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. The finally fairytale theme present in "A Sorrowful Woman" is that of the rescuing male. The husband in the story is portrayed as actively compassionate. He sends the wife off to bed and takes care of the child when she first becomes overwhelmed by the demands of being a wife and mother. When she is unable to sleep, it is the husband who procures the sleeping draught, and keeps it available for her. When she assaults the child, rather than chastising her and evicting her from the home, which may have been the more appropriate response, the husband again plays the role of the protector and keeps the child from the woman. Even when the woman determines that she does not want the nanny helping in the house, the husband permits that behavior. Though he has met his half of their presumed bargain from the beginning; going...

Never once does the husband try to coerce of push the woman into doing something that she is not ready to do, but is consistently presented as a patient and loving man who is trying to help her find a way out of her depression. Of course, Goodwin's twist on the traditional fairy tale is that the woman is not looking for a release from her captivity. There is no foe to vanquish but that of the woman, herself, and the husband cannot be both protector and vanquisher at the same time.
In the traditional fairy tale, the damsel is held captive by an outside foe, sometimes at the bequest of an evil maternal figure, and rescued by a knight or similar hero-figure. Goodwin lets the reader see that the husband is willing to play the part of the knight, but that he is unable to rescue the woman from her captivity. That is because the woman's captivity is not a result of someone else' action, but the result of her own mistake. She mistook her own fairy tale ending, believing that she would find happily ever after with the man and a child. When she did not, she became the evil woman of fairy tales, negligent, cruel, and selfish, damaging all of those around her with her icy indifference.

Works Cited

Goodwin, Gail. "A Sorrowful Woman." Tom Bacig's Home Page. 1997. University of Minnesota Duluth. 22 Feb. 2009 http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/tbacig/hmcl1007/1007anth/ggodwin.html.