The Reproduction of Patriarchy and the Normalization of Violence: A Socialist Feminist Study of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls and Pam Gems's Camille

Abstract

          The research deals with two plays that negotiate women’s experience with the aim of shedding light on the profound impact of capitalism on women’s roles during the three terms of Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. It examines how patriarchal structures underpin the capitalist system in Caryl Churchill's Top Girls (1982) and Pam Gems's Camille (1984). Moreover, it explores how women attempt to reconstruct the gendered labour hierarchies, yet they perpetuate power imbalances. It uses socialist feminism and the theories of power relations as critical lenses. Withdrawing from the emotional expression ascribed to women, Churchill gives a reversed and an unconventional or even an orificial image of a woman. She is in favor of the affective image. This shift is shown through Churchill's character, Marlene who is left alone on the top, having espoused masculine qualities and adopted an anti-family attitude. She preaches Thatcher and oppresses her own fellow women. In Gems’s Camille, sex work is portrayed as the sole glorified yet radical choice for the courtesan mother, Marguerite Gautier, to survive the completely male-dominated class system and secure a better life for her illegitimate son, Jean-Paul. The research analyzes how sex work is used by Gems as a lens whereby she can show her rejection of the twentieth century masculine world and men's personal desire to dominate, subdue, and limit women's roles. In Camille, Gems shows how women are given no space and an attractive or a glorified alternative choice, other than sex work, to achieve agency.