While these women are telling their stories, Marlene plies them with drinks but doesn’t tell her story at all. Instead, she encourages them to tell theirs and acknowledges their extraordinary lives. She almost separates herself from these women by not having a bizarre story to tell. When Joan says ‘Have we all got dead lovers?’, Marlene replies ‘Not me, sorry.’ (p.10 TG), implying she has no-one to think about. As each woman speaks, something she says triggers another to say something about her own life. The author has used a dialogic structure to enhance the energy of speech in this scene. A backslash (/) is used to denote where someone is interrupted by another, and an asterisk (*) to show where speech has followed on from an earlier statement. Also, the women sometimes talk over each other, creating an atmosphere of excitement, which is very loud. It is a scene of ‘noisy celebration and shared storytelling’, with ‘overlapping dialogue which brings the women together’ (p.238 L&G). This confusion of overlapping speech together with the amount of alcohol being consumed creates a scene of drunken debauchery. It becomes a verbal game of scoring points, where the women are all trying to stay the centre of the conversation.
These life stories introduce a feminist theme, no male being present. This scene sets the theme of the whole play as feminist based, and Marlene progresses through to the following scenes whereas the five characters don’t reappear. Marlene toasts their achievements with ‘We’ve all come a long way. To our courage and the way we changed our lives and our extraordinary achievements’ (p.13 TG). She is obviously including herself in this, as we find out later in the play how she herself sacrificed her child and her family in order to pursue her ambitions. The difference however, between her sacrifices and those of her guests, is that hers were her choice, those of the other women were not their choices. They had to accept what happened to them.
The fact that Marlene is celebrating her promotion with ‘a host of women from myth and history’ (p.235 Literature and Gender L&G), suggests that she has no friends, yet another sacrifice she has had to endure, again of her own choosing. Her success in business has cost her dearly, suggesting that she is ‘at odds with a world which expects too much of women and offers too little support’ (p. 235 L&G).
Marlene is portrayed as a feminist heroine in this play, yet she seems to support only women who show strength of character as she does. It is for this reason that she has chosen to celebrate her promotion with these five characters, after all, they too have endured and sacrificed much in order to have survived in their male dominated world.
Marlene seems to have taken on the male role, being used to getting what she wants. When interviewing Jeanine in the Employment Agency, she doesn’t give her chance to question anything, instead she lets her know that in this male dominated world of business, when she goes for a job interview she can’t display any female anxieties, wear an engagement ring or even mention marriage. In answer to Jeanine not wearing an engagement ring, Marlene says ‘Saves taking it off’ and ‘So you won’t tell them you’re getting married?’ (p.31 TG). Jeanine expresses a wish to travel with a job, but Marlene is very pushy and insists she go for one of the jobs she has in her books, with ‘If I send you that means I’m putting myself on the line for you’ (p.33 TG). She comes across as a modern superwoman, but the fact is that family ties have no place or value in her life. This comes to light in the scene with her sister Joyce when we find out that Joyce’s daughter Angie is really Marlene’s daughter, whom she gave up. Joyce says ‘Look you’ve left, you’ve gone away, /we can do without you.’ (p.78 TG).
Top Girls is a play showing contemporary women at work and how they are affected by society. It shows the sacrifices involved in making that decision to push ahead and make something of themselves. The scene at the restaurant sets this theme of how women struggled in years gone by, as told by the five women from the past, and how women are still fighting against male dominance in modern day, as highlighted by Marlene as the play progresses. In their own way, all these characters express their anger at their lot in life. Joan dressing as a man, Nijo becoming a nun, Isabella pushing herself to her limits despite her illness, Dull Gret giving the devils a beating and even Griselda in her ‘nice’ way eventually saying ‘it would have been nicer if Walter hasn’t had to’ (p.27 TG). By listening to how the other guests had overcome male control, she probably got to thinking that maybe things could have been different for her.
This scene might be performed more realistically by including other customers in the restaurant and giving brief speaking parts to the waitress. Set in a high-class restaurant with the other people speaking normally, if not more discreetly than Marlene and her guests, it would add the necessary ambience to the scene. The dialogic system used of overlapping speech, makes it quite confusing at times and although people do talk over each other when they are excited, this should be toned down so that the five guests can properly re-tell their stories, knowing they have been heard and understood. Yes, they would be drinking, but not so much that Pope Joan would be sick. The other customers can show their annoyance at having their meal disturbed by these rowdy women, by complaining to the waitress, which is what would normally happen. Performing this restaurant scene needs to be more realistic in all of these ways, it would give an interesting angle to the story, even humorous. It’s relationship to the rest of the play would then become a genuine representation of feminist strength against male control. Whereas the actual scene is more of a surreal, private dinner party, merely acting out events of the past, without having any effect on contemporary lifestyles. So although it does have a relationship to the rest of the play, it is only so much as the subject matter, it comes across as quite a separate entity in practical terms. The rest of the play however, is real life, those situations do present themselves and we do have those problems to deal with.
Words: 1559
Bibliography
GOODMAN, Lizbeth, Ed. Literature and Gender (London: Routledge in association with The Open University, 1996).
CHURCHILL, Caryl. Top Girls (London: Methuen, 1991).
Audio/Visual
VC1: A210 Approaching Literature: A Doll’s House.
VC 2: A210 Approaching Literature: Top Girls.
Audio Cassette 4: A Doll’s House AC 2123
Audio Cassette 5: A Doll’s House AC 2124
