Rethinking The Progressive Myth Of Feminism

Caryl Churchill is one of the most prestigious contemporary British female playwrights to emerge in the post-war era,entering glamorously the male-dominated theatrical canon with extensive acknowledgement among theatre audiences and critics,acclaimed for her profoundly inspiring theatrical themes,audacious theatrical language experiments and abundant dramaturgy innovations.Throughout her prolific career as a socialist feminist playwright,Churchill has been making a consistent effort to produce authentic portrayal of female experience and status,which are neatly embedded in her exclusive dramatic structures,discourses as well as devices.Furthermore,rendering herself beyond the conventional ranges of mere account of and empathy for female sufferings and misfortune,Churchill furthers her theatrical subjects to the macro narrative of feminism and upon repudiation of the former,furnishes the audience with an alternative perspective of more truth to examine the factual feminist history.Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls is one of the most acclaimed plays of female subjects,well acknowledged throughout the theatrical arena home and abroad with Obie Award and Susan Smith Blackburn Prize conferred on it.The play reviews the status of women throughout historical,cultural and geographical extents,narrating the fetters and sufferings inflicted on them by patriarchal ideology as well as how they regard and handle the fate as the female.This dissertation first introduces the generational narrative of feminism as a dominant discourse and its deficiency.To proceed,through probing into Top Girls,it illustrates how Churchill employs epic theater devices to achieve alienation effect which converts the audience to critical reflections and accordingly exposes the nonlinear and fragmented development of feminism,leading to the demystification of the progressive narrative of feminism.In Chapter One,it is illustrated how Churchill manages to engender the intended alienation effects through her extensive adoption of Bretchian epic theatre techniques and innovative devices developed by herself.Thus the audience is emancipated from the emotional shackles imposed by the traditional theatre and ushered onto the stage of critical reflection on and rational reasoning of feminist issues,on which basis Chapter Two proceeds to the exposure of characters’ alienation from their female identities to a variety of degrees in a wide spectrum of senses throughout history.It is demonstrated that there is an unbridgeable abyss among the experience and perspectives of female individuals,which fail to construct a coherent continuum,thus the absence of consensus or empathy.Chapter Three explores how Churchill denies the heroine Marlene’s misguided notion,that is,her individual success is the inevitable result of the continuous progress of women,a homogeneous collective,in the process of historical development,by depicting the experience of differentiation and fragmentation within the female as well as the lack of consensus and empathy among them.The specific female individuals in the play respectively represent the female experience and feminism under their own historical and cultural circumstances.This thesis strives to illustrate that through denying the contemporary feminism represented by Marlene as a bourgeoisie,and rejecting the exploitation and oppression of the lower class women by bourgeois women,Churchill further debunks the progressive narrative of feminist history.With the introduction of epic theater theories employed in Top Girls,the author of the dissertation rethinks the progressive narrative of feminism: From the vertical dimension of time,the historical development of women’s experience and feminism is not a ray that shoots unidirectionally,but a collection of tortuous curves with numerous fragments.Meanwhile,if a horizontal section is taken at any point in time,even in the same time and space dimension there still exist striking distinctions among individual female experience and perspectives,with such factors as social hierarchy,economic condition and education level eliminating the possibility for them to reach an agreement,and even worse,they may be confronted with each other on sheer opposite sides.Therefore,the thesis’ rethinking discerns that the progressive narrative adopted by writers and literary critics on feminism at a macro level actually applies indiscriminately and mechanically a template of homogeneity,consistency,and continuity to women’s experience and feminist history,thus to a significant extent limiting the genuine presentation of feminist reality in literary creation and research.The thesis concludes with the progressive narrative of feminism debunked and an exploration for alternative dialectical narrative perspectives and methods which appropriately accommodate and reflect the heterogeneous and inconsistent nature of female experience and feminist history in literary creation and criticism.