These pages contain information I collected using the 'night, Mother Concord Database, a database created by Rosanne G. Potter to conduct word-level searches of the play's dialogue, while working on my M.A. thesis* at Iowa State University during the winter and spring of 1996. The aforementioned database is linked to a much larger one called the ISU Play Concordances database, which is also maintained by Rosanne G. Potter and currently allows one to conduct word-level examinations of nine plays by eight modern playwrights (more are being made available in this searchable form as I write this).
In my thesis I examined 'night, Mother's dialogue, looking closely at the language Norman gave to each character. In addition to gaining a better knowledge of each character's ideolect, I discovered a number of problems with current psychoanalytical interpretations of the play. Here, though, you will find only nine tables, six of which appear with discussions excerpted from my thesis, and a list of selected References covering criticism of 'night, Mother, written by both theater critics and literary scholars, and a variety of empirically based literary studies.
If you are interested in more of my findings, you will need to check out the paper version of my thesis (at least for now). In all, it's an exploratory project that shows what one can do when working such databases and when using computers and empirical methods to forward various readings of a text.
Enjoy the site, and please contact me if you have any questions or concerns.
Maria Bernardy