The short story "A Sorrowful Woman" by Gail Godwin represents in parable-fashion, what may in fact happen within a (supposedly at least) "fairy tale marriage" in which the wife becomes overwhelmed, bored, and discontented with her traditional role(s). This story, in which everyone is nameless and faceless, takes place in an unidentifiable place, except that we are told the weather is cold, and winter turns into spring. But otherwise there are no physical descriptions except that the girl who comes to clean house for the exhausted young wife, is "not pretty" (Godwin, p. 34) (which, if she had been, might have complicated the predictable direction). This parable is, in fact, like a fairy tale in reverse even at the end when the "sleeping beauty" splayed out in the kitchen fails to be stirred awake by a man's loving caress.

             The discontented young wife works just as hard as a Cinderella (at first, that is, until an ugly step-daughter type, though more cheerful than that, is hired to take over); but later she sleeps her life away like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty. At the end of the story, in fact, after all the cooking, baking and other exhausting food preparation (and the writing of several love sonnets) she falls down dead [this generally happens at the beginnings of fairy tales, with the young princess falling into a trance. But unlike the ending of a fairy tale, the loving husband in this story cannot kiss his wife awake, or rescue her, just by showing up, from a protracted spell or trance]. The child of this quasi-fairytale couple is "a tender golden three" (p. 33), a reference that becomes ironic when the reader sees that his exhausted young mother can barely cope (when she can cope at all) with motherhood. .

             Within this parable, all ends "unhappily ever after", with the devoted but mystified young husband, and their three year old son, perhaps munching turkey and pie beside the dead body.