Introduction 1
Chapter one
Male Expectation: the Weaker Vessel
Chapter Two
His Property: the Exchanged Commodity
Chapter three
A Transvestite: Usurping Male Power
Chapter four
Witches: Against Male Gaze
Chapter five
Subversion in the Family
Chapter six
Gender Identity of Career Woman
Conclusion
Works Cited
文摘
Coincidently, the silent women characters also appear inCaryl Churchill's plays and those women are socially neglectedlike that sign-language translator. In Top Girls, Churchill employsthe technique of silence and creates a silent waitress as a foil tothose hustling women. She serves Marlene and other five femaleguests throughout the dinner party but has no opportunity to speak.When those women guests have a warm conversation, the waitressconstantly comes and goes, serving food and drink they order, butsays nothing. None of those women guests on the stage takes anynotice of the waitress. Though there is no way for the audience toknow who the waitress is and what she is thinking about, her exis-tence on stage is highlighted by her always silence. It is obvious that the waitress's embarrassing situation is similar to that of the sign translator in Showalter's observation at the conference. Both of the waitress and the sign translator serve effective roles, but pitifully neither of them has their own voices.
In the beginning of Feminist Critique of Language, Deborah Cameron brings up the question directly "What does it mean that women are silent？" The question is based on her observation that "It cannot be that women are always and everywhere silent, nor obviously, that they lack the ability to use language" （3）Cameron's question finds an indirect answer in Alice Jardine's analysis of language. Jardine reveals the fact that there exists the difference between women's voice in public and private spheres and then accordingly she makes a division of public voice and private voice. She differentiates the two in the following way that "the public voice, for example, lecturing and teaching, has tradi- tionally been preserved for the male" while "the private voice with intimacy has been left for as the female".（73）
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