Gail Godwin's A Sorrowful Woman

Until recently, women played very specific and limited roles in life. They were limited to housewife, cook, maid, nurse, and a few other “feministic” jobs and couldn’t break out of this set social norm because it has always been this way. But what happens when a woman does break the pattern, when she has had enough and cracks, or when the roles in the household become swapped?

“A Sorrowful Woman” is a short story written by Gail Godwin in 1971. The story focuses primarily on the mother/wife of a family of three who becomes overwhelmed with her roles and duties in life and as a result she withdraws from her family and home life, and eventually from the world, communicating only through notes passed under the door threshold to her room written

by both her husband and her three-year-old son. The story begins quite ironically with a “Once upon a time…” fairy tale beginning, but trails into: “there was a wife and mother one too many” which describes the path our tale will take; not happily ever after, but exactly th
opposite.
While we as readers aren’t told directly about life before the birth of the couple’s child, we can assume that they lived a beautiful and harmonious life based on some passages throughout the story: “…the man took his wife to dinner. He made a courtship ceremony of it, inviting her beforehand so she could get used to the idea. They dressed and were beautiful together again…”
The decline of our protagonist begins immediately in the second sentence of the first paragraph: “The sight of them made her so sad and sick she did not want to see them ever again.” Right away we can tell that the woman is unhappy and she quickly devolves into a withdrawn shell of a person, of who she used to be. She rapidly grows tired of her role as a mother and wife, and thus begins to attempt satisfy herself by testing other roles, but quickly fails to find satisfaction this way. However, the woman is not so much upset with the traditional role she must play, but more so with the fact the feels inadequate in her situation.
As the story progresses the wife and the husband decide to bring in a babysitter, who seems to be the perfect young lady, doing all of the woman’s previous jobs. For a time it seems that life will return to normal, but this feeling is not sustained as the woman becomes jealous of the help as she finds it hard that someone else is doing the work she should be doing.
As the woman disappears from her daily duties as a wife and a mother and the babysitter is fired, the husband is left to pick up what needs to be done. This is what leads me to believe that the husband is the most interesting and dynamic character in the story. Not only does the husband continue on with his normal daily life of work, but he completely redesigns his schedule to fit in what the wife is not doing anymore.
While this story focuses on the societal norm of women, Godwin does a good job at examining the role of the father and husband within the household as well.

We learn the husband plays both parts of the typical household in this time period: “He got up hours early, did the shopping, cooked the breakfast, took the boy to nursery school. ‘We will manage,’ he said, ‘until you’re better, however long that is.’ He did his work, collected the boy from the school, came home and made the supper, washed the dishes, got the child to bed. He managed everything.” He managed everything. Even for today’s standards, this is an impressive feat for a single parent, a father in particular because of the view that society has on fathers. To modern society, fathers aren’t meant to be the caretakers and cleaners of the house, they aren’t meant to take care of children full-time. They’re supposed to go to work and bring home money; they are bread winners. The husband is also very loving and patient, showing support to his wife throughout the entirety of the story. He was perceptive of her wants and needs but he understood, “Perhaps the best thing is for you to follow it through… I want to be big enough to contain whatever you must do.” Even when he was discouraged, he tried his best to care for and console his wife by providing all her care and needs and understanding.

Something to focus on in “A Sorrowful Woman” is the conflict between the mother and her son. For many people having a healthy child is one of the greatest blessings anyone can get. Even the woman recognizes this: “I am the luckiest woman,” she says while crying, which is ironic because she does not seem to feel so due to her weariness from doing things for her husband and

child.
One thing to wonder about is if the situation would be different if the child was a girl instead of a boy. Would the mother still feel the same way if the one detail was different? Although we will never have a definitive answer, I believe that the answer is no. In fact, I think a girl would make the situation worse. One of the prime factors for the woman’s breakdown is her role that society forces onto her simply because of who she is, something she has no control over. We see what fate does to the mother when she outgrows this tendency, but think about what would happen if she had to imagine or even witness her child going through the same thoughts and feelings that she is going through. If anything, having a daughter would’ve catalyzed the woman’s episode sooner than what we are witnessing in the story presently.
To touch on the fairy tale feeling we receive at the beginning, Godwin continues to carry it on throughout the story with lines like: “You look…like a cloistered queen,”, “She was a young queen, a virgin in a white tower.” Instead of a happily ever after however, we end on the polar opposite of a happy ending should be. The woman essentially works herself to death in the few days that she is motivated and always busy with work, and when she was finally done, the house was filled with an odor of renewal and spring, potentially showing that wife was over her hunch and back at what she wanted to be, but instead, we find the woman residing dead in the cold, lonely room that she made into her tower.
To end the story is the single line: “Can we eat the turkey for supper?” This signifies the distant relationship between the child and mother. They had grown so far apart that even in the presence of her death, the child really doesn’t care about her but more so the food on the table. Our fairy tale comes to a close as we, the readers, realize that “once upon a time there was a wife and mother one too many times.”