The imagined occupant is externally defined (by her spouse’s occupation, by the stuff in her house), and her lack of interiority is implied, most obviously, by her absence: she’s not there because, well, she’s not there, even when she is. The Grocer’s Wife is less socially elevated, as the title sardonically hints: its linoleum floor, in squiggled paint at odds with Toebbe’s schematic rendering of cupboards and stools, suggests a humbler income, though the interior is no less oppressively over determined.