Identifying And/or Resisting: A Study Of Women's Gender Identity In Caryl Churchill's Four Plays

Emerged as one of the leading playwrights of the international stage since 1960s, Caryl Churchill has drawn considerable critical acclaim for her contributions to theatre. But most of critical studies concentrate on Churchill's innovations of theatrical techniques, such as the unexpected changing of time and space, the juxtaposition of the past and the present and the unconventional cross casting. Not enough attention has been paid to the text-based thematically study of her plays. Therefore, this dissertation undertakes a detailed exploration and analysis of Churchill's four plays, to name them chronologically, Owners (1960), Vinegar Tom (1976), Cloud Nine (1978), and Top Girls (1982), with a special emphasis on her feminist concerns of women. A combination of gender issues with Churchill's other concerns, such as class and age, will definitely enable us to understand fully the issue of gender identity of women.Though labeled as a socialist-feminist, Caryl Churchill has claimed to create 'not ordinary, not safe" plays. Many critics have noticed Churchill's unconventional treatment of women characters. The fact, however, is often ignored by most of them that Churchill's feminist consciousness and her political stance as a socialist have undergone a process of development in accordance with her writing career. This dissertation shows particularly how the playwright's interest in social concerns like feminism and socialism lead her to reshape in her plays the conventional relationship of two sexes and to challenge the socially expected domestic roles of women.Moreover, since the feminist studies of Churchill's plays are scattered and unsystematic, my study, therefore, centers specifically and exclusively on the changing possibilities of women's gender identity, the issue Churchill meditates in her plays. This dissertation privileges feminism theories that stress the social construction of identity and recognize the need for historical specificity. Churchill's drama presumes that women's gender roles and male expectations are intrinsically linked andconstantly collide and reconcile with each other. Consequently, she uses transgressions of social, religious and economic forms to encourage women's reformation of their gender roles. This dissertation traces such transgressions through a gallery of women characters in Churchill's plays. In particular, it examines how some women characters identify with traditional women's gender roles and how others consciously attack social confinement and male dominance. Such a study requires, of course, close readings of the plays.The dissertation finds that Churchill attempts to balance biological determination and social dominance on gender identity in creating women characters: she sympathizes with the submissive women (and other marginal groups) but fails to find an outlet for them. Fantasizing with the unconventional women characters and their impossible life experiences, Churchill is consistently experimenting and pursuing a suitable gender identity for women.The dissertation begins with the historical examination of the male expectations of women. In the male projection, women are expected to be and biased as "the weaker vessel," a biblical derogative term, inferior to men bodily, mentally and socially. Most of male characters in Churchill's plays have internalized the ideology of male superiority, such as Clegg in Owners and Clive in Cloud Nine. Consciously or unconsciously, they try to impose the patriarchal values on women, silence them in the public sphere and confine them to the domestic responsibilities. Women are therefore deprived of their voices and thus social status and degraded to be "the second sex" in Simone de Beauvoir's term.A convincing evidence of women's powerlessness is that they are regarded as men's properties and exchanged as commodities in marriage by their fathers and husbands, such as Lady Nijo and Griselda in Top Girls. In this aspect, Karl Marx's commodity theory can be appropriately applied to analyze the "buying and selling" of women in...