Night, Mother

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1998

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Part 1

Part 2

Character Analysis

Themes

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Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Illness Versus Agency

Jessie’s entire life was dominated by undiagnosed illness and by her mother’s attempts to control and mitigate that illness. Her depression seems to stretch back into childhood. Jessie tells her mother about seeing a photo of herself as an infant, when happiness was simple. Crying would bring her mother to meet her needs and make her happy again. Jessie describes the transition from that child to the person she has become as a type of loss. Her depression manifested as a sense of isolation and apathy, which her mother couldn’t truly comprehend. Thelma saw Jessie’s affinity for her father as a rejection of her as both a mother and a wife. However, Jessie appreciated the quiet moments with her father, who likely had the same depression, because his presence didn’t require her to open up or mask her feelings of alienation.

From the time that Jessie had the first of her seizures at age five, Thelma covered them up. According to Thelma, they became more subtle during Jessie’s school years. Despite their severity, however, Jessie’s entire life was marked by a disorienting loss of control over her body with no conscious understanding of the underlying physical cause. She developed an agoraphobic anxiety of leaving the house and entering an environment that she couldn’t control. Jessie tried to fight her depression and fear for the sake of her life with Cecil. However, she couldn’t defeat them, and medical intervention for depression was inadequate in the 1970s and 80s. Unable to control her failed marriage or help her son, who seemed to be suffering from the same mental illness, Jessie returned to her mother’s house.

Whenever Jessie had a seizure as an adult, her mother’s caretaking was invasive. She cleaned her, changed her clothes, and called Jessie’s brother to carry her to bed. As a result, Jessie woke up even more disoriented than if she’d remained where she fell. When Jessie was finally able to control her epilepsy with medication, her mental illness still made her feel as if she had no agency. For Thelma, as for most people who don’t seek out death, dying is frightening because it takes away agency. Thelma knows that death will come for her when she doesn’t expect it and that one has no agency in fighting death because death will always eventually win. Jessie, however, sees suicide as a way to exert the control that she never had over her life. She can use her ordered lists to give herself the illusion of controlling the world she’s leaving, and then she can decide her own death.

Unspoken Words

Thelma needs words. She needed her husband to talk to her and reveal his inner self. She needs Jessie to articulate her feelings that have led her to planning suicide. Thelma has always needed spoken words to manipulate the world around her. She called Jessie’s seizures fits to minimize them. She exaggerated details about Agnes to turn her into something wildly fascinating. She used carefully chosen words to cajole, guilt, convince, and control her daughter. Silence makes Thelma insecure. In her husband was silence, she felt pity and condescension. In his lack of final words, she felt dismissal. When she saw her husband and Jessie talking, Thelma felt rejected, as if they chose each other and left her out.

Although Jessie’s father spoke as little as possible, he expressed affection with his pipe-cleaner stick figures. Jessie loved them, understanding that he was demonstrating whimsy and creativity. He could make her laugh without words and show her that he was thinking about her when they weren’t together. Her mother, however, despised his pipe-cleaner creations because she saw them as a way for her husband to retreat further into himself, making inscrutable pipe-cleaner families instead of communicating with her. When he was dying, Thelma hoped that he’d finally rise above his limitations and give her the words that she needed to hear, but it simply wasn’t in his nature. Thelma complained that Agnes’s parrot spoke more than Jessie or her father ever did.

Ironically, Thelma doesn’t seem to notice that she and her daughter have reached a sort of wordless understanding of each other from years of living together. Jessie, who takes after her father, doesn’t want extraneous or exaggerated words or the empty words of parrots. At the play’s beginning, she tells her mother about her plan to commit suicide because she hopes to force her mother to have an honest final conversation—words of substance rather than words to fill the silence. She gives her mother the meaningful talk that her father couldn’t. The conversation is uncomfortable for Jessie, and she frequently deflects her mother’s emotional responses by returning to her own unemotional, practical lists about the house. Nevertheless, by the end of the play, Thelma has a better understanding of her daughter.

Running Out of Time

The stage directions state that all the clocks on the set should be set to about 8:15pm at the start of the play and allowed to run, visible to the audience, until the play is over. The playwright also explains that the actors should not speak in any accent that might seem heavy or alienating to the audience. The play is meant to take place with immediacy, in the present time and place, running in real time. When Jessie informs Thelma that she plans to commit suicide that night, she starts the timer counting down to the end of her life. Even without explicitly stating the exact time, she has scheduled her death within their endless regular routine, placing it at the same time that Thelma would be brushing her teeth. Although Jessie has set the deadline herself, she will not take more time or deviate from her plan regardless of whether she finishes everything on her list.

For Jessie, more time is useless. She’s certain that nothing in her life will be improved with time. Thelma, however, is desperate for more time. To her, where there is time, there is still hope. Ricky may be an unscrupulous criminal today, but Thelma can imagine a future in which he turns his life around. She pleads with Jessie to extend her time because more time can bring pleasant surprises. Thelma is afraid of death, because to her, death brings a sudden and unexpected cut-off, and she plans to fight for any extension of her time on earth. Throughout the play, Thelma is especially frantic for more time with Jessie. She sees every moment as an additional chance to save Jessie’s life. When time runs out, Thelma begs for more.

Time is also connected to aging and illness in the play. Jessie’s epilepsy steals chunks of time from her life. Now that her seizures are under control, Jessie can see that she’s spending her life marking time, following a routine. She sees her childhood self as a person who had promise. Throughout her life, she was someone who was trying and not succeeding. However, in her late thirties/early forties, she has decided that she’s reached the age where failing has turned into failed. She no longer has any hope that she can become the version of herself that she believed she could, so she feels that she has nothing to look forward to. Jessie gives up because she believes that she has run out of time.