Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama.

Jones, Ann Rosalind

Wendy Wall. Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiv + 292 pp. index. illus. bibl. $60. ISBN: 0-521-80849-9.

In this rich and surprising study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English drama in the context of middle-class housework and nationalist ideology, Wendy Wall takes further the turn toward materialist cultural analysis begun in Karen Newman's Fashioning Femininity and Patricia Fumerton's Cultural Aesthetics. Opening with a survey of the assumptions and verbal formulas of conduct books and domestic manuals from the middle 1500s, Wall points to the extraordinary physical strength, violence to animal and human bodies, and social power operating in the early modern household, especially in the kitchen, where women dismembered game, concocted medicinal potions including powdered human skulls, and applied home remedies to the sick. The conclusion she reaches through her close analysis of such texts is that domestic labor profoundly shaped collective fantasies about women's powers (especially via the erotics of sewing, cleaning, milking, and curing the body) via the perception of the household as a disorderly and conflicted place but also as a site from which a secure sense of Englishness could be constructed.

Wall uses six sets of plays to examine particular aspects of housewifery as challenging and affirming English identity, especially masculine identity. Chapter by chapter, she traces out the rivalry between domestic culture (female and vernacular) and the Latin pedagogy of boys' schools in Gammer Gurton's Needle and The Merry Wives of Windsor; analyzes the meanings of fairies, especially the figures of Puck (who sweeps) and Robin Goodfellow (who "bepinches sluttish queanes") as folk legends appropriable by characters representing both elite and middle-class value systems in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor; explores the infantile, pastoral, and patriotic gratifications associated with milk and such specifically English foods as Shrove-tide pancakes in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and The Shoemaker's Holiday; argues for the power of kitchen physic (potions, purges and plasters, all made and administered by women) to destabilize gender hierarchies and sexual identities in The Knight of the Burning Pestle and a trio of other plays including The London Merchant, Twelfth Night and Rams-Alley; and points out the homosocial and nation-affirming bonds achieved through domestic rivalries in Heywood's two plays about unfaithful wives, A Woman Killed with Kindness and The English Traveller. Throughout, Wall analyzes a large number of domestic advice books in order to account for the language, plots, and nationalist closure in these and other texts, narrative and lyric as well as dramatic. These manuals are fascinating as cultural information on their own. Wall's use of them to expose the official beliefs and less conscious wishes of people in all ranks of English society is consistently persuasive and at times brilliant. Her readings of The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Shoemaker's Holiday are particularly original and convincing.

To the extent that feminist writing about early modern culture has sometimes deployed an ahistorical psychoanalysis or focused on women in isolation from other subordinate groups, Wall's book usefully complicates and deepens the field. She is concerned, as she explains, with collective fantasies rather than individual case histories that ignore the great differences between modern and early modern households: the putting out of infants, wet nursing, strict hierarchies including servants as well as children, and market labor carried out in large workshop households consisting of a master and his wife, apprentices, and young women workers, rather than nuclear families. At the same time, she recognizes that national identities arise from complex shared fantasies rather than geographical or political fact. This theoretical clarity, which defines a national unconscious as constructed of historical contradictions fictionally (or dramatically) resolved, leads Wall to a cumulative argument attentive to the ways domestic goods and practices in England shaped the intricacies of sexuality, gender, and class in English identity formation.

Staging Domesticity provides a map for reading that could illuminate other Renaissance texts as well: Rabelais, for example, whose battle of the chitterlings versus Lent is marvelous "kitchen stuff"; Cervantes, whose hero, like Dekker's apprentice shoemaker Firk, has visions of animated comestibles marching to heroic encounters; European epic in general, which variously represents women's magical potions and promises of bodily cure as challenges to masculine identity and national projects. The sheer strangeness of household instructions in this period alone would make Wall's book worth reading. (In fact, an amusing contrast arises between the cover illustration of a benign old woman doing household accounts, tenderly painted by Nicolaes Maes in 1656, and the movement of Wall's chapters from "Familiarity and Pleasure in the English Household Guide" to "Blood in the Kitchen.") Wall's startling and subtle exploration of the cultural work done by these domestic dramas, though weakened on rare occasions by over-reading (in some lines, a needle might be just a needle), produces illuminating interpretations of the dramatic texts she scrutinizes and also of the gendered social dynamics of early modern England.

ANN ROSALIND JONES

Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts