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Abstract
Born in 1947, Marsha Norman grew up in Louisville, Kentucky in a fundamentalist Christian family. She worked as a journalist writing articles and reviews on books, plays and films for the Louisville Times. She is much appreciated for dramatizing everyday life in her writings, later as a playwright Norman is known for the treatment of human relationships, which primarily concerned with the psychological and emotional difficulties faced by women; her focus is on the ordinary characters enduring in spite of personal misfortune and futile familial relationships. Her most widely read play, “ ‘night, Mother” which premiered in December 1982, has been translated into twenty-three languages and was produced as a film; it won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play. The drama critic Janet Brown identifies Norman as, “perhaps the most successful author of serious feminist drama working in the U.S. today.” (Brown 60) Her work naturally lends itself to feminist criticism and feminist praise. One of the major focal points of feminist psychology has been the relationship between mother and daughter and its ramifications in the life of an adult woman. One may find thousands upon thousands of novels and works of non-fiction exploring the mother-daughter bond but in dramatic works is extremely rare. Norman explores the damages and inadequacies that arise in this relationship. “ ‘night, Mother”, follows the emotions and reactions of a mother and daughter from the time the daughter announces her imminent suicide until she commits the act ninety minutes later. It may rouse debates about the extreme choice in committing suicide, but it has resonance about contemporary life and what gives it, or fails to give it substance.