MAY:
Mother, this is not enough. […]
MOTHER:
Will you never have done … revolving it all?

(Beckett's Footfalls)¹

It has been over a decade since Marsha Norman's play 'night, Mother was first produced (1981) and shortly after won the Pulitzer Prize (1983). During those years, feminist critics have both praised it and attacked it as a discourse on the condition of women in (post)modern society, disagreeing among themselves on whether to applaud the play's positive virtues of presenting female entrapment in a male-centered ideology or to condemn the play's defeatist resolution of suicide in the face of that entrapment. Beyond this character-based debate has arisen the equally heavily debated, more general criticism that female/feminist playwrights who utilize the realist format are implicitly permitting the feminist message to be subordinated to a restrictively dominating, male-constructed mode of presentation. While some critics challenge this position and defend Norman against the charge, others have virtually dismissed her precisely because of her format choices.

Critics outside the feminist dialectic similarly have both lauded the play and condemned it, on a point that in several ways relates to the above. The central issue here involves the concept of universality. Stanley Kauffmann, for example, observed in his 1983 article/review “More Trick than Tragedy”:

If the hoopla about Marsha Norman's new play were credible, the current state of American drama would be better than it is. … Because the play has only two characters, is in one long act, and ends with a death, some commentators have called it classical and have invoked Aristotle. I envy their rapture; the play itself keeps me from sharing it.²

Invoking Aristotelian criteria in an effort to accord the play universal status, critics seem forever to seek safe, secure traditions in their efforts to “understand” new works of art. Though Kauffmann may or may not have a valid justification for disliking the play, he is certainly justified here in questioning other critics' invocations of Aristotle. The play's formal allegiance to Aristotelian principles, even regular assertions of the play's cathartic results, appear little more than well-intentioned, though misdirected, Procrustean efforts to find a “place” for 'night, Mother in the American dramatic canon.

Indeed, in all of the above cases, the question of canonicity seems to be central. Does 'night, Mother rise to a universal level sufficiently to grant it canon status? Which canon? Should the play qualify to enter into a new and growing feminist canon, especially given the concern that it betrays feminism by presenting defeated women and by using an ideologically repressive form of expression—realism? What is this universality we are seeking? Is it gender-specific, and if so, are mother-daughter relationships less “universal” (less consequential, somehow) than the father-son relationships that dominate the canon?

Jill Dolan³ has traced the efforts of the male-dominated American theatre industry to find reason to include the play in its canon. She accurately illustrates that in that effort the industry has found ways to see the play as essentially unthreatening to it or its ideology. It has found ways to disarm any potential feminist message and as a result has granted Marsha Norman “token” status by allowing her to be considered a good but—by its standards—not a great playwright. Dolan's cataloguing and analysis of myriad male reviews of the play impressively support her case, demonstrating how Norman has been neutralized, made safe to enter the male-dominated canon. In fact, the play's vulnerability to co-option by the dominant power structure is a primary reason Dolan rejects the play as possibly feminist, concluding that “Norman's play can be considered for canonical membership because Norman is still writing for male spectators under the guise of universality” (39).

Jeanie Forte⁴ has crystallized the more general concern that any play that adopts a realist format, such as Norman's has, cannot be genuinely feminist, observing that “classic realism, always a reinscription of the dominant order, could not be useful for feminists interested in the subversion of a patriarchal social structure” (116). However, because realist plays like 'night, Mother at least find an audience, whereas alternative women's texts rarely do, Forte concedes that at least “'night, Mother may be perceived as a feminist text, in that it challenges on some material level the reality of male power” (123).

While both Dolan and Forte accept that the play in part presents a challenge to the reality of male power, neither can accept Jessie's suicide as a viable challenge to that power. And rightly so, for the “heroic” gesture of defiance appears so obviously defeatist. In fact, this ultimate message of defeat that troubles Dolan and Forte is what they see as central to the male gaze's reassuring sense of comfort in the play—after all, if female defiance leads simply to female eradication, then the challenge is not really threatening to social order.

The fact of Jessie's suicide is just that—a fact—and the attendant response of it signifying defeat is unavoidable. So, too, is the fact that Norman utilizes realism, a form that signals suspicions of submission to a dominant hierarchy. Both facts, in turn, lead to the documented fact that male critics are reassured that the play's message is not rebelliously threatening. Though I don't pretend to have a resolution to the ambivalent—at best—feelings that many have toward the play, I would like to suggest a more benign reason why male critics could ascribe universal status and canon consideration for the play. It need not be a cowardly bow to pressure to include at least one woman among its pantheon or to consider Norman for such selection because she's “safe.” Though no critic (male or female) to date has hit on this point, I would like to suggest that it is possible to see the play as “universal” because it has universal relevance that transcends gender-specific considerations even as it speaks to gender-specific issues. In fact, the question of canonicity (and of which canon) is not a central concern of mine. I would simply like to suggest that Norman's play presents a heretofore unseen, legitimate challenge to dominant hierarchy. I leave for others to decide what canon criteria 'night, Mother might meet as a result of this alternate perspective.

The first point is that Norman's use of realism does not have to be seen as ideologically predicated but can be seen rather as a theatrical expedient. As Dolan and Forte admit, produce a realist play and audiences will come. Norman's strategy here is not all that different from, say, a contemporary like David Mamet's when he argues, “This is the way we perceive a play: with a clear beginning, a middle, and an end. So when one wants to best utilize the theatre, one would try to structure a play in a way that is congruent with the way the mind perceives it.”⁵ Note that for Mamet this is the way we perceive a play and not necessarily the way we must perceive reality, though admittedly the threat of confusion/conflation exists. For Mamet, however, the choices of creating a well-made play and using a realist format are clearly choices of artifice more than reflections of actual order.⁶ While other choices, even for Mamet, may better reflect alternate visions of order/reality that a playwright may want to present, Forte herself asks when speaking of Adrienne Kennedy, “does the text implicate classic realist structure in the workings of an oppressive culture, by frustrating the audience's expectations vis-à-vis narrative?” (121). Kennedy's works frustrate narrative expectations and avoid realist practices, but is she successful at undermining these elements and their ideology by ignoring them? It may in fact be beneficial to start with the structure that one is attacking, providing a clear object to assault. Though Kennedy may in fact offer such an object in her work through other means, one pragmatic benefit derived from employing the realist form itself in this task is the one Mamet makes: without a realist frame, production is less likely, and without production/transmission, no message of any sort exists. This latter issue of “producibility” is the problem that, Forte concedes, exists in the case of Kennedy, and that presumably would exist in the cases of Norman and Mamet as well, had they not chosen to activate at least the artifice that is well-made realism.

The obvious question that follows here is how we can distinguish realism as artifice from the identical-looking classical realism and its attendant ideology of dominant order reinscription. In the case of Norman, as well as in the case of many playwrights who appear to have selected realism as artifice (Rabe, Mamet, and Shepard are among this list), most observers have not noted the difference, primarily because the indicators are not easy to locate. And in every case where this confusion occurs, problems have arisen concerning the “quality” of the playwright involved. Because for each playwright the indicators assume a variety of unique manifestations, it is difficult to articulate a “formula” for identification, and a case-by-case examination is generally necessary to reveal the manifestations that take on the critical appearance of dramatic flaws from a traditionalist's/classicist's perspective but that are in fact deconstructive signals from this new perspective. With this matter of perspective in mind, it is critical to re-examine Norman's work.

I quote brief lines above from Samuel Beckett's Footfalls to suggest several points that may loosen the soil in which the seeds of 'night, Mother criticism have been sown. Footfalls involves a failed mother/daughter relationship and a totally despairing daughter in virtually every manner that 'night, Mother does. The only “plot” deviation—an admittedly significant one—lies in the fact that the despairing daughter, May, continues her pacing and doesn't commit suicide as Jessie does. But May doesn't do anything else, either, certainly nothing positive or productive. It is clear, though, that the pair of women in Footfalls is similar to the pair in 'night, Mother, the daughters in each pair desiring but not finding means of personal redemption, the mothers choosing to avoid despair by accepting much less out of life. Beckett's play, however, is generally studied from an “existential” perspective with little commentary on how materialist social conditions lead to the women's situations, while 'night, Mother seems to be exclusively confronted by critics with little more than social considerations in mind at all.

There are several possible reasons for the focus on social conditions in 'night, Mother. Norman does not have the “absurdist/existential” reputation that Beckett does. Her socially defined, “real” milieu does not readily encourage intellectual abstraction in the way that Beckett's non-realistic, theatrical presentation does. Further, Norman is a woman, so one seems “naturally” to assume, as so many critics have verified, that she's probably writing about real women, while Beckett may be assumed to be writing about archetypes.

Is it possible to see Norman with the same (or similar) critical eyes that we see Beckett? Does use of realism require us to assume the play is planted in a social context, reacting only on a social plane? Can we look at the set of 'night, Mother (with its white-light intensity) in the same abstracted way that we look at the set of, say, Waiting for Godot? As Norman's stage directions indicate, and as Dolan confirms, Norman clearly intended the play to have a non-specified locale, reflecting neither regional nor particular economic limitations for the women (25). Dolan, however, summarizes the unfortunate fact that set design decisions and actor selection ignored Norman's wishes (on Broadway, the arbiter of decisions for subsequent productions) and chose to reflect regionally limited, economically restricted conditions (27). In these matters, however, we are speaking of productions rather than of the play; if we hold to Norman's prescriptions, we move one major step away from “kitchen drama” and perhaps one step toward Beckettian drama. Can there be such a thing as a post-Beckettian realism, a realism that is anti-realism, either in the sense of anti-“classic realism,” to use Forte's chosen term, or perhaps even in the sense of anti-“naturalism,” a specific permutation of this “classic realism”?

Dolan excerpts a particularly telling passage from a Gussow review which observes that Norman's “dark view of life comes not from a Samuel Beckett, but from an affable, determined and petite [emphasis Dolan's] young woman who looks more like a graduate student than a serious playwright wrestling with profound emotions” (qtd. in Dolan 38). Dolan rightly attacks Gussow for his sexist assessment of Norman's art based on her physical appearance (a strategy rarely applied to male playwrights), but Gussow's reductive assessment of Norman based on appearance may additionally be little more than a reflection of an even larger strata of viewers' reductive assessments of 'night, Mother, assessments based on its “domestic,” petite (e.g., “realist”) appearances rather than on what occurs beneath its surface. Further, while Gussow is of course literally accurate in stating that the play is not authored by Beckett, a Beckettian strain is clearly evident, and clearly evident once we look past the theatrical expedient of clothing the play in realist trappings. The final point, of course, almost needn't even be made: women, even affable, petite women, have minds capable of profound thoughts that transcend “kitchen” concerns. The simple, common-sense truth of this assertion needs no further explanation.

My suggestion here is that we strive to move beyond the traditional/classical visions of realism as reserved for social philosophy and social commentary, that we slip out of standard visions of what realism typically does and look at what (post-Beckettian) realism has actually done in this case. If, for Forte, realism is an obstruction to her appreciation of the play, for me her sense of it being an obstruction is itself the obstruction, for it restricts our vision into the heart of the play. Forte, of course, is not alone; in this matter, it seems, many opposing positions join in implicit agreement. I nonetheless accept the choice—even compromise—Norman made in order to get her play an audience. It is an expedient that Beckett, growing out of a European rather than American tradition, was not forced to submit to, at least not to the degree to which Americans have been forced.

This type of anti-realist realism responds to the several assumptions about the form itself that we have been discussing. While the assumptions are part of the specifically patriarchal/feminist discussion above, the discussion takes another fruitful direction when it moves into the domain of epistemology rather than sociology. Here the central assumption concludes that in order to write realist drama, one must utilize naturalist-based precepts of logical and psychological consistency, a rationalist progression that denies alternatives, insisting on singular, inevitable results and accepting a masculinized interpretation of “reality” as linearly explicable. This naturalist assumption is part of a larger frame that assumes existence itself is causally ordered and that the foundations of human knowledge itself must be causally predicated.

'night, Mother is essentially a realist play that challenges realist assumptions, that is, naturalist or “classic realist” assumptions. In fact, these assumptions find their general roots not so much in Zola as they do in Aristotelian philosophy and aesthetics itself. They are assumptions that have anchored Western dramatic and even most Western philosophical traditions for centuries. 'night, Mother's direct challenge to this causal system takes the form of a dialectic between the two generations of women in the play, the conservative, classically-minded mother, Thelma, and the “new”-thinking daughter, Jessie. Throughout the play's clash of generations, Norman argues not merely feminist stances invested in social critique but also broader philosophical conceptions that combine to create a debate on the nature of perception itself. If we look at the play as we look at a work by Beckett, that is, from a metaphysical perspective that takes into account issues of ontology and epistemology, then the play takes a whole new direction than previously assumed.

Norman's challenge to Aristotelian/classical visions of order parallels the contrasts Natalie Crohn Schmitt⁷ delineates when she sees Aristotelian order being replaced by the visions of John Cage in postmodern theatre. Shifting from Aristotle's biological model of nature, Cage has adopted a vision of nature based on twentieth-century physics. In place of causality and teleology, Cage sees the world structured by chance, indeterminacy, and ultimate, random purposelessness. Unity and order are replaced by unimpededness and interpenetration. Aristotle's strict, undeniably predictable vision of action and reaction (as well as Newton's classic physical model and the naturalist's co-option of both Aristotle and Newton) is vastly loosened into a Cagean/new-physical vision of an unpredictable indeterminacy that can at best secure a sense of “probable” behavior. 'night, Mother engages in a debate that pits the Aristotelian biological (and Newtonian physical) metaphor for human behavior against a postmodern, Cagean quantum physics metaphor.⁸

It is at this epistemological and ontological level that 'night, Mother operates at its most radical. It challenges the dominating, patriarchally inspired order at what has become its most vulnerable point, its epistemological roots. 'night, Mother essentially pits two positions on perception against each other, and a new order espoused by Jessie wins out in the play despite the urgings of an old, naturalist-based creed that Thelma adheres to and that has convinced some among its audiences but not Jessie herself. Thelma speaks from the old grounding of naturalist order, a classical perspective insisting—in Aristotelian/Newtonian terms—that every action provokes an equal and opposite reaction and is itself a reaction to prior action, or more specifically—according to Darwinian social scientists—that every human action can be traced to an environmental or genetic source/cause. Jessie, on the other hand, speaks from a position that challenges these pervasive concepts of predestination. Unwittingly challenging classical scientific assumptions of inevitably deducible, ordered action, Jessie has inadvertently become a proponent of the “new-science” vision of reality as revealed in quantum physics, which is itself a challenge to the classical, Aristotelian-derived order that is the source of naturalism, or “classic realism.”

As a metaphor, the world of quantum physics informs us of Jessie's own world view (and perhaps Norman's) in that scientific certainty (the goal of classical science and its artistic cousin, naturalism) is no longer possible, or is at best a mutually agreed upon monolithic fiction. Quantum mechanics insists that the most one can predict about existence is the probability of an event unfolding in a predictable, singular manner. So while the likely results of events can be reduced to a realm of probable results with relative confidence, there is no concrete, objective way to determine/presume particular actuality, as classical science previously aimed at doing. The best one can do is to see that, within certain parameters of probability, an agent is free to complete an event in any number of ways, a concept quantum physicists call “the uncertainty principle.” In contrast to naturalism, which follows the lead of classical science, the new science would insist that the certainties once posited by naturalism inaccurately reflect reality. The extent that 'night, Mother actually presents this new vision is the extent to which it (1) undermines the very ideological tenets of “classic” realism and (2) undermines the foundations of dominant, patriarchal order itself.

Following Jessie's action reveals the process described by this new vision of reality. The given set of parameters, as tightly drawn as humanly (scientifically) possible under this new formula of human understanding, would allow her the latitude to choose to live or die. Either choice could be calculated to be a probable choice. There is no inevitability, no determining factor that permits us to guarantee either outcome. Accepting suicide as one among several possible/probable choices seems the central issue of the play, at least on the level of metaphysical dialectic. Marsha Norman herself noted that the point of the play was not that Jessie “chooses to die” but that “she chooses to die.”⁹ According to the new science, and according to Jessie herself, freedom exists within a generally determined (and determinable) set of probable options.

The play's action reveals the above abstracted dialectic between old and new perception in the form of Thelma's struggle to convince Jessie not to commit suicide, continually asking “why” and finding arguments/reasons designed to instill hope in the future into her daughter. The daughter counters each argument, insisting that there is no single reason/cause for her decision, observing that she's just lost hope in the future. She's finally decided that after a lifetime of being told what to do (and doing it badly), the one action she can do without outside influence/interference is to commit suicide. The choice is made, but even after Jessie's continued explanation, it is a choice that still lacks a good “causal” justification from Thelma's perspective.

If, as naturalism argues, all human beings are products of their genes and their environment, then Thelma would be right in continually demanding reasons for Jessie's choice. In that linear perspective of existence, there must be a reason, or else Jessie is just insane. The list of possible causes is indeed lengthy. Jessie is an epileptic, though the attacks haven't occurred for some time now, and many of her personal failings stem from this often debilitating ailment. However, Jessie denies that epilepsy is a cause of her decision. She in fact insists that she's planned on this night exactly because she's been unafflicted for a good period of time. Her marriage has failed, and her son is a delinquent, but she says she's made private peace with these demons. Her life with mom is unproductive, a tedious routine, but she refuses to blame her mother or this “entrapped” lifestyle. She is tired of her brother and sister-in-law's invasion of her privacy, but that's not cause enough to die. She's even tired of events in Red China, yet one more level over which she has no control, but it's not enough for her to end her life over. Dolan has pointed out another of the critics' “reasons” for Jessie's suicide: Kathy Bates, the actress playing Jessie, is overweight, and that attribute has been added to Jessie's list of reasons despite the fact that weight plays no part in the text of the play (30). Jessie blames no event and no agent in her choice, insisting it's her free decision simply to stop the bus that is her life and get off.

Thelma, on the other hand, insists at different points that every one of the above factors is a cause, or even the cause for Jessie's decision. For many who don't accept that Jessie is making a free choice, Thelma's position is convincing. Each clue in the play is for them a reason.

Ironically, as critics attack naturalist dogma, many of them continue to judge from exactly the perspective they condemn. It is not possible that Norman is actually highlighting naturalist arguments not for us to accept them but in order to reveal their weaknesses/flaws? To give the debate credibility, Norman, of course, needed to present as strong a counter-case as possible: Thelma is indeed a strong opposition voice to Jessie's insistences. But either Thelma has grown in production and on paper as a too strong voice or audiences have chosen to side with Thelma as a result of empathy with her world view. If, as I believe, the latter matter of choosing to be naturalists is what we see in audiences and among critics, then it is the spectators—and Thelma—not Norman, who are entrapped by a safe naturalist creed and unwilling to consider new options. So those who attack the play are registering a predisposition to accept a creed called into question by contemporary science itself when they don't realize or can't accept that Jessie's decision could be free and unpreprogrammed. Several critics have even followed a direct line of naturalist “reasoning,” in the purest form, when they choose to look back and see Jessie's escapism as a result of her being of her father's seed, a man who “went fishing” every opportunity he had. But that is clearly not the line of reasoning Norman wishes us to follow, though we are apparently free to do so.

If the above reading/viewing of 'night, Mother succeeds at demonstrating Norman's serious challenge to dominant hierarchical thought, it does not resolve the concern that Jessie's suicide presents a negative—and unacceptable—resolution to the confrontation with dominant order that she has undertaken. Wishing for a sort of Hegelian resolution/synthesis to the above-described dialectic confrontation, critics obviously see the actual results as unsatisfactory.

There is, however, another way to view the play's outcome. What Norman has presented is not an Hegelian dialectic treatise but an Adornian negative dialectic resolution, a conclusion that presents Adorno's “principle of nonidentity” as solidly as Adrienne Kennedy's The Owl Answers satisfactorily presents it for Forte. In contrast to her conclusion about 'night, Mother, Forte applauds Kennedy's non-narrative, anti-realist choices in The Owl Answers and even the matter of non-identity it presents. Norman presents a similar conclusion in this ultimately anti-utopian play, a conclusion of current failure that possibly paves the way for a utopian future. As Susan Buck-Morss observes, “[W]hereas Hegel saw negativity … as merely a moment in a larger process toward systematic completion, Adorno saw no possibility of an argument coming to rest in unequivocal synthesis.”¹⁰ Neither, apparently, does Jessie. What she wants, quite plainly, is a reality that does not exist and that very likely will not find dialectic resolution/synthesis in her lifetime, if resolution is even possible. Along with Jessie—and Norman as well—we see Adorno confess the obvious, that as Buck-Morss observes, “the utopian future could not be affirmatively defined” (89); however, Buck-Morss further observes that, according to Adorno, “the cognitive process which served that future could be” (90). Though her defeat is the result of a negative dialectical process that fails to present a prescriptive vision of the future, Jessie has served the future by presenting a cognitive process that will itself serve the future. Her death has not, ultimately, been a defeat.

My viewing of the play, I admit, was not a cathartic experience, as many women claimed it was for them. Perhaps the distance I took in arriving at the above conclusions is symptomatic of what Jenny Spencer¹¹ has identified as a matter of gender-specific reception: men see the play differently from women. But I think that the perspective I'm suggesting at least in part explains why Norman's play can be well received by either gender. At different levels Norman's play confronts dominant institutions in ways that engage a number of perspectives.

What Norman has presented in this play has been validly viewed as a social drama. From this perspective, the feminist assault on the play as at least in part reinscribing dominant ideologies seems justified. On the other hand, if we move away from the social level and see the play utilizing a post-Beckettian realism that suggests a new scientific metaphor, then 'night, Mother offers its audience something quite different, an argument that subtly (a fact that may not please all) but clearly attacks dominant order and in the process asserts that it is ultimately unjustified to assault realism as a form that, without exception, embraces an inevitable, linearly naturalist dogma—either positively or negatively asserted.

In 'night, Mother, Norman has commissioned the realist form to present perhaps the most radical vision of experience in human history, one that denies understanding as centuries of inquiry have striven to formulate and perfect it. This assault seems exactly the kind of approach feminist thinkers are looking for. Other critics as well, those who attack realism as an outmoded form presenting outmoded thought, should likewise reconsider 'night, Mother. Perhaps work such as Norman's, suggesting a new foundation of understanding, may help us to create a yardstick (a feminist yardstick as well as others) whose assumptions are, finally, truly relevant to our age.

Notes

1. Samuel Beckett, Footfalls, in Ends and Odds. Nine Dramatic Pieces (New York, 1976), 45, 48.

2. Stanley Kauffmann, “More Trick than Tragedy,” Saturday Review (Sept./Oct. 1983), 47-48.

3. All quotations by Jill Dolan are from her work, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor, 1988). Page references will be cited in the text.

4. All quotations by Jeanie Forte are from her work, “Realism Narrative, and the Feminist Playwright,” Modern Drama, 32 (1989), 115-27. Page references will be cited in the text.

5. Matthew C. Roudané, “An Interview with David Mamet,” Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present, 1 (1986), 77.

6. In Beyond Naturalism: A New Realism in American Theatre (Westport, CT, 1988), I have previously argued that Mamet, Norman and others have used realism in the manner just described, using the form in fact to overturn the assumptions commonly attributed to it.

7. See Natalie Crohn Schmitt, Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature (Evanston, IL, 1990), 5-37.

8. For a readable though challenging layman's explication of quantum mechanics, see J. C. Polkinghorne, The Quantum World (Princeton, 1985). Using Polkinghorne as a reference, I have suggested ways in which new science and postmodern drama collide in “Of Sciences and the Arts: From Influence to Interplay between Natural Philosophy and Drama,” Studies in the Literary Imagination, 24 (1991), 75-89. Of particular note in this field is David E. R. George's “Quantum Theatre—Potential Theatre: A New Paradigm?” New Theatre Quarterly, 18 (1989), 171-80.

9. See Elizabeth Stone, “Playwright Marsha Norman: An Optimist Writes about Suicide, Confinement and Despair,” Ms. (July 1983), 58.

10. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York, 1977), 63. Page references are hereafter cited in the text. I thank William Ryder, whose yet-unpublished applications of Adorno to the works of Pinter inspired my thoughts on Norman.

11. See Jenny S. Spencer, “Norman's 'night, Mother: Psycho-drama of Female Identity,” Modern Drama, 30 (1987), 364-75.