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کلیدواژهها
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Terms: Foreclosure, Getting Out, Identity, Lacan, Marsha Norman, Name-of-the-Father, Night, Mother, Oedipus Complex
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چکیده
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This study aims to scrutinize Marsha Norman’s plays, being Getting Out (1977) and Night, Mother (1982) in terms of Lacanian concepts of Oedipus complex, Foreclosure, Identity, and Name-of-the-Father which serve as a methodology in psychoanalytic criticism. Along with these main concepts, other related ones such as Desire, Lack, Object Petit a, Ego, Ideal Ego and the Big Other are frequently referred. The main objective of the present study is to demonstrate the importance of the role of the father (not necessarily the biological one) and its presence or absence in shaping the subjectivity of the main characters of the two plays. Analyzing the two case studies, in terms of Lacan’s key concepts, revealed that Norman, as a playwright, records her character’s psychoanalytical growth and the troubles they face on the process of reforming their corrupt identity. Night, Mother depicts last night of Jessie Cates life, revealing the conflicts between she and her mother. After experiencing a failed marital life, epileptic Jessie is back home to live with her mother. Norman presents a modern American woman’s mental world of a repressed personality just through the abundant dialogues between Jessie and her mother. Jessie resorts to suicide to claim back her long-lost autonomy. In spite of her, in Getting Out, Arlie fantasizes an alternative self, namely Arlene, and lives “her” out to affirm her new-built identity. In this play, Norman portrays one day of Arlene Holsclaw’s life – a newly released prisoner- along with the synchronic act of her younger counterpart –Arlie- that plays in role of her past life, and illustrates the resultant conflicts of this young woman. Based on Lacan, it is by the intervention of the father that the child traverses from the whole-childish Imaginary Order to the lack-loaded Symbolic one, and any defeat in facing the role of the father may result in psychoanalytical disorders. Through an unsuccessful transition, both main characters of the previously mentioned plays were undergoing growing unfulfilled desires which mislead them in finding their true identity out. Analyzing the process in which the two main characters pass through to rebuild their fragmented identity was the main concern of studying the selected plays of Norman based on psychoanalytical theories.
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