A Sorrowful Woman

The story’s fairy-tale structure demonstrates how traditional gender roles operate as myths. Far from the happy ending that the “once upon a time” opening suggests, the woman becomes increasingly erratic in her role as wife and mother. No magic potion (the nightly draughts) or Prince Charming (the doting husband who carries her in his arms) can vanquish her curse. The woman fluctuates between bouts of recovery and regression, and finally succumbs to her mental breakdown. Rather than reviving after her son’s kiss, she commits suicide. These subversions to the fairy-tale genre challenge traditional gender roles where the mother is the nurturer, the father is the protector, and the child is the precious being that defines the mother’s purpose in life. To emphasize their function as gender archetypes, Godwin eschews personal names and physical descriptions, and generically designates each character with the definite article “the.” The woman is interchangeably the wife and the mother, suggesting these appellations alone define womanhood. The detached narration and matter-of-fact tone also heighten the sense that the family would prefer to live in a fairy tale, as the narrator relates startling events with a neutrality that seeks to maintain normalcy.

The narrative never fully discloses what ails the woman, though the cautionary line “one too many times” suggests her malaise is rooted in a life ill-defined by gender roles. The woman recedes into different rooms and attempts to constitute her own identity but remains circumscribed by preexisting gendered narratives. When she moves into the former nanny’s room, the bare white walls offer a tabula rasa for her to explore different versions of herself. However, the alternatives to the role of mother and wife still rely on other female archetypes of the “queen” and “virgin” (252). These personas are equally unsatisfying to the woman, who “tried these personalities on like costumes, then discarded them” (252).

The husband’s supportive and accommodating behavior emphasizes the room’s role as a liberating sphere for female identity. However, his openness also has boundaries, as seen in his wish to be “big enough” so he can “contain” what she must do (252). The proverbial room of one’s own offers a glimmer of recovery when the woman reminisces about her time at school, delves into escapist fiction, and attempts to write poetry, yet none of these endeavors provide relief. Despite her husband’s attempt to improve her condition by hiring a nanny and then taking on the household duties, the woman withdraws further from her family and from her sense of self.

In her final act, instead of a suicide note, the woman leaves behind a kitchen teeming with the hyperbolic products of her domestic labor, mingled with her creative spurts of art and writing. The excessiveness of what she leaves behind suggests a life buried under the unrealistic expectations of a mother and housewife.