Mabel In Making History Contradicts Prevailing Attitudes Towards Women Shown In Top Girls
Mabel In Making History Contradicts Prevailing Attitudes Towards Women Shown In Top Girls. Discuss.Tom Roberts In Top Girls by Caryl Churchill, our protagonist is a hard working, hard living woman called Marlene, who gives up many aspects of her life in order to obtain a successful career. She gives up a real family life and even a social life in order to be a ‘top girl’. In Making History by Brian Friel, the character of Mabel is also shown to do something similar; she leaves behind her family, who are from a different religion and belief system, in order to marry a man of power and to become powerful herself. These contradicting attitudes are interesting to the audience because although the characters both do the same thing, they have different reactions to it. In Top Girls, Marlene gives up a child, a mother, and her sister in order to pursue her ideal life choice of running an employment agency. She moves away from her family in their little out of town village, and seemingly does not regret this very much. More importantly, she gives up her own child in order to live out her dreams in a big city, and seems to forget about the fact that she has a mother, sister and child not so far away, and is surprised to find out that Joyce sees her mother every week. When she is in the city and doing her job, she blocks them out completely. This is opposite to the way Mabel feels about Henry and Mary, her siblings. She feels that she should go back and misses them, but she stays firmly put with Hugh because she knows what she wants, and what is best for her. She says ‘this is my home, mary’ when mary implores her
‘come home’ with her. She does this despite the fact she feels guilty for her family, because of the hard times she was living in, and because of her love for Hugh. This love is so strong that she converts religion to catholocism ‘out of loyalty to hugh’. This is something Marlene would never do. This leads us on to another contradicting point between Marlene and Mabel; the fact that Marlene has seemingly never had a long-lasting relationship, and doesn’t want one. She disregards love in order to help her obtain a sustainable career, along with her work colleagues, preferring ...
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‘come home’ with her. She does this despite the fact she feels guilty for her family, because of the hard times she was living in, and because of her love for Hugh. This love is so strong that she converts religion to catholocism ‘out of loyalty to hugh’. This is something Marlene would never do. This leads us on to another contradicting point between Marlene and Mabel; the fact that Marlene has seemingly never had a long-lasting relationship, and doesn’t want one. She disregards love in order to help her obtain a sustainable career, along with her work colleagues, preferring to have one night stands ‘one Friday, one Saturday’. This relates to how, in both books, men seem to be the higher power, and are able to control the women in the plays in certain ways. Mabel does everything because of her love for Hugh; she leaves her family and her whole life behind in order to live with Hugh 50 miles away from home. This is something that Marlene would never ever consider doing for anybody but herself; even though she, like Mabel, moves away from her family, she does it for very different reasons. She does it for the sake of her own happiness, and for her career, whereas Mabel does it so she can be with her husband. Although this undoubtedly aids Mabel’s happiness, it is still contradictory to the attitudes presented towards men in Top Girls. Relating back to the ideas I presented earlier about how Marlene gives up her child, in Making History, Mabel does the complete opposite of what Marlene did. She gives up her own life so that her child might live, and to make her husband happy with a child. In Top Girls, Marlene gives up her child so that she can have her own life, and to ensure that her success is not marred by an unwanted spouse. She then tries to shift the blame for whatshe did away from her, avoiding being blamed and saying ‘you were quick enough to take her’ when Joyce tries to reprimand her. Figuratively, Marlene can be said to have taken a life away from Angie in giving her away, because she took her away from a place where she could have grown up in successful surroundings, and learned about the world of business. She then placed her with her sister in a small village where she probably would never grow up to become anything of success, due to her surroundings. The way the two women react at childbirth is very contradictory, and says a lot about their personality and attitude towards submission to patriarchy. Another way in which the attitudes present in the two plays are contradictory is how the two main women in them react to criticism and to being put down. In act 2 of Top Girls, when Marlene is being shouted at by Mrs. Kidd about how she should give up her job so that her husband can have it, and insults her, Marlene stands her ground against her, at first in a calm way, by saying ‘i’m sorry but i have some work to do’ and later by saying ‘could you please piss off?’. She does not care about the fact that she is being insulted and put down by Mrs. Kidd, and goes about her business in a tough way. She has had to do this all her life in order to get to the position we find her in at this point; if she hadn’t had a tough exterior, she would not have been able to become successful, as part of being successful is to be able to take criticism lightly. This is contradictory to how Mabel reacts when Lombard and O’Donnell ignore her when she is introduced to them by O’Neill in act one. She is immediately upset by their cold reaction to her being English in the scene, saying ‘i’m in pieces i am, look, my hand is shaking!’ and later, ‘I think maybe i’m going to cry, and the stupid thing is i never ever cry’, and seems to need calming down by O’Neill in order to let herself relax and be calm again. This contradicts Marlene’s attitude because she simply doesn’t care what anybody thinks, with the exception of her sister. This also relates to how Mabel is dependent upon O’Neill for her own happiness and comfort. In this scene, when he calms her down by letting her ‘put her arms around him’ it shows us that she needs him in order to survive without being upset, whereas Marlene needs nobody to comfort her, and simply gets on with her own life, due to the previously mentioned tough exterior she had. This tough exterior is most likely due to the fact that she grew up with a father who abused her mother, and so she is making a point by being strong and also by not having a partner; she does not need a man to get by. She could also be scared of the fact that she may fall into the same trap as her mother and become abused, hence why she moved away from the sleep village she grew up in. The fact she grew up in an abusive household also contradicts the way that Mabel is shown; she is shown to have grown up in a loving household with a good father and siblings, and appeared to be happy there, until she met Hugh. This is why she feels guilty for leaving home whereas Marlene does not; Mabel’s family were good to her and never did anything to harm her, which cannot be said for Marlene. We can tell Mabel remembers her home life fondly from the way she reminisces about people with her sister. Marlene, however, remembers it in a very different way, talking about her mother being sad because she was ‘married to that bastard’. In conclusion, the attitudes towards the main women in both books differ by quite a large degree. Where, in Making History, women are shown to be subservient to men through the character of Mabel, in Top Girls, the character of Marlene bolsters this idealism and subverts the way in which women are subservient to men. Through the use of love, or lack of in the case of Marlene, the respective authors have told us a great deal about the attitudes that the women have, and the attitudes with which they have presented. Marlene is shown to be a feisty, well kept woman who knows how to look after herself and does not need a lover or family to keep her stable, instead choosing to put all her efforts into her career. Contradictory to this, Mabel both misses her family and her old life (unlike Marlene) and has a deep need for Hugh, needing his consolation when she is upset, and eventually giving up her life so that she can provide him with a child. Friel wrote Mabel in this way to show how women were below men in every way in the time period when Making History was set, even when it came to things out of their personal control. Churchill presents an opposing attitude in Top Girls, and basically shows the audience how a woman can be just as successful as a man, but that they will have to make some serious sacrifices in order to obtain what they want in life. Overall, although on first glance Mabel and Marlene do not seem all that different, they are very contradictory in nature and their attitude towards men (and submission to) differs greatly.
