Traps, Softcops, Blue Heart, and This Is a Chair: Tracking Epistemological Upheaval in Caryl Churchill's Shorter Plays

Traps, Sojtcops, Blue Heart, and This Is a Chair: Tracking Epistemological Upheaval in Caryl Churchill's Shorter Plays DANIEL J E RNIGAN Much of the secondary literature about Caryl Churchill focuses on the ideological issues raised by her plays. Indeed, contemporary critics have queried her work at every tum, attempting to divine its implications for a wide range of feminist and Marxist ideals. Despite the fact, however, that Churchill's own political and creative associations are by and large with groups that have strong feminist and Marxist ideals (Monstrous Regiment, Joint Stock, Second Stride), a number of notable critics have found her work at odds with these very same ideals. Jane Thomas, for instance, shows us the full extent to which Churchill has been regarded suspiciously even by her most like-minded feminist and Marxist critics: Critical readings of Caryl Churchill's plays as programs for social advancement along socialist or socialist feminist lines are often unable to account for certain gaps and contradictions in the texts other than as oversights, aberrations. or in some cases, betrayals of the political paradigm. After juggling (eons like "bleak," "ambiguous," "murky," "worrying," and "irony," Michelene Wandor concludes that Churchill's plays display "an equivocal attitude to change." Helene Keyssar draws auention to Churchill's "tricky political stance" and discusses "the absence of any positive strategy to change the dismal enslavement of women." (160) To look at a specific case, Michelene Wandor expresses concern that the work does not invoke a strong enough socialist-feminist dynamic, which she defines as follows: Theoretically and strategically, socialist feminism is more far.reaching than either bourgeois or radical feminism; where radical feminism proposes a real surge of energy and solidarity between women, it does so by devaluing and ignoring men; bourgeois feminism values social power for women, but has no concern for class Modern Drama, 47: 1 (Spring 2004) 2 1 22 DANIEL JERNIGAN issues, and is still absolutely defined by men as the nonn. Socialist feminism, on the other hand, proposes changes both in the position of women as women, and in the power relations of the very basis of society itself - its industrial production, and its pOlitical relations. (t36) Wandor brings this understanding of the various fonns of feminism to bear in her interpretation of Churchill's Cloud Nine, explaining that while "[tlhe ways in which the individuals deal with their lives are sharp and moving [... l there is no solid political dimension to the experiences, no cause and effect as there is in the first half [of the play]" (171). Wandor feels that this failure to invoke cause-and-effect explanations of social injustice leaves the close of the play too open-ended, potentially reinforcing "the radical feminist and bourgeois feminist dynamic which shows women in existential control of their lives" (172). Churchill does, however, have equally vehement supporters, including Linda Fitzsimmons, who rejects Wandor's notion that Churchill's play supports bourgeois feminism, arguing instead that "Top Girls and Fell must, on the contrary, be seen as political texts, specifically as socialist-feminist texts" (r9). One objective of this article is to weigh in on this debate, and in doing so, I find significant appeal in Elin Diamond's description of the differences between Vinegar Tom and Fen: "[Wlhile Vinegar Tom shows the possibility of growing consciousness and change [, ..J the Fen women are studies in abjection" (197). Diamond reminds us that "there is no affective triumph in [theirl songs, rather a grim awareness of the conditions that prevent their singing" (199). I will, then, make a similar argument about the difference between Traps and SoJtcops, the latter of which I see as a watershed event in Churchill's career, as it, like much of her later work, might also be referred to as a "stud[y] in abjection" (a fact which marks it as at least as ideologically progressive as any socialist-feminist study). Churchill's ideological progressivism arises directly from the epistemological and ontological implications of her varied dramatic techniques (crosscasting and role switching in Cloud 9, radical anachronisms in Top Girls); Churchill's plays interrogate the relationships among theatre, reality, and the way in which the power hierarchy uses theatrical...