On the Violence of Silence: The Intergenerational Transmission Mechanism of Implicit Family Trauma in 'night, Mother

Abstract

Marsha Norman’s one-act play 'night, Mother (1979) centers on a 90-minute conversation after the daughter informs her mother of her suicide plan. With its almost brutal theme of "suicide," the play condenses the life crisis under the silent violence of the family—an achievement that earned Norman the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and established the work as a classic Broadway production. Through the tragic fate of the daughter Jessie, the trauma-internalization mechanism of the family’s silent system can be clearly observed in shaping her individual life. The father’s emotional neglect, the mother’s discursive evasion, and Jessie’s "self-silence" (a result of trauma internalization) together form an invisible power structure. As a form of structural violence, silence leads to the disintegration of individual existence through the logic of "discourse suppression → trauma normalization → behavioral compensation." Essentially, Jessie’s suicide is a desperate resistance against the "unspeakable pain" embedded in the family’s power structure. 'night, Mother not only provides a literary model for understanding the implicit trauma caused by silence but also offers an effective perspective for examining social and family issues in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s.