheelbarrow." As well, she sees the vibrant red of the wheelbarrow as representing the lifeblood of the "dark woman" which connects it to all the other "bleeding reds [that] emerge from the dreary landscape of the 'Interborough Rapid Transit Co.'" (147) in Spring and All.
[...]
"The Red Wheelbarrow" is caught up in "the sexual politics of enjambmental form" (50) that Sharon Dolin finds in her essay "Enjambment and the Erotics of the Gaze in Williams's Poetry." Although focusing on just three poems from Spring and All (XI, "In passing with my mind," XVIII, "To Elsie," and XXVI, "At the Ball Game") we can extend her thesis:</p> <pre> The phallic gaze, finally, dominates many of the Spring and all poems, asserting itself through enjambmental interest in eroticized visual detail. Irigaray (1985) has written that the extreme 'oculocentrism' of our culture privileges the penis because it can be seen; 'Nothing to be seen is equivalent to having no thing. No being and no truth ... [V]isual dominance therefore carried out in actual fact' (48, her emphasis). Perhaps the obsession with vision, with fixing the particularity of objects, in Williams's
poems is so the I/eye, fearing castration, can reconfirm its phallic dominance through visual dominance. (50) </pre> <p>Dolin's thesis gives a new meaning to Burke's explanation of Williams' objectivism: "For all of his 'objectivist' accuracy, Williams' details are not in essence descriptions of things but portraits of personalities" ("Williams" 56). And in "The Red Wheelbarrow," the personality that is most vividly portrayed, much more than the wheelbarrow's black owner, is Williams' own.
As a portrait of castration anxiety, however, it is necessary to recognize that the sources provoking the fear of castration in "The Red Wheelbarrow," and hence the fetishistic scopophilia attempting to control that fear, are racialized. Stevens, again, suggests how Williams' anti-poetic is connected to race, or the "primitive," (10) as well as gender. Although not using the term explicitly, it is easy to read from Stevens' description of Williams' "passion for the anti-poetic":</p> <pre> His passion for the anti-poetic is a blood passion and not a passion of the inkpot. The anti-poetic is his spirit's cure. He needs it as a naked man needs shelter or as an animal needs salt. To a man with a sentimental side the anti-poetic is that truth, that reality to which all of us are forever fleeing. (213) </pre> <p>As a "blood passion," the anti-poetic is an assertion of a primitive (masculine) need, like a naked man's need for shelter or an animal's need for salt. For "a man with a sentimental side" confronting contemporary life--"as one looks out of the window at Rutherford or Passaic, or as one walks the streets of New York" (213)--the anti-poetic is "a source of salvation" (213). Consequently, the feminine gives access to a primitive experience, or as Stevens puts it, "something of the sentimental is necessary to fecundate the anti-poetic," which provides a "truth" and "reality" amidst the shallow and transitory commercial values of modern consumer capitalism.
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