Top Girls and Pygmalion seen from the feminist prism

Abstract

The present paper aims to study and analyse the female characters on two different British plays that belong to the 20th century. This analysis will be made from a feminist perspective, that is to say, the named analysis will focus on women through a feminist analysis method, on how the female characters of Top Girls and Pygmalion are represented and portrayed by taking into account their evolution, the stereotypes they represent or how they are treated depending on the language. There is a critical method that covers this kind of analysis called feminist literary theory. This paper will introduce some of its features in order to make accessible and more understandable the object of the study. The analysis has been tackled from the named feminist perspective of this critical method in terms of stereotypes and psychological evolution of the treated women. After putting the plays into their social background and making the whole analysis of the female characters, the paper will end with a comparison between the different women that appear in the two British plays –above all their main characters Marlene and Eliza- and the conclusions drawn from this comparison without forgetting and putting aside the feminist literary theory.