Analysis last scene of Gail Godwin's "A Sorrowful Woman"

The last scene in Godwin’s sad and poignant “A Sorrowful Woman” shows the woman, in a final, maniacal burst of energy, accomplishing what society expects of a traditional wife/mother role, which ends up depleting her entirely, sacrificing of her selfhood. At this point in the story the woman rarely left her white-painted room; hastily written, short but loving notes from her husband and drawings from her boy slid under the door were her only connection to her estranged family. Hinting at recovery, Godwin has the woman, in a token of her reformed attempt to please them as wife and mother, bake a loaf of bread—symbol of the sharing family—but the “joyful notes” slid under the door seemed now to have their own power to push her further into the corner of the room, as though psychological invasions against which “she had hardly space to breathe.” Earlier and earlier she’d drunk the “sleeping draught”, symbolic of her husband’s well-intentioned attempt to quiet (and so repress?) her vaguely understood restlessness.

But the story moves from dark winter into spring, and while the husband and boy were gone during the day, the woman began retaking her role as wife and mother and homemaker to a fantastical degree. Indeed, now “the days were too short. She was always busy…. Worked till the sun set. No time for hair brushing.” In keeping with the dystopian inversion of the fairy tale, the husband and son return home to an outrageous scene smelling “redolently of renewal and spring.” They find “five loaves of warm bread, a roast stuffed turkey, a glazed ham, three pies of different filling….” There were also a “two-weeks’ supply of fresh laundered sheets and shirts and towels” as though the woman was preparing for an extended leave. The husband also found not just one but a “sheath of marvelous watercolor beasts accompanied by mad and fanciful stories nobody would ever make up again” and the final, tragic touch of a “tablet of love sonnets addressed to the man.” This exaggerated feat of stamina and energy serves as the tragic climax, where, giving in to the societal expectation for the woman to sacrifice everything for family, house, and home, the boy notes that “Mommy is sleeping…she’s tired from doing all our things again” as they’d burst into her room with overwhelming joy.

The woman had tried to be everything the idealized young babysitter represented, what social expectations of the time demanded. Unaware of the sacrifice his mother had made—and women in these traditional roles are expected to make—the child’s only thought is to ask whether “we can eat the turkey for supper?” It is telling the reader doesn’t receive a reply from the husband, who Godwin characterizes in the end as having none but a silent, clinical reaction, rolling “tenderly back her eyelids” and testing “the delicate bones of her wrist.” The diction here is woman as fragile creature, her strength sapped and depleted to sustain the role of perfect wife and mother, a dream perhaps attained once upon a time.

Hayfork 1852

A new song loosely commemorating a massacre of Native peoples not too far from here...

Hayfork 1852



[Man] The miner digs with a tin pan
River’s icy and running fast
The scent of her body lingers
A beauty so young
What he left he left undone

[Woman] “How’s your luck holding out, man?”
The woman calls from an iron bridge
Loneliness like a bloodstain
Burning like gold
What is left is left unsold

O you paid your dues
Walking in their shoes
Red white the blues
You don’t suffer fools
You paid your dues
Somebody win, somebody gotta lose

[Man] The miner says “I’m a damn fool
Slaving here eleven days
S’waste of time panning Hayfork
River is cursed,
They tell me 9 to 5 is even worse”

[Woman] The woman blinks at her old man
Twenty-four and there’s not much more
They’re down to whisky and Saltines
Scars and disease
Pretty soon they’re scheming like thieves

Chorus

[Woman] The woman gazes upriver
Men and women and children too
Bodies broken and bleeding
A dream is a ghost
Vanishes when you need her most

[Man] The miner smokes in the doorway
A final drag and he disappears
Lilies grow in his footsteps
River runs red
What is left is left unsaid.

July 2015