Within the play Shirley’s monologue script contains various areas reflecting upon the gender roles in conversational styles. As it is written in the monologue form it is Shirley’s interpretation of the events which is presented as well as her attitudes and values toward them, for instance when Shirley tells of her first meeting with Costas she describes how she perceives the conversational style of a typical man,
“Most men, really, there no good at talkin’ with women. They don’t know how to listen or they feel that they have to take over the conversation”.
This speech, and the example which Shirley also includes with it, holds various evidence within it for all of the three of the gender conversational models. The dominance model, the male conversationalist sees the woman as a disadvantaged speaker and feels the need to assert himself as the dominant participant, this is how Shirley perceives the situation but by looking at the evidence closer the reader can justify the two other gender models. The difference model, the male conversationalist style sees the situation differently than the female perceiving the topic raised as a discussion he then develops her topic to continue the conversation. The deficit model, the female conversationalist lacks a tag on her opening line encouraging no response from the male and losing topic control, in this model the woman lacks the techniques to collaborate with the man.
Another opinion of Shirley’s is that Costas is not like other men with his conversational style. When she talks to Costas Shirley maintains topic control, often by using politeness strategies, to which Costas responds politely and without threatening behaviour or aggressive dominance technique such as her husband Joe uses. At home Shirley’s conversations with Joe show him to use dominance techniques, such as demands, taboo language threatening language, physical actions and minimal responses,
“he said ‘I am not … eating shit,’ and honest to God, an’ he pushed the plate the entire length of the table.”
By doing this Joe hopes to keep topic control but often this is not so as Shirley’s quick witted more literate conversational style often defeats him,
“he goes, ‘What’s this? What. Is. This?’ I said to him, I said, ‘well when I cooked it was egg an’ chips, an’ as neither of us is Paul Daniels I’m assumin’ it still is egg an’ chips.”
this sarcastic wit, which Shirley uses against Joe in order to wrestle topic control from him, is not found in her conversations with Costas, as his conversational style is very different to Joe’s. Costas’ conversational style incorporates many features commonly associated with the female conversational style, politeness, which allows Shirley to maintain topic control, and verbosity rather than the minimal response characteristic associated with male conversational style.
Shirley’s conversational style, unlike the two male characters Joe and Carlos, doe not remain constant through out but rather progresses changing converging with her situation. At the beginning of the play Shirley’s conversations tend to be a battle for topic control with Joe and using her intelligible nature and literate advantage she produces various sarcastic witty phrases to achieve topic control. Later at the end of the play Shirley’s style has changed dramatically, her use of taboo language and long pauses in her speech mirror male speech and seem to show a convergence with Joe as she has gained her understanding of the world.
Overall Willy Russell has shown gender conversational styles to be diverse and controversial, not unique to a gender but diverse. This can be seen through the conversational styles of Joe, dominant, threatening, and using minimal responses, and Carlos, polite and veracious, one thought of as a typically male style the other a feminine style. Shirley also shows this diversity through her changing of styles to incorporate the typically masculine features at the end of the play but also in her example of male speech where the gender models can all be met preventing it being classified as one definite style.
