Top Girls

Clothing is an important symbol in the play, beginning with the stories of the women in the first act. When the emperor first raped Lady Nijo, he sent her a silk dress to wear that was ripped by the end of the encounter, symbolizing the veneer of formality, ritual, and obligation that covers sexual violence in Nijo’s role as a concubine. Nijo wore three-layer silk dresses, which the emperor’s wife didn’t like, but Nijo was a noblewoman with permission from the emperor to wear them. Isabella makes a point to preemptively say that she wore feminine clothing when she traveled, as the newspapers apparently sometimes said otherwise, which bothers her. But Isabella found the trappings of life as a lady intolerable, asking, “How can people live in this dim pale island and wear our hideous clothes?” (26) Nijo, however, finds it difficult to understand why anyone would be relieved to dress comfortably. Pope Joan changes using clothing to present herself as a man, allowing her to become the pope when she would likely have otherwise been married off, borne children, and sunk into domestic labor. Gret tells the others that when she called the women to go with her, they all came out to fight demons in the clothes and aprons they were wearing to do household work.