1. “There is nothing more
that I can say or lose”
MOTHERHOOD AND MENTAL
INSTABILITY IN TWENTIETH CENTURY
AMERICAN WOMEN’S LITERATURE
Shannon Kreiner
Senior Honors Project, English Department
Mentors: Leona Sevick, Tom Bligh
22 April 2015

2. Project Focus
 Study of gendered experience in the context of American social
history for a specific group of women and the articulation of their
experience
 Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”
 Sylvia Plath’s “The Fearful” and “Morning Song”
 Anne Sexton’s “The Double Image”
 Marsha Norman’s ‘night Mother

3. Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“The Yellow Wallpaper”
 Published in 1893 after Gilman’s own experience with “nervous prostration”
and the rest cure depicted in the text.
 Gilman’s explicit intent was objection to contemporary women’s psychological
healthcare.
“It was not intended to drive people crazy,
but to save people from being driven
crazy, and it worked.”

4. Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“The Yellow Wallpaper”
 “He said there was only one window and not room for two beds, and no near
room for him if he took another… I have a schedule prescription for each hour
in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to
value it more.”
 Gilman uses setting to make the protagonist’s patriarchal confinement absolute.
 “It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women
do not creep by daylight… I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I
can't do it at night, for I know John would suspect something at once.”
 The protagonists’ identity becomes fused with the confined woman and her
diagnosis.

5. Sylvia Plath
“Perfection is terrible,
it cannot have children.”
 Plath viewed perfection as a full
commitment of her unchanging self, power,
and talents to the creation of art.
 Plath’s conception of the static perfect self
came in direct conflict with the
expectation of motherhood.

6. Sylvia Plath
“The Fearful”
She hates
The thought of a baby—-
Stealer of cells, stealer of beauty—-
She would rather be dead than fat,
Dead and perfect, like Nefertit

7. Sylvia Plath
“Morning Song”
 Plath did have children, and the obligation to become a mother despite her
self overwhelmed her. Plath viewed commitment to this role as surrender of
her self.
One cry, and I stumble from
bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.

8. Anne Sexton
“The Double Image”
 Sexton’s early trauma and mental illness isolated her from her own mother.
 Sexton did not begin writing until after the birth of her first child, but her
poetry bears the scars of a damaged relationship that informs her ability to
mother.
I cannot forgive your suicide, my mother said.
And she never could. She had my portrait
done instead.
 Sexton’s mother could not engage with her daughter’s identity, so she
rejected it.

9. Anne Sexton
“The Double Image”
 Sexton wrote poetry as a means to ground and invest herself in reality.
 Sexton also sought identity in “ideal womanhood.”
 Sexton’s ability to mother was inhibited by her trauma, her relationship with
her mother, and her post partum depression.
I, who was never quite sure
about being a girl, needed another
life, another image to remind me.
And this was my worst guilt; you could not cure
nor soothe it. I made you to find me.

10. Marsha Norman
‘night Mother
 Norman wrote ‘night Mother in 1983 because she
felt the cultural conversation on mental illness
and suicide needed to be changed.
 Norman chose the setting of a mother-daughter
relationship to show the way that mental illness
affects even the most intimate bonds.
 One way Norman highlights these effects in role
reversal between mother and daughter.

11. Marsha Norman
‘night Mother
 While Jessie moves through the night calmly, Thelma exhibits signs of a
tantrum:
 You’ll miss. You’ll just wind up a vegetable.
 It’s your own sweet fault… I guess you think they’ll all
have to talk about you now.
 I’ll sing till morning to keep you alive, Jessie, please!

12. Marsha Norman
‘night Mother
 The play received critique because of its blunt discussion of suicide that some
critics argued bordered on advocating the act.
 What emerges in closely reading the text is evidence of Jessie’s worldview, which
is entirely removed from the goal of self-preservation to allow suicide as a logical
choice.
Jessie: It’s exactly what I want. It’s dark, and
it’s quiet.
Thelma: So is the back yard, Jessie! Close your
eyes. Stuff cotton in your ears. Take a
nap!

13. Learning from Our Mothers

14. Thank you!