Thirteen years ago, when feminist theory and “gynocritics”¹ were in their infancy, Janet Brown, one of the authors of this article; tried to identify the essential characteristics of feminist drama. Using the rhetorical model of Kenneth Burke, she argued that a drama is feminist if it depicts a woman seeking autonomy in an unjust patriarchal society.² Since then, feminist theory has matured and our sense of what makes a work “feminist” has grown more complex. Some recent theorists have struggled to identify the principles and practices at the core of feminist art, employing a dizzying variety of terms to characterize these: “a female aesthetic,”³ “feminist poetics,”⁴ “matriarchal aesthetic,”⁵ “women's poetics,”⁶ and “Penelope's aesthetic.”⁷ Others, like Jill Dolan, have challenged Annette Kolodny's notion of the “playful pluralism” of the feminist critical venture and insisted on the necessary link between feminist art and ideology, particularly a materialist ideology.⁸ Here we employ the phrase “feminist aesthetic” to refer to a philosophy of art that crystallizes the work of feminist theorists, scholars, and activists in the 1970s and 1980s. As we see it, such an aesthetic encompasses a range of insights that belong to the “feminist public sphere,” “a discursive space which defines itself in terms of a common identity, … the shared experience of gender-based oppression, [and which] can accommodate disparate and often conflicting ideological positions, because membership is conditioned not on the acceptance of a clearly delineated theoretical framework, but on a more general sense of commonality in the experience of oppression.”⁹ Our project is to examine two plays by the commercially successful Marsha Norman, the feminism of whose work has been the subject of considerable debate,¹⁰ in an attempt to illustrate the operation of a feminist aesthetic in popular drama.

In an interview published in 1987, Norman characterized herself as someone whose work reflects that cultural revolution known as the women's movement:

The appearance of significant women dramatists in significant numbers now is a real reflection of a change in women's attitudes toward themselves. It is a sudden understanding that they can be, and indeed are, the central characters in their own lives. … The notion of an active central character is required for the theatre. Not until enough women in society realized that did the voices to express it arrive.¹¹

According to Norman, the female creator must accept her own power before she can create women characters who take active roles in their lives. Myra Jehlen, theorizing about the situation of women writers, makes a similar assertion. Before a woman can write seriously, she argues, the woman must first “assume herself,” by constructing “an enabling relationship” with language, because patriarchal language by its very nature silences the female.¹² For Marsha Norman, women's speech seems to arise out of a consciousness—at once individual and collective—that alters the cultural context in which the artist can create and the work can be viewed.

In another interview, Norman suggests that, as they begin to find voices, women playwrights are breaking taboos about subject matter and beginning to expand the range of dramatic vision: “It's a time of great exploration of secret worlds, of worlds that have been kept very quiet.”¹³ Within these worlds, Norman finds distinctive and crucial values and attitudes that arise out of women's life experiences: “The things we as women know best have not been perceived to be of critical value to society.” Employing a domestic metaphor, Norman describes a point of view which has been “engendered” by women's life experiences:

As women, our historical role has been to clean up the mess. … We are not afraid to look under the bed, or to wash the sheets: we know that life is messy. We know that somebody has to clean it up. … This fearless “looking under the bed” is what you see in so many plays by women, and it's exciting. It says, “There is order to be brought from this chaos, and I will not stop until I have it.” The lessons of all those years of domestic training … show up in the writing of today in a very powerful way.¹⁴

Norman herself in writing Getting Out and 'night, Mother looks fearlessly “under the bed” at the totality of women's experiences. Silenced and oppressed by the patriarchy, her characters struggle both to articulate their needs and also to create meaning and order in their lives. The plays are neither ideologically political nor simply personal. Instead, each demonstrates the complexity of the interrelation of those spheres. Getting Out (1979) foregrounds political feminism but in a context of women's psychology and culture. In 'night, Mother (1983) the reverse is true: the economic and political situation of women in a patriarchy is a backdrop to the primary action, which is moral and psychological. In a real sense, then, each play crystallizes key feminist issues of its time. In the 1970s, feminist energy was directed at identifying and combatting sexism. But, as Jo Freeman observes: “A movement can begin by declaring its opposition to the status quo, but eventually, if it is to succeed, it has to propose an alternative.”¹⁵ In the 1980s, studies of women's culture, psychology, and moral development began to suggest ways of filling the “normative vacuum”¹⁶ created by the critiques of patriarchy.

Because it grows out of a set of feminist ideas, the aesthetic reified in Getting Out and 'night, Mother concerns itself more with meaning and effect than with form, style, or even subject. Feminist theorists such as Silvia Bovenschen have celebrated the fact that “no formal criteria for ‘feminist art’ can be definitely laid down,”¹⁷ and hence women artists are freed from a “calcified” debate over the existence of a uniquely feminine or female style. As Patricia R. Schroeder observes, to insist that “plays cannot be feminist unless they adhere to a particular ideological stance or that they take shape in a certain prescribed dramatic form, is to practice essentialism in its most insidious guise. …”¹⁸ Indeed, Marsha Norman has praised the freedom of contemporary women dramatists to write in any style on any subject: “Now we can write plays and not have them put in a little box labelled ‘women's theatre.’”¹⁹ The subject matter of Norman's two plays is not inherently feminist either. Getting Out depicts female juvenile delinquency, while 'night, Mother presents the suicide of an epileptic, middle-aged woman. One could easily imagine explicitly antifeminist plays on either subject. But in these works, feminist values dictate the meaning and effect that the playwright wants to achieve and thus lead her to shape action, character, and setting in particular ways.

In the two plays under discussion, Marsha Norman's feminist aesthetic manifests itself in the following ways:

1. The Characters: In both plays the lives of silenced, marginalized women are brought to center stage.
2. The Settings: These marginal women inhabit domestic interior settings, redolent of women's culture. The stage business of the plays consists largely of housekeeping activities.
3. The Plot: The action of the plays consists of the protagonists' attempts to “rewrite the scripts” of their lives, drawing upon values, strengths, and moral categories that scholars like Carol Gilligan and Nancy Chodorow have identified as characteristically “female” in Western industrial cultures.²⁰

By celebrating these women in this kind of setting struggling to break into speech and to define new life paradigms for themselves and others, Norman is writing drama that foregrounds many specifically feminist concerns, as these have been defined over the past twenty years. So, for example, Gerda Lerner argues that the recognition of silenced and forgotten women is one of the hallmarks of contemporary feminist thought. In The Creation of Patriarchy, she traces women's absence from written history, their marginalization, back to history's earliest appearance in ancient Mesopotamia. In a significant analogy, Lerner compares recorded history to a play in which both men and women “act out their assigned roles. … Neither of them ‘contributes’ more or less to the whole. … But the stage set is conceived, painted, defined by men.”²¹

While Norman's women do inhabit domestic settings—the “proper sphere” for women—they have transformed these spaces and the rituals associated with them into the sources of comfort and personal power. Jane Marcus posits a women's poetic “with repetition and dailiness at the heart of it, with the teaching of other women the patient craft of one's cultural heritage as the object of it.”²² Both Getting Out and 'night, Mother reflect this female culture and poetic. Indeed, they mirror a female way of seeing, which Josephine Donovan calls “woman's epistemology.” According to her analysis, the shared experience of oppression or “otherness” and the consignment to the domestic sphere have produced a particular female consciousness and a special ethic “based on a fundamental respect for the contingent order, for the environmental context, for the concrete, everyday world.” This ethic is “nonimperialistic,” “life affirming,” and it “reverences the concrete details of life.”²³

Just as these women redefine for themselves the meaning of domesticity, so they commit what Gerda Lerner calls the “worst of all sins” by assuming “the right to rewrite the script.”²⁴ This power to invent a life of one's own was identified as the key problem of feminism as early as Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. She observed that in an androcentric culture “humanity is male and man defined woman not in herself, but as relative to him.”²⁵ More recently, Carolyn Heilbrun has argued that “women have been deprived of the narratives, or the texts, plots, or examples by which they might assume power over—take control of—their own lives.”²⁶ Yet women cannot assume an isolated autonomy in imitation of the patriarchal plot. Bell Hooks warns that “neither a feminism that focuses on woman as an autonomous human being worthy of personal freedom nor one that focuses on the attainment of equality of opportunity with men can rid society of sexism and male domination. Feminism is … necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels.”²⁷

Such an ideology has until recently permeated the social sciences as well, representing the psychological and moral development of women as simply a deformed version of men's development. But Nancy Chodorow challenged the paradigm by mapping out a distinctly female psychology which arises from the girl child's primary relationship with a parent of the same sex. The resulting sense of merged personalities and communal responsibility, according to Carol Gilligan, has produced in females a moral calculus based on an “ethic of care” rather than an “ethic of justice.” Thus, to elucidate Norman's feminist aesthetic in Getting Out and 'night, Mother, we will identify, within the traditional categories of character, setting, and plot, the animating forces of women's speech, women's culture, women's scripting of their lives, and women's values.

THE CHARACTERS: SILENCED WOMEN

In Getting Out, the central character is represented by two actresses, one playing Arlene, recently released from prison and settling into an apartment; one playing Arlie, her past self, imprisoned upstage for much of the action. This doubling of the protagonist is allied to a number of attempts in recent writing by women (both in drama and in fiction) to find a form to render the complexity of the female consciousness. Playwrights like Susan Griffin in Voices and Ntozake Shange in For Colored Girls depict groups of women who collectively constitute a self. Honor Moore finds this dramatic form, which she has dubbed the “choral play,” one of the hallmarks of contemporary female playwriting.²⁸ Novelist Toni Morrison suggests that in a misogynistic society psychic wholeness is a difficult achievement for women; thus in Sula two women—each half a self—together serve as the novel's protagonist. Similarly, Arlie and Arlene are the dual protagonists of Getting Out.

Arlie is a delinquent—foul-mouthed, hostile, unskilled—an unwed mother, and finally a suicide survivor. Arlene is the reformed self who tries to behave according to socially acceptable codes of female conduct. As the play opens, Arlene arrives at her new apartment accompanied by her former guard and would-be lover, Bennie. Two parallel plots constitute the rising action: Arlene struggles to establish her new identity in the face of her mother's skepticism and the importuning of her former pimp, Carl; she plans to go straight so that she can gain custody of her son. At the same time Arlie struggles in flashbacks against a series of patriarchal institutions—family, school, prison—which abuse her, silence her, and label her a “bad girl.” As Arlie and Arlene occupy the stage simultaneously and engage in sometimes synchronous and sometimes diachronous dialogue, the audience is forced to question the gender stereotypes that lie behind notions of “good” and “bad” girls.

Arlie has been molested by her father and trapped by him in a terrified silence. In a flashback to childhood she screams: “No, Daddy! I didn't tell her nuthin'. I didn't! I didn't!”²⁹ Consequently, her only mode of speaking is the curse, her mode of acting, the crime. Forbidden from articulating deep and traumatic feelings, Arlie feels that her words can't make an impact. So when the cab driver tries to touch her, Arlie screams at him but, lacking confidence in her speech, also grabs his gun and accidentally shoots him. The girl plagued by unspeakable feelings and antisocial actions becomes in the course of the play the woman who can verbalize her love for the earlier self she had tried to kill and who can aspire to make it in society. The plot of the play, which will be considered in detail later, traces Arlie/Arlene's path from silence to speech, from self-division to psychic wholeness. The climactic self-healing and self-unification take place with the help of Arlene's neighbor, Ruby (herself an ex-convict). “You can still love people that's gone,” she tenderly reminds the distraught Arlene as she rocks her like “a baby” (Getting Out, 62). Through the positive reinforcement that sisterhood can bring, the silenced, outcast self and the “model” prisoner finally unite and speak as one person—a delightfully exuberant and mischievous person at that. As we shall see when we discuss the plot of Getting Out, Arlie's empowerment takes place through a rejection of the restrictive life paradigms imposed on her by a sexist society.

Like Arlene, Jessie in 'night, Mother is a woman marginalized by society. She can't hold a job; she found a husband only through her mother's machinations and then lost him again. She is without beauty, talent, or popularity. Unlike Arlene, though, she has been less oppressed than simply overlooked by patriarchal society. She even appears to have colluded in this invisibility, rarely leaving the house and avoiding her brother Dawson and his family. She is closest to her mother, but seems to have lived on a surface level even with her until now. When she tells her mother, “You have no earthly idea how I feel,” Mama responds, “Well, how could I? You're real far back there, Jessie.”³⁰

On the evening depicted in the play, Jessie breaks her silence in order to connect with and console Mama for her planned suicide, which ends the play. She evokes Mama's feelings for Jessie's father, now dead. For the first time she speaks honestly about her own feelings for her father, about her failed marriage to Cecil and about their delinquent son, Ricky. Her mother, exhilarated by this new level of intimacy, urges Jessie to live because “We could have more talks like tonight. … I'll pay more attention to you. Tell the truth when you ask me. Let you have your say.” But Jessie responds, “No, Mama! … THIS is how I have my say. This is how I say what I thought about it ALL and I say no. To Dawson and Loretta and the Red Chinese and epilepsy and Ricky and Cecil and you. And me. And hope. I say no!” ('night, Mother, 75). Paradoxically, Jessie's breakthrough into speech occurs as a prelude to her final silence.

All dramas “embody a society's understanding of the universe, for they are attempts to define the human situation and its relationship to the world.”³¹ Thus when the protagonist of a serious drama is, as in the plays examined here, a woman or women of low social and economic status without youth or unusual beauty, a new perception of the world is revealed to the audience. Simply by moving to center stage those who traditionally have been minor characters or off-stage altogether, a feminist drama teaches the audience, glorifying the women patriarchal society has defined as marginal.

THE SETTINGS: WOMEN'S CULTURE

In both plays, these marginal women are presented in domestic interior settings. Getting Out takes place in Arlene's new apartment, the first space she has ever been able to call her own. Much of the play's stage business involves her attempt to make a home by arranging possessions, cleaning, and shopping. Significantly, the domestic becomes the nexus of Arlene's relationship to the other characters: her mother visits to help her clean, and their only productive conversations revolve around cleaning and cooking. Bennie tries to help her settle in and buys her plants to hide the bars on the windows; Carl, on the other hand, breaks down her door, eats her food, and throws groceries on the floor. Finally Ruby offers her homespun advice on how to survive in this new life when pressures mount:

RUBY:
You kin always call in sick … stay home, send out for pizza an watch your Johnny Carson on TV … or git a bus way out Preston Street and go bowlin. …

.....

ARLENE:
(Anger building.) What am I gonna do? … What kind of life is that?
RUBY:
It's outside.

(Getting Out, 59)

Ruby here offers Arlene a chance to control where she goes and what she eats. In fact, Norman uses Arlene's changing attitude to the domestic sphere and to food as symbols of her movement toward self-respect. When Arlie was a child, food was a form of patriarchal control associated with violence and sex. As Mama reflects: “You always was too skinny. Shoulda beat you like your Daddy said. Make you eat” (Getting Out, 19). This is immediately followed by Arlie's revelation to the audience, but not to Mama, that Daddy molested and beat her. The prison guards are always trying to get Arlie to eat for what they describe as explicitly sexual motives: “Got us a two-way mirror in the shower room. … We sure do care if you go gettin too skinny” (Getting Out, 18). In prison the “good girls” obediently fatten themselves up. Arlie, however, resists violently, flinging her food at the wall. Even when she is beginning her new life, Arlene must face Bennie's insistence that she eat. Although she claims she isn't hungry, she complies, forcing down the chicken he has bought.

In act 2 Arlene's increasing commitment to a self-determined existence is suggested by the fact that she voluntarily shops for the food she likes and returns to her home to stock her shelves. At the play's end, Arlene has clearly resolved to make this new life work: “Slowly but with great determination, she picks up the [grocery] items one at a time and puts them away in the cabinet above the counter” (Getting Out, 64). For Arlene, such mundane details are the palpable signs of her new freedom and self-control; moreover, they symbolize the new domestic life she plans to establish with her son. Josephine Donovan postulates a separate woman's culture whose values include a respect for the contingent order and for the concrete world of everyday life. These values are “non-imperialistic, life-affirming, and holistic.”³² As Arlene tries to make a home for herself and her son at the play's end, she moves not into domestic confinement but into a sphere in which she can nurture her newly found psychic wholeness and commitment to life.

In 'night, Mother, the domestic environment shared by the mother and daughter not only externalizes the bond they share, it becomes the focal point of much of their activity on stage. Moreover, the question under debate, whether to live or die, is represented for both characters by the value they place on their material surroundings. The play begins with Mama searching the cabinets for a cupcake. Jessie spends much of the evening restocking her mother's supplies of candies, explaining how the washer works, and updating her mother on the procedure for ordering groceries: “And they won't deliver less than fifteen dollars worth. What I do is tell them what we need and tell them to add on cigarettes until it gets to fifteen dollars” ('night, Mother, 25). Just as Ruby offers Arlene the power to send out for pizza as a reason for living “straight,” so Mama tries to dissuade Jessie from suicide by suggesting: “You could work some puzzles or put in a garden or go to the store. Let's call a taxi and go to the A & P!” ('night, Mother, 34). To Mama, gardening, shopping for food, and eating represent reasons to live. But although Jessie understands her mother's pleasure, it is not a pleasure she can share.

Near the end of the play, Jessie tries one last time to explain why she wants to die: “… I would wonder, sometimes, what might keep me here, what might be worth staying for, and you know what it was? It was maybe if there was something I really liked, like maybe if I really liked rice pudding or cornflakes for breakfast or something, that might be enough” ('night, Mother, 77). Unlike Arlene, who decides to put away the groceries and begin a new life, Jessie finds no pleasure in food, and thus no reason to live. Jessie and her mother agree that the meaning of life resides in domestic culture; but it is Jessie's inability to savor this meaning that makes her choose to end her life instead.

THE PLOTS: REWRITING THE SCRIPTS

From its opening scene, Getting Out clearly criticizes the patriarchal ideology of domination which abuses and silences women while denying them access to the power to rewrite the script of their lives. Here the patriarchal script is represented visually and verbally by the prisons in which Arlie is incarcerated: first the linguistic prison created by her pimp; finally, the literal correctional institutions in which society incarcerates her. At four key moments, Marsha Norman visualizes the connection among all these forms of exploitation and imprisonment by placing Arlie/Arlene on the bed. As Arlie fearfully responds to her father's threats, the stage directions read: “Screaming, gets up from the bed, terrified” (Getting Out, 21). Similarly, after the rebellious Arlie has tried to set a fire in her prison cell, she is sedated, pinned to the bed, and roughly searched by a leering guard:

GUARD-EVANS:
So where is it now. Got it up your pookie, I bet. Oh that'd be good. Doc comin' back an me with my fingers up your. …

(Getting Out, 15)

The prostitute Arlie was similarly victimized; as Arlene talks to Carl in the present, the memory of past indignities surfaces:

ARLIE:
You always sendin me to them ol droolers …
CARL:
You kin do two things, girl …
ARLIE:
They slobberin all over me …
CARL:
Breakin out and hookin.
ARLIE:
They tyin me to the bed! …
ARLIE:
(Now screaming, gets further away from him.) I could get killed working for you. Some sicko, some crazy drunk … (Goes off stage, guard puts her in the cell …).

(Getting Out, 33)

Even the reformed Arlene is still in a kind of prison: there are bars on her windows and she must fend off the unwanted help of her former guard who wants to take care of her in return for sexual favors. In the concluding moments of act 1, Arlene again finds herself pinned to the bed by a man who would use violence to get sex.

At the play's beginning, Arlene has been liberated physically but not psychologically. In jail Arlie was converted from defiance to compliance (she ate chocolate pudding and took up knitting) by the prison chaplain who came to talk and to listen when she was at a psychic low point in solitary confinement. But even he blames the victim for her own victimization. As Arlene later explains: he “said Arlie was my hateful self and she was hurtin me and God would find some way to take her away … and it was God's will so I could be the meek …” (Getting Out, 61). When the chaplain departs without saying goodbye, Arlene is so distraught that she tries to help God along by killing that “hateful self”:

they didn't hear nuthin but they come back out where I was an I'm standin there tellin em to come see … but there's all this blood all over my shirt an I got this fork I'm holdin real tight in my hand … an there's all these holes all over me where I been stabbin myself and I'm sayin Arlie is dead and it's God's will. … I didn't scream it, I was jus saying it over and over. …

(Getting Out, 61)

At the injunction of the patriarchy, using an implement symbolic of the patriarchy's control of women, and observing the code of silence, the tormented woman tries to kill that self born out of her struggle to survive in the dominant culture.

Clearly, Arlene's prison metamorphosis is not without its ironies. She has abandoned one repressive paradigm—the “bad girl”—for another—the “compliant ex-convict.” Her real progress toward self-scripting takes place in her apartment as she learns to use words not as weapons of assault but as descriptors of reality, particularly the reality of her emotions. Arlie had killed a cab driver for trying to touch her, but Arlene can use words to defend herself from Bennie's attempted rape. Arlene controls the situation by shocking Bennie into an awareness of what he is doing. Aware of the change in herself, she says: “I ain't Arlie … Arlie coulda killed you” (Getting Out, 39). It is no wonder then that the final reconciliation between Arlie and Arlene can take place only after Arlene has told her neighbor Ruby the story of her attempted destruction of her earlier self. Haltingly and painfully she confesses: “I didn't know what I … Arlie! (Grieving for this lost self.)” (Getting Out, 62). Significantly, that reuniting of Arlie, who was never allowed to tell her story, and Arlene, who has gradually learned the liberating power of her own speech, is dramatized as an act of story telling (about Arlie's mischievousness in the past). For the first time in the play both selves speak together, giving voice to the play's last line. Having overcome the silences and the self-alienation imposed by the patriarchy, the protagonist can finally begin to write the script of her life.

As Arlie metamorphoses into Arlene and then Arlene circles back to reclaim her lost self, she enacts not the linear, masculine path to maturity but a particularly female pattern of development. As Gilligan observes in her discussion of psychologist Jean Baker Miller's work: “Development does not displace the value of ongoing attachment.”³³ A recent study of the female bildungsroman suggests that the protagonist's progress is often not linear but circular; her ultimate “development” is not achieved through absolute separation but through the achievement of “fusion, fluidity, mutuality, continuity, and lack of differentiation.”³⁴ Morally, Arlie/Arlene's development parallels that observed by Gilligan in her study of women who were facing a decision about abortion. Gilligan discerned three phases: 1) an initial focus on caring for the self in order to assure survival; 2) the development of a sense of responsibility for others, manifested through self-sacrifice; 3) a broad perspective on the interconnection between the other and the self which dissolves the tension between selfishness and responsibility, and which Gilligan calls an “ethic of care.”³⁵

Arlie lives in the first phase, struggling for survival. Arlene begins the play in phase two, having rejected that “selfish” and “hateful” self and having decided to live a socially acceptable life, despite the difficulty, for the sake of her son, Joey. As Arlene awakens to the complexity and the hardship of the path she has chosen, she has to vanquish the temptation to turn to men for help: her pimp offers luxurious living and easy money instead of a grimy apartment and a dishwashing job; Bennie offers protection and security. Resisting both of their appeals, Arlene learns to be self-reliant without reverting to the violent self-protectiveness of Arlie. Moreover, with Ruby's help she learns to love and accept her old self as the first step toward a new life. Arlene now not only sees her self as connected with Joey but with the humor, the energy, even the rebelliousness of Arlie. She ends the play on the verge of Gilligan's third phase, “inter connectedness.”

The repeated juxtaposition of Arlie and Arlene as they respond to similar situations or use similar words forces the audience to question the meaning of Arlene's reform and to understand what has been lost in the course of her resocialization. Before Arlene herself realizes it, the audience knows that she needs Arlie if she is going to face the future as a complete woman. Contemporary women's psychology argues that women face a particular struggle in defining the boundaries of the self, in negotiating between merging and separating. If that is so, the very structure of this play embodies that process of negotiating new boundaries for a healthier self. The form then extends the feminist implications of the action.

But if in Getting Out psychic health comes from extending the borders of the self, in 'night, Mother the protagonist must delineate those borders more precisely. The intensity of Jessie and Mama's interaction epitomizes the mother/daughter relationship described by Chodorow. “A girl continues a preoedipal relationship to her mother for a long time. … Mothers tend to experience their daughters as more like, and continuous with, themselves. Correspondingly, girls tend to remain part of the dyadic primary mother-child relationship itself. This means that a girl continues to experience herself as involved in issues of merging and separation, and in an attachment characterized by primary identification and the fusion of identification and object choice.”³⁶

In Getting Out Norman physicalizes the self-division of the protagonist by employing two actresses to depict the temporally removed selves of Arlene and Arlie. In 'night, Mother the characters are literally different people, but they form so close a community that they seem nearly to be complementary sides of one female self. Throughout the play the women alternate patterns of motion and stasis, of engagement and disengagement. Jessie begins by bustling about the house, filling candy dishes and pill bottles, preparing for her imminent departure. But when she persuades her mother to make hot chocolate “the old way,” the stage directions note that “JESSIE, who has been in constant motion since the beginning, now seems content to sit” while her mother cooks ('night, Mother, 37). When the hot chocolate is finished, Jessie resumes her activities, emptying the garbage and refilling the honey jar, taking care of her mother as her mother presumably took care of her in childhood.

Mama is convinced that Jessie is still a part of her: “Everything you do has to do with me, Jessie.” She believes that she is responsible for Jessie's decision to die: “It has to be something I did.” Jessie strives to persuade her mother: “It doesn't have anything to do with you” ('night, Mother, 71-72). By the end of the play, she has succeeded. Mama greets Jessie's death with the words: “Jessie, Jessie, child … Forgive me. I thought you were mine” ('night, Mother, 89). Paradoxically, the very night that Mama achieves her greatest closeness to her daughter is the night that she must acknowledge their distinctness as adults.

In Getting Out, Arlene struggles against oppressive patriarchal institutions, graphically portrayed. In 'night, Mother the focus is narrower, almost microcosmic. Jessie's decision is an individual one, and indeed her struggle in the play is to claim her suicide not as a reflection on her mother or as an act of self-aggrandizement, but simply as her personal decision. Jessie wants to control the script. In their last moments together, Jessie and Mama rehearse Mama's role at the funeral. Mama wonders what she will say was Jessie's motive, since Jessie has asked her to keep this evening “private, yours and mine” ('night, Mother, 82). Finally Mama decides she will say, “It was something personal,” and Jessie agrees, “Good. That's good, Mama” ('night, Mother, 82).

In the background, however, lurk larger societal reasons for Jessie's decision. Although she seems to have been a competent housekeeper for her mother, Jessie reminds her, “You know I couldn't work. I can't do anything. I've never been around people my whole life except when I went to the hospital. … The kind of job I could get would make me feel worse” ('night, Mother, 35). Her lack of marketable skills, her preference for solitude, and the degraded and meaningless nature of most work in our society prohibit Jessie from using work as a way of making her life meaningful.

Women in a patriarchy are expected as well to create the scripts of their lives through their relationships with men. But Jessie's father, whom she loved but never understood, is now dead. Her husband has abandoned her. Her teenaged son stole her only valuable jewelry, two rings, before he disappeared. None of these specific problems, however, has led to her decision to end her life. Rather, she is dissatisfied with the sum of her life, with her self. She explains to her mother that she is not her child any more: “I am what became of your child. … It's somebody I lost, all right, it's my own self. Who I never was. Or who I tried to be and never got there. … So, see, it doesn't much matter what else happens in the world or in this house, even. I'm what was worth waiting for and I didn't make it” ('night, Mother, 76).

While Arlene is able to relocate her child-self and thus to survive, Jessie has no self and thus no future. As Norman explains, “Jessie thinks she cannot have any of the other things she wants from her life, so what she will have is control, and she will have the courage to take that control.”³⁷ Jessie displays her courage by separating from her mother, and by dying. But although she is determined to die, Jessie is also determined to help her mother survive this blow as well as possible. In both plays, the protagonists seek autonomy in a context of connection with their families: Arlene for a future with her son, Jessie for her mother's future without her. Jessie stocks the pantry, cleans the closets, and even makes a list of Christmas presents for her brother to give her mother for the next ten years. Most importantly, she strives to explain her decision to her mother in order to alleviate the guilt her mother may feel. Mama pleads, “How can I get up every day knowing you had to kill yourself to make it stop hurting and I was here all the time and I never even saw it” ('night, Mother, 73). Jessie reassures her: “I only told you … so you wouldn't blame yourself. … I don't want you to save me. I just wanted you to know” ('night, Mother, 74).

“Knowing is the most profound kind of love, giving someone the gift of knowledge about yourself,” Norman comments.³⁸ Although Dolan argues that “Jessie's death leaves no … legacy to her mother,³⁹ we would argue on the contrary that Jessie's action in the play is to give her mother the gift of knowledge, of connection. By so doing, she frees her from guilt and responsibility. She exercises her own freedom of choice, but in a context of responsive concern for her mother. Gilligan describes the transition she has observed in women's moral development in similar terms: “Questioning the stoicism of self-denial and replacing the illusion of innocence with an awareness of choice, they struggled to grasp the essential notion of rights, that the interests of the self can be considered legitimate. … Then the notion of care expands from the paralyzing injunction not to hurt others to an injunction to act responsively toward self and others and thus to sustain connection.”⁴⁰ Whereas Arlene only begins to understand an ethic of care at the end of Getting Out, Jessie begins from Gilligan's third phase. By honestly sharing her deepest feelings with her mother, Jessie has created a mature connection with her, replacing the childish bond of merged personalities. She defines herself as a separate but loving adult, demonstrating a distinctly female moral and psychological maturity.

CONCLUSION

Different, though often complementary in subject, style, and emphasis, Getting Out and 'night, Mother both embody a feminist aesthetic in drama. In each, the playwright “looks under the bed” by bringing to center stage silenced, marginalized women who spend a good bit of their time on stage performing “women's work,” cleaning, shopping, cooking. These women, however, resist their marginalization, transform lifelong silence into speech, and try to find a way to control their individual destinies while maintaining close bonds with others. Both plays are open-ended and affirmative; Norman herself describes 'night, Mother as “a play of nearly total triumph.”⁴¹ Each concludes with a woman on the verge of a new phase in her life: Arlene is trying to live within the law in order to establish a relationship with her son. Mama, on the other hand, is trying to live without her daughter's physical presence but within the nurturing physical environment that Jessie created as her legacy. In a variety of ways—only a few of which we have been able to discuss here—these plays extend and comment on each other.

Norman's commercial success and public recognition—'night, Mother won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983—have earned her contempt in some feminist circles where she is accused of “writing for male spectators under the guise of universality.”⁴² Viewed differently, her success illustrates the extent to which feminist values have permeated areas of popular theatre and the capacity of feminist writing to be “both popular and oppositional.”⁴³ Her plays serve to further a feminist consciousness in mainstream American theatre from Broadway to college campuses and small local theatre groups. (In one year in the Hartford area alone, Getting Out was performed by a small, nonprofit theatre group and 'night, Mother by a university drama department.) Heide Göttner-Abendroth observes that patriarchal aesthetics divides art into two categories: “formalist, elitist, socially effective art on the one hand, and a popular, widespread but socially vilified and outcast art on the other.”⁴⁴ She calls for a feminist art that can transcend this division and return art to its important social role. Norman's aesthetic in Getting Out and 'night, Mother produces drama that is both popular and socially effective, drama that crystallizes a range of feminist ideas and values, bringing these before large and diverse audiences.

Notes

1. Elaine Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985).

2. Janet Brown, Feminist Drama (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1976).

3. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “For the Etruscans,” in The New Feminist Criticism.

4. Joanne Frye, Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women in the Novel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986).

5. Heide Göttner-Abendroth, “Nine Principles of a Matriarchal Aesthetic,” trans. Harriet Anderson, in Feminist Aesthetics, ed. Gisela Ecker (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985).

6. Josephine Donovan, “Toward a Women's Poetics,” in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Shari Benstock (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987).

7. Jane Marcus, “Still Practice, A/Wrested Alphabet: Towards a Feminist Aesthetic” in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship.

8. Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988) and Annette Kolodny, “Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of Feminism,” Feminist Studies 6 (Spring 1980).

9. Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 166-67.

10. See, for example, Dolan, Feminist Spectator, 19-40.

11. Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, ed. Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987), 338.

12. Myra Jehlen, “Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism,” Signs 6 (1984): 582.

13. Mel Gussow, “Women Playwrights: New Voices in the Theatre,” New York Times Magazine, 1 May 1983, 40.

14. Ibid., 339.

15. Jo Freeman, Women: A Feminist Perspective (Palo Alto, California: Mayfield, 1984), 554.

16. Ibid.

17. Silvia Bovenschen, “Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?” trans. Beth Weckmueller, in Feminist Aesthetics, 48.

18. Patricia R. Schroeder, “Locked Behind the Proscenium: Feminist Strategies in Getting Out and My Sister in This House,” Modern Drama 32 (March 1989): 112.

19. Gussow, “Women Playwrights,” 40.

20. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1982) and Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

21. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 12-13.

22. Marcus, “Still Practice,” 84-85.

23. Donovan, “Woman's Poetics,” 173.

24. Lerner, Creation of Patriarchy, 13.

25. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), xviii.

26. Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 7.

27. Bell Hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984), 24.

28. Honor Moore, “Women Alone, Women Together” in Women in American Theatre, ed. Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins, 2d ed. (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987), 188.

29. Marsha Norman, Getting Out (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1978), 21. Subsequent references are given parenthetically by page number.

30. Marsha Norman, 'night, Mother (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 55. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically.

31. Oscar Brockett, History of the Theatre, 4th ed. (New York: Allyn and Bacon, 1982), 4.

32. Donovan, “Woman's Poetics,” 173.

33. Gilligan, Different Voice, 170.

34. Marianne Hirsch, “The Spiritual Bildung: The Beautiful Soul as Paradigm,” in The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1983).

35. Gilligan, Different Voice, 73-74.

36. Chodorow, Reproduction, 166.

37. Gussow, Women Playwrights, 39.

38. Ibid, 40.

39. Dolan, Feminist Spectator, 32.

40. Gilligan, Different Voice, 149.

41. Betsko and Koenig, Interviews, 339

42. Dolan, Feminist Spectator, 39.

43. Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 181.

44. Göttner-Abendroth, “Nine Principles,” 563.