SOURCE: Burke, Sally. “Precursor and Protege: Lillian Hellman and Marsha Norman.” In Southern Women Playwrights: New Essays in Literary History and Criticism, edited by Robert L. McDonald and Linda Rohrer Page, pp. 103-23. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 2002.

In October 1974, Israel Horowitz told of a conversation with Samuel Beckett during which Beckett expressed admiration for a line in Horowitz's new play, a line about something having occurred “in the space of a closing window.” Excited, Horowitz began to discuss the scene; then came the flash in which he realized—and said—“Oh, hell, I got it from you.” To which Beckett replied, “That's alright. Mine was a door, and I got it from Dante” (Horowitz “Address”). Apparently such an admission from the younger male artist and such amiability on the elder's part are rare. Rarer still, at least until recently, were such exchanges between older and younger female playwrights, women having had far less access to the stage and to publishing their dramas than did their male counterparts, and thus fewer opportunities to establish a women's canon. Gender discrepancies in opportunity still predominate, but as the precursor-protégé relationship between Lillian Hellman and Marsha Norman illustrates, female artists in such relationships seem more akin to Beckett and Horowitz and less like the males described by Harold Bloom who wish to annihilate their predecessors.

When Bloom articulated the “anxiety of influence” as an Oedipal battle between a “strong Poet” and his “precursor,” feminist critics realized that this male struggle did not apply to the woman writer, nor, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point out, could “Bloom's male-oriented theory of the ‘anxiety of influence’ … be simply reversed or inverted in order to account for the situation of the woman writer” whose “precursors [were] almost exclusively male, and therefore significantly different from her” (48). The younger male poet, feeling overwhelmed and threatened by the originality of his poet predecessors, responds with a poem of his own as defense, or as Bloom said, “The meaning of a poem can only be another poem” (94). The female writer, meanwhile, undergoes an “Anxiety of Authorship—a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a ‘precursor,’ the act of writing will isolate and destroy her” (Gilbert and Gubar 49). Like Gilbert and Gubar, Joan Feit Diehl, Lillian Faderman, Louise Bernikow, and Annette Kolodny remark the inadequacy of Bloom's model for the woman writer. Kolodny, for example, points to the lack of a woman's canon—or to the failure of women's writing to become canonical—as meaning that “again and again, each woman who took up the pen had to confront anew her bleak premonition that both as writers and as readers, women too easily became isolated islands of symbolic significance, available only to, and decipherable only to, one another” (54).

The absence of women, as readers and writers, from Bloom's theory underscores the need to explore the woman's tradition. In Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing, Elaine Showalter presents a crucial question: “Does a ‘muted’ culture have a literature of its own, or must it always revise the conventions of the dominant [culture]?” (6). Using as analogy the quilt whose pattern name—Sister's Choice—provides her title, Showalter suggests that rather than the revising and repetition which have been the bases of men's writing, “piecing and patchwork” provide “[b]oth theme and form” in women's writing and have “become metaphors for a Female Aesthetic, for sisterhood, and for a poetics of feminist survival” (146). In sum, these critics all suggest that to overcome the “anxiety of authorship,” the “woman writer must actively [seek] a female precursor who … proves by example that a revolt against patriarchal literary authority is possible” (Gilbert and Gubar 49).

Marsha Norman, as she has acknowledged in numerous interviews and essays, found her precursor in Lillian Hellman. Norman began reading Hellman's plays in high school; more than twenty years later, in the summer of 1983, she met the frail, nearly blind Hellman who was attended by nurses around the clock. A year later, Hellman was dead. In the introduction to her transcription of their conversation that day, “Articles of Faith: A Conversation with Lillian Hellman,” Norman wrote: “Quite simply, I owe her a great debt” (10); in the conversation itself, she told Hellman, “I was a kid who didn't really know it was possible to write for a living. I grew up in a religious fundamentalist family in Kentucky and my mother hoped I would work for the airlines for a few years and then marry a doctor. But all through high school there were teachers who put your plays in my hands” (11). The ensuing conversation touches upon the subjects of love, faith, and morality, and ends with Norman reminding Hellman of a statement in the introduction to Chekhov's letters in which the elder writer noted that “all great art requires a kind of spiritual violence” (15). Norman, stating her “desire to protect” the older playwright and, one assumes, to refrain from doing “her privacy” any violence (10), makes no further comment about the impact the meeting had upon her. Later, in writing of this meeting for the New York Times, Norman acknowledges that Hellman's “voice was the one that carried all the way to Kentucky, where I lived”; she adds, “Writers like Lillian Hellman, who are willing to share their lives as well as their work make it possible for those who come after them to survive.” Calling herself Hellman's “admirer and debtor,” (“Lillian Hellman's Gift to a Young Playwright” H7), Norman also describes Hellman as “[t]his wonderful, looming model, this great, vibrant, feisty, swearing lady who had managed to make a life in [the theater]” (Harriot 156).

Most obviously, of course, Hellman and Norman share a Southern heritage. Born in New Orleans, Hellman spent the first six years of her life there. Even after moving to New York, the family returned to New Orleans each year for six months, which they spent with Hellman's two unmarried aunts. In An Unfinished Woman, Hellman writes of being bored by school; she preferred to retreat to a perch in a tree from which she observed the world below and read what she chose (20-21). Norman, a native of Louisville, Kentucky, also reports being solitary as a child. Forbidden to play with the neighborhood children whom her mother considered inferior, Norman, like her precursor, spent much time reading. She remained in the South for college, becoming a scholarship student at Agnes Scott College, a Presbyterian liberal arts institution for women in Decatur, Georgia. After earning her bachelor's degree in philosophy, she took a master's degree in education at the University of Louisville.

In Pentimento, Hellman reveals her lasting tie to the South, stating that “there's nothing like the look of Southern land, or there's no way for me to get over thinking so. It's home for me still” (94). Like Hellman, who sets dramas in Washington, D.C.; Bowden, Alabama; a Louisiana town on the Gulf of Mexico; and New Orleans, Norman utilizes her native South in her settings. Getting Out takes place in both a women's prison in Alabama and Arlene's apartment in Louisville. While the playwright specifies no city as the setting of Third and Oak, there once was a laundromat in Louisville at the location named in the title. Norman also confesses that, in preparing to write Loving Daniel Boone, she “sat down and made a list of the things [she] loved best about Kentucky. It was a silly list including things like Mammoth Cave, Shaker Lemon pie, spoonbread, country ham, the Paris Pike, and the whole town of Harrodsburg” (Loving 332). At times this protégé departs markedly from her precursor. For example, in The Autumn Garden, Hellman utilizes the specifically Southern Gothic locale of the Tuckerman house on the Gulf of Mexico to pursue the universality inherent in the wasted life of Constance Tuckerman, who devotes her life to memories of loving Nick Denery and thus remains unmarried, and that of General Benjamin Griggs, who discovers that he has “frittered [him]self away” (542). Norman tracks the same issue by locating 'night, Mother in “a relatively new house built way out on a country road” (3). The locale in which Jessie determines to make the wasted life of the “somebody [she] lost … [her] own self” (76) count for something remains unspecified. Indeed, in the notes on the characters, set, and setting preceding the drama's text, Norman insists that the set “should simply indicate that [Jessie and Thelma] are very specific real people who happen to live in a particular part of the country” (3). She also rules out “[h]eavy accents” (3). Yet, to those familiar with the Norman canon, Southern threads are visible in this drama, also.

A deep-seated connection to the South also manifests itself in both playwrights as they carry on the Southern tradition of creating grotesque characters. Of course, non-Southern writers have also created eccentric personages, but when one contemplates the gallery of grotesques created by Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and Tennessee Williams, for example, one almost wishes to grant copyright on such characters to Southern writers. Hellman's “pig-face cute” (360) Laurette Sincee in Another Part of the Forest makes the pig-calling noise “Squee” (365), speaks of being taught to love music by an uncle who “had a little drum” (365), leading Marcus Hubbard to remark, “Sincee's uncle played Mozart on a little drum. Have you ever heard of that, Miss Bagtry?” (365). Laurette also admits that her “business” is “fancy whoring” (361). Rose Griggs of Hellman's The Autumn Garden, who wears clothes “that [are] much too young for her” (465), speaks in non sequiturs, and has only a slight grip on reality, typifies the faded Southern belle. One might say of her what Jacob H. Adler does of Tennessee Williams's Alma Winemiller, that is, Rose is “beyond question southern” in such traits as “the living of life as though it were a work of fiction, [and her] insulation from the world” (352). Among Norman's grotesques are the offstage Josie Barrett of Traveler in the Dark, the good-hearted “joke” (163) who, Sam fears, might ruin Mavis's funeral with a misguided attempt at singing (163), and Agnes Fletcher, Mama's friend in 'night, Mother, who has a “house full of birds” (40), “wears … [several] whistles around her neck” (40), and has “burned down every house she ever lived in. Eight fires, and she's due for a new one any day now” (38). Clearly, both playwrights mine the vein of the Southern grotesque.

Interestingly—but perhaps not surprising, considering the patriarchal heritage of these Southern women—strong, successful men influenced the careers of both playwrights, especially in the subject matter of each woman's first play. Hellman's lover, Dashiell Hammett, creator of the Thin Man mystery series, suggested to her that the chapter “Closed Doors; or The Great Drumsheugh Case” in William Roughead's Bad Companions would make a good drama (Wright 73). Moved from Scotland to the fictional Lancet, Massachusetts, the story became The Children's Hour. In 1971, Norman met Jon Jory, artistic director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and began her long affiliation with that institution, serving as its playwright-in-residence in 1978-79 and, over the ensuing years, contributing many dramas to its annual Humana Festival of New American Plays. (Louisville was an early center of drama in the South, where, as William S. Ward reports in A Literary History of Kentucky, “as early as 1808 there had been amateur performances and by 1814 a ‘season’ of plays” [108]). Initially, Jory suggested that Norman write a docudrama about busing, which had just begun affecting Louisville (Stone 57). When she decided against it, he recommended she write about a time when she was “physically frightened” (Norman, “Introduction” 2). Recalling a teenager she had observed while serving as a hospital volunteer, Norman created Arlie/Arlene, the dual protagonist of Getting Out.

Hammett also suggested that Hellman center a drama around a male protagonist, telling her, “There's this man. Other people, people who say they love him, want him to make good, be rich. So he does it for them and finds they don't like him that way, so he fucks it up, and comes out worse than before. Think about it” (Pentimento 206). Hellman reports that after writing an act and a half she discovered, “I can write about men, but I can't write a play that centers on a man. I've got to tear it up, make it about the women around him, his sisters, his bride, her mother and—” (Pentimento 206). She transmuted Hammett's idea into Toys in the Attic, a drama set in Hellman's native New Orleans that centers on the middle-aged and unmarried Berniers sisters, Anna and Carrie, who dote on their brother, Julian, and attempt to exercise control over his business life and his marriage.

Unlike her precursor, Norman created several male protagonists, among them the adolescent Archie Tucker in The Holdup, Shooter in Third and Oak: The Pool Hall,¹ and Sam of Traveler in the Dark; however, she does portray her male protagonists as strongly influenced by the women around them. Lily, the ex-whore turned innkeeper of The Holdup, initiates Archie sexually (150), encourages his dream of becoming an aviator (150), and pronounces a blessing upon him: “Goodness and mercy … follow you all the days of your life” (156). Sam, overwhelmed as a child by the Imaginary, grows up to become a staunch disciple of the Symbolic, and a world-famous surgeon. In declaring his allegiance to the rule of phallogocentrism, Sam must flee both parents. He finds his preacher father's theology, which includes a vision of Sam's dead mother in heaven “singing and flying around” (172), as much a fairy tale as the story of Sleeping Beauty read to him by his mother, who would greet him after school each day with “milk … and a pile of things she'd found in the ground … like dragons' teeth, witches' fingers and fallen stars” (171). Norman locates Sam's mirror stage of development in the shiny crystals held within the geodes he once collected. Figuratively seeing himself, Sam rejects the feminine principle located both in his mother's fairy tales and nursery rhymes and in his father's Bible. He insists, “I don't, in fact, believe in anything. It has taken me my whole life, Dad, but I have finally arrived. I am free of faith” (192) Yet, contrary to his claim, Sam cannot live without faith, here portrayed by his allegorically named wife Glory. Initially Sam thinks he wishes to leave her; by the end of the drama they reconcile and he makes a leap of faith, acknowledging in the words of his mother's nursery rhyme that though he “knows not what you are,” the brightly twinkling little star truly does “[g]uide the traveler in the dark” (204). Thus, though her protagonist proclaims allegiance to the male symbolic, Norman depicts him finally as relying on the female imaginative.

As late as 1984, the younger playwright had never seen any Hellman play performed. In fact, she showed a preference for Hellman's memoirs, calling them “the most compelling [story] she wrote” (“Lillian Hellman's Gift” H1); Norman also told Esther Harriot that she based her admiration for Hellman more on her predecessor's craft and sense of style than on her subjects (156). Still, Norman, wittingly or unwittingly, does piecing and patchwork in her precursor's fabric bag, as she adopts, adapts, and further develops Hellman's subjects and, in some instances, even echoes her language.

Like Hellman's work, many of Norman's plays center on the family, delving into the forces that unite as well as those that divide. The family drama, a staple of the American stage, is far from being the exclusive province of Southern playwrights. Yet, viewed through the prism of Southern drama, Richard Poirier's claim that the South fosters “intense familial … relationships” (x) compels agreement. Both Hellman and Norman scrutinize the parent-child relationship. Hellman's cold, withdrawn, or failed mothers such as Regina Hubbard Giddens in The Little Foxes and Lavinia Hubbard in Another Part of the Forest resurface in Norman's dramas. A thrall to greed to such an extent that avarice might be said to be her identity in The Little Foxes, Regina Giddens distances herself from her daughter. Norman repeats this distancing in Getting Out, where it arises from a willed blindness. When she visits her newly paroled daughter, Mrs. Holsclaw clearly resists Arlene's embrace; Arlene “moves as if to hug her. Mother stands still [and] Arlene backs off” (15). Furthermore, she ignores Arlene's initial “request” (22) to be invited to Sunday dinner and, after they argue about Bennie, the guard who has driven Arlene home, Mrs. Holsclaw, variously described in the stage directions as “cold, fierce, [and] furious” (26), rages, “You're hinting at coming to my house for pot roast just like nothin ever happened, an all the time you're hidin a goddam guard under your bed” (26). When Arlene asks whether she'll visit again, her mother responds, “You ain't got no need for me” (27). As she moves to leave, Arlene rushes toward her, only to be repelled by the words, “Don't you touch me” (27). She exits, leaving Arlene “stunned and hurt” (27), and echoing her line: “No! Don't you touch Mama, Arlie” (27). With this scene of estrangement, the mother disappears from the drama. While Arlene may be stunned by the rejection, the audience is not. The earlier flashback which details the aftermath of Arlie's being raped by her father explains Mrs. Holsclaw's attitude—for to embrace her daughter she would have to open her eyes to the sexual violence her husband inflicted upon Arlie and see what was truly hiding in her own bed all those years ago.

Incest in drama is as ancient as Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and as current as Paula Vogel's 1998 Pulitzer Prize—winner How I Learned to Drive. In her introduction to Southern Quarterly's special issue on Southern women playwrights, Milly S. Barranger notes that these women have brought to the Southern theater “enactment of such taboos as incest” (7). She adds: “Southern writers know that human beings are fallible; they are, therefore, more tolerant as observers and recorders of human foibles. Out of this understanding that human beings are not perfectible comes a tolerance for the unusual, the bizarre, even the perverse. Hence the playwright's depiction of suicide, miscegenation, violence, incestuous relations, grotesque characters and whole families takes place within a local literary tradition one hundred and fifty years old” (8).

Exploring one of these taboo subjects in Getting Out, Norman illustrates the effect of incest on mother-daughter as well as father-daughter relationships. Here, too, Hellman's influence seems to pertain. In The Little Foxes, Oscar points out to Ben and Regina that “our grandmother and grandfather were first cousins” (151). In the later Another Part of the Forest, the closeness between Regina Hubbard and her father, Marcus, carries the scent of his incestuous desire, a desire which Regina seeks to manipulate to gain her own ends. The father and daughter call each other “darling” (333) and “honey” (334), and Marcus indulges his daughter's appetite for sumptuous clothing, allowing her to spend three hundred dollars for one fur piece alone. (Hellman sets her drama in 1880; in 1893, “＄700 was a comfortable, if modest annual income” [“Late Nineteenth Century” 8]). Regina's brother, Ben, extrapolating from Marcus's desire to have Regina to himself, forecasts an evening fifty years in the future when: “Papa'll still be living, and he'll interrupt us, the way he does even now; he'll call from upstairs to have you come and put him to bed. And you'll get up to go, wondering how the years went by—(Sharply) Because, as you say, he's most devoted to you, and he's going to keep you right here with him, all his long life” (341).

Ben also points out the fact that “Papa didn't just get mad about you and Horace Giddens. Papa got mad about you and any man, or any place that ain't near him” (342); later Ben underscores the anticipated vehemence of Marcus's reaction to Regina's plan to marry John Bagtry by saying, “I'm taking a vacation the day he finds out about your marriage plans” (358). Indeed, Marcus exhibits jealous anger when he discovers that Regina has invited John to the Hubbard home (368); later, when he learns of her affair, he rages, “How could you let him touch you? When did it happen? How could you—Answer me” (379). As he breaks down, Regina continues to manipulate his desire:

REGINA:
(Softly, comes to him). All right, Papa. That's all true and I know it. And I'm in love with him, and I want to marry him. (He puts his hands over his face) Now don't take on so. It just won't do. You let me go away, as we planned. I'll get married. After a while we'll come home and we'll live right here—
MARCUS:
Are you crazy? Do you think I'd stay in this house with you and—
REGINA:
Otherwise, I'll go away. I say I will, and you know I will. I'm not frightened to go. But if I go that way I won't ever see you again. And you don't want that. My way we can be together. You'll get used to it and John won't worry us. There'll always be you and me—(Puts her hand on his shoulder) You must have known I'd marry someday, Papa. Why, I've never seen you cry before. It'll be just like going for a little visit, and before you know it I'll be home again, and it will all be over. You know? Maybe next year, or the year after, you and I'll make that trip to Greece, just the two of us. (Smiles) Now it's all settled. Kiss me good night, darling.

(379)

Meanwhile, Regina's mother, Lavinia Hubbard, consumed by her own desire to atone for what she sees as the sin of marrying Marcus, has no time for her daughter and seems not to notice the abnormal relationship between her daughter and her husband. Finally, in her last original drama, Toys in the Attic, Hellman returns to the topic of incest. Anna Berniers tells her sister Carrie that soon their brother Julian will become aware of Carrie's desire for him: “You lusted and it showed. He doesn't know he saw it, but he did see it, and someday he'll know what he saw. (With great violence) You know the way that happens? You understand something, and don't know that you do, and forget about it. But one night years ago I woke up and knew what I had seen in you, had always seen. It will happen that way with him. It has begun” (737).

In Norman's Getting Out, predecessor Hellman's intimations of incest grow into the repeated incestuous rapes of Arlie, who denies the assaults with the words, “Daddy didn't do nuthin [sic] to me” (16). Mrs. Holsclaw, to preserve her marriage, wishes to accept the lie and, like some real-life incest victims, Arlie further obliges by protecting the criminal perpetrator, claiming, “Was … (Quickly) my bike. My bike hurt me. The seat bumped me” (15), thus enabling her mother to ignore the child's bleeding body.

Arlie's later behavior also mirrors that of real-life incest victims; she runs away to join her pimp lover, Carl, and works as a prostitute, a not infrequent occurrence, as Ellen Westerlund points out in Women's Sexuality after Childhood Incest (13). As Judith Lewis Herman notes in Father-Daughter Incest, the fall into prostitution, whether the daughter literally becomes a prostitute or not, occurs along with the incest, for: “The father, in effect, forces the daughter to pay with her body for affection and care which should be freely given. In doing so, he destroys the protective bond between parent and child and initiates his daughter into prostitution. This is the reality of incest from the point of view of the victim” (4).

Most tellingly, in prison, Arlene rejects, then symbolically slays, her younger self Arlie, the child within who suffered the sexual assaults. By doing so, Arlene exhibits the behavior that Ellen Bass and Laura Davis report in survivors of childhood incest in The Courage to Heal, “Many survivors have a difficult time with the concept of the child within. … Too often women blame her, hate her, or ignore her completely. Survivors hate themselves for having been small, for having needed affection, for having ‘let themselves’ be abused” (111). Victims, add Bass and Davis, “feel split, caught in a real schism. There is the ‘you’ that's out in the ‘real’ world, and then there's the child inside who is still a frightened victim” (111). In Getting Out, Norman's dual protagonist, prior to her partial reintegration at the drama's end, offers a stunning portrait of a psyche split by incestuous rape and experiencing all of the emotions of hate, fear, and revenge prompted by her father's violation of her.

As noted above, in Another Part of the Forest, Hellman's twenty-year-old Regina is quite conscious of and thus able both to manipulate and deflect her father's desires. Marcus willingly indulges his daughter's appetite for expensive clothes as the price of her company—and his fantasies. Mr. Holsclaw is never seen onstage, but Norman makes it clear that he bribes the vulnerable, prepubescent Arlie to remain silent about his attacks on her, the price he pays being the few “crumpled dollars” Arlie tells the school principal she has earned by “[d]oin things … [f]or my daddy” (18).

The onstage relationship between Hellman's Regina and Marcus Hubbard also reverberates in Norman's later drama 'night, Mother, in the deigetic relationship between Jessie and her father. Just as Marcus prefers Regina's company to that of his wife, Lavinia, Mr. Cates would rather spend his time in nonverbal communication or quiet whispering with his daughter than in uncomfortable silence with his wife. The silent and near silent modes of communication between father and daughter effectively shut the mother out of the relationship. As Thelma remarks,

Agnes gets more talk out of her birds than I got from the two of you. He could've had that GONE FISHING sign around his neck in that chair. I saw him stare off at the water. I saw him look at the weather rolling in. I got where I could practically see the boat myself. But you, you knew what he was thinking about and you're going to tell me.
JESSIE:
I don't know, Mama! His life, I guess. His corn. His boots. Us. Things. You know.
MAMA:
No. I don't know, Jessie! You had those quiet little conversations after supper every night. What were you whispering about?
JESSIE:
We weren't whispering, you were just across the room.
MAMA:
What did you talk about?
JESSIE:
We talked about why black socks are warmer than blue socks. Is that something to go tell Mother? You were just jealous because I'd rather talk to him than wash the dishes with you.
MAMA:
I was jealous because you'd rather talk to him than anything!

(47-48)

Norman further illuminates the closeness of father and daughter through Jessie's epilepsy, a disease not often inherited. Mama tells Jessie, “I think your daddy had fits, too. I think he sat in his chair and had little fits” (62); later Mama explains that both Jessie and her father experienced absence seizures, which mimic daydreaming or “thinking spells” (62) as Mama calls them: “Oh, that was some swell time, sitting here with the two of you turning off and on like light bulbs, some nights” (69). The playwright displays an obvious clinical knowledge of the disease, knowing that seizures can intensify with age (69), that both victims and their families experience shame and other emotional problems (70), and that many drugs used to treat epilepsy have undesirable side effects—Dilantin, for example, can cause the swelling of the gums that Jessie once suffered (66). Although Mama insists at one point that “[y]our daddy gave you these fits, Jessie. He passed it down to you like your green eyes and your straight hair. It's not my fault” (68), she also appears unable to discount a mother-child connection. Finally, she assumes blame—“It has to be something I did” (71)—and when Jessie insists, “It's just a sickness, not a curse,” accepts culpability not for the epilepsy but for “this killing yourself” (72).

In the father-child relationship, Norman intimates subliminal sexual desire, perhaps played out in Jessie's choosing a phallic symbol of her father—his gun—as her means of committing suicide. In childhood, Jessie develops such a strong attachment to her father that she cannot later resolve it in favor of her relationship to her husband. Discussing her choice of weapon, she tells Mama, “I had Cecil's [gun] all ready in there, just in case I couldn't find this one, but I'd rather use Daddy's” (14). In the film version of 'night, Mother (1986), on the night of her suicide, Jessie places her father's picture on her bedside nightstand, but removes it saying, “That wouldn't be right.” She then puts it on her mother's bureau, but decides “That's not right, either” and places the photograph on a sideboard in the living room. Thus Norman reveals in her screenplay that the sexual overtones of the father-daughter relationship in the play remained on her mind.

Despite her daughter's obvious preference for her dead father, Thelma Cates does not turn away. In fact, unlike Getting Out's Mrs. Holsclaw, she wishes to embrace her daughter, but despite her desire, she cannot beguile her child into continuing to live. For although Jessie promises Thelma that she will “do whatever you want before I go” (34), ultimately Jessie rejects the embrace meant to hold her within this life. When, just prior to Jessie's suicide, Thelma grabs her daughter, Jessie “[t]akes her hands away” and says, “Let go of me, Mama” (87). To some extent, this scene is prefigured at the end of Hellman's The Little Foxes when Regina tells Alexandra that she will not make her stay. The daughter replies, “You couldn't, Mama, because I want to leave here. As I've never wanted anything in my life before” (199). Both Hellman's Alexandra and Norman's Jessie, in their moves to, free themselves of their mothers, act in a manner that contradicts the Freudian theory that a woman, lacking a penis and thus not impelled by castration anxiety, experiences a lesser need to resolve her pre-Oedipal attachment to her mother.

Interestingly, surrogate mothers may succeed where biological mothers fail. In The Little Foxes, Hellman provides a surrogate mother for Regina's daughter Alexandra in the person of Addie, the black servant to whom Zan looks for guidance. While Regina accuses Addie of babying Zan, the dying Horace turns to Addie in seeking protection for his daughter. Here Hellman perpetuates the myth of the all-loving, self-sacrificing “Black Mammy” found in the work of many Southern writers, most notably, perhaps, in Faulkner. Horace asks Addie to take Zan away from the foxes' influence and she hesitates for only a second before responding, “Yes, sir. I promise” (184). Hellman repeats the sacrificing of the black woman's life to the needs or desires of the white woman in Another Part of the Forest when Lavinia assumes that the patient, motherly Coralee, her black caretaker, will accompany her on the return to Lavinia's childhood home. In Getting Out, Ruby, Arlene's upstairs neighbor, plays the surrogate. (Ruby's race is not designated; she could be played by an actor of any race. On the other hand, in using the name Ruby, a Southern writer like Norman may have had a black woman in mind as her mother surrogate, thus providing another echo of Hellman's dramas.)² After revealing how she attempted to exorcize Arlie by repeatedly stabbing herself, Arlene breaks down and falls into Ruby's lap. Ruby tells her, “You can still love people that's gone” and “hold[s] her tenderly, rocking as with a baby” (61). Norman underscores the surrogate mother's success through the partial reintegration of personality in the drama's final scene when Arlie and Arlene, each spotlighted,

(say together, both standing as Mama did, one hand on her hip) Arlie, what you doin in there?
ARLENE:
(Still smiling and remembering, stage dark except for one light on her face) Aw shoot. (Light dims on her fond smile as Arlie laughs once more).

(64)

Hellman herself seems to have found a black surrogate mother in Sophronia Mason, the woman who was “her wet nurse and her guide through childhood and the pain of early adolescence” (Poirier x). She also might have experienced a surrogate mother-daughter relationship in the time she spent with her aunts Jenny and Hannah in their New Orleans boarding house. They surely serve as the models for the Berniers sisters—one of whom bears the name Hannah in an early draft of the drama (Falk 90)—who mother their brother Julian in Toys in the Attic. In The Little Foxes, Regina's daughter Alexandra deals with her less-than-adequate biological mother by deciding to leave home. When confronted with an unfeeling mother, Deedee in Norman's Third and Oak chooses to become a surrogate daughter. Indeed, she literally forces the older widow, Alberta, who, according to the stage directions “[w]ants Deedee to vanish” (63), to pay attention to her. Norman underlines Deedee's symbolic adopting of Alberta by giving both characters the same last name, a fact that leads Deedee to exclaim, “Hey! We might be related” (64). Later, the initially reticent Alberta admits her own childlessness while also responding “Oh yes” when Deedee asks, “Didn't you want some?” (66). She then becomes Deedee's mother for the moment, instructing her about such disparate topics as bullfighting, doing laundry, and dealing with marital infidelity. When Shooter appears, he mistakes Alberta for Deedee's biological mother (71), again underscoring the connection between the two women. (Of course, his mistake also says something about the male assumption that a biological relationship accounts for every instance of an older and a younger woman associating with each other.) In contrast to Deedee's biological mother, who seems never to enjoy seeing her daughter and “do[es]n't say two words while [she's] there” (76), Alberta offers Deedee counsel and a parting kiss, and one sees that, for a moment at least, the younger woman, by becoming Alberta's surrogate daughter, has had her fantasy mother, one who is “Smart. Nice to talk to” (75).

Most Southern playwrights comment on race relations in their dramas. Hellman and Norman are no exceptions. In Another Part of the Forest, Hellman's Oscar defends his riding with the Klan by saying, “I'm a southerner. And when I see an old carpetbagger or upstart nigger, why, I feel like taking revenge” (343). Hellman clearly detests this bigotry and makes it a hallmark of others of her foolish or villainous characters. Ben Hubbard frequently uses the word “nigger” and Carrie Berniers professes astonishment that “Julian d[oes]n't mind” that Mrs. Warkins is “part nigger” (Toys 742). In Third and Oak, Norman presents Shooter as being a person of some prominence to Deedee, who seems thrilled to meet the disc jockey who is “the Number One Night Owl!” (70). Yet once he leaves the laundromat, she speculates that he “[c]oulda been a murderer, or a robber or a rapist” (73). When Alberta objects to the sexual innuendo that took place between the two, Deedee calls her “prejudiced” (73), adding:

DEEDEE:
If that was a white DJ comin' in here, you'd still be talking to him, I bet. Seein' if he knew your “old” favorites.
ALBERTA:
If you don't want to know what I think, you can stop talking to me.
DEEDEE:
What you think is what's wrong with the world. People don't trust each other just because they're some other color from them.
ALBERTA:
And who was it said he could be a murderer? That was you, Deedee.
Would you have said that if he'd been white?

(73)

Race relations continue to be problematic. Deedee, despite what she sees as her devotion to the cause of equality, ponders accepting Shooter's invitation to the pool hall as a means of hurting her husband, Joe. She feels that finding her with Shooter “Might just serve [Joe] right though. Come in and see me drinkin' beer and playin' pool with Willie and Shooter. Joe hates black people. He says even when they're dancin' or playin' ball, they're thinkin' about killin'. Yeah, that would teach him to run out on me. A little dose of his own medicine. Watch him gag on it” (74). Alberta, resuming the role of surrogate mother, counsels her to make something productive of her anger by going home, not by attempting to use Shooter as a pawn.

Often, the biological mothers created by both playwrights try to be or to do everything for their daughters. In Toys in the Attic, Albertine³ Prine arranges Lily's marriage to Julian Berniers, just as Thelma by, in Jessie's words, “flirt[ing Cecil] out here” (57-58), arranges her daughter's marriage in 'night, Mother. Interestingly, each mother takes part in an exchange historically transacted, as Claude Levi-Strauss pointed out, by men; however, such an exchange is no more benign in female hands. Women who are treated as chattel have little opportunity to develop a sense of worth. Even when mother love precipitates the exchange, the traffic yields bitter fruit: in Hellman's Toys in the Attic, Lily's fear of losing Julian results in his being savagely beaten, and in Norman's 'night, Mother, Cecil divorces Jessie.

Hellman's and Norman's onstage mothers also make the all-too-common mistake of identifying with their daughters to the extent of viewing them as extensions of themselves. In The Little Foxes, Hellman's Regina promises Alexandra that she shall have “all the things I wanted. I'll make the world for you the way I wanted it to be for me” (198). Following Jessie's suicide in 'night, Mother, Norman's Thelma cries, “Jessie, Jessie, child. … Forgive me … I thought you were mine” (89). Here the work of Nancy Chodorow offers illumination. As Chodorow notes about the mother-daughter relationship in The Reproduction of Mothering, “Mothers tend to experience their daughters as more like, and continuous with, themselves” (166). Linda Kintz goes so far as to suggest we read Thelma's line as “I thought you were me” (229). Mama's words certainly bear out Kintz's claim; earlier in the drama Thelma insists, “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” (72). However, such identification, interference, and possessiveness can lead only to problems, especially in reference to separation. Chodorow finds that, “Mother-daughter relationships in which the mother has no other adult support or meaningful work … produce ambivalent attachment and inability to separate in daughters” (213). The pain thus engendered is evident in 'night, Mother; as Jessie screams, “What if I could take all the rest of it if only I didn't have you here? What if the only way I can get away from you for good is to kill myself? What if it is? I can still do it” (72), her suicide, read symbolically, enacts a desperation-driven breaking of the mother-daughter bond.

Chodorow also points out that “the mother-child relationship recreates an even more basic relational constellation” than that of mother-father-child, because in the former “[t]he exclusive symbiotic mother-child relationship of a mother's own infancy reappears, a relationship which all people who have been mothered want basically to recreate” (201). Through Arlene in Getting Out, Norman presents compelling images of the frustration of this desire. When the authorities take away the child she bears in prison, Arlene goes “crazy” (33), escapes, and kills the cab driver who attempts to assault her (30). Given an extended sentence, Arlene, longing for her infant, creates a pathetic substitute from a pillow (33). After singing to this surrogate child, she asks what he will be when he grows up, but her tone turns bitter when she remembers her own childhood. She tells the infant Joey: “Best thing you to be is stay a baby cause nobody beats up on babies or puts them … (Much more quiet) That ain't true. People is mean to babies, so you stay right here with me so nobody kin get you an make you cry an they lay one finger on you (Hostile) an I'll beat the screamin shit right out of em. They blow on you and I'll kill em” (33). Although Arlene later speaks of regaining custody of Joey, Mrs. Holsclaw disrupts her daughter's narrative, cutting off her protest of “But I'm his …” (17), thus refusing to let the daughter acknowledge her own motherhood. To Arlene's plan of Joey coming to live with her, the mother responds, “Fat chance” (17). Not only does she attempt to dash Arlene's dream, she claims that her daughter “never really got attached to [Joey] anyway” (17) and forecasts that she'd be an inadequate mother because “[k]ids need rules to go by an he'll get them over there [in his foster home]” (17), but not—she implies—from an ex-convict like Arlene.

In the later 'night, Mother, Jessie Cates, commenting on one of her own baby pictures, repeats Arlene's claim about infancy as an idyllic stage, but without adding any bitter revelations about child abuse. Jessie's infantile desire to be taken care of by an all-powerful (m)other provides insight into the failure of her relationship with her son, Ricky, who has progressed from stealing Jessie's possessions to “start[ing] in on other people, door to door” (11). If the mother-child relationship is crucial to a child's development, Jessie's own failure to mature may be central to Ricky's anti-social behavior. Admitting that she holds no hope of getting through to her son (25), Jessie refuses to join Mama in daydreams about Ricky getting a job, getting married, or “bring[ing] her grand-babies over” (74). But she does willingly own her influence on him: “I see it in his face. I hear it when he talks. We look out at the world and we see the same thing: Not Fair. And the only difference between us is Ricky's out there trying to get even. And he knows not to trust anybody and he got it straight from me. And he knows not to try to get work, and guess where he got that. He walks around like there's loose boards in the floor, and you know who laid that floor, I did” (60). Ultimately, Norman's parent-child relationships, like those of her predecessor, range from troubled to criminal in desire, if not in fact.

Each playwright also represents patriarchy, a hallmark of Southern culture, in the form of a controlling older brother. Hellman's Ben Hubbard cajoles, threatens, and dominates Regina in both Hubbard family dramas. In 'night, Mother, Jessie's brother, Dawson, never appears onstage, but it is he whose name is on their charge accounts, who knows the intimate details of their lives, and who manages their finances (53). Both dramatists also mention clothing to characterize certain aspects of the brother-sister relationships. To remind Ben that she is her father's favorite, Regina flaunts her expensive wardrobe. In 'night, Mother, Jessie cringes to remember that, when her mail-order bra was misdelivered to Dawson's house, he opened the package and “saw the little rosebuds on it” (24). To Jessie, his act seems that of an all-seeing patriarch, perhaps not unrelated to the ultimate patriarch, God the Father. Yet, unlike Ben, who asserts his control at the end of Another Part of the Forest, Dawson controls Jessie only until her final night, for the bullet she fires says “No” to Dawson as much as to life itself (75).

Finally, Hellman's influence is strikingly audible in the dialogue of 'night, Mother. In one instance, Jessie tells Mama that she might have decided to live “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). This line probably has its genesis in Hellman's first drama, The Children's Hour, in which Joe promises to take both Martha and his fiancée, Karen, to Vienna for “good coffee cake” (57). Martha, not long before she commits suicide, replies, “A big coffee cake with lots of raisins, it would be nice to like something again” (57).

A second echoic instance occurs when Thelma asserts ownership over her daughter, telling Jessie, “You are my child!” (76). Jessie responds: “I am what became of your child. I found an old baby picture of me. And it was somebody else, not me. It was somebody pink and fat who never heard of sick or lonely, somebody who cried and got fed, and reached up and got held and kicked but didn't hurt anybody, and slept whenever she wanted to, just by closing her eyes. Somebody who mainly just laid there and laughed at the colors waving around over her head and … felt your hand pulling my quilt back up over me” (76). Here Jessie speaks of the comfort and nourishment found in being loved. In Hellman's Toys in the Attic, Lily tells Albertine that early in her marriage to Julian, “I was beloved, Mama, and I flourished” (719). Later, when Lily asks where she would go should Julian cease to want her, Albertine replies, “You will come home to me. You are my child” (748, emphasis added). Norman's echo of the earlier Hellman play is obvious and, of course, Jessie comes home to Mama when Cecil no longer wants her. (Also obvious is the childishness of these women, found in Jessie's nostalgic desire to be taken care of and Lily's childish mentality.)

Jessie's sense of estrangement from her earlier infant-self may be the product of the overprotectiveness that led Thelma to such acts as concealing Jessie's epilepsy even from her (69) and wooing Cecil for Jessie because she thought her daughter should be married (57-58). Jessie's reference to the quilt, which can function for the infant as both a comfort and a restraint, emphasizes this possibility. Mama acknowledges that had Jessie not moved in with her after divorcing Cecil, the daughter would have “[h]ad a life to lead. Had [her] own things around [her]” (27). But Jessie does move in, leading to her experiencing herself as a split consciousness: an adult woman and mother of Ricky in her own right, yet a child again in her mother's house. Unable to reconcile the two, she now appears to long for the comfortable, preconscious life of the infant. On the other hand, in Getting Out, Arlene's unstable identity arises from experiencing too little mother love and from her mother's failure to protect her. Later in life, she attempts to ignore the schism within by renaming herself:

MOTHER:
So, you're calling yourself Arlene, now?
ARLENE:
Yes.
MOTHER:
Don't want your girlie name no more?
ARLENE:
Somethin like that.

(21)

Again, Hellman's work offers a possible key, this time to a character's inability to recognize or accept the self she has repressed. In The Children's Hour, just prior to committing suicide, Martha confesses to Karen, “I have loved you the way they said”⁴ (62). She then adds:

I don't know how. I don't know why. … maybe because I wanted you; maybe I wanted you all along; maybe I couldn't call it by a name; maybe it's been there ever since I first knew you—

it's all mixed up. There's something in you, and you don't know it and you don't do anything about it. Suddenly a child gets bored and lies—and there you are, seeing it for the first time. … I didn't even know.

(63)

Hurt, confused, unable to accept the lesbian self she only now begins to perceive, Martha shoots herself. Her choice of weapon leads back to Norman's Jessie, with a twist. Jessie claims she wants to die to preclude the possibility of losing the control that she feels she has achieved over her life. For the first time, her epilepsy is under control; she is “feeling as good as [she] ever felt in [her] life” (66). When Mama asks what is wrong with her, Jessie responds, “Not a thing. Feel fine”; she adds that she “[w]aited until [she] felt good enough, in fact” (14). Furthermore, when Mama protests that Jessie doesn't have to kill herself, Jessie illustrates her feeling of elation at gaining such self-determination by saying, “No, I don't. That's what I like about it” (27). Restrained in the past by her roles as dependent child and wife, and hampered by her illness, Jessie now exults in being able to decide what she will do, in controlling her own destiny. If she cannot change her life, cannot make it better, she can, she asserts, “stop it. Shut it down, turn it off like the radio when there's nothing on I want to listen to. It's all I really have that belongs to me and I'm going to say what happens to it. And it's going to stop. And I'm going to stop it” (36). Yet Jessie experiences a profound sense of dissociation from self, signaled in her speech about the picture of herself as an infant. Is the control she thinks she exercises a chimera? She is as alienated from herself as are the early Arlene in Getting Out and Hellman's Martha, and the character's response in each case, albeit symbolically in Arlene's slaying of Arlie, is death.

In suggesting that Hellman's memoirs, craft, and style influenced her more than did the elder playwright's dramatic subjects and characters, Norman overlooks the homage to Hellman evident in her own dramas. When one examines Norman's plot points, character relationships, and even her dialogue, it seems obvious that the Hellman dramas put into Norman's hands by her high school teachers impressed the fledgling playwright at least as much as did the memoirs. In a review of 'night, Mother, Robert Brustein comments that “in the way it exhumes buried family secrets, exposes the symbiotic links among parents and children, and alternates between bitter recriminations and expressions of love, 'night, Mother is a compressed, more economical version of A Long Day's Journey into Night” (67). Being male, Brustein might well think first of a male precursor, but one could easily substitute Hellman's dramas, particularly the Hubbard plays, for O'Neill's drama. For, as Showalter remarks in Sister's Choice:

Surely one element which unites us and which permeates our literature and our criticism is the yearning for community and continuity, for the bonds of even an unequal sisterhood. To a striking degree, American women writers have rejected the Oedipal metaphors of murderous “originality” set out as literary paradigms in Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence; the patricidal struggle defined by Bloom and exemplified in the careers of male American writers, has no matricidal equivalent, no echo of denial, parody, exile. Instead, Alice Walker proclaims, “each writer writes the missing parts to the other writer's story.”

(174)

Rather than the “anxiety of authorship” produced in earlier women writers by male precursors, an assurance of authenticity now arises when a woman writer finds her female precursor and thus her own place in the line of succession. In an article Norman identified as “a simple tribute to the power of her voice to carry down the dark road, the strength of the example she never meant to set, and the generosity she unwittingly showed to another girl, who, like Lillian Hellman, ‘stepped too early into solitude’” (“Lillian Hellman's Gift” H7), the younger woman acknowledges herself as in her precursor's debt. As she told Elizabeth Stone, Norman found her place in the theater thanks to Hellman and may now repay the debt as a precursor for today's twelve-year-old girl wishing to write for the theater, to whom she says, “There is a place for you in American theater. Now come get it!” (59).⁵

Notes

1. The Pool Hall is act 2 of Third and Oak. The acts have been published and performed separately, but Norman notes that she “prefer[s] that the two acts be seen together. Rather like the right foot following the left” (Third and Oak 60).

2. When questioned about Ruby's race at Methodist College's Twelfth Southern Writers' Symposium in March 1996, Norman replied that she had not “consciously” written Ruby as a black woman, but is “thrilled when [the role] is cast that way.” She added that Whoopi Goldberg once played Ruby. (I presented an earlier version of this paper at that conference.)

3. Yet another Hellman-to-Norman echo occurs in the names Albertine (Toys in the Attic) and Alberta (Third and Oak).

4. Hellman does not attribute Martha's lesbianism to inadequate mothering. She may have intuited that lesbianism, seen as sexual “inversion” in her era, had a genetic basis.

5. I thank Linda Rohrer Paige for suggesting that I look into the subjects of both surrogate daughters and the divided self, particularly as Martha represents that self in The Children's Hour.

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