Nurturing and murderous mothers in Suzan-Lori Parks's In the Blood and Fucking A

Abstract

Suzan-Lori Parks has created two Hesters. Hester La Negrita in In Blood and Hester Smith in Fucking A draw on and reimagine Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, a character who cherishes her child. However, plays also allude to Medea, who kills her own children as an act of vengeance against their father, and to mothers in slave narratives--exemplified by Sethe in Toni Morrison's Beloved--who kill their children to save them from a worse fate. The complex genealogy or matrilineage of Suzan-Lori Parks's two Hesters against which contemporary audiences are likely to interpret women's behavior underscores but ultimately reconciles contradictions in their characters and behavior as mothers. These contradictions--nurturing love and murderous rage--exist side by side in Medea and Sethe and perhaps in sublimated form in Hester Prynne as well. The rage of Parks's two Hesters and their foremothers is not directed at child or children whom they kill but at what child represents, what society has made of child or will do to child. In killing their children, contemporary Hesters destroy not those who have harmed them but those whom they love, those who are in some sense a part of themselves, without effecting any change in social conditions that produced their rage. For them there is no grudging respect from community or rescue by flying chariot. The pessimism of In Blood and Fucking A is moderated only by love and courage of two Hesters, which elicit audience's sympathy for characters ostensibly unlike any probable theatergoer. By using dramaturgy derived from Brecht, Parks shocks her audiences into confronting their own prejudices, recognizing two Hesters as individual human beings, and acknowledging appalling social injustices that produce murderous rage or despair that causes loving mothers to kill their own children. Hester La Negrita in In Blood batters to death eldest of her five children, Jabber, in a fit of rage for which child's behavior is merely catalyst. In Fucking A Hester Smith kills her adult son, Monster, in order to save him from certain and imminent death by torture; she also, unknowingly, destroys her grandchild by forcibly aborting Monster's as an act of revenge against mother. In this essay I will describe psychological and sociological causes of Jabber's murder in In Blood in light of Hester's namesake and findings of sociological studies of infanticide, to which typology of Hester's act conforms in many respects. I will then examine Parks's more exclusively literary take on nurturing, murderous mother in her presentation of Hester Smith in Fucking A. Finally, I will consider how Parks's two plays illuminate reasons why inherently repellent stories of mothers who murder their children fascinate their audiences and suggest kind of cultural work they do. Both In Blood and Fucking A explicitly riff (to borrow Parks's own term) on The Scarlet Letter, but they reimagine Hawthorne's work quite differently. Though Parks describes In Blood as her alien baby that burst out of huge (originally 52-scene) Fucking A (Garrett 134), it is new play that more directly incorporates and revises elements of The Scarlet Letter. The violent image Parks evokes to describe relationship between her two plays is particularly appropriate given that both of them explore what Adrienne Rich in her groundbreaking book Of Woman Born refers to as the heart of maternal darkness--a mother's violence against her own children (256). In years since Rich's book first appeared psychosociological studies have confirmed that devotion to their offspring and violent rage against them typically exist side by side in mothers who purposely kill their children (Meyer and Oberman 89). In fact, we may infer that most mothers at one time or another feel both intense love for and murderous rage against their children. …

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