Regret Theme Analysis

“The Son’s Veto” is ultimately a story about the unfulfilled possibilities of Sophy’s life. It is a story of “what ifs”: what if Sophy had married Sam, as she had originally planned? What if she had chosen to keep working after her foot injury, rather than marrying Mr. Twycott? What if she had disregarded her son Randolph’s wishes and married Sam after her husband’s death? As her life becomes increasingly unhappy, Sophy is troubled by all of these lost possibilities, and tries, unsuccessfully, to find some way to recover them. Even her relationship with Sam is perhaps motivated not so much by her love for Sam himself—after all, she chose not to marry him in the first place because she did not truly love him—but rather by a desire to recover a certain kind of life that she has now lost. Through this depiction of Sophy’s regrets about the choices she has made, the story suggests that no choice in life can be made without costs, since the opening of one door always leads to the closing of another—and that one might not know which trade-off is the right one to make until it is already too late. 

Even before the death of her husband, Sophy seems to feel some latent regret over her marriage, wondering about the alternate paths that her life might have taken. In the first scene at the concert, Randolph’s cruelty in correcting his mother’s grammar prompts her to wonder “if she had done wisely in shaping her life as she had shaped it, to bring out such a result as this”—hinting at her awareness that she could have made choices that would have set her life in a quite different direction. This reflection suggests that the distance between her and her son has prompted her to question her marriage to Mr. Twycott. Part of Sophy’s regret may stem from the fact that she “did not exactly love” Mr. Twycott; she had agreed to marry him out of a “respect for him which almost amounted to veneration,” rather than out of romantic desire. As a result, Sophy and Mr. Twycott’s marriage is characterized more by friendly companionship than by true love—a circumstance that might naturally lead Sophy to wonder what might have happened if she had married someone she truly loved.

After her husband’s death, Sophy’s regret grows, sparked by her misery and isolation as a widow, her growing estrangement from her son, and her renewed relationship with Sam, which reminds her of how her life could have been different. In the loneliness of her life in the villa left to her by her dead husband, Sophy often finds herself looking out at the country roads leading into London, pining for her home village. Her desire to go back to Gaymead indicates a longing to retrace her life, undoing the past fourteen years and going back in time just as easily as one might travel from the city to the countryside. One day, staring out at the road like this, Sophy spots Sam, the man she almost married in her youth. Throughout her marriage Sophy had occasionally thought of Sam, and wondered if she might have been happier if she had married him; now, her interest in him has increased on account of her present misery. Sophy’s renewed relationship with Sam is motivated, at least in part, by her desire to regain a possibility in her life that had been lost through her marriage to Mr. Twycott. The contrast between the misery of her present life and the carefree happiness she recalls from her youth causes her to love Sam far more passionately than she had loved him before. Sophy’s regret for leaving behind the life she once led in her youth is accompanied by her regret over the distance between her and her son. She wishes that her son had been brought up in a different way, with a different set of values, a worldview that would not create such a rift between them: “If Randolph had not appertained to these,” Sophy thinks, referring to the rich spectators at a cricket match, “has not centred all his interests in them, had not cared exclusively for the class they belonged to, how happy would things have been!” But of course, Randolph is simply adopting the values of the world he grew up into; if Sophy had married someone else, from a different social world, she might have had a son who loved her, instead of one who is ashamed of her.

The unfulfilled promise of Sophy’s renewed relationship with Sam causes a new source of regret for her, and to the moment of her death, she is left wondering how her life might be different if she could bring herself to defy her son’s wishes and marry Sam. After swearing not to marry Sam, Sophy spends the remaining years of her life “pining her heart away,” thinking of alternate possibilities as she stares out at the country roads. She wonders to herself: “Why mayn’t I say to Sam that I’ll marry him? Why mayn’t I?” Unlike her earlier regrets, which were about past choices she cannot undo, this regret is about a choice that she could still reverse, but she never quite works up the courage to do so. The ending of the story, with the scene of Sophy’s funeral procession, represents the final cutting off of all her life’s alternative possibilities. It implies that Sophy pined her life away until she died of regret.

In the end, it is impossible for Sophy to know whether she truly would have been happier if she had married Sam when she was younger; but it is precisely the fact that she will never know, will never be able to experience those alternate paths, that is the source of her tragedy.