“I found another to admire”: The Thing of the Female Body in William Carlos Williams’s Medical Narratives

Abstract

I'll die before I've said my fill on women.-William Carlos Williams, / Wanted to Write a Poem (1958)I.Critics have long since established the exceptionality of the figure of the woman in Williams's poetry. Indeed, in his foundational literary biography of Williams, Paul Mariani devotes a whole chapter to the concept of Williams's Woman: not specific women, not even women's bodies, but the abstracted ideal of the woman. Appearing throughout Williams's literary career as Kora, Core, Persephone, the Beautiful Thing, the radiant gist, and the Egyptian goddess of history Mut, the abstracted is always the object of Williams's pursuit of an authentically American voice, language, and poetics. As previous Williams criticism has noted, Williams's formulation of his muse as either a goddess or an otherwise disembodied force suggests that this woman is not derived from a specific woman, but an abstracted ideal that Williams imagines as a specifically feminine energy.1Does-or can-Kora have a body? This article argues that the assumption that Williams's Kora cannot have a body is as fallacious as the assumption that Williams's Woman should be read separately from the women who appear in mundane, vulnerable, and compromising positions in his fiction and poetry. Through my analysis of the short stories the The with the Pimply Face and Comedy Entombed: 1930 and the take off your clothes moment from Paterson Book Three, I argue that the women Williams observes in their homes and in his exam room are a part of his search for the new order, embodiments of the American ideal that is at the heart of his understanding of medicine, sex, and modernity.At the center of Williams's descriptions of his modernism-as well as of critical readings of Williams's work-is the thing, the object that should be read for its own sake, without which there can be ideas in poetry. In closing the Autobiography, Williams writes: That is the business. Not to talk in vague categories but to write particularly, as a physician works, upon a patient, upon the before him, in the to discover the (A 391). In this formulation, Williams's differentiation between the and the suggests the same ideology that is behind the thing and the idea in his assertion no ideas but in things (P 6). By comparing the poet's business to the work of the doctor, Williams suggests that a key avenue by which the writer can move from the particular to the universal is the body.As his short stories based on his experiences in medical practice would suggest, a large percentage of the patients worthy of literary representation were his female patients: women and young girls who often attracted Williams's attention as a doctor. And yet, at the same time, Williams's doctor-narrator often noted an extra attraction to these women. He admired them. He fell for them. He noted their well-formed bodies. These sometimes seemingly misplaced moments of attraction that accompanied narratives of medical diagnosis have often lead critics to read this attraction as erotic in nature, a problematic violation of the doctor/patient relationship. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century,literary critics like R.F. Dietrich and Marjorie Perloff, have used psychoanalytic and feminist literary theory in order to establish the troubling sexual politics inherent in Williams's treatment of the female patients in his medical narratives.2 Other readings of these stories, however, emphasize the redeeming aspects of the doctors' interest in their patients: the narrator of The Use of Force can ultimately diagnose Mathilda's dyptheria and potentially save her; in Girl with a Pimply Face, the doctor cures her acne; in A Night in June, the narrator ultimately chooses to allow the patient to labor naturally, rather than administer pituitrin to speed the delivery so he can return home sooner. …