境界を内破する

─キャリル・チャーチル『トップ・ガールズ』における身体

抄録

This paper discusses Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls by focusing on the portrayal of Angie, who is regarded by critics as a comparatively minor character. As symbolically exhibited in the confrontational relationship between Marlene and Joyce, a binary opposition functions as the dominant structure of the play. Marlene, one of the leading characters, is bent on boosting her already successful career and espouses Margaret Thatcher’s monetarist policies. Appearing in almost every scene, she seems to be at the heart of the play, and her presence reinforces various dichotomies, such as winner/loser and centre/margin. Her sister Joyce, a working-class single mother, does not accept Marlene’s point of view. However, Angie, who has been raised by Joyce but is actually Marlene’s sixteen-year-old daughter, has the potential to decentralise Marlene’s position and subvert the rigid binary opposition.
First, Angie demonstrates the possibility of fluidising binary relationships at various levels. In Act II scene 2, she and her friend Kit are crammed into a small shelter. Their interdependent relationship is shown through the representation of their bodies, as when Kit shows her menstrual blood to Angie on her finger, and Angie licks it. These representations also symbolize the variable relationship between the inner and outer parts of the body. In that scene, Angie is geographically and socially in the most marginalised position in relation to the centre, London, where Marlene lives. However, Angie decides to visit London because she believes that Marlene is her birth mother. In this manner, Angie is able to break up the rigid relationship between the two.
Second, the unrealistic dinner party in the first scene can be thought of as Angie’s dream, which also overthrows Marlene’s centrality within the play. Although the party is held to celebrate Marlene’s promotion, her position is gradually decentralised as guests talk about their painful experiences in childbirth and separation. The separation between mother and child suggests a strong connection to Angie’s search for her biological mother. During the dinner party, verbal language gradually recedes as the characters’ bodies come to the fore. These processes are symbolically represented by the portrayal of the female pope, Joan, whose vomiting in the final scene evokes the story of her horrible childbirth. These images also imply the plasticity of the relationship between the inner and outer parts of the body, as suggested by Angie’s bodily representation in the shelter scene. Thus, Angie implodes the various boundaries and decentralises Marlene’s position in Top Girls.