As dramatic characters, Marsha Norman's Jessie Cates and Tennessee Williams's Laura Wingfield might seem unconnected, or even incompatible, yet they are sisters in disguise. A clue to the relationship presents itself in the similar circumstances of their lives. Both women are grown daughters who have returned to their mothers' homes, or who have never left, because of a significant physical handicap. Both have mothers, in Thelma Cates and Amanda Wingfield, all too alike in their capacity for manipulative love, compassionate dishonesty, and a stroke of matchmaking when all else fails. Despite the matchmaking, both daughters experience a similar absence of men or, more exactly, a desertion and disappearance of sons, lovers, fathers, and brothers alike. Although Tom Wingfield seems to be a more interesting brother than Dawson Cates, neither proves to be of much help to his family. One has departed, and the other is readying to depart, both more or less indifferent to their sisters' profound needs. As with brothers, so too with husbands, actual and potential. This parallel between Jessie and Laura is touching and ironic since Cecil and Jim O'Connor are indeed “the right men.” Thelma's and Amanda's matchmaking has been all too effective in providing (if not holding) the men their daughters really love.

The two nameless fathers in 'night, Mother and The Glass Menagerie present a more complex parallel than any of the other missing males. Jessie's father is dead, while Laura's has deserted the family, yet both absent men are strong forces in the plays, so as to verge on becoming characters in their own right. In The Glass Menagerie, the Wingfield father is tangibly commemorated by a series of symbolic objects: a larger-than-life portrait magically capable of illumination, a postcard containing only the words “Hello—Goodbye,” and the abandoned Victrola records that Laura, to her mother's displeasure, plays and plays again (Williams 23, 34). Through such symbols, this invisible father comes to represent the spirit's desire for freedom and escape—imagination's urge to say “Hello—Goodbye” to the compromises and limitations of daily life. When Tom Wingfield asks, rhetorically, “who in hell ever got himself out of … [a coffin] without removing one nail?” his father's photograph lights up (Williams 45). Tom and Laura have surely inherited this man's spiritual essence in that, for better or worse, they perpetuate his escapism, his discomfort with the ordinary, his hunger for something it does not provide.

It would be all-too-easy, and misleading, to portray the Cates father as this lively man's opposite number—a figure disappearing into his coffin rather than out of it. While this, of course, is literally true, the two disappearances amount to very much the same avoidance of and protest against life's inadequacies. What Thelma Cates says of her daughter Jessie also applies to her deceased husband—he has “already gone,” in spirit, well before his physical death completes his disappearance (Norman 78). In life a kind of red-neck Bartleby, he seems to personify not an opposite principle but a negative expression of the Wingfield need for undefined alternatives. He prefers not to be married to a woman whose lack of imagination has disappointed him profoundly. He prefers not to fish when he goes fishing but, instead, to escape into a state of peaceful and mysterious contemplation. While not overtly suicidal like Jessie, he finally prefers not to live, and not to speak either—at his last opportunity, ever, to do so.

Laura Wingfield's and Jessie Cates's families and life-situations are, indeed, alike. The parallel suggests a creative kinship between Tennessee Williams and Marsha Norman, who has publicly expressed her high regard for the earlier playwright and special affinity for his work.¹ More important for reader and audience, the parallel provides a way of seeing the newer, less familiar, play in light of one that is established and known. To the point of this essay, it allows for exploration of the intricate sisterhood between Laura and Jessie, a relationship founded on their link with the absent father and response to the example his invisible spirit provides.

Laura and Jessie both prove to be faithful daughters who keep alive their fathers' memory. Although Laura never speaks of her father, she pays him silent yet meaningful tribute through a ritual of emulation. The Victrola records which give background music to Laura's fragile and beautiful world are her father's tangible legacy. That world itself affords the daughter a limited and temporary version of the father's disappearance into “long distances” (Williams 23). Within the squalid St. Louis apartment, it becomes an imaginative enclave where unicorns and virgins can sport for a time, and where the idealized image of Jim O'Connor, secretly nicknamed “Freckles,” can be celebrated and recelebrated in fantasy (Williams 104). For Laura this world provides an essential sanctuary, protecting her against reality's threat and allowing her, albeit briefly, to survive.

Jessie Cates is far more consciously and verbally involved with her father's memory than Laura, yet somehow she seems to lack any similar gift of protection from him or any similar capacity to re-enact his escape. Seen from this perspective, Jessie emerges as a version of Laura without imaginative coloration, thus exposed and vulnerable to the blows of the world. Far more vigorously than Laura, Jessie has attempted life grounded in reality and unmodified by dreams. Here she encountered only setback after ugly setback—a son gone bad, a husband simply gone, an illness kept under control at best. With no unicorns to guard her, with no access to Laura's alternative world, what wonder at the intensity of her despair?

Jessie Cates's dreamless vulnerability, if it can be this harshly described, is puzzling since she has been so close to her father, a man who retreated into himself most effectively as a means of escaping the unpleasant. We are given no hint that Laura Wingfield and her father were in any way as close, yet she appears to be his spiritual disciple. Jessie, according to her mother, loved her father “enough for both of us … followed him around … knew what he was thinking … had those quiet little conversations after supper every night,” all to no apparent effect on this heroine's capacity to dream and, thereby, to elude reality (Norman 46-47).

It is even possible to suggest that before his death Jessie's father sought for subtle ways to invite her into his world of silence and slow time—to awaken the dreamer in her, if an illogical metaphor may be allowed. In a gesture suggesting Kenneth Burke's idea of symbolic action, he repeatedly offered her the harvest of his fishing trips: not literal and ordinary fish, but unreal creatures crafted from pipe-cleaners—a menagerie of Jessie's own if only she were willing to accept it (Burke 58). Unfortunately, her reaction to these small but crucial offerings was to be pleased but not, finally, to respond to their intent. Her mother, Thelma, even more literal-minded than Jessie, would have liked nothing better than to throw the pipe-cleaner animals and people away.²

It seems appropriate to ask, at this juncture, whether an exact parallel between Laura Wingfield and Jessie Cates ever emerges. Thus far they appear more like opposite figures, sharing similar experiences and backgrounds but reacting to them with radical difference. While the opposition of Jessie and Laura, as realist and dreamer, controls the plays up to a point, it breaks down, finally, as both heroines experience major shifts in one another's direction. The result of these shifts, however, is not a convergence but, instead, a crossing of destinies—an “hour-glass” figure, as E. M. Forster describes it in Aspects of the Novel (150). Laura and Jessie confirm a complex sisterhood not by ending alike but by remaining opposites through an almost exact exchange of identities. By the close of The Glass Menagerie, Laura has been torn from her fantasy world to become a figure without imaginative protection, much the way Jessie has been throughout most of her life. Jim O'Connor's entrance at first seems to promise the realization of Laura's dreams, yet he ends instead by destroying them. Along with her unicorn, he shatters her idealized and treasured memory of himself as “Freckles” by presenting, in its place, the reality of a mediocre man engaged to someone else. After this disaster, Laura does attempt a return to her father's Victrola records, but it seems certain that her fantasy-world can never be rebuilt. When she blows out her candles, to end the play, the glow of her own imagination is extinguished, and the resulting darkness seems utterly permanent.

Where Laura is wrenched by force into reality, Jessie, on the last day of her life, effects a final and creative escape from its grasp. It might seem invalid, or at least controversial, to argue that Jessie's or anyone's suicide is a “creative” act; yet this must be allowed, I believe, if 'night, Mother and its heroine are to command long-term attention and respect. If not, Jessie falls far short of noble stature, and Marsha Norman's play achieves only pathos over a desperate woman's death.

In what sense, then, does Jessie Cates's suicide suggest imagination and sisterhood to Laura finally confirmed? It might be appropriate here to discuss Jessie's artful orchestration of her own death, although this is not what best reveals her achievement. More to the point, if we recall Jessie's father as the informing figure of imagination, surely her suicide can be understood as a permanent alliance with him in death and also as the deepest possible repetition of his rejection of the world. Capturing Laura's pose at the very last—then immediately perfecting it—Jessie discovers the one way to remain her father's spiritual daughter forever.

In fact, many of the carefully planned and crafted details of Jessie's suicide lead back, like a trail of clues, to her absent father. If she has no other choice, Jessie will use her ex-husband's pistol to take her life. She is certain, however, that the one fitting instrument of her death is “Daddy's gun” (Norman 7). Jessie virtually begins 'night, Mother in search of this weapon, explaining to Thelma that she intends to use it for “Protection” (Norman 9). She means protection from reality and life, a fact which her mother and the audience are not yet in a position to understand. Later in the play, Jessie also tells Thelma that her funeral service should be handled by the same “preacher who did Daddy's” (Norman 80). Perhaps the most intriguing of these clues is a metaphor Jessie uses to describe her imminent suicide and to equate her death, emphatically, with the imaginative essence of her father's life: “I want to hang a big sign around my neck, like Daddy's on the barn. GONE FISHING” (Norman 27).

Jessie's use of metaphor in 'night, Mother is itself a revealing subject, well beyond this single example. Her discourse and thought process have, in the main, been literal and pragmatic. She seems, however, to discover metaphor during the play, in the effort to justify her suicide and explain it as a meaningful human act: “I can't do anything either, about my life, to change it, make it better,” she tells her mother, “But I can stop it. Shut it down, turn it off like the radio when there's nothing on I want to listen to” (Norman 36). Just before this exchange, Jessie confronts Thelma with a similar and even more powerful figure:

Mama, I know you used to ride the bus. Riding the bus and it's hot and bumpy and crowded and too noisy and more than anything in the world you want to get off and the only reason in the world you don't get off is it's still fifty blocks from where you're going? Well, I can get off right now if I want to, because even if I ride fifty more years and get off then, it's the same place when I step down to it. Whenever I feel like it, I can get off. As soon as I've had enough, it's my stop.

(Norman 33)

A less literal and more creative mode of speech is apparently born in Jessie as she closes with her own death. Such a gain in eloquence, however, may seem slight consolation in the face of what is about to happen. The utter negativity of suicide forms a barrier against any easy acceptance of its validity as a human action. The way through this barrier is again to recall that Jessie's father expressed his spirit purely in the negative. Jessie's suicide merely carries his method through to finality and permanence. If Jessie has very lately become her father's disciple, then father and daughter emerge, together, as unconscious yet faithful likenesses of Melville's Bartleby and even of Sophocles' Antigone. Like these literary ancestors, they find death much more attractive than imprisonment or death-in-life. All four choose “nothing,” in its perfect negativity, as far preferable to the shabby “something” the world has offered them.

Perhaps the most telling evidence that Jessie's suicide is a creative victory lies in the heroine's intensity, verging on exuberance, as the play nears its close. Such energy does not contradict the negation within Jessie's act. Her final gunshot, in fact, sounds like the word “No,” shouted loud in answer to Thelma and the world. Yet it is also a triumphant “No,” in that for once an action of Jessie's will not reflect clumsiness and probable failure but, instead, freedom, grace, and even a touch of mystery. Unlike Laura, who is lost from view in the dying of her own light, Jessie makes her final exit hinting at transcendence. Before the gunshot, “She vanishes,” in Marsha Norman's exact words, through a door which the author takes pains to describe as both an “entry” and a way out—also as “the point of all the action” of the play (3). The description of this exit/entrance occurs, appropriately, at the beginning rather than the end. It will serve, now, to close the present commentary and also, I believe, to confirm the strange tribute to the human spirit which lies at the heart of 'night, Mother and of dramatic literature in general:

One of the … bedrooms opens directly onto the hall, and its entry should be visible to everyone in the audience. It should be, in fact, the focal point of the entire set, and the lighting should make it disappear completely at times and draw the entire set into it at others. It is a point of both threat and promise. It is an ordinary door that opens onto absolute nothingness.

(Norman 3)

Notes

1. During an appearance at Alfred University (April 8-9, 1986) Marsha Norman discussed her general sense of debt to Tennessee Williams, although without reference to specific parallels between his plays and her own.

2. The present discussion of fathers and daughters in 'night, Mother and The Glass Menagerie seems to be approaching the borderline of a male-centered reading of the plays, one which could possibly be termed “patrocentric.” The truth, however, is that the invisible fathers in both plays do seem seriously identified with the informing (and potentially saving) principle of imagination. For a reading of 'night, Mother which provides a maternal counterbalance or antidote to my own stress on the absent father, see Jenny S. Spencer's “Norman's 'night, Mother: Psychodrama of Female Identity,” Modern Drama 30 (1987): 364-375. Spencer suggests that mother and daughter, not father and daughter, provide the informing relationship of the play.

This paper was presented in 1988 at the Comparative Drama Conference at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

Works Cited

Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. New York: Random House, 1957.

Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955.

Norman, Marsha. 'night, Mother. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.

Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. New York: New Directions, 1970.