Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

Corinne S. Abate, Corinne S. Abate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351908740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

The ten essays in this collection explore the discrete yet overlapping female spaces of privacy and domesticity in early modern England. While other literary critics have focused their studies of female privacy on widows, witches, female recusants and criminals, the contributors to this collection propose that the early modern subculture of femaleness is more expansive and formative than is typically understood. They maintain that the subculture includes segregated, sometimes secluded, domestic places for primarily female activities like nursing, sewing, cooking, and caring for children and the sick. It also includes hidden psychological realms of privacy, organized by women's personal habits, around intimate friendships or kinship, and behind institutional powerlessness. The texts discussed in the volume include plays not only by Shakespeare but also Ford, Wroth, Marvell, Spenser and Cavendish, among others. Through the lens of literature, contributors consider the unstructured, fluid quality of much everyday female experience as well as the dimensions, symbols, and the ever-changing politics and culture of the household. They analyze the complex habits of female settings-the verbal, spatial, and affective strategies of early-modern women's culture, including private rituals, domestic practices, and erotic attachments-in order to provide a broader picture of female culture and of female authority. The authors argue-through a range of critical approaches that include feminist, historical, and psychoanalytic-that early modern women often transformed their confinement into something useful and necessary, creating protected and even sacred spaces with their own symbols and aesthetic.

Chapter 1
Introduction: “indistinguished space”

Elizabeth Mazzola and Corinne S. Abate

1 “Indistinguished space”: Goneril’s Fantasy, Oswald’s Pockets, Edgar’s Lament

In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the household is attacked from within and without: a king banishes a daughter, a bastard betrays his father’s legitimate heir, and royal sisters turn on each other. But what seems most horrifying, most inexplicable, at least to the male characters in the play, is the reach of female interests and their fierce opposition to both the home and the state. We see this when Edgar goes through the dead servant Oswald’s pockets in Act IV and finds a note from Goneril to her lover Edmund. The note exposes the secret of an adulterous love affair, but it also reveals a harder truth – one that Lear had angrily uncovered at the opening of the play – that women’s affections and perceptions are never adequate to patriarchal demands, lacking both rational discernment and real feeling.

“Let our reciprocal vows be remembered,” Goneril has written Edmund. “You have many opportunities to cut him off. If your will want not, time and place will be fruitfully offered. There is nothing done, if he return the conqueror. Then am I the prisoner, and his bed my jail; from the loathed warmth whereof deliver me, and supply the place for your labor. Your (wife, so I would say) affectionate servant. Goneril” (IV.vi.262–69).¹ In a way, Goneril’s instructions resemble those of Lady Macbeth to Macbeth where husband and wife jointly plan the murder of Duncan; here, though, Goneril petitions her lover for her husband’s death. Lady Macbeth’s directions, however ruthless, uphold her marriage vow and invite her husband’s affection; Goneril’s planning, in contrast, repels warmth and voids her pledge to her spouse: indeed, she figures husbands as conquerors and brides as prisoners. “O indistinguished space of woman’s will,” Edgar exclaims to his father upon reading her note, appalled as much by Goneril’s cruel logic as he is by her disloyalty and lust (1.270).²

Edgar’s charge is a serious one, but it is a confusing one as well, and scholarly interpretations often muddy already murky waters. In the Arden edition of King Lear, for instance, Kenneth Muir proposes that Edgar is complaining about the chaotic and fearfully unknowable extent of female desire.³ More recently, the editors of the Norton Shakespeare suggest that Edgar’s disgust is better understood as a more basic misogyny, the terror inspired by the shadowy regions of the vaginadentata.⁴ Yet there is another possibility implied by Edgar’s anguished picture of female space, a possibility explored by each of the nine essays collected here. His charge suggests that Goneril’s cognitive defect is as grave as her erotic crime for she fails both to see Edmund for the base monster he is and to reckon Albany’s virtue correctly. These are obvious distinctions which even the blinded Gloucester can still make. “To distinguish” in Shakespeare’s day meant to differentiate or to classify, even to properly punctuate a sentence (OED 1 .B and C); it was thus an act of faithfully acknowledging or recognizing something and giving reason, in other words, its due. Edgar is not merely lamenting the unnaturalness of female desire or its incoherent expression, then, but also pointing to a clouded region where patriarchal codes and values – the reality of fathers and sons alike – is obscured, a place of unregulated desire as well as anomie.⁵ The readings supplied by the Arden and Norton editors maintain that women’s passions and their bodies are startlingly boundless, yet Edgar may also be suggesting that women simply have no feeling at all.

Such a devastating privation of patriarchal reason and sentiment seems obvious in the alleged activities of early-modern widows, witches, female recusants and criminals – in the obstinate, obdurate subculture of femaleness which scholars like Joy Wiltenberg and Frances Dolan have analyzed in two recent historical studies.⁶ But the contributors to this collection propose that the early-modern subculture of femaleness is more expansive and formative than is typically understood, and that the “indistinguished space” Edgar bemoans is actually a crucial feature of Renaissance culture, terrifying and necessary all at once.

The “indistinguished space” Edgar describes is, upon closer inspection, a place where the established order of things has become inconspicuous, a place that is, as a result, unfettered by patriarchal constraints and unschooled by its syntax. In the early modern period, this place is frequently located in domestic settings with their own set of material practices and material goods. It includes segregated, sometimes secluded, places for primarily female activities like nursing, sewing, cooking, and caring for children and the sick.⁷ These are settings where mother tongues are spoken or sung and where “white” magic and common sense maintain order, often in the absence of patriarchal figures, sometimes without their knowledge. Edgar’s lament implies that women – even queens – are unable to discern or to judge as reason dictates, to make the “real” world’s ontological commitments, to see and feel things the way men do.⁸ Clearly, Goneril and Regan threaten Lear’s universe, along with the lives of nearly everyone else in Shakespeare’s play. Although women’s worlds are not always subversive or spiteful, dangerous or disorderly, they are no less threatening for that. The “indistinguished space” Edgar apprehends has its own codes and sentiments, and what Virginia Woolf calls its own “little language unknown to men.”⁹ And if such a space is situated in the sewing room or the nursery, it might also be described as a private or hidden psychological realm, organized by personal habits, around intimate friendships or kinship, and behind “institutional powerlessness.”¹⁰ Ultimately, though, this space describes a female world inaccessible to male reason, and not entirely interested in it.

2 Privacy, Domesticity, Women’s Worlds and Second Worlds

Privacy and domesticity comprise overlapping spaces and habits which make up the nearly invisible background of patriarchal reality,¹¹ and scholars have only recently felt confident about approaching those spaces and habits, much less able to make out their hazy outlines.¹² But any study of early modern women requires a consideration of privacy and domesticity. The two terms are related but not interchangeable. According to Lawrence Stone, privacy, for instance, is really a development of the eighteenth century, afforded by elite architecture and enlightened thinking.¹³ In contrast, the aristocratic household of the Renaissance was characterized, he says, “by its lack of well-defined boundaries.”¹⁴ We want to challenge Stone’s influential model and his conclusions, in part because he appears to rely more on concrete structures, be they buildings or printed texts, than on the unstructured and fluid quality of much everyday, female experience.¹⁵ Stone describes the eighteenth century country house, for example, as increasingly “closed off from prying neighbors,” “with rooms themselves more specialized in function and more numerous, with more bedrooms, studies, closets, and withdrawing chambers... where members of the family could get away from each other.”¹⁶ But early modern developments of humanism, capitalism, and Protestantism encouraged a more dramatic segregation at an earlier stage by codifying patriarchy¹⁷ and thereby confining women more and more to separate spheres.

Griselda Pollock and Roszika Parker offer yet another reason for middle class women’s increasing confinement. “It was only with the social and economic changes beginning in the Elizabethan era that women’s relationship to embroidery altered. The Reformation brought the large-scale production of ecclesiastical embroidery to an end, while greater national prosperity led to enormously increased demand for domestic embroidery.”¹⁸ Parker and Pollock’s account reminds us too that social status and class affect both the uses and gendering of the early modern phenomenon of privacy, whereby women’s worlds became segregated social settings. Sheila Rowbotham concludes that “[a]s crafts became more intensely capitalised[,] the wives of larger tradesmen no longer worked in the business... . The external world of work became the sphere of men exclusively, and the internal world of the family and the household was the proper business of the woman.”¹⁹

There were still other factors which divided the home from the rest of the world and women from men at this time. Alice T. Friedman argues that “while the creation of the country house helped to place domestic work and family life directly under women’s control, it also opened up the possibility for an identification of women with the home and for the virtual exclusion of women from public life.”²⁰ One consequence of this exclusion, paradoxically, was the increased scrutiny upon women of all classes: more important than anything they did was the male perception of women’s inactivity, silence, chastity, and obedience. David Cressy claims that “[e]ven within the recesses of domestic routine, every action, every opinion, was susceptible to external interest, monitoring, or control.”²¹ Well beforethe material apparatus Stone deems necessary for privacy there exist ideological as well as economic supports for a division of labor and a split between cultural spheres. The result was that across class lines, marriage and family became the primary contexts for and rewards of most women’s lives.²²

With developments like these in mind, Joan Kelly–Gadol once raised the question of whether women even had a Renaissance.²³ Scholars have been wrestling with the answer ever since. Despite the fact that the early modern period witnessed a number of powerful women on European thrones, despite the imaginative and religious liberties Protestantism and the printing press afforded women by loosening clerical ties and encouraging the reading of vernacular texts, Renaissance women often found themselves forced into closed quarters as courtly bureaucracy and Protestant theology pitted the outside world against the home. Other divisions of experience were afforded by humanist thinking. Harry Berger has described the efflorescence of imaginative second worlds which offered alternative venues for humanist abstraction and experimentation, like the ones supplied by Hamlet’s dumb show or by More’s utopia.²⁴ In contrast, some readers have emphasized the narrowness or inadequacy of women’s “second” or “green” worlds.²⁵ The essays collected here challenge this assumption by outlining how private and domestic and predominantly female spaces were imagined and employed in the early-modern period so as to produce and reproduce culture.²⁶

That privacy and domesticity could ever provide sites for authority or agency has been nevertheless debated by other critics. More’s utopia, for instance, is rational and orderly exactly because it outlaws privacy. But early modern women who found themselves increasingly isolated in the home encountered privacy as...