A Sorrowful Woman

“A Sorrowful Woman” is Gail Godwin’s most anthologized short story and tackles the themes of depression, domesticity, and female identity. Godwin is a best-selling American author and multiple National Book Award finalist who often explores these themes in her novels. “A Sorrowful Woman,” a subversion of the fairy tale, details a woman’s struggles with her role as wife and mother and the expectations and disappointments that lead her to suicide. Godwin’s unnamed characters upend the archetypes of mother/wife, husband, and child to critique constricting gender roles and highlight the psychological toll of maintaining the myth of the perfect family.

This guide refers to the version in Joyce Carol Oates’s 1973 Scenes from American Life: Contemporary Short Fiction, which includes the epigraph that accompanied the story’s original 1971 publication in Esquire.

The story opens with an epigraph: “Once upon a time there was a wife and mother one too many times” (249). Its events take place entirely in the confines of the home, and the characters do not have proper names. The main character is a woman who struggles with a malaise and can no longer tolerate the sight of her husband and child. Although her husband is understanding and takes over her domestic duties, she continues to feel revulsion.

The woman’s interactions with the child become increasing difficult. While storing away the dishes one evening, she notices her son’s “approving” (249) gaze and immediately begins to scream. On another occasion, the child pretends to claw at her like a tiger and draws blood. The woman tells him to “[g]o away” (250) and quickly locks herself in her room. After purposefully striking the child under the man’s watch, she isolates herself in different rooms of the house for the remainder of the story. The husband hires babysitters to fulfill the child-rearing duties.

The husband attempts various other solutions to help the woman cope. He often carries her in his arms after she collapses. After her wish for “instant sleep” (250), he administers nightly doses of cognac and a sedative of brown liquid. The husband explains to the child that his mother is ill, and the woman feels grateful for his support as he arranges childcare, prepares meals, concocts her draughts, and puts the child to bed. Eventually, he hires a live-in nanny who moves into the spare bedroom and decorates the walls with her own artwork. The girl energetically and lithely accomplishes all the mother’s tasks.

The woman limits her son’s visits to twice a day and no longer shares her room with her husband. She secludes herself in the bedroom, reading novels and staring out the window. On one of her son’s visits, he brings a gift of a grasshopper, which she finds repellent when it spits “brown juice” (251) in her palm. The girl tells the woman she is overreacting, which prompts the woman to fire her.

Without the girl, the husband dutifully manages the housework in addition to his job, and the double shift exhausts him. He falls asleep in the child’s bed one night, and the woman tenderly tucks him into his own. The next day, she moves into the former nanny’s room, desiring to acquire the girl’s energetic traits and feel like “a young queen, a virgin in a tower” (252). The husband is at first disappointed but reassuringly tells her, “I want to be big enough to contain whatever you must do” (252). In the room, the woman attempts to write sonnets but falters when she faces the option of writing in free verse.

One night, the woman tastes the child’s saliva after he kisses her goodnight. From that point, the woman no longer wants to see her child and instructs the husband to leave notes under the door along with her draughts. He acquiesces, and the woman becomes further withdrawn. She replaces reading with repetitive hair-brushing, sneaking out to gather supplies, and, on one evening, listening to her husband and son breathing behind their doors. When spring arrives, the woman emerges from her room only when she is certain her family has left the house. The kitchen is newly rearranged, and she impulsively bakes them a loaf of bread, which they take as a sign of restored normalcy. Their effusive notes leave her feeling claustrophobic, but she repeats this routine of busying herself in the kitchen while her family is away and sustaining herself with the daily draughts.

The father and son return home one day to see the kitchen filled with a banquet of meats, baked bread, desserts, knitted sweaters, poetry, drawings, and clean laundry. The child is delighted and believes his mother has returned to “doing all [their] things again” (254). The child assumes the mother is tired and sleeping, whereas the father rushes to her room to check her pulse. As the father mourns his wife’s death, the child asks if he can eat the turkey.