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De-tangling the web: Mother-daughter relationships in the plays of Marsha Norman, Lillian Hellman, Tina Howe, and Ntozake Shange
Abstract
De-Tangling the Web: Mother-Daughter Relationships in the Plays of Marsha Norman, Lillian Hellman, Tina Howe, and Ntozake Shange uses psychoanalytical theories to examine the mother/daughter relationships in Norman's 'night, Mother, Hellman's The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest, Howe's Painting Churches, and Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf. This study employs the theories of Freud, Chodorow, Lacan, Kristeva, and Irigaray to elucidate the role of language and behavior in the construction of the mother/daughter subjective positions, their relationship, and the concept of the maternal as it is found in these plays. This study concludes that these plays reflect the semiotic (Kristeva's term) in its relationship to the Symbolic order. This study also applies these theories to the bibliographical elements found in these plays and ascertains that these elements provide cohesive substructures for these plays. It further suggests that Norman, Hellman, and Howe deal artistically with their relationship to their mothers in order to come to terms with the Symbolic order in which they, as artists, are problematically enmeshed and that unlike Norman, Hellman, and Howe, Shange does not resist the maternal; instead she celebrates it. In Norman's 'night, Mother, Lacan's concept of the Imaginary, specifically the imagos, and its position within the Symbolic order are found in certain images and in the language and behavior that accompanies the play's action. The section on Hellman argues that The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest reflect Hellman's unresolved pre-oedipal relationship to her mother. The one play in which the semiotic is overwhelmingly present is Tina Howe's Painting Churches. Colors, sounds, images, and repetitive behaviors are so tightly woven in this play that a tapestry of the semiotic exists. In Shange's for colored girls, the primacy of the African Great Mothers--their creativity, their autonomy, and their strength--governs Shange's for colored girls and her other dramas and poems.
Subject Area
Theater|African literature|American literature|British and Irish literature
Recommended Citation
Foster, Karen K, "De-tangling the web: Mother-daughter relationships in the plays of Marsha Norman, Lillian Hellman, Tina Howe, and Ntozake Shange" (1994). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9507806.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9507806