The Ghosts at the Table

In this paper I will argue that Caryl Churchill's Top Girls is an attack on the bourgeois feminism and Thatcherism of 1980s Britain; I will maintain that the sacrifices and betrayals suffered by the protagonists were not the faults of the women in the play, but rather were the inevitable results of a system that forces women to achieve power by cutting off ties with other women. The paper, unlike readings in which Top Girls is either a celebratory testament to the possibilities and potential of women or a mournful examination of feminist failure, asks three questions: In what way, does Top Girls embrace a picture of how ambitions are shaped and skewed by both capitalist and patriarchal forces in women? What, in light of the women's movement's abandonment of its socialist principles, does the play's model of sacrifice demonstrate about the ideological contradictions engendered by that process? And Why does Top Girls represent women's aspirations within a capitalist system as both inherently self-defeating and ongoing? The three questions were analysed in order to reveal that Top Girls is a socialist feminist study through the texts and criticism of Marxist feminism, the concept of hegemony developed by Raymond Williams, and Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre as applied by feminist hauntology demonstrate that Marlene's achievements come only at the expense of her daughter and class solidarity, the women at the dinner are historical ghosts of a non-realized revolution, Joyce and Angie symbolize the women who are left out, and, most significantly, the play's incomplete nature deliberately does not provide catharsis to the audience. The conclusion of Churchill's study therefore is that an ultimate revolution for women is simply a continuing one that cannot be realized within capitalism.