Suicide as an Autonomous Choice in ’night, Mother

The main argument of this study is to shed a light on the suicide of Jessie, the protagonist of Marsha Norman’s ’ night, Mother. In a dyadic status of mother-daughter relationship, daughters are to struggle against nurturing or domineering maternal figures to achieve subjectivity. In ’night, Mother, audiences are presented with a mother/daughter pair in the dead end of their relationship. The myth of nurturing and self-sacrificing maternal figure has become an obstacle for both mothers and daughters and their needs as individuals are compromised by the duties and responsibilities that they must carry out the household. For decades, feminist scholars have pointed out that motherhood not a given and unchangeable reality for women. Mothering, to quote Chodorow, is an institution and it is subject to change since it, as Kristeva points out, is a primary source of depression and abjection of women. In this light, ’night, Mother, is a significant depiction of the complex relationship between mothers and daughters on their subjectivity and social conditioning.