'Night, Mother and Dysfunctional Relationships

I’d like to make a few comments on the play ‘Night, Mother.

I first began to notice that the relationship between Jessie and Mama was strangely unhealthy when the following exchange occurred:
Mama: “You don’t have to take care of me, Jessie.”
Jessie: “I know that. You’ve just been letting me do it so I’ll have something to do, haven’t you?”
Mama: “I don’t do it as well as you. I just meant if it tires you out or makes you feel used…” (1316)
We have, once again, an example of what appears to be a symbiotic relationship between mother and daughter up until this point. However, when I put Mainardi’s tools to work here, there is the key phrase of “I don’t do it as well as you” put into play, making Mama the parasite. She, much like Mainardi’s fictional husband-type, has been sucking away at Jessie’s hard work, and Jessie knows exactly what is happening. In her own way, Jessie is cutting Mama off from the niceties that she (Mama) has become accustomed to. Jessie is not asking Mama to take on some of the workload, but she’s merely telling Mama that Jessie just isn’t going to do it anymore, what with her being dead and all, and Mama goes into shock. We see that Mama is two-natured, for lack of a better term. She is the nurturing mother toward an epileptic daughter, but had to be the father figure to Jessie when her father was gone. This example shows how Mama is more male-centric.
However, Mama, being the mother that she is, also reveals that she does have some motherly tendencies during the following exchanges:
Mama: “All right! I wanted you to have a husband.”
Jessie: “And I couldn’t get one on my own, of course.”
Mama: “How were you going to get a husband never opening your mouth to a living soul?. . . I married you off to the wrong man. . . Cecil might be ready to try it again, honey, that happens sometimes. Go downtown. Find him. Talk to him. He didn’t know what he had in you” (1321).
Here, Mama is, for all intents and purposes of her world, doing her job as a mother. She wanted Jessie to live a normal life with a husband and a baby, which she eventually got with Cecil and Ricky, respectively. In a desperate attempt to understand why Jessie would want to kill herself, Mama makes a mistake in thinking that the whole ordeal of Jessie’s suicide is about a man. What I find ironic, however, is that because Mama has more masculine attributes in this relationship, Jessie does, in fact, have a problem with the “man” in her life. Mama is all she has and Jessie knows that this is not enough for her. So, is this a feminist play or a play about a dysfunctional relationship? In my opinion, it’s both. Jessie is a liberated woman by the end of the play, and we know that the relationship is dysfunctional- at least, according to societal norms- due to the fact that Jessie is taking care of her mother, and then abruptly ends her life, thus stopping the care for her mother. I find that the play has another level of “cool things to notice and pick up on” when one reads it thinking of Mama as gender-neutral (I say gender-neutral because of my arguments that Mama has both male and female attributes). Having never read this play before, I find myself wanting to add ‘Night, Mother to my feminist literary canon, and- while probably not holding it on a pedestal- making it a good reference point in the future.