Last Laugh of the Medusa: Cixousian Écriture Féminine in Marsha Norman’s ‘Night Mother and Sarah Kane’s Blasted

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Nancy Jones  

Sarah Kane burst onto the London theatre scene in the mid-1990s with her brutally shocking “in yer face” drama. Kane scorned realistic and formal narrative structure and her onstage dramas and tragically short life meld into a tale that bends toward the hagiographic. Kentucky born playwright Marsha Norman’s ‘night Mother holds firmly to the sort of form that Kane abhorred, containing a unity of time, place, and action. Writing this play in the early 1980s, Norman’s investigation of suicide was a radical thematic choice – especially for a woman. In this paper, I examine these plays (and playwrights) through the lens of French feminist theorist and playwright Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa”, an essay in which Cixous talks about what it means to write (and create) as a woman. Cixous connects the act of writing to the body itself as a physical action, and demands that women put themselves into what they write in a personal way so as to not replicate forms and content that were created and maintained by a patriarchal/male power system. Both Marsha Norman and Sarah Kane adhere to Cixous’s dictum yet take radically different paths to embody her philosophy of écriture féminine. Through a close reading of the texts and their intersectionality with Cixous’s essay, I investigate the nature of women’s writing and how Kane and Norman use form, theme, and character in radically different and not always obvious ways to fuel their projects that embody écriture féminine.