Marsha Norman's Bi-Regional Vision in ’night, Mother

DAVID RADAVICH Eastern Illinois University, Emeritus Marsha Norman’s Bi-Regional Vision in ’night, Mother PLAYWRIGHT MARSHA NORMAN WAS BORN AND RAISED IN LOUISVILLE, Kentucky, a pleasant city along the Ohio River on the northern fringe of a Southern border state that did not join the Confederacy. Like other cities along this region-defining river, Louisville operates at an intersectionofSouthernandMidwesternculturalperspectives.Whereas its sister river city, Cincinnati, seems more Midwestern, in Louisville Southern elements hold greater sway. But not surprisingly in this borderland area, cultures meet, amalgamate, and sometimes clash. Marsha Norman’s most famous dramatic work embodies this bi-cultural dynamic, less as literary ideology than as aesthetic and social Weltanschauung. Other successful playwrights have dramatized regional differences in striking ways. William Inge’s Kansas is situated on the Great Plains western fringe of the Midwest. Bus Stop (1955) and particularly The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957) incorporate Western themes and characters into Inge’s largely Midwestern vision. Arthur Miller’s two major Midwestern plays, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944) and All My Sons (1947), written following his student days at the University of Michigan, retain some features of the playwright’s Northeastern Jewish perspective in a new regional setting. Tennessee Williams set a number of works in the city of his youth, St. Louis, which he always called some variant of “a large Midwestern American city” (The Long Goodbye. 203). Although Midwestern elements surfaced in his later plays, Williams always regarded his dramatized South as a region quite distinct. The Glass Menagerie. (1944) enacts the regionally marked dilemma of the narrator Tom, who cannot accept either the faded, over-heated, not-altogether-truthful Southern heritage of Amanda or the gung-ho, work-oriented, self-improving Midwesternism of Jim. In Williams’s farewell to St. Louis, two regional options tear at the pivotal character so much he feels forced to flee. In real life, the playwright departed St. Louis first for New Orleans and thereafter to New York before traveling to many locations in his subsequently restless life. Only in the late A 116 David Radavich Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1978) can the central character opt to find comfort and remain in the previously rejected Midwest. From the outset of her career, Marsha Norman has established herself as an explorer in diverse regions, even as she has remained emotionally anchored in her native Kentucky. Getting Out (1979), her first major dramatic success, takes place simultaneously in a Kentucky apartment and at a co-ed prison in Alabama. The audience receives a gritty yet gripping portrait of life both inside and outside confinement, based on the playwright’s experience while working in a state mental hospital (Collected 2). The Holdup (1982), set in New Mexico, derives from stories her grandfather told of his youth in the American Southwest (Collected164). SarahandAbraham (1992)exploresbi-culturalterritory by interposing Biblical characters and themes into the present. Loving DanielBoone(1992)againfeaturesadialoguebetweencontemporarylife and Kentucky in 1778. The bi-regional perspective in ’night, Mother (1981) differs profoundly, imbedded in what Robert Brustein calls “a minutely detailed mosaic of the commonplaces of everyday modern life” (160). This work investigates a philosophical intersection of Midwest and South, though the regional poles are never identified as such or specifically grounded in either history or tradition. Unlike Tom at the end of The Glass Menagerie, the two central characters cannot simply leave town; the clash remains more fundamental and intractable. ’night, Mother enacts a more existential impasse that never gets resolved. In order to understandthefascinatingbi-regionalityofthisaward-winningplay,we must position its characters, themes, and world-views in the context of two distinct American sub-cultures. I use the term “bi-regional” in the title of this essay advisedly. Scholars of hybridity such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak have concentrated their attention on colonial and post-colonial contexts in the nexus of identity, hegemony, misappropriation, and resistance. Robert J. C. Young defines cultural hybridity as inherently unstable, a union in which each of the parts threatens to revert “to its original state” (26). But the blended consciousness of northern Kentucky and Southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio represents a more stable fusion of elements from neighboring...