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beccaelizabethIbsen's A Doll's House [Ibsen, A Doll's House, 1991 Methuen Student Edition; All quotations are taken from this edition] and Churchill's Top Girls [Churchill, Caryl, Top Girls, 1991 Methuen student edition; All quotations are taken from this edition] share many central issues. They both feature women as central characters. These women have to deal with finance, work, and children, all while negotiating a patriarchal system that expects them to live within certain restrictions. In both plays there are characters that choose to live within those expected roles and others that leave them and create new ones.
Ibsen's play was from a time when women had no right to vote, limited opportunities for work, and no control of their own finances. In order to borrow money a woman had to have a man stand guarantor – or, like Nora, break laws. Because it's necessary to save Helmer's life she feels it cannot be wrong, because it's for love.
To pay back the loan Nora took small jobs. At the time a middle class woman was expected to depend on her husband or father for money, and publicly Nora maintains a facade that fits this expectation. Privately she tells an old friend that working makes her feel almost like a man, as if she has power and independence and responsibility like a man. In her acceptable feminine role she is meant to be powerless, dependent and actually irresponsible – childlike and frivolous. She pleases her husband when she entertains him, dancing and playing dress up, just as she pleases her children playing games with them. However her husband also expects her to act responsibly with money, so she is in fact in a double bind of expectation, meant to do and not do both at once.
The women that work for her – her maid and her nurse – are of a lower social class. The expectations on them are quite different. The play does not focus on the maid at all – she follows orders, brings in a lamp, introduces visitors and answers the door. She does not get to speak for herself of her own motivations. But the nurse gets a moment to talk with Nora. When Nora's mother died she was brought in to raise her. To do this she gave up her own child, one born out of wedlock. This was expected of her, at the time, and she seems to accept it calmly. The only annoyance she expresses is with the father, who left her. It is never raised as a possibility that she could have raised both children.
The expectations of a married middle class mother were quite different – to define herself as a mother, yet leave the routine work to servants. Nora says she “the children have been my dolls”[A Doll's House, Act 3]. Her role as a mother was ornamental, not practical. And yet she was expected to sacrifice everything for it.
Reactions to the play at the time focus on Nora leaving her husband, and her children. This was set up carefully in the play. Nora starts to doubt her moral fitness, having been told a lie is a moral taint that could infect her children, so she leaves them to the Nurse more. Then she is left unsure about what morality is at all; without knowing, she can't raise children herself. “I don't want to see the children. I know they're in better hands than mine. As I am now I can be nothing to them.”[A Doll's House, Act 3] So her departure is meant as an act of love for them.
But contemporary critics called this unthinkable - no woman would ever do what Nora did. The idea she could leave her socially determined roles for individuality was outrageous, despite individuality being a middle class value then. Being a mother was more important than being a human being. Challenging that made the play shocking.
Todorov's description of typical narrative structure suggests that the story starts with the status quo, which is then disrupted, but by the end is restored. Such a structure can reaffirm that the original status quo was right. But A Doll's House never goes back to the way it started. It ends at it's most disrupted, and Nora believes this a good, necessary thing. So the structure, along with the content, calls the initial setup into question.
Top Girls disrupts the pattern much further. It opens with impossibility – women from across story and history, fiction and fact mixed together, having dinner in a restaurant. The play is not in chronological order, ending with a scene from a year before the restaurant. It questions both traditional patterns and newly dominant replacements. Nora left to go find herself, get a job and an education. The women in Top Girls have traveled, left home and the men that would want them to play at their roles like dolls, had educations and jobs. And yet their lives are not fulfilled either.
Top Girls has many more characters than A Doll's House. The polyphony of voices give multiple views on the dilemmas they all face, and express many different ways of approaching them. Though Marlene is present for most of the story and can provide an important line through it, this isn't the story of one woman; it has no Nora. Many women, across many centuries - demonstrating that their problems are not those of a single person or family; they are faced by women in many times and places. But it also doesn't present their problems as normal – almost everyone finds aspects in the lives of others that seem bizarre and objectionable. So their solutions vary widely.
Marlene is a career woman in the 1980s, celebrating her promotion, won in competition with men and putting her in charge of men. She is a fervent Thatcherite, a follower of Conservative party policies of the time, and considers Thatcher, the first female Prime Minister, to be “Terrifico.”[Top Girls, Act 3] She believes that individual achievement can win any reward. But she has won the good things in her life at high personal cost, leaving behind attachments to family and friends – hence her celebratory party of strangers from stories. Her daughter was raised by her sister, in the same kind of poverty Marlene rejected, reaping nothing of her rewards. Marlene has succeeded among men on men's terms, by the dominant – patriarchal and hierarchical – definitions of success.
When faced with a system where men have control and will not allow women to so much as start studying, Pope Joan chose to live as a man – successfully, reaching the very top. Unfortunately the men around her found that so unnatural that, when discovered, they killed her and her newborn. Her achievements did nothing to improve the condition of other women – in fact, in being caught, she made it more difficult for others to do the same thing. Dull Gret lost her children, so she lead other women in collective action against the source of the evil – meaning she lead them all into hell, full of yet more fighting. Not an obvious improvement. Patient Griselda lived inside the system, in her expected role as a woman – and yet still lost everything, position and children. Following all the rules or breaking them all, still it is in men's power to take it all away.
Griselda eventually got her children back; her story was a popular ideological weapon to teach women their place. Though Lady Nijo lived by the letter of her father's request – taking religious orders as he wished - she cries that she did not get such an opportunity. Marlene gets her daughter back – because Angie thinks she is 'wonderful' she follows her to Top Girls. But Marlene can only judge her as she judges everyone – and by those standards, “She's not going to make it.”[Top Girls, Act 2 Scene 3] In an individualist system there really is no room to bring your children with you. They have to rise – or fall – on their own.
Both plays make the audience think about the problems raised, and both show popular solutions only to show them cut off, or show how limiting they are. The central issues remain difficult whenever they are faced.
Bibliography
Burk, J.T. (1993) 'Top Girls in performance' in Donkin, E. Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing Theatre as if gender and race matter. University of Michigan Press.
Buse, Peter (2001) 'Towards a citational history – Churchill with Benjamin' in Drama and theory critical approaches. Manchester University Press.
Churchill, Caryl (1982) Top Girls. London: 1991 Methuen student edition.
Fitzsimmons, L. (1989) File on Churchill. London: Methuen.
Goodman, Lizabeth (1996) Literature and Gender. London: Open University.
Ibsen, H. (1879) A Doll's House. London: 1991 Methuen Student Edition.
Kritzer, A.H. (1991) The Plays of Caryl Churchill. Great Britain: Palgrave.
Marker & Marker (1989) Ibsen's Lively Art: a performance study of the major plays. Cambridge University Press.
Rabillard, Sheila (1998) Essays on Caryl Churchill: Contemporary Representations. Canada: Blizzard.
Tornqvist, E (1995) Ibsen's A Doll's House. Cambridge University Press.
Again there's lots of helpful stuff in the margins, filling in all the words I took out to make it smaller, and sometimes "same paragraph" because apparently I haven't got the hang of how academic paragraphs work. Is some nice helpful marking.
You tend to write in rather short, jerky paragraphs - try to link these more cohesively.
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