A woman dressed in an evening gown is sitting in a wooden rocking chair; no other props or scenery are called for. She sits totally still until the very end of the play. The chair apparently starts and stops "rocking of its own accord, since her feet are visible on its footrest. The motion creates a ghostly atmosphere." The woman (W) is described in the notes as "Prematurely old. Unkempt grey hair. Huge eyes in white expressionless face." Beckett is equally specific when it comes to the gown: "Black lacy high-necked … Long sleeves. Jet
sequins … Incongruous headdress set with extravagant trimming to catch the light." pre-recorded voice (V) – her own – recount details from her own life, and that of her dead mother's, in what Enoch Brater describes as "a performance poem in the shape of a play." "The French title,
Berceuse, means both ‘rocking chair’ and ‘
lullaby’, while the English
Rockaby refers to a
traditional lullaby in which a baby's
cradle falls from a treetop, thus bring together in one song the images of birth and death which are so often juxtaposed in Beckett." Both a traditional cradle and a rocking chair have
rockers. "[T]he
synchrony of the rocking motion and the
dimeter verse line – one back-and-forth per line – plays against the recorded narrative." To achieve this effect Billie Whitelaw was encouraged by Beckett to "‘think of it as a lullaby’ which she interpreted as ‘soft, monotonous, no colour, soothing, rhythmic … [a] drive toward death." The play can be broken down into four sections. All begin with the childlike demand, "More" (consider
Oliver Twist’s request for more gruel). Billie Whitelaw pronounced it more like ‘
maw’ – a
pun – "to suggest a need for nourishment" or even "Ma". Intermittently, she joins in three of the lines: ‘time she stopped’, ‘living soul’ and ‘rock her off’" at which point the rocking stops and only starts again when she demands "More," each time a little softer than the time before. The fact that time play begins with this word indicates that this scene has been being played out for some time before this. At the end of the final section the woman fails to join in with the voice, the rocking ceases and the woman's head slowly inclines; "she has apparently died." evocative of Molloy’s quest to find his mother. The voice’s speech is fragmented and simple "creating an affinity between the language of the child and that of
senescence and dying." This could also be a reason for the "huge eyes". As with
Not I, the voice speaks in the
third person.
Section 2 The second section reprises and therefore emphasizes the decision taken in Section 1. It also marks the "beginning of her next phase of activity – sitting at her upstairs window, searching the windows opposite to see another ‘one living soul … like herself.’" "Life is nothing more nor less than the act of perception or the state of being perceived, or, in the words of
Bishop Berkeley which find echoes throughout Beckett’s work, ‘
esse est percipi’ (‘to be is to be perceived’). She sees no one however and is seen by no one. "Voice has become the woman’s own Berkeleyan observer, without whose surveillance any claim to existence would be invalidated."
Section 3 In the third section the woman has lowered her standards again. She would be content now to simply see a raised blind as evidence of life. At the end of this section she realises it is "time she stopped" even this activity. "A drawn blind [is] and old custom signifying death" and the last thing she does herself before sitting down in the old rocker is "let down the blind" before closing her own eyelids. This decision [is] first announced in part three by the lines ‘till the day came/in the end came/close of a long day’ reiterated at the opening of part four. "The objects surrounding [the] ‘window’ endow it with layers of feeling. ‘Pane’ and ‘blind’ imply more than the
things of windows, and ironically comment on the classical
metaphor of ‘window’ as ‘eyes of the soul.’" until the rocking stops completely. She has stopped actively searching for another and given up watching for proof of the existence of another, but through all of this she has always had the voice for company; now she is "done with that" too and has concluded that it is time she herself "was her own other ... living soul." Billie Whitelaw has said: "[The voice of the woman in
Rockaby] gets softer because she's getting weaker, and the rock of the chair should be lessening, and the light is lessening. ... In fact, the woman in
Rockaby is actually going further and further down that steep stair. So with the last ‘More’ she knows she's on the way out, and as long as that rocker keeps rocking she's all right. Once it stops she's gone... I do find it very frightening to do. And I find it desperately lonely to do. I feel very, very lonely in that chair." "In French, ‘
chair’ means flesh, especially naked flesh, so that the combined image of ‘rocking chair,’ ‘mother rocker,’ and ‘rocking flesh’ bring together inside a single word two realities of subject and object, the object being endowed with subjective
realism." It has been suggested that the "other" that the woman has been searching for all this time is actually her mother. There is clearly an underlying text here of a little lost girl looking for her ‘mammy’. Having abandoned the search she opts for the rocker's "embrace" so that she can fulfil both roles, she can become her "own other". "Other" and "mother" sound very similar. As
Molloy puts it: "I have her room. I sleep in her bed ... I have taken her place. I must resemble her more and more. == Background ==