SSRJ#1: A Sorrowful Woman by Gail Godwin

I spent the entirety of this short story wishing and hoping for the mother to come out of the state she was in and become a happy individual once more. Even as I was reading, I was fairly sure that there would be no pleasing resolution to the conflict, but I hoped the whole time that there would be. Despite the mother’s cruelty and distance from her family, I felt quite saddened by her assumed death at the end of the story. I felt rather cheated that she’d finally found some sort of happiness in the things she could do for the husband that had already done so much for her and then she wasn’t allowed to live further. The disappointment in that feeling reminded me a lot of visiting older, sick relatives at hospitals. When the problems first begin, I always hope that they’ll be able to leave soon and be alright again, but generally they progressively get worse. It seems like such a silly hope to hold onto, but, like the husband of the story, there is always a lot of visiting the sick and understanding when they’re too tired to talk. It makes me wonder if the man already knew that the woman was never going to recover the entirety of time the story progressed. The woman cooking dinner felt much like the one or two days a relative spends at home away from the hospital looking like everything is going to be alright, and then a very harsh relapse follows.

Godwin starts out her story with a fairytale-like line. The general consensus in fairytales is a happy ending, but this opening statement is not a very cheery prospect. Instead of talking about youth, princesses or a similar, it talks about what would be an aftermath of other fairytales. Society tends to look at marriage and motherhood with sparkly eyes, but the way the text is written it seems as though Godwin has rejected this idea as an absolute. She uses the term “one too many”, which gives off a feeling that this particular wife and mother was one that probably shouldn’t have been one. The story itself, however, does not go into grave detail on how she became the state she was in. The reader is left guessing as to what “being a wife and mother one too many times” means.

The initial text of the story itself seems to have a distance to it. The words that Godwin uses to describe the atmosphere are much like those you might expect to find in a fairy tale. Things like “receptive, gentle, warm” describe the way the husband treats his wife and her surroundings. Despite these seemingly comforting and happy words, the writer adds contrasting sentences to go with them that make their normal joy-inducing responses be cut short. “‘It’s all right, Mommy,’ but this made her scream.” The mother’s reaction to the boy’s comforts is utterly bizarre. It seems to heighten this idea that the woman has become mentally unstable. This pattern continues throughout the duration of the story.

When the child sitter comes, the author describes her as being perfect. Yet, it is read much later how much the mother cannot deal with this. It seems to me that she is projecting images that seemingly do not match to try and bring attention to the fact that things are not always what they appear or what we’d hope them to be. For a long time in history, marriage and children was the accepted value and even now, I even have a tendency to look a little bit higher and more enviously of a mother and father couple with one or two children trailing at their heels. The family aspect, however, is not portrayed as at all appealing in this case. It has cause the woman who the story focus’ on to do things that are generally not considered healthy. She locks herself away in her own sorrow, she has to take a sleeping draught to help her sleep every night. It becomes quite clear that the idea of the family drives her quite over the edge.

She seems to be doing alright a few times, until the child or the husband seems to become strangely happy. The sight of her own child’s drawings made the character creep back into the shadows still the further until she seemed to lack personality at all. Everything about the way she lived seemed a monotonous drone, but one without too much misery on her part. It makes me wonder if Godwin was trying to say that the misery of seeing something happy that you could not share the same emotion over is a much worse fate than never having to face those experiences at all. At the end, however, the mother seems to get some sort of happiness over the notes they scrawled for her. The difference between the affection of her husband and child this time is that she put out an effort for them instead of the other way around. She even finishes up her life by making them a great feast, perhaps to preserve that strange slice of happiness that she did not get from anywhere else? The last line is particularly powerful. The child shows his incomprehension of the situation entirely with his seemingly innocent wish to eat the Turkey that the mother made. I ended up thinking less of the child then, because it felt as though he did not appreciate the large gesture that the wife made by going about such a task. It strangely made me relate to what the wife seemed to be experiencing all along: I was guilty for thinking less of the child, but it somehow felt justified.

Question: Did you like the story where you could feel more sympathy and connection for the character better? What made you sympathize more with one than with another?