Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.29162/ANAFORA.v13i1.11
Stylistic Reading of the American Dream Myth in Marsha Norman’s ‘night, Mother
Sanja Jukić
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Osijek, Croatia
Biljana Oklopčić
orcid.org/0000-0001-9949-6293
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Osijek, Croatia
Abstract
The American Dream is one of the most enduring myths in American history, politics, culture, and fiction. Its hypothetical promises of upward mobility, comfortable life, wealth, economic independence, respectable job, equality, and home ownership have offered almost everyone a fair chance to succeed in the United States. As any dream, the American Dream must be regularly reexamined, even questioned, to ensure at least the illusion of its viability for the people and nation it serves. Such a reexamination occurs in Marsha Norman’s play ‘night, Mother (1982), where the sustainability of domestic felicity, unnegotiable social equality, and the pursuit of material wealth as symbolic incarnations of the American Dream myth are challenged by being turned into minus devices that lead to the breakdown of the American nuclear family. This paper aims to question the American Dream myth in Marsha Norman’s play ‘night, Mother through the lens of Marina Katnić-Bakaršić’s stylistics of drama discourse (2013) to show that different stylistic strategies are used to create various aspects of the unsustainable American Dream, as well as to emphasize the possible impact of their textual meaning on the depiction of problems arising from the individual–society–American Dream interrelationship.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
348120
URI
Publication date:
19.6.2026.
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