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"Fen" to "Hot Fudge": A study of subjectivity and agency in the drama of Caryl Churchill
Abstract
Contemporary British dramatist Caryl Churchill has drawn considerable critical acclaim during the last decade for her highly theatrical treatment of class and gender relations. In her dramas, Churchill has claimed a focus on possibilities of change: my study investigates those possibilities and the specific questions of subjectivity and agency in Churchill's work. Under what conditions can socially established practices be displaced and how do Churchill's plays manifest these conditions for an audience? For my study, I have drawn on the contemporary theories of social construction of Louis Althusser and on the work of Michel Foucault and his notion of the discursive, epistemic field. I have also employed some of the psychoanalytical ideas of Julia Kristeva and the cultural theory of Jean Baudrillard. I begin with a discussion of Fen, a play that overwhelmingly invokes the major question concerning me: if one is subjected--in ideology or in language--how does one make purposive interventions in the social frame? Along with Fen in chapter one, I have included a discussion of Softcops because there Churchill explicitly utilizes the work of Michel Foucault. In Chapter Two, I discuss two plays from 1976, Vinegar Tom and Light Shining in Buckinghampshire. In both, people are caught in social practices that seem particularly unyielding to real change. In Chapter Three I discuss Churchill's 1982 play, Top Girls, and its depiction of the "Thatcherite" woman, Marlene, who appropriates much of the ideology and the practices of that era in her climb to the "top." I discuss Traps and Cloud 9 in Chapter Four, which examine social and gender-related roles in contemporary and as well as colonial Britain. In Chapter Five I consider an older play, Objections to Sex and Violence, and its reverberations within A Mouthful of Birds (1987). This duo explores the unsettling themes of possession and violence. In my final chapter I examine three more recent plays, the postmodern Serious Money, and the complementary pair, Hot Fudge and Ice Cream. These plays suggest that agency needs to be rethought in an era of simulation; I argue further that they represent a nascent attempt to rethink the possibilities for change in a postmodern and cynical world.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature|Theater
Recommended Citation
Hamilton, Joan Teresa, ""Fen" to "Hot Fudge": A study of subjectivity and agency in the drama of Caryl Churchill" (1991). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9200137.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9200137