“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 …show more content…
story to make a statement about the unfair life a female might have in the role of a housewife. They go about their days in a sort of prison keeping busy with the duties of the home. By giving brief introductions to the unnamed characters, without any physical or detailed personality descriptions, the focus of this short story is placed on the emotions and feelings of this Woman. Within the brief first two paragraphs, the reader is given all the information they need for the central three characters of this family.
The first paragraph of the story reads, “One winter evening she looked at them: the husband durable, receptive, gentle; the child a tender golden three. The sight of the them made her sad and sick she did not want to see them ever again” (Godwin 39). The author was straight and to the point in her introduction to the story. This is the only opening description given about the husband and child, and immediately describes the disgust the Woman feels at the sight of them. Those two sentences also come across with a bit of irony. The words used to describe the husband and child are not done so in a negative sense. “Durable” and “receptive” seem like the qualities one would want to have in a partner, instead the Woman feels nothing but sadness towards …show more content…
him. There is some of emphasis on the phrase, “he understood such things” (Godwin 39). This line first appears in the second paragraph where the Woman admits her feelings of sadness towards him. This line also comes later on when she has begun locking herself away in room for all hours of the day. It seems as if the husband is very quick to adapt to whatever he must do to “make her better,” but it does not seem like he has a great understanding of the situation. It seems as if he is just waiting for the Woman to become better once again so that she will then go right back to her housewife duties. One of the early solutions to allowing the wife to rest more if by employing a sort of “replacement” in the hiring of the live-in nanny. The hired girl brings joy to everyone in the household, except for the Woman who still feels the same. All the husband did was shift the duties from one woman to another at first. When the Woman can no longer stand having the girl in the household, she requests that she be let go. The husband immediately complies and is left with no other option than to take over the “wifely” duties at this point. He rearranges his schedule completely fit this in on top of working a full day. Almost immediately this begins to drain him. Although he does work a job on top of caring for the child and keeping up the home, he gets a small taste of what the Woman’s life might have been like. Her breakdowns of sadness in the story seemed to occur while she was in the middle of a chore, or having to care for the child. She had episodes of crying while trying to finish up the dishes, and was even drawn to hit the child from his mere presence. The activities that once did on a daily basis bring her nothing but misery at this point of her depression. The child, described as being “a tender golden three,” becomes a character of much stress to the Woman that she nearly comes to fear him. His watchful eyes make her anxious, and then his interactions with her are stated in an almost violent sense. When the boy is following her around the house one day, “he pretended he was a vicious tiger…growling and scratching” (Godwin 40). When describing a small scratch he inflicts on her, the author writes, “One of his sharp little claws ripped her flesh…together they paused and to watch a thin red line materialize” (Godwin 40). Instead of describing a boy playfully being a tiger, he come across dangerously from the Woman’s perspective. A small scratch is instead something much worse to her and brings her so much fear she must hide herself away. At the point where the Woman has locked and distanced herself nearly completely is where the story begins to take on some twisted fairy tale like inspiration. This story was introduced with a line that read, “Once upon a time there was a wife and mother one too many times” (Godwin 39). This immediately cued the reader into the fact that this story was going to a place that would not have a happy ending. Having a “wife and mother one too many times” means that it all must go wrong at some point during one of those tales. When the Woman takes to locking herself way in her bedroom all day, she comes across almost Rapunzel-like. She begins by trying to spend her time writing poetry, and then eventually spends most of her hours of the day brushing her hair. Earlier in the story, the husband described her as a “cloistered queen”. This foreshadowed that her life would become more withdrawn and shielded away from the rest of the family. The story then concludes with the Woman’s death in a Sleeping Beauty fashion that the son is unable to tell she has passed away by how peaceful she appeared. Very little information was given explicitly about why the Woman fell into such a sadness, but with the series of events provided in the story, it is possible to draw conclusions.
She distances herself farther and farther away from what she was once tasked to do, until she has withdrawn herself completely. Since the character of the story are unnamed, the reader is forced to focus on the very descriptive events of what is happening within the story. Leaving the characters in a more vague sense also gives this story the opportunity to be more relatable to other woman that might be at the same point of their life. Being a character without any physical descriptions leaves the opportunity for someone to easily place themselves in her
shoes. The emotions of the Woman, on the other hand, are described with such great detail that there is no question about how she is feeling. Her perspective of the world around her twists into something dark and gloomy. She has a child that she is afraid of that she perceived as a “vicious tiger” at one point, and a husband that has become so exhausted that he is barely there in an emotional sense. Godwin has constructed a story that follows the decline of housewife realizing that her life has become so meaningless, she is driven to suicide. Instead of writing a story centered around a very specific character, the Woman is kept intentionally vague for the purpose of the meaning of the story being that much more present.
In the story, Windows by Bernice Morgan, the protagonist, Leah, is convinced that she is dying. As the story progresses, she experiences a full range of emotions and thoughts about everyone and everything in her life. Leah struggles with mental and physical illnesses. Her biggest problem is her depression. The theme of depression is explored through Leah’s relationship with other characters and her surroundings.
Nevertheless, her attempts are futile as he dismisses her once more, putting his supposed medical opinion above his wife’s feelings. The story takes a shocking turn as she finally discerns what that figure is: a woman. As the story progresses, she believes the sole reason for her recovery is the wallpaper. She tells no one of this because she foresees they may be incredulous, so she again feels the need to repress her thoughts and feelings. On the last night of their stay, she is determined to free the woman trapped behind bars.
The novel complicates its own understanding of women
...e relationship with men, as nothing but tools she can sharpen and destroy, lives through lust and an uncanny ability to blend into any social class makes her unique. Her character is proven as an unreliable narrator as she exaggerates parts of the story and tries to explain that she is in fact not guilty of being a mistress, but a person caught in a crossfire between two others.
In the stories “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner and “Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin both women suffer through expectations brought on by society and the ideas of marriage. Emily loses her sanity trying to obtain love and live up to the expectations of society. Emily kills the man she loved so that he would never leave, and so that she could maintain her reputation. She was put on a pedestal, and that pedestal would end up being her destruction. Louise is a woman afflicted by heart problems, which could relate her unhappiness. After losing her husband she starts to feel free; however when her husband walks through the door she dies. Louise was a prisoner of societies making, she was never given a voice. She could never explain her unhappiness because women were expected to love and obey their husband’s without complaints. Marriage to these women meant different things, although the idea of marriage damaged both women. Louise and Emily were women damaged by the pressures of who they are expected to be.
Louise, the unfortunate spouse of Brently Mallard dies of a supposed “heart disease.” Upon the doctor’s diagnosis, it is the death of a “joy that kills.” This is a paradox of happiness resulting into a dreadful ending. Nevertheless, in reality it is actually the other way around. Of which, is the irony of Louise dying due to her suffering from a massive amount of depression knowing her husband is not dead, but alive. This is the prime example to show how women are unfairly treated. If it is logical enough for a wife to be this jovial about her husband’s mournful state of life then she must be in a marriage of never-ending nightmares. This shows how terribly the wife is being exploited due her gender in the relationship. As a result of a female being treated or perceived in such a manner, she will often times lose herself like the “girl
influence all her life and struggles to accept her true identity. Through the story you can
Later, we learn of her isolation and broken dreams and get a deeper insight into why she behaves as she does; we begin to feel sorry for her even though, ironically, we never discover her name.
This is a story of a series of events that happen within an hour to a woman named Louise Mallard. Louise is a housewife who learns her husband has died in a train accident. Feeling joy about being free she starts seeing life in a different way. That is until at the end of the story she sees her husband well and alive. She cries at the sight of him and dies. The story ends with a doctor saying “she had died of a heart disease—of the joy that kills” (Chopin). Even though the story doesn’t describe Louise doing chores at the house like in The Storm we know that she was a good wife because of the way she reacts when she learns that her husband is dead. Louise gets described as “young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength” (Chopin). From this line we get a bit of insight into her marriage and herself. We get the idea that she wasn’t happy being married to her husband but still remained with him and did her duties as she was supposed to. In reality her being a good wife was all an act to fit in society’s expectations of a woman being domestic and submissive. As she spend more time in her room alone thinking about her dead husband she realizes life would finally be different for her. She knows that “there would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself” (Chopin) For a long time in
But she has zero capability left to even interact normally with the outer physical world, and so it is, although she isn’t even there. Throughout the story, the reader is called to trust the narrator although it is clear she is going crazy, for she is the only telling the story. Gilman is able to develop the theme through this character’s point of view by showing that the narrator has no choice in the world in which she lives—she must obey the men in her life above all else. If Gilman chose any other perspective, the story would not have been able to portray the woman’s oppression as well, because the reader would not have been able to see into her mind as it slipped away well into insanity.
Common among classic literature, the theme of mortality engages readers on a quest of coping with one of the certainties of life. Katherine Anne Porter masterfully embraces the theme of mortality both directly and indirectly in her story, “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” Understanding that all mankind ultimately becomes subject to death unleashes feelings of dread and anxiety in most people; however, Granny Weatherall transitions from rushing to meet her demise in her sixties to completely denying she is on her deathbed when she is eighty. Readers have seen this theme of mortality reverberated over and over in literature, but what makes this story stand the test of time is the author’s complexity. In Katherine Anne Porter’s
Death and Grieving Imagine that the person you love most in the world dies. How would you cope with the loss? Death and grieving is an agonizing and inevitable part of life. No one is immune from death’s insidious and frigid grip. Individuals vary in their emotional reactions to loss.
Her husband rejects the idea of her having any social interaction and does not allow her to have contact with anyone other than himself and Jeanie. She attempts to write for entertainment but she becomes too tired and soon the only source of entertainment for the Narrator is the wallpaper. She begins to look for patterns to ease her
...ouse wives, and mothers who are fragile and insignificant. Instead, she is to remain in a “closed pot” (228), just as she is expected to do. As a result, she cries at the truth that she will always be reminded, that she is a “weak” and “useless” woman, which only increases her frustrations and dissatisfactions about her marriage (238).
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.