Chapter Three: "Women must have their longings, or they die": Capitalism as Gendered Discourse
in Honest Whore (1604) and Chaste Maid of Cheapside (1613)
Alas, sir, do you ever think to find a chaste wife
in these times? Now? When there are so many
masques, plays, Puritan preachings, mad folks,
and other strange sights to be seen daily,
private and public?"
-- Epicoene; II.ii.30-4
By 1609, the year Epicoene was first performed, London had become a metropolis filled with exotic sights and activities and a "plenitude of things." As early as 1580 the city was clearly the place of economic exchange, as evidenced by Stow’s Survey of London, which catalogues a surprisingly long list of foreign commodities available in the London shops. Stow ends the list with the observation that these things "made such a Shew in the Passengers Eyes, that they could not but gaze on them, and buy some of the knicknacks, though to no Purpose necessary" (11). In other words, the very spectacle—the "Shew"—of the "foreign Commodities" caused the citizens of London and "of other Parts of England" to "spend extravagantly" (Stow 11). Centrally, Stow’s concern seems to be that citizens bought ‘commodities’ simply for the sake of buying rather than to buy necessary or useful items. And as Truewit’s tirade against women and marriage indicates, the city provides the opportunity for indulging material and sexual desires. In fact, to follow the logic of Truewit and Stow further, seeing "strange sights daily" both causes citizens— notably women—to spend "extravagantly" and to lose their "chaste" or virtuous behavior. While perhaps the cause-effect is not quite so simple as that, many of the city comedies of the Elizabethan-Jacobean age, as well as secular and religious tracts ("Puritan preachings") and proclamations from the court, participate in the contemporary discourse about who is spending money and how they are spending it. New World colonization, expanding exchange with Europe, and London urbanization, among other reasons, created new ways of getting and spending wealth: most especially, the markets of late sixteenth and early seventeenth century London provide the opportunity for new types of consumers—women. As Catherine Belsey and Karen Newman, among others, have shown, women in Elizabethan England entered the public sphere for the first time by "going to market, both to buy and to sell" (Newman 184). Thus at the same time that the markets flooded with "strange sights" (to buy and see) women became customers: they had money to spend, and did in shops and in theaters, and they began to have some influence in the economic and social arena. In response an anxious discourse rose up around the idea of woman as extravagant consumers: in part, this discourse posits women as dangerous to masculine authority because of their ‘unnatural’ or un-feminine behavior and because of their ‘excess’ desire—for both sexual and economic things.
In fact, King James I issued proclamations intended to regulate trade and city growth: he rebuked "those swarms of gentry who, through the instigation of their wives and to new model and fashion their daughters (who, if they were unmarried, marred their reputations, and if married, lost them) did neglect their country hospitality, and cumber the city" (Newman 188). In James’s view, then, bringing "wives" and "daughters" to the city in order to buy or learn the newest "fashion," results in sexual aberrations, in "marred" reputations. James’s anxiety about women migrating to the city in "pursuit of fashion" mirrors Truewit’s claim that no city maid is chaste—a common and reoccurring claim in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and especially in Middleton’s city comedy Chaste Maid in Cheapside. In fact, even the title is an oxymoron for Cheapside was commonly the habitat of rogues and prostitutes, not virgins or ‘honest’ wives. In stating that there is a chaste maid in Cheapside, Middleton plays on his audience’s familiar knowledge of the social-geographical arrangement of the city. Furthermore, the arrangements whereby the merchant Allwit sells his wife’s sexual favors to Sir Walter Whorehound in exchange for a comfortable lifestyle and the Yellowhammers marry their son Tim to the "Welsh Gentlewoman" (really Sir Walter’s former whore) to gain wealth and social prestige, capitalize on the contemporary anxiety about the loss of moral values in English society: Middleton insinuates that there is no difference between a whore and chaste maid in "these times."
Significantly, chaste means more than sexual purity; it also implies, in this social context, the "proper" decorum or behavior expected of women. With the traditional roles and the place of women changing as a result of shifting economic conditions, notions of appropriate behavior were, of course, also disrupted. And that gap between the old moral system and new modes of social interaction gives rise to a conflict about proper and improper behavior. In this conflict, gender, rather than being a "self-evident foundation," is revealed as a "performative act" with "real social consequences" (Howard, "Producing New Knowledge" 307). As a "performative act," meaning that one’s subject position is determined by one’s actions rather than by an inherent, essential quality, gender depends upon naturalized notions of "proper" behavior; deviation from this naturalized position creates a breakdown or ‘de-territorialization’ of the traditional social structures and beliefs—and, typically, an anxious attempt to reorder the apparent disorder of society, as the polemical tract Hic Mulier exemplifies. Thus, those Renaissance women who were increasingly seen outside the home, women who were both being seen by and seeing the "public," posed an especially transgressive presence to the dominant order. As Howard points out in The Stage and Social Struggle, women who went to see masques and plays were both spectacles and spectators—objects of male gaze and subjects who could look back. Or in economic terms, the early modern woman was both consumed and consumer.
Earlier, in discussing The Dutch Courtesan’s concern with upholding the distinction between honest wife and whore, I drew on Stephen Gossen’s address to the "Gentlewomen Citizens of London" in which he urged women to stay home and away from the theaters—out of the "whoring gaze" of men—as an example of the concern directed towards the increasingly mobile woman. By mobile I mean both physically present in public spaces like the theaters or the city shops as well as having the freedom to purchase (and, for that matter, to sell) goods and services, for those same women who frequented the theaters also patronized the London shops and markets. Thus, the very conditions that allowed for the presence of women in places like Cheapside or Eastcheap—including the availability of loose currency, wealth that could be carried—and is celebrated in plays such as Chaste Maid and Honest Whore, also aroused anxiety over the very nature of the mobile, ‘spectacling’ woman. For to be a spectator implies ‘consuming’ the object under scrutiny: the eyes grow full on "prodigall feasts" (Honest Whore; II.i.437). Likewise, the woman’s gaze was anxiously seen to have the power to corrupt men’s virtue. Thus, in the most basic configuration, women who can now see "strange sights…daily," threaten the symbolic distinction between whore and chaste maid, for in ‘consuming’ (both figuratively and literally) the women who look also place themselves in the position of activating lustful gazes—their own and males’.
Moreover, as Chaste Maid shows, the consuming desire of women is posited as a "natural" feminine trait that also threatens male wealth and social status. For instance, Allwit complains that the gossips who come to his daughter’s christening are greedy, disgusting old bawds and that his wife’s ‘longings’ are so expensive that if he were paying he would be impoverished. Likewise, Mrs. Yellowhammer’s longing for social prestige—her husband is a jeweler—causes her to nearly kill her daughter Moll, and to marry her son Tim to a whore. In this way, the desire for food, sex, wealth, and social prestige are gendered feminine and, simultaneously, as anomalous. For this reading I draw on Karen Newman’s argument that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century commodification was inscribed as feminine (women are both consumed and consumers), and Gail Kern Paster’s book in which she shows that the image of woman as "excessive" is a "culturally familiar discourse" whereby the "representation of a particular kind of uncontrol [the production of excess bodily fluids]" is seen as a "function of gender" (The Body Embarrassed 25). Thus the lack of control exhibited by the gossips (drinking, eating, talking, pissing) in Chaste Maid is linked to the economic extravagance—consumption that threatens masculine ‘control of commodity exchange’—that Allwit so happily avoids by farming out his wife.
In part, this gendering of desire is an anxious response to the pressure of capitalism. Capitalism, of course, operates through exchange and commodification and ignores the social relation between who buys and sells. Marx explains in The German Ideology that in pre-capitalist social relations the bonds between people are "based on a personal relationship, on a kind of community" but in capitalist relations bonds between people take "on a material shape in a third party—money" (68). Thus people are "only held together by exchange" and see in each other "another subject who follows his interest and interests him only in so far as he possesses something—a commodity—that could satisfy some of his needs" (Zizek 25). Since, as I argued in chapter one, the relationship between people becomes demystified in capitalist exchange and, instead, money becomes mystified, what counts is the act of exchange—the circulation of commodities and money. As the following quote indicates, this circulation occupied a central position in Jacobean social thought: "Silver is the King’s stamp, man God’s stamp, and a woman is man’s stamp, we are not current till we pass from one man to another" (Northward Ho; I.ii.81-3). This metonymic linkage between sexual activity and economic exchange, or more precisely, the conflation of economic and sexual circulation, bespeaks to the degree to which capitalist relations have become raw or exposed "flows of desire," to use Gilles Deleuze’s phrase. Capitalism, Deleuze argues in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, explicitly depends on these flows of desire and thus deliberately perpetuates "decoded flows" in order to continue reaching toward its "limit point"—the point of maximum production and consumption (34). However, every society depends upon en-coding these desires into acceptable, containable channels so as to not render its social-ideological and material structures transparent. In other words, capitalism does not care who buys but the society it encodes does. Hence, in the Jacobean age, as paying customers women had as much right as men to attend masques and plays or to buy goods; women as consumers, however, presented a threat to the patriarchal order.
To return to my comment that Middleton satirizes the lack of morality in his society by collapsing the distinction between whore and chaste maid—Mrs. Allwit is at once wife and mistress, the Welsh "Gentlewomen" is a whore but through a trick of rhetoric Tim proves her "honest," and Lady Kix takes Touchwood Senior’s fertility "potion" the "old fashioned way"—one might, then, read the play’s commodification of bodies as symptomatic of a society feeling the pressures of ‘decoding’. For as Deleuze explains, capitalism depends upon maximizing "decoded flows of production in the form of money-capital, and the decoded flows of labor in the form of the ‘free worker’" (33). The absolute commodification of human flesh—especially seen in Mrs. Allwit, Moll Yellowhammer and Touchwood Senior—is a result of capitalism’s decoding force: the center of reference, the basis of society, is exchange. Thus, consumerism as gendered feminine is a product of anxiety about capitalism and, arguably, the attempt to ‘reterritorialize’ or restore the "residual and artificial, imaginary, or symbolic" institutions to provide a code or "symbolic order" for its subjects.
Susan Wells agues that the festive market (the world of Rabelasian carnival) functioned as a critique to the world of accumulation and commodification. Especially, she sees city comedies as dealing with the conflict and contradictions between the city’s official ideology and its material conditions; discussing Chaste Maid, she says "Within the play, festive and communal forms are generally debased; they become, in the hands of the Yellowhammers or of the greedy gossips, transparent excuses for accumulation" ("Ideology of the City" 58). And Wells goes on to state that "Middleton only restores the play to the context of the popular festival by an audacious redirection of its tone in the final scene, as a bogus funeral leads to weddings, reunions of estranged spouses, and a feast" (58). I would argue, however, that even as Middleton deals directly with the city’s contradictions in class and sexual conflict, he displays a lessened attempt to re-inscribe traditional moral values. In dramatizing the ‘limit point’ of capitalism—the point where all moral systems and codes are seen as empty signifiers rather than "reality"—Middleton, arguably, also departs from the conventional comedy conclusion by not attempting to restore order or morality, at least through the convention of "restorative" or "regenerative" marriages and feasts (in L.C. Barber’s sense of the words). Thus, the ‘fantasy resolution’ of earlier city comedy has shifted and become more cynical; but as I will argue later, the play participates in a discourse which displaces anxieties about capitalist economies onto women.
Middleton and Dekker’s play, however, reacts somewhat differently: it also ends with a marriage (which, interestingly, takes place near or in Bedlam Hospital) but, especially if one focuses on the main plot of Hippolito and Bellefronte, the material seems concerned largely with restoring moral order. In this plot, Bellefronte the whore falls in love with the virtuous and upperclass Hippolito (who is in love with Infelice, but thinks she is dead); after a long lecture from Hippolito about the evils of prostitution, Bellefronte decides to be "honest" and, in turn, proceeds to lecture her former customers and bawd: "The soule that leaving chastities white shore, Swims in hot sensuall streames, is the diuels whore" (IV.i.175). The didacticism and moral positing of both Bellefronte and Hippolito act, then, as an overtly conservative movement in the play. The plot of the merchant Candido and his wife Viola, however, is much more engaging—certainly for the purpose of this essay and possibly for the Jacobean audience since Viola’s desire for a husband who will get angry at her takes the form of a series of outrageous tricks that mock citizens and gallants alike. Furthermore, Viola’s longing is contrary to ‘normal’ wishes; most city comedies depict women who teach their husbands to be more forgiving and trusting or less authoritative (as, for example, Dekker’s Westward Ho). Of course, there are sexual undertones to her desire, as even the title suggests with the reference to "humours" and "longings"—the full title of the play as printed in the quarto is The Honest Whore, with, the Humours of the Patient Man, and the Longing Wife—and it is on this view of Viola’s desire that I will focus. For, arguably, Viola’s shrewish, domineering behavior and her sexual desire are seen as results of capitalism, or more precisely, of the changing lifestyle experienced by the London citizens in early seventeenth century England. Like the gossips in Chaste Maid, Viola is "verbally excessive" and her waspish behavior threatens her husband’s masculinity: in other words, anxieties about changing economic and social conditions take the form of apprehension about the security or dominance of masculine authority. Thus once again, talk about city women renders them disorderly, masculine, desiring and thus, conversely, ‘feminine’.
Thus, in this paper I am interested in how women become the locus foci of anxieties about capitalism and ‘excessive’ spending, and in what function the gendering of consumerism serves, especially as played out in A Chaste Maid of Cheapside and The Honest Whore. To read the plays this way avoids the deductive traps of whether or not there is a moral center to Chaste Maid or whether or not Honest Whore is a piece of sentimental "melodrama." While Middleton’s play more overtly participates in the Renaissance discourse of women as ‘excessive’, Dekker also takes as his material similar anxieties and ideas about women and their bodies—especially what women want—and he, too, participates in confirming economic and sexual desire as something ‘naturally’ feminine. Furthermore, as Karen Newman states, "Marriage sermons, conduct books, popular forms such as plays, ballads, and jest books—in short, the discourses that managed and produced femininity in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—all conflate the sexual and the economic when representing feminine desire" (184; emphasis added). An obvious example of this conflation is in the language Bellafronte and Roger use in Honest Whore I to describe prostitution:
Bell. Downe, downe, downe, downe, I fall downe, and arise I neuer shall.
Rog. Troth Mistris then leaue the trade if you shall neuer rise.
Bell. What trade? good-man Abram.
Rog. Why that, of down and arise, or the falling trade (II.i.27-30).
The bawdy pun on "falling trade" works, of course, through the metaphorical play between the actions of sexual intercourse and the economic terms of ‘falling’ as losing wealth and ‘rising’ as becoming rich, as well as ‘falling’ as losing social favor. Moreover, the whore’s body is territorialized, inscribed by a conflation of sexual and economic commerce: "Her shop has the best ware; for where these [merchants] sell but cloth, satins, and jewels, she sells divine virtues as virginity, modesty, and such rare gems, and those not like a petty chapman, by retail, but like a great merchant, by wholesale (Dutch Courtesan; I.ii.35-7). Like the city itself, the metropolis of unusual goods and foreign ‘knicknacks’, the prostitute is the symbol of exchange, the availability of "rare" goods, as well as the loss of that very rarity through the act of consumption. These examples reveal that the symbolic—and literal—conflation of economic and sexual desire was a source of many Jacobean jokes but, arguably, also a source of anxiety.
Offstage, this conflation is presented less explicitly; however, as noted, much of the Elizabethan-Jacobean discourse links women’s sexuality and their "natural" disposition toward consuming commodities and men’s wealth. In 1615, just a couple of years after Chaste Maid was produced, Joseph Swetnam wrote The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, froward, and unconstant women: in it he warns men about the "common sort of Women" for
The pride of a woman is like the dropsy, for as drink increaseth the drought of the one, even so money enlargeth the pride of the other. Thy purse must always open to feed their fancy, and so thy expenses will be great and yet perhaps thy gettings small. Thy house must be stored with costly stuff, and yet perhaps thy Servants starved for lack of meat. Thou must discharge the Mercer’s book and pay the Haberdasher’s man, for her hat must continually be of the new fashion and her gown of finer wool than the sheep beareth any. She must likewise have her Jewel box furnished, especially if she is beautiful, for then commonly beauty and pride goeth together, and a beautiful woman is for the most part costly and no good housewife. (196)
Most noteworthy, Swetnam’s language continually makes the connection between food and commodities: drawing upon the bible’s injunction that woman is "a helper unto man," Swetnam writes, "she helpeth to spend and consume that which man painfully getteth" (193). In fact, he seems to make no distinction between the woman’s mouth and her desiring nature (the man’s money ‘feeds’ women’s ‘fancies’), and in the process he suggests that a woman’s ‘appetite’ is limitless—and thus impoverishing. I will return to the concept of women’s mouths later, but for now I would like to point out that Swetnam also claims that a beautiful woman, although she is a desirable object, is a "no good wife" precisely because she costs so much. As he warns, "A King’s crown and a fair woman is desired of many. But he that getteth either of them liveth in great troubles and hazard of life" (196). Thus, like King James’ "daughters" who flock to the city in order to see and to buy the latest fashions, the housewives of Swetnam’s sermon crave the newest and finest without any regard for their husband’s "gettings."
This is the very "hazard" that Allwit so happily avoids by letting Sir Walter Whorehound take the responsibilities normally taken by the husband. Allwit gloats that for the past ten years Sir Walter has "maintained my house" in exchange for his wife’s sexual services and "Not only keeps my wife, but a keeps me/ And all my family; I am at his table;/ He gets me all my children and pays the nurse (I.ii.18-20). In short, Allwit is happy he does not have to finance his marriage, and all those things that a woman wants—in fact, he echoes Swetnam by observing that his wife "lies in" as if "she lay with all the gaudy shops in Greshnam’s Burse about her" (I.ii.35-6). Mrs. Allwit’s pregnant belly is both fertile and symbolic of women’s consuming, swelling, swallowing self: as Bakhtin might say, of the ‘grotesque body’ that knows no limits and which consumes in order to regenerate. Thus, Allwit sees his wife’s desires and body as a financial burden which he can escape by letting Sir Walter "keep" her.
Likewise, by selling his wife’s body Allwit avoids the other great ‘hazard’ of marriage: jealousy. Sir Walter both pays for the family and he takes on the role of the jealous husband: "O miraculous blessings, ‘tis the knight Hath took that labor all out of my hands…I live at ease; He has both the cost and the torment" (I.ii.51-6). What Allwit fails to notice in his obvious gloating over his situation, however, is that in addition to being "freed" from the "labor" of jealousy and the financial burden (with an obvious pun on "labor" as sexual activity) he is reduced to a willing cuckold. In fact, the servants note that "Now’s out of work he falls to making dildoes" (I.ii.58). Sir Walter’s manservant calls Allwit a "wittol" and notes that "he’s but one pip above a servingman, and so much his horns make him" (I.ii.69). And even his own servants mock him, saying, "Oh, you are but our mistress’s husband" rather than the "master" of the household (I.ii.65). So careful is Allwit to maintain his comfortable life that when Sir Walter jealously asks "what entertainment has lain open here?" and accuses Allwit of "offering to go to bed with her," Allwit reveals that he is literally husband in name only: "she’s a wife as honest of her body to me as any lord’s proud lady can be" (I.ii.103). Thus, unlike earlier city comedies, like Merchant of Venice for instance, where Shakespeare attempts a utopian vision of capitalism and pastoral life co-existing through the marriage of Portia and Bassanio, in Chaste Maid the vision is less nostalgic for a time where traditional "family values" are upheld.
Alexander Leggatt writes that Chaste Maid is ostensibly about the "brisk trade in human flesh" (139)—since every female (and several male) bodies serve as medium of exchange for wealth and social prestige—or, I suggest, the limit point of capitalist relations. Every society depends upon rebuilding or reusing the codes of the previous society (meaning at a time when the modes of exchange and production were different) to uphold and render its own codes "natural" and "ahistorical": in Chaste Maid, however, the codes of morality are openly revealed as mere "convention." The conclusion, where Touchwood Junior and Moll’s funeral turns into a wedding feast (and their shrouds into wedding sheets), seems to be a mockery of conventional comedy endings: "fortune seldom deals two marriages/ With one hand, and both lucky. The best is, /One feast will serve them both" (V.iv.124-6). Even to the last word, then, the merchants are most concerned about saving money and getting rich. And Tim’s capitulation to the "logic" of English—"so much for marriage and logic" (V.iv.121)— furthermore parodies the institution of marriage and love: "I’ll love her for her wit; I’ll pick out my runts there; and for my mountains, I’ll mount upon…" (V.iv.122-23). Thus, as Leggatt writes, "The immoral menage is so thoroughly accepted by all parties that it becomes a settled domesticity in its own right—or rather a parody of domesticity" (138). Furthermore, although Allwit eventually discards Whorehound and reestablishes control over his own household, Lady and Sir Kix will evidently follow the same pattern. Sir Oliver Kix tells Touchwood Senior
I am so endeared to thee for my wife’s fruitfulness
That I charge you both, your wife and thee,
To live no m ore asunder for the world’s frowns;
I have purse and bed and board for you;
Be not afraid to go to your business roundly;
Get children, and I’ll keep them. (V.iv.79-84)
The irony, of course, is that Sir Oliver means that he’ll pay for the Touchwood’s children, not the children Touchwood gets on Lady Kix. Or, perhaps, Sir Oliver does not care if Touchwood is the biological father: as long as he is the husband, the children of his wife are recognized as his, and he will gain the inheritance and land that he so desires. In this reading, then, Chaste Maid is to the end a "brisk trade in human flesh," or as Allwit himself says: "’tis [my] living, as other trades thrive, butchers by selling flesh, poulters by venting connies" (IV.i.253).
Also focusing on the body and economics, Coppelia Kahn argues that Chaste Maid is "an economy…of getting and spending, in which women and their fertility serve as the coin for which land and wealth are exchanged" (255). Lady and Sir Kix obviously depend upon the getting of a child to inherit land—"Ho, my wife’s quickened; I am a man forever" (V.iii.1)—and Allwit rents out his wife’s sexual services to Whorehound in exchange for bourgeois stability: "the founder’s come to town. I am like a man/ Finding a table furnished to his hand,/ As mine is still to me" (I.ii.13-4). However, to stop here means ignoring the very reason Allwit does farm out his wife: she costs too much to keep;
there’s her embossing,
Embroid’rings, spanglings, and I know not what…
[then there’s] her restoratives,
Able to set up a young pothecary,
And richly stock the foreman of a drugshop,
Her sugar by whole loaves, her wines by rundlets. (I.ii.33-9)
Allwit finally concludes the list of things that his wife wants by reiterating a common story about pregnant women: "No mar’l I heard a citizen complain once that his wife’s belly only broke his back" (III.iii.70-1). And like Allwit, Touchwood Senior is threatened by the very ‘economy’ of the female body—as Touchwood says to his wife, "Our desires/ Are both too fruitful for our barren fortunes" (II.i.8). Thus, even as the woman’s fertility guarantees the continued existence of the Allwits and the Kixs, it also presents the possibility of consuming, of swallowing, the masculine wealth and world: "My wife’s as great as she can wallow, Davey, and longs for nothing but pickled cucumbers" (I.ii.6-7). Obviously, Mrs. Allwit’s longing for "cucumbers" bespeaks to the Renaissance view of women as insatiable consumers even as it is equated to sexual desire.
The gossips who come to the christening of Allwit’s new baby also consume abundantly. They eat, drink, talk, and kiss, much to the disgust of all the men present. Watching the women eat and drink, Allwit remarks "Had this been all my cost now, I had been beggared" (III.ii.63). And, of course, Middleton adds a little extra poke at the hypocrisy of his times by calling two of the gossips Puritans: even as these women mouth the language of puritan chastity and virtue they do not refrain from taking all the "sweetmeats" and leaving only crumbs "not worth mouthing" (III.ii.69-70). Along with their consumption, they also eliminate: "They have drunk so hard in plate/ That some of them had need of other vessels" (III.ii.201) Allwit complains. These ‘other vessels’ turn out to be chamber pots for the women have left puddles under their chairs, and Allwit’s reference to the sewers of Cheapside—"Come along presently by the Pissing Conduit" (III.ii.205)—locates this reference directly in the realm of bodily fluids. Even the gossip’s kisses are described in terms of wetness and excess: Tim complains that "she wets as she kisses" and asks his tutor to "wipe them off as fast as they come on" (III.ii.183).
This portrayal of the gossips in Chaste Maid takes part in what Paster calls "a culturally familiar discourse about the female body, an anxious symptomatological discourse to be found in a variety of other texts including Renaissance medical texts, iconography, and the proverbs of oral culture" (25). Paster then goes on to state that "this discourse inscribes women as leaky vessels" (25). Obviously the spilt wine, the drunk, pissing gossips, and the pregnant/just delivered Mrs. Allwit contributes to this discourse about women’s "material expressiveness." Furthermore, as one gossip reveals, her daughter "has a fault, gossip, a secret fault…she’s too free…Oh, ay, she cannot lie dry in her bed" (III.ii.110). Notably, this "secret" is revealed only because the gossip has drunk too much wine; the image of leaky vessels "links this liquid expressiveness to excessive verbal fluency" (Paster 25). The gossips, then, are "leaky vessels" who emit bodily fluid and talk.
Pointing out the action in Cheapside takes place during Lent—the time of strict feasting and sexual abstinence—Kahn writes that "Middleton celebrates the female body…a body open, fertile, perpetually flowing and growing, consuming flesh and producing it in a limitless economy which transcends Lent" (255). While it is true that the reproductive nature of the female body (including Touchwood Senior’s extraordinary virility) serves to both secure economic wealth—as in the case of Lady Kix—and as a festive occasion (evidenced by the christening party and the meat that the promoters confiscate), arguably this celebration also mocks and critiques the female body, the "leaky vessel." Certainly Allwit is disgusted by what he sees, as is Tim: "Oh, this is horrible; she wets as she kisses" (III.ii). And all the men escape the women’s room as soon as they possibly can: "I’ll stay no longer; it would kill me and if I paid for’t" (III.ii.87). Thus, although Tim’s mother accuses her son of "want[ing] nothing but audacity" (III.ii.118), it is the women themselves who are cast as ‘monstrous’ and over forward.
Obviously on stage was not the only place where women were seen to be monstrous or shameful. In fact, numerous treatises were devoted to chastising women for their aberrant behavior. One of the more vehement of these sermons, Hic Mulier (1620), accused women of being "masculine" because they were no longer silent, modest, and at home. In other words, because they threatened the social order:
For since the days of Adam women were never so Masculine…You that are stranger than strangeness itself; whom Wise men wonder at, Boys shout at, and Goblins themselves start at: you that are the gilt dirt which embroiders Playhouses, the painted Statues which adorn Caroches, and the perfumed Carrion that bad men feed on in Brothels: ‘tis of you I entreat and of your monstrous deformity. (265-6)
Interestingly, like Gossen and Stubbes, one of the main points of the tract is that these new women are watched and, indeed, desire to be "wonder[ed] at" and gazed upon like outlandish or exotic statues. Centrally, the author focuses on the clothing that these women wear, including "the loose lascivious civil embracement of a French doublet, being all unbuttoned to entice, all of one shape to hide deformity, and extreme short waisted to give a most easy way to every luxurious action" (Hic Mulier 267). In short, women have exchanged all modest, "comely" clothing and behavior for "apish incivility": the author even links crime to women’s mode of dress.
Furthermore, the sermon reveals that clothing was a material article that distinguished and upheld both gender and class status; and concern about wearing the proper clothing—that which is appropriate to one’s rank and ‘degree’—was growing exponentially in Elizabethan society. Both Queen Elizabeth and King James issued many sumptuary laws to control who wore what, to "inscribe" one’s rank visibly in a society threatened by a blurring of "natural" distinctions. Marjorie Garber’s study on cross-dressing in the Renaissance notes that "the term ‘sumptuary’ is related to ‘consumption’; the laws were designed in part to regulate commerce and to support local industries, as well as to prevent—or at least to hold to a minimum—what today would be known as ‘conspicuous consumption’, the flaunting of wealth by those whose class or other social designation made such display seem transgressive" (Vested Interests 21). Several year later, of course, King James’s anxiety about women flocking to the city for the latest fashions—including cross-dressing—and thereby ruining their reputation, resulted in his ordering preachers to condone "mannish" women from the pulpit.
Just as the ‘consumption’ of clothes indicates socially disruptive behavior by distorting the categories between class (aristocracy/the landless), so too does it indicate a slippage between the formally fixed positions or roles of men and women within society.
The "masculine woman," the woman who is no longer silent and closed, presents a threat to the social order: like the plague, the "monstrous" woman "is an infection" (Hic Mulier 269) that crops up all over the city. This anxiety—notably about female sexuality and the threat it poses to men—indicates that women are stepping outside predetermined roles: women were not just in the house anymore, and they were certainly not all silent. As mentioned above, it was not until women entered the markets to buy and sell that they entered the public sphere; until this time women were excluded and relegated to the private life of the home. Thus, "[w]henever women’s talk is removed to public spaces, it became a threat; when it burst out of the house and into the streets or villages, town or city, or when it took place in the church or alehouse, it became dangerous, even seditious" (Newman 184).
In fact, women’s talk in public was so dangerous that numerous texts and sermons were devoted to both chastising these "monstrous women" and warning men to avoid talkative women, as in the following lecture delivered by John Taylor in 1639:
It is better for a man to have a fair Wife that himself and every man else will love (provided that she be not a scold withal), or a deformed wife that would hire others to make much of her (for foul water will quench fire as much as fair), or a drunken Wife that would make much of herself, or an old wife that were bedridden of her tongue, or a thievish wife that should steal from himself and others, or a proud one that would waste all his estate in fashions….or a sluttish wife that would poison him and end all his miseries: I say it were better for a man to marry with any of all these forenamed wicked kind of women than to be matched and overmatched with a scold. For a scold will be all these and worse. (A Juniper Lecture 297)
The vehemence of Taylor’s warning against "scolds" conflates women who "waste" men’s estates or economic stability and women who are sexually promiscuous ("every man else will love"); moreover, in describing a woman as "foul water," he further participates in the familiar cultural discourse where women are inconstant, unreliable, and consuming. City women, in Taylor’s mind, are the worst for they have greater freedom to buy things and are thus "scolding, clamorous, proud, lascivious, voluptuous, high fed, rich clad, commanding all, not to be commanded by any" (296). As Newman explains, "[t]alk in women then is dangerous because it is perceived as a usurpation of multiple forms of authority, a threat to order and male sovereignty, to masculine control of commodity exchange, to a desired hegemonic male sexuality" (184). Thus, the scold represents the worst of women, the stereotypical, yet monstrous, Woman.
The linen draper or merchant Candido in Honest Whore is faced with such a wife, one who devotes most of the play to trying to provoke her husband to anger, and in the process railing at both him and the apprentices who work at the shop. Although Viola describes herself as "patient," the apprentices retort, "You patient! I, so is the diuell when he is horne madde" (I.v.9). In fact, many times Viola acts the scold by refusing to cook, be polite and, above all, by constantly chastising Candido and the apprentices. Viola’s desire to provoke her gentle husband into anger stems from a "longing" that she cannot define, a longing that is, however, linked to sexual desires: "I long to haue my patient husband eate vp a whole Porcupine, to the intent, the bristling quills may sticke about his lippes like a flemmish mustacho, and be shot at me" (I.ii.86). Furthermore, Viola believes that a man who "cannot be angry is no man" (I.ii.64). Thus, many of the tricks that Viola plays on her husband are intended to arouse him by jealously or through shame.
In fact, one of the plots Viola devises to provoke Candido involves pretending that she is mistress to another man. Employing her sailor brother in the game, she flaunts in front of Candido, playing the "typically" unchaste citizen’s wife; "call me your loue, your yngle, your coosen, or so; but sister at no hand" (I.ii.118) she commands her brother. Centrally, Viola and her brother Fustigo attempt to emulate the gallants and citizen’s wives by using the language they think all citizens use—as Fustigo says, "no, no, it shall be coosen, or rather cuz, that’s the gulling word betweene the Cittizens wiues and their made-caps, that man em to the garden" (I.ii.119-20). Moreover, their emulation points to belief that all "true" citizens indulge in unchaste behavior. When Fustigo demands Viola’s "ring" (slang for female genitalia) and then asks Candido if he is angry, her husband replies "if she can part so easily with her Ring, tis with all my heart" (III.i.25). Although he undercuts Viola’s attempt to provoke him to anger, the reference to "ring" further participates in that discourse which locates desire in the woman.
Thus even though Viola and Fustigo’s "game" fails, within the context of Jacobean society the wife’s "longings" are posited as something inherent to woman. Once again, as Truewit’s warning to Morose, or Swetnam and Taylor’s sermons indicate, along with ‘conspicious consumption’ of clothing, jewelry, cosmetics and other "knicknacks" that London markets made readily available, women also are seen as sexually consuming. So widespread was this view that it provided popular material in numerous city comedies. For instance, in another of Dekker’s plays, Westward Ho, there is a rather telling reference to women’s insatiable appetite: "If she be a right Cittizens wife, now her Husband has given her an inch, sheele take an ell, or a yard at least" (II.i.20). The heart of the joke lies in the pun on "yard" as a man’s sexual organ; therefore the citizen’s wife is both sexually voracious (or promiscuous) and, of course, libel to demand as much freedom as she can.
Interestingly, in the second part of Honest Whore Candido is married to another shrewish wife also named Viola; this time, however, he ‘tames’ her: "A curst cow’s milk I ha’drunk once before/ And ‘twas so rank in taste, I’ll drink no more./ Wife, I’ll tame you" (II.ii.72-4). The form of this taming takes place outside where Candido challenges Viola number two to a dual, she with an "ell" and he with a "yard." Viola asks for the first strike, which he grants and she kneels in front of him saying
Behold, I am such a cunning fencer grown,
I keep my ground, yet down I will be thrown
With the least blow you give me; I distain
The wife that is her husband’s sovereign.
She that upon your pillow first did rest,
They say, the breeches wore, with I detest:
The tax which she imposed upon you, I abate you,
If me you make your master, I shall hate you.
The world shall judge who offers fairest play;
You win the breeches, but I win the day. (II.ii.106-15)
Obviously, her speech is inscribed with sexual images ("fencing" being a common term for sexual intercourse) and in this way women’s nature is represented as desiring. As both Violas make evident, women’s mouths (or tongues) and excess desire are linked together: Viola complains that "I am ready to bite off my tongue, because it want that vertue which all womens tongues haue (to anger their husbands:) Brother, mine can by no thunder turne him into a sharpness" (Honest Whore I; I.ii.75). In this complaint, she reveals, once again, that women’s ‘natural’ tendency is to "anger" men; as Newman writes, the "whore’s insatiable genitals" were represented as a "thirsty mouth," and the "talking woman is everywhere equated with a voracious sexuality that in turn abets her avid consumerism: scolds were regularly accused of both extravagance and adultery" (184). Obviously, both Hic Mulier and Taylor accuse women of "voracious sexuality" and "avid consumerism" and it is easy to recognize the gossips of Chaste Maid in Cheapside as belonging to this same tendency.
Thus, feminine desire is culturally inscribed as both "natural" and "unnatural": in Chaste Maid Mrs. Yellowhammer attempts to fix crying Moll by finding her a husband and she marries Tim to a Welsh whore: greed for wealth and prestige governs her actions and thus she is defined as an unnatural mother but a typical female. Similarly, in The Dutch Courtesan, Mrs. Mulligrub is greedy for wealth and she is linked to sexual inconstancy (at her husband’s hanging, she agrees to go with Cocledomoy). In Honest Whore I, however, this distinction is less clear—Viola’s longings (suggestively sexual) are paradoxically represented as both a "natural" wish for a ‘real man’, to be dominated, and yet she never manages to teach her husband to lose his patience. It takes a second play to ‘tame’ Viola with a "yard" and in this way remedy the fact that "hee haz not all things belonging to a man" (I.ii.59).
Thus, while Chaste Maid can been seen as both limit of capitalism—a society where commodification of flesh is ‘naturalized’ or at least accepted by those within the play—it also constructs the female as a potential threat to the economic and moral system. In Honest Whore this threat is more narrowly located in Viola whose longings cause her to browbeat her husband. As these two plays reveal, the terms used to describe consumption and capitalism are gendered feminine as an anxious response to the extravagance of spending and the disruption of ‘natural’ or traditional gender roles. Perhaps, then, it is accurate to say that women’s bodies become the site of social and economic struggles to come to terms with a disrupted and disruptive social system. Women’s bodies become the site of struggle because they represent all that does not fit in the symbolic order, into "reality." Women’s bodies, then, are that which escapes and cannot be contained by the discourse of the ‘classical body’ to use Bakhtin’s phrase—they are that which gives definition to the classical body by remaining, forever, its dialectical opposition, the Other.
In much the same way that Francischina in The Dutch Courtesan functions as a spectre or reminder to her society that capitalism makes prostitution—commodification of sex—possible and that, indeed, she represents all that is unadmissable in capitalist recoding, or that Shylock functions as the scapegoat to a society anxious about capitalist transactions, a look at the representation of women’s bodies in Chaste Maid and Honest Whore reveals the Renaissance discourse which would locate the source of "excess" desire in the ‘leaky’ or grotesque body. Thus, in the process of encoding society or attempting to legitimate its codes, capitalist ideology utilizes the classical-humanist tradition (the "residual" ideologies) to locate all that is excess and shameful and dangerous to masculine authority in the feminine body. Specifically, the possibility of uncontrollable consumption—figured as both sexual and economic desires and represented metynomically through women’s mouths and genitals—and its parallel, the possibility of uncontrollable elimination—again represented via women’s bodies—are displaced unto the female: in this way the continued existence of economic conditions is ensured and the social hierarchies maintained. The gendered discourse of capitalism, then, functions as reterritorialization—or to use Bakhtin’s language, as a unifying, centripetal force to the unstable social system. Once this authoritative, "centripetal" discourse is established and accepted—by the characters within the plays, the audience, and, even, the plays’ critics—such that the "implicit norm" is assumed to be "positive and ‘natural’ rather than culturally produced" (Newman), it is not a far step to then dismiss the leaky, consuming woman as an external, "unnatural" aberration from the social order rather than an inherent product of the social order. Thus, as Candido says about his scolding wife, "Pray Gentlemen take her to be a woman, Do not regard her language" (I.v.91).
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