The Presence of Perfection in Womanhood; And Why An Alarming Number of Musicals Explore Mother/Daughter Relationships.
It can be difficult, at first, to tell what this musical is about.
Let’s look at the most popular contemporary musicals at the moment. Dear Evan Hansen, Hamilton, Beetlejuice, Hedwig and The Angry Inch…a strikingly consistent theme of central characters names within the title.
Jagged Little Pill is not similar to the above. It’s an intrinsically ensemble musical, with 6 main characters and each undergoing a separate storyline. The show tackles racism, rape, drug addiction, sexuality, underage drinking, cheating, strained family relationships and more within it’s 2 and a half hours.
I’ve seen a quote going around quite regularly regarding JLP’s complex storyline of interweaving pertinent social issues.
“Jagged Little Pill is like Glee…it tackles every issue possible, but not a single one of them was done well.”
It’s a terrifying review, the stuff of nightmares for someone who wants to write musicals one day.
However, I think my biggest issue with the quote is not that it tears apart years of work within one sentence, but rather that it’s a complete misunderstanding of the musical’s purpose. And despite the ensemble cast’s large role, and the multiple entwining storylines – there is a very clear relationship that the entire show is centred around. This relationship is influenced by every event in the show and influences every other character.
It’s the mother/daughter relationship between MJ and Frankie.
Next to Normal graced Broadway in 2009, 10 years prior to Jagged Little Pill’s opening in November 2019. The show focuses on a number of issues; the mental health care system and drugs take centre frame, and explore them through a mother/daughter relationship, very similar to JLP. Diana is a stay at home mother struggling with bipolar disorder who lives in a delusion where she has been raising her son for the past 16 years, despite his death at 11 months. Natalie is her 16 year old daughter with whom she has a very strained relationship, feeling as though she’ll never be able to compete with the perfect delusion her mother has created of her older brother. However, to the outside world their family appears to be perfect, as Diana sings about keeping ‘all the plates spinning, with a smile so white and winning’ in the opening number.
MJ is a stay at home mother who is struggling with an addiction to pain medication, which she has been using for the past year to cope with being raped when she was in college. She has a very strained relationship with Frankie, her 16 year old daughter who feels as though her mother doesn’t love her and that she can never compete with her brother, who MJ calls ‘the only thing in my life I’ve done right.’ Alike to Next to Normal, the family appears to be ‘perfect’ and ‘winning at Candyland’ as MJ’s husband, Steve, puts it. In the opening number, we hear MJ sing as she writes a Christmas card, detailing her husband’s promotion and her son’s acceptance to Harvard. At the mention of Frankie, the story begins to fall apart when we see Frankie making out with her girlfriend, Jo, as MJ recounts how glad she is that Frankie has female friends with whom she can discuss boys.
Already in both these shows it’s easy to identify a clear theme; the rift between the reality of family relations compared to how a mother presents her family.
What I find interesting though, is how in neither of these narratives is there any focus on the complexity of male characters. Nor do we really have a similar level of insight into their inner worlds. Sure, we learn that Nick, MJ’s son, feels like he has to uphold his mother’s expectations for how he should live his life….but apart from that one number, his emotions towards his future are never mentioned. And yes, Dan, Diana’s husband, does mention how he has bad days too and would like to be cared for, not the carer, for once. But again, it’s never truly explored.
Instead, the depth and themes of the musical are explored through the woman’s perspective, and the events rely on their reactions.
There’s a quote I love by Jeffery Eugenides from his novel The Virgin Suicides.
“We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”
I feel as though both Next to Normal and Jagged Little Pill exemplify this quote; in both stories, the women react to the noise men make, and this creates the events in the musical.
In Jagged Little Pill, the central plot piece – the rape of one of Frankie and Nick’s friends, Bella – sparks every action within the film after it. It leads Frankie to fighting with Nick and it leads MJ to overdosing. Nick, despite being a key witness to the rape so expectedly a key character, doesn’t actually cause any action. Instead, his biggest moment – going to the police to tell his story, doesn’t even occur on stage and isn’t mentioned until later on in the musical.
In Next to Normal, the central plot piece – the death of Diana and Dan’s son, leads to Diana undergoing ECT therapy and forgetting her family, and to Natalie experimenting with drugs.
So why do these two shows, which both focus so specifically on the function and perfect presentation of the family unit, only truly show female perspectives?
Because the pressure of perfection for a family unit is thrust upon mothers, and not fathers. Sons are allowed leeway, where daughters are not. If a boy sexually assaults a girl, it’s because she wasn’t clear enough when she said no. If a man cheats on his wife, it’s because his wife wasn’t providing. The pressure is on the woman to be perfect and provide, and because she didn’t, the man misbehaved.
I raised a note earlier, regarding the misinterpretation of Jagged Little Pill’s purpose. Yes, both Jagged Little Pill and Next to Normal explore a vast array of issues – but, they explore them within the context of sexism.
There’s a line close to the end of JLP, during the protest Frankie organises to support Bella, the rape survivor. Nick has come forward to the police and explained that he witnessed the rape, and everyone now believes Bella.
Nick: But everyone knows the truth now.
Bella: Because you said it. Why wasn’t it enough for me to say it?
Rape isn’t an issue that solely affects women, but in this instance the writers are exploring it through the context of sexism. The community of Greenvale only believes Bella after a man says she is speaking the truth.
On my first watching of Next to Normal back in 2009, I was 10 years old and had no understanding of feminism or sexism. I despised the ending the first time I watched it – I saw Dan as the saviour of the show. His unwavering support of his wife, ‘keeping her feet firmly on the ground’, I found his ability to love his disabled wife heroic. When she decided to leave him in the end, I couldn’t believe my ears. She cited that for once, she wanted to fly, and I wondered how she could do that to her husband who obviously loved her very much.
When I re-watched it this year, I found myself in a new position. Though I’m unsure of the writer’s original intentions, I began to see Dan as a morally grey character. One moment in particular stands out to me.
Diana is offered the possibility of ECT treatment, and is told that it might be her last hope to lose her delusions of her son. Diana is firmly against it, scared of its dangerous side effects, and still not ready to mourn the loss of her son.
Dan holds Diana’s hand and sings A Light In The Dark. He convinces her to go through with the treatment, asking her why they have a house at all when he is the only one who lives there.
The song itself is beautiful, filled with lyrics of perfect realities that they could live in – but the proposal itself is much darker. Dan is firmly pushing Diana to go through with the therapy, insinuating that she is a bad wife and a bad mother for not, despite the risks to her health. And those risks come true – she has complete amnesia after her first session.
Diana’s position is that to get better, she needs her husband to acknowledge the fact that their child died. Her mental deterioration occurs mostly from the pressure of Dan to ‘get better’ so that they can be perfect again, but Dan refuses to acknowledge Gabe, their son.
So, there’s strong similarities to Jagged Little Pill – the issue of a lack of quality mental health care is presented through a feminist lens, where we see the pressure that husbands can put on their wives to go through with harmful treatments so as to not disrupt a perfect family unit.
Across these two musicals we see even more similarities. We see husbands presented as saviours, sons as perfect, mothers as the purveyors of that perfection, and daughters as rebellion. Both explore the concept of medication as a crutch for achieving the desire of perfection that is present in womanhood. We see the strained relationships between mothers and daughters, as the generational gap proves a difference in the opinion of what womanhood means.
This strained relationship is the centre of Jagged Little Pill, and it’s the centre of the Alanis Morissette album too. Morissette sings of an ever-present authority figure commenting on her imperfections constantly. As an album, it’s indicative of her relationship with her parents and the older men she dated.
As a musical, on a basic level we see it as a representation of the strained relationship between mothers and daughters due to the pressure for perfection that is intrinsic to womanhood.
But if we take a step back and consider all the issues at play here, we can see that they’re not only acknowledging the strained relationship between mothers and daughters, but rather, the exhausting fight between women and the patriarchy.
It may be difficult at first to see a central narrative, or uncover a central theme, but that is because this isn’t a story. It’s a retelling of an everyday reality that women face.
Swallow it down, what a jagged little pill.
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