Once upon a time there was a wife and mother one too many times
The opening of this story situates the tone within the realm of fairy tale and then instantly pulls the rug out with the addition of an ironic twist to the familiar refrain. “A Sorrowful Woman” maintains this same thematic bifurcation between presentation and content with a short narrative written in the style of such fables. The sentences are quick and declarative, providing information with little context about characters lacking individualism that act as archetypes meant to convey a lesson. This lack of context for the story to storyline to carry out the ironic implications set up by the opening line.
It was the kind of freakish thing that happens once in a million times, and it's a wonder the poor woman kept her sanity.
“Dream Children” is a story with a narrative driven by a singularly horrific memory which occurred in the past that is constructed by two separate—but inextricably linked—tragic events. The first without the second would be enough to stain a life forever, but the second following so quickly upon the first seems almost impossible to imagine and totally impossible to imagine living with. The two characters at the center of the story—the “her” and her husband—both go about dealing with the job of maintaining sanity in completely different ways. What is most striking about this quote is that it is not the opening line despite the fact that it would be such an effective one.
Mrs. Karl Bandema
Box 59
Ocracoke, N.C. 27960 June 16
Dear Violet,
Please forgive the familiar address when I don’t even know you, but the more formal would still feel strange.
Like the opening lines to “A Sorrowful Woman” this quote should exhibit the fact that Godwin likes to experiment with form. Although she is given to pursuing certain themes with a passion capable of unifying multiple stories within collections, her manner of pursuit is anything but simple and predictable. To suggest that Godwin has not pursued the epistolary form with the same passion as she has her themes hardly needs to be stated. This example of the long literary tradition of telling stories through correspondence between characters was simply deemed most suitable for this particular narrative even as it covers thematic material covered by multiple stories in the same collection within which it is found.
People say, "Oh, they must be so useful to your writing. All that material." But in fact the majority of the agonies, furies, passions, and dreads, penned in various inks in a handwriting that has changed from a stiff baroque upright to a looser, loopy slant, are as cold as those pancakes in the attic.
After bemoaning the lack of fruitful material which has been produced by adhering to her daily habit of journaling the narrator proceeds to tell a story based on the writings of that journal. "Mr. Bedford and the Muses" is not just a story within a collection, but the title given to that collection of stories by Godwin. It is an apt title because the stories are unified by the theme of writers agonizing over the reality or possibility of what Carrie refers to here as cold pancakes.
