Sorrowful Woman the Traditional Fairytale

¶ … Sorrowful Woman

The traditional fairytale offers several themes that give insight into the role that women play in society. The woman wasting away in captivity is a theme that is repeated throughout fairy tales: Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, and Beauty and the Beast all share elements of this tale. Moreover, in many of these tales there is a negative maternal figure that is somehow responsible for the damsel's distress. However, in each of those classic stories, the woman is saved by a prince of some sort, who rescues her from her isolation and takes her to live happily ever after. The reader is left to presume that happily ever after means marriage, children, and all of the other trappings of domestication that women are supposed to desire. In "A Sorrowful Woman," Gail Goodwin begins her story with the familiar phrase "once upon a time," and, throughout the story uses the familiar imagery of the fairy tale to challenge the traditional notion of what women desire, making it clear that happily ever after may be the most elusive fairy tale of them all.

The most prominent theme in "A Sorrowful Woman" is the idea of a woman who is wasting away in captivity. The mother retires to bed the first night, simply needing a break. A few days later, instead of just retiring to bed, the woman takes a sleeping draught. She is given the draught by her husband, which makes it seem as if he is doing something to keep her in captivity, but it is significant that she asks for and seems to want the draught. In fact, the husband repeatedly enables to woman to be in captivity, for example bringing her breakfast in bed and letting her sleep through the day. However, he does nothing to keep her there; she is her own captor. The mother begins to spend all of her time in the bedroom, isolating herself there physically and mentally by escaping into fiction stories. Eventually the mother refuses to see the family, asking her husband to push notes under the door for communication. Though her husband is not depriving her of nourishment, she begins to act as if he is, sneaking downstairs for food and supplies.

Eventually, she moves herself into the white room that had been occupied by the nanny, placing herself in a subservient position. Of course, there is a significant difference between the mother's captivity and the traditional distress felt by a damsel in a fairytale. In this story, the mother is both the captive and the captor, so that it is impossible for anyone else in the story to save her.

Another prominent theme in "A Sorrowful Woman" is the theme of the wicked mother. Goodwin begins her story by having the mother look at her husband and son, "the child a tender golden three." (Goodwin). Rather than being filled with love or admiration, Goodwin describes that, "The sight of them made her so sad and sick she did not want to see them ever again." (Goodwin). After a few days of recovery from this episode, the child accidentally injures the mother in play, giving her a scratch on her arm. She overreacts, demonizing the child, locking herself away in a room and calling her husband reporting that she is scared of the child. Several nights later, she carried out a plan to assault the child in front of her husband. Eventually, she rejects the child entirely, telling her husband that she cannot see the child anymore. Moreover, she is not content to withhold her own love and affection from the child. On the contrary, when her husband employs a babysitter, the mother is threatened by the girl's competence and makes the father fire her. In this way, she absolutely fulfills the fairytale elements of the evil maternal figure, playing a role that is traditionally filled by stepmothers in these stories. Not only does she refuse to love her child, which could be explained away by the character's obvious struggle with mental illness, but she takes knowing and intentional actions to make sure that her son is deprived of any type of maternal love.