On The Inter-subjectivity Of Mother-daughter Relationship In 'Night,Mother

Marsha Norman,as one of the representatives of the American female playwrights,is regarded as the most successful playwright who engages in the serious feminist theatrical creation.Her works focus on the female experience and the female living state in America of the 20^th century,expressing her deep concern for the female.Norman's masterpiece,'night,Mother,is a philosophical play which is rare in the American drama.The play turned out to be a big success when it first came on the stage of Broadway in1979 and won Norman the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.'night,Mother is about the story between a daughter and a mother:the daughter,Jessie,who is an epileptic patient,suffers from much difficulties in life,and finally decides to control her own life by resorting to suicide.The mother,Thelma,tries her best to forestall Jessie's suicide but in vain.The mother who deeply loves her daughter faithfully subordinates to the patriarchal culture,yet the daughter is keen for constructing her subjectivity.They stick together but disagree with each other,resulting in a problematic and passive mother-daughter relationship.Luce Irigaray,a French feminist theorist,advocates an inter-subjective relationship between the mother and the daughter.In her opinion,the problematic mother-daughter relationship originates from the mother's lack of subjectivity which results in the daughter's incapability to construct the subjectivity of her own.Since both the mother and the daughter lack the subjective identity,she stresses that the mother and the daughter should try to construct their subjectivity and the relationship between them should be a subject-to-subject relation.Obviously,the mother-daughter relationship is a significant issue simultaneously concerned by Norman and Irigaray.The inter-subjective mother-daughter relationship proposed by Irigaray is the very solution to the problematic relationship between Thelma and Jessie.With the help of Luce Irigaray's feminist theory,this thesis aims at interpreting the mother-daughter relationship between Thelma and Jessie,discovering the problematic mother-daughter relationship in the play and its causes,and discussing the significance of inter-subjective relationship in the construction of a harmonious mother-daughter relationship and the fulfillment of female identity.The thesis is composed of three parts apart from the introduction and conclusion.The first chapter discusses the problematic relationship between Thelma and Jessie.Under the patriarchal oppression and the conflict of identity recognition between mother and daughter,Jessie and Thelma become intimate strangers.The second chapter discusses the protagonists'quest for subjectivity.Norman endows Jessie with strong sense of subjectivity to fight against the patriarchal power and the confinement in the name of love from mother.The third chapter analyzes how Norman tries to construct an inter-subjective mother-daughter relationship.Jessie resorts to the most extreme way to embrace herself,enlightening Thelma.Their last sincere communication restores the intimacy between them and renews the broken mother-daughter bond.The inter-subjectivity can eliminate the subject-to-object relationship between Thelma and Jessie.In addition,'night,Mother provides not only a cultural approach for the female to construct subjectivity,but also a positive exploration of the social construction of mother-daughter relationship.