Madness? A woman wakes up to her situation and does something sane. No doubt she has fulfilled the expected thing: married an impoverished woodsman like her own father and set about trying to be a grownup "hill wife." But it is not a sweet life. Threat seeps out of every natural thing -- the pine scratching the glass -- and ever artful thing -- their own empty house. The isolation unnerves her but doesn't necessarily drive her mad.
The unsaid, unexplained things in the poem lead one to imagine the actual contours of this young woman's life: does her husband treat her cruelly? is he a clumsy lover or not a lover at all (no children)? a non-talker? someone who takes her for granted? She trails along with him each day because she doesn't want to be alone; then, in a sudden insight, she realizes she is still alone, utterly alone in a double solitude. But she is free! Unburdened by children and heavy housework, she is free to walk the woods with her husband; one day she realizes she is also existentially free. She leaves him; she disappears.
It is so interesting to me that this poem, centered on the hill wife, ends with the hill husband and his utter bewilderment. She becomes a symbol of the fragility of all human ties.
Around 1969, in the grubby Bronx, I first encountered this poem about a hill wife and thought I could read my future in it.
Frost must have really liked women. I like to imagine that the hill wife matured into a woman of power and grace, someone free but not entirely free, someone who might inspire that other Frostian meditation on a woman and human freedom, The Silken Tent.
The Hill Wife is a layered poem, to be sure; I'd be interested to hear your madness angle, Tim.
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