Top GirlsLecture 4: The Bottom Girls

Key Issues in the scene• Children and teenage children; single motherhood; single

parenting; rearing a family; rearing daughters; estranged children

• Problems of modern living; money issues• Studies and schooling• Work and Women (a central concern): Jobs and job

hierarchies; • Marriage and family;• Violence and women; violent language; violent thoughts

and topics; violent leisure activity;• Language and class;• Peer groups and friends replace family;• Alienation, estrangement, insecurity, and resentment

What we have seen so far• The office women have achieved relative success and

independence; however— • The system is competitive and hierarchical; the office

scenes provide a clear picture that women’s professional horizons are limited, even in today’s world

• Think back to job offers made to Jeannine - Marketing knitwear and secretarial-reception duties for a Lampshades Firm: what are her chances then of becoming a ‘top’ girl? (Stasis and stagnation)

• Also consider the limited options that exist for Shona and Louise

Power in the home

• Whilst we have seen the struggle for power of women and among women in the sphere of work, Act 2 Scene 2 provides a glimpse of the same power struggle happening in the domestic sphere and an echo of similar issues

• The fact that this scene is sandwiched between two scenes of politics in the workplace leads us to question the intention of Churchill in doing so:

• Perhaps she is suggesting that the struggle for power is not simply limited to the public and adult world as represented by scenes 1 and 3, but even in the supposedly ‘safe’ world of the home and children’s play

Setting

• Setting: note its empty, squalid state: contrast to Scenes one and two. Joyce’s backyard. (note, not a back garden)

• The house with back door is upstage.• Downstage a shelter made of junk, made by children.• Two girls, ANGIE and KIT, are in it, squashed

together.• ANGIE is 16, KIT is 12.• They cannot be seen from the house. Joyce calls

from the house.

Angie

• Through the character of The diminutive form of her name, Angie; (Angela) defining her class;

• Hopeless at school, lazy, and disturbed• The play exposes how divisive the system is; • By taking into account the situation of the helpless; Girls

like Angie who are incapable of entering the competition for top jobs because of poor, social, working class backgrounds; while the successful look after themselves,

• Who then looks after the ‘Angies’ of society?

• Angie reacts and revolts against her environment;• Intelligent in some ways (though not academically); ‘Now

I’m a cannibal’ (p36)• ‘Joyce about Angie: ‘She’s clever in her own way’ • She registers as being very moody and unhappy; Full of

anger and frustration;• No real ambition, as against her friend, Kit;• Uses foul language, and projects a very negative outlook

on life; ‘I don’t care anyway.’ • Is presented with few real options or prospects

Angie and Kit• Close relationship, though it is also marred by conflict • We see her being argumentative with, and she intimidates

Kit;• Nature of their relationship made convincing by a

recognition of typical insecurities affecting their age group;

• The continuous reference to themselves in the immediate present through the repetition of personal pronouns

Angie ‘I’ve no money’; the struggles and pressures of working class life

• Rows; quarrels; bickering;• Television ‘There’s nothing on telly.‘(p33)and going to movies

like ‘The Exterminator’• ‘What’s on at the Odeon?’ • Consequences of unsupervised youth; bored and misguided; • Dialogue on trivia, violence and sex;• Angie is very quick to anger, and uses physical as well as verbal

violence; • < Angie twists Kit’s arm till she cries out >

Actions as Metaphor;Liberalisation of women’s sexuality

• Angie’s confrontation with Kit; (Katherina & Bianca)• Angie asserts that Kit is frightened of blood;• Kit puts hand under her dress, then brings it out with blood on her

finger;• She then brandishes her menstrual blood covered finger in front of

Angie;• This action functions as a literal and metaphorical assertion that she

is a woman, not the ‘baby’ that Angie makes her out to be;• Angie licks the blood; her gesture is childish, ignorant, and immature;

while also openly sexual• Even in the world of children, there is the desire to express one’s

power over the other through physical action

Continue?Quit?

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• The dialogue in this scene is characterised by very short sentences; and short syllabic lines

• Saxon diction and register (level of formality?) • Producing the manner and sounds of natural

speech• Working class and vernacular speech• Ungrammatical speech as against standard

English• But the emotional drive and motivation has to be

determined through keenly audialising and visualising the text in performance on stage;

To illustrate• Kit: Do you wanna watch The Exterminator?• Angie: It’s X, innit. • Angie: She don’t like you.• Kit: I still got three pounds birthday money.• Angie: Tell you what?• Angie: Well I don’t like her so tough shit.• Angie: Last night when I was in bed I been

thinking yesterday could I make things move.

Angie: a school drop out

• Joyce: Maybe Angie should have stayed on.• Kit: She didn’t like it.• Joyce: I didn’t like it. And look at me. If your

face fits at school it’s going to fit other places too. It wouldn’t make no difference to Angie. She’s not going to get a job when jobs are hard to get. I’d be sorry for anyone in charge of her. She’d better get married. I don’t know who’d have her, mind. She’s one of those girls who might never leave home.

Kit

• Though Kit’s role is minor, she symbolises the potential of the woman of the future

• Intelligent and mature for her age• Kit’s choice of career shows she recognises the value of

rationality and empiricism and also her awareness of current affairs

• She functions as a foil for Angie’s childishness, and immaturity, and her readiness to believe in claptrap and nonsense; such as telekinesis

Joyce and AngieIssues

• The competitiveness of a capitalist society• The survival of the fittest• The need for women to go out and work• The social and economic cost of other

women’s individual economic success that throws up victims of society like Angie

Joyce and AngieConflict

• Elected to stay at home and look after Angie;• We note her dissatisfaction with the sheer drudgery of her life.

She is a bitter woman entrapped within the domestic world of the home – we do not see Joyce in any other context except that of the home.

• Joyce’s verbally violent hostility towards Angie. Her emotionally charged verbal battering of Angie and wild emotional swings are evident in the scene: contrast with the tone and language that she uses with Kit

• ‘Fucking rotten little cunt. You can stay there and die. I’ll lock the back door.’ (p37)

• It strongly suggests her dissatisfaction and discontentment with her struggling role as a mother and perhaps resentment at her ‘duty’ to look after her sister’s daughter whilst

• Angie’s loveless relationship with Joyce; Angie hates Joyce, and dreams of killing her; the act of matricide.

• We see the oppressive figure here being the mother-figure - It is women oppressing women again but there is a ‘natural’ hierarchy to this oppression, that of mother and child.

• Thus the desire to kill the mother is the desire to individuate and be free from the tyrannical oppression that the mother represents.

• Ironic that this Freudian desire to kill one’s father is transposed into the desire to kill one’s mother; it is not the figure of the man in this play that represses and restricts but the woman.

• The movie, The Exterminator (an X-rated violent movie); Functions to reflect and reinforce their mutual anger; Angie’s hatred of, and her wish to kill her mother;

• I’m going to kill my mother and you’re going to watch

• Angie about her mother: ‘Wish she was dead’.• Stage directions p44: Angie picks up a brick• ‘I put on this dress to kill my mother’( p 44 ) • Kit’s anger about her dependence on her mother

for permission to go; she’s still a girl despite her assertions to womanhood.

• Angie to Kit: ‘Your mum don’t let you go’

Joyce• Joyce is not close enough to her daughter to be a proper

guide for her life, and her development • She is the figure of the invisible mother: her being inside

the house and Angie outside in the backyard symbolises their emotional distance

• Conflict of domestic responsibility, motherhood and work outside the home; Joyce has chosen to remain in a closed domestic environment

• Accepting the traditional role of wife and mother has brought Joyce nothing but hardship

• Both sisters, Joyce and Marlene, have each had to choose between career and family

• Few options open to them as women despite the 20th century societal myth that anything is possible

Joyce and Marlene

• Marlene’s high-flier world in her Top Girls employment agency contrasts significantly with the world of her sister, Joyce, in her run down poor domestic abode.

• Worlds apart socially and economically, and as we later see, politically

• The worlds of Marlene and Joyce are structurally interlinked by Angie, given that she makes an appearance in both.

• The abandonment of Angie has allowed Marlene to pursue her career while the care-giving of Angie has led to the stasis and stagnation of Joyce’s life.

• There is a clear dichotomy made between those who are successful and those who are ‘stuck’ in the rut of the domestic world.

• Ironic that Joyce is the caregiver of the child Marlene has abandoned: she is doing the very ‘job’ that Marlene has rejected.

• But this is a ‘job’ not for a “Top Girl” but for the uneducated, lower class of women who are unable to cut it in the world of work.

• It seems to beg an almost simplistic equation that a woman with a career = good, and a woman who embraces and chooses motherhood = bad.

• Irony. • For Angie (and Joyce), and those in her societal situation

— despite her admiration for, and association with Marlene, there will be no great help from fellow womenkind to get to the top of the Great Chain of Being (an issue we see in Shrew as well)

• She will, to all intents and purposes, remain at the bottom of the hierarchical order

• An unequal, fragmented society is presented to us in this act where there is a clear divide between those at the top and the rest who languish at the bottom – there is no real hope of advancement in such a world.

• This irony is compounded when we compare with Act 1’s seeming celebration of feminine success: how true can this be if women like Joyce and Angie still exist and in fact are perpetuated by the entire socio-economic and political system? When they are oppressed by those of their very sex?

Role of Daughters – always to be submissive?Katherina & Bianca; Angie & Kit

Father-daughter relationship• Mild gentle / refined • Soft-spoken • Respectful • Silent • Obedient & Patient • Submissive• Powerless • Socially, and verbally unfree

Mother-daughter relationship• Rough / Violent • Disrespectful; • Foul-mouthed / Course;• Politically aware (Kit)• Ambitious (Nuclear

Physicist) • A sense of the world - ‘Shall

we go to New Zealand?’ (Kit)