| Drama, like all other literary genres, is in a constant state of flux, forever working to reflect human conditions in a certain cultural milieu, which finds a convincing proof in the development of the American drama. A retrospective look at the first two decades of the twentieth century finds that, while male playwrights claimed the strongest presence on the center American stage, their female counterparts remained marginalized or even invisible. However, since the 1930s, coinciding with the changing and enhancing roles of women in society, women playwrights have become a contributive and vital voice in the American theatre with an extraordinary production of works which signifies a new thrust in the dramatic world. The second wave of feminism in the 1960s sparked a more spectacular emergence of women playwrights. Their literary creations foreground their female experiences and extend their special concern to the reality of female existence. Among them, Lillian Hellman and Marsha Norman are two remarkable representatives who have invigorated and influenced the American stage with their classic creations in which women are the main characters. Noticeably, in both her articles and interviews, Norman acknowledges her indebtedness to Hellman and regards her as a precursor.Lillian Hellman is widely claimed as one of the leading playwrights in the first half of the twentieth century. Being the first woman playwright that is admitted to the previously all-male space of the canon of American dramatic literature, Hellman keeps producing respected plays in a span covering three decades from the 1930s to the 1960s and she is best known for The Little Foxes staged in 1939. Although Hellman's generation writes for a theatre where feminism is not yet a common currency, it is evident that the issues concerning women's pursuit of power and gender equality keeps appearing in her works. Marsha Norman won the Pulitzer Prize for 'night, Mother in 1983, almost half a century later than Hellman produced The Little Foxes. Norman adheres to Hellman's realistic mode of dramatic writing and expresses the same deep feminist concerns; what's more, Norman evolves Hellman's feminist ideas.This dissertation, with the theoretical support of materialist feminism and psychoanalytic feminism, aims to make a comparative analysis of the original plays written by Lillian Helhnan and Marsha Norman, so as to explore women's existential state in the moral, physical and psychological spaces and its impact on the formation of the women's identity, and to trace further the evolution of the female identity embodied in the plays.The dissertation is composed of five parts. The introduction clarifies the origin, significance, and analytical approaches of the study, provides the necessary background information on the two playwrights, and makes a review of the scholarly research that has already been conducted on them both abroad and at home. This part also justifies the compatibility of realism and feminism, which serves as a groundwork for the ensuing discussion.The first chapter focuses on the presentation of women's inferior status in the moral space by analyzing The Children's Hour by Hellman and Getting Out by Norman. The Children's Hour chronicles the moral turmoil of two women teachers due to a child's lie that they are lesbians. In it, Helhnan reveals the hidden assumptions of people about unmarried women who seek independent careers. As is shown in the play, the lie fabricated by a child confirms people's suspicion of the "unnatural relationship" between the two teachers, and the astounding rapidity with which the slander is spread indicates the force of prejudice against professional women. The two women teachers end up being convicted by the patriarchal law. Thus, one of Helhnan's recurrent themes is manifest in her first play: society definitely has no place for those women who dare to deviate from conformity to social expectations. In fact, the two women's guilt lies not in their lesbian relationship, but in their refusal to accept the traditional role designated by the paternal society. Their action of starting their own school and claiming autonomy is itself a menace to the established social order and security. Particularly, Lillian Helhnan dramatizes in the play the cyclic regeneration of the women defenders of the patriarchal prescriptions who turn out to be the major force in the persecution. There exists no chance for the women teachers to struggle out of the web of slander. Hence, the last act of the play witnesses the bankruptcy of the school, the suicide of one character and the collapse of the other.Similarly, Marsha Norman commits herself to the moral issues in her debut, Getting Out. The play depicts the dilemma of a young woman named Arlene Holsclaw, who is legally convicted and morally condemned by the social norm. Norman, by employing the split-self technique, presents the adult Arlene and her teenager self Arlie simultaneously on the stage in order to look retrospectively at the girl's passage to adulthood and investigate the factors that lead the girl to prostitution, forgery and then murder. Norman exposes the consistent and cooperative parts that the seemingly moral institutions of society, like family, school and prison, have played in the girl's degeneration. Also, she lays bare the negative impacts these institutions exert on the girl even after she is released from prison. Being an ex-convict, Arlene is denied the freedom to make free choices. What she can choose is either to live an undignified life as a prostitute or a difficult and humble existence as a dishwasher. But different from Hellman's characters who withdraw from the grim reality, Arlene, with a strong desire to start a new and decent life, seems to have found ways out of her moral confusion. She has therefore gained the strength to establish a new identity as an independent, autonomous being.The second chapter features an in-depth analysis of the playwrights' exposure of women's entrapment in the physical space. Hellman's The Little Foxes and Norman's 'night, Mother best illustrate women's confinement in the domestic context of family. In their plays, circumstances set women up as the victims of their own sexuality. The Little Foxes presents the avaricious Hubbard family as a cage and the women in it as encaged birds. Here, Hellman attributes women's subordinate position in the domestic sphere to their economic powerlessness. The Hubbard women, with no access to money, hence no independent identity, are traded via marriage by the male members of the family to satisfy their own selfish purpose of acquiring more wealth and power. Hellman shows that the stifled Hubbard women bear the same longing to escape. When their effort to escape ends in failure, they swerve from reality by retreating to fantasy or nostalgia for the past, burying themselves either in religion or in alcohol. Regina, one of the most formidable women figures in American drama, dreams all her life of fleeing her family and the uncultured South for Chicago. Regina knows well that, to fulfill her dream, she needs first of all to have money, so she determines to defeat her brothers and garner the lion's share in the family business at any cost, even the life of her husband and the trust of her daughter. The history of the Hubbard family reveals that the impulse behind Regina's money hunger is precisely her own belief in the inferiority of her social position. A seeming victor, Regina is actually a victim of patriarchal values, ending up in fear and loneliness when the curtain falls.Norman, likewise, expresses her concern for women's physical circumscription, which finds its best expressions in her masterpiece, 'night, Mother. Jessie Cates, the protagonist, is an inherited victim of her father's epilepsy. Jessie's bodily defect has deprived her of any job opportunities and her contact with the outside world; therefore, she is confined completely to the limited and solitary domestic sphere. In the play, Norman foregrounds the smothery familial relationships, especially that between the mother and the daughter, which exerts great negative pressure on the formation of Jessie's independent self. Jessie can by no means control her own life course due to her epilepsy and her mother's domination. Expecting no hope or change in her restricted life, Jessie finally decides to claim herself master of her own life by resorting to suicide, which enables her to triumph over the external forces that attempt to control her. Norman asserts that the play is not a study of suicide, but of a search for autonomy and free choice. The play highlights that one owns the right to control one's life even to the point of suicide.The last chapter dwells on the playwrights' revelation of the psychological malaise of the women characters who are posited in restrictive social and familial circumstances. The characters in Hellman's Toys in the Attic and Norman's The Laundromat share a lot in common: they stick to their connection with men and thus establish their dependent identity. This submissive position inevitably leads to their strong sense of psychological loss. The women characters in Toys in the Attic willingly sacrifice their personal needs to satisfy the demands of Julian, the only male in the family, taking the happiness of this man as the exclusive purpose of their lives. They exist with no other identity than being "Julian's sister" or "Julian's wife". In order to maintain their connection with Julian, they keep him financially and emotionally dependent on them. With Julian's claiming economic independence, the women sense great loss and peril. To reinstate the original familial pattern and regain the sole meaning of their existence, they even unite to smash Julian's plan of making a fortune and make him as penniless as before. What Hellman intends to demonstrate here is that the root of the women's destructive love lies in the patriarchal familial dynamics, in which men are the center pillar, while women are marginalized and have to cling to men for existence and survival.Impressively, Norman also investigates women's deformed psychology in her play The Laundromat, in which she unfolds an intersection of two strangers. One midnight, in the traditionally female location of a laundromat, the intense need to have an audience to share their confusion soon leads to an authentic conversation and it turns out to be of vital importance in their respective lives. Beyond the big difference in class, age and temperament, the conversation reveals that these two women share the same sense of loss and disappointment. The younger woman is uncovered to have lived in agony and self-denial, due to the domination of a critical mother and the infidelity of an unfaithful husband; the elder one is known to have lived in distress and self-deception, unable to face the fact that her husband is already dead. To help the other recuperate from her loss and trauma, the two women take the roles of being "mother" to each other. The newly established connection enables them to gain the rapport and recognition that they have always been longing for. When they leave the laundromat and say good-bye to each other, they are women with higher self-esteem and a better knowledge of self. In this play, Norman stresses the functions that the female community plays in the regain of psychological wholeness and in the construction of an independent identity in her characters.The concluding part summarizes the findings of the study. With an informed reading and a comparative assessment of the original plays written by Lillian Hellman and Marsha Norman, this dissertation comes to the conclusion that: Marsha Norman not only inherits from Lillian Hellman her realistic mode and feminist concern, but also develops a much freer and more optimistic feminist expression, especially in the presentation of female identity.Both Hellman and Norman have probed women's entrapment and transcend in their plays the plight of individual female to the general female condition in the twentieth-century American society. By demonstrating women's social inferiority, physical confinement and psychological loss, they drive home women's identity in a society which declares the characteristics of men as the norm. While Hellman explores women's inferior status and their existential dilemma, she fails to come up with any active solutions for her women characters to their problems. In her plays, the women characters yield to moral attack, retreat to the confined isolation, and resort to fantasy or self-deception for survival. They are presented either with no sense of self or with fragmented identity. In contrast, Marsha Norman endows her women characters with stronger desire for autonomy and a better knowledge of self. Her women characters are more determined to fight against social prejudice, to break free of physical limitations, even in a self-destructive way. They actively seek a way to exercise control over their own destinies and to exert their influence on those around them. Very often, with rapport and encouragement from the female community, they succeed in establishing an independent identity.This dissertation, by examining the creations of Lillian Hellman and Marsha Norman within the history of the American theatre, hopes to bring to light the considerable contributions made by these two playwrights to the vibrant American dramatic world. The inheritance and evolution embodied in their plays indisputably record and reflect the continuous growth of the American feminist drama.
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