How important are names?  The most often impression of a name is to reflect the subject.  However, the lack of a name can reflect its subject just as efficiently.  It is rare for a protagonist in a story to not have a name however it is not impossible as proven in the short story “A Sorrowful Woman” by Gail Godwin.  The protagonist is referred throughout the story as the mother or the wife.  Despite her lack of a name, she is still a very round character.  The mother character in “A Sorrowful Woman” lacks self identity because she is more encamped in the roll of being a mother than focusing on becoming self-aware, until the last day of her life.

            The mother has been following the footsteps of the typical women in the last few decades whose lives involved getting married, having children and caring for their family the rest of their life.  The mother has become so involved in her roll that Godwin only refers to her and the other characters in the story by their roll in society.  Godwin even starts her story by stating, “once upon a time there was a wife and mother one too many times” (Godwin 39).  Godwin is letting her readers know that this story is about how the repetitious rolls of women are beginning to become unbearable.  The mother in “A Sorrowful Woman” is that one wife and mother too many.  She decides she cannot hack it any longer.  This was a growing problem during the time period.  Godwin’s story was written in 1971, during the second wave of the feminist movement, “the women’s liberation movement…combined liberal, rights-based concerns for equality between women and men with demands for a woman’s right to determine her own identity and sexuality” (Encarta 1).  As human beings it is essential to become self-aware and as long as women were leaving out their mundane lives as domesticated women, they struggled with finding their own identity.  The mother and wife in “A Sorrowful Woman” is an example of one of the women during the feminist movement who could not be quiet little housewives any longer. 

The mother has become so unaware of her own wants and beliefs that she finds it difficult to realize she has options on how to live her life.  She has spent all of her time doing household chores and not doing anything for her that she finally keeps herself shut in a room with a pad of paper, a pen and a hairbrush.  She decides to write poetry but cannot decide what kind of poetry to write, “…she did not have to write a sonnet.  Her poem could be six, eight, ten, thirteen lines, it could be any number of lines and it did not even have to rhyme.  She put down the pen on top of the pad” (Godwin 42).  When the wife realizes she has so many options to write whatever kind of poem she wants, she cannot even bring herself to start writing because she is so baffled by the choice.  How can one know who they are if they do not know what they want?  The wife has an epiphany that she does have choices and can be whoever she wants to be.

            The husband of the mother in the story invokes her depression by thinking he can solve the problem, when really no one can but the mother herself, therefore encouraging her lack of self-identity.  When the mother decides to fire the live in nanny, referred to as “the girl,” she exclaims that she is sorry and does not know what her and her husband will do now since she can not take care of the boy due to her depression the husband decides to act alone.  The husband tries to solve her problems and assure her he’ll make everything better, “‘let me think.  I’ll think of something.’ (Still understanding these things.)” (Godwin 41).  Godwin repeats how the husband believes he understands what the mother is going through, when in reality, as much as he would like to understand he has no clue.  This hinders her more than helps her.  Although it makes sense for a woman struggling with being a mother and a wife to take a break for a while to try and get out of a depression, all she is doing is avoiding one problem and trying to solve another, instead of finding a middle ground, thus being why she ends up dying from exhaustion.  If the husband would have been so accommodating, it would have been easier for the wife to become self-aware and be a mother and wife.    

            The mother’s self identity is finally found on the day of her death. Ultimately, the mother has lived her whole life without knowing who she is so she leaves a piece of her behind right before she dies.  She finishes writing a series of love sonnets to her husband and watercolors of fantastical stories, “Finally, in the nick of time, it was finished one late afternoon” (Godwin 43).  Godwin is emphasizing how the mother is finally getting to express who she is.  After all these years of just acting on societal expectations, she has this one last ounce of strength in her to let her family know her.  Also by saying “in the nick of time” Godwin expresses how vital it was for her to finish in the last hours of her life, for she would of died being only known as another mother and a wife.

            The round character of the mother and wife in “A Sorrowful Woman” struggles with her lack of self-awareness, which she finally becomes in the last moments of her life.  Though, she ended up dying she reached a point of self identity and passed it on to her family through the works of sonnets and watercolors.  Although the mother’s depression one in the end by costing her life, her life is gratified through discovering who she is.