The Wife's Lament Summary

According to an article entitled “Woman”, the term wife evolved from the word “winman” to “woman-man” to “wifman.” The shift in letters over time has created a drastic effect on the way women are characterized. After being severed from her husband and exiled to a “Den in the Earth” (28), she is left isolated to analyze her life of sorrow and of course, write about it. The interesting feature that is found in this poem is the internal switch the wife has from sorrow to strength. In the poem, “The Wife’s Lament,” the speaker struggles to challenge the patriarchal societies that marginalized the female archetype through the uses of psychological analysis and internal victories.
The speaker describes her psychological state of loneliness after her husband departs, whether voluntary or not. The archetype of the dutiful wife is expresses through the first few stanzas of the poem. She initially blames herself for her husband's departure saying, “I grieved each dawn / wondered where my lord my first on earth might be” (7-8). The archetype portrayed in these lines describes how the writers and …show more content…
The speaker is forced to live in an isolated hole where she, “May sit the summerlong day / there I can weep over my exile/ my many hardships” (37-39). Her unlikely misfortune has led her to psychologically believing that it was her own fault for being who she is. This stereotype of women always being the ones to blame has been a universal theme. The hopeful part of this story is that she found the shift inside herself, to stand up and question the norms that were being prescribed upon her. We face these issues today; women not being considered educationally equal to men because their only job is in the kitchen, and sometimes not even that. As a society, we need to stand up for the women who fight the system, because if Rosa Parks didn’t take a stand, we wouldn’t be standing

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