1. Introduction
This paper argues that women’s success, when pursued within structures of neoliberal capitalism or racialized performance culture, often demands ethical betrayal—of solidarity, of ancestral memory, and of the self. Drawing on cultural memory theory and tragic framework of moral insight, I examine Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1982) and Sun Mee Chomet’s Asiamnesia (2008) as dramatic enactments of betrayal—of one’s body, ancestry, and solidarity—in pursuit of success. These plays interrogate whether women’s visibility—particularly when framed as feminist success—is truly liberatory or whether it functions as a reward for disavowal and complicity. This paper approaches that disavowal through a concept of ethical rupture—a moment in which the expected arc of moral recognition fails, and insight is displaced from the character to the audience. While the term ‘ethical rupture’ is not drawn from a single source, the term is used here to synthesize ideas from Nietzsche, cultural memory theory, and theater’s ethical address to the audience. Ethical rupture marks a break not in the plot but in the possibility of reconciliation. It emerges not from the character’s transformation but from the audience’s recognition of what remains unseen, unspoken, or structurally impossible to address. Drawing on Nietzsche’s understanding of moral insight as a product of estrangement rather than clarity, ethical rupture reframes tragedy as confrontation rather than resolution.
Also, in this paper, I use ‘success’ and ‘visibility’ not to denote feminist achievement but to describe socially legible forms of advancement that appear empowering while sustaining structural violence. These plays do not merely critique patriarchy or racism; they question the very conditions under which women become visible. They ask whether such visibility, rather than signaling liberation, simply reinscribes the exclusions feminism seeks to undo. By invoking figures from history, Churchill and Chomet expose the painful irony that what is often celebrated as feminist empowerment is achieved through ethical compromise and the abandonment of solidarity. Their characters do not reach resolution or redemption. Instead, the plays displace ethical recognition onto the audience, demanding that the spectator confront the cost of progress when it is built on silence, sacrifice, and erasure.
To explore this tragic dynamic, the paper draws on four intersecting frameworks: (1) cultural memory theory, particularly Jan Assmann’s idea of memory as rupture rather than restoration; (2) Nietzsche’s notion of insight as arriving through crisis rather than clarity; (3) Baudrillard’s concept of simulation, where reality disappears into endless reproduction; and (4) Deleuze’s theory of the “time-image,” which destabilizes causality and linear history. These theories are used to read these two plays as ethical performances that dramatize our contemporary inability to inherit a coherent feminist or racial past.
Cultural memory, as theorized by Jan Assmann, is not simply an archive of the past but a performative structure of collective identity that is activated through symbolic repetition, affective investment, and reactivation of historical trauma within the present (13). The plays analyzed here mobilize cultural memory not to reclaim continuity but to expose rupture—where the past becomes unreadable, the voices of the dead incoherent, and solidarity impossible. In this way, memory in both plays becomes ethically charged not because it restores what was lost, but because it confronts the present with what remains unresolved. Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human offers a philosophical framework for this tragic logic, treating moral insight as a consequence of estrangement rather than clarity, betrayal rather than revelation. “The great liberation… comes suddenly, like an earthquake” (Nietzsche 8), rupturing all prior obligations and affections.
This earthquake is not only existential, but aesthetic. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the time-image, this paper also considers how temporal disruption—the collapse of linear progression and stable causality—operates in these plays to fracture realism and displace ethical recognition from the character to the spectator. Baudrillard’s concept of simulation further illuminates the political implications of such displacement: when identity becomes a repeatable image divorced from its origin, visibility no longer guarantees agency.
Together, these frameworks suggest that Churchill and Chomet are not staging feminist redemption but performing its failure. Their characters do not resolve; they disintegrate. What they offer is not a coherent feminist subject but a spectral remainder—what is left when success becomes ethically frightening.
In this context, tragedy is not a genre with expected emotional effects but a philosophical mode of insight. It does not conclude with catharsis but with confrontation. Marlene in Top Girls is not tragic because she experiences moral revelation, but because she cannot. Her success is built on denial—of class, of kinship, of collective struggle—and she remains ideologically steadfast even when emotionally fractured. It is not Marlene but Angie, the child she abandoned, who delivers the final insight. When Angie whispers “frightening,” the audience is left with the knowledge Marlene cannot bear (Churchill 235). This gap between what the character sees and what the audience understands is the tragic breach Churchill so precisely constructs.
Drawing structural inspiration from Top Girls, Chomet’s Asiamnesia pushes this rupture further, offering a landscape where racial identity itself is a simulation—repeating hollow signs of ethnicity for the consumption of others. Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation is especially resonant here. As he argues in The Vital Illusion, the dead in postmodern culture do not disappear but are endlessly reproduced in hollowed-out forms (11-12). Figures like Afong Moy or other historical Asian actresses in the play are not resurrected in order to speak—they are exhibited again, emptied of substance, and offered as spectacle.
Yet both plays resist the closure of spectacle by turning that simulation back on the viewer. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s notion of the “emancipated spectator,” the paper proposes that these works do not instruct but implicate. They assume the audience is already engaged in the act of interpretation and already complicit in the systems being exposed. The spectator, in Rancière’s words, is not a passive receiver but a translator of signs: “Every spectator is already an actor in her story; every actor, every character, is in turn the spectator of the same kind of story” (17). In this way, both Top Girls and Asiamnesia shift the ethical burden onto the viewer, staging rupture not to resolve it, but to make it inescapably visible.
These plays dramatize memory’s failure and solidarity’s fragility. Their protagonists—Marlene and Sarah—are not models of resistance but tragic figures caught within systems that reward mimicry and abandonment. What emerges is not clarity but confrontation, not empowerment but a demand: to look directly at what gendered success within patriarchal or racialized systems so often requires us to forget.
2. Ghosts of the Self: Tragedy and the Cost of Empowerment in Top Girls
Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls is often recognized for its structural innovation and Brechtian technique, yet its deepest critical edge lies in its ethical critique of success as betrayal. At the heart of the play lies a paradox: Marlene’s professional ascent is framed not as a feminist achievement but as a severance—from kinship and ethical solidarity. Churchill stages this paradox not as melodrama but as tragedy—a narrative that culminates not in moral clarity, but in ethical rupture for the audience—and unfolds in fragments through doubling, interruption, and spectral repetition. Marlene is not a villain; she is a figure of ideological success, and her tragedy is not in personal failure but in the cost of achieving visibility through disavowal.
The opening dinner scene features a surreal gathering of women—Pope Joan, Lady Nijo, Griselda, Isabella Bird, and Dull Gret—summoned to celebrate Marlene’s promotion but quickly fractured by the weight of their own stories. Each woman delivers her story in an overlapping monologue that resists dialogue. The result is cacophony, not communion. These women speak but are not heard. As Rebecca Cameron observes, Top Girls opens with “a fleeting fantasy of transnational, transhistorical sisterhood,” reminiscent of earlier feminist spectacles like Cicely Hamilton’s A Pageant of Great Women (1909), which staged “notable women from various nations and centuries … in support of women’s rights” (Cameron 143). Churchill’s tableau evokes the “spectacle of female solidarity extending across national, cultural, and class boundaries,” but, as Cameron notes, it soon reveals the “strain” of that ideal as the imagined unity collapses into conflict (143–44). The historical women in the dinner scene describe forms of success achieved through submission, denial, or violence—each story a fragmented echo of feminist aspiration turned sour.
Pope Joan ascends to the papacy by disguising her gender, only to be exposed and stoned during childbirth. Pope Joan confesses, “I thought God would speak to me directly. But of course he knew I was a woman” (Churchill 118), capturing the exclusion at the heart of her journey. Griselda endures repeated trials of obedience to prove her worth as a wife. Lady Nijo is passed between emperors and then renounces court life, only to become trapped in a new ritual of suffering. These women do not share knowledge—they circulate pain. Their speech is fragmented, their presence ritualized. This spectral repetition dramatizes what Jan Assmann calls the rupture of cultural memory, where “archived voices fail to communicate with the present” (Assmann 98). Churchill does not recover these women into a unified history; she stages their incoherence. Marlene listens, but not with empathy. She selectively hears what validates her own choices without feeling for them but only affirming her own worldview.
This performance of cultural memory, with historical women gathered with currently alive Marlene, as Jan Assmann describes it, is not reparative. It denies the expectation of a ‘celebratory’ dinner for female victory. Memory “works through reconstruction” (Assmann 27) and without cultural memory, there can be “no infringements, conflicts, innovations, restorations, or revolutions” (Assmann 8). Cultural memory is ruptured, broken into affective fragments that cannot be reassembled into a cohesive tradition. It is not a closed system of inherited knowledge, but a dynamic field of conflict and negotiation. At Churchill’s dinner party, that negotiation fails. The ghosts appear not to transmit knowledge but to expose a lack of inheritance. Marlene has no use for their stories. They exist to ornament her success, not to inform it.
This breakdown of communicative meaning in the dinner scene is not only thematic but also formally embedded in Churchill’s dramaturgy. Her use of the Brechtian technique reinforces the rupture within cultural memory by preventing emotional absorption and instead emphasizing contradiction, fragmentation, and discontinuity. While the script does not mandate fixed casting, Churchill explicitly encourages doubling, stating in her “Notes on Production” that: “Doubling is possible. The actress playing Pope Joan can play Mrs. Kidd. Lady Nijo can double with Win. Isabella with Joyce, Dull Gret with Angie, and Patient Griselda with Kit” (Churchill xix). This strategy, commonly adopted in major productions, creates a structural resonance between characters separated by centuries. For instance, Isabella Bird and Joyce were played by the same actress in the first performed Top Girls, linking the restless adventurer and the working-class caretaker. The visual and performative overlap collapses linear progress, revealing how both women, despite differing historical circumstances, remain constrained by systems that demand their emotional labor and self-denial.
Even the structure of Act I resists forward momentum. Churchill abandons linear development in favor of a fragmented temporal landscape, where historical figures speak across eras without sequence or resolution. This aligns with what Deleuze calls the “time-image”—a form in which causality breaks down and multiple temporalities coexist in disjunctive, often disorienting ways (189–92). Instead of linking events through cause and effect, the time-image introduces “irrational cuts,” breaks in narrative that disrupt continuity and force reflection. Churchill’s dinner scene exemplifies this: history is not staged as progress but as recurrence. Each woman’s story—whether of ambition, loss, or submission—loops through time, repeating the cost of survival without offering resolution or inheritance.
This disjointed temporality reaches deeper resonance in the final scene of the play—a flashback that destabilizes everything the audience thought they understood about Marlene. Rather than clarifying her character, the backward movement in time reveals the ethical void beneath her success: the abandonment of her daughter, the denial of her class origins, and her emotional disconnection from familial responsibility. Yet this return to the past offers no transformation. Marlene’s encounter with Joyce, her working-class sister, is stripped of grandeur. Their dynamic is not merely a familial rift but a clash between lived material struggle and ideological abstraction. Joyce embodies a grounded, embittered realism shaped by caretaking, poverty, and political betrayal. Her resentment is not only personal but historical: she is the one who stayed, who raised Angie, who inherited the residue of Marlene’s mobility. Their argument—over politics, over Angie, over motherhood—exposes the cost of Marlene’s upward mobility. Marlene experiences no reckoning, no moment of recognition. Her infamous declaration, “I don’t believe in class. Anyone can do anything if they’ve got what it takes” (Churchill 233), does not merely express optimism. This moment comes in the midst of a political argument with Joyce, where Marlene defends Margaret Thatcher: “She’s a tough lady, Maggie. I’d give her a job.” Joyce retorts bitterly, “What good’s first woman if it’s her?” (Churchill 229). The exchange lays bare Marlene’s vision of feminism—one rooted in individual achievement, not structural reform. As Hayder and Al-Hilo argue, Marlene’s aggressive individualism makes her a theatrical embodiment of 1980s Thatcherism, a figure whose success depends on the disavowal of class solidarity and maternal responsibility (Hayder and Al-Hilo 33). She is not a critique of the system; she is its product. What makes Marlene so unsettling is not her cruelty, but her conviction. She does not hesitate, even when challenged by Joyce or reminded of Angie’s struggles. Her refusal to recognize structural inequality becomes a kind of ideological armor—protecting her from self-reflection while rendering her complicit in the very systems that marginalize others.
Marlene’s tragedy lies in her ideological coherence. She never wavers, never confesses. In the final scene, a flashback to a drunken evening with Joyce, she insists that her decisions were justified. “I had to get out,” (Churchill 231) she says, defending her abandonment of her family and later Angie, with tired certainty. Unlike classical tragedy, there is no moment of recognition. Marlene is not undone by her realization; she is affirmed in her refusal to change. Nietzsche would say this is not the absence of tragedy, but its modern form. As he writes in the preface to Human, All Too Human, the “great liberation” comes “suddenly, like an earthquake: all at once the youthful soul is deeply shaken, torn loose, torn from its place—it does not itself understand what is happening” (7). Marlene never experiences this rupture. But the audience does. They see what Marlene cannot: that her clarity is itself a form of blindness.
In the final Act, the cost of that blindness becomes most visible. The scene reveals that Marlene relinquished her daughter Angie to Joyce in order to pursue her career. Along with contrasting Marlene and Joyce’s current situation, Churchill thus exposes the contradiction between care and ambition within a structure that permits only one. The true insight of the play comes from Angie, the child Marlene gave up, whose presence in Marlene’s life—however unacknowledged—renders the cost of success visible:
Marlene sits wrapped in a blanket and has another drink.
Angie comes in
Angie Mum?
Marlene Angie? What’s the matter?
Angie Mum?
Marlene No, she’s gone to bed. It’s Aunty Marlene.
Angie Frightening.
Marlene Did you have a bad dream? What happened in it? Well you’re awake now, aren’t you pet?
Angie Frightening.
In this closing moment of the play, Angie, who idolizes Marlene, is left in the doorway to whisper the play’s last word: “frightening” (235). The line is stark, unqualified, and final. It functions as a tragic reversal: Angie, who lacks knowledge of her origins and future, expresses the ethical truth Marlene refuses to see. She becomes the embodiment of what remains unspoken in Marlene—an affective residue of sacrifice and abandonment that returns not as knowledge but as rupture. This moment does not offer closure—it opens a wound. This moment constitutes the ethical rupture of the play: a dislocation of meaning and moral recognition Marlene refuses to be burdened with. Angie’s word is not simply a reaction; it is a judgment. Her presence functions as the play’s ethical pivot. She sees what Marlene cannot: that the world Marlene inhabits is frightening and unlivable for girls like her. In this sense, Churchill reconfigures tragedy. Marlene’s downfall is not her own—it is deferred onto others. The recognition scene belongs not to the protagonist but to the audience, who must confront the emotional wreckage left behind by ideological ascent.
Churchill’s achievement lies in this asymmetry. Marlene does not suffer because she sees but because she cannot. Her ethical failure is not punished but rewarded. That is the tragedy. The burden of insight falls on the spectator, who sees the ghosts, hears the dissonance, and realizes what Marlene never will.
3. Specters of Representation: Racial Visibility and Cultural Haunting in Asiamnesia
If Top Girls reveals the cost of feminist success through class betrayal, Asiamnesia confronts the racial logic of representation, where to be seen is not to be heard, and to be visible is to become consumable. At the center of Sun Mee Chomet’s play lies a simple but devastating irony: the Asian-American woman can only achieve recognition through mimicry of the very stereotypes that dehumanize her. Visibility does not liberate; it haunts.
The play opens with Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman publicly exhibited in the United States, presented on stage as a display. Afong Moy is not literally silent, but her voice is treated as incomprehensible—she becomes a visual exhibit rather than a speaking subject. It is the condition of her visibility. She is allowed to exist only as an object of curiosity—her body legible, her voice irrelevant. This opening tableau establishes the tragic structure of the play: history returns not to be reconciled but to be reenacted. As Jan Assmann explains, cultural memory emerges when lived, and interpersonal memory (what he calls communicative memory) fades with the passing of its carriers. Traumatic or foundational experiences that resist forgetting are preserved not as coherent narratives but as symbolic fragments—rituals, myths, and performances that keep the past present in unsettling ways. These returns are not redemptive. They often reappear in distorted, abstracted, or hollowed-out forms. In this sense, Afong Moy is not recovered—she is performed. Her reappearance in Asiamnesia does not restore her historical voice but reiterates her visibility as spectacle. What the cultural memory transmits is not her subjectivity, but her symbolic function: an exhibit that continues to circulate. As Baudrillard would argue, Afong Moy becomes a simulation—not a recovered voice, but an endlessly repeated sign of voicelessness.
This structure of visibility and spectacle closely echoes Churchill’s opening of Top Girls, where mythic women recount their success through suffering. Yet while Churchill’s women speak, however fragmented, Chomet’s ghosts return in visual silence or theatrical fatigue. The lineage between the plays is formal, but their critique diverges: Churchill indicts class betrayal; Chomet stages the racialized exhaustion of performative identity.
Sarah, the contemporary Asian-American actress at the center of the play, is cast to play Afong Moy in a Hollywood film. She is excited, and hopeful—believing that participation in the system, however flawed, is a first step. “I have to start somewhere,” she says (Chomet 182). But what she starts is not empowerment—it is erasure. The role has no real lines. She is being asked to disappear into a simulation of a woman who was already voiceless.
Baudrillard’s theory of simulation offers a crucial lens for understanding Asiamnesia’s critique of racialized visibility. In The Vital Illusion, Baudrillard contends that under postmodern conditions, reality does not vanish through absence, but through excess—its meaning displaced by endless reproduction. He describes this condition as one in which illusion governs experience, and the real, when it appears, is already delayed, distorted, or lost (66). This is not a disappearance by subtraction but by excess—a saturation of images that displace the original referent. In Asiamnesia, this logic is dramatized through the character of Sarah, who is cast to play Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman exhibited in America. What appears at first to be an opportunity to recover a silenced historical figure gradually becomes an act of erasure. Sarah does not resurrect Afong Moy’s voice or agency. Instead, she reenacts her silence, embodying a spectacle of ethnic authenticity that is tailored for consumption. Her casting signifies not historical reclamation but repetition, a cyclical simulation that empties the original of substance.
Afong Moy’s reappearance through Sarah is thus not a restoration of memory but a displacement of it. The past, in Baudrillard’s terms, does not return—it circulates. Sarah is not channeling Afong Moy in any substantive sense; she is performing an image of Afong Moy that has already been filtered through Western historiography and cinematic convention. The more Sarah tries to inhabit Afong Moy, the more she disappears into the role. What is left is a copy of a copy: a portrayal of racial difference that mimics authenticity while severing it from its source. The play’s structure reflects this endless loop. Historical and contemporary figures blur; characters morph; time collapses—a collapse staged through multiple casting, nonlinear structure, and fluid character transitions that make time feel recursive rather than sequential. By having actors shift between historical icons and modern stereotypes, the play dramatizes how Asian American identity is not inherited but reenacted under constraint. Like the third-order simulacra Baudrillard describes, the figures in Asiamnesia do not refer back to a real person or event—they refer to a system of signs that reinforce themselves. In this way, the play stages not a recovery of marginalized history, but a tragic display of how that history has already been overwritten by simulation.
This recursive structure shapes the play’s most surreal and unsettling scene: the dinner party of Asian-American ghosts. Historical figures such as Anna May Wong and Isabel Rosario Cooper appear—not to educate, but to complain, to collapse, to warn. Anna May Wong, the first Chinese-American Hollywood star, enters not in triumph but in exhaustion. Her demeanor and fragmented lines suggest a weariness with the recurring role she is forced to play. She does not return to celebrate representation, but to question it. Their stories are fragmented, angry, and dissonant. They interrupt each other, break character, and repeat. Their presence is theatrical haunting—staged not to restore memory but to indict its failures.
Chomet’s dramaturgy reinforces this disruption by highlighting how Asian-American women are visually overdetermined by stereotypes. Characters play multiple roles, often as exaggerated caricatures—the Dragon Lady, hypersexualized women, and submissive actresses. In one sequence, the women mimic exaggerated accents and use chopsticks to hold up their hair for a casting director. These moments are both humorous and painful, exposing the absurdity of racial typecasting while also illustrating how internalized and external expectations reduce complex identities to a repertoire of signs. Chomet deliberately blurs the line between satire and sincerity: scenes oscillate between irony and sincerity, leaving the audience unsure when to laugh and when to flinch. This tonal instability is a strategy—it forces viewers to confront their own role in passively consuming these images without questioning their origins or implications.
This dilemma aligns with what Dorinne Kondo describes in her analysis of racial performance: “must one reinscribe stereotypes in order to subvert them?” (Kondo 25). Shimakawa echoes this caution, suggesting that such critical mimicry, even when strategically deployed, may risk “lend[ing] a veneer of authenticity” to the very representations it intends to critique (126). In Asiamnesia, this tension is enacted repeatedly. Sarah’s performance risks solidifying, rather than undermining, the codes of representation imposed upon her. These performances, far from being liberatory, reveal how easily critique collapses into complicity—especially when mediated through an industry that thrives on legible, racialized spectacle.
This is what Jacques Rancière refers to as a “redistribution of the sensible”—a shift in what is perceptible, intelligible, and politically meaningful on stage (13). For Rancière, aesthetic and political acts are deeply linked: both reconfigure who is seen, who is heard, and who is granted the right to appear as a speaking subject. In Asiamnesia, the women on stage are visible, but their visibility does not grant them agency. They are both subjects and simulations—forced to perform legibility through codes they did not create. Chomet refuses to clarify their position, thereby implicating the viewer not as a passive spectator, but as a participant in the representational system that keeps these performances in circulation.
Sarah’s role in this haunted landscape becomes increasingly ambiguous. What begins as excitement—her hope that playing Afong Moy might mark a step forward—gives way to a slow unraveling. Her agents, Barb and April, and the casting director reinforce the same message: there is no room for authenticity. The only way to survive in the industry is to perform the stereotype. Sarah is repeatedly nudged into roles that require her to exaggerate her ethnicity, forcing her to embody tropes that collapse her identity into a marketable image. What starts as negotiation becomes coercion. The requests from the casting room blur the line between irony and reality until the performance of Asianness becomes indistinguishable from its parody. Chomet stages this point not only through dialogue but through gesture and sound. This breakdown is vividly dramatized at the end of Scene 5, when Sarah 3, overwhelmed by the accumulation of demands, surrenders her resistance to stereotype. Her emotional collapse leads into a “dance of frustration,”choreographed to a techno-jumble of contemporary pop songs that reference Asian women in fetishized and exoticized terms (Chomet 194). This is not catharsis—it is saturation. The dance becomes a grotesque mimicry, scored by cultural simulation rather than personal voice. The other women on stage join and all four women dance to this mis-mash of stereotyped songs.
Also, in this play, language does not liberate—it overwhelms. Like Churchill’s use of fragmented dialogue in Top Girls, Chomet saturates the script with excess rather than absence. The accumulation of absurd demands from the industry builds toward a psychological and ethical breakdown—not through silence, but through the relentless reinforcement of stereotypes:
Woman 2 (with bad Asian accent) What do you want? You know, I got double-dildo for you. You like?
Casting director This is a frat boy comedy, ladies! You gotta turn on the boys in the suburbs—some humor, please!
Woman 1 and Woman 3 (Repeat together) What do you want? You know, I got double-dildo for you. You like?
Casting Director That’s more like it. (To all women) Can I see some martial arts? (Chomet 190)
These repetitions are not moments of dramatic tension; they are performative loops that reduce identity to commodity. It is not only the body that is made legible for consumption, but language itself—weaponized, rehearsed, and emptied of selfhood.
This erosion of identity culminates in the reappearance of Dorothy—not just a racialized figure, but a white-coded character from The Wizard of Oz, which Sarah played in childhood. Dorothy once represented Sarah’s first experience of being seen, a moment of innocent inclusion that inspired her to pursue acting. But in Asiamnesia, Dorothy returns as something far more unsettling. Singing “Over the Rainbow” while violently dispatching other racial caricatures, she embodies not freedom but grotesque repetition. Her line—“Why, oh why can’t I?” (Chomet 199)—no longer expresses longing; it performs it. Dorothy now signifies a role Sarah can no longer occupy—a fantasy of belonging that has turned against her. Joshua Chambers-Letson argues that performance becomes politically potent not merely by representing identity, but by disrupting hegemonic norms: it enables “minoritarian subjects” to enact “ephemeral, insurgent, counter-discursive forms of knowing and being in the world that disrupt the dominant hegemony” (Chambers-Letson 143). In Asiamnesia, however, this disruption—an Asian girl playing the white-coded character Dorothy—does not stabilize into empowerment of Asian American women. Woo Mi-seong notes, “positive representational opportunities allow those of particular race or gender to overcome the traumas and injustices of their past” (271), but Sarah’s traumas seem to worsen rather than resolve. While Woo Mi-seong emphasizes the play’s reflexive structure and its potential for subverting stereotypes through performance, this essay argues that Asiamnesia does not culminate in subversion or empowerment. Instead, it enacts an ethical rupture—a structural breakdown in which even resistance becomes overcoded, and the burden of recognition shifts to the audience.
Unlike Marlene, however, Sarah comes to see. Her insight is painful, not redemptive. Her encounter with Han Yoo, a young girl from the States visiting Korea, helps Sarah to see the loop of historical performance and self-justification she was caught in. Han Yoo’s words, though not accusing Sarah directly, reveal that Sarah’s representation is meaningless to someone from the culture she claims to portray. There is no climactic breakthrough, only a quiet, devastating realization: participation in the system of visibility may itself have become the betrayal. In the final scene, Sarah stands alone on stage, shaken by the realization that even her fan, Han Yoo cannot truly see her. In this moment, Sarah ceases to perform. Her silence, her stillness, and the image of her younger self jumping rope are not signs of resolution but of rupture. Unlike Marlene, who never wavers in her ideological commitment, Sarah breaks. She does not reconcile with the system; she falters before it. Yet even this break is not redemption—it is a kind of haunting. Her fan cannot see her. Her legacy cannot speak. The future loops, suspended between image and erasure. There is no final monologue, no gesture of closure. Only repetition of jumping in the same place. The future, like the past, loops unresolved. The silence is not a dramatic pause, but a structural impasse—a haunting question without answer. Sarah’s final silence is not an assertion of agency but a refusal to continue. She does not resolve her role—she relinquishes it. In doing so, Chomet redirects the possibility of insight from character to audience, shifting the ethical demand from the performer to the witness.
4. Conclusion
Both plays end with dissonance. Sarah and Angie—neither powerful nor articulate—become ethical figures not because they act, but because they see. In a representational economy that rewards performance and punishes ambiguity, their silence constitutes resistance. Both Top Girls and Asiamnesiawithhold catharsis not only from their characters but from the audience. Their endings are unresolved, not due to narrative ambiguity but as a deliberate ethical gesture. These plays are structured around a theatrical address that shifts the burden of recognition onto the audience.
Jacques Rancière’s theory of the emancipated spectator offers a compelling framework for reading this strategy. Emancipation of the spectator does not occur when a spectator passively receives meaning, but when they actively interpret, question, and reconfigure what they perceive. As Rancière explains, spectators are not passive recipients of meaning, but active participants who must interpret, question, and reconfigure what they perceive: “every spectator is already an actor in her story; every actor, every character, is in turn the spectator of the same kind of story” (17). Churchill and Chomet construct their plays around this invention: the protagonists do not gain clarity but the audience is made to reckon with what the characters cannot grasp.
The tragic displacement of insight does not ask for empathy; it demands responsibility. The rupture in each play reveals that visibility—when built on simulation or abandonment—is not liberation, but a form of ethical loss. Marlene and Sarah do not fail because they make poor choices; they succeed within systems that reward betrayal and silence. Their tragedies lie in the structure, not in their psychology. What emerges is not resolution, but exposure: of disavowed kinship, of memory that returns not as legacy but as distortion—ghosts that interrupt rather than guide. In Top Girls, the historical women at Marlene’s dinner party do not pass on wisdom; their overlapping stories collapse into dissonance. As Joseph Marohl describes, Top Girls exposes the illusion of feminist progress (379). In Asiamnesia, Afong Moy is not recovered but recycled—stripped of context and used again as spectacle. Chomet renders representation itself ethically incoherent. In this way, Top Girls and Asiamnesia do not ask the audience to feel sympathy; they demand responsibility. The emancipated witness is not the one who understands everything, but the one who can no longer look away. Rather than offering narrative closure or ideological coherence, both plays stage memory as contested and solidarity as elusive.
To stage failure as insight is to position the audience as the inheritor of rupture. Drawing on Nietzsche’s vision of insight through estrangement, Deleuze’s concept of temporal disjunction, and Baudrillard’s theory of simulation, these plays reveal that recognition is not born from resolution, but from breakdown. Cultural memory here does not reconcile or instruct—it returns in fragments, symbolic ghosts that accuse rather than comfort. Angie and the rope-jumping girl are not heirs to reclaimed traditions; they inherit what was abandoned. Their gestures do not resolve trauma—they mark its persistence.
Importantly, these plays do not seek to restore feminist or racial histories, nor do they advocate nostalgic recovery. Afong Moy reappears not as a reclaimed voice but as a symbol still trapped in spectacle, while Pope Joan’s presence at Marlene’s dinner table ultimately fails to connect history to feminist solidarity. These figures are not legible ancestors—they are failed transmissions. Their return marks not continuity, but collapse. In this way, memory’s rupture is not a flaw but a condition of ethical seeing.
To witness, then, is not simply to observe but to inherit. Top Girls and Asiamnesia stage this inheritance as painful, destabilizing, and politically urgent. Their protagonists are not redeemed, and their audiences are not comforted. Instead, the plays transform theatrical space into an arena of ethical reckoning. They do not teach how to repair history—they show the cost of pretending it was never broken.
This research contributes to existing scholarship by reframing both Top Girls and Asiamnesia through the lens of theatrical ethics rather than character psychology or representational politics alone. While Top Girls has been widely studied for its critique of Thatcher-era feminism and class betrayal (Hayder and Al-hilo; Kritzer; Marohl), and Asiamnesia noted for its satire of racial stereotypes and Asian American identity (Woo), this essay positions both not simply as critiques, but as performances of ethical rupture—where the structure of the play itself displaces insight from the protagonist to the audience. Furthermore, by comparing a canonical feminist text with a lesser-studied work of Asian American theatre, this study reveals how both dramatize the cost of visibility when achieved within systems that demand betrayal. Rather than offering models of resistance, Churchill and Chomet enact a failure of continuity and a refusal of closure—confronting the spectator with memory that does not heal but haunts, and progress that fractures more than it repairs.
Works Cited
Assmann, Jan. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Archives. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Vital Illusion. Translated by Julia Witwer, Columbia University Press, 2000.
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Witnessing the Rupture: Tragic Insight and the Cost of Recognition in Top Girls and Asiamnesia
| Abstract | Damsil Kim |
This paper examines how Top Girls by Caryl Churchill and Asiamnesia by Sun Mee Chomet dramatize the tragic cost of visibility for women under neoliberal and racialized systems. Rather than affirming narratives of empowerment, the plays reveal how recognition often demands ethical betrayal—of kinship, ancestry, and the self. Drawing on theories of cultural memory, Nietzschean rupture, simulation, and spectatorship, the analysis explores how both plays displace moral clarity from their protagonists onto the audience. Through fragmented time, spectral repetition, and performative saturation, Churchill and Chomet stage ethical rupture—a moment when insight fails within the narrative but is transferred to the spectator. Marlene’s class ascent and Sarah’s racial typecasting do not culminate in transformation, but in exposure. These plays resist closure and catharsis, asking not how memory or identity can be recovered, but what remains when they collapse. In doing so, they transform the audience from passive observers into inheritors of an unresolved ethical demand.
Key Words
Asiamnesia, Contemporary Women’s Drama, Ethical Rupture, Top Girls, Spectatorship and Ethical Response
Journal of English Studies in Korea
48 (2025): 24-93
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