“A Sorrowful Woman”, a short story by Gail Godwin describes a woman's tragic battle with depression. Throughout the story, the woman becomes emotionally, and eventually physically, detached from her family while she also attempts to regain her identity. At first, it was a struggle to perform her daily tasks around the house, often requiring medicine before she slept. Fortunately, her husband, ever so caring and understanding, takes up many of her duties while caring for his wife. However, as the husband inevitably grew weary and the woman's mental health deteriorated further, exemplified as she breaks down and questions her state of mind after hitting her child, they eventually hire a maid to look after the house and their child. At this point, …show more content…
After an incident where the maid allowed the woman's son to bring a grasshopper into her room, the woman decides to fire her. Perhaps the decision was out of jealousy or just disdain for the harmless prank, but even the woman herself began to realize how much of a burden she became on her family. Without a maid, the husband again took up every responsibility in the house, leaving the woman alone to find her identity. She tries poetry, she tries to watch the world outside, but in the end, she chooses to refuse to see her child and spends her time alone, brushing her hair. When all seemed to be lost, the woman finally ventures out of her room to find that kitchen had changed, and she was inspired by it. She raced back to her room to complete a new, mysterious task. The story ends with a final moment of redemption for the woman, as they find her in a room full of poetry, paintings, food, and clothes, a nod to her old life and role as a …show more content…
Often, he allows her to make decisions that make her life more isolated or difficult in general, such as firing the maid or refusing to see her child. As a caring, kind husband, it's understandable that he would not like to go against his sick wife's wishes. However, by allowing these few, key decisions to be made, he essentially aids her in her efforts to detach herself from the world. Although he did put more effort to make her special by taking her to dinner, I feel that her situation and mental health could have improved if he had done more to connect with her on a more casual level. This would allow her to reconnect with the normal life surrounding her, rather than allowing her to alienate herself and enabling her by letting her stay in the room alone for most of the day. Perhaps rest was what she needed, but isolation from her child and husband only helped her mind forget how to be a mother and a wife. If the husband had allowed the maid to stay, at least the woman could focus solely on rebuilding her relationships. Similarly, if the husband had taken their child to spend more time with her as a family despite her wishes, she would have eventually learned how to interact with her son. Overall, rather than allowing her fall victim to every bit of pain that depression gave her, such as when she decided to not see her son after
While she might think that her plans are working, they only lead her down a path of destruction. She lands in a boarding house, when child services find her, she goes to jail, becomes pregnant by a man who she believed was rich. Also she becomes sentenced to 15 years in prison, over a street fight with a former friend she double crossed. In the end, she is still serving time and was freed by the warden to go to her mother’s funeral. To only discover that her two sisters were adopted by the man she once loved, her sister is with the man who impregnated her, and the younger sister has become just like her. She wants to warn her sister, but she realizes if she is just like her there is no use in giving her advice. She just decides that her sister must figure it out by
She begins to tear strips of the wallpaper and continues to do so all night until morning yards of the paper are stripped off. Her sister-in-law Jennie offers to help, but at this point the narrator is territorially protective of the wallpaper. She locks herself in the room and is determined to strip the wall bare. As she is tearing the wallpaper apart she sees strangled heads in the pattern shrieking as the wallpaper is being torn off. At this point, she is furious and even contemplates jumping out the window, yet even in her euphoric state, she realizes this gesture could be misinterpreted.
She tried to do many things to be “better” than she had been. Showering everyday to be the cleanest version herself made her feel that it enhanced her quality of life. She was doing this day in day out and even sometimes twice a day as part of her “cleanliness”. While she did not have much money, she spent her extra cash on what she felt was its place to be spent in. Herself. Her appearance. Edith had bought the nicest and most soothing scent of perfume along with a flashy wristwatch and admirable dresses in an attempt to boost her self-esteem and self-image. Amidst the scent of roses and nice clothes Edith tried to change her attitude. She refused to gossip anytime Mrs.Henderson would endeavour at gossip. Edith read beauty magazines and books about proper etiquette one of many customs she had adopted. She did this daily and accustomed to it believing that she needed to it to be the more proper version of herself as the way she wanted to execute her plan of a changed woman. Edith altered herself and the way she did many things. Although she still knew who she really was and where she came from, she refused to accept it. Along with many things were done Edith’s decisions were overthrown by her self-image on her role of a daughter
With nothing that demands her attention, the narrator is left with only the wallpaper to focus herself on. She describes the paper as a living thing and how, “On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind.” (Gilman--). She begins to fixate on the paper, to an unhealthy degree, battling with the numbness of her mind that boredom brings. The point where the narrator has truly lost all sense of mind can arguably be when the narrator states, “Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see, I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was.” (Gilman----). Although she is eating better, she is losing her connection to reality. As she speaks less to her husband and handmaid, she sinks deeper into the bends and whorls of the wallpaper receding further into her
Ever since she has been entrapped in her room, the narrator’s vivid imagination has crafted fictional explanations for the presence of inconsistencies in the wallpaper. She explains them by saying “The front pattern does move! And no wonder! The woman behind shakes it” (Gilman 9). In the story, the narrator explains the woman mentioned creeps in and about the old house she and her husband reside in. Venturing towards the conclusion, the narrator becomes hysterical when thinking about the wallpaper, explaining to her husband’s sister Jennie how she would very much like to tear the wallpaper down. Jennie offers to do it herself, but the narrator is persistent in her desire-”But I am here, and nobody touches that paper but me-not ALIVE”(Gilman 10)! The narrator has realized the apex of her mental instability as the story
The narrator, referred to as Jane, has been suffering from what her husband, who is a physician, believes is a “temporary nervous depression.” He prescribes a “rest cure”
She cannot live a life of serving others and existing merely to entertain guests while simultaneously being an independent individual. When she visits Madame Reisz for consulting, she warns Edna of the strength it will take to metaphorically fly above her social roles. Ultimately, Edna decides she cannot sacrifice herself for anyone else, even her own children. She decides to move out of her husband’s house and into the pigeon house, taking only the possessions he did not buy for her. Soon, she realizes the pigeon house acts as a cage just as much as her old home did. In the end, her internal conflict tears her apart and, to escape the feeling of entrapment, she drowns
The first taste of this newfound freedom is the satisfaction that Edna feels in being able to provide for herself with her own money. The fact that she no longer has to rely on her husband’s money breaks the last tie that she had with him: "I know I shall like it, like the feeling of freedom and independence."(80) In her mind now, her marriage is dead, and Mr. Pontellier has no control over her. Financial freedom is not the only thing the pigeon house gives to Edna; it also allows her both physical and spiritual freedom. When Edna kisses Arobin in her husband’s house, she feels "reproach looking at her from the external things around her which he had provided for her external existence."(84) Yet, her first night at the pigeon house she spends with Arobin, and this time feels no reproach or regret. As for the spiritual ramifications provided by her new home, Chopin writes, "There was a feeling of descending in the social scale, with the corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual.., she began to look with her own eyes... no longer was she content to feed upon opinion."(94) The pigeon house provides a way for Edna to escape from the society that she hates. She has the freedom to make the decisions in her life now; and she decides that she is going to live life by her own rules, not the rules that society has laid out for her. When she is within her home, she is free from the pressures of being the "mother women" which society forces her to be. The pigeon house nourishes this newfound freedom, allowing it to grow and gain strength.
Gail Godwin's short story "A Sorrowful Woman" revolves around a wife and mother who becomes overwhelmed with her husband and child and withdraws from them, gradually shutting them completely out of her life. Unsatisfied with her role as dutiful mother and wife, she tries on other roles, but finds that none of them satisfy her either. She is accustomed to a specific role, and has a difficult time coping when a more extensive array of choices is presented to her. This is made clear in this section of the story.
Within this chapter, Barbara Ehrenreich experienced the maid’s life by becoming a maid. She was employed for three weeks by The Maids International in Portland. During her employment, she worked with team members to clean multiple houses. Cleaning up after the owners Ehrenreich subjected herself to “about 250 scrubbable
...the story concludes with the woman "crouched," still naked, "in the underbrush" below her house and marveling how strange it is to be seeing her husband at last after "having wanted so desperately to get home," and yet now feeling "no emotion" at what she saw. (138)
Through her three marriages, the death of her one true love, and proving her innocence in Tea Cake’s death, Janie learns to look within herself to find her hidden voice. Growing as a person from the many obstacles she has overcome during her forty years of life, Janie finally speaks her thoughts, feelings and opinions. From this, she finds what she has been searching for her whole life, happiness.
threatening to her and her family. She runs into the house filled with fear but then finds herself not
She begins to sense a "yellow smell" in the room. Convinced there’s a woman stuck behind the wallpaper, she strips it off the walls in order to free her. She then declares that she has escaped from the paper, and her husband faints when he finally sees how insane she has become. The narrator and her physician husband, John, have rented a place for the Summer.
The story begins when she and her husband have just moved into a colonial mansion to relieve her chronic nervousness. An ailment her husband has conveniently diagnosed. The husband is a physician and in the beginning of her writing she has nothing but good things to say about him, which is very obedient of her. She speaks of her husband as if he is a father figure and nothing like an equal, which is so important in a relationship. She writes, "He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction." It is in this manner that she first delicately speaks of his total control over her without meaning to and how she has no choices whatsoever. This control is perhaps so imbedded in our main character that it is even seen in her secret writing; "John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition...so I will let it alone and talk about the house." Her husband suggests enormous amounts of bed rest and no human interaction at all. He chooses a "prison-like" room for them to reside in that he anticipates will calm our main character even more into a comma like life but instead awakens her and slowly but surely opens her eyes to a woman tearing the walls down to freedom.