29 pages • 58 minutes read
Gail GodwinA Sorrowful Woman
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1971A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Grasshopper
The grasshopper symbolizes the woman’s repressed feelings of rebellion. The insect “spat brown juice” (251), a liquid that evokes the draughts the woman drinks daily to cope with her anxiety. The grasshopper regurgitates the liquid and leaps away, whereas the woman addictively consumes the fluid and remains sedated. The grasshopper also alludes to fairy tales where humans transform into creatures. The woman, cursed in an unrecognizable body, wishes to return to her original form by spitting out the poison. The insect leaves her repulsed because it too closely resembles her present form, one of fragility and insignificance.
Hair Brushing
The motif of hair brushing reveals the woman’s fixation on femininity and the pressures to resume her role as wife and mother. As her condition worsens, the woman replaces the act of reading with habitual hair brushing. The ritual is a conventional act of feminine grooming and alludes to tales of Rapunzel and the woman’s own fantasy of being trapped in a tower. When she moves into the girl’s room, she imagines that she becomes “the previous inhabitant, the girl with all the energies” (252). She brushes her hair for hours, as if doing so will restore her youth or doll-like existence. Though she never leaves the house or allows anyone to see her, her constant grooming connotes an obsession with looking presentable and keeping up her feminine appearance.
In the final scene, the husband mourns his dead wife and embraces her, smothering his face in her “fresh-washed hair” (254). The irony of her clean hair and “the house smell[ing] redolently of renewal and spring” (254) on the day of her death suggests the husband may not have understood her at all. Indeed, the husband and child misinterpret the bread loaf as a return to normalcy, and that very underlying expectation may have contributed to her death.
Listening
Throughout the story the woman withdraws from her family, and the motif of listening measures her levels of alienation. At first, she hears the joyous laughter of her husband and son, who have given her an entire Sunday off. She is equally pleased and boasts, “I am the luckiest woman” (250). Their absence for the day “let her sleep until it grew dark again” (250). Rather than feeling refreshed from her day off, she wakes up to a foreboding darkness where she must resume her roles.
It becomes increasingly difficult for the woman to rejoin the family as she spends more time listening than interacting with them. When she locks herself in her room after the child scratches her, she speaks to her husband through the telephone and then listens as the sitter enters her house. The woman becomes more isolated, and her presence, like her sense of identity, fades as she mediates her environment through sounds: She hears her husband mixing batches of her medication, and she sneaks around the house like ghost, listening to their breathing. She waits for auditory clues like the sound of the car driving away to ensure no one is home before emerging from her room. Listening becomes her alternative to seeing, as she associates vision with the reinforcement of her role as wife and mother. The mere sight of her husband and child “made her so sad and sick she did not want to see them ever again” (249). Her recourse to listening allows her to reject the image of ideal womanhood and escape the child’s male gaze.
