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From Monstrous to Miraculous: Violent Mothers and Daughters at Home on Stage

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Violent Women in Contemporary Theatres

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Abstract

Taylor Porter discusses sociological research and contemporary plays about female characters who are violent within the home. Many violent women in domestic spaces suffer from some level of psychosis, but especially when their victims are children, so they are violating their most fundamental cultural norm of nurturance, judgment against them is often exceptionally harsh. Examination of these types of characters include Carson Kreitzer’s 1:23 (2007), based on Andrea Yates, Susan Smith, and Juana Leija, and Anna Reynolds and Moira Buffini’s Jordan (1992). The other section of the chapter evaluates “Hush,” (2009) drawn from interviews with victims of domestic violence, and Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County (2007). These plays depict a wide range of daughters enacting violence, from a woman who engages in relatively harmless physical confrontation when highly stressed, to a woman who uses force to protect another, to a teenager inexplicably bent on controlling her mother through emotional and physical violence.

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  1. Department of Theatre, Illinois College, Jacksonville, IL, USA

    Nancy Taylor Porter

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  1. Nancy Taylor Porter
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Taylor Porter, N. (2017). From Monstrous to Miraculous: Violent Mothers and Daughters at Home on Stage. In: Violent Women in Contemporary Theatres. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57006-8_4

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