29 pages • 58 minutes read
Gail GodwinA Sorrowful Woman
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1971A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Trappings of Gender Roles
The conflation of wife, mother, and woman becomes unbearable to the titular sorrowful woman. Initially, she cannot perform the nightly routine of putting her child to bed and reading him a story. When her husband takes over these tasks, she provides instructions for him to follow. She requests, “If you could put the boy to bed and read him the story about the monkey who ate too many bananas, I would be grateful” (259). Just before passing out from her sedative, she manages to utter, “Thank you and could you get him a clean pair of pajamas out of the laundry, it came back today” (250). The specifics of these tasks, recounted in a rambling tone, reveal the numerous jobs she juggles and connote the tedium of her routine. Keeping track of different bedtime stories, laundry schedules, and the daily minutiae of running the home delimit her existence. Later in the story, these details still preoccupy her as she notices that the man “bought a different brand of butter” (254) and new dishcloths. She observes, “Had the old ones worn out? The cannisters seemed closer to the sink” (254). The “worn out” dishtowels reference her own tired state, and her keen awareness of the changes reveals how closely her identity ties to the kitchen.
The responsibilities of housework and childcare are not inherently trivial or unfulfilling, as the husband enjoys and successfully performs these duties. After a walk with his son, “they returned, red-cheeked and boisterous, [and] the father made supper” (250). The husband neither chastises his wife for neglecting her motherly duties nor thinks it beneath him to take on her tasks. The man fulfills both roles of nurturer and breadwinner and deconstructs the gendered division of labor. He is often “tired” and depicted “with his head in his hands” (253), but his fatigue does not leave him with a crisis of identity. Unlike the woman, he completes the household chores and has an identity outside the home. He works in an office and feels a sense of accomplishment when he assures the woman, “We have the money for a girl” (251). He experiences a sense of flexibility that the woman lacks, for when she rejects her gender roles, she struggles to find alternatives to take their place.
Modern readers may find the woman’s despondency and lack of direction challenging to comprehend, but the story’s historical context situates the woman’s struggle in a culture that deems the inability to be a mother and wife pathological and unnatural. In her search for a different identity, the woman experiences a broad range of emotions. At times, she feels remorse and apologizes to her husband. At others, she is violently defiant and hits her son. She is intimate when she tucks her husband in bed yet distant when she insists on communication via notes slid under her door. She is equally catatonic and impetuous. These contradicting and varying moods may signal a woman on the edge of sanity, but in the context of a story where identity is essentialized into narrow gender roles, the woman’s unpredictable behavior makes sense; it is an outpouring of all the various emotions and actions that make one human and not an archetype. The effluence of her emotions mirrors the flood of activities she performs on her final day. Yet the pressure to return to her assigned roles becomes insurmountable. The woman returns to a hyperbolic domesticity only to die by suicide, unable to imagine herself outside the scope of traditional gender roles.
Alienation and Self-Estrangement
The woman gradually becomes a stranger in her home and to herself. She only communicates through notes and constantly listens, invisible to those around her. Even brief moments of intimacy have a metaphorical and literal wall that she does not penetrate. She listens to her family breathing through the door on a night when she would normally sneak downstairs to stock her room, an activity that implies a specterlike existence. When she moves the husband to his own bed, she “came as a visitor to her son’s room” (252). She performs her tenderest moment of tucking in her husband while he is fast asleep and unaware of her affections. The girl’s presence in the home only makes her feel more invisible, as the girl seamlessly takes her place. She fires the girl without remorse, stoically “turn[ing] away her face” (252).
In addition to feeling disconnected from her environment, the woman no longer feels like herself. In an early scene when her husband undresses her for bed, she is in a stupor. She looks at her nipple and dangling bra and thinks, “How absurd, a vertical bra” (250). The sight of her nipple, both an erotic and maternal body part, leaves her feeling perplexed and disoriented, as if she is viewing herself from the wrong angle. The erotic and maternal imagery suggests that her self-perception is framed through the lenses of marriage and motherhood. Her feelings of self-estrangement increase as she becomes addicted to her daily draughts. When her husband leaves her two glasses and squeezes her arm in assurance, “she [sits] there looking at the arm” (253). The combination of sedatives and alcohol numb her senses, and the use of “the arm” instead of “her arm” connotes her dazed detachment from her own body.
Woman as Reader and Writer
The woman occupies not one but two rooms of her own, an allusion to Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay “A Room of One’s Own,” which has become an emblem for women’s writing. The family is financially capable of providing this space, yet when the woman attempts to write, she does not experience gratification. The woman’s failure to find her identity or express herself despite having a literal room of her own signals Godwin’s demystification of both fairy tales and feminist metaphors that have taken on mythic status as well.
The first room the woman has to herself is her bedroom. With the hired help now taking over her tasks, the woman spends her winter days by a cozy fire reading books. She escapes her reality and goes “away into long novels about other people moving through other winters” (251). As a reader, the woman belongs to a literary tradition of similar women who find their voices echoed in the pages they read. However, her condition only worsens, and she moves into the girl’s white room in hopes of a fresh start. Her idealism is almost parodic when she “stock[s] the little room with cigarettes, books, bread and cheese” because she doesn’t “need much” (253). Despite her initial enthusiasm and the white room’s “new view of streets she’d never seen that way before” (252), the woman’s malaise fails to abate. She attempts to write and acknowledges the freedom of writing sonnets with “six, eight, ten, thirteen lines, it could be any number of lines, and it didn’t even have to rhyme” (252). Writing in free verse is analogous to living a life that breaks with conventions. However, rather than feeling invigorated by the liberating prospects of free verse, the woman “put[s] down the pen on top of the pad” (253). Her internal struggles are more complicated than switching rooms or poetic forms.
The woman’s inability to write points to the severity of her identity crisis. Even when given all the opportunities to express herself, she does not know who she is or what to say. Eventually, the major form writing takes in her life are the daily notes from her husband and son, which gradually degrade from “painstaking” to “hurried scrawls” (253). Rather than bring the family closer, the notes contribute to their distance. In the end, along with her parting frenzy of food and laundry, the woman leaves behind “a sheath of marvelous watercolor beasts accompanied by mad and fanciful stories nobody could ever make up again, and a tablet full of love sonnets addressed to the man” (254). She dies despite this manifestation of creativity, which suggests that even these imaginative and passionate exercises could not save her life. Art and literature are avenues of self-expression, but in this tale, neither books nor poetry can lighten the woman’s life or bring the reader any closer to understanding her.
