Strangers Under The Same Roof: Mother-daughter Relationship And Its Formation In ’Night, Mother And The Glass Menagerie

The mother-daughter relationship is not only a concern of women playwrightsbut also a topic of male playwrights. This thesis chooses respective plays ofTennessee Williams and Marsha Norman as the object of research to analyze how themother-daughter relationship is dramatized.Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) is a representative American playwright withoutstanding achievements and great fame. Although being a male playwright, heshows great concern about women’s survival in contemporary society in his playssuch as The Glass Menagerie and A Street Car Named Desire. The previous one gotthe Award of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle in1945and the latter one won thePulitzer Prize for drama. Marsha Norman (1947-) is one of the most distinguishedfemale playwrights in America after the Second World War. She pays much attentionto female fate and the relationship between mothers and daughters in most of herplays such as Getting Out and’night, Mother, the latter one earning her the PulitzerPrize for drama in1983. Williams’ representative work The Glass Menagerie andNorman’s masterpiece’night, Mother lay the foundation of fame and achievementsfor these two playwrights in the literary field respectively. In both plays, the twoplaywrights portray women’s predicament in the contemporary society and present aconflicting, abnormal and negative relationship between mothers and daughters.This thesis aims to explore the mother-daughter relationship and its formationwith a close reading of these two plays on the basis of striking similarities of thefemale characters in their family relationship and life experiences. To better interpretThe Glass Menagerie and’night, Mother, this thesis adopts psychoanalytic feministtheories of Nancy Chodorow and Nancy Friday as the theoretical basis. Friday’stheory on three stages of the mother-daughter relationship and Chodorow’sobject-relations theory are both instrumental in the analysis of the mother-daughterrelationship and its formation in the two plays.In addition to introduction and conclusion, this thesis consists of three chapters. The introductory part introduces the background information of Williams andNorman and their representative plays. In addition, it also introduces current researchon The Glass Menagerie and’night, Mother both at home and abroad. The theoreticalsupport is introduced in this part as well.Chapter One elaborates the mother-daughter relationship in both plays andanalyzes the reason of its formation by adopting the object-relations theory ofChodorow and Friday’s theory on the development of the mother-daughterrelationship. Both mothers tend to consider their daughters as the extension ofthemselves in the two plays. The conflict between their manipulative love anddaughter’s pursuit of self and separation further deepens the breach in themother-daughter relationship. Furthermore, the inversion of roles between mothersand daughters in both plays results in the absence of maternal nourishment.Eventually, they become intimate strangers to each other.Chapter two dwells upon social elements in the formation of the mother-daughterrelationship. As social individuals, it is inevitable that their existence andinterpersonal relationships are influenced by social elements. The social elementsanalyzed in this thesis are mainly divided into three aspects: the enclosure in apatriarchal context, the yoke of Southern culture as well as the prescribed image as“Southern lady”. Through detailed textual analysis, this thesis discusses the effects ofthese social elements on the shaping of the abnormal and conflicting mother-daughterrelationship.Chapter three mainly discusses the influence of male family members on themother-daughter relationship and its formation. This chapter interprets male familymembers’ negative function and their inaction in the mother-daughter relationship. Ithappens that the two families share similar structures which have an absent father, anirresponsible husband and an onlooker brother.The concluding part gives a summary of the above textual analysis. On the basisof psychoanalytic feminist theories, especially Chodorow’s and Friday’s, this thesisdraws a conclusion that Tennessee Williams and Marsha Norman portray a certainkind of mother-daughter relationship in the patriarchal context which is unhealthy, negative, and conflicting. Mothers and daughters are more like intimate strangers thanclosest friends as they are expected to be. With the analysis of the relationshipbetween mothers and daughters in The Glass Menagerie and’night, Mother, thisthesis highlights both dramatists’ concern of women’s predicament and healthyrelationship between women. Furthermore, indebted to Chodorow’s theory, this thesisargues that co-parenting and men’s participation in mothering should be advocated forthe benefit of children’s healthy growth.