As human beings, we deny things. We deny that we are hungry. We deny that we are tired. We deny that we want things. We even deny that we are in denial. For me, this fact was made particularly evident after reading Gail Godwin’s “A Sorrowful Woman.” The story describes a woman who is struggling and how her family deals with her struggles. Throughout the story the woman makes a slow but steady effort to withdraw from her family until eventually she is completely isolated from them. This is a situation that I personally cannot imagine being in. What drives a person to the point that they can no longer stand to be around the people that they love? The woman obviously had a problem that caused her to feel this way. She recognized the symptoms but made no real effort to rid herself of them. I think this is something that we all struggle with. Either out of laziness or a fondness for them, we choose to dwell in our problems, our poor choices, our undesired behavior, instead of trying to improve.
At first glance the husband in the story seems to be the most responsible. With his wife falling apart at the seams and a son of only three years old he had to step up and take control of the household. The husband seems to be a sort of “knight in shining armor” coming to his wife’s rescue in her illness. When the woman first tells her husband about her feelings of sadness, he says that he understands and asks her what he can do to help her. The irony is that this initial act of love is what ultimately leads to the death of his wife. As the story goes on the husband assumes more and more of the wife’s responsibilities until he is doing all of the tasks that the woman used to do, while the woman spends the day sitting in a room brushing her hair. The husband appeared to be helping. He was taking care of things, trying to make life go on as usual. He was selfless. He was caring. But more than anything else he was in denial. His wife was extremely sick. It was apparent. Several times in the story, the husband mentions his wife getting better. He acknowledged that there was a problem but did nothing to fix it. If he was truly acting out of love, then why was it that he just waited for his wife to get better? Was there nothing that he could have done? Why did he enable her to withdraw?
Meghan, You bring up some great questions that steadily arise out of the context of this perplexing story. I agree with you that the husband is initially "loving her to death". But must we also recognize that this love, and "waiting" for her to get better go hand in hand with his role as a husband. I think that maybe he was more of an enabler to her illness rather than an additional factor leading to her death. Great Post, I enjoyed reading what perspective you are coming from in this story.
ReplyDeleteHi Meghan,
ReplyDeleteI too also agree with what you are saying. I felt the husband was just catering to his helpless wife. I don't recall him questioning her illness or problem. To me a loving husband would want to figure out whats going on, that is causing "The Sorrowful Women," to struggle to be a caring mother and a loving wife. So, I don't feel much sympathy for the man because he could have raised above and beyond to help his wife come out of her funk. Instead, he became the mother and the father of the household.
You bring up some good points in your blog entry. I believed the woman to be calculating and not sick at all, but when you write about how the husband said she seemed to be getting better this does hint to her being sick.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the husband was more of an enabler for her to stay sick than a helper, but I also think he was so busy taking care of the house, the son and his job that there was no time to think about how truly bad she had become.