Discuss_the_Importance_of_the_Restaurant_Scene_in_Top_Girls.

Discuss the importance of the restaurant scene in Top Girls. Act I of Caryl Churchill's play Top Girls depicts a dinner party in a restaurant thrown by the main character Marlene to celebrate her recent promotion to managing director of the employment agency she works for; the titular Top Girls. The importance of this scene may be overlooked perhaps because of its largely fantastical content. But this scene sets up many of the themes that run through the play and prepares the audience for the revelation in the third act that the play is as much to do with class and socio-economic policies within a patriarchal society as it is to do with gender politics. Marlene has invited five guests, women who are either long dead or fictional characters. Aside from herself and the waitress who serves them no other character in this Act can be said to be real in the same way that the women we encounter in Acts II and III seem to be real. These acts have more of a 'social realist' style so Act I can seem to jar, stylistically, with the rest of the play. However, it could be suggested that this, along with the non-linear time frame, is a deliberate choice on the part of the author. Caryl Churchill has commented that her own particular field of work was historically largely dominated by men and so traditional ways of writing plays could be said to be very much masculine. Stories tend to be linear with a definite climax. The language and structure of Top Girls is anything but linear, characters talk over one another, the time frame jumps from present to past, it begins with what seems to be a fantasy sequence, and ends ambiguously. This non-chronological almost cyclical style mirrors Marlene's story. Moving as it does from celebrations in the present (Act I), to what should be the end of the play (Act II) where she is forced to confront the consequences of her choices, (Angie's visit to her office, her confrontation with Mrs Kidd). The conclusion (Act III) is set a year previously and the argument with Joyce and Angie's final statement 'frightening' reveals to the audience that none of Marlene's 'successes' helps anyone other than herself and even that is in question. Marlene does not appear to have any 'real' friends to celebrate with, she appears to be incredibly socially isolated despite (or more likely probably because of) her 'success'. This seems to be a price she is willing to pay. The mutual lack of attention to each others stories displayed by her dinner guests, demonstrated by the overlapping dialogue (monologues'), draws attention to the isolation of each of these women's successes, how it means little to anyone other than themselves. Isabella Bird s concerned primarily with escaping from the domestic life that she cannot bear and takes to travelling which she very much enjoys, but the peculiarity of a single woman travelling alone in the 19th century was commented on by the press and she is very keen for everyone to know that she took great care to be perceived as 'feminine' at all times (pg.8). She feels guilty for indulging herself in her love of travel and berates herself for not being more like her much more domestic minded sister Hennie. At one point she compares the excessively passive Patient Griselda to Hennie, 'Hennie had the same sweet nature' (pg.25) unconsciously comparing her own active nature unfavourably with the more conventional female passivity. Lady Nijo is concerned with pleasing and obeying the men in her life, her father and the Emperor, and her lovers and maintaining social conventions. The latter is demonstrated by her preoccupation with clothes. She passively accepts her role as concubine to the emperor and speaks quite pragmatically about his taking her virginity when she was fourteen. Her only expression of unease being that she disliked taking other women to him. Her subsequent travels as a nun around Japan are, as with Isabella ,unusual for a woman but Nijo reconciles herself with the notion that she was obeying her father's wishes. “Priests were often vagrants, so why not a nun' You think I shouldn't'/ I still did what my father wanted.” (pg.3) Patient Griselda, who ironically arrives late and last, is the most passive of the women, allowing her Marquis husband unquestioning obedience even to the extent of allowing him to take their two children from her to, as far as she is concerned at the time, be killed. Griselda is from peasant stock and is told by her husband that the people cannot accept her because of this and this is why he tests her. She denies that handing her children over for apparent slaughter was difficult as 'It was Walter's child to do what he liked with.'(pg.23). Marlene is very distressed by this and one suspects that this is as much to do with her intolerance for Griselda's refusal to take any active role in her life as any personal resonance she may feel concerning the abandonment of a child. Pope Joan rejects her femininity in order to indulge her passion for learning, she leaves home at age twelve, disguised as a boy, to travel to Thebes to study theology. She eventually moved to Italy because the men there did not wear beards and was eventually made Pope. So removed from all things feminine, Joan does not realise that she is pregnant and remains in denial about it up until the point where she gives birth during a papal procession. She describes her and her child's subsequent stoning to death quite dispassionately. She seems unaware of the irony that up until she was discovered she made a perfectly acceptable Pope; “...I shouldn't have been a woman. Women, children and lunatics can't be Pope.” (pg.15) Dull Gret reveals the least about herself, other than Marlene, but we do learn that she had ten children and watched many of the die under the hands of 'the Spanish'. Deciding to exact revenge on the source of this evil she corrals her female neighbours into marching into Hell to battle the Devil. This her only monologue comes at the end of the act and is ironic as will be mentioned below. Marlene makes no mention of her own abandoned child, Angie and only reluctantly admits to having a sister. The issue of children and the role of women as mothers and how this role is perceived by both women and wider society is a theme set up in Act I. All of Marlene's guests have had children taken from them and have either been complicit in this (Marlene and Griselda) or helpless to avoid it (Nijo, Joan and Gret). The only woman not to face this particular issue is Isabella who did not bear any children as she only married when she was fifty. In fact it is arguable from the context of the major theme of the play, that of the inherent helplessness of the individual in the face of greater societal pressures, that all the women were victims of circumstance to some extent. In some respects this is reminiscent of the themes of Alice Walker's The Colour Purple. Women are forced to give up their children, in order to either further their careers, Shug, or because of patriarchal interference, as in the case of Celie and Sofia (eventually to be reconciled like Griselda and unlike Nijo or indeed Marlene although that seems to be her own choice). The devaluing of the maternal role is signposted in this act and is picked up by Joyce's ambivalent relationship with Angie in the following Acts. In this vision of the past, we see women’s struggles throughout history to achieve, to live their lives to the fullest, to have the same choices available to them that men have. With the party guests being real and fictional women from the past, we see that this struggle not only spans history, but that also cultures and differing cultural values. We also see that each of these women's individual struggles and their imitating men has not managed to change anything for women generally. Women still have to choose between a career or a family, like Isabella, Joan, Nijo and even to a certain extent Griselda. This is paralleled by the 'real' women in the second act. Louise has sacrificed a social and family life for a career and has subsequently encountered a glass ceiling. Jeanine is actively discouraged by Marlene to mention her impending nuptials to any prospective employers for fear it will put them off. The overlapping dialogue in Act I very much goes to demonstrate the lack of real communication between the women, highlighting perhaps a broader issue to do with the general lack of dialectic regarding gender and class inequities within society. The women present overlapping monologues and use each others stories as platforms for their own with little regard to social niceties. It is relevant to note that of all the women the most masculine seeming Joan is rarely talked over and more often listened to. But generally the women literally do not hear each other. “Dull Gret's final, apocalyptic vision of collective female action ('We're going to where the evil comes from and pay the bastards out') is set against the stage picture of a group of women no longer listening to each other.” (Churchill, 1982, pg.xxix) They are locked into separate discourses unable to hear each other due to deep rooted socio-economic factors and this serves to reflect the plays broader theme of the perils of individualism within the established socio-political framework. Marlene is portrayed in Act I as a heroine, a woman who despite fierce competition from men and other women has 'made it'. She surrounds herself with these ghost characters that she perceives have also achieved great things. But their achievements are as insubstantial as themselves because as at the end of the play Joyce remarks 'nothing has changed for most people' ( pg.85). People are still trapped even if, like Marlene, they simply trade one trap for another. In her case adopting the values of individualism and capitalism that were arguably responsible for the home situation she was so desperate to escape. This provides the focus for the remainder of the play, the recognition of a need for class analysis. The main conclusion seems to be that individual achievement is meaningless as long as there are huge inequities in society. As long as we have the 'stupid, lazy and frightened' (pg.86) Angie's in our midst, we can’t fully be proud of the Marlene's. All of this is set up by the characters, dialogue, and structure of Act I. Bibliography. Churchill. C. (1982) Top Girls. The Open University. Goodman. L. ed. (1996) Literature and Gender. The Open University.