Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1989

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

William Shurr

Committee Members

Allen Caroll, Nancy M. Goslee, Robert DeRycke

Abstract

Sprawled on a Brooklyn brownstone, yellowed paint reads, "Suicide Jesters." Fading black letters splattered on the side of a local Knoxville bar also confess, "Suicide Tendencies." As the real world is both compelled and repelled by suicide, so too have playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen, Lillian Hellman, and Marsha Norman found it an alluring and provocative subject. Their works, Hedda Gabler, The Children's Hour, and 'night, Mother, respectively, were influenced by tandem psychology and the nineteenth century's rising concern for fair treatment of women-at-home, in education, and under the law. They depict female characters whose suicides represent both a rebellion against patriarchal oppression and a movement toward female autonomy in a world which refuses to define woman in any way other than by her relationship with man.

This study examines female suicide in drama, from both male and female perspectives, beginning with Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (a nineteenth-century precursor of modem female suicide), and continuing into modem American portraits of women's suicides in Hellman's The Children's Hour (critically acclaimed both in the early and middle part of the twentieth century) and Norman's 'night, Mother (a contemporary example of female suicide). Approaching its investigation from a feminist perspective, this project uncovers the signs of female suicide, interpreting both method and meaning of the protagonist's death. It employs some theatre semiotics, explores relevant myths, analyzes key scenes, and identifies recurrent motifs of "housing" (especially "house" as the female body), "invalidism," "waiting," and "acting," all of which are crucial to our understanding of the protagonist's motivation for self-destruction.

By examining the relationships of these protagonists to other important characters who, to varying degrees, represent patriarchy, this study identifies patriarchs and their "agents"-those female characters who threaten, undermine, invalidate, and attempt to squash the heroine's rebellion. It finds the mysterious suicides of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Hellman's Martha Dobie, and Norman's Jessie Cates to be angry responses to patriarchy as well as assertions of the heroine's will to control her own body, mind, and destiny.

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