Unavoidable Stereotype:an Analysis Of Women’s Destiny In ’Night, Mother’ And Getting Out

During the second wave of feminism, a large number of outstanding female playwrights emerged in America whose literary works are mainly concerned about the living conditions and social status of females. Marsha Norman is one of them. Getting Out, her first play, which utilizes the technique of split self, attracted lots of attention from the dramatic critics. Furthermore, her masterpiece------’Night, Mother’which has only two female characters on the stage won the Pulitzer Prize in1983.In Marsha Norman’s plays, the protagonists are always women who live in a confined environment and try to break away from the patriarchal society but fail at the end. In Getting Out, Arlie resorts to violence, prostitution and hunger to maintain her authority upon her body and soul but ends as an obedient female who lives up to the social ethics. And in’Night, Mother, divorced Jessie finds she never lives as her true self throughout her life because Thelma, her mother, takes total control on her life. Furthermore, she desperately finds that the patriarchal society leaves her no space to act out of her own will. As a result, she resorts to the extreme way of suicide to claim her authority upon her soul and body. This thesis aims to analyze the growing process of Arlene in Getting Out and Jessie in’Night, Mother’to find the essential reasons of their failures to break through the confined environment by means of Germaine Greer’s feminist theory in The Female Eunuch.In The Female Eunuch, Greer proposes a new feminist definition:stereotype and gives a detailed description of its forming process. The stereotype here refers to castrated female whose "energy" is restrained so that they are servile and the only value of them is to satisfy the demand of patriarchal society. Females are not born as stereotype which is the product of socialization. From the period of baby, girlhood and puberty, the patriarchal society constantly restrains female’s "energy" through family, school and customs, and replaces it with femininity. Even though females are conscious of their "energy", the established thinking method would resist the new ideas.According to the stereotype definition of Greer and on the basis of text analysis, the author of this thesis holds that both Arlene in Getting Out and Jessie in’Night, Mother’ have gone through the process of asexualiation. Young Arlie utilizes the extreme way of violence to express her inner "energy" in order to prevent the process towards stereotype but fails at last. And Jessie, who is under the strict supervision of a rigid mother, has been transformed into a stereotype in her early childhood. Even though she finally becomes aware of her inner "energy", her established mode of thinking forces her to use suicide to prove herself and ends in death. The reason of two females’tragic destiny lies in that they use the way of patriarchal society------violence to break their difficult situation but violence can only lead to the suicide of body and soul. They are supposed to use the way of "revolution" to stop loving males who only bring them pains and sufferings, to refuse marriage and to enjoy the unstable but free life as a single woman.By means of Greer’s stereotype definition, this thesis comes to the conclusions that it is possible for females to escape from the destiny as a stereotype as long as they understand the condition of women clearly and make use of proper methods.