SOURCE: Brown, Janet, and Catherine Barnes Stevenson. “Fearlessly ‘Looking under the Bed’: Marsha Norman's Feminist Aesthetic in Getting Out and 'night, Mother.” In Theatre and Feminist Aesthetics, edited by Karen Laughlin and Catherine Schuler, pp. 182-99. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Brown and Stevenson argue that Getting Out and 'night, Mother foreground many “specifically feminist concerns” through the formal theatrical means of setting, plot, and character.

Thirteen years ago, when feminist theory and “gynocritics”¹ were in their infancy, Janet Brown, one of the authors of this article; tried to identify the essential characteristics of feminist drama. Using the rhetorical model of Kenneth Burke, she argued that a drama is feminist if it depicts a woman seeking autonomy in an unjust patriarchal society.² Since then, feminist theory has matured and our sense of what makes a work “feminist” has grown more complex. Some...