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Sorrowful woman analysis
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In A Sorrowful Woman, there is a woman who gets very depressed because of her lifestyle. She is tired of all of her motherly duties and is yearning for a new life. Her husband “understood such things.” This is because she is literally going insane. The husband eventually does everything around the house and even gives his wife a sleeping remedy every night. She begins distancing herself from her son. She does a lot of motherly things for her husband and son; cooking, baking, knitting, and writing. After all that, she ends up committing suicide by drinking a whole batch of secret elixir because she wants to be freed. Mother begins to become depressed because she was living the same routine day in and day out. It was driving her to the point of insanity. Looking around one night and realizing this awfully boring routine, “She began yelping without tears, retching in between.” She then gets scratched by her son and “locked herself away from him.” I believe she has a sickness that is making her go insane. She and her husband know …show more content…
The doctor would have warned them about her essentially losing her mind. The husband was more than happy to take over her motherly duties for her. He was more than happy doing whatever would make her happy. After her first outbreak, he undressed her, redressed her and put her to bed. The cognac and secret elixir was then given by the husband this wife to help her sleep at night, which was advised by the doctor. The husband soon realizes he needs help taking care of her and his son, so they decide to hire a girl. They pick the perfect live-in nurse. Things seem to be getting better until the boy brings a grasshopper to his mom. The grasshopper spat brown juice in her palm and leapt away. She then freaked out and they fired the girl. She then soon after began to distance herself from her son. When she passed she didn’t want her son to be
She sees her father old and suffering, his wife sent him out to get money through begging; and he rants on about how his daughters left him to basically rot and how they have not honored him nor do they show gratitude towards him for all that he has done for them (Chapter 21). She gives into her feelings of shame at leaving him to become the withered old man that he is and she takes him in believing that she must take care of him because no one else would; because it is his spirit and willpower burning inside of her. But soon she understands her mistake in letting her father back into he life. "[She] suddenly realized that [she] had come back to where [she] had started twenty years ago when [she] began [her] fight for freedom. But in [her] rebellious youth, [she] thought [she] could escape by running away. And now [she] realized that the shadow of the burden was always following [her], and [there she] stood face to face with it again (Chapter 21)." Though the many years apart had changed her, made her better, her father was still the same man. He still had the same thoughts and ways and that was not going to change even on his death bed; she had let herself back into contact with the tyrant that had ruled over her as a child, her life had made a complete
After the death of her brother, Werner, she becomes despondent and irrational. As she numbly follows her mother to the burial
While she might think that her plans are working, they only lead her down a path of destruction. She lands in a boarding house, when child services find her, she goes to jail, becomes pregnant by a man who she believed was rich. Also she becomes sentenced to 15 years in prison, over a street fight with a former friend she double crossed. In the end, she is still serving time and was freed by the warden to go to her mother’s funeral. To only discover that her two sisters were adopted by the man she once loved, her sister is with the man who impregnated her, and the younger sister has become just like her. She wants to warn her sister, but she realizes if she is just like her there is no use in giving her advice. She just decides that her sister must figure it out by
...manic depressive state which leads her to her suicide. She no longer has a will to repress any untold secrets from the past or perhaps the past. Since she has strayed far from her Christian beliefs, she has given in to the evil that has worked to overcome her. She believes she is finally achieving her freedom when she is only confining herself to one single choice, death. In taking her own life, she for the last time falls into an extremely low mood, disregards anyone but herself, and disobeys the church.
The narrator, a new mother, is revoked of her freedom to live a free life and denied the fact that she is “sick”, perhaps with postpartum depression, by her husband, a physician, who believes whatever sorrows she is feeling now will pass over soon. The problematic part of this narrative is that this woman is not only kept isolated in a room she wishes to have nothing to do with, but her creative expression is revoked by her husband as we can see when she writes: “there comes John, and I must put this away, - he hates to have me write a word (Gilman,
There is no one to listen to her or care for her ‘personal’ opinions. Her husband cares for her, in a doctor’s fashion, but her doesn’t listen to her (Rao, 39). Dealing with a mentally ill patient can be difficult, however, it’s extremely inappropriate for her husband to be her doctor when he has a much larger job to fulfill. He solely treats his wife as a patient telling her only what could benefit her mental sickness rather than providing her with the companionship and support she desperately needs. If her husband would have communicated with her on a personal level, her insanity episode could have been prevented. Instead of telling her everything she needed he should’ve been there to listen and hear her out. Instead she had to seek an alternate audience, being her journal in which he then forbids her to do. All of this leads to the woman having nobody to speak or express emotion to. All of her deep and insane thoughts now fluttered through her head like bats in the Crystal Cave.
The Narrator’s family treats her like a monster by resenting and neglecting her, faking her death, and locking her in her room all day. The Narrator’s family resents her, proof of this is found when the Narrator states “[My mother] came and went as quickly as she could.
According to the Mayo Clinic, another symptom of chronic depression includes “angry outbursts, irritability or frustration, even over small matters” (“Depression”). During the story, the main character was walking around her house. Her son was following close behind acting like a tiger. The boy accidentally scratches his mom, which causes her to bleed. The main character is furious and locks herself in her room. She calls her husband and states; “I’ve locked myself away from him. I’m afraid.” (Godwin 40). The woman locked herself away from her own child due to a minor
“A Sorrowful Woman,” by Gail Godwin, is a dreary story from the opening line to its closing paragraph. Godwin creates a story surrounding an unnamed housewife that can no longer stand her current place in life, which ultimately leads to her death. The reader is instantly thrown into the central conflict of the moment the Woman realizes her sadness, and communicates it to her husband. No background information is provided explicitly as to why the character feels this way, but that does not keep the reader disengaged from the emotions of the Woman. From the events that happen along the way as she spirals into a further depression, Godwin drops hints that the Woman could be depressed from feeling a lack of purpose. The author uses this
A Sorrowful Woman is a short story written by Gail Godwin. This is a story about a woman who refused to accept her roles as a mother and a wife. The woman in the story was overwhelmed by her duties as a wife and a mother and withdrew from her husband and children completely. She was dissatisfied with her roles as a woman, but after trying other roles, none of them were able to satisfy her. Conversely, her husband is depicted as a gentle, respective and understanding man who does all he can to understand the sorrows of the wife, and tries to support her and help her overcome them. The husband hired a baby sitter to help her on the house hold roles but she still remain dissatisfied and fired her, then locked herself in a white
How far can sorrow in a woman’s heart take her? Who or, what comes to her rescue? In the excerpt from A Secret Sorrow by Karen van der Zee and the story “The Sorrowful Woman” by Gail Godwin, two women’s sorrow takes them into completely different worlds. There are many similarities and differences in the quality of literature each story carries. In this case, “The Sorrowful Woman” is a much better piece of literature. It leaves the reader with much more wonder and questions, when compared to A Secret Sorrow. The theme, the characters in the stories, and the foreshadowing of each make up this division.
In “The Wife’s Lament,” (Norton, pp.102-103) the narrator feels sorrow for her isolation but more importantly, she laments the separation between her and her husband.
The husband is more concerned with the societal norm than the physical well-being of the wife. She loses sanity in the struggle to become independent and overcome the idea of the husband suppressing her thoughts. The husband is seen torturing the woman,
Gail Godwin's short story "A Sorrowful Woman" revolves around a wife and mother who becomes overwhelmed with her husband and child and withdraws from them, gradually shutting them completely out of her life. Unsatisfied with her role as dutiful mother and wife, she tries on other roles, but finds that none of them satisfy her either. She is accustomed to a specific role, and has a difficult time coping when a more extensive array of choices is presented to her. This is made clear in this section of the story.
The Wife’s Lament by R.M. Liuzza is a poem and is a lament for some kind of loss or sorrow, also known as an elegy. In this case, the poem is a woman's song. She is lamenting the loss of her lover who is possibly not there. The poem is not particular a happy poem. The words “grief”, “dark”, and “exile” indicate this in the first paragraph.