Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (review)

"She is indeed—my Melusine—just such a combination of the orderly and humane with the unnatural and the Wild—as you suggest—the hearth-foundress and the destroying Demon." So writes the fictional Victorian poet Christabel LaMotte in A. S. Byatt's novel Possession . ¹ LaMotte is talking about the protagonist of her fairy epic Melusine , but she might as well be describing the early modern housewife as she figures in Wendy Wall's new book, Staging Domesticity . Wall's argument "rests," she tells us, "on a simple observation. In the early modern period, domestic labor was represented in two importantly different ways . . . as a reassuringly 'common' sphere in which people immersed themselves in familiar rhythms, and as a profoundly alienating site that could never be fully inhabited or comprehended" (5). Reading plays from the 1550s to the 1630s in relation to early modern English household guides and cookbooks, Wall presents the home as at once familiar and strange, both an orderly and humane model for patriarchal politics and a place no less unnatural and wild than LaMotte's fish-tailed fairy lover. That the same heimlich —homely and uncanny—doubleness should be projected onto (or found in) the Victorian and the Elizabethan pasts at about the same time by both novelist and literary critic suggests that both are participating in a more general phenomenon, a reinterpretation of the feminine and domestic as dangerously familiar.

That last phrase may remind readers that this topic has not been neglected in early modern English drama studies. Frances E. Dolan started the discussion in 1994 with her Dangerous Familiars , and others—Lena Cowen Orlin, Viviana Comensoli, Frank Whigham, Catherine Belsey, and the present reviewer among them—have joined in. ² What distinguishes Wall's book is its focus on the seemingly most ordinary features of household work: wet-nursing, housecleaning, laundry work, milking, cheese and butter making, butchery, cooking, and domestic medical care. In these everyday practices and their representation Wall finds a basis for the emerging national self-consciousness that others have discussed in quite different terms. Early modern Englishness derived, she contends, as much from the nation's kitchens as from its royal court, as much from housewives and other domestic workers as from the queen. In itself, this welcome corrective to the more usual understanding should not be all that surprising. Englishness, like most national identities, has always been strongly flavored with homeyness. But Wall does a wonderful job of giving substance to that sometimes neglected commonplace, and the topics she emphasizes are full of surprises. Domestic practices involving milk and blood, home remedies and brooms, needles and birches, urine, umbilical cords, and skulls are intriguing by their very strangeness, by an unfamiliarity that can seem anything but homey. Yet at one time, Wall brilliantly demonstrates, these odd practices not only were familiar but undergirded, in part through their very familiarity, a newly insistent national identity played out again and again in England's theaters.

Following an overview of her topic and an opening chapter surveying sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cookbooks and domestic manuals, Wall turns her attention to the English vernacular and its association with the home, particularly with the domestic servants who were often a child's first teachers of English. "The 'mother tongue' could," she remarks, "be . . . attached to both a reassuringly original and 'natural' femininity and an anxiety-producing lower-class domain" (74). The antidote to this homely, potentially degrading vernacular was the Latin taught in all-male schools and colleges. Wall traces the rivalry between the two registers first in an English comedy written for a Cambridge University audience, Gammer Gurton's Needle , in which farcical household behavior radically troubles sex and gender identifications, and then in two later public-theater plays, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and The Merry Wives of Windsor...