Rebecca M. Quoss-Moore
Domestic Economy and Domestic Security:
The English Housewife and her Nation
ABSTRACT
As
the changing economy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to
increased social and physical mobility, the housewife, as a central figure of
English domesticity, became an increasingly important figure in Renaissance
England. “Her” domestic centrality was made possible by the anxieties and
complications accessed through increased travel, mobility, and change. At the
same time, these complications led English men and women to create ever
stricter definitions to control the role and depiction of the English
housewife, in whose image the entire country now had a vested interest. As the
English translation of Juan
Luis Vives’s Instruction of a Christian
Woman, Gervase Markham’s The English
Housewife, and Elizabeth Jocelin’s posthumous The Mother’s Legacie to her Unborne Childe reflect, English society invested enormous amounts of energy in
attempting to create a stable, safe identity for itself by crafting a stable,
safe identity for the housewife. This figure necessarily influenced the way
that Englishwomen and men thought and wrote about a definition of the foreign
and a particular, domestic, English national identity.
FULL TEXT
1>
As the changing economy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to
increased social and physical mobility, and vice versa, the ideals of English
national identity were increasingly shaped in response to the perceived threats
or difference of the foreign. England itself became increasingly conceptualized
as a domestic space; the English housewife became a symbol for discussions of
the problems and virtues of England historically, politically, and socially.
This focus on the idealization of the housewife had uses ranging from the
domestication of history to expressions of a need for class control and hierarchy.
What all such narratives reflect, though, regardless of intent, is a newly
centralized facet of the English national identity, a new definition created in
response to the increase of travel and the changes involved therein. As such,
it was perhaps natural that the housewife, as a central figure of English
domesticity, became an increasingly important figure in Renaissance England; “her”
domestic centrality was made possible by the anxieties and complications
accessed through increased travel, mobility, and change. At the same time,
these complications led English men and women to create ever stricter
definitions to control the role and depiction of the English housewife, in
whose image the entire country now had a vested interest. This figure, also,
then influenced the way that Englishwomen and men thought and wrote about their
own culture and history. By juxtaposing the values created through these sorts
of domestic exercises, the English people could articulate a definition of the
foreign and claim a particular, domestic, English national identity.
2> The formation of this
English national identity is here examined through the relationships between
three different sorts of texts about housewives: Juan Luis Vives’s Instruction of a Christian Woman as
translated by Richard Hyrde, Gervase Markham’s The English Housewife, and Elizabeth Jocelin’s posthumous The Mother’s Legacie to her Unborne Childe.
Vives’s text, of course, does not deal specifically with the idea of the
English housewife, but both the original Latin text of the 1520s and the
English translation in 1585 mark relatively early examples of the emerging
interest in literature explicitly about women’s roles. In the 1585 translation,
Hyrde preserves Vives’s prefatory dedication to then-queen Katherine, heading
the preface only to identify the author and the dedicatee. No additional
English preface is created, and Hyrde’s title page is similarly restrained;
there is relatively little to resituate the text as explicitly English, but the
project of translation itself, particularly after the Reformation represents
complicated intersections of reclamation of certain identities, as will be
examined, here. If Vives’s text can only be considered in terms of English
identity specifically insofar as its patronage and translation make it “English,”
Gervase Markham’s The English Housewife
is more clearly and consciously a product of nationalism. “English” is, indeed,
the largest word on the title page, emphasizing the particular nationality considered
within the pages of Markham’s text. Further, the title page promises that this
text is “[a] worke very profitable and necessarie, gathered for the generall
good of this kingdome” (Markham 1). From the earliest introduction to the text,
Markham privileges the instruction of the English housewife as integral to the
good of the kingdom at large. Though less explicitly invested in national
identity, Elizabeth Jocelin’s text reveals an interest in a different sort of
instruction, one which may be targeted, like Vives’s treatise and Markham’s
huswifery book, at education, but which also ensures a place for the housewife
herself in history as author rather than subject. Thus, the three texts together trace an
evolution of discussions of the housewife, as her role in, and contributions to,
society become ever more centralized and acknowledged.
3> Further, these three texts
mark an increasing individualization of the housewife, from Vives’s Christian
woman, who could be maid, wife, or widow of any European nation, to Markham’s
more specific English housewife, to Jocelin’s own personal voice. By very
virtue of the publication of her text, though, Jocelin becomes simultaneously
an individual in history and a representative of a larger group. As Vives
speaks to women, Jocelin is cast as speaking for women, though the Approbation
both justifies the publication of the text by implying that she is exceptional
and, in preserving her voice, makes her exceptional. Nonetheless, the very fact
that her advice is considered sound and worthy of national consideration
reflects the increasing investment of English identity in the nation’s
housewives. This investment was partly influenced by the gender politics of
Elizabethan England; as Louis Adrian Montrose’s seminal essay outlines, the
inviolable body of the queen was inextricably bound to the inviolable space of
England (“Subject” 315), and Elizabeth used her gender to build upon the
established political imagery of body and country. On the one hand, Elizabeth’s
use of gender shores personal political power; as Montrose outlines in that essay,
“Elizabeth perpetuates her maidenhood in a cult of virginity; transfers her
wifely duties from the household to the state; and invests her maternity in her
political rather than in her natural body” (Montrose “Subject” 310). However,
the terms which Elizabeth used were both determined by and available to the
subjects she governed, and “her subjects might rework those terms to serve their
turns.” (Montrose “Subject” 310). Thus, the terms which Elizabeth uses to
secure her space can also become a way of securing English housewives within
their domestic spaces; as Jocelin’s use indicates, though, those terms may also
be a way to codify identity and to preserve one’s voice.
4> Markham’s text, an example
of both impositions and preservations, is distinctive partly as an example of
the particularly English genre of the cookbook.
By Markam’s 1615 publication, the genre was well-established; Wendy Wall
traces some of the history of the cookbook as a distinct genre, noting that
“[h]ousewifery, first published as a subset of knowledge in sixteenth-century
husbandry books, broke off as a separate discourse in the 1570s when English
cookbooks appeared in bookstalls” (333). This genre, she notes, was distinct
from its European counterpart in terms of the intended audience; cookbooks,
elsewhere, were designed for professional men–chefs. Cookbooks, in England,
were designed instead for domestic women–huswifes. Not least significant for
the discussion here is the planned journey of the book. The cookbook elsewhere
was a product of men for men, which moved from the workplace of the printers’
shop to the workplace of the kitchen. The cookbook in England was instead a
product for an audience of consumer-producers, a product brought into the home
to govern production in the home. The cookbook was then a kind of foreign
invader of the domestic space at the same time that it shored up ideas about
that space. Wall addresses the product of this generic difference when she
argues that “[a]s the earliest published domestic advice manuals and cookbooks
in England shaped conceptions of domesticity, they made readers self-conscious
about the meaning of daily life” (333).
5> There were, of course,
other invaders of the home making the English particularly self-conscious of domestic
meaning and its making in the 16th century. Though the argument of
this essay focuses particularly on the economic formation of nationalism in
response to the foreign, the political and religious shifts of the time were
equally important contributors. When Kim F. Hall, for example, argues that
“[t]he cookbook played a relatively unheralded role in the formation of
European nationalism,” her argument is not only economic, but also political
and even specifically geographic (170). Hall herself outlines the intersection
thus:
“in
making ‘preserves and conserves,’ seventeenth-century women participated in a
growing movement from a Mediterranean to an Atlantic economy, and made the
English home an important part of [...] the modern world system. While it may look
odd to read both nationalism and a developing world system in the same cultural
enterprise, in this case it seems precisely the tension between a changing
world economy and attempts to define the boundaries of individual national
identities that produces such ambivalent (and often contradictory) notions of
the foreign and the domestic in English texts.” (Hall 169)
6> The identity of the English
household was formed by the English housewife at its center, and this household
formed in new patterns, with new importance, as the major concerns of the
country itself shifted, in some ways, from domestic concerns to international–or
as international concerns began to necessarily impact the domestic. As England
became an increasingly colonial player in terms of trade, politics, and
territory, her people also become more invested in identifying what set them
apart. Nationalism simultaneously became and resulted from the drive to define
Englishness, both in opposition to, and as something that could be taken,
“abroad.” Hall notes, to this point, that “the shaping of the English woman’s
role in the household was necessary, not only for maintaining domestic order,
but for the absorption of the foreign necessitated by colonialism” (170).
England and her housewives defined each other in acts of mutual and
self-protection.
7> The use of the feminine
pronoun for the state, above, is intentional and intentionally reflects a
significant proportion of the discourse of the day. Speaking about the later
period of the Civil War, Christopher Orchard outlines the common use of the
figure of the female body as the disordered body politic, by both the opposing
factions, as “a subtle consensual agreement that inscribed the female body as a
passive subject that followed prescriptive gender codes of behavior” (Orchard
10). The agreement is significant as a reflection that “the ideological
bifurcation that had divided citizens along religious, political, and class
lines did not preclude both Royalist and Parliamentarian writers from employing
the same analogy, that of the female body, to describe political crisis.”
(Orchard 10) I would extend the argument backwards to acknowledge that this
image is available to the Englishmen of the Civil War because it has already
been established in the preceding decades as the dominant figure of English
national identity. In the face of imminent civil war, the well-ordered housewife
instead becomes an unordered hussy as the civil order breaks down, emphasizing
the connection between the English domestic order and the English people’s
self-definition.
8> The preeminence of the
housewife and her domain–as well as her later, implicit culpability in the
civil disorder of the mid-century–resulted from her place at the center of the
home and the home’s place at the center of the state. Wall summarizes that
“[a]s the ‘first society” and ‘seminary,’ the early modern family bore the
tremendous burden of inculcating citizenship in a patriarchal and hierarchical
world by structuring the proper dependencies that founded church, state, and
body politic.” (331). Colonialism and protocapitalism then go hand in hand in
defining many of the major changes to these structures of the state and her
people; Wall observes the impact of these changes in the figure of the
housewife as represented in huswifery guides, as well, noting that as they
“[r]espond [...] to widespread economic changes ushered in by the emergence of
protocapitalism, these guides interpret housewifery in different ways: its
destructive potential is circumscribed as a game, its economic value becomes
the sign of national character” (335). The “proto” element of this particular
capitalism is also essential to the huswife’s place, because the economic
nature of the period meant that “[t]he household was, after all, the primary
unit of production as well as consumption in the period” (Wall 333). The
household produced goods and citizens; it was also the site of use of the
colonial products that were made possible by the export of citizens and of
“Englishness.”
9> Part of the relationship
between England and her housewives was the domestication of the space within
which they both existed, particularly as idealized by the English themselves.
This space was contained, defined, and protected. Mary Thomas Crane points out
that the term “huswife” is used mostly by male writers (212). She associates use of the term with “anxiety,
first over working-class women’s wage-earning potential within the home (with
fears of a concomitant sexual independence) and, later, anxiety over
upper-class women’s increasing idleness (with fears of concomitant sexual
freedom) as they were confined to a domestic sphere where servants did most of
the work” (Crane 212). The anxiety of sexual freedom as connected to proscribed
social roles mirrors the elision of “huswife” and “hussy;” the terms used to
describe women are unstable because the roles ascribed to them are too bound to
the anxieties that destabilize those roles, leading to “attempt[s] to separate
huswives from hussies by confining women within the space of the home” (Crane
216). In Markham’s text, especially,
there is a decided emphasis on the physical limitations of the space controlled
by the housewife. Whereas “the perfect husbandman[‘s] [...] office and employments
are ever for the most part abroad, or removed from the house [...] our English
housewife [...] hath her most general employments within the house” (Markham 5).
Vives similarly limits the movements of women, though he clarifies that “I say
not this becau[se] I would have women continually sh[ut] up and kept in, but
because I wold ha[ve] them go seldome abroad, and be little [a]mong men” (280).
The limitations placed on the movements of women are not about movement itself
but instead about the risk of contamination for the domestic space. Movement “abroad,” for both Vives and Markham,
implies a scope which necessitates encounters with the foreign and the
unfamiliar. The space of the domestic, in contrast, does not necessarily have
to be completely isolated, but ought to be restricted to interactions with
familiar–that is, the housewife ought to operate within a particular,
demarcated sphere of influence.
10> However, the relationship
between the housewife and her space was much more complex than one of simple confinement;
woman and space, like woman and nation, defined one another. When Markham later
discusses the making of malt, he clarifies that “[t]his office or place
belongeth particularly to the housewife [...] it is properly the work and care of the
woman, for it is a house work, and done altogether within doors, where
generally lieth her charge” (180). Even as the domestic space limits the
housewife, it is also through that space that the housewife exerts control;
this space is her responsibility and within her power. Within the household,
the housewife is assigned a space and influence that are definably hers. In
this particular instance, that control may seem to extend over only a relatively
minor element of English life. In fact, though, these minor features added up
to include almost the sum of English domestic product; malt, bread, herbs,
physics, and cloth are all among the several products which Markham expects the
English housewife either to produce or to have produced with assistance from
other women within her local markets. Lena Cowen Orlin’s list of likely reasons
for men’s much more rapid rate of remarriage in the period reflects the
emphasis on women’s productivity in the period; she links men’s quick
remarriages to “how dependent they were upon their partners for running their
households, rearing children, supervising servants, and contributing to family
incomes” (Orlin 164) In a very real sense, the economy of England depended on
the domestic spaces of housewives.
11> Further, in addition to
the influence that might spread from the products of these physical spaces, the
social space affected by the English housewife was quite wide. Just as many
products took root in the home economies of English housewives, so, too, did
English citizens. Though on the face of it, such a claim may seem so obvious as
to be of little value, the increasing literature about the role of the English
housewife reflects a clear concern with the influence the housewife exerted
beyond her sphere. Surely her influence on her children was “natural” in
contemporary thought, but that influence then meant that, insofar as she shaped
its citizens, the housewife shaped England as a whole. Thus, the housewife
became conceptualized not only as a symbol of national identity, but as a maker,
an idea which could cause more anxiety in the deeply patriarchal English social
structure; Crane describes the conflict as centered on “anxiety about the role
of women [...] around the unstable boundaries between their potential as
‘producers’ [...] and a literally ‘conservative’ sense [...] of their role as
caretakers and preservers [...]” (212). Markham’s work makes this especially
clear, as each section of his text begins with a discussion of the wider
implications and consequences of the housewife’s knowledge and practices. The proper education of the English housewife
is important, Markham claims, because “from the general example of her virtues,
and the most approved skill of her knowledges, those of her family may both
learn to serve God, and sustain man in that godly and profitable sort which is
required of every true Christian” (5). Though Markham does not ever cast the
role of the housewife as one of explicit instruction or education, her example
and her creation of a sound domestic space are central to the proper formation
of those in her charge.
12> Vives engages with this
influence of the wife by first discussing her ability to shape the very
specific space of her own household, a space where the propriety of her
influence was accepted and, largely, uncontested. Discussing concord within the
house, Vives tells the wife that “a great part of this matter resteth in thy
hand [...] to have thy husband pleasaunt and loving to thee, and to lead thy life
wealthfully: or else [...] to have him froward and crabbed, and to ordain for thy
self grievous torment” (183). Though Vives largely casts the surest path to
marital contentment as one of submission of the wife’s part, he nonetheless
casts this as her choice – she can control the space within which she lives.
This is more explicit in Vives’s promise that “if thou by vertuous living and
buxumnes, gyve him cause to love thee, thou shalt be mystres in a merry house”
(182). Just as Markham allows that which is in the house to be a part of the
housewife’s “charge,” so Vives emphasizes the housewife’s leading role in the
domestic space. If she correctly forms her household, she can naturally rule
over that successful space as its appropriate mistress. Vives then begins to
connect this household space more explicitly with the larger social order. For
example, Vives’s list of rules from “Pithagoras’ discipline” ends that
“sedition [should be put] out of the Citie, and discord out of the house” (231).
The housewife’s successful performance of her domestic duty is a fulfillment of
the natural order, and each level of that order relates to the next. As Valerie
Traub, M. Lindsey Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan point out, this is the natural
result of the image of the ruler as parent, which meant “the parent was also
given the rights and responsibilities of a ruler. In order for the subject to
enact the monarch’s will, he or she required a measure of authority in his or her
own right” (3). The natural result was that “the political status of the
family, while reinforcing the subordination of the wife, nevertheless offers
women a public role and a proximity to power” (Traub, Kaplan, and Callaghan 3).
The housewife has power over her family as an image of the parent-ruler. As
such, harmony does not just result from the elimination of discord and
sedition, but depends on the elimination of discord at the domestic level which
will naturally result in the elimination of sedition on the civic level.
13> This sentiment is echoed
when Jocelin explains the effect she hopes to achieve through her text, though
she claims to write to an audience of only one.
“Againe,
I may perhaps be wondred at for writing in this kinde, considering there are so
many excellent books, whose least note is worth all my meditations. I confesse
it, and thus excuse my selfe. I write not to the world, but to mine own childe,
who it may be, will more profit by a few weake instructions comming from a dead
mother (who cannot every day praise or reprove it as it deserves) then by farre
better from much more learned.” (Jocelin 10-11)
14> Though Jocelin’s focus is
only her own offspring, she nonetheless feels compelled to enter her voice into
record in order to control her particular contribution to the social order. Further,
Jocelin’s text here affirms the unique nature of the voice of the housewife;
she asserts that, in the role of mother, the housewife’s words have a
particular power to shape those within her household. In this shaping, then,
the housewife necessarily contributes to the kingdom at large, shaping the
space of England through the shape of her own domestic space. The role of the
good housewife, Jocelin’s text implies, is amending the country’s ills from
within the domestic space. This interest in the wider world is more explicitly echoed
when Jocelin casts her concerns for her child in terms of the larger issues of
England, as when she warns that “our Kingdome hath of late afforded more
examples of those who have been slain by their friends in a drunken quarrell,
than of those that have fallen by the enemies sword” (Jocelin 72). Through
proper instruction of her own child, though, Jocelin hopes to contribute to the
solution to this discord. The housewife, herself a domestic figure, becomes an
agent in keeping England free of violence and vice within its borders,
preserving the national domestic space through the proper ordering of her
private domestic space.
15>
The acknowledgement of these influences of the housewife was intimately bound
up with anxieties about her role and about her security. Because the idea of
the housewife belonged so completely to the domestic, anxieties about her role
often took the form of discussions about travel and foreignness. Foreignness
here needs special attention, as the word, when considered in juxtaposition
with the ideal of the English housewife, could include not only ideas of
foreign countries and practices, but also ideas of practices foreign to nature,
or of social settings, such as the court or the city market, which were foreign
to the specific domestic space envisioned by many Englishwomen and men as the
proper provenance of this housewife. Even as rules governing movement were
created and encoded through huswifery texts and conduct texts, the facts of the
changing economy meant that women’s roles were shifting and involved both more
travel and an increased level of consumerism. More, and more diverse, goods
were being brought into the home–Hall’s sugar and Wall’s cookbooks are two
immediate examples–and the English household was, thus, increasingly less
self-sufficient, mirroring changes in the national economy. This then inspired
fears about foreign influences, both as “unnatural” and as potentially damaging
to the English economy and English national identity. While such anxiety
partially limited the scope of the housewife, both Elizabeth’s use in her
iconography and Jocelin’s use in her text indicate the ways that opposition and
othering could be used to shore up ideas of particularly English feminine
identities.
16> The anxiety about new
products, new movements, and new economies was particularly connected to the
English housewife because any concern with consumption and economy necessarily
created concerns about the domestic space of England. Though Michelle M. Dowd
focuses her discussion of these concerns on a consideration of the Dekker and
Webster play Westward Ho!, she makes
several important points about the connection between “consumer power and
illicit sexuality” (230). As Dowd argues, “[t]he same economic changes that
made London the ‘national lodestone’ also had a dramatic impact on urban
housewives and their connections to the market” (225). Where these housewives
might previously have largely taken their own domestically produced goods to
market and collaborated with other housewives to produce or barter for other
domestically produced goods, many products were now moved across counties or
even countries, and, though Dowd focuses on urban housewives, these changes
were occurring across the country. As Dowd points out, the shifting market then
naturally led to a greater reliance on “goods produced outside the home” (225). This,
then, necessitated a certain amount of movement on the part of the good English
housewife, as well as an addition to her roles: part of the primary role of
these housewives was now consuming, rather than producing. This consumption not only changed the established economy, then, but
also changed the definitions and delineations of the housewife. Travel,
particularly as it altered economy, threatened the domestic; even within the
accepted spaces of England, the housewife’s travel threatened her family’s
domestic space by necessitating an introduction of the foreign and the
unfamiliar.
17> Vives warns his reader
quite explicitly against the evils of consumerism at several places throughout
his text, as when he admonishes that wives must “beware thou fall not into such
a wicked minde, to will him for lucre of monye to occup anye unhonest craftes,
or to do any unhappy deeds, that though mayest live more delicatelye, or more
wealthy, or go more gayly and gorgiouslly arrayed, or dwell in more goodly
housing” (211). Though here the specific warning is against allowing
consumptive desires to lead to sinful acts, the very connection between the two
implies a very particular view of consumerism. The desire for better goods is
an evil which is “wicked” and unnatural, and thus leads to wicked and unnatural
deeds. Further, these consumer desires are here essentially domestic. Though a
desire for a “wealthier” lifestyle might imply class movement, the basic focus
is on improvements to house or person – to those areas which lie with the
wife’s sphere of influence. A desire to change the quality of these domestic
goods implies a discontent which disorders the familiar domestic space. In
contrast, a properly ordered domestic space is one where the wife is satisfied
with her social space and so contents herself with those goods most precisely
appropriate to her “place.”
18> Markham quite explicitly
endorses this idea of domestic space suiting social place when he discusses the
necessity of the housewife conforming to the estate of her husband. Markham argues that “it is meet that our
English housewife be a woman of great modesty and temperance as well inwardly
as outwardly” (Markham 7). Modesty speaks to a lack of ambition, while
temperance implies a balance of resources and expenditures, which Markham explicates
when he explains that:
“her
apparel and diet [...] she shall proportion according to the competency of her
husband’s estate and calling, making her circle rather strait than large, for
it is a rule if we extend to the uttermost we take away increase, if we go
beyond we enter into consumption, but if we preserve any part, we build strong
forts against the adversities of fortune, provided that such preservation be
honest and conscionable; for as lavish prodigality is brutish, so miserable
covetousness is hellish.” (Markham 7)
19> Building on Markham’s
earlier claims about the space of the housewife, these prescriptions more
clearly relate that space to a particular social sphere. These prescriptions
are not limited to warning the wife simply against overeager consumerism;
Markham also points to a need for a particular kind of consumption as
appropriate to the housewife’s class and resources. She must not consume over
eagerly or too widely, but neither should she limit herself in any way
inappropriate to her station. The boundaries of her desires should be enlarged
or shrunk exactly according to her social status.
20> Markham continues his
discussion of the appropriate consumption of the English housewife through his
discussion of her apparel and diet in more specific terms, and these terms tend
to be more specifically limiting than liberating. He claims that her diet
should “be rather to satisfy nature than [...] revive new appetites” (Markham 8),
focusing on the need for the housewife to act according to natural orders and
desires. More precisely, he says that the diet of the house ought to “be
esteemed rather for the familiar acquaintance she has with it, than for the
strangeness and rarity it bringeth from other countries” (Markham 8). Not only, then, should the diet of, and
provided by, the English housewife accord to nature, it ought specifically to
accord to English nature. In much the same way that Markham or Vives would
limit the wife’s travel to those areas with which she is already familiar, so they
would limit her experiences to the same, thus, again, preserve the domestic
space from the contamination of the foreign. “Strangeness” is, in Markham’s
text, suspect by nature, and so the housewife should most naturally avoid its
influence.
21> One other distinct space
of anxiety that stemmed from these fears of consumerism, consumption, and
foreign influence was fashion, where concerns about both nature and nation
guided much of the dialogue. Just as Markham would have the English housewife’s
dress “as far from the vanity of new and fantastic fashions, as near to the
comely imitations of modest matrons” (Markham 7-8), Jocelin warns her child and
her reader about the foolishness of those who “deforme and transforme
themselves by these new fangled fashions” (Jocelin 32). The emphasis on “new”
here reflects the ways in which the threatening foreign might be cast as any
sort of unfamiliar, whether because the object was not English, not natural, or
not traditional. Jocelin, though, also links this idea of the “new” to the
“unnatural,” saying that it is “a monstrous thing to see a man, whom God hath
created of an excellent forme, each part answering the due proportion of
another [...] by a fantasticall habit [...] make himselfe so ugly, that one cannot finde
amongst all Gods creatures any thing like him” (Jocelin 31). This concern with attire
reflects England’s aversion to foreign influence, which could creep in
sinisterly through foreign fashions and product, but the concern with fashion
was not just that it could corrupt a person’s English identity, but that it
could also corrupt one’s natural and Christian identity.
22> Though these prescriptions
regarding fashion, diet, and ordering of the house all reveal a very particular
preoccupation with the established order, the English housewife was also
subject to the more traditional paranoia of the Renaissance man. The most
serious transgressions against nature are addressed when the concerns about
consumerism give way to more explicit fears about sexual misbehavior. Unnatural
consumer behavior may result from an exposure to the foreign and a break from
natural Englishness, but sexual transgression necessitates a break into
unnatural behavior which is more explicitly damaging to country and society. Vives,
in particular, draws again and again on the idea of nature as a base for his
arguments, and this language is strongest in his condemnation of adultery. Vives
does not only condemn adultery in women, though the focus of his text
necessitates a certain imbalance in his discussion of this “unnatural”
practice. Though Vives counsels the good wife to remain calm in her
remonstrations of husband made ill through relations with a concubine (Vives
[226]), his discussion of the event still clearly casts concubines as foreign
invaders bringing disease, through the husband, into the domestic space.
However, in the instance of male adultery, the housewife had the power, through
careful handling, to maintain the domestic order of things, by gently exhorting
her husband to better action and then by submitting to his will.
23> The consequences of female
adultery imply that this act is more severely unnatural and so more essentially
foreign to the proper housewife. Not incidentally, the sections where Vives
discusses adultery by a wife are also where the strongest identification
amongst housewife, household, and country occur. In discussing the unnatural
behavior of the female adulterer, Vives asks, “What greater offence can they
do: or what greater wickedness can they infect them selves withal, that destroy
their countrey, and perish al lawes and justice, and murther their fathers and
mothers, and finally defile and marre all thinges both spirituall and
temporal?” (Vives 187). The destruction of the domestic space is quite
explicitly the destruction of all larger social orders as well, spreading out
of the family to encompass entire nations. In return, according to Vives’s
depiction of the natural order, all of those social spheres will revenge
themselves upon the wife who commits adultery. Closely mirroring his list of
the offended orders, Vives describes that “thy countrey folkes, all rightes and
lawes, thy countrey it selfe, thy parentes, all thy kinfolke, and thine husband
him selfe shall condemne and punish thee” (187-188). While concord in the house
is implicitly connected to the end of sedition in the city earlier in Vives’s
text, here Vives clearly shows the deeply unnatural behavior of adultery as
leading to ever greater and more unnatural disruptions–which then must turn on
the adulterer to restore any semblance of balance. The destruction of the
marital bond destroys the domestic space of the housewife. Thus, insofar as
that domestic space creates all others, its destruction must lead to a
reverberation through all social spheres touching the housewife’s own.
24> Vives, Markham, and Jocelin
all assume the importance of keeping the housewife from transgressions and
reflect the currents of thought that linked transgression to contamination from
“foreign” influences. These concerns were important, though, specifically
because of the ways that the ideal housewife ought to reflect English identity.
Through her proper preservation and proper ordering of the domestic space, the
housewife could become the perfect symbol of England. She was, as an ideal,
paradoxically self-sufficient, self-contained, and also subjugated to her
husband – a perfect locus of control, who was somehow conceived of as both
totally self-controlled and totally controlled by someone else – specifically,
by her husband. As Christopher D. Gabbard surmises, in England, “patriarchalism
manifested itself both on the political and on the household levels. Depending
on the signs and symbols of monarchy for legitimizing the male’s household
rule, domestic patriarchalism became entrenched as England’s governing gender
ideology” (88). However, an important element of this manifestation of
patriarchalism in England was also the extent to which the monarchy depended on
the “signs and symbols” of male household rule to legitimize the ruling ideology.
While Elizabeth I’s rule complicated this structure to some extent, Montrose
emphasizes the ways that the power of the royal cult rested on “virginal,
erotic, and maternal aspects of the Elizabethan feminine [...] appropriate[d] from
the domestic domain [...]” (Montrose “Shaping” 64). Further, more poetic, less
practical texts than those discussed here, often dedicated to Elizabeth, came
back time and again to the idea that “the woman who has the prerogative of a
goddess, who is authorized to be out of place, can best justify her authority
by putting other women in their places” (Montrose “Shaping 76”); through this
logic, “[t]he royal exception could prove the patriarchal rule in society at
large” (Montrose “Shaping” 80). Thus the power of one royal woman emphasized
the importance of other women staying in their place; subordination of women
becomes ever more central to social stability. Whenever England was represented
as a domestic space, the housewife became an important anchor for that space,
and so the stability of her role influenced, conceptually, the stability of the
state.
25> Vives particularly tends
to speak of the ideal housewife in terms related to the ideal state, a
connection made more significant by the patronage of his text by Henry VIII. Speaking
of the role of the wife, Vives writes that “[n]ature sheweth, that the males
duety is to succour and defend, and the females to followe and to waite uppon
the male, and to creepe under his ayde, and obey him, that shee may live the
better” (Vives 204). The wife is, of course, the subject, who must let herself
be governed by her husband’s reason; this is quite specifically the natural
order of things. This is, then, related to the natural social order, when Vives
directs the wife to “[l]et the aucthoritie and rule bee reserved unto thine
husbande: and bee thou an example to all thine house, what soveraignety they
owe unto him” (Vives 206-207). Through
the proper enactment of her role, the housewife reinforces patriarchalism – an
exact counter to the sort of extensive damage which results in these texts from
any disorder on the part of the housewife. Through her support of her husband,
sovereignty is enforced in the domestic space; her influence then enforces
sovereignty on each ascendant level of the social order.
26> This stability also
functions symbolically to reinforce the domestic space and the domestic economy
of England. Markham provides the clearest and most explicit example of this in
his discussion of the English housewife’s role in making malt. This practice is
first linked to the space of the housewife, and so reinforces her domesticity,
the definitions of her identity, and her authority within her assigned space.
The making of malt, in Markham, is a locus for the intersection of both the
housewife’s power and for control of her power. Moving from that relationship
to space, then, the making of malt also becomes an action wherein the housewife
proves her ability to order her household, provides for the growth of that
household, and reaches beyond the household to order the world beyond. Markham
dictates that
“It
is most requisite and fit that our housewife be experienced and well practiced
in the well making of malt, both for the necessary and continual use therof, as
also for the general profit which accrueth and ariseth to the husband,
housewife, and the whole family: for as from it is made the drink, by which the
household is nourished and sustained, so to the fruitful husband [...] it is an
excellent merchandise, and a commodity of so great trade, that not alone
especial towns and counties are maintained thereby, but also the whole kingdom,
and divers others of our neighboring nations.” (Markham 180)
27> The housewife must be
expert and practiced in the areas pertaining to her domestic space. Through her
expert management, she can guarantee the success and stability of her house.
Not only, then, does her influence within her house determine the behavior of
those within the household – children, husband, and servants – but her
influence can also actually affect the economy of the country. Thus, in
stabilizing her local or national economy, the housewife actively encourages
the kind of self-sufficiency of which she is a symbol.
28> In addition to stabilizing
the English social system, though, the housewife also reflected the ways that
the English wanted to think about themselves and their national identity on a
more individualized level. This involved not only ideals of self-sufficiency,
but also much more exact qualities and virtues. Vives and Jocelin both reflect
the Christian nature of the English national identity, but the complications of
the situation between Vives’s original authorship and Hyrde’s translation, in
addition to the rapidly shifting landscape of English Renaissance religious
thoughts, mark the difficultly of generalizing across decades the various ways
in which the English housewife might be expected to practice religion.
Certainly, though, she was meant to align her beliefs with her husband’s and to
serve as an example to those within her household. Markham helpfully summarizes
that he wishes “English housewife [to] be a godly, constant, and religious
woman, learning from the worthy preacher, and her husband, those good examples
which she shall with all careful diligence see exercised amongst her servants”
(7). Again, her subjection to her husband creates a stability within the house,
the virtue of which is then transferred to those over whom she has control. Though
Markham was writing well after the English Reformation, there would likely be
some stability throughout the English Renaissance at least in the ideal that so
long as the housewife aligned with whatever she was told by her preacher and
her husband, she could effectively govern the beliefs of her household and
ensure that her domestic space was correctly aligned with the larger social
order. That the breakdown of stability and of religious coherence that
characterized the civil war was so often characterized in terms of unruly women
emphasizes the conceptual link between the housewife’s identity and the idea of
English stability and order.
29> The elements of the
English housewife’s identity involved a promise that the housewife could be and
inspire more than even domestic stability or social hegemony. In protecting the
housewife from foreign influences that might corrupt her nature or her
Englishness, the domestic sphere could then serve as protective space for
English national identity. Through conduct manuals, moral treatises, huswifery
books, and countless other texts, authors sought to express the central nature
of the domestic space and, at the same time, to control that space. Fears of
foreign influence in both national character and national economy were then
acted out in domestic terms, so that the English housewife was encouraged to be
ever more self-sufficient and isolated, ever more dependent on her husband, and
ever more influential in society, simultaneously. As Vives, Markham, and Jocelin’s
texts reflect, English society invested enormous amounts of energy in
attempting to create a stable, safe identity for itself by crafting a stable,
safe identity for the housewife. So long as the housewife was “of chaste
thought, stout courage, patient, untired, watchful, diligent, witty, pleasant,
constant in friendship, full of good neighborhood, wise in discourse, but not
frequent therein, sharp and quick of speech, but not bitter or talkative,
secret in her affairs, comfortable in her counsels, and generally skilful in
all the worthy knowledges which do belong to her vocation” (Markham 8), England
itself could be assured of the preservation of its domestic security.
_____
WORKS CITED
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“‘Players in your huswifery, and huswives in your beds’: Conflicting Identities
of Early Modern English Women.” Maternal
Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period. Ed. Naomi J.
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Dowd, Michelle M.
“Leaning Too Hard Upon the Pen: Suburb Wenches and City Wives in Westward Ho.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 15 (2003): 224-242.
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Christopher. "Gender Stereotyping in Early Modern Travel Writing on
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“Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth
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Christopher. “The Rhetoric of Corporeality and the Political Subject:
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Companion to English Renaissance Literature. Ed. Donna B. Hamilton. Maiden,
MA: Blackwell, 2006. 160-179.
Traub, Valerie, M.
Lindsey Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan. Feminist
Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1996.
Wall, Wendy. “Blood
in the Kitchen: Violence and Early Modern Domestic Work.” Women and Violence in the Early Modern Period: Essays in Honor of Paul
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Vives, Juan Luis. The Instruction of a Christian Woman.
Trans. Richard Hyrde. London, 1585. Early
English Books Online. Web. 3 Nov 2012.
_____
Rebecca M. Quoss-Moore received her PhD from the University of Arkansas in
2016. Her dissertation on subversive translation and transcription in the
Henrician Court prioritized examination of women’s strategies in manuscript
production. Her essay “Education and Agency in The Miseries of Mavillia”
is forthcoming in Explorations in Renaissance Culture.
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APPOSITIONS:
Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture,
http://appositions.blogspot.com/,
ISSN: 1946-1992,
Volume Nine (2016): Texts & Contexts
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