Top Girls

Isabella Bird (1831-1904) is one of five real historical figures whom Marlene hosts in a celebratory dinner part in the first act. The actor who plays Isabella in the first act comes back in the second and third acts as Marlene’s sister Joyce, and she also appears once in the second act as Mrs. Kidd, the wife of Howard, whom Marlene beat for the promotion. Isabella Bird was a travel writer from Scotland in the 19th century. She spent her childhood and early adulthood trying to be the proper daughter of a clergyman by sewing and studying Latin. Though she had health issues throughout her life, Isabella had an intense desire to travel the world. The sacrifice Isabella had to live with was leaving her beloved sister behind at home. In this sense, Isabella is the opposite of Joyce, who felt responsible for everything that Marlene left behind. Within the body of one actor, they are two sides of the same woman. Isabella left and Joyce stayed. Isabella lived most of her life alone, rejecting the man she probably loved and never having children. Her marriage at age 50 is presented in the play as almost a kindness to her husband in return for his care of her sister, and after he died, she was free again to wander.

A century later, Joyce takes the opposite path, staying behind to care for family while her sister sets out into the world. Her husband leaves, and she is also alone, but she is raising her sister’s child. Joyce struggles to care for Angie, who doesn’t seem capable of caring for herself. Like many of the other women in the play, Joyce has lost a child. She had a miscarriage due to the stress of caring for infant Angie, so raising Angie also meant that she didn’t get to have her own biological child. Joyce works four jobs and despises the rich, and the revelation that Marlene despises the poor is divisive enough that Joyce cuts off their relationship. She wants nothing from Marlene, but as Mrs. Kidd, Howard’s husband, she becomes Marlene’s opposite. Mrs. Kidd is fully invested in domestic life and keeping the house and children to support her husband’s success. If the patriarchy falls, Mrs. Kidd has no home. Her tacit request that Marlene refuse the promotion is unreasonable, but she insinuates that her husband is taking his anger out on her. She represents the kind of woman who lived her life as she was told to live, and if patriarchy sinks, she goes down with the ship. Marlene has no empathy for her or for any of the non-historical women in her life.

Lady Nijo (1258-c.1307) was young noblewoman who was raised at court from the age of four to become a concubine to Emperor Go-Fukakusa, who first raped her at the age of 14—although in the play, Lady Nijo doesn’t see this as rape, since she was raised to see herself as the emperor’s property. She was groomed into sexual servitude, compelled to do whatever the emperor demanded with whoever he wanted. Her father told her that if the emperor ever sent her away, she must become a nun. Nijo was proud to be allowed to wear thin silk, which was a signal of class status, but the emperor’s wife hated it and her as well. Nijo took lovers and gave birth to four children, who were immediately taken away. When the emperor grew tired of Nijo and rejected her, she followed her now-dead father’s wishes and became a nun, but she wandered the earth instead of staying in a convent. Lady Nijo’s a reflection of the brutality of both an unchecked upper class and an unchecked patriarchy.

The actor returns in the second act as Win, one of Marlene’s coworkers at the Top Girls agency. Whereas Lady Nijo spent the first half of her life in place and the second half wandering and traveling, Win spent the first part of her career traveling and wandering as a salesperson and has now settled down. She gave up selling because she realized that she wasn’t aggressive and didn’t want to be. Now that Win is in one place, she has, like Lady Nijo, become entangled with a married man. Like Nijo, Win feels no pity for his wife. Of becoming a nun, Lady Nijo says, “The first half of my life was all sin and the second all repentance” (5). Win expresses a similar sentiment of redemption in her career change, remarking, “Here your clients want to meet you because you’re the one doing them good” (65). Notably, Win is the only adult who sees something positive in Angie. She calls her a “nice kid” (66), while Marlene sees Angie as a lost cause.

Dull Gret is a figure from Flemish folklore who is the subject of multiple paintings, but Caryl Churchill’s Gret is based on the painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. In the period, “dulle” could either mean “insane” or “stupid.” Bruegel’s painting was inspired by the proverb, “While one woman makes some noise, it can be borne. But the more women, the more trouble there would be.” Although the proverb is misogynistic in its original context, in a contemporary mindset, it can describe the sisterhood of feminism. Gret is mostly silent during dinner, rough like a peasant who interjects one or two words and laughs at jokes about penises. But then she tells the story depicted in the painting, in which she assembled a mob of women to go into the mouth of Hell to fight the devils, who had killed two of her ten children and caused death and destruction in town. Dull Gret became a trope to describe women who were seen as unfeminine, ill-tempered, hen-pecking, and shrewish, but seen through a feminist lens, she could be a hero.

Angie, like Gret, is perpetually underestimated and demeaned. When the audience first meets her, she is rough and strange like Gret, prone to moments of troubling aggression. At 16, Angie’s only friend is 12-year-old Kit, whose mother has started to question whether there’s something wrong with Angie or if the friendship is inappropriate. Angie licks menstrual blood from Kit’s finger and talks about murdering her mother while wearing an ill-fitting dress. Angie suspects that Marlene is her birth mother, and she shows up for a surprise visit in London. But Angie won’t get the motherly love and affection from Marlene that she needs to grow as a person. However, the play ends with a scene from a year prior, when Angie arranges a visit from Marlene without her mother’s knowledge. Angie from a year ago is still a child. The dress fits her. She is hopeful and desperate for attention from her real mother. Angie and Kit represent the future of women, but Angie has been hurt and warped. Fortunately, she has Kit, who is smart and socially adapted, and who is there to reach out and grab Angie’s hand.

Pope Joan is a historical figure who may or may not have existed. She dressed as a man to be allowed to get an education, and ended up becoming a brilliant religious scholar who was eventually elected as pope. She successfully defied her gender for two years until her body betrayed her by getting pregnant and giving birth at the inopportune moment of a papal procession. Joan was immediately dragged off to be stoned, punished by death for being a woman. Her contemporary counterpart is Louise, who comes to the agency seeking a job. She is 46 years old, and she is excellent at the job she has been doing for 21 years. But no one sees Louise or recognizes her impeccable work. She has, like Pope Joan, suppressed her gender, although Louise’s gender denial is more symbolic than Joan’s. She comments that she doesn’t think anyone sees her as a woman at all. Louise is tired of watching the men she trains pass through and move on to better jobs, and she wants to leave her position so that in her absence, her talents and hard work will be seen. Both Pope Joan and Louise represent women who lose their gender identities for advancement. In Act I, Pope Joan interjects repeatedly that she lived as a man and can’t relate to the others’ experiences of misogynistic treatment, but in her final moments she experienced the full force of misogyny.

Patient Griselda, like Dull Gret, is a folkloric figure with multiple artistic representations, but the most famous is in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. To test her obedience, her husband took away her children and convinced her that he had killed them. He tossed her out with almost no clothing, then enlisted her help in preparing for his wedding to a younger woman. Griselda obeyed him without question. She was “rewarded” by her husband bringing her back to the marriage and revealing their now-teenaged children. However, Griselda’s story isn’t told as a tale of a gaslighting and abuse. It’s told as a parable about women being virtuous, patient, and loyal. In the second act, Nell is avoiding marriage. She works at the agency, and she competed with Marlene for the promotion, although she is a gracious loser. Nell used to be a salesperson, and she describes herself as “not very nice” (61), which is meant to be a positive trait in the business world. Jeanine is a woman who comes to the agency and is interviewed by Marlene, looking for a job that might allow her to travel. But Jeanine mentions that she is engaged, so Marlene writes her off, only giving her leads for local jobs. In a sense, Jeanine is the person Nell is trying not to be, and Patient Griselda is the person who Jeanine is afraid to become.