A Feminist Approach To Caryl Churchill’s Drama
UNIVERSITATEA „OVIDIUS” DIN CONSTANȚA
FACULTATEA DE LITERE
SPECIALIZAREA: STUDII ANGLO-AMERICANE
FORMA DE INVĂȚĂMÂNT: ZI
LUCRARE DE DISERTAȚIE
COORDONATOR ȘTIINȚIFIC:
Conf. univ. dr. LUDMILA MARTANOVSCHI
ABSOLVENT:
PARASCHIV (CARAION) ALINA MONICA
CONSTANȚA
2016
UNIVERSITATEA „OVIDIUS” DIN CONSTANȚA
FACULTATEA DE LITERE
A FEMINIST APPROACH TO CARYL CHURCHILL’S DRAMA
COORDONATOR ȘTIINȚIFIC:
Conf. univ. dr. LUDMILA MARTANOVSCHI
ABSOLVENT:
PARASCHIV (CARAION) ALINA MONICA
CONSTANȚA
2016
CONTENTS
Introduction .…………………………………………………..………………… 1
Chapter I: FEMINISM AND THEATRE .…………..…………………………..5
Chapter II: GENDER POLITICS AND DECONSTRUCTION OF PATRIARCHY IN VINEGAR TOM, CLOUD NINE AND TOP GIRLS ………………………….23
Chapter III: FEMININE RELATIONSHIPS AND MOTHERHOOD…………43
CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………..65
BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………….70
INTRODUCTION
Caryl Churchill is one of the most accomplished female playwrights to emerge in Britain in the twentieth century. Her appointment as writer-in-residence at the Royal Court Theatre (1974), the winning of several prestigious awards (the Obie Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, the Olivier Award and the London Evening Standard Award) and the wide performance and publishing of her plays testify to her success.
The current study focuses on analyzing Churchill’s plays of the 1970s and 1980s. The time period in question was particularly significant for British feminists and female playwrights. Censorship laws pertaining to theatre were abolished in 1968. Before that, as Michelene Wandor explains “plays had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain in manuscript and could only go into rehearsal after he had given his permission” (Women Playwrights and Feminism in the 1970s 56). Furthermore, any references or adverse commentary on politicians, the church or the royal family were prohibited and representations of sexuality were restricted. As the censorship was abolished, there was a greater interest in the work of European playwrights, including Ionesco and his Theatre of the Absurd, and the polemical Bertolt Brecht, fact that created new opportunities for exploring various new forms and approaches (Wandor 56).
In the Theatre of the Absurd the action does not proceed in the manner of a logical series of events. For example, plays written by Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov or Eugène Ionesco confront the audience “with a bewildering experience, a veritable barrage of wildly irrational, often nonsensical goings-on that seem to go counter to all accepted standards of stage convention” (Esslin 3). Each of these writers, however, focuses on a certain type of absurdity: Beckett’s absurdity is melancholic and emphasizes a feeling of futility born from the disillusionment of old age and hopeless; Adamov’s type of absurdity is more active, aggressive and tinged with social and political awareness, while in Ionesco’s plays absurdity is highlighted by “its own fantastic knock-about flavor of tragicomical clowning” (Esslin 4).
The Theatre of the Absurd shows the world as an incomprehensive place where the events happening on stage are entirely shown to the audience from the outside, without an understanding of the full meaning of these events. As Esslin outlines, this confrontation between characters and events, that the audience is not quite able to comprehend, shares Bertolt Brecht ‘Verfremdungseffekt’, the alienation effect, reflected by the inhibition of any identification between spectator and actor (Esslin 4).
Thus, the Theatre of the Absurd fulfils Brecht’s postulate of a critical, detached audience, who is unable to identify with characters. The spectators are “compelled to puzzle out the meaning of what they have seen” (Esslin 14). In this sense, the Theatre of the Absurd confronts the spectators with solving an intellectual paradox, even if the audience is aware that this fact is probably unsolvable.
At the same time, another important aspect of the time period in question was the first British Women’s Liberation Conference, held at Oxford in 1970. The rise of Women’s Movement had influenced the first specifically gender-oriented political demonstrations and feminist consciousness raising groups began to form throughout Britain. Feminists began to locate the oppression of women in the reproductive labour for capitalism and male domination was challenged in various fields. However, it took a long time before the Feminist Movement had influenced female playwrights. Wandor suggests that there were “hardly any plays by women being produced on the professional stage” (Women Playwrights and Feminism of the 1970s 57). Churchill, for example, wrote stage and radio plays but it was not until the middle of the 1970s when, starting with her collaboration with the Monstrous Regiment theatre company, she “began to show evidence of radical thinking about relationships between men and women” (Wandor 57).
Nevertheless, the drive for democracy provided the framework for many political theatre groups to work ‘collectively’, as Wandor explains “with everyone doing a bit of everything, discussing the content and message of the plays, writing scenes individually and bringing them back for comment, as well as directing the plays together during the course of rehearsal” (58). A great number of playwrights, such as David Hare, Howard Brenton, John Mcgrath and David Edgar began to work in such ‘collective’ theatre groups: David Edgar worked with the Welfare State; John Mcgrath was one of the founders of the 7:84 theatre company while David Hare founded, together with Max Stafford Clark, the Joint Stock theatre.
In 1973 the Women’s Theatre Group was founded but it was not until the 1978 when they began to work with individual women playwrights, such as Melissa Murray, Donna Franceschild or Timberlake Wertenbaker. The Monstrous Regiment, another feminist theatre company, was founded in 1975 by a group of actresses “fed up with their secondary roles in socialist, political theatre companies” (Wandor 60) and commissioned women playwrights such as Claire Luckham and Caryl Churchill.
Churchill’s collaboration with the Monstrous Regiment and later, with Joint Stock company theatre group, proved to be a significant period for her development as a playwright. At the same time she engaged in the socialist-feminist activism and her plays “seemed intimately connected to a historical moment of great promise” (Reinelt, Caryl Churchill and the Politics of Style 175).
The three plays under discussion Vinegar Tom (1976), Cloud Nine (1979) and Top Girls (1982) are representative for the time period mentioned above and rank amongst Churchill’s most successful plays, both in commercial and in literary terms. The first, Vinegar Tom (1976), heralded a new maturity in Churchill’s work. The play, created in collaboration with Monstrous Regiment, presents a shocking connection between medieval attitudes to witches and continuing attitudes to women in general. Cloud Nine (1979) places human sexuality in a framework consistent with socialist feminism, and encompasses the question of sexuality. It presents the height and decline of a patriarchal system. In Top Girls (1982), an examination of women from diverse backgrounds allows Churchill to illustrate how assumptions about roles in society can determine commonly held thinking patterns, and how bourgeois society can dehumanize ambitious women. Top Girls specifically “tackled a bourgeois interpretation of feminism which had become prevalent under Thatcher” (Reinelt, Caryl Churchill and the Politics of Style 179).
The current study aims at analyzing Caryl Churchill’s selected plays by using a feminist critical approach, focusing on the construction and representation of gender politics that challenge the central position of patriarchy within conventional theatre.
Chapter I “Feminism and Theatre” will analyze the view point of different thinkers and feminists focusing on the misrepresentation of women and their social position within a patriarchal rule governed society, together with their representations in theatre. This analysis will lead to an exploration of the theatrical possibility of vindicating subject positions for women instead of their being reduced to object positions fetishized by the male gaze. In doing so, this chapter will trace the ways in which the idea of ‘woman’ could be demystified with the aim of contesting the non-dynamic objectification of women without submitting to the exclusionary and over-simplistic practices of the patriarchal and heteronormative matrix. The focus will be on identity construction, reaching the conclusion that identities are constructed through difference. It will be shown that patriarchal and heterosexual identity needs exactly what it represses in order to be that which it purports to be. Hence, the idea of power as merely repressive is discredited on the grounds that power also produces the very unintelligible identities that it renders aberrant. This heralds the possibility of subversion within, not outside, the discursive limits of the patriarchal power relations. As the elements of conventional theater are based on a patriarchal phallic paradigm, their deconstruction could also be exercised by making use of the prevailing theatrical techniques, contesting and disrupting the assumed credibility of such prosaic conventions.
Chapter II “Gender Politics and Deconstruction of Patriarchy” will provide an analysis of gender politics imposed on individuals by the patriarchal society in which female characters, limited by patriarchal ideology, fail to achieve a complete break from the structuring defined in its context. As a result of their inability to reject the language they are given, the female characters cannot escape the object position they have been reduced to. The analysis will demonstrate how Churchill rejects a female equality within the existing patriarchal society that transforms women into surrogate men by reversing the conventional expectations of male and female behavior. Churchill’s use of gender and cultural reversal underlines the artificiality and conventionality of the characters sex and race roles and changes in the position of women are artificial because the achievements of women characters appear in two forms: they either succeed through taking roles reserved for men or embody the archetypal feminine qualities as defined by the patriarchal system.
Chapter III “Femininity and Empowerment” aims at discussing Churchill’s criticism of gender roles imposed on both sexes by patriarchy and Churchill’s attempt in drawing attention to the issue that women should and must avoid being trapped while trying to get rid of the patriarchal structures. This chapter demonstrates how the definitive role that class plays in social organization inflicts a notable difference between upper-class and working-class women: there is little or no notion of women solidarity and the women in the privileged class in fact oppress and/or exploit those in the working class.. Thus rather than suggesting that liberation can be achieved through women’s particular gender strengths, class and history are allocated a very specific place in their oppression. It comes as a result of the specific economic conditions of women, in which they are exploited by virtue of their gender and since the oppression of women, for socialist feminists, is always within the class analysis.
CHAPTER I
FEMINISM AND THEATRE
I write this as a woman, toward women. When I say ‘woman’, I’m speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history.
From the very beginning of literary activities women occupied peripheral positions in the production of literature and, despite their ability to write and produce literature they were excluded from the literary canon because of their economic limitation and lack of subject position. As Virginia Woolf mentions in A Room of One’s Own (1989) “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (4). Woolf explores women’s exclusion from literary culture and, as Katherine Mullin explains, she shows how “women writers were turned away from libraries, refused access to the major universities, and denied the cultural space and material resources necessary to creative life . In a male dominated society women were denied the time and the space to elaborate creative works, they were expected to focus on household duties and on raising children, being financially and legally bound to their husbands.
Theatre, “a practice that represents gender relations through the grammar of theatrical production” does not constitute an exception to the constant exclusion of women from the central male established positions. In the history of British theatre, the 1920s and 1930s proved to be an unfruitful period for female playwrights. As Maggie B. Gale mentions in Women Playwrights of the 1920s and 1930s plays written by female playwrights were mainly produced in commercial mainstream theatres and critics often alluded to the fact that these women playwrights were amateurs or ‘one hit wonders’, being categorized as not good enough to be perceived as professional playwrights . Furthermore, Gale states that “rare acknowledgements of women writing for theatre of the time […] are often underpinned by comment on their seeming lack of a feminist perspective or innovative strategy: they were largely middle class, writing for a commercially oriented theatre and so the assumption is that their work does not warrant serious examination” . Female playwrights were perceived as having a tendency for sentimentality and domestic plots and, thereby it was assumed that feminist plays only serve the interest of female audience.
In consequence, there was a need for a distinctive literary canon of women’s writing in response to the literary tradition governed by male hegemony. Women’s writing was, as Virginia Woolf explains, an art of exclusion:
[…] if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, saying in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical.
For Woolf, female writing is undoubtedly different from men’s writing, as it is based on personal female experience in the patriarchal society. Female writing is, as Woolf suggests, a genre of its own that “calls for gigantic courage and strength (50). Woolf also adds: “more than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion that we are, it calls for confidence in oneself” . Through the means of her seminal essay A Room of One’s Own, Woolf advises women to continue writing even though they are actually lacking in confidence in the way people continue living their lives even wrecked by doubt about their relevance in society.
The French Feminist Hélène Cixous takes Woolf’s ideas on feminism further and urges women to break the boundaries of patriarchal literary conventions and to write:
An act which will not only realize the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being given her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal .
With no access to writing their history, women have no identity of their own and remain trapped in a society governed by the patriarchal rule. Cixous urges women to use their voice and their body as a means to communicate and as a source of power and inspiration, in order to regain their identity and to acquire the freedom they have historically been denied. As Keri Weil outlines in French Feminism’s Ėcriture Féminine (2006), Cixous does not hesitate to describe and theorize a writing of and through the body which will liberate the “immense resources of the unconscious” and thereby “confirm women in a place other than that which is reserved for her in the symbolic”.
By raising issues of desire and the body, Feminists had focused on revealing “the blindness and misogyny of patriarchal representations of women, or on discovering an alternative female-authored tradition . They questioned the inadequate representation of ‘woman’ and called for a revolution in theory that, according to Weil, would provide subject positions for women, and through which “the traditional divide between theory and practice would be effaced in the act of writing” . The focus on woman’s body highlights the fundamental inseparability and interdependence between mind and body, reason and emotion, and ultimately between masculinity and femininity.
As Simone de Beauvoir states in The Second Sex (1949) the woman is “defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute- she is the Other” . According to de Beauvoir, women have no ability to define themselves and they have passively accepted the labels men have imposed on them. De Beauvoir rejects the notion of femininity as a biological feature and argues that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman […]. It is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine” (156). Thus, she implies that neither biological nor psychological characteristics could define one’s gender. On the contrary, one ‘becomes a woman’ only after going through certain life experiences . Furthermore, de Beauvoir states that “femininity is neither a natural nor an innate entity, but rather a condition brought about by society, on the basis of certain physiological characteristics” ( de Beauvoir qtd in Andrew 31).
Judith Butler comments on de Beauvoir’s theory on differentiating sex from gender and asserts that this distinction leads to a new understanding and meaning: “If ‘the body is the situation’, as she [de Beauvoir] claims,[…] sex, by definition, will be shown to have been gender all along” . Butler takes further Simone de Beauvoir’s theory on feminism and raises questions about the stability of the category of ‘woman’:
If there is something right in Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born, but raher becomes a woman, it follows that woman itseelf is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannnot righfully be said to originate or to end.[…] Even when gender seems to congeal into the most reified forms, the ‘congealing’is itseelf an insistent and insiduous practice,, sustained and regulated by various social means .
Butler sustains that the assumption of a ‘natural’ gender is no longer available due to the fact that anatomy is not fate, but rather a “heteronormative formation of society […] which assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender” . Furthermore, Butler claims that the distinction between sex and gender does not represent a real diferentiating because “this construct called ‘sex’ is culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender” . Thus, by questioning the unstable nature of gender based categorization she argues that gender is performative.
As Sara Salih outlines, Butler aspires to deconstruct the ‘heteronormative’ matrix through the means of a deconstructive analysis of the Oedipus concept . Salih argues that the Oedipus concept was first used by Sigmund Freud in his theories, being “based upon a socially imposed primary loss or rejection of homosexual desire” . According to Salih, Freud asserts that the Oedipus complex occurs in the phallic stage of psychosexual development. At the phallic stage, the child wants to have sexual gratification through the parent of the opposite sex. Freud sustains that “in the process of ego formation a child’s primary object-cathexes are transformed into an identification” . In this sense, the child first identifies with the parent of the same sex and then perceives him/her as a rival. Salih comments on child’s identification process and states that “like the melancholic who takes the lost object into her- or himself and thereby preserves it as an identification […] The ego is therefore a repository of all the desires it has had to give up” .
Furthermore, as Margaret Muckenhoupt suggests, Freud questions whether the development of human civilization could be explained in terms of the Oedipus complex and claims that this development “depends on believing that there is a ‘collective mind’ […] that can persist for thousands of years” also considering that “guilt could be inherited” . Hence, this argument emphasizing the inheritable guilt shapes Freud’s theories on psychosexual development and the progression of human civilization.
According to Salih, Freud’s theorization was questioned by many feminist critics due to its misogynist nature and his “postulation of innate sexual dispositions” . Among other feminists, Luce Irigaray objects to Freud’s theories in This Sex Which is Not One (1985) by first blaming patriarchy for defining the parametres in evaluating female sexuality and claims that “the opposition between masculine clitoral activity and feminine vaginal passivity, an opposition which Freud and many others saw as stages, or alternatives, in the development of a sexually ‘normal’ woman, seems rather too clearly required by the practice of male sexuality” . Irigaray questions Freud’s theorization of sexual development, which reduces the complex female psychology to a ‘lack’ of something that supposedely fails her:
About woman and her pleasure, this view of the sexual relation has nothing to say. Her lot is that of lack, “atrophy” (of the sexual organ), and “penis envy”, the penis being the only sexual organ of recognized value. Thus she attempts by every means available to appropriate that organ for herself: through her somewhat servile love of the father-husband capable of giving her one, through her desire for a child-penis, preferably a boy, through access to the cultural values still reserved by right to males alone and therefore always masculine, and so on. Woman lives her own desire only as the expectation that she may at last come to possess an equivalent of the male organ .
Judith Butler also rejects Freud’s theories on sexual disposition, that represents “the infant’s innate desire for a member of the opposite sex or the same sex” . She rejects the idea according to which these ‘dispositions’ are innate and natural. Rather, as Salih emphasizes, Butler aspires to explain “how ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ dispositions can be traced to an identification, and where those identifications take place” . Furthermore, Butler aims at locating the place where identification is developed. She concludes that identification is “on the body as its surface signification such that the body must itself be understood as an incorporated space” . Thus, the body comes to obtain its sex through the constitution of object-cathexes and it could be considered “not as a ready surface and signification, but as a set of boundaries, individual and social, politically signified and maintained” .
Therefore, the assumption according to which the body is a natural and innate entity becomes an illusion because the body functions as a surface, on which lost desires are encrypted. This leads to the conclusion that “the body is the effect of desire rather than its cause” .
For feminists, women’s desire is what is most oppressed and repressed by patriarchy and, therefore, women must use their bodies as a way of writing their desires and by doing so, to unleash their power. Elaine Aston emphasizes that “for ‘woman to write herself’ she needs to be re-located, un-made in the pre-Oedipus space of the Lacanian Imaginary […] It requires a bursting, a violent breaking up of the symbolic order/language which has denied women their voice, their identity” . The Imaginary is a concept used by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in his work The Psychoses (1956). Lacan argues that the Symbolic order structures the visual field of the Imaginary and involves a linguistic dimension. Language has symbolic and imaginary connotations. In its imaginary aspect, language is the ‘wall of language’ that inverts and distorts the discourse of the other. Thus, the Imaginary is rooted in the subject’s relationship with his own body . Following Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical theories, Aston claims that the access to the Symbolic Order is a consequence of the mirror stage that comes together with the acquisition of a language where women’s voice, their identity, will be totally artificial, in a societal system dominated by men.
As Keri Weil explains “Lacan’s readings of Freud emphasize what is only implicit in Freud, that subjectivity is formed in and through language” . Lacan argues that we are not only the active users of language, but we are also subjected to its terms and limitation and furthermore, the language is the one that precedes us .
From the feminist perspective Lacan’s theory outlines that women are born into patriarchy since language is its primary tool of subjection, writing even the female unconsciousness. As Weil asserts, hence the idea of a specifically feminine language or desire is unconceivable within his philosophy, Lacan perpetuates the Freudian tradition of considering male subject formation as the norm for all subjectivity, by whose standards female subjects are always regarded as ‘lesser than’ or ‘lacking’ . Lacan argues that:
[…] there is woman only as excluded by the nature of things which is the nature of words, and it has to be said that if there is one thing they themselves are complaining about enough at the moment […] only they don’t know what they are saying, which is all the difference between them and me.
The Lacanian theories seem to emphasize the inevitability of patriarchy and therefore render useless any attempts of women in their struggle to undermine it.
Theatre is not an exception to the constant exclusion of women. Due to its political and ideological system of representation, it has been perceived as a male-dominated area and thereby, women playwrights were labeled as ‘the others’ and ‘one hit wonder’ and were not permitted to occupy central subject positions . The patriarchal construction of meaning in theatre can be traced back in the Aristotelian theatrical ideal, a starting point from which to develop a particular patriarchal expounding of theatre-making. As Kritzer asserts:
Theories of theatre and drama generally acknowledge the primacy of Aristotle. The Aristotelian ideal is one of structural and stylistic unity based on a narrative plot that built progressively to a climax and resolution, presenting an instructive example of character development. It is one which has pervaded drama throughout its history. […] romanticism and expression have invariably carried the implication of protest against authoritarian power and assertion of a need for social change.
Kritzer’s words recall the structure that many plays have followed especially since the Renaissance, when there was a revival of interest in the classical tradition. But from the view point of Feminist theatre, the Aristotelian model of dramatic structure relates to male sexuality and with phallic modes of pleasure that “glorify the phallus centre stage” (Aston, An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre 6). Representations of women in theatre are traditionally based on a male fantasy that neither reflects the realities of women nor places them in subject positions and thus, Aristotelian theatrical conventions serve to perpetuate a patriarchal theatrical structure that always serves to the public a male fantasy of female pleasure.
In the light of all these facts, Kritzer asserts that feminist theatre tries to subvert the Aristotelian ideal of drama “in its protest against patriarchal authority and struggle to create forms of expression that affirm the subjectivity of women” . Therefore, Feminist theatre aspires to develop new possibilities to vindicate subject positions for women and, as Mark Fortier claims, it aims to deconstruct the phallocentric formation of theatre as a system of signification controlled by male hegemony and “attempts to understand the ideologies which have limited women’s ways of becoming subjects or agents, and to open up new patterns in which women are free to escape the confines of the subjectivity patriarchy sets up for them” .
Through the notion of a stable category of woman, the patriarchal and ‘heterosexual matrix’ controls the social position of women in order to perpetuate the hegemonic existence of ‘gender-based formation’ of society . As Mary Poovey argues “instead of reflecting a unitary self, identity is rational; as such ‘woman’ is only a position that gains its definition from its placement in relation to ‘man’”. Therefore, this binary opposition between ‘woman’ and ‘man’ only serve to marginalize the existence of woman, which feminist theatre challenges and aims to subvert. In this sense, Kritzer argues that “masculine subjectivity depends upon identification of the feminine as other, within the closed structure of the subject/object opposition, the male elite has appropriated the space, apparatus, and products of culture to the on-going project of reifying the repression of femininity and the objectification of women” .
Following Kritzer’s ideas on the ‘otherization’ of women, it could be argued that as the formation of binary categorization of man and woman is one that reinforces the superiority of man over woman, feminism refutes the already established notion of a stable hierarchy between man and woman that is based on such binary categories. The patriarchal authority tries to assert the centrality of the category of man through the marginalization of the category of woman. Thus, men are granted with central positions, whereas women are placed on the periphery of a patriarchal power system. Furthermore Stuart Hall argues that the formation of male identity is strictly connected with that of the female and hence these “identities emerge within the play of specific modalities of power, and thus are more the product of the marking of difference and exclusion, than they are the sign of an identical, naturally-constituted unity-an ‘identity’ in its traditional meaning” (4).
Hall’s theorization of unstable identities constructed through difference, outlines the fact according to which the category of man is represented in a close relationship with that of woman, as a basis of its construction. Hall asserts that:
Identities are constructed through, not outside, difference. This entails the radically disturbing recognition that it is only through the relation to the Other, the relation to what it is not, to precisely what it lacks, to what has been called its constitutive outside that the ‘positive’ meaning of any term—and thus its ‘identity’—can be constructed […] Every identity has at its ‘margin’, an excess, something more. The unity, the internal homogeneity, which the term identity treats as foundational is not a natural, but a constructed form of closure, every identity naming as its necessary, even if silenced and unspoken other, that which it ‘lacks’.
Commenting on Hall’s theories on identity, it can be assumed that male identity formation is realized through its relation to the ‘other’, the female. By deconstructing the mythical contextualization of women, feminist theater draws attention to their marginalized subjectivity, which concerns the stability of patriarchal conventions when confronting difference with the ‘other’. As Barbara Freedman argues:
Difference produces great anxiety. Polarisation, which is a theatrical representation of difference, tames and binds that anxiety. The classic example is sexual difference which is represented as a polar opposition (active-passive, energy-matter). All polar oppositions share the trait of taming the anxiety that specific differences provoke.
Feminism, which is “predicated upon subverting the figuration of difference as binary opposition” (Freedman 81), aspires to highlight and consequently challenge the established binary oppositions that perpetuate patriarchal supremacy in theatre, both as a dramatic text and a performance text. In this sense, traditional theatre creates a sense of doubleness with respect to the relationship between player/ role in the same way as it constructs a self/other distinction in the formation of subjectivity. Thus, as Kritzer claims, “the operation of patriarchal ideology in structuring theatrical conventions mimics its structuring of subjectivity in male-dominated culture” (6). As traditional theatre emphasizes a clear distinction between player/role and male/female, Roland Barthes expands on this differentiation:
The actor’s body is artificial, but its duplicity is much more profound than that of the painted sets or the fake furniture of the stage; the grease paint, the imitations of gestures or intonations, the accessibility of an exposed body—all this is artificial but not factitious” and characterizes theater “as the site of an ultraincarnation, in which the body is double, at once a living body deriving from a trivial nature, and an emphatic, formal body, frozen by its function as an artificial object .
The opposition between player/role reinforces “the masculine/feminine opposition fundamental to patriarchal subjectivity” . Taking further this argument, Kritzer analyzes the relation of the opposition between player/role to that of masculine/feminine, arguing that:
Theatre’s player/role opposition mimics the division and hierarchization of masculine and feminine. The player is real, while the role makes visible the false man, the feminine that must be repressed in the attainment of subjectivity. Stage parlance, which places the player in a role, confirms the penetrable, feminine quality of the role, as well as the unitary, masculine quality of the player. […]This division between true man and false man (player and role) has governed traditional theatre. Theatre assures the audience, through the enactment of the player/role relationship, that true man, unitary man exists. The false man of the role reinforces the construction of the subject as phallic unity by offering the concept of the role as an other upon which tendencies or qualities that threaten this wholeness can be projected.
Kritzer’s analysis requires Feminist theatre to subvert the theatrical conventions of doubleness in order to allow females to enter in the multiple productions of meaning. By highlighting the possibility of a subjectivity based in multiplicity and relationality rather than binary opposition and separateness, Feminist theatre attempts not only to divide the subject into multiple identities, but also aspires to break the boundaries of patriarchal operation of individual subjectivity by answering “Cixous’s call for an écriture féminine, which aims to break the controlling link between the phallus and word that marks the discourse of man” (Kritzer 10).
Furthermore, since the Berliner Ensemble brought its production of Brecht’s Mother Courage to London in 1956, Feminist theatre has been influenced by Brechtian theatrical conventions that discredit the supposedly necessary identification between actor and character. Janelle Reinelt asserts the influence of Brecht’s theatre on feminism and states that:
Brecht’s theorisation of the social gest, epic structure, and alienation effect provides the means to reveal material relations as the basis of social reality, to foreground and examine ideologically-determined beliefs and unconscious habitual perceptions, and to make visible those signs inscribed on the body which distinguish social behavior in relation to class, gender, and history. For feminists, Brechtian techniques offer a way to examine the material conditions of gender behaviour (how they are internalized, opposed, and changed) and their interaction with other socio-political factors such as class.
In this regard, Brecht uses a series of theatrical techniques, such as demystifing representation, showing how and when the object of pleasure is made, and the release of the spectator from imaginary and illusionary identifications, which helps him analyzing and deconstructing the conventions of traditional theatre. Instead of following the realistic model of presenting a cohesive production, Brecht intended to separate the elements of production, he organized the dramatic narrative in episodic units in order to raise the audience’s awareness. Alicia Tycer explains “Brecht was very critical of the extreme emotionalism within Aristotelian-based theatre. By avoiding catharsis at the end of a production, Brecht hoped to motivate the audience to action” .
Caryl Churchill’s non-linear play structure and her refusal to provide her audience with clear answers correspond to Brecht’s concepts of epic theatre. The Brechtian influence on Churchill’s drama is based on a series of terms that Brecht utilized to describe his epic theatre: alienation, gestus and historicization.
The foregrounding element of Brecht’s theory is the Verfremdungseffekt, also known as the Alienation effect (A-effect), which consists in “the technique of defamiliarizing a word, an idea, a gesture so as to enable the spectator to see or hear it afresh” . The A-effect requires the actors to be alienated from their characters, emphasizing themselves with the characters’set of behaviors, a means through which the actor signals to the audience that he/she is aware of the performance. By using the alienation effect, Brecht intended to defamiliarize the audience with the existing societal order and to attempt a new understanding. He explains that “the A-effect consists in turning an object from something ordinary, familiar, immediately accessible into something pelicular, striking, and unexpected”.
Another Brechtian theatrical device taken into account by Feminist theatre is the ‘not…but’, which requires “keeping differences in view instead of confronting to stable representation of identity, and linking those differences to a possible politics” . This technique encourages the actor to perform in a way through which he will invoke what is not obvious in his acting. In other words, Brecht uses this technique to make visible that particular difference which is concealed from the audience’s eye. Therefore, the ‘not…but’ technique urges the audience to see what is ‘unseeable’ and not to be satisfied with what is already presented on stage, thereby realizing the repression of difference in traditional theatrical representations.
Historicization is another influential technique of Brechtian theatre that is related to the importance of the “understanding of women’s material conditions in history, and the problematic of uncovering women’s history” . Thus, the primary objective of historicization is to urge the audience to change the class-based acknowledgement, by observing the purpose of this perception and thereby initiating a process of change. Brecht asserts that the gaps between the different historical periods are not to be filled in:
We must drop our habit of taking the different social structures of past periods, then stripping them of everything that makes them different; so that they all look more or less like our own, which then acquires from this process a certain air of having been there all along, in other words of permanence pure and simple. Instead we must leave them their distinguishing marks and keep their impermanence always before our eyes, so that our own period can be seen to be impermanent too. (Brecht 190)
Through the means of historicization Brecht emphasizes the need of avoiding the annihilation of distance with a view to encouraging a critical attitude rather than accepting an apparently inevitable fate. In this regard, Brecht’s historicization gives the audience an active role in the process of resistance against “the presumed ideological neutrality of any historical reflection” (Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre 50).
A good example of historicization can be found in Churchill’s play Vinegar Tom, where the songs bring past witch-hunts to bear on current societal scapegoating. Another example rises from the contrast between Top Girls’ dinner scene and the contemporary scenes, Alicia Tycer highlights “Churchill and Brecht’s utilization of Brueghel’s Dulle Griet can be seen as an exemplifying their shared investment in the working class. Churchill’s understanding of the figure parallels with Brecht’s description of Griet as helpless and handicapated, with the features of a servant”.
The last point to analyse in Brechtian theatre is the gestus technique which is considered to be “the explosive synthesis of alienation, historicization, and the ‘not…but […] a gesture, a word, an action, a tableau, by which, separately or in series, the social attitudes encoded in the playtext become visible to the spectator” (Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre 52). The gestus outlines the relationship established between the play being performed and the public taking part at this performance. The gestus encourages the audience to observe the contradictory relations between discursive ideologies and it “signifies a moment of theoretical insight into sex-gender complexities, not only in the play’s fable, but in the culture which the play, at the moment of reception, is dialogically reflecting and shaping” (Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre 53).
The gestural technique is employed by feminists to reveal the relations between the sexes, to highlight the struggle of women to free themselves from both economic and sexual male oppression. For example, in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, the Brechtian gestus is evident in the way Dull Gret eats her soup. The gestus does not just “say something about her as an individual, but shows her peasant class, the scarcity of food during wartime, and her economic relation to those around her”. Another gestural example can be found in Angie’s act of trying on the dress that Marlene gives her as revealing the gap between Angie’s world and Marlene’s world. The feminist use and transformation of Brechtian techniques denotes women’s engaging in a process of discovering the appropriate and effective contemporary methods of their reenactment in society.
One of the most important periods for the reenactment of women is strongly connected with the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s in Britain. According to Alicia Tycer the movement “focused on uniting women as ‘sisters’ and on politicizing women according to the slogan ‘the personal is political’” . The movement, also known as the Second Wave Feminism, started in 1970 at Ruskin College, Oxford where, as Sheila Rowbotham outlines, women attended a conference and articulated a series of demands that became the foundation of the feminist movement: equal pay, equal education and opportunity, 24-hour nurseries, free contraception and abortion on demand (Rowbotham, “The Beginnings of Women’s Liberation in Britain” 401-402). The innovations in contraception and the right to legal abortion become, as Juliet Mitchell asserts “totally voluntary […] their significance is fundamentally different. It need no longer to be sole or ultimate vocation of woman: it becomes an option among others” (Mitchell qtd. in Rowbotham The Past is Before Us 63). This new reform triggers a fundamental rethinking for many women concerning their ability to control their own bodies. Janelle Reinelt documents that sexual education, mental health practices and breaking the taboo of talking about breast cancer are only some of the topics women wanted to debate and reform (“On Feminist and Sexual Politics” 22).
The feeling of many women sensing the importance of the conference and its results connected with generally recognized determination to bring a change can be expressed by Wandor’s claim that:
As part of a generation who took over Ruskin College for a weekend in 1970, we were in at the beginning of a change in the consciousness of women in this country. For me, the most important overall legacy of that weekend was the realization that, marginal as I very often felt, I was objectively a part of the historical process, and that I could help shape and change that history.
One of the most important aspects of Second Wave Feminism was represented by the challenging of male hegemony with regard to the production of history. Janelle Reinelt states that feminist historians insisted upon the importance of women’s roles, personal, subjective experiences, on domestic sphere activities and on “practices of reproduction and kinship systems as central to historical investigation” (“On Feminist and Sexual Politics” 21). Caryl Churchill’s work emphasizes every aspect of the feminist doctrine. In Vinegar Tom Churchill depicted the construction of women’s identity “at turbulent historical moments” (Reinelt 21) in the seventeenth century by portraying the collusion between state and religion and emphasized the way women built fragile connections to each other despite their oppressive situations. Furthermore, in Cloud Nine, Churchill “traced the legacy of colonial regimes’ sexual and racial oppression in contemporary life” (Reinelt 21) and even put the agency of remarkable women on stage at the dinner party scene of Top Girls.
In 1976, on an abortion march, Churchill met the women of the feminist theatre company Monstrous Regiment, Reinelt explains, “newly constituted, the Monsters had a socialist-feminist viewpoint and wanted to create free from male bias” (“On Feminist and Sexual Politics” 19). Churchill’s two projects with Monstrous Regiment (Vinegar Tom and Floorshow) brought her both artistic and intellectual stimulation and also a recognition that she belonged to a movement. Churchill’s second important collaboration was, as Elaine Aston explains, with Max Stafford at the Joint Stock Theatre Company (Introduction:on Caryl Churchill 4). According to Aston, Churchill “learned methods of making work collaboratively, of experiencing theatre-making as ‘joint’, democratized labour informing all aspects of process, practice and production” (Carryl Churchill 4).
Churchill’s experience of working with both theatre companies had an important impact and influence on her evolving dramaturgy. Elaine Aston explains that working “with Monstrous Regiment it was being in a community of shared feminist ideas and activism […] In the case of Joint Stock, whose pattern of work was to have a period of workshopping, a break for the written to go away to work on a script and then a final rehearsal phase, Churchill was introduced to a different economy of ideas that are not just her own” (On Collaboration: ‘Not Ordinary, Not Safe’ 147). Churchill asserts that:
If you’re working by yourself, then you’re not accountable to anyone but yourself while you’re doing it, You don’t get forced in quite the same way into seeing your own inner feelings connect up with larger things that happen to other people (Churchill qtd. in Aston On Collaboration: ‘Not Ordinary, Not Safe’ 147).
Churchill’s comment outlines the significance of seeing how the personal, marginalized lives of ordinary women and men are situated into an increasingly globalized capitalism (Aston 147). Churchill’s exposure to exercises and improvisations in the group’s workshops influenced her in creating new ideas through the means of a practical exploration. Aston claims that “creating ideas in a theatre workshop is not a question of working to a strict intellectual or political agenda, but of mixing ideas through collective, creative labour” (On Collaboration: ‘Not Ordinary, Not Safe’ 147). Churchill’s collaboration with Joint Stock and Monstrous Regiment clearly influenced her willingness to remain involved with the production of her work and to fulfill the role of writer as collaborator (Aston, On Collaboration: ‘Not Ordinary, Not Safe’ 150).
One of the most controversial issues of second-wave feminism concerned the three categories of feminism: liberal or burgeois feminism, radical or cultural feminism, and socialist or materialist feminism. Janelle Reinelt explains that the first category shared the liberal feminism which focused on equality with man, assuming equal pay and equal social status. The second category, radical feminism, emphasized women’s culture and communities and focused on establishing a women centred socio-political movement based on sisterhood and solidarity among women. The third category, socialist feminism was different from the other two types, being the most common and widespread type of feminism in Britain (Reinelt, On Feminist and Sexual Politics 29-30). Socialist feminism was based on the common belief according to which men were not the only oppressors of women. Race, class and culture were the inherent part of women’s oppression.
Sue-Ellen Case explains the difference between socialist feminism and the other two types and emphasizes that:
Rather than assuming that the experiences of women are induced by gender oppression from men or that liberation can be brought about by virtue of women’s unique gender strengths, that patriarchy is everywhere and always the same and that all women are’sisters’, the materialist position underscores rhe role of class and history in creating the oppression of women […] Not only are all women not sisters,but women in the privileged class actually oppress women in the working class (82-83).
As Alicia Tycer suggests, Churchill considers herself a socialist feminist and Sue-Ellen Case’s description parallels Churchill’s examination of sisterhood with Margaret Thatcher and Marlene in Top Girls (1982) , both of them being rejected as ‘sisters’. Although both had achieved success from the liberal feminist perspective, they “engage in intra gender oppression of their working-class counterparts” (Tycer, 16). As a result of her influence by feminist socialist politics, Churchill mentions that Top Girls was also closely linked to Thatcher recent rise to power:
Thatcher had just become prime minister; there was talk about whether it was an advance to have a woman prime minister if it was someone with policies like hers; (Churchill qtd in Tycer 19)
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, the leader of the Conservative Party, was the first woman in British history to become the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Her election proved to be a success of the feminist campaigning for equality and empowerment. Thatcher represented a chance for women to become both equal and autonomous. Being autonomous was considered the immediate outcome at the beginning of the second-wave feminism thus, the women’s individual freedom in personal relationships was a right for women to decide about their bodies and a possibility to manage as an independent human being. However, when concerning the chances provided to men, equality between men and women was just a bias and a target for feminists to be still worked at.
Thatcher’s becoming the first woman Prime Minister was seen as the feminist victory, leading to the belief that “the eighties are going to be stupendous” (Top Girls 95); however, the very beginning of Thatcher’s governing proved the fact that only some women thought “I’m going up up up” (Top Girls 95), while others believed that “nothing’s changed and it won’t with them” (Top Girls 95).
As Rowbotham describes her, Margaret Thatcher was a woman who “had little sympathy with the post-war generation’s preoccupation with women’s right and wrongs” (A Century of Women:The History of Women in Britain and the United States 472). Rowbotham goes further in her depiction of the Thatcherist period arguing that “the fact that a woman could become Prime Minister had a symbolic meaning; modern women, it seemed, could do anything now. However, like many of her generation, Margaret Thatcher, born in 1925, did not want to be seen as a woman in politics. She preferred to be a politician who happened to be a woman” (472).
Thatcher’s determination, belief in her own skills of making decisions, intransigence and unwillingness to negociate and to listen to the ideas of others was already apparent during her leadership of the Conservative Party; however, their immediate application when she was elected the Prime Minister led to the astonishment of many members of the Conservative Party. Thatcher quickly made all members sure of the fact that she was not going to preside the discussions but to lead them and to replace those members who seemed not to be devoted to her beliefs. She started to cooperate with the specially designed circles where decisions about the politics of the government were made with the people who were often called ‘one of us’, people who stood for her ideas (Rowbotham, A Century of Women:The History of Women in Britain and the United States 473) .
Thatcher strongly opposed to the politics of consensus that was built on the cooperation with trade unions, on the highest level of employment and the principles of Welfare State. Because of the growing inflation and state investments in a traditional industry, which was proving to be ineffective and which the previous Conservative government attempted to restrict, Margaret Thatcher decided to reduce or close down heavy industries by emphasizing the responsibility of individuals for themselves and liberalism. Furthermore, a strict monetarism propagating the control of invested money to reduce inflation, the growth of indirect taxes and wide cuts in public investments concerning mostly health and social sphere were applied (Rowbotham, A Century of Women:The History of Women in Britain and the United States 473). Thatcher distanced the state responsibility from the unemployment and encouraged the wide public to become actively involved in private business, privatization and self-reliance, which was, as Churchill depicts through Angie, a character from Top Girls coming from a poor working class background, not so easy.
Other features of Thatcherism, apart from monetarism and liberalism, were definitely authoritarianism, the emphasis on hierarchy and order. The conservatism influenced the growing authority of the state and restricted the power of trade unions and local governments and authorities, which were the most accessible organizations to feminists. Therefore, Margaret Thatcher proved to be a very conservative politician that whose politics reinforced the returning to traditional patriarchal society, as Lovenduski further claims:
One aspect of the conservatism apparent in Thatcherism has been a form of patriotism, nationalism, or its detractors might even want to call it neoimperialism, which was most obviously manifest in the Falklands/Malvians episode. […] Closely allied with this, many have seen racist undertones in Thatcherism. Before she became Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher made a television appearance, following which electoral support for the Conservatives jumped by several points, in which she talked of the danger of British family life being ´swamped´ by alien cultures. In the prevailing climate of race relations in Britain, it is difficult to view this remark as an innocent one. (35)
Thus, through her remarks, Margaret Thatcher can be perceived as a very conservative politician stressing, among other conservative values, a return to traditional patriarchal family. Thatcher’s restricting policies propagating individual enterprise and self-reliance can be widely depicted in her approach to feminism, to which she was hostile. However, in her youth, Thatcher herself could have been perceived as having been aware of women’s question when she is quoted in Lovenduski’s work:
For a short while after our twins were born I was without help and had to do everything myself including three-hourly feeds day and night, so I know how exhausting children and housework can be! As well as being exhausted, however, I felt nothing more than a drudge … I had little to talk about when my husband came home in the evening and all the time I was consciously looking forward to what I called ´getting back to work´- namely, to using some of the mental resources which I had been expressly trained to use for years (43)
Hence, as many women of that period, Margaret Thatcher felt the need to realise her skills outside the family as well, she was aware of salutary effects of working and realising herself in a public sphere. However, after becoming the first woman Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher seemed to forget about the opinions and beliefs that she articulated and represented before, when she was at home with her small children. And thus, as will be further suggested in connection with the analysis of the play Top Girls, instead of improving the quality of women’s lives, Thatcher acquired policies that in fact made women’s lives much harder and their poverty more visible.
Women, celebrating their victory through Thatcher’s achievement to get to the top of the British politics, expected other achievements in women’s lives that would be influenced by the policy of the first woman Prime Minister.
As Alicia Tycer mentions, Churchill’s play Top Girls explores the political career of Margaret Thatcher and “although some viewed Thatcher’s rise to political power as indicative of progress for women, Churchill worried that Thatcher’s right-wing politics benefited a minority of wealthy Britons while leaving the less fortunate behind” (1). In addition to this Churchill argues that “She may be a woman but she isn’t a sister, she may be a sister but she isn’t a comrade. And, in fact, things have got much worse for women under Thatcher” (Churchill qtd in Tycer 19).
Thatcher, like Marlene in Top Girls, found it necessary to leave class markers behind her and to realize her skills outside the family. As Pugh states “Mrs. Thatcher chose to believe that she owed her success solely to her own talents and hard work” (335); and, therefore the disillusion of her as a Prime Minister who attempted to fit into traditionally patriarchal political system, can be best encompassed in Pugh’s statement: “One prime minister doesn’t make a matriarchy” (335).
However, when considering that the central aim of Women’s Liberation Movement was represented by the challenging of patriarchal hegemony and oppression, it can be argued that the intra-gender oppression is, in fact, the most obvious factor that contributed to women’s condition as a marginalized, oppressed group.
More than this, although feminists had struggled to regain for women ‘their voice’, ‘their identity’, as Churchill stated above “things have got much worse for women” (Churchill qtd in Tycer 19), as female tried to surpass her condition by placing herself in the role of her perecutor.
CHAPTER II
GENDER POLITICS AND DECONSTRUCTION OF PATRIARCHY IN
VINEGAR TOM, CLOUD NINE AND TOP GIRLS
Throughout history the difference between genders has been extensively discussed by different thinkers and later feminists. In this regard, feminists deplored he fact that women were viewed as secondary as far as gender was concerned and they were oppressed by the patriarchal system.
In analyzing the way women are viewed in a given society in general and in literary works in particular, the primary belief is that women seem to be more oppressed than liberated. This fact provides insights to the meaning of Elaine Aston’s point that “patriarchal oppression articulates the marginality of women” (Aston, An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre 55). In this sense socialist feminism focuses on gender politics in relation to capitalism by exploring the intersection between race, class and gender. For socialist feminists, women’s oppression derives from economics as well from patriarchy since capitalism and patriarchy are mutually dependent. A patriarchal culture is carried over from one historical period to another to maintain the sexual hierarchy of society, a system whereby some men benefit economically and historically through gender inscription. Churchill herself became politicized when she married and had children. Within the enclosures of marriage and motherhood she found herself isolated from life outside these institutions. Her political identity was formed within this social context.Alicia Tycer points out some of Churchill’s disparate feelings and quotes her discontents and growing politicization:
I didn’t feel part of what was happening in the sixties. During that time I felt isolated. I had small children and was having miscarriages. It was an extremely solitary life. What politicized me was being discontent with my own life of being a barrister’s wife and just being at home […] it seemed claustrophobic […] By the mid-60s, I had this gloomy feeling that when the Revolution came I would be swept away. (Churchill qtd in Tycer, Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls 6)
Churchill’s comment is based on the fact that although the 1960s were a period of upheaval and beginning of a new era, Churchill’s duties as a parent separated her from these newly progressive events.
In the broad feminist perspective, patriarchal oppression consists in the imposition of certain social standards of femininity on all biological women, in order to make women and society believe that the chosen standards for femininity are natural. Feminists are thus faced with the task of elucidating the confusion between the terms femininity and femaleness.
In her book Sexual /Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, Toril Moi states that: “Though political reality (the fact that patriarchy defines women and oppresses them accordingly) still makes it necessary to campaign in the name of women, it is important to recognize that in this struggle a woman cannot be: she can only exist negatively, as it were, through her refusal of that which is given” (163) .
Accordingly, for feminists the terms ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ refer to social constructs, representing patterns of sexuality and behaviour imposed by cultural and social norms. The terms ‘female’ and ‘male’ are used to refer to the exclusively biological aspects of sexual difference. The American feminist writer, Betty Friedan, presents femininity as an artificial construct in her book The Feminine Mystique (1963). Later Eva Figes, in Patriarchal Attitudes (1970) asks: “What is a ‘natural’ man or woman? One is forced to answer that there is no such thing” (13).
The rejection of the notion of ‘femininity’ as a derivative of biology also features in the work of the influential French writer, Simone de Beauvoir. In her feminist study, The Second Sex (1949), de Beauvoir describes how one is not born a woman – one becomes one. She claims that “it is not the body-object described by biologists that actually exists, but the body as lived in by the subject. Woman is a female to the extent that she feels herself as such…It is not nature that defines woman; it is she who defines herself by dealing with nature on her own account in her emotional life” . Biology, for de Beauvoir, does not determine woman’s nature, but powerfully affects and partially explains her history; woman is what humanity has made of the biological female in the course of its history. She refutes the view that woman can be understood either in terms of her biological function or psychological function and implies that one becomes a woman only after facing certain changes and life experiences. Thus, neither biological nor psychological characteristics could define one’s ‘gender’.
In Gender Trouble Judith Butler develops de Beauvoir’s theory on feminism and elaborates on her analysis:
Beauvoir is clear that ‘one becomes a woman’, but always under a cultural compulsion to become one. And clearly, the compulsion does not come from ‘sex’. There is nothing in her account that guarantees that the ‘one’ who becomes a woman is necessarily female. If ‘the body is a situation’, as she claims, there is no recourse to a body that has not always already been interpreted by cultural meanings; hence, sex could not qualify as a prediscursive anatomical facticity. Indeed, sex, by definition, will be shown to have been gender all along.
Butler’s comments lead to the understanding that gender is acquired in time through undertaking various actions. She refers to gender as “a kind of persistent impersonation that passes as the real (viii), by making the distinction between sex and gender “is no longer possible to attribute the values or social functions of women to biological necessity, and neither can we refer meaningfully to natural or unnatural gendered behaviour: all gender is, by definition, unnatural” . This perception motivates Churchill’s frequent use of cross-dressing as a dramaturgical device. Butler asks:
Is drag the imitation of gender, or does it dramatize the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established? Does being female constitute a ‘natural fact’ or a cultural performance, or is ‘naturalness’ constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within the categories of sex? (viii).
She asserts that “gender practices within gay and lesbian cultures often thematize ‘the natural’ in parodic contexts that bring into relief the performative construction of an original and true sex” (viii), and questions what other foundational categories of identity can be exposed as productions that create the effect of the natural, or original.
Socialist feminism seeks to locate oppression in terms of the complex matrix of gender, class, race and ideology, and to identify the historical settings of such oppression in order to radically transform society. Reinelt states that the acting method which was widely adopted by feminist groups in the 1970s was based on the theory and practice of Brechtian theatre. Bertolt Brecht, an ardent socialist, outlined the idea that theatre could create the intellectual climate for social change. He viewed a successful theatre production as one that engaged the audience on an intellectual, as opposed to an emotional level. He developed the convention of what he termed ‘epic theatre’, though he was not, of course, the first to employ epic techniques (Reinelt,24).Plays written in this convention break down the unified work of art with the goal of instructing. Such plays are predominantly episodic in structure, usually dealing with history or foreign lands, covering a great period of time, shifting locale frequently, with intricate plots and a large number of characters.
In her drama, Churchill adapts epic theatre conventions into a style uniquely suited to her socialist-feminist writing technique, particularly in her disregard for the linearity of traditional drama. Her selected plays Vinegar Tom (1976), Cloud Nine (1979) and Top Girls (1982) are particularly representative for the time period in question. The 1970s and 1980s were significant for British feminists. The rise of women’s movement had influenced the first specifically gender-oriented political demonstrations since the suffragette movement and feminists began to locate the oppression of women and therefore, male domination was challenged in all fields. At the same time women’s organizations emerged, including the first women’s theatre collectives. The three plays discussed offer a significant analysis of sexual class oppression and gender politics of the time period.
In Vinegar Tom (1976) Churchill uncovers traditional history from a socialist feminist perspective, revealing the economic and gender bias of the seventeenth-century witch hunts (Aston, Caryl Churchill 26). Although the play is not based on any precise historical events, it is set during a time when English society was moving swiftly from a feudal-type structure to a capitalistic one when the last of the major English witch hunts was taking place. It is in the context of this social upheaval that Churchill presents the women who become society’s scapegoats. Although capitalism as an institution was still emergent in terms of the time period of the narrative, the contemporary translation of the materialism, or economics, in the play can be expressed as capitalism. As a “play about witches with no witches in it; a play not about evil, hysteria and possession by the devil but about poverty, humiliation and prejudice, and how the women accused of witchcraft saw themselves” (Caryl Churchill, “Plays I” Vinegar Tom 127), it grapples with issues of class and gender in a patriarchal seventeenth century society. The women in Vinegar Tom are not witches but are defined as such because they do not conform to the male construction of female identity, or are economically disadvantaged. They are the seventeenth century’s victims of destructive capitalist patriarchy, but Churchill forces the audience to question what form witch hunting has taken in the present. The play, fragmented in twenty-one scenes separated by songs, mainly focuses on representing women’s life in a rural society where economic inequalities and patriarchal hegemony work together to create a witch hunt. Four women are persecuted and condemned to torture and hanging because of the ‘crimes’ of being poor, old, single or unconventional. Churchill exposes the punishment of women whose acts of non-conformity threaten the sexual and economic hierarchy. She emphasizes how low value within the economic hierarchy increases vulnerability and marginality. The four women accused of being witches, Joan, Alice, Susan and Ellen, all try to act in an autonomous manner, sexually or economically, and are violently expelled from society.
The play primarily focuses on relationships between women while the songs explicitly combat the male oppression. The song is a theatrical device that Churchill uses both in Vinegar Tom and Cloud Nine, in order to distance the audience from the events of the play. Elaine Aston outlines that the songs “performed out of character and in modern dress, create the opportunity for the performer to insert her body into the performance text as a si[gh]te of disruption. This (…) offers a way of representing the marginal and the absent in dominant systems of representation” (Aston, Caryl Churchill 27). The songs are to be perceived as personal urgings of the women playing these roles and shift the audience’s attention from the events on stage to the reality of facing women’s oppression in the present.
The first two songs in Vinegar Tom, “Nobody Sings” and “Oh, Doctor”, specifically display the invisibility of women as a representative symbol of identity. The woman’s plea to men “What’s wrong with the way I am? … Stop cutting me apart before I die. … Put back my body… I want to see myself … (Vinegar Tom 156) emphasizes the phenomenon of female invisibility. The distinction between the biological body and the body as object of representation outlines the fact that women are denied to own their bodies and they cannot be represented as a whole. Through the means of the song women are allowed to move beyond the patriarchal system of representation, where the female body is abused and fragmented, to a space which emphasizes the possibility for change. Throughout the play Churchill reminds the audience of the overlap attitudes to women and Kritzer asserts that “the undisguised rejection of male privilege in this play probably accounts for the disproportionate share of negative comments (…) that it has received from male critics, who have referred to Vinegar Tom as ‘graphic’, ‘shrill’ and ‘hysterical’ (95)
The action of the play is centered on Jack and Margery, a couple looking for economic success. Jack is both financially and sexually frustrated, while Margery’s sexual defeat is obvious in her repeated complaints that the “butter won’t come” (Vinegar Tom 142), as an aspect of sexual imagery that pervades the play. Their dreams of economic prosperity are threatened by their dying cattle, and they immediately search for a scapegoat. Jack initially blames himself, stating that “it’s my sins those calves shaking and stinking and swelling up their bellies in there” (Vinegar Tom 152), but he immediately changes his thoughts when Margery suggests that all their problems are caused by a witch: “If we’re bewitched, Jack, that explains all” (Vinegar Tom 152). The man agrees with his wife’s idea of witchery, as it clears his conscience: “Then it’s not my sins. Good folks get bewitched” (Vinegar Tom 153). They find their scapegoat in the person of Joan Noakes, who is also blamed for Jack losing the use of one of his hands and for Margery’s headaches.
Joan Noakes is the first woman to be accused of witchery. She defies the economic and social hierarchy when trying to appeal to Margery’s religious code and desire for social position to procure ‘a little yeast to do a little baking now and brew a little beer maybe” (Vinegar Tom 143). When Margery refuses Joan’s request and asks her to get out, Joan curses her: “Damn your butter to hell (…). Devil take you and your man and your fields and your cows and your butter and your yeast and your beer and your bread and your cider and your cold face” (Vinegar Tom 144).
By enumerating Margery’s material possessions, Joan highlights that the overwhelming social difference between them is determined by material condition. Right after Joan is being hanged, Margery gives thanks that the witched has been destroyed and the good has been blessed, when in fact Joan is the one who has suffered a humiliating and cruel death on Margery’s account, for her sins of poverty and social indecency. Margery appears to share no sense of solidarity with the other women as she conforms to the standards imposed by patriarchal society and even takes part in the prosecution of women.
Despite Margery’s collusion with the male dominant order, she also faces women’s oppression, being exploited both as Jack’s wife and as a domestic labourer. The nuclear family is represented by the patriarchal system which reinforces the woman’s oppressive condition. Jack orders Margery to “hurry up with that butter, woman (…). There’s other work to do” (Vinegar Tom 142). His words resemble those of employer and employee, defining Margery’s condition in the capitalist patriarchal society. When referring to her as “Lazy slut, get on with it” (Vinegar Tom 143), Margery is humiliated and gains a lower status both as a woman and as a labourer.
Alice, a young unmarried mother, emphasizes the sexually active body of women’s representation. The first scene of the play depicts her sexual encounter with an unknown man in black, in a roadside ditch. By asking her ‘Am I the devil?’ the man emphasizes and continually tries to reinforce the masculine power, which introduces to the audience with the common belief that a normal practice of all witches is carnal copulation with devils, as outlined in Malleus Maleficarum, The Hammer of Witches, a handbook on witches written by Dominican monks James Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer. Churchill’s specification that Kramer and Sprenger are to be played by the ‘hanged’ women, Joan and Ellen, introduces the dimension of multiple-role playing. This theatrical device outlines a clear difference between the actor performing a role and the character represented by the actor. Joan and Ellen’s resurrection as the men who predetermined their executions allows a constructive disengagement of the speaking body and its signifiers. Churchill’s simultaneous presentation of two time periods, unrelated to the historical narrative, distances the audience from the story and prevents it from identifying with any individual character. Churchill’s concern is not with these characters or with the seventeenth century, but with the ideology on which women’s oppression is based: “This scene promotes a realization that the entire recorded history of women has been created in and through patriarchal ideology” .
As a married man who has followed his sexual desire, the unknown black man condemns and courses Alice for being the object of his fantasy, a fact outlined by the play’s last song ‘Evil Women’. The man tries to categorize Alice, but finds himself unable to use a suitable word for an unattached, sexually liberated woman: “You’re not a wife or a widow! You’re not a virgin. Tell me a name for what you are” (Vinegar Tom 137), and ends by classifying her as a ‘whore’ and a ‘witch’ (Vinegar Tom 137). The French feminist Luce Irigaray describes in This Sex Which is Not One (1985) how women have been historically limited to being sexual objects for men:
“Mother, virgin, prostitute: these are the social roles imposed on women. The characteristics of so-called feminine sexuality derives from them; the valorization of reproduction and nursing, faithfulness, modesty, ignorance of and even lack of interest in sexual pleasure; a passive acceptance of men’s activity; seductiveness, in order to arouse the consumers ‘desire while offering herself as its material support without getting pleasure herself (…). Neither as mother nor as virgin nor as prostitute has woman any right to her own pleasure” (186).
Alice’s rejection of Jack’s advances, as a result to her infatuation with the unknown man from the first scene, confirms the hollowness of her categorization as a ‘whore’. Jack exploits her economical condition in the social hierarchy, that of a poor woman close to starvation, for his sexual gain: “Alice, I’d be good to you. I’m not a poor man. I could give you things for your boy” (Vinegar Tom 148). Furthermore, Jack’s gestus of attempting Alice with apples subverts the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Churchill represents the sinfulness of man, rather than that of the woman. Unsuccessful in his attempt to seduce Alice, Jack accuses her of having bewitched him by removing his penis. In terms of Malleus Malificarum it was commonly believed that witches had the power to render any man impotent at any time and with any woman, by making his penis appear or disappear.
In an ironic contrast to the first scene of the play, where Alice was labeled a witch for choosing to surrender to her sexual desire, she is now considered to be a witch for resisting Jack’s sexual advances. In a Brechtian gestus that Elin Diamond calls “the crude double-bind logic by which innocent women were condemned as witches” (Diamond Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre 267), Churchill reveals how Alice is perceived in the phallagocentric order as a castrating figure. When Jack accuses her of removing his penis, arguing that “give it me back (…). You bewitched me. You took it off me!” (Vinegar Tom 163),Alice “puts her hands between his thighs” saying “There. It’s back!” (Vinegar Tom 164). Diamond emphasizes the importance of this gesture, by reveling the male terror of such logic: “the economy of sight (as of commodities) is a phallic economy based on castration fear of disavowal of a feared absence. The female shores up that economy by functioning as a lack in relation to phallic presence; as the male’s complement and opposite female acts as guarantor against castration” (Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre 267). After endowing Alice with the power of the phallus to give him back his penis, Jack seeks to nullify this power by labeling her a witch.
Alice’s bitter outburst as she waits to be hanged in the public square, with the corpses of her mother and Ellen dangling behind her, provides the anger of women at their oppression. Her anger is palpable: “I’m not a witch. But I wish I was. If I could live I’d be a witch now after what they’ve done (…). Oh if I could meet with the devil now I’d give him anything if he’d give me power” (Vinegar Tom 175). Although Alice’s speech in the end makes no difference to the outcome of the narrative, it does, however, serve a political purpose in that it “breaks the silence that has aided her oppressors throughout history by renouncing powerlessness even at the price of embracing an imagined evil, Alice offers a political response to the narrative from within that narrative” .
Susan, another oppressed women accused of witchery, represents the birthing body of the play due to the fact that she is constantly either pregnant or miscarrying. She is concerned about the fact of giving birth again, after numerous miscarriages, outlining that “nearly died last time” (Vinegar Tom 146). Her husband is insensitive to her fears, he wants to prove his virility without taking in consideration the woman’s needs: “let’s hope a fine child comes of it” (Vinegar Tom 145). As Adrianne Rich emphasizes, patriarchy requires that “women shall assume the major burden of pain and self-denial for the furtherance of the species” (43). Although Susan is certain about not wanting another pregnancy, she is afraid of taking control of her body, and in this fear and uncertainty she functions as the lack in relation to phallic presence.
Susan, as a mother, “bears the weight of Eve’s transgression (is, thus, the first offender, the polluted one, the polluter) yet precisely because of this she is expected to carry the burden of male salvation” . Churchill conveys religion as a convenient tool in the oppression of women, sanctifying society’s patriarchal power arrangement, and allowing men to distance themselves from any sense of guilt at their unjust wielding of that power.
Alice convinces Susan to visit Ellen, the ‘cunning woman’ who offers Susan a potion to induce miscarriage. Ellen’s words “If you won’t do anything to help yourself you must stay as you are” (Vinegar Tom 155), are representative for Churchill’s hope that women will progress from the state of passive acceptance to one where a meaningful attempt is made to challenge the existing order. Susan finally takes the potion and, thus, she must ultimately suffer the consequences of her act of independence when she is hanged. Rich argues that “the experience of maternity and the experience of sexuality have both been channeled to serve male interests; behaviour which threatens the institutions, such as illegitimacy, abortion (…) is considered deviant or criminal” (42).
Ellen is a self sufficient woman who works outside of the monetary system, dispensing herbal medicines and advice to the villagers. She represents Churchill’s offer for women to living a life free from conventions. Ellen’s wish for the villagers to take responsibility for their actions is outlined in her insistence that Susan makes her own choice regarding the abortion. Her social status thrusts her before the unrelenting gaze of the witch hunter: “These cunning women are worst of all (…) yes, all witches deserve death, but especially good witches” (Vinegar Tom 167). Ellen reiterates “ I’ve done nothing wrong” (Vinegar Tom 169), but she is powerless.
Vinegar Tom depicts the power and interdependence of patriarchy and materialism as a complex reality, which none of the women in the play are able to fully understand. Women’s oppression, represented graphically onstage by torture and hanging, derives from non-compliance with the economic system, like Ellen and Joan or from the sexual system, like Alice and Susan. A patriarchal culture is carried over from one historical period to another to protect the sexual hierarchy of society, and women are therefore products of their social history, but they are capable of shaping their own lives as well. Churchill frees herself from convention and empowers herself by the very structure of the play: “The anarchic and recuperative power of play points to a Brechtian way out for
contemporary women” (Kritzer 95). Her attempt to bring the audience to a new, or greater, level of consciousness is a means of initiating change, and the anger and grim determination contained in the language of Joan and Ellen at the close of the play further locates a possibility for change: the powerless challenge their oppressors by imagining alternative social structures. Churchill appeals to members of the audience to examine their roles in the perpetuation of victimization and discrimination, and stimulates women to reflect on “how they’re stopping you now”. Echoed throughout the play is the question posed in the song Lament for the Witches: “Where have the witches gone? / Who are the witches now?” (Vinegar Tom 170).
In Cloud Nine, written in 1979, Churchill highlights the extent to which patriarchal structure, gender definition and sexual orientation are interrelated, presenting a setting where an ostensibly rigid patriarchal sex and gender system is in operation, and another where the traditional sex and gender system has been broken down. The women, homosexuals and natives of the first act are shown to be the victims of the patriarchal power system, and Churchill uses images to equate sexual repression and sexual imperialism with economic repression and political imperialism. The play does not focus only on one sexually oppressed group, but encompasses the broad spectrum of sexual politics. This aspect is sustained by Churchill’s own remark, as she is quoted in Elaine Aston’s work Caryl Churchill:
One of the things I wanted very much to do, in Cloud Nine…was to write a play about sexual politics that would not just be a woman’s thing. I felt there were quite a few women’s groups doing plays from that point of view. And gay groups…There was nothing that also involved straight men. Max [Stafford Clark], the director, even said, at the beginning ‘Well shouldn’t you perhaps be doing this with a woman director?’ He didn’t see that it was his subject as well. (37)
For feminists, gender is “the crucial encoding of the subject that has made it historically a position unavailable for women to inhabit” . Social conventions about the female gender are encoded in all signs for women and they produce a meaning based upon cultural associations with the female gender. Feminist semiotic theory has attempted to examine and deconstruct “this sign for ‘woman’ in order to (…) distinguish biology from culture and experience from ideology” . In Cloud Nine the costumed body is cross-displayed to deconstruct gender. The cross-gender casting, a theatrical device marginally employed in Vinegar Tom, together with the doubling of roles and cross-racial casting, are employed in the first act to visually disrupt sexual and racial identities. Churchill uses these casting techniques to destabilize the fixed sexual identities determined by the dominant heterosexual ideology. They serve to overturn rigid perceptions of sexual identities and challenge gender definitions that are based on physical differences. Elin Diamond claims that “cross-gender and cross-racial casting demonstrate that gender and servitude are culturally coded effects that effectively erase the body and its desires” (Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre 265). Clive and Betty, who is a woman played by a man, may be viewed as either a homosexual or heterosexual couple, based on whether one views Betty in terms of gender or biology. These perceptions become ridiculous in the patriarchal society system when introducing a man as “all I dreamt a wife should be” (Cloud Nine 251).
Cross-dressing, a timeless theatrical device, dismantles the institutionalized constructions of gender and sexuality: it exposes the artificiality of conventional gender, while creating a new state of being. Aston claims that the ideological pleasure of cross-dressing in Cloud Nine is that it allows the spectator the possibility of seeing beyond institutionalized gender roles and sexuality by crossing vestimentary signs of masculinity and femininity with the wrong body” (Aston, Caryl Churchill 32). The cross-gender casting in the context of the colonial setting is suggestive of the connection between dominant ideology and prescribed gender roles and sexuality. This is displayed at the beginning of the play as the patriarch, Clive, introduces his family around the flagpole displaying the Union Jack: Betty his wife, ‘man’s creation’, is played by a man; Edward his son is played by a woman; his black servant, Joshua, is played by a white actor, and Victoria, his daughter, is represented by a doll. Although the characters verbally consent to the imperialist roles assigned to them by Clive as what they want to be, visually their visual bodies dismantle the construction of sexual and racial identities.
By confusing sexual identities, Churchill suggests non-representability. Identity is based on ideology, and, in particular, the patriarchal order does not represent women. Representing Betty as a man does not imply that the man is feminized, but that the female is absent. Betty as a woman is not represented. She is a man-made woman, and her identity is constituted by encoded female behaviour. A powerful social gestus is seen when Betty rearranges the folds of her (his) skirt, as the very awkwardness draws attention to the fact that feminine social graces are learned behaviour. Sexual identity in the patriarchal family amounts to gender codes. Feminine and masculine patterns and codes of behaviour force the characters into gender roles. Mrs. Saunders and Ellen, two versions of female marginality, are played by the same actress. They are indicative of how women are divided from themselves. The coming together of their shattered selves potentially constitutes the woman of the future: Ellen’s lesbianism and Mrs. Saunders’uninhibited sexuality and desire for independence constitute the woman portrayed in Act Two.
In the first act, Churchill critiques the Victorian values of Empire and family in a colonial setting, while in the second one she elicits the characters from the first act to a contemporary London setting of the 1970’s. Although the time had shifted with more than one hundred years, the characters find themselves only twenty-five years later. As Elaine Aston emphasizes “the past is physically marked in and on the body of the performer present” (Aston, An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre 32).
Cloud Nine opens with a song, Come Gather Sons of England, simultaneously evoking British imperialism and patriarchy. In its location in Victorian Africa, the setting of the first act serves as a metaphor for the oppressive patriarchal structure that defines the roles of women, homosexuals and black people. Clive is the stereotype of the paternalist imperialist: he acts as caretaker of his wife and children, a larger family of other British colonials and the country’s native population. Churchill’s critique extends beyond patriarchal gender construction to the assertion that patriarchy depends on notions of racial supremacy. Clive imposes his ideals on his family and the native African people, while the natives agitate against imperial rule – symbolically reflected through the experiences of the single colonial family. The scene itself is set on the verandah of Clive’s house, solidifying the sense that Clive’s home is the bedrock of the system. Throughout the act, Clive intends to maintain society in the state he wishes to be. He clings on his ideals of a faithful wife, a devoted servant and a manly son. In the middle of a native rebellion, Clive and his family celebrate Christmas, and while the Empire collapses around them, Harry does a magic trick with a union jack. Despite escalating evidence to the contrary, Clive clings to his superficial perceptions of the other characters. For him, Mrs Saunders, a widow of independent means, represents sex, and her ‘amazing spirit’ (Cloud Nine 259) results in his state of permanent sexual arousal. Edward is, or should be, manly, and should not try to play with Victoria’s doll. Joshua is Clive’s ‘boy’ (Cloud Nine 251), and is devoted to him, he is “a jewel…you’d hardly notice that the fellow’s black” (Cloud Nine 251). Harry’s homosexuality is abhorred and Ellen’s lesbianism is invisible. “Both Harry and Ellen are ‘offside’ bodies in the symbolic which have to be corrected” (Aston, Carryl Churchill 33). But this world is precarious from the starting point and, beneath appearances, there’s an obvious mock of the patriarchal system of representation.
Clive is the central patriarchal figure of act one. He is the representative of the queen in Africa, master of the house and head of the family. He asserts his patriarchal position by introducing his wife, son, daughter and servant to the audience: ‘This is my family…we serve the Queen wherever we may roam…I am a father to the natives here, And father to my family so dear’ (Cloud Nine, 251). When the characters introduce themselves after Clive’s cue, the pervasion of patriarchy becomes abundantly clear. Betty, Clive’s wife, tells the audience that she is “a man’s creation as you see”, and declares that “what men want is what I want to be” (Cloud Nine 251). She has no sense of her self-worth as a woman, but strives to live her life by male-specified codes of behaviour. Betty’s two-year-old daughter is of such diminished regard that she is played by a dummy: she is petted like a toy, or ignored. She is so insignificant that Clive heaps her together with his mother-in-law and Edward’s governess when introducing her. Clive also marginalizes the three women’s roles, stating that there is “no need for any speeches by the rest. My daughter, mother-in-law and governess’ (Cloud Nine 252). Clive’s treatment of Edward, his son, contrasts with that of his treatment of his daughter. He takes an active interest in drawing in Edward the tenets of patriarchy: ‘I’m doing all I can to teach him to grow up to be a man’ (Cloud Nine 252). Edward in turn says of himself, ‘What father wants, I’d dearly like to be’. He is, however, homosexual, and adds that ‘I find it rather hard as you can see’ (Cloud Nine 252). In turn, Joshua, the black servant, aspires to be what white men want him to be. Reciting a line from The Little Black Boy, he states, “My skin is black but oh my soul is white…What white men want is what I want to be” (Cloud Nine 251/252). He stifles his own identity and bows to the exploitative social order: “I hate my tribe. My master is my light” (Cloud Nine 251).
Clive and the members of his household speak in rhymed couplets in the opening introduction, suggesting the artificiality of the situation: the characters are positioned into various roles by a smooth shining of words.
At the beginning of the play, Clive, Betty, their children, black man-servant, governess and friends all appear to be exaggerated stereotypes of their given roles. Clive, the authoritarian husband and father, keeps his wife subjected while he lusts after a lady of independent means, and it becomes evident as the act proceeds that it is only he who is content in his role. All the other characters are playing roles that have been imposed upon them. Churchill overturns traditional structures, so that patterns of behaviour wholly acceptable in terms of ingrained social standards begin to seem ridiculous: Betty, Clive’s dutiful wife, becomes infatuated with heroic explorer Harry Bagley, who is actually a homosexual; Harry deliberates over his loyalty to Clive and his love for Betty, then has sex with the black servant and Clive’s son; Ellen reveals that her devotion to Betty is based on sexual attraction rather than obligation; Mrs. Saunders has sex with Clive because she enjoys ‘the sensation’ (Cloud Nine 263), but he undermines her claims of independence by satisfying himself only. The act closes with a wedding, but the bride and groom are a homosexual and a lesbian. Churchill unsettles thus habitual perceptions and transfers the audience into a liminal space where alternative social codes and structures can be imagined.
The second act reflects a new time and setting, and a sexual liberation of the constraints of the first act. It is set in London Park, one hundred years later, in 1979. Although the time period was the contemporary time for Churchill when she wrote the play, the setting is now more than twenty years in the past. In the first act, any resistance to that which Clive’s society represents is camouflaged, while in the second it is blatant, the characters are choosing to reject society’s perception of them. Patriarchal marriage is no longer upheld as the ideal for relationships, and heterosexuality is no longer compulsory. The characters have acknowledged the existence of a plurality of desires and of potential ways of life and relationships. Social and sex roles have become more a matter of individual choice than of social imposition. There are sexualities, rather than one sexuality. Homosexuality is now unconcealed, and the sexual liberation manifests itself in the casualness about varieties of sexual behaviour. The characters are, however, struggling with gender roles and identities in that they are bewildered by the many options open to them, and there are still prejudices and preconceptions that need to be further explored. The play thus begins to narrow its focus to gender construction in the absence of the patriarch. The patriarchal family has been dissolved, but imperialism still haunts this new world. ‘The bitter end of colonialism’ (Cloud Nine 246) is apparent in the person of Lin’s soldier brother, who dies in Northern Ireland. Bill is Joshua’s counterpart in this act, in that the identities of both men are stifled by imperialist activity, and Bill’s ghost symbolizes the destructiveness of such activity.
While most of the action of the first act takes place on Clive’s verandah, the setting of the park in the second act is less confining. The free space of a park is able to accommodate a variety of character types and activities, and here the audience finds the characters exploring, like children. Although only one of the characters is a child, the other characters are engaged in a process of discovery which in a sense returns them temporarily to the status of children. The setting of a public space also emphasizes the degree to which sexuality and sexual choices have been brought into the open, although Edward’s fear of revealing his homosexuality does serve as a reminder that, in spite of this, some Victorian attitudes do persist.
The last scene of the play, when Betty comes into an awareness of herself, is set in late summer, and this can possibly be perceived as the progression to her ‘flowering’. In the first act, the family is Clive’s property, and his perceptions structure the act. Although he makes a brief appearance towards the end of the second act, he is absent from its action, and this absence is tantamount to an absence of roles and parameters consistent with oppressive ideology. While Clive’s words “we are not in this country to enjoy ourselves” echo through the first act, the pursuit of pleasure predominates in the second act, suggesting that the characters are in the process of freeing themselves from Clive’s value system. The characters experiment with different roles and possibilities, and the shattering of long-held sexual taboos tests the limits of the new freedom. By the end of the play, all the members of Clive’s family have managed to overcome the strictures that patriarchal definitions had placed on them.
Churchill’s dramatization of sexual politics in Cloud Nine demonstrates the way in which the personal is political and the political affects the personal, bringing together people’s internal states of being and the external political structures which affect them. The play’s deepest theme is power: that of colonizer over colony, husband over wife, parent over child. All the characters make changes in their personal lives in the context of these power relations, but they all acknowledge the difficulty of doing so: the options which individuals understand occur as a response to, and hence within, the dominant ideology. Although all the characters in the second act do change a little for the better, Churchill indicates that she is aware of the painfulness that change involves. Churchill suggests that there is hope for a society in the future, when gender relationships are not governed by an imposed power structure, when homosexual identities are not marginalized by heterosexuality, when race is not cause for oppression, and when women have moved beyond the objectification of the gaze.
Top Girls (1982), staged at the Royal Court Theatre in August 1982, is often cited as one of Churchill’s most accomplished plays. Through the means of her play, Churchill calls for collective action in class and female solidarity, providing criticism against women who advance themselves according to the tenets of patriarchal capitalism. The play opens with a dinner table scene with several historical female figures gathered in a celebration ceremony. These figures include a legendary Chinese woman, a woman taken from a Brueghel painting, a Chaucerian tale figure, a tenth century papal character, and a modern female top executive manager. To celebrate her promotion to the executive suite, the ambitious business woman calls these important characters of their time to a dinner party. The dinner guests enter the stage individually and without formal introduction, until later in the play. They interact in a realistic way even though they are aware of the impossibility of this meeting. When Griselda arrives in the middle of the scene, Marlene reflects on this gathering of women with the same interest she later has, during dessert:
“Now who do you know? This is Joan who was Pope in the ninth century, and Isabella Bird, the Victorian traveller, and Lady Nijo from Japan, Emperor’s concubine and Buddhist nun, thirteenth century, nearer your own time, and Gret who was painted by Brueghel. Griselda’s in Boccaccio and Petrarch and Chaucer because of her extraordinary marriage. I’d like profiteroles because they’re disgusting”. (Top Girls 74)
The common feature of Marlene’s dinner party guests is their activity: they are travellers, mothers who have lost children, and adventurers. Marlene’s points to this in her words: “I don’t think religious beliefs are something we have in common. Activity yes” (Top Girls 60). Each of the characters serves a purpose, they all made significant changes in their lives, had travelled and had also encountered difficulties combining children with their various activities.
Lady Nijo was a Japanese Emperor’s courtesan who later became a Buddhist nun, and is known to have travelled across Japan on foot, but her story is amplified by Churchill’s depiction of her. She became the concubine of a retired Emperor in Kyoto at the age of 14, and participated in the elaborate ceremonial and social life of the imperial family. Pope Joan’s existence in history is less certain. Although not historical fact, it is believed by some that Pope Joan disguised herself as a ‘boy’ to gain an education. She subsequently fell in love with a young monk at the monastery, and absconded with this monk to travel and study. Churchill depicted that this monk died and that Joan, as John the Englishman, went on to Rome where she entered the Church, becoming a Cardinal. The story relates that when Leo IV died, she became Pope John VIII, but her identity was revealed when she gave birth during a procession. The shocked crowd stoned her to death and dragged her body through the street. Dull Gret, the subject from the Pieter Brueghel painting Dulle Griet, is pictured wearing an apron and armour, symbolizing her dual roles as woman and warrior, leading a crowd of women through hell and fighting devils. She strides boldly forward, carrying the long sword of the giants of mythology, wearing a helmet and breastplate. Isabella Bird, a nineteenth-century Scottish traveller, is known as a woman of stubborn eccentricity. Born in Yorkshire, England, in 1831, the daughter of a clergyman, Isabella had a poor health for an extended period as a young woman. In 1854, on the advice of her doctor, Isabella travelled to the Americas, and she found in travelling the cure for her malady. She travelled extensively, and wrote about her adventures in the books A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains and Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan. Patient Griselda is known as a character in the literary texts of Boccaccio, Petrarch and Chaucer, and Churchill depicts her as the model of the self-sacrificing woman, denying herself both food and the right to express her own emotions. Griselda has been upheld as the role model for wifely obedience and subservience.
The story of Marlene’s life along with the one of the other characters give a painful reckoning of the choices, sacrifices and compromises that women made in their quest to reach the top. Women are portrayed as full participants in the economic system, but at a cost. The women’s dialogue records both patriarchal oppression and the desire to move beyond the conventional gender divide: Nijo turned from courtesan to nun, Joan acted against the patriarchal order by becoming Pope, and Isabella left the confines of domestic life for travel. However, in serious respects the achievements of all the speaking characters in the first scene, with the exception of Gret, are individualistic and made without actively challenging the systems of oppression. Griselda, who reaches the limits of wifely self-abasement, ultimately wins her children and husband through her absolute compliance with the system. Nijo travels alone as a nun, but only after she has lost favour with the Emperor. Joan becomes Pope, but in so doing she rejects her own sex. Isabella travels widely at the expense of her sister but only begins her travels once her father is dead, and refrains from travelling for the six years of her marriage. Joan is proud of her scholarly accomplishments and truly enjoyed being Pope, but at the same time she calls herself a heresy for daring to become Pope: “I had thought the Pope would know everything. I thought God would speak to me directly. But of course he knew I was a woman” (Top Girls 68). Furthermore, Nijo reveals her desire to please the Emperor and her love of fine clothing: “I can’t say I enjoyed my rough life. What I enjoyed most was being the Emperor’s favourite / wearing thin silk” ( Top Girls 58). Griselda’s narrative about becoming the wife of a Marquis after having been a peasant girl signifies the objectification of women in the heterosexual, male gaze. Rejection of the masculine is, thus, constantly at odds with the physical and verbal indications of patriarchal oppression. Nijo’s constant references to dress in the first act are also indicative of her narrow perception of sexual identities. Her understanding of the masculine and the feminine is informed by confining images, the external pointers. References to male and female clothing form the basis of the account of her rape by the Emperor: “He sent me an eight-layered gown and I sent it back…My thin gowns were badly ripped…he’d a green robe with a scarlet lining and very heavily embroidered trousers” (Top Girls 57). She cannot avoid using these stock indicators of masculinity and femininity. In her world, human bodies are also signed according to their respective places in the power order: “The Empress had always been my enemy, Marlene, she said I had no right to wear three-layered gowns. But I was the adopted daughter of my grandfather the Prime Minister. I had been publicly granted permission to wear thin silk” (Top Girls 66). She asks:
“Don’t you like getting dressed? I adored my clothes. When I was chosen to give sake to His Majesty’s brother, the Emperor Kameyana, on his formal visit, I wore raw silk pleated trousers and a seven-layered gown in shades of red, and two outer garments, yellow lined with green and a light green jacket. Lady Betto had a fivelayered gown in shades of green and purple”. (Top Girls 62)
Isabella Bird also references to clothes, by suggesting the domesticity of sewing: “I sat in Tobermory among Hennie’s flowers and sewed a complete outfit in Jaeger flannel” (Top Girls 66). The end of Griselda’s story, and the alcohol they have consumed throughout the scene, affects all the women deeply, and their reactions suggest that they begin to achieve some perspective on their histories. Griselda’s passivity and loving acceptance in the face of brutality seems to awaken each of them to some of the anger they have about their own situations. In the drunken climax of the dinner scene there is a verbal and physical representation of an attempt to reject patriarchal oppression Joan says “I can’t forgive anything” (Top Girls 79) while Isabella argues “How can people live on this dim pale island and wear our hideous clothes? I cannot and will not live the life of a lady” (Top Girls 80). Nijo realizes “Nobody gave me back my children” (Top Girls 79), and tells a story about how the women got even with the Emperor for allowing attendants to beat them at a ritual ceremony by attacking the Emperor themselves. Even Griselda says “I do think – I do wonder – it would have been nicer if Walter hadn’t had to” (Top Girls 81). Gret calls on women to leave their “baking or washing” to fight the “devils” in hell, to go “where the evil come from and pay the bastards out” (Top Girls 82) while Joan speaks some Latin and is sick in the corner. But the women do not evaluate the experiences themselves, or the structures responsible for their suffering, in any coherent or integral way. Their treatment of the waitress, who is invisible as a subject but highly visible as an object, is suggestive of their individualism. She is ordered about by everyone imperiously and is barely acknowledged. These historical ‘successful’ women are no more to be emulated than Marlene is, and the ‘top girls’ of the title is as ironic a description of them as it is of Marlene. They have sacrificed part of their female identity to images compliant with a male-dominated world, and it is, ironically, to these images that Marlene toasts. Marlene toasts herself and her guests, announcing, “We’ve all come a long way. To our courage, and the way we changed our lives and our extraordinary achievements” (Top Girls 67). Activity and achievement impress Marlene. It becomes clear that there is a lack of understanding on Marlene’s part as to the overall dynamics of oppression, as she equates individual female action with empowerment. She ostensibly allies herself to an anti-oppressionist position, asking Nijo “Are you saying he raped you?” (Top Girls 57) and declaring, “Walter’s a monster” (Top Girls 79). The hollowness of these words becomes evident as the circumstances of her life unfold, particularly as it comes to light that she has abandoned her child for selfish reasons.
Through the means of the play, Churchill examines the ‘top girls’, women who succeed in a ‘man’s world’ by accepting capitalistic structures and functioning within them, exploring the negative consequences of a system that copies the worst traits of male hierarchy by establishing a female hierarchy. The women in the play have internalized patriarchy, and reproduce the antagonistic exclusivity which feminism deplores as a characteristic of patriarchy. The achievements of the ‘top girls’ are valueless, as their ‘successes’ involve the adoption of traits that are destructive. Marlene, like Marion in Owners (another play written by Caryl Churchill), demonstrates that the capitalist impulse is not determined by the biological difference between male and female, but illustrates how women may also take on the values of the masculine. Women like Marlene are driven by the desire to own and control. Members of the dispossessed group, represented by Joyce and Angie, are the victims of the owning classes. Marlene is an individual character as well as a stock figure representative of an era. While Vinegar Tom coincided with the interest generated by the Woman’s Movement, Top Girls was staged at a time when women needed to examine more closely the complexities of feminism in the light of the politics of bonding and sisterhood of the seventies. The play is set in a very specific decade and political context, that of Thatcherism, and feminism in Britain in the eighties. Thatcher, like Marlene, was successful in a competitive, capitalist sense, and for socialist feminists, was therefore not legitimately a feminist. Churchill uses Marlene as Thatcher’s equivalent in the play, the symbol of the 1980’s career woman, or ‘superwoman’, but, indeed, the play is not about Marlene’s success but rather about her failures. She fails because in her singular ascent to the top of the corporate ladder, ‘female community’ is lost. Marlene embraces patriarchal capitalism and in so doing she abandons her less ‘fortunate’ sisters. The effects of ‘superwoman’ status on individual women, their families and society more generally, come to light in the play. The oppression suffered by women is systemic; the patriarchal power systems ensure the subjugation of women, their lack of control over their lives and their children’s lives.
CHAPTER III
FEMINININE RELATIONSHIPS AND MOTHERHOOD
In the 1970s and 1980s Caryl Churchill wrote several plays in which she challenged the popular image of women, by focusing on the social, political and economic effects of womanhood and by constructing some alternative histories, both thematically and structurally. This chapter provides a close examination of the aspects of patriarchal ideology that constructs Churchill’s female characters as women, mothers and sisters, and also outlines the ways through which Churchill depicts the patriarchal domains that govern the characters’ relationships in Churchill’s plays Vinegar Tom (1976), Cloud Nine (1979) and Top Girls (1982), selected for analysis here.
Churchill’s plays challenge the traditional representation of women as idealized mothers and nurturers and, by avoiding or manipulating the stereotypical and archetypical representation of women, allows her audience to consider motherhood in various new ways and contexts. As Catherine Itzin mentions in Stages in the Revolution: Political Theatre in Britain Since 1968, “British theatre of 1968-1978 was primarily a theatre of political change” . The politics were rooted not only in the provocative content of Churchill’s plays but also in the rejection and subversion of traditional theatrical conventions, as well as in the development of a strong “fringe theatre movement which established new models for theatrical production” (Itzin 12).
Churchill’s experimentation with form, such as creating episodic, non-linear narratives and integrating song and dance into her plays, challenges the established models of theatrical representation. She presents history in a non-naturalistic way, a technique that emphasizes the thematic connection between the past and the present, while simultaneously contests the traditions that have left women out.
In the 20th Century English History Plays:From Shaw to Bond, Niloufer Harben states that:
Modern historical playwrights continually draw upon the present, which enables us to see history as knit into the fabric of our own time. The present is carried into the past as the past is sometimes carried into the future. Startling anachronisms are very much a part of the style of modern playwrights in their effort to drive from the connections between past and present. (…) All we can know of the past is largely a subjective interpretation, and each observer rewrites history according to the bias of his own age. (225)
Churchill uses history as a starting point for the examination of her own time and place, as she face clear contemporary political and social concerns that are deeply rooted in the history she represents on stage. The historical context in which the plays were written and originally staged serves as a counterpoint for the historical subjects of the plays. According to Janelle Reinelt, the socialist feminist movement that was emerging in Great Britain during the 1970s “recognized hugely powerful socio-economic categories among women and men, making some lived realities more unequal that others, and also criticized radical feminists for failing to understand how much difference class made in the lived experiences of women who did not really share values when divided by status or money” (On Feminist And Sexual Politics 30).
Caryl Churchill was one of the militants for a non-authoritarian society, and in an interview with Linda Fitzsimmons, she stated:
I’ve constantly said that I’m both a socialist and a feminist. If someone says ‘a socialist playwright’ or ‘a feminist playwright’ they can suggest to some people something rather narrow which doesn’t cover as many things as you might be thinking about. I got asked if I mind being called a woman playwright or a feminist playwright, and again it depends entirely on what’s going on in the mind of the person who says it.(Fitzsimmons 19)
Nevertheless, the use of history is critical to the socialist feminist perspective and Churchill’s plays are written closely following this socialist view. By setting the plays in previous historical periods, Churchill allows connections between the past and the present and encourages the audience to examine and question the cultural position of women, by emphasizing the complex intersections between feminine solidarity, motherhood and universal sisterhood. Churchill uses history as a means of treating the present as a historical monument to explore contemporary society. In Contemporary Feminist Theatre: To Each Her Own (1993), Lizbeth Goodman argues that Churchill considers theatre as an “art form in which political change can be effected directly, as in guerilla warfare” (221). Taking further Goodman’s statement, I believe that Churchill’s consistent examination of women’s place in history, particularly the ways in which social and political attitudes towards mothers and motherhood shape women’s lives, contributes to the political nature of her work. As though the definition of motherhood is not transcendent, the way in which history functions in Churchill’s plays emphasizes the fact that certain problems women face in relation to mothering do survive across time. This view is also sustained by Nancy Chodorow who argues that:
The sex-gender system is continually changing (…) yet it stays the same in fundamental ways. It does not help us to deny the social and psychological rootedness of women’s mothering nor the extent to which we participate, often in spite of our conscious intentions, in contemporary sex-gender arrangements. (215)
‘Woman’ and ‘mother’ are two interrelated terms that can be conjoined through the means of a cultural, social and political perspective. In Vinegar Tom for example, women’s place in the seventeenth century was defined in part, by their ability to reproduce, connected to the Biblical Story of Eve-the pain of labour as suffering from Eve’s sin and carnality. Whether a woman is a mother, it does not matter; the potential to reproduce is what differentiates women and, as an immediate result of this categorization, the woman/mother becomes a unified category of gender. According to Nancy Chodorow, the major difference between genders can be summarized as follows:
women’s mothering is a central and defining feature of the social organization of gender (…) because of their child-care responsabilities, women’s primary social location is domestic, [whereas] men find a primary social location in the public sphere (…) It gives men power to create and enforce institutions of social and political control, important among these to control marriage as an institution that both expresses men’s rights in women’s sexual and reproductive capacities and reinforces these rights. (9)
Churchill herself, as quoted in Catherine Itzin’s Stages in the Revolution: Political Theatre in Britain Since 1968, noted that found the experience of staying at home and raising children as politicizing, particularly because she felt so isolated from the outside world. She stated that:
I didn’t really feel a part of what was happening in the sixties. During that time I felt isolated. I had small children and was having miscarriages. It was an extremely solitary life. What politicized me was being discontent with my own way of life- of being a barrister’s wife and just being at home with small children. (Itzin 279)
The 1970s provided for women in Britain a framework of politics that was strongly emphasized by class structure and “at least one obstacle in the women’s movement was a clear understanding of the relationship between gender conflict and class conflict” (Keyssar 16).
Churchill’s interest in motherhood has nothing to do with establishing a new gender, but rather examines the ways through which women’s reproduction acts as an additional factor to their material oppression. Throughout her plays, Churchill suggests that many ‘institutional arrangements’ dictate the choices women have about motherhood, such as a lack of adequate day care options for working mothers, that either impede their ability to become workers in their society, or forces them to abandon the option of motherhood. As Maggie Humm outlines, the difficulties in managing both spheres of interest contribute to the ways in which women are often constrained by their culture’s institutions, while “men have a specific material interest in the domination of women and (…) construct a variety of institutionalized arrangements to perpetuate this domination” (Humm 213).
By experimenting with theatrical conventions and employing stereotypes to ultimately subvert them, and simultaneously expanding the boundaries of the genre in history plays, Churchill critiques the historical consistency with which the institution of motherhood has been manipulated as a means of controlling women. Reinelt argues that Churchill “foregrounded the ideological implications of representation with respect to gender assumptions, demystifying their apparent inevitability and appropriateness” (Beyond Brecht: Britain's New Feminist Drama 82).
As a result, Churchill attempts to alter perceptions about mothers and motherhood that have been instituted and reinforced through law, social mores, and even art itself. In this context, Churchill examination of women’s experience in both past and present time raises questions upon the social issues that for mothers are both personal and political. Therefore, in her plays, Churchill portraits characters who refuse to adopt conventional values which place them into stereotypical males and females.
By referring to Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, Michael Billington states that “the choice confronting Marlene between careerism and family responsibility now seems unduly stark” (184). Thus, the play seems to be dated. It is, without question, firmly located in the early 1980s, but the ‘stark’ device is no less relevant at the beginning of the 21st century. As suggested by Lisa O’Kelly in her article It Beats Working, published in The Guardian Review in June 2004, many of today’s ‘top girls’ are choosing to stay at home with their children rather than trying to balance motherhood and careers, and she also addresses the ways in which little has changed socially or legally to accommodate the balancing act. Max Stafford-Clark, who directed the original 1982 production of Top Girls, as quoted in Goodman’s work, stated that “the dilemma posed in the final scene between Joyce and Marlene, of a woman who opts to have a career and the woman who raises the child, is as pertinent today as it was ten years ago. I imagine that dilemma won’t go away” (Goodman, “Overlapping Dialogue” 78).
Top Girls presents a social history of Churchill’s own time and place, and it evokes the past through the characters present in the dinner sequence at the beginning of the play. Motherhood is a central concern in Top Girls. Several characters in Top Girls are simultaneously mothers and not mothers; some have born children but have not had the experience of raising those children, while others have raised other women’s children as their own. The characters’ struggles in the world of the play in order to balance the demands of their public and private lives, reinforce issues of power, class, and gender identity and the ways in which not only women’s but also men’s roles are traditionally configured. In examining the characters’ experience of motherhood, it can be argued that it is difficult for them to come to terms with both their femininity and their procreative ability.
At the celebration, Marlene offers a toast “To our courage and the way we changed our lives and our extraordinary achievements” (Top Girls 24), focusing on the women’s professional strides before the topic of motherhood is introduced into the conversation. The women represent a wide variety of cultures, classes and eras, but almost every one of them has a horrifying story about motherhood. The stories the characters share are not positive accounts of motherhood. Men exert control over women and children; often, both mother and child suffer humiliation, subordination, and even death. Some of the characters are mothers only in the sense of having delivered children, never experiencing the day-to-day practice of mothering because their children were taken away from them shortly after being born. For example, Lady Nijo recounts the tale of how she was forced to give up her daughter because the Emperor, her husband, was not the baby’s father; she goes on to note that the two sons she later bore to the priest Ariake were also taken away from her. Patient Griselda’s story, as well as her identity, focuses on her willingness to give up her children at her husband’s request; testing her obedience, Walter, the marquis, sends their daughter away when she is just six weeks old, and their son when he is two years old. Griselda believes the children are going to be murdered because her husband tells her that “the people” were rebelling because the children were nothing more than peasants themselves because of Griselda’s previous status as a commoner. Twelve years after her son was taken away, Griselda is reunited with her children, and she is rewarded for her unconditional obedience; upon the revelation of this “happy” ending to Griselda’s tale of woe, Nijo weeps, “Nobody gave me back my children” (Top Girls 37). Thus, although these women had the power to bring a life into the world through childbirth, they did not have control over their own lives or the lives of her children, no matter what their status—Pope, marquise, or emperor’s concubine.
The opening scene of Top Girls, by introducing historical characters, positions Marlene in an historical moment in relation to various other historical moments. The focus on history at the opening of the play combines with Marlene’s predictions about the ‘stupendous’ 1980s to come in the final scene of the play to reinforce, structurally and thematically, the primacy of history in this play. As the final scene returns the characters and the audience to the past, the first scene works in parallel to it, contrasting Marlene’s imagined sisterhood with the historical characters to her actual sisterhood with Joyce in what is also a historical moment in Marlene’s immediate past. The opening scene in which Marlene communicates with her figurative sisters over an elaborate dinner in a chic restaurant stands in sharp contrast to the final scene, which dramatizes the lack of communion between Marlene and her actual sister in Joyce’s shabby working-class kitchen, where there is no food and the only alcohol to be had is a bottle of whiskey that Marlene has brought with her.
The scene immediately following Marlene’s promotion party provides a look at Marlene’s professional persona, revealing an absence of the sisterly solidarity that pervades the prologue. Act one, scene two takes place at the Top Girls Employment Agency on Marlene’s first day in her new position. The scene is very brief, as Marlene conducts an interview with a young woman named Jeanine. As Kritzer highlights “Marlene defends the power base she has acquired by patronizing, intimidating, and further narrowing the options of women who come seeking opportunity” (Kritzer 145). When Jeanine tells Marlene that she wants to make more money because she is saving to get married, the conversation takes a turn that reveals Marlene’s bias against this type of woman. Marlene is very concerned that Jeanine would better not mention her marriage plans because prospective employers will likely not hire a young woman who is planning to marry, ultimately because that means she will want to take time off to have children.
MARLENE. Does that mean you don’t want a long-term job, Jeanine?
JEANINE. I might do.
MARLENE. Because where do the prospects come in? No kids for a bit?
JEANINE. Oh no, not kids, not yet.
MARLENE. So you won’t tell them you’re getting married?
JEANINE. Had I better not?
MARLENE. It would probably help. (Top Girls 43)
Churchill uses the manipulation of time to create a dramatic effect, as the final scene reveals the secret that Marlene is a mother whose desire to move beyond her working-class existence motivated her to give up her child. Marlene’s sister Joyce has been raising the child, Angie, as her daughter for fifteen years. In the final scene, Joyce criticizes Marlene’s choice, saying, “I don’t know how you could leave your own child” (Top Girls 90).
Yet, Churchill’s criticism in Top Girls is not about Marlene’s failure as a woman because she gave up her role as a mother, but a criticism of a society that forces women to make such choices. Marlene attempts to persuade Joyce that a woman can have both a successful career and a fulfilling experience of a mother, but Joyce undermines Marlene’s claims:
JOYCE. Turned out all right for you by the look of you. You’d be getting a few thousand less a year.
MARLENE. Not necessarily.
JOYCE. You’d be stuck here/like you said.
MARLENE. I could have taken her with me. . . I know a managing director who’s got two children, she breast feeds in the board room, she pays a hundred pounds a week on domestic help alone and she can afford that because she’s an extremely high-powered lady earning a great deal of money.
JOYCE. So what’s that got to do with you at the age of seventeen? (Top Girls 90).
Joyce’s point is striking; a seventeen-year-old single mother does not have many options when it comes to choosing between motherhood and a career. Churchill returns to a consideration of history in this final scene by evoking the past of the teenaged Marlene faced with the dilemma of becoming a single mother. As Joyce and Marlene’s argument continues, the story of Marlene’s past illustrates the point that when Marlene had the child at the end of the 1960s, she would not have had the same options as the ‘high-powered lady’ in the 1980s that she uses as an example of progress:
JOYCE. You . . . said you weren’t keeping it. You shouldn’t have had it/if you wasn’t
MARLENE. Here we go.
JOYCE. going to keep it. You was the most stupid, / for someone so clever you was the most stupid, get yourself pregnant, not go to the doctor, not tell.
MARLENE. You wanted it, you said you were glad, I remember the day, you said I’m glad you never got rid of it, I’ll look after it, you said that down by the river. (Top Girls 91)
That the two women discussed Angie’s fate “down by the river” hints at the possibility that Marlene was considering a radical solution to her problem, and suggests a desperation that contradicts her confident attitude in the present world of the play. For example, at the end of the play, Marlene reveals that she has taken advantage of options that have afforded her greater control over her choices about reproduction, but when Joyce suggests that Marlene could have a child now that she is financially secure, Marlene says, “I might do… I’ve been on the pill so long I’m probably sterile” (Top Girls 91). The potential for significant side-effects from the Pill and other forms of contraception concerned feminists in the 1970s and 1980s (Rowbotham, “The Beginnings of Women’s Liberation in Britain” 62). Though such methods surely provide more reliable means of controlling reproduction they also raise questions about the politics of choice as it relates to access and safety. Additionally, when Joyce reveals that she miscarried when Angie was still an infant, “because I was so tired looking after your fucking baby” (Top Girls 92), Marlene counters by saying, “I’ve had two abortions, are you interested? Shall I tell you about them? Well, I won’t, it’s boring, it wasn’t a problem” (Top Girls 92). The exchange highlights the complexity of women’s relationship to motherhood on various levels: Joyce wants children but cannot carry them to term; she has willingly adopted her sister’s daughter as her own, but her description of Angie as “your child” belies an unsurpassable distance from her daughter that informs her engagement in the practice of mothering; Marlene has taken steps to avoid bearing more children, and though she says it was not a problem, both her tone and her desire to change the topic suggest that none of the choices she has made, whether giving up Angie or having two abortions, has been easy or without compromise. Ultimately, both women’s experiences represent a complex network of social, economic, and biological factors, reflecting the need for what Rowbotham argues is a “quest to dissolve the boundaries [between social constructions and nature] and to approach maternity as a continuing interaction between physical growth and mental perception” (The Beginings of Women’s Liberation in Britain 104).
Thus, as Top Girls begins, there seems to be a special significance placed on the inherent conflict that social institutions create for women who choose to be both workers outside the home and mothers. It is, in fact, Joan’s role as a mother that betrays her secret and leads to her demise. Joan’s statement that “Women, children and lunatics can’t be Pope” (Top Girls 26), by placing women to the same category as those who are too young to be in charge and those who are mentally incompetent, suggests that women are not supposed to hold positions of power.
Churchill’s presentation of Joan and her story, then, works on two levels. First, she presents a woman who allegedly became Pope in 855 (and was subsequently murdered for it), introducing history into the play as a means of examining the present. Second, she emphasizes an idea that she originally explored in Vinegar Tom: by connecting women’s reproductive abilities to Eve’s sin of bringing sex into the world, social institutions have used motherhood as a means of control by keeping women out of positions of authority because they are regarded as inherently morally inferior. Ironically, the opening scene is Marlene’s fantasy celebration of her own rise to a position of authority. When asked about her recent promotion, Marlene says, “Well it’s not Pope but it is managing director,” which prompts Lady Nijo to respond with admiration, “Over all the women you work with. And the men” (Top Girls 24).
The audience, however, ultimately learns that Marlene has paid a significant price for her status, as Helene Keyssar explains, “Marlene is a woman we must take seriously but she is also a woman who accepts male models of success as exemplary and is thus not someone we are meant simply to admire” (98). Marlene’s quest for power and success leads her to the choice to relinquish the role of mother in order to fit into a specific social role. Thus, while the audience may admire Marlene’s successful career, they are forced to contemplate the sacrifice she made to achieve it, as well as the ways in which her subsequent choices, including the active distance she maintains from her working-class mother, sister, and daughter/niece, actually reproduce and reinforce certain attitudes about women. Though she may not admit it to herself, Marlene, too, is a victim of social oppression. Though no one literally forced Marlene to give up her child, as both Lady Nijo and Patient Griselda were forced to give up theirs, the audience can sense that the same forces are still at work in Marlene’s society; in order to achieve her current position in the business world, Marlene had to abandon her role as mother because it would be virtually impossible for her to negotiate the two worlds as a single parent in London in the 1970s and 1980s. Lisa Merrill suggests that “by attempting to equate Marlene’s promotion at work with the extreme circumstances overcome by the other five guests, Churchill renders Marlene’s achievement petty and ludicrous” (83).
By merging the past and the present, Churchill suggests that women have not come as far as Marlene would like to believe. Janelle Reinelt writes: “Top Girls is concerned to show how progressive social movements such as feminism can be diluted and accommodated by capitalism . . . the play shows the prices that women throughout history have had to pay for being unique and successful and suggests that contemporary women are also paying a price that may not be desirable (Beyond Brecht: Britain's New Feminist Drama 88-89). As a counterpoint to highlight this struggle, Churchill presents Marlene’s sister Joyce, a single mother who struggles to support herself and her daughter by working four different cleaning jobs. Joyce is a casualty of the same society in which Marlene is a success. When she took Marlene’s child, she was married; however, by the time Angie was twelve, Joyce was on her own. She keeps the child despite the various hardships that she faces as a single parent in a society that offers little accommodation in terms of flexible work or affordable childcare.
Churchill’s critique of the present is explicit in Top Girls. The connection made to historical women at the beginning of the play crystallizes in the final scene. In a heated argument with Joyce, Marlene says:
This country needs to stop whining. / Monetarism is not ,. . . stupid. It takes time, determination. No more slop. / And
JOYCE. Well I think they’re filthy bastards.
MARLENE. who’s got to drive it on? First woman prime minister. Terrifico. Aces. Right on. / You must admit. Certainly gets my vote.
JOYCE. What good’s first woman if it’s her? I suppose you’d have liked Hitler if he was a woman. Ms Hitler. Got a lot done, Hitlerina . . .
MARLENE. Bosses still walking on the worker’s faces? Still dadda’s little parrot? Haven’t you learned to think for yourself? I believe in the individual. Look at me.
JOYCE. I am looking at you. (Top Girls 95)
It is ironic that Marlene believes in the power of the individual when she has had to shed a part of her own identity in order to succeed. Her veneration of Thatcher as a role model for women is disturbing, especially in Joyce’s opinion. Thatcher, like Marlene, represents a woman who has gained her position in society only by downplaying her femininity, as is indicated by her ‘Iron Lady’ persona. If Thatcher is one of the historical figures who represent how far women have come, Top Girls seems to suggest, the notion of equal opportunity is a fraud; the only way women can move up in the system is to become more like men, and that is not truly equality.
In Cloud Nine, Churchill undermines stereotypes by employing them in a way that exposes them as social constructions. She plays with a variety of stereotypes, including various mother types: Maud as domineering mother/mother-in-law, 20th century Victoria as distant mother, Lin as slightly violent working-class mother, 19th century Betty as disaffected mother, and 20th century Betty as, at first, a replication of Maud’s domineering mother/mother-in-law. Edward also adopts motherly roles in both acts, though he does not embody any particular stereotype about motherhood. There are no idealized mothers in the play, but in becoming a “real” person by the end of the play, Betty also becomes a ‘real’ mother rather than a mother type, who recognizes that her lives and her children’s, though forever entwined, are actually separate existences. Edward is inclined to be a nurturer in both acts, and his ‘maternal instinct’ seems stronger than his sister’s, raising questions about the relationship between gender and mothering.
In act one, Edward’s interest in mothering is seen as unacceptable behavior by the adults in his society, from his parents to the family’s servant, Joshua. The first time Edward is caught playing with the doll in the play, he explains to Clive and Betty that he is ‘minding’ Vicky’s doll for her, rather than ‘playing’ with her, since he has been reprimanded for playing with the doll in the past. In this scene, both Betty and the children’s nanny, Ellen, defend Edward, assuring Clive that Edward is not playing with the doll. Edward relents, and his relieved father notes that Edward is being ‘manly’ by taking care of his younger sister (Cloud Nine 257). The next time he is caught with the doll, however, Edward protests giving her up, saying, “She’s not Victoria’s doll, she’s my doll. She doesn’t love Victoria and Victoria doesn’t love her. Victoria never even plays with her” (Cloud Nine 275). His mother reacts more violently in this scene, slapping him as she forcibly removes the doll from his grasp. In this instance, neither Clive nor Ellen is on stage, though Betty’s mother, Maud, is present and offering her critique of not only Edward’s but also Betty’s behavior, suggesting that Betty is failing in her duties as a mother primarily because she has allowed the governess to leave Edward unattended. Betty’s markedly different handling of her son in this context reflects her own conflicts in both the desire and ability to perform her role according to cultural standards. When Clive is present, Betty does not act as disciplinarian, but as moderator between father and child. When her mother is observing her, however, Betty becomes more aggressive in exerting control over her child, perhaps a reflection of her own mother’s methods. For once the doll has been retrieved from Edward, Maud reprimands the doll, saying, “Where did Vicky’s naughty baby go? Shall we smack her? Just a little smack? There, now she’s a good baby” (Cloud Nine 275). Of course, Victoria is a very young baby, and is herself represented by a doll, but her disinterest in playing with dolls/babies emerges in contrast to Edward’s maternal instincts in discussions that illustrate the ways in which gender roles are culturally prescribed; the discussions are themselves enactments of such constructions. For example, after Edward’s declaration that Vicky never plays with her doll, Maud remarks, “Victoria will learn to play with her” (Cloud Nine 275), suggesting that Victoria will have little choice in the matter, much like Edward cannot choose to play with dolls because it disrupts the accepted order, raising questions about choice as it relates to mothering as a practice. As Chodorow suggests, “Being a mother … is not only bearing a child—it is being a person who socializes and nurtures” (11). Yet in act two it seems that Victoria has not developed an interest in playing the role of mother, even though she now has a child of her own. Her son never appears on stage, and the lack of Tommy’s physical presence on stage indicates a disconnection between mother and child. For example, in scene two, Tommy goes off on his own, and no one knows where he is:
LIN. Where’s Tommy?
VIC. What? Didn’t he go with Martin?
LIN. Did he?
VIC. God oh God.
LIN. Cathy! Cathy!
VIC. I haven’t thought about him. How could I not think about him? Tommy. (Cloud Nine 304)
Lin’s daughter Cathy eventually finds Tommy hiding in the bushes and solves the problem. Earlier in the scene, Victoria and her husband Martin discuss her job opportunity in Manchester; Martin tells her to “follow it through … leave me and Tommy alone for a bit, we can manage perfectly well without you” (Cloud Nine 301). In trying to find her own identity, Victoria needs to distance herself from her husband and her son. She is as distant from her child as Betty was from hers, but for different reasons. Victoria’s distance from a traditional maternal role is further heightened by Edward’s assumption of the duties of homemaker after he moves in to live with Lin and Victoria and their respective children. Edward is the person who gives Martin instructions for the evening when Martin is taking the two children to spend the night at his house, making the children seem to be his primary responsibility. When Edward tells his former lover, Gerry, about the new living arrangements he notes, “I’m on the dole. I am working, though. I do housework. . . They [Lin and Vic] go out to work and I look after the kids” (Cloud Nine 315). Thus, in act two, Edward’s desire to nurture is liberating for both him and Victoria, as both are freed from their socially defined roles through their adoption of a reimagined notion of family.
Churchill also explores the possibility of alternatives to the traditional family unit through Lin, the lesbian single mother. Lin comes from a working-class background, and she serves as a contrast to the theoretically informed Victoria, particularly in her relationship with her daughter, Cathy. Whereas Victoria is markedly separate from her child, Lin is often besieged by Cathy. She tells Victoria:
[Cathy’s] frightened I’m going to leave her. It’s the baby minder didn’t work out when she was two, she still remembers. You can’t get them used to other people if you’re by yourself. It’s no good blaming me. She clings round my knees every morning up the nursery and they don’t say anything but they make you feel you’re making her do it. But I’m desperate for her to go to school. I did cry when I left her the first day. You wouldn’t you’re too fucking sensible. (Cloud Nine 290)
As a single parent, Lin has no opportunity to get away from her child because she bears the sole responsibility for her. Cathy is rarely “delightful,” even if she is a comic character. Her presence makes Lin’s job seem that much more challenging, particularly as the audience watches Lin struggle to find a balance between allowing Cathy to make choices for herself and needing to supervise, and sometimes deny, those choices. Lin’s confusion over the ‘right’ way to raise her child touches on the idea that shaping a child’s identity, particularly as it relates to traditional gender roles, is a mother’s responsibility. Lin tells Victoria, “I give Cathy guns, my mum didn’t give me guns. I dress her in jeans, she wants to wear dresses. I don’t know. I can’t work it out, I don’t want to” (Cloud Nine 303). Similarly, twentieth century Betty reflects on her perceived successes and failures as a mother based on how her children have “turned out.” For example, when she meets Gerry at the end of the play and acknowledges openly for the first time that her son is gay, Betty says, “Well people always say it’s the mother’s fault but I don’t intend to start blaming myself. He seems perfectly happy” (Cloud Nine 320). Because both Edward’s and Cathy’s behavior indicates that children will ultimately find a way to become themselves, and that the children’s search for their identity is affected by forces beyond their relationships with their mothers, the play presents the hopeful suggestion that women might be able to break free from the impossible, culturally invented, notion that mothers “have unlimited power in the shaping of their offspring” (Thurer 300).
The burden of single parenthood is compounded by Lin’s open identification as a lesbian. She and her child face significant challenges because of it, both socially and legally:
LIN. I left my husband two years ago. He let me keep Cathy and I’m grateful for that.
VIC. You shouldn’t be grateful.
LIN. I’m a lesbian.
VIC. You still shouldn’t be grateful. (Cloud Nine 291)
The threat that Lin’s lesbian identity poses to her role as a mother reminds the audience that the freedom the twenieth century characters seem to have over their choices about sexuality and identity is somewhat superficial. Furthermore, when compared to Ellen, the Victorian governess, who hides her lesbian identity, Lin’s situation seems equally oppressive, although in a different way. Ellen earns a living caring for other people’s children, even though she has no interest in mothering, a point that emerges when she tries to express her love for Betty near the end of act one:
ELLEN. I don’t want children, I don’t like children. I just want to be alone with you, Betty, and sing for you and kiss you because I love you, Betty.
BETTY. I love you, too, Ellen. But women have their duty as soldiers have. You must be a mother if you can (Cloud Nine 281).
Betty does not acknowledge Ellen’s lesbian desires and no one perceives Ellen as a threat because she does not openly challenge societal norms. Yet because Lin openly challenges those norms, she may be deemed unfit to care for her own child, despite her obvious commitment to her daughter’s well-being and her interest in mothering. Lin’s active role as a mother also contrasts with nineteenth century Betty’s performance of her role of mother, further questioning the standards of acceptable behavior and the definition of motherhood.
As a mother in the nineteenth century, Betty does not do much mothering. She does not seem particularly interested in spending time with her children, pawning them off on Ellen or her mother, to control. Children are a part of her societal role, but not a part of her life. When she introduces herself in the opening scene of the play, she says “I live for Clive, the whole aim of my life Is to be what he looks for in a wife, And what men want is what I want to be” (Cloud Nine 251). The description shows Betty’s need to fit in and fulfill her duty as prescribed by her culture. She spends her days reading, playing the piano, and letting the nanny care for the children, a life she finds monotonous.
Throughout the first act, characters are defined by their roles, rather than as individuals. The isolation that comes from Betty’s dedicated performance of her duty results in antipathy for other women, failing to see them as anything but their functions; when she notes that she looks forward to Harry Bagley’s arrival because he will “break the monotony” (Cloud Nine 253), Clive says “You have your mother. You have Ellen” to which Betty replies “Ellen is a governess. My mother is my mother” (Cloud Nine 254). Her role also means a rejection of her own desires. For example, the dashing explorer, Harry Bagley, in an attempt to thwart Betty’s sexual advances tells her “You are a mother. And a daughter. And a wife” (Cloud Nine 268). Her various roles dictate her choices, and none of them gives her room to be what she wants to be. Maud challenges Betty’s amorous interest in Harry Bagley, saying “I don’t like what I see. Clive wouldn’t like it Betty. I am your mother” (Cloud Nine 268). Maud’s reprimand reinforces not only Betty’s duty to obey her husband, and her mother, but also establishes her own role as a guardian of appropriate behavior. In act one, Maud fits the stereotype of controlling mother by attempting to control the domestic environment. She is displaced in a way because she lives in her adult daughter’s home, and has to relinquish some of her authority as a result. Nevertheless, she constantly chides Betty for what she sees as inappropriate behavior. Discussing Betty’s treatment of the children’s nanny, Ellen, Maud says: “You let that girl forget her place, Betty” (Cloud Nine 258). Maud’s philosophy implies an emphasis on the historical tradition of maintaining the status quo; the pride she takes in accepting her designated role in emulation of her mother, to whom she refers as ‘an angel’ (Cloud Nine 275), reinforces the continuity of such social structures.
It is obvious that most of the characters in Cloud Nine are not outside the norms of their society because they expend so much energy trying to blend in. By hiding their true identities more successfully, they manage to get by, even though they feel constricted. There is still a call to action, pointing at the need to change the social structures that define people’s roles within their societies, but the change must come from the individual’s ability to see the problems and his or her willingness to change them, as Betty recognizes she only needs to accept herself to be herself. The characters in Cloud Nine seek, and discover, new ways of expressing themselves despite cultural constrictions.
Vinegar Tom is set in the seventeenth century. The action of the play centers on the witch-hunt that claimed the lives of many people, mostly women, during that period. In this way, the emphasis controlling women’s body is central to Vinegar Tom as Churchill examines the ways in which motherhood becomes a fundamental agent in the struggle for control, whether it is the ostracizing of single mothers like Alice, or the harassment of midwives, in Ellen’s case, or even mothers whose children die, like Susan’s.
By living in a patriarchal rule based society, women suffer because they are inherently sinful. Alice, a single mother, has gone to the cunning woman Ellen, for a charm to keep her getting pregnant again. Susan, married with three children, the youngest of them being not yet a year old, and with another on the way, not to mention three miscarriages, believes that not only birth control, but also seeking remedies to relieve the pain of labour is immoral because:
They do say the pain is what’s sent to a woman for her sins. I complained last time after churching, and he said I must think on Eve’s who brought the sin into the world that got me pregnant. I must think on how woman tempts the man, and how she pays God with her pain having the baby. So if we try to get round the pain, we’re going against God. (Vinegar Tom 139-140)
Susan’s beliefs and her acceptance of her subordinate position in society stem from the construction of women as inherent sinners, based largely on the teachings of church. She struggles throughout the play with the fear of challenging authority, be it God, the church, her husband, or the witch hunters. Her conflicted feelings about her pregnancy and her choices about controlling her own body become clear when she goes with Alice to visit the cunning woman. When Ellen offers her something to take to “be rid of trouble” (141), Susan says “I don’t want it but I don’t want to be rid of it. I want to be rid of it, but not to do anything to be rid of it” (Vinegar Tom 141). Her statement emphasizes the trap that she is in physically, emotionally and morally. By the end of the scene, Susan relents, saying “Maybe I’ll take some potion with me. And seen when I get home whether I take it” (Vinegar Tom 143). Susan’s condition and her obvious confusion and fear suggest that women’s control over their bodies is limited by both external and internal forces. The woman’s physical options are few and her psychological dilemma compounds the difficult choice she faces.
In scene thirteen, Susan reveals to Alice that she has miscarried as a result of drinking the potion and she clearly regrets her choice. She fears her husband discovering that she is no longer pregnant, and has convinced herself that she is bewitched. As the scene progresses, Susan’s emotional state worsens, she cannot stop crying and Alice can do little to help her:
ALICE. Oh, Susan, you’re tired out, that’s all. You’re not witched. You’d have cried more to have it. All the extra work, another baby
SUSAN. I like babies.
ALICE. You’ll have plenty more. God, you’ll have plenty. What’s the use of crying? (Vinegar Tom 141)
Susan’s grief over her own choice indicates that ending a pregnancy does not come without remorse. Nor does it come without physical repercussions. Susan’s refrain “I’m so tired” throughout the scene reinforces both her emotional and physical devastation. Additionally, the arguing between Susan and Alice over appropriate behavior, particularly in relation to children and men, suggests that Susan’s weariness stems from not only her recent decision to end her pregnancy but also her constant struggle to do the right thing by society’s standards even at risk to herself.
Susan’s response to her choice reflects the “contradictory feelings and the complexity of choice, both in an existential sense and in relation to social circumstances” that Sheila Rowbotham notes began to emerge in feminist writing on the topic of abortion in the late 1970s and early 1980s (A Century of Women:The History of Women in Britain and the United States 82). Rowbotham goes further and argues that:
Contradictions – gaps between desire and social reality, between aspirations and feelings-were […] being raised within the process of political struggle […] Trusting women to make their own decisions about fertility means also trusting women to comprehend the complexity of this rather new human possibility. (83)
By showing the intensity of such ambivalent feelings through the character of Susan, Churchill allows the audience to consider the act of choice. Seventeenth century women have had fewer and less technologically advanced methods and controlling their fertility, but they had choices nevertheless. The play draws a parallel between the women in the world of the play and women of the present times in terms of access and prevailing social attitudes towards the subject of abortion.
Susan’s conflicted feelings ultimately contribute to her own condemnation as a witch, as she attempts to shift the responsibility for her choice onto other women. Being devastated by her miscarriage and the subsequent death of her youngest child, she offers evidence against her friend, Alice, when the witch-hunter, Packer, asks if anyone can give clear proof that Alice is a witch. Susan tells Packer that Alice took her to the cunning woman and that the two forced her to drink “a foul potion” (Vinegar Tom 164) to end with her pregnancy. Unfortunately for Susan, her testimony leads to her own conviction, as well as those of Alice and Ellen, as Packer condemns her for being complicit, saying “We’ll prick you as you pricked your babies” (Vinegar Tom 166-167). Susan’s failures as a mother are thus used to convict her as a witch. That she is pregnant while still nursing a baby who was not yet one year old, in addition to raising two others, is not considered as a possible reason for her babies’ failure to thrive.
Alice’s conviction as a witch is also connected to her maternal role. Though the charges against her stem primarily from Jack’s claim in scene fourteen that she “bewitched his organ” (Vinegar Tom 155), Packer’s interrogation of Alice in scene seventeen is based on what he considers her responsibility as a single mother:
PACKER. How could a mother be a filthy witch and put her child in danger?
ALICE. I didn’t.
PACKER. Night after night, it’s well known.
ALICE. But what’s going to happen to him? He’s only got me.
PACKER. He should have a father. Who’s his father? Speak up, who’s his father?
ALICE. I don’t know…
PACKER. Is the devil his father?
ALICE. No, no, no.
PACKER. I’ll have the boy to see me in the morning. If he’s not the devil’s child he’ll speak against you. (Vinegar Tom 164-165)
Alice’s endangering the child “night after night” stems from her leaving him at home with her mother Joan, a widow, who is also being convicted for witchcraft. Alice’s reputation as a loose woman, culled from her neighbors’ gossip about her social and sexual activities, makes her a target for society. Alice’s failure to conform to her society’s definition of a good mother thus contributes to her vulnerability in the witch trial. Packer’s insistence that the child “should have a father” reinforces the perception that the non-traditional family unit of mother, child and grandmother endangers not only the child, but also society. Alice’s child does, of course literally have a father, but his absence, as well as Alice’s refusal to say his name, either because she does not know it or simply does not wish to reveal it, disrupts the accepted order of her community.
Furthermore, Packer’s proclamation that the child’s defense of his mother will prove her guilt, dramatizes the illogic of the charges against Alice by exposing the no-win situation suffered by women accused of being witches. One naturally assumes that the child will proclaim his mother’s innocence, and by doing so, the child will condemn her as a witch. Elaine Aston writes that:
Packer’s cross-examination of Alice bears a frightening resemblance to the 1990s crusade against lone mother and home alone children by right-wing politicians who, for example, have argued that it is good Christian doctrine to stop single women having children before they […] formed stable relationships or have defended the Government’s right to speak out against the impact of single parenthood on crime and social breakdown. (33)
Though Aston suggests that Churchill was “anticipating social issues” (30) by dramatizing social attitudes in 1976, warnings about single parenting and mothers working outside the home were prevalent at the time, indicating that Churchill was responding to the contemporary social climate regarding such issues.
The traditional arrangement of the nuclear family, with women as homemakers and care takers of children, requires that a woman’s identity is linked to her husband, and women who fall outside of this standard are seen as a threat to the society.
The song is set between two scenes in which the primary accusers, the married couple Jack and Margery, gather evidence about witchcraft against Joan and Alice, the two characters who represent women who fall outside the boundaries of accepted norms. The placement of the song thus emphasizes the connection between Joan and Alice’s status as unwed, working-class mothers and the perceived threat they pose to their society.
The character of Betty demonstrates that the quest for control over women’s bodies does not recognize class boundaries. Betty is the daughter of the land owner from whom Jack and Margery, and others, rent their property. Margery’s description of Betty as “always so soft on your lap, not like our children all hard edges. I could sit all afternoon just to smell her hair” (Vinegar Tom 141) makes her as physically different from working-class women.
Nevertheless, Betty’s social status does not provide her with more control over her own body. She tells Jack and Margery that she has escaped through a window after being locked up by her parents because she refuses to marry. When the audience next sees Betty, she is literally bound on the stage, tied to a chair and being treated by a doctor. because The doctor’s explanation of Betty’s illness is that she is hysterical because she is a woman. He states:
Hysteria is a woman’s weakness. Hysteron, Greek, the womb. Excessive blood causes an imbalance in the humours. The noxious gases that form inwardly every month rise to the brain and cause behaviour quite contrary to the patient’s real feelings. After bleeding you must be purged. Tonight you shall be blistered. You will soon be well enough to be married. (Vinegar Tom 149)
The biological explanation for Betty’s refusal to participate in the prescribed customs of her society is tied directly to her reproductive abilities. Her body is the cause of her illness and, therefore, must be controlled. Despite the efforts to control her, Betty is spared from being convicted as a witch, indicating that her position in society afford her some privilege. In scene sixteen she tells Ellen:
I’m frightened to come anymore. They’ll say I’m a witch.
ELLEN. Are they saying I’m a witch? … Nobody’s said it yet to my face.
BETTY. But the doctor says he’ll save me. He says i’m not a witch, he says I’m ill. He says I’m his patient so I can’t be a witch.
ELLEN. You get married, Betty, that’s safest.
BETTY. But I want to be left alone…
ELLEN. Left alone for what? To be like me? There’s no doctor going to save me from being called a witch. Your best chance of being left alone is marry a rich man, because it’s part of his honour to have a wife who does nothing. (Vinegar Tom 160-161)
Betty too, is in no win situation; she can lose her freedom or lose her life. As Ellen notes, however, Betty is luckier than most of the women because she is protected by being under a doctor’s care. Nevertheless, just as is Susan’s case, Betty’s options are limited, fact suggesting that although class privilege provides certain benefits it does not necessarily provides another fate or agency.
Vinegar Tom renders issues of female solidarity in the struggle for equality. The only women who appear to have some control over their lives are those who conform to the society’s standards and participate in the persecution of other women. Margery, who along with their husband, accuses Alice and Joan of witchcraft, is the most obvious example of a woman who rigidly adheres to the prescribed societal order. She enjoys a form of security that the other women in the play do not have because she devotes herself to running the household, focusing her energy on her duties as a wife and mother, and thus, conforming to the rules assigned by those roles. Yet, Margery is not a happy woman. Her interaction with her husband reveals that her life as a wife and mother offers her no particular pleasure or comfort. Her children are not present in the play. She mentions them once, and that is to compare them with Betty “not like our children all hard edges” (Vinegar Tom 141). Jack, her husband, calls her a ‘lazy slut’ when she fails to get the butter to churn (Vinegar Tom 148) and later in the play he reveals to Alice “I’m no good to my wife. I can’t do it. Not these three months. It’s only when I dream of you or like now taking to you” (Vinegar Tom 152).
Despite these less than ideal circumstances, Margery calls herself blessed in scene nineteen, praising to God for saving her “in her struggle against the witches” (Vinegar Tom 177), as she watches Joan and Ellen being hanged. Although, her victory seems hollow and her prayer grotesque, in this context, especially as she ends by asking God to make Jack “love [her] and give us land, Amen” (Vinegar Tom 178). Though she is not a likeable character, she is pitiable. The audience realizes that Margery escapes a similar fate as a witch only as a result of her willingness to accept her designated position in the patriarchal society.
Another woman that accepted and even alienated herself with the patriarchal system is Goody. In scene fifteen Goody, an older woman working as Packer’s assistant, serves as a counterpoint to Joan. Like Joan, Goody is a widow, but instead of borrowing from her neighbours, she seeks gainful employment in the form of witch hunting. Goody delivers a monologue to the audience in which she praises Packer’s skill as a witch-hunter and she admits that “it’s interesting work being a searcher and nice to be good at the same time as earning a living. Better than staying home a widow. I’d end up like the old women you see, soft in the head and full of spite with their mutterings and spells. I keep healthy keeping the country healthy. (Vinegar Tom 177). By not only conforming but also joining in, Goody aligns herself with a system that threatens women who are not very different from her. She notes that, surprisingly, earns as much as Packer does for every witch they find (Vinegar Tom 178). Her survival thus comes at the expense of other women.
Even at the end of the play, some of the accused women are against each other, fact suggesting that victims do not always find solidarity with one another. In the final moment of the play, the song “Evil Women” undercuts Kramer and Sprenger’s song and dance by allowing contemporary women to have the final word. The lyrics focus primarily on sex and cultural representations of women:
Evil women
Is that what you want?
Is that what you want to see?
On the movie screen
Of your own wet dream
Evil women…
If we don’t say you’re big
Do you start to shrink?
We earn our own money
And buy our own drink.
Did you learn when you were dirty bodies, did you learn
Women were wicked to make you burn? (Vinegar Tom 178)
By alluding to Kramer and Sprenger’s charges against women, the song emphasizes women as identifying themselves to witches and it also draws a parallel between women of the present day and those in the seventeenth century world of the play. As Lisa Merrill asserts “women’s autonomous desires are seen as punishable offences because they are committed without official sanctions” (82). This is seen in the acts of all the four women who attempt to act in an autonomous manner, either sexually or economically but are cruelly driven out of the society.
CONCLUSION
The current study has aimed at applying contemporary theories of feminism, gender studies to theatre with a special focus on Caryl Churchill’s plays. It was shown that theatre, as a site of power relations and ideological representation is based on a heteronormative matrix that subverts the patriarchal societal structure based on binary oppositions. By analyzing the deconstruction of the boundaries of heteronormative foundations in predominant patriarchal discourse, the study has shown that the notion of a primordial and stable gender does not exist, and it only serves to perpetuate the patriarchal power relations. Furthermore, it has been argued that the notion of gender does not refer to an inner core, but to the repetitions of various stylized acts, and therefore, it could be subverted by repeating these acts in unconventional ways, fact that highlights the performative nature of gender. Churchill’s distinctive theatrical techniques challenge mainly the conventional ways of perceiving the notions of gender and sexuality. She uses cross-casting and non-Aristotelian theatrical strategies and contests the provincialism in the representation of women and marginal groups, fundamental to the patriarchal and heteronormative mentality. Hence, this study has shown how Churchill refutes the patriarchal narratives of the inherent and unalterable gendered identities by profoundly challenging the patriarchal gaze on non-conforming individuals through the intentional rupture in the assumedly stable parallel between the body of the actor and the character that she/he is supposed to perform. Thus, Churchill lays bare the constructedness of the notions of gender and sexuality through her representation of troubling genders on stage and the wide discrepancies in the social impositions dictated on individuals.
Furthermore, Churchill seeks to urge women and oppressed groups to vindicate their rights of subjective power by upholding the idea that the supposedly stable and unalterable notions of gender, sexuality and the assumed inferior positions of women and marginalized groups within the patriarchal hierarchical system are illusory. Moreover, she empowers the audience into assuming the meaning-making responsibility so as to demonstrate the possibility of challenging the taken-for-granted conventions and assert that individual change brings about social change. Besides, through the adoption of a feminist critical approach mingled with Brechtian theatrical techniques, Churchill invites the audience to contest the established notions of gender and sexuality with a view to initiating a social revolution that could turn the patriarchal and heteronormative matrix upside down. Her plays reveal how signs create reality rather than reflect it. In capitalist patriarchy the term ‘male’ refers to the male subject, and ‘woman’ is constituted as ‘Other’. Churchill uses the Brechtian-based distancing methods to induce a critical examination of gendered relations, and these methods’ impact on her drama are most effectively presented in its visual presentation.
In the analysis of traditional relations of power, not only between the sexes but also among different social groups, it has been proved how Churchill uses the multi-dimensionality of theatre to explore both the surface of social structures and the mental territory beneath that surface. Thus her work fuse with theatrical inventiveness to present a convincing critique. Challenges to form, or the unfixing of boundaries, are now widely recognized strategies of feminist theatre which explore the liminal in the interest of challenging the sign of ‘woman’. Churchill’s skilful manipulation of sign-systems through her use of time-shifting, overlapping dialogue, doubling and cross-casting have secured her place as a major British feminist contemporary dramatist. The above mentioned theoretical and theatrical devices illustrate the intersection between sex, race, class, gender in order to challenge patriarchal-capitalist ideology. The study has analyzed the portrayal and experiences of female characters and the roles they play in Churchill’s selected plays Vinegar Tom, Cloud Nine and Top Girls.
In Vinegar Tom, it has been shown how Churchill exposes traditional history from a socialist feminist view point, revealing the gender bias of the seventeenth century witch hunt. Churchill exposes the patriarchal constitution and its persecution of women under the pretext of abominable witchcraft. The power and interdependence of patriarchy and materialism is seen as a complex reality, which none of the women in the play are able to fully understand. The women are perceived as witches because they do not conform to the patriarchal system that constructs the female identity. These women are the seventeenth century victims of destructive capitalist male hegemony. Through the analysis of the play, it has been shown that Churchill exposes the punishment of women whose acts of non-conformity threaten the sexual and economic hierarchy and also emphasizes how women’s struggle to overcome their imposed condition only increase their vulnerability and marginality. The play ignores historical boundaries and aspires for deeper roots imbedded in universal human character.
The play Cloud Nine, written in the period of radicalization of British feminism and of its dramatic surge influencing everyday lives of ordinary women, depicts that the important feminist belief in sisterly solidarity and the sense of sharing stood for a widely recognized and applied practice. The fact that women’s solidarity helped to change the lives of other women, influenced their recognition of self-worth and of the worth of other women and helped them to recognize and refuse patriarchal bonds and oppression is undeniable. All women characters analyzed in the current study managed to leave patriarchal orders that were tying them so much, they identified their own sexuality, recognized the biases long imposed on their lives and started to perceive themselves and other women from a different angle, the one that the second wave of feminism, women’s solidarity and their group dynamics helped to be generally recognized among women. Therefore, the sisterly solidarity supported the characters to find themselves through the reappraisal of women, through the influence of feminist activities questioning traditional ´male´ depiction of women and proving that women have their own tradition and history. Moreover, the analyzed characters became influenced by group dynamics, an open climate characteristic for the late 1970s, and by widely recognized belief that women are self-sufficient. Thus, radical communities of women living without men, lesbian separatism and the identification with true sisters affected their lives.
In the play Top Girls, the characters are represented as already liberated and self-identified; thus, they do not struggle to find self-worth and they do not discuss patriarchal bonds and values from which they are freed. However, the characters in Top Girls lack the sense of solidarity and sisterhood which they do not apply even when their position at the Top Girls Employment Agency evoking ethic of caring is taken into account. On the contrary, they are depicted as harsh women who have acquired a tough approach which they consider important and desirable characteristic of any woman who seeks a prosperous job and recognition in a professional field. Therefore, the women who do not represent a ‘top girl’or those who lack the skills to manage to be recognized are completely marginalized, the sisterly solidarity, so important for women’s liberation in the 1970s, and the help of powerful women are denied to them no matter what bonds connect an influential woman and the one who is powerless. Marlene and other powerful ´top girls´ are highly influenced by Margaret Thatcher’s policy stressing individual skills and enterprise, fierceness when desiring to be successful, patriarchal family, responsibility of individuals for themselves and women’s role of carers connected with the belief that women should stay at home with their children. Thatcher’s reactionary policy against the achievements of the second wave of feminism forced women to make existential choices between a traditional role in the centre of a family life and recognition in public sphere connected with the necessary acquisition of ruthlessness and determination. Thus, women in Top Girls are represented as victims of the period since sisterly solidarity is defeated by Thatcherism through its focus on individuality and harsh competitiveness without the recognition of others, which, in fact, makes women perceive one another as enemies. A woman who does not lack the skills, which are required by Thatcherism, has a chance to become recognized and successful and even more powerful than men, provided she abandons solidarity to other women who lack the skills for achievements or who choose different way of life. Therefore, such a woman, through the denial of sisterly solidarity, becomes disloyal to feminist ideals; however, as Churchill seems to stress, there is no other option offered by Thatcher’s policy when considering the fact that such a woman wants to achieve another feminist aim, which is a recognition and success in a public sphere.
The lack of a sense of community among women, highlighted by Churchill’s portrayal of women such as Marlene, forms a critical element of Churchill’s drama. Her drama reiterates how meaningful change is impossible while women continue to oppress one another, and while economic structures perpetuate patriarchy.
Rather than suggesting that liberation can be achieved through women’s particular gender strengths and motherhood, sisterhood, class and history are allocated a very specific place in their oppression. It is as a result of the specific economic conditions of women, in which they are exploited by virtue of their gender, that the oppression of women, for socialist feminists, is always within the class analysis. Churchill draws attention to the fact that women may still remain trapped by the categories of patriarchal essentialism, even while they are rejecting gender roles imposed on them. Therefore, they assert that they can do all and everything. Moreover, they claim that they are “free” and “equal” to men but they miss the point that these terms belong to the dominant male culture. Being equal to men requires internalizing patriarchal values and accepting male models of success. As a result, women who are trying hard to cope with inequality through male modeling transform into surrogate men. They become oppressors of other women and men they deal with. This proves that their position is ironic because while trying to eliminate patriarchy, they become a part of it. On the other hand, it has been discussed that Churchill considers motherhood as one of patriarchy’s traps because patriarchy continuous its structure through motherhood and keeps the female in the service of the male in this way. Therefore, Churchill urges that women who attempt to get liberated should be wide-awake in order not to get hooked by patriarchal essentialism through motherhood. If they take all responsibilities for bearing children, they will remain trapped by patriarchal essentialism which accepts every woman as a mother and responsible for child care and women’s mothering as the central and continuing element of the social organisation and reproduction of gender in patriarchy. In the light of this study, as has been shown, although the women characters in Churchill’s three plays pretend they are liberated, it is obvious that they are not.
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