Marsha Norman's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, ‘night, Mother, has been greeted by many critics as a major drama. Robert Brustein notes that the play is “chastely classical in its observance of the unities,” and he welcomes Norman as one writing in “a great dramatic tradition” who, “young as she is, has the potential to preserve and revitalize it.”¹ Another critic appreciates Norman's dissection of the “mythic relationship between mother and daughter”² in the play. Escaping the weaknesses of melodrama, Norman offers a drama that not only leads up to the carefully planned suicide of Jessie Cates, for which Jessie prepares her mother, Thelma, during the play, but one that also leads to a quickened sense of life. Departing from an overt dramatization of a split self in an earlier drama, Getting Out (1977), in which the author explored the relationship between Arlene, newly released from prison, and her earlier, juvenile delinquent self, Arlie, Norman offers in 'night, Mother a dramatization of doubling between mother and daughter that leads to a character integration her earlier heroine sought in vain.

One way of approaching this drama is by looking at its banal surface in the context of the underlying mythic relationships of Demeter and Kore (Persephone), a relationship that offers clues to the mother-daughter relationship in the play. C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, in their exploration of the Mysteries of Eleusis in Essays on a Science of Mythology, suggest an essential oneness of the Demeter and Kore figures in mythology, a oneness that is actually threefold, also embracing the third mythological figure, Hecate. Commenting on the identification of mother and daughter, Jung writes, “Demeter and Kore, mother and daughter, extend the feminine consciousness both upwards and downwards. They add an ‘older and younger,’ ‘stronger and weaker’ dimension to it and widen out the narrowly limited conscious mind bound in space and time, giving it intimations of a greater and more comprehensive personality which has a share in the eternal course of things.”³ Much of the power of Norman's play emerges from a mythical identification of mother and daughter that leaves Thelma bereft of the daughter she thought she had possessed but ironically at one with that daughter from whom she has derived new strength and life. More cathartic than depressing, the play reveals a bond between mother and daughter and a mythical sense of their oneness that allows for what Kerényi, commenting on Jung's ideas, calls “being in death.”⁴

Although Jessie seems like a very different protagonist in her quiet determination and lack of pretension, she is, in some ways, descended from such self-destructive and flamboyant heroines as Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Strindberg's Miss Julie. Like Hedda and Miss Julie, Jessie is her father's daughter (like Hedda, Jessie kills herself with her father's pistol), and she has identified with his kind of withdrawal: “I want to hang a big sign around my neck, like Daddy's on the barn. GONE FISHING” (27),⁵ she explains to her mother. Like Hedda and Miss Julie, Jessie finds some measure of redemption in a suicide that is partly an escape from a world in which she lacks the strength to act with freedom or control; but her suicide also is a way of taking control by embracing a death that affords that freedom and fulfillment denied her in life.

What distinguishes Jessie from these former heroines is her reaching out to her mother in her last hours of life, recognizing her mother's greater appetite for life, arranging for the continued availability of the sweets her mother craves as a consolation for her empty existence but also offering her the more nourishing truths that may sustain her after her daughter's death. As she plays the role of mother to her mother, a role she has assumed after her husband has deserted her and she has moved into her mother's house, Jessie may be understood as both the Kore figure who feels used or raped and the Demeter figure who shares in that sense of loss and has lost the zest for life. As the drama progresses, however, we see not only the reversal of the Demeter-Kore role as daughter plays mother but also the common ground that binds the two, both in their shared sense of being used and in their deep feeling for each other. This kind of mutual participation in an archetype is that Jung suggests rescues the individual from isolation and restores her to wholeness.⁶ Only a sense of incipient wholeness allows Jessie's mother to accept her daughter's death, to allow her that freedom, and to understand her choice.

The major difference between Jessie Cates and her mother seems to be a question of appetite. As Jessie readies herself for suicide and attempts to prepare her mother for her life without her, the focus is on food. Mama opens the play with her assertion of appetite.

MAMA:
(Unwrapping the cupcake.) Jessie, it's the last snowball, sugar. Put it on the list, O.K.? And we're out of Hershey bars, and where's that peanut brittle? I think maybe Dawson's been in it again. I ought to put a big mirror on the refrigerator door. That'll keep him out of my treats, won't it? You hear me, honey? (Then more to herself) I hate it when the coconut falls off. Why does the coconut fall off?

(5)

Mama is concerned with not running out of the sweets that sustain and console her in what we soon learn is an arid existence. Significantly, she addresses her daughter as sugar and honey here as well as in subsequent exchanges.

Although Jessie assures her mother that she has ordered a “whole case” of snowballs, she is intent in the opening moments of the drama on preparing for her death by locating her father's gun and collecting enough old towels for the mess her death will make. There is nothing sweet about Jessie as she determines that “garbage bags would do if there's enough” (6). Later, when she tries to explain her failed marriage to her mother and why her husband has chosen to leave her behind, Jessie notes: “You don't pack your garbage when you move” (61). What Jessie has bought in a “feed store” her brother Dawson told her about is bullets, not food.

The question of appetite is at the heart of Mama's choice for life and Jessie's choice for death. When they discuss Jessie's son Ricky, who has become a thief, Mama looks on the bright side and sees Ricky's redemption in terms of food. Ricky, she suggests, may simply be going through a bad period, mixing with the wrong people. “He just needs some time, sugar. He'll get back in shoool or get a job or one day you'll get a call and he'll say he's sorry for all the trouble he's caused and invite you out for supper someplace dress-up” (11). Such a proposition has no value for Jessie, however, who says, “Those two rings he took were the last valuable things I had” (11), and she insists she would turn him in if she knew where he was. Jessie knows she could choose to live rather than to die, but she lacks the appetite for the choice. She tells her mother that she wondered after her decision at Christmas time to kill herself what might make it worth while staying alive and says, “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” (77).

Appetite is also a major concern in the Demeter myth for both mother and daughter. When she learns of her daughter's rape by Hades, who has taken her to be queen of the Underworld, Demeter will neither eat nor drink. In the myth, however, the implications of this loss of appetite involve the fertility of the earth itself and the revolution of the seasons. As goddess of the corn, not only does Demeter refrain from eating; she also will not permit the crops to grow, depriving mankind as well as herself of food and the gods of their sacrifices. Only the restoration of her daughter will bring the return of spring. Persephone as Kore, the maiden, also refuses food in the Underworld, but her eating of pomegranate seeds just before her return to her mother ensures her marriage to Hades and her return for three months of each year to his abode.

Here the paradox of the myth may offer a clue to the paradox of the play. The pomegranate, although it ties the Persephone-Kore figure to the Underworld and thus to death, is associated with fertility and sexuality. Geoffrey Grigson describes the fruit as “enclosed by the enlarged calyx—a womb with an opening, a womb packed with seeds of translucent pink … The pomegranate, then, is the physical secrecy and portal of the feminine, whether for Aphrodite, or any related goddess of fertility and the sexual.”⁷ Not just a fruit of the Underworld, the pomegranate is one of Demeter's “fruits of the earth” as well, symbolizing marriage, in this case the marriage of Persephone and Hades for the winter of each year. The fruit is paradoxical in that it ties the daughter figure simultaneously to life on earth and to death in the Underworld—in other words, to life's cycle with its death and rebirth.

Although on one level the play deals with Mama as a Demeter figure trying to rescue her child from death, to talk her out of it, one senses as the play unfolds that on a deeper level it is about the reclamation of the mother from death, that it is about Thelma's rebirth. However, because there is a doubling of mother and daughter in the drama that is similar to its doubling in the myth, one senses at the end of the play a rebirth that combines mother and daughter as aspects of one entity.

Despite differences in Mama and Jessie's appetite for food and life and their different attitudes toward death, Mama fearing that which her daughter seeks to embrace, Norman establishes the similarity between mother and daughter early in the play. When Mama thinks Jessie is looking for her father's gun to protect them from thieves, she says, “We don't have anything anybody'd want, Jessie. I mean, I don't even want what we got, Jessie” (10). Jessie's “Neither do I,” of course, has a more ominous meaning because one senses that the “protection” she seeks with the gun is not from thieves but from life even before she announces her intention to commit suicide. Still, neither woman values what she has.

Mother and daughter also share the sense of violation that permeates the Demeter myth. Some versions of the myth depict Demeter as herself raped by Poseidon, lord of the sea, while searching for her violated and kidnapped daughter.⁸ In the play, mother and daughter feel violated by their respective husbands. Mama admits to Jessie that she didn't love her husband, who “wanted a plain country woman and that's what he married, and then he held it against me the rest of my life like I was supposed to change and surprise him somehow” (46). Although Jessie did love her husband, she expresses a similar feeling about their relationship, explaining to her mother that it was a “relief” when Cecil left. “I never was what he wanted to see, so it was better when he wasn't looking at me all the time” (61). As Jenny S. Spencer has noted, “Despite differences in personality and coping patterns, the two characters share similar attitudes toward the meaninglessness of their lives, toward the demands of their husbands and children.”⁹

Even concerning appetite, one comes to see that the differences between mother and daughter are less profound than they would appear. Rather than having a true appetite for life, Mama's appetite for sweets symbolizes her need for a slave for her death-in-life existence, a way of filling up an emptiness and of hiding from her fear of life and death. One begins to see that she, like Jessie, also is in death's grip.

Although Jessie has no particular fondness for any food, Mama has rejected almost all nourishing foods. In her state of agony over her daughter's announced suicide, she even rejects the proferred sweets that are her main source of consolation if not nourishment, and she insists that she will not cook if Jessie carries through with her plan. She wants her daughter to throw out all but one pan: “I'm not going to cook,” she explains, and adds, significantly, “I never liked it, anyway. I like candy. Wrapped in plastic or coming in sacks. And tuna. I like tuna. I'll eat tuna, thank you” (51).

Mama also informs Jessie that she doesn't like carrots, and after making cocoa at her daughter's request, she finds it as undrinkable, because of the milk, as her daughter does. “God, this milk in here” (45), Mama complains, and Jessie agrees; “I thought it was my memory that was bad, but it's not. It's the milk, all right” (45). When Mama tells Jessie she doesn't need to finish it, she might be talking about Jessie's life, which Jessie has decided not to finish.¹⁰ Perhaps it is this shared and symbolic distaste for milk that helps Mama finally to accept and understand Jessie's decision.

Jessie's preparations for her mother's welfare, however, involve milk. She has told the grocer to deliver “a quart a week no matter what you said” (54), she informs Mama, thus insisting on offering her mother the nourishment that she herself rejects, recognizing in her mother a life force that she lacks. Mama's old glasses, it also turns out, are “in an old Milk of Magnesia box” (56), further information she garners from her daughter that suggests Thelma's gaining insight during the play as well as the nourishment that such insight affords her.¹¹ When she grasps the hot chocolate pan at the end of the play, holding “it tight like her life depended on it” (89), something Jessie has advised her to clean after hearing the shot, calling her son, and waiting for him to arrive, Thelma is doing what she said she would not and could not. She is finding a way to go on, a way pointed out to her by her daughter, who, by taking control of her life by killing herself, has also offered her mother a new sense of life and strength to live it.¹² One shares Mama's feelings of devastation at the end of the play but also feels a sense of her impending renewal.

The seeds of that renewal, like the pomegranate seeds of the myth, involve a quickened sense of life through the gaining of a quickened sense of death; Mama must face that death which Jessie chooses; must, so to speak, taste it, if she is to achieve a reversal of her death-in-life existence and achieve that “being in death” that Kerényi suggests is at the center of the Demeter-Kore myth.¹³ Explaining her fear of death to her daughter, Mama describes death as “some killer on the loose, hiding out in the back yard just waiting for me to have my hands full someday and how am I supposed to protect myself anyhow when I don't know what he looks like and I don't know how he sounds coming up behind me like that or if it will hurt or take very long or what I don't get done before it happens” (77-78). Mama might be describing some modern version of Hades, waiting to pounce, violate her, and carry her off to the Underworld.

After this outburst, however, Mama confronts death in her own daughter, whom she now sees is beyond persuasion, “Who am I talking to? You're gone already, aren't you? I'm looking right through you!” (78). Only by coming to see her daughter as gone, unreclaimable, married to Hades, and by experiencing her daughter's acceptance of her own lostness and death can Mama undergo an integration with her daughter that is the only possible source of renewal at hand.

As she battles with Jessie over the impending suicide, partly blaming herself for urging Jessie to move in with her after her divorce, Mama senses in some profound way the doubling of herself and her daughter.

MAMA:
Everything you do has to do with me, Jessie. You can't do anything, wash your face or cut your finger, without doing it to me. That's right. You might as well kill me as you, Jessie, it's the same thing. This has to do with me, Jessie.

(72)

Here Mama is partly expressing her identification with Jessie as a part of herself—but as that part Jessie is also the antagonist, the killer. Otto Rank has discussed this aspect of doubling in which the double symbolizes death so that encountering one's double is a kind of encounter with one's own mortality. Although doubling, Rank explains, grows out of a narcissistic inability to love others and a fear of death, resisting exclusive self-love leads to the doubling and a projection of hate or fear onto the other self.¹⁴ Mama's slow acceptance of Jessie's decision to die is a movement toward acceptance of her own mortality. That this is a life-giving experience becomes clear as Thelma begins to accept the impending separation and hence the death of her dependency. Mama's expression of identification with Jessie—“This has to do with me Jessie” (72)—is partly an expression of dependency. Realizing Jessie's loneliness—“How could I know you were so alone?” (88), she begs, addressing the now locked door—her final words after she hears the shot display a moment of true recognition. “Jessie, Jessie, child … Forgive me. (Pause) I thought you were mine” (89).¹⁵ Mother and daughter merge as they separate, the death of one giving life to the other.

Similarly, it is only through an anticipated encounter with death, one that Jessie associates as a merging with her withdrawn father, a gentle and quiet Hades, that Jessie has been able to achieve the independence that she manages at last to pass on to her mother. When Thelma claims possession—“You are my child!”—Jessie explains that she is “what became of your child” (76). She has decided not “to stay” because she feels she has never shown up as a person and that she never will. Again, there is a paradoxical sense of identity here as Jessie, taking control and guiding her mother to acceptance, finally does seem to arrive as a person.

If Jessie were entirely calm as she approached her death, the play might lose some of the tension that comes from her vulnerability that lasts, despite her overall control, until the end; thus both Jessie and Mama experience growth during the play. Learning from her distraught and angry mother that the epilepsy she thought derived from a fall from a horse as an adult had been with her since childhood and was probably inherited from her father, who had similar seizures, Jessie feels that this knowledge was her right, that it was hers to know (70). She is hurt further to learn from her mother that her husband Cecil had another woman, the daughter of her mother's friend Agnes. Jessie's ability to digest these new hurts without loss of control is a measure of the sense of self she has achieved now that she has decided to protect herself from further hurt through death. Significantly, her seizures, which are like minor descents into the Underworld and represent a loss of control and self, have been brought under control by medication, and it has been more than a year since her last one. No longer overtaken by Hades and violated by him, she is choosing to consummate her union with him.

More information Jessie gains during the drama involves the somewhat comic Hecate figure, Agnes. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the oldest account of the rape of Persephone, there is, according to Kerényi, a doubling not only of Demeter with Persephone but also with the moon goddess Hecate.¹⁶ Hearing the cries of the raped Persephone in her cave, Hecate meets Demeter and together, torches in hand, they seek knowledge of the lost child from the sun. Various versions of the myth, according to Kerényi, depict now Demeter, now Hecate seeking Persephone in the Underworld, these different versions suggesting an underlying unity between the goddesses.¹⁷ Because Hecate also is sometimes portrayed as queen of the Underworld, she may also be identified with Persephone. Despite her slight role in the myth, Kerényi suggests that Hecate may even be its primary goddess on some level.¹⁸ Whether one considers her in her depictions as three-headed like her dog Cerberus, or as having influence over either the three realms of heaven, earth, and sea, or heaven, earth, and the Underworld, she may be understood as one who encompasses the other two figures in the myth.

Agnes, who is only discussed by Jessie and Mama in the play, seems to have more of the crone and witchlike attributes that Hecate has developed over time. Surrounded by birds and living on okra, even in the winter, Agnes is described by Thelma as being “as crazy as they come … a lunatic” (42)—hence her lunar aspect or association with the moon. She does not help Thelma with Jessie, avoiding the house when Jessie is home because she associates Jessie with death and she fears that it is catching (43). But if her avoidance of Jessie seems to preclude her Hecate role on the mythic level of the play's action, her setting fire to her houses may be associated with Hecate as a torch bearer bringing light. Agnes's behavior is akin to Jessie's suicide and is applauded by mother and daughter, although they consider it “crazy.” Apparently Agnes has set eight fires already, waking up people so they won't be hurt and serving lemonade. Seeking to rationalize this behavior, Mama explains, “The houses they lived in, you knew they were going to fall down anyway, so why wait for it, is all I could ever make out about it. Agnes likes a feeling of accomplishment” (39). Jessie's “Good for her” (39) indicates her appreciation of Agnes deciding to terminate before termination date, a similar choice to her own, and when she expresses doubt that Agnes would burn down a house now since her dead husband could not build a new one, Mama also appreciates the act: “Be exciting, though, if she did. You never know” (40), is Mama's response.

Although Mama's picture of Agnes surrounded by birds, living on okra, and burning down houses may be an exaggeration, it has some of the festive quality that is associated not only with the torch-bearing Hecate but with Demeter in her role as goddess of the grain. One may liken the burning and rebuilding of houses to the dying and returning moon (Hecate) or the dying and returning corn (Demeter or Persephone). Kerényi reminds us that “Whether it is parched or baked as bread, death by fire is the fate of the grain. Nevertheless, every sort of grain is eternal.”¹⁹ In the Demeter myth, Demeter treats the child Demophoön with fire in an attempt to make him immortal, as though he were the grain.²⁰ Jessie recognizes Agnes's value for her mother, and despite being hurt by what she learns of Agnes's fear of her, she suggests that her mother may like to live with Agnes after she is gone. Thelma, however, doubtless will be able to live alone. In the midst of telling Jessie about Agnes, Thelma insists that three marshmallows are the best way, the “old way” to have hot chocolate. She is imbibing not only Jessie's strength but Agnes's strength as well. She will be the primary goddess among the three in this drama.

Marsha Norman surely did not attempt to make 'night, Mother a modern version of the Demeter myth. The rhythms and resonance of that myth, however, give the play, despite its great sadness and sense of loss, its quickened sense of life. “Hades,” it has been noted, “is the god presiding over our descents, investing the darkness in our lives, our depressions, our anxieties, our emotional upheavals and our grief with the power to bring illumination and renewal.”²¹ Jessie embraces this god, and it is he that she introduces to her mother, who perhaps is able to see him more clearly through the image of Agnes's fires, a torch that burns to help one find what is lost. Mama learns from Jessie what it is that she used to whisper about after dinner with her withdrawn father—“His life, I guess,” Jessie reveals. “His corn. His boots. Us. Things. You know” (47). And now Mama does.

Notes

1. Robert Brustein, “Don't Read This Review!,” New Republic, 2 May 1983, p. 25.

2. Patricia Basworth, “Some Secret Worlds Revealed,” Working Woman 8 (October 1983): 204.

3. C. G. Jung, “The Psychological Aspects of the Kore,” in C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 162.

4. C. Kerényi, “Epilegomena: The Miracle of Eleusis,” in C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 182.

5. Marsha Norman, 'night, Mother (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). Subsequent references are cited parenthetically by page number.

6. Jung, “The Psychological Aspects of the Kore,” p. 162.

7. Geoffrey Grigson, The Goddess of Love: The Birth, Triumph, Death and Return of Aphrodite (New York: Stein and Day, 1977), p. 202.

8. C. Kerényi, “Kore,” in C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 123.

9. Jenny S. Spencer, “Norman's 'night, Mother: Psycho-drama of Female Identity,” Modern Drama 30, no. 3 (September 1987): 371-72.

10. This idea was suggested in an unpublished paper on 'night, Mother written by Linda Brown, 1986.

11. Debbie McCormick, “The Use of Food in 'night, Mother,” unpublished paper, 1986.

12. Ibid.

13. Kerényi, “Epilegomena: The Miracle of Eleusis,” p. 182.

14. Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, ed. and trans. Harry Tucker, Jr. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1971), pp. 71-73.

15. Inexplicably, the otherwise sensitive film version of 'night, Mother leaves out this crucial line.

16. Kerényi, “Kore,” pp. 110-11.

17. Ibid., p. 110.

18. Ibid., p. 113.

19. Ibid., p. 116.

20. Ibid.

21. Arianna Stassinopoulis and Roloff Beny, The Gods of Greece (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1983), p. 187.