A Sorrowful Woman

“A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf (1929)

Virginia Woolf’s formative essay explores the relationship between women’s writing and the educational and class systems that stifle the female literary tradition. She argues that women must have money and a room of their own to produce literature. The room has since functioned in feminist literature as a metaphor for independence. For Godwin’s protagonist, the room is a space where she hopes but fails to find her identity.

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“Fairy Tale Liberation” by Alison Lurie (1970)

Alison Lurie was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and English professor at Cornell University who specialized in folklore and children’s literature. In this essay, she argues that fairy tales belong to the tradition of women’s literature not only because of their subversive female characters but also because these tales were part of women’s oral traditions. Her contention that fairy tales support women’s liberation provoked many feminists to counter her claims, most notably Marcia Lieberman in her essay, “‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’: Female Acculturation Through the Fairy Tale” (1972). The feminist debate around fairy tales in the 1970s offers a lens through which to analyze the allusions to fairy tales in “A Sorrowful Woman.”

“Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs” by Jonathan Metzl (2003)

Jonathan Metzl is a professor of psychiatry and the director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University. His research includes topics on race, gender, and social justice in health care. In this book, Metzl examines the 1950s onward to assess how the trend of prescribing psychotropic drugs to women was grounded in traditional gender roles as well as biological and Freudian assumptions of what it means to be a healthy woman. His research provides a socio-historical context for Godwin’s protagonist and her addiction to the draughts.

“Mother’s Little Helper” by The Rolling Stones (1966)

After the song’s release, the term “mother’s little helper” became synonymous with Valium and other tranquilizers frequently prescribed to women in the 1960s and 1970s. Like Godwin’s story, the song’s lyrics describe addiction and the unfulfilling life of a housewife.