Gail Godman's Sorrowful Woman

In Gail Godwin’s short story, A Sorrowful Woman, an unnamed woman withdraws herself from her family due to her belief of having an overwhelming life. Godwin’s protagonist in the short story is unhappy with her current role as a housewife and seeks to explore different roles, but has a hard time coping when faced with making more engaging decisions when they are presented to her. The wife slowly steps out of her role in the family until they are completely shut out of her life. The only thing the wife seems to want in A Sorrowful Woman is the ultimate escape from what she finds unbearable, life confined by roles related to her gender. Godwin uses different elements to elaborate the theme throughout the short story by involving changes in setting, the aspect of fairy tales and the characters’ interactions with one another. The overall theme of A Sorrowful Woman is the meaning of self-discovery and how Godwin’s protagonist attempts to find herself through the tensions of being a mother and wife. The one element that Godwin really hits on in the short story to strengthen the overall theme is the use of fairy tale aspect. At the beginning of the narrative, Godwin inserts a line before the actual story starts that reads, “Once upon a time there was a wife and mother one too many times” (Meyer 36). In this line, she is trying to put the point across to the reader that this short story will challenge the notion of what women desire. Godwin tries to portray that the wife in her story is not the normal wife and mother, like in most fairy tales. The wife in A Sorrowful Woman resembles the exact opposite of what women in fairy tales were portrayed as. In most fairy tales, the woman usually finds prince charming, gets married, has children and lives happily ever after. She desires to different and hopes for a changed role in society. The reader doesn’t know about the wife and husband’s life before their child’s birth, however some passages presume that she had a

Cited: Meyer, Michael. Literature to Go. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. Print.