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.