55 pages • 1 hour read
Caryl ChurchillTop Girls
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Angie’s Dress
Clothing is an important symbol in the play, beginning with the stories of the women in the first act. When the emperor first raped Lady Nijo, he sent her a silk dress to wear that was ripped by the end of the encounter, symbolizing the veneer of formality, ritual, and obligation that covers sexual violence in Nijo’s role as a concubine. Nijo wore three-layer silk dresses, which the emperor’s wife didn’t like, but Nijo was a noblewoman with permission from the emperor to wear them. Isabella makes a point to preemptively say that she wore feminine clothing when she traveled, as the newspapers apparently sometimes said otherwise, which bothers her. But Isabella found the trappings of life as a lady intolerable, asking, “How can people live in this dim pale island and wear our hideous clothes?” (26) Nijo, however, finds it difficult to understand why anyone would be relieved to dress comfortably. Pope Joan changes using clothing to present herself as a man, allowing her to become the pope when she would likely have otherwise been married off, borne children, and sunk into domestic labor. Gret tells the others that when she called the women to go with her, they all came out to fight demons in the clothes and aprons they were wearing to do household work. For Griselda, clothing symbolizes her husband’s favor. She had to marry him on the same day he proposed to her. Nijo questions, “And what did you wear? He didn’t make you get married in your own clothes. That would be perverse” (22). Griselda tells about the white silk dress that she was dressed in with jewels in her hair. When her husband told her he was divorcing her and sent her home to her father, he stripped her of her clothes, leaving her with only her slip so she wouldn’t have to walk home naked. When brought her back and revealed that he was testing her, he dressed her in “cloth of gold” (25). For Griselda, clothing signifies her elevation in status from a peasant woman to the wife of a nobleman.
Angie’s dress first appears in the second act, when Angie is sent in to clean her room and comes back out wearing “an old best dress” (44) that doesn’t quite fit her anymore. The image of Angie wearing a too-small dress is symbolic of her inability to become the adult that others are urging her to be. The dress is inappropriate, as Angie herself is often inappropriate, and Joyce, exasperated, tries to get her to change it. She claims that she wants her to change so she doesn’t ruin it, and even promises that Angie can wear it after, but there’s no repair for it simply being too small. Cryptically, Angie tells Kit that she wore this dress because she wants to have it on when she kills her mother. However, in the third act, it becomes clear why the dress is so significant to Angie, and why Joyce would be unsettled at the sight of it. It was a gift from Marlene a year earlier. Marlene hadn’t seen either of them in six years, so her gifts are impersonal. She brings chocolate, perfume, and a dress that she warns Angie might not fit, and the fact that it does is pure luck. That night, which Angie remembers as the happiest day of her life, Marlene tucked her in and acted interested in her secret society notebook. She was still awkward, but she was sweet and allowed to act like the child she was. When she puts the dress on in the present, it doesn’t fit because she’s too old for everything—the person she wants to be, her friendship with Kit, her lack of career ambition. She fantasizes about Marlene as a mother, so wearing the dress and killing her adopted mother would be a symbolic reinstating of Marlene. But Marlene is a stranger who doesn’t know how to (or care to) nurture anyone, much less a child. When it’s too small, she’s too old—too old to act like a child, too old to be friends with Kit, too old to not be thinking about her future.
Blood
As Kit and Angie argue in their backyard fort about whether Kit is afraid of blood, Kit reaches under her dress and produces her finger, bright red with menstrual blood, and says, “There, see, I got my own blood, so” (36). Angie immediately grabs Kit’s hand and licks the blood off her finger. Angie exclaims that she’s a cannibal, or perhaps a vampire, and they argue about whether Kit is now obligated to lick Angie’s blood when she’s menstruating. For Angie and Kit, it’s a moment of childish intimacy; Kit is only 12, and Angie, although 16, acts as if she is much younger. Kit shows Angie the blood to stop Angie’s taunting, and to perhaps disgust her and gain something to taunt her about. But Angie proves that she isn’t scared either, and she raises the stakes by doing something more grotesque and articulating the expectation that Kit will have to do it too. By placing the expectation of reciprocation on Kit, Angie turns the act into a sort of ritual to prove their loyalty to each other. This mimics the “blood brothers” ritual that many children enact, in which two children cut their hands and press the wounds together to mingle their blood.
Kit and Angie aren’t sisters by blood, but they are the only example in the play of girls or women who treat each other like sisters, with all the intimacy and conflict that relationship often entails. This moment calls attention to blood as a symbol. In the first act, the historical women may not mention blood, but blood is a significant presence in their stories. For Nijo and Griselda, who were taken by adult men as teens, menstrual blood was the signal of supposed sexual maturity. To Pope Joan, that blood was a liability, a reminder that she could never be a (cisgendered) man. Blood was in the forceful rape of a young teen by an emperor. In the women’s many pregnancies, their blood fed and nurtured the babies they carried. Their blood also ran through their children’s veins. When they gave birth, they shed their own blood to bring their newborns into life. For Pope Joan, the blood and pain of birth meant swiftly enduring the blood and pain of death for herself and her baby. Demons spilled the blood of two of Gret’s children, one with a sword, which is how the cord was cut for Nijo’s baby, whom the father took away and killed. Griselda’s husband tormented her by telling her that her children had been murdered, but they were kept away, dead to her for 16 years. Nijo grieves her stolen children as if they’re all dead, and the one time she spotted her daughter, she felt the connection of their shared blood.
These stories reverberate in the present through Marlene and Joyce, who, unlike Kit and Angie, are sisters through blood. But blood also separates them. Marlene experienced the blood connection and blood shedding of pregnancy and birth, but she gave the baby to her sister. Although Joyce is related to Angie by familial blood, caring for Angie caused her to miscarry the baby that Joyce gestated and fed with her own blood. Joyce and Angie’s connection is off, and Angie, who suspects that Marlene is her mother, wants kill Joyce by bashing her with a brick, as if seeing her blood will give her the answers. Marlene tries to hurt Joyce by telling her that she had two abortions. She offers to give detail but then adds, “I don’t like messy talk about blood” (81). After giving Angie to her sister, Marlene all but severed her connection with Joyce and the rest of her family. She is setting out to live an individualist life, so she avoids the messiness and obligation of blood, leaving the full weight of responsibility on Joyce. In the third act, Marlene shows up without verifying the flimsy invitation of a teenager, seeming hopeful for reconciliation. This suggests that blood still means something to Marlene, as much as she has pushed it away. But Angie and Kit have a much more powerful sisterly connection, and Angie’s symbolic act of licking Kit’s menstrual blood suggests that the sisterhood of feminism can connect all women, but women must let go of the trappings of capitalism and the patriarchy.
Top Girls Employment Agency
On its surface, the employment agency seems like an empowering mechanism, much as Marlene seems like a paradigmatic feminist from the 1980s. The name suggests that the agency is going to turn women into “top girls” by connecting them with top employment, which sounds like the feminist sisterhood of women helping women. But the agency is just an example of what today might be called “woke capitalism,” in which capitalist enterprises perform their allegiance to progressive causes as a marketing technique. First, although the agency’s top executives are invisible in the play, the only bosses mentioned, other than Marlene, are men. Perhaps promoting Marlene over Howard was a matter of optics. Similarly, Win mentions that the company headhunted her and offered a lot of money, suggesting that they hired her, at least in part, for her gender. The name of the agency, “Top Girls,” is also condescending and infantilizing. Louise inadvertently calls attention to this when Win asks her if she is the only woman in her office, and Louise replies, “Apart from the girls of course, yes” (52). The “girls” in Louise’s office would refer to the secretaries and assistants who work for the high-powered men for low pay and often the expectation that they will accept disrespect and sexual harassment. Therefore, the name suggests that the women who come there can become “top girls,” but they’ll still be one of the girls and never a woman who receives respect as an adult with autonomy. The agency inserts women into a patriarchal workforce, using the appearance of feminism to thinly cover the way it actively works against social change.
When Marlene, Nell, and Win speak to applicants, they push back against social change as well, sometimes attempting to gaslight the women they’re interviewing into dropping their ambitions. But succeeding as a woman, as evidenced by Marlene, Nell, and Win, means choosing to devote one’s life to capitalist pursuits and give up on personal ones. Each one comes into Top Girls because they want more. Jeanine wants to travel. Louise wants her work to be seen and appreciated, and Shona wants to utilize her potential. But the three women who interview them uphold the patriarchy as much as any man, pigeon-holing them into spots that are no better than where they started. When they speak about their clients, they have little respect for them. They treat them all as competition. Notably, Caryl Churchill’s unique and innovative dialogue structure, in which actors interrupt and overlap each other, requires the actors to work together very closely and listen to each other to produce the rhythm of the text, even as the interrupting and overlapping signifies that they are not working together or listening. Marlene, Nell, and Win have reached the level of middle management, and they are making more money than the other women, but like their clients, they feel restless and undervalued. With the individualism and materialism of the 1980s, the agency isn’t producing “top girls.” It’s sending women off to interview for male-driven companies, and it’s using Marlene as window dressing. Marlene, Nell, and Win have reached a level of success within the patriarchy by selling out, but it’s insinuated that there is nowhere else to advance. None of them will ever be pope.
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By Caryl Churchill
