Baldwin Norman

The profundity of silence is a theme that plays a significant role in the works “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin and “ ’night, Mother” by Marsha Norman. The two tales represent confessions by family members that uncover the profound effect that each person’s communication method has had on the other. In particular, one identifies a lack of communication within both family relationships that demonstrates itself in an overabundance of silence.

Baldwin’s tale recounts the woes of a certain brother who feels himself somehow responsible for the tragic events that have faced his younger sibling, and it portrays a relationship that lacks effective communication. Likewise, Norman portrays a family that has spent its usefulness in the avoidance of conversation. She eventually reveals the inadequacies of the mother who is at last unable to rescue her child from the pressures that cause her to contemplate death as the only acceptable option.

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The protagonists of each story find themselves in family relationships that fall short of the support necessary to prevent each from receding beyond the point of recovery. The tale rehashed in Marsha Norman’s play “ ‘night, Mother” explores the hopelessness that leads to suicide, and in so doing, closely maps the psychological condition of the character Jessie (Whited 65). It takes the analysis of the situation into the realm of the family and considers that cocoon to be the engine that generates and exacerbates the problem Jessie faces. The “problem” is given its lineage in the relationships experienced by the members of the family.

The relationships appear to be filled with action and devoid of communication. Of her own culpability, Mama says, “I didn’t tell you things or I married you off to the wrong man or I took you in and let your life get away from you or all of it put together” (lines 611-613). This circumstance points toward an overemphasizing of action and the downplaying of the type of conversation that allows true feelings to come to the fore. Jessie also recalls the silence of her father, and Norman hints that this silence has for the past decades stabilized or subdued the appearance of Jessie’s mental condition.

Yet, this same silence has perhaps created the environment in which her mental or psychological illness has been allowed to germinate (Whited, 67). The idea that Jessie breaks her silence precisely at that hour in which her mental condition has become overwhelming and irreparable gives the idea that the lack of communication within her family setting may actually have been to her detriment. The exploration of the relationship between the narrator and his brother Sonny in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” also represents a crisis of silence and suffocation within a family setting.

This family in which Sonny resides also betrays a tendency toward continual action that precludes the kind of conversation which might have allowed the brothers to truly understand each other. Without understanding Sonny, the narrator (his brother) and their mother make plans to protect him for the rest of his life. They encourage him to live in situations that are not conducive to his spirited nature, such as his residence with Isabel while his brother goes off to war. Yet the silence Sonny endures, like that of Jessie, has the appearance of being his preferred mode of existence.

The narrator says, “Sonny has never been talkative,” yet he goes on to say something more insightful that hints at the true desires that Sonny has always had. He continues, “So I don’t know why I was sure he’d be dying to talk to me when supper was over the first night” (Baldwin, 8). This hints at the underlying idea that though silence prevailed within the family, probing by his brother and mother might have dispelled both the silence and the dismal circumstances that later defined Sonny’s life.

Literary analyst Tracey Sherard writes: “the narrator comes to understand his brother Sonny through the latter’s apparent struggle to strike out into the deep, unexplored waters of jazz improvisation” (691). Therefore, it is only through the music that Sonny’s brother is able to communicate with and understand him in the end. Comparisons between the two tragic characters of the stories, Sonny and Jessie, can be made in regard to their life choices. The two characters can be seen to choose silence during the early years of their lives, and this might be connected to another form of silence throughout the later stages of their lives.

Sonny’s choice of life has led him to heroin, and this dangerous drug might be considered one that paves a path to death in a manner that is very similar to the suicide that Jessie contemplates. Both characters, therefore, choose suicide as the only means of silencing the worries and discontent of their lives. Jessie expresses a desire to sleep “whenever she wanted to, just by closing her eyes” (line 637), and this she has not been able to do since she was a “pink and fat” baby (639-40). This choice to commit suicide is therefore an extension of the idea of closing one’s eyes to problems of life.

Sonny, in a similar way, chooses to close his eyes to his problems via his use of heroin. And likewise, the extension of this action (continued heroin use) is precisely concurrent with the death that Jessie so openly craves. Jessie’s mother, who desires not death, says “I’m not like you, Jessie. I hate the quiet and I don’t want to die” (lines 626-27) and this juxtaposition of death and quietness underscores the idea that the death desired by Jessie and Sonny can be seen also to be a form of silence.

The motif of silence can be carried through even further within the analysis of the stories told by these authors. During the few short moments before her death, Jessie takes a break from her silence to explain the essence of it to her mother. Within this time she uncovers all the pain that her silence has embodied for the years preceding (Whited, 67). She also enumerates the problems that her ensuing death will hope to silence within her. This moment of conversation can be compared to (and in fact prefigures) the bullet that breaks for a split second the silence that has defined Jessie’s life.

It also effects the reconstruction of that silence by guaranteeing its continuation in death. Death guarantees not only that the disappointments and fears in Jessie’s psyche will be quieted, but also that the events that have generated or exacerbated these problems will also cease to trouble her. The forms of silence to which Sonny subscribes are heroin (as has been uncovered above) and music. While heroin promises to lead him toward that final and inexorable death of the body, music provides a spiritual release for him that also provides an effective (if temporary) silence from his turmoil.

Sonny’s escape to music as a means of silencing his demons can be compared to the way his brother describes their father as being “on the lookout for ‘something a little better. ’” Yet he goes on to say that his father “died before he found it” (Baldwin, 8). Sonny, too, looks to music as a form of escape—a means of quieting his dissatisfaction with his circumstances, a way of searching for something better. While as a youth he annoyed Isabel’s family with his constant piano playing, everyone was able to sense that “Sonny was at that piano playing for his life” (16).

The piano’s music silenced not only the troubles that haunted his mind, but also the voices of hoodlums and vagrants on the street that would have called him into a life of crime and dissipation. It was, in fact, the eventual silencing of the piano by the screams of Isabel’s family that precipitated the demise that his music had been holding at bay. This re-establishes and supports the idea that music was a means of silencing the call of the inner city life and pressures that threatened to overtake Sonny in his youth.

The lives and relationships explored within “’Night, Mother” and “Sonny’s Blues,” as told by Marsha Norman and James Baldwin respectively, speak loudly and portray vividly a distinct and almost impenetrable silence that enveloped the main characters. For Jessie, silence has been the defining characteristic of her relationship between her father during both his life and his death. During his life, he demonstrated his love with actions, and while Jessie appeared to be comfortable in that silence, the very essence of it provided the environment in which her psychological demise germinated and matured.

Her mother, though disliking silence, has rarely been able penetrate Jessie’s, and this proves to facilitate the more permanent form of silence to which she graduates: that of death. Sonny too experiences silence within his relationships—a silence that becomes extended and embodies by the activities of his life. He refuses to speak to his family, silencing the discomfiture with music or heroin. Like Jessie, Sonny’s major life decisions place him on a path toward the ultimate silence: death. Works Cited Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues. ” Wright State University.

1957. Online Text. http://www. wright. edu/~alex. macleod/winter06/blues. pdf Norman, Marsha. “’Night, Mother. ” Literature: Reading, Writing, Reacting. Laurie G. Kirzner & Stephen Mandell (Eds). 4th Ed. New York: Harcourt College Publishers, 2001. 1708-1743. Sherard, Tracey. “Sonny’s Bebop: Baldwin’s ‘Blues Text’ as Intracultural Critique. ” African American Review. Vol. 32, Issue 4. (Winter 1998): 691-705. Whited, Lana A. "Suicide in Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart and Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother. " Southern Quarterly 36 (Fall 1997): 65-74.

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