Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting (review)

Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting. By Richard Helgerson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 238 pp.

With this fine new study, his first since the groundbreaking Forms of Nationhood, Richard Helgerson turns his attention to the representation of domestic spaces and their vexed relationship to the discourse of history in early modern Europe. ¹ While broader in scope than the earlier study, Adulterous Alliances makes a similarly bold intellectual move, revealing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cultural formations generally associated with a much later period. Whereas Forms of Nationhood argued that the writing of England in the late sixteenth century served as an early articulation of the nation, Adulterous Alliances demonstrates that the nineteenth- and twentieth-century cult of domesticity and the realistic representation of the home in literature and art both have their prehistory in texts that far predate the inception of realism as typically understood.

Helgerson ranges from English and Spanish plays at the turn of the seventeenth century, to genre painting in the Dutch Republic, to reworkings of domestic drama in the Enlightenment. His incisive readings link these disparate texts and genres by showing how they all force us to take the home seriously, evoking identification rather than laughter. Adulterous Alliances finds realism where critics have been accustomed to seeing only comedic or burlesque representations of domestic space. This insight is in itself significant, for it opens new avenues for the exploration of less canonical texts within the traditions Helgerson considers. Thus the study continues the work of such recent collections as Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, in which one of the chapters first appeared. ² But Helgerson goes further: what characterizes these instances of early modern realism, he claims, is the violent irruption into the domestic space of the newly unified monarchical state, usually represented by a figure of sexual predation. Realism is therefore as much an ideological as an aesthetic development, intimately connected to early modern state formation even as it attempts to carve out for itself a different political and artistic space.

Helgerson adroitly traces the interconnection of the domestic and the historical. He shows, for example, how the figure of Jane Shore, the London wife seduced by Edward IV, enters a series of historical and literary traditions despite the humanist historiographical prejudice against the representation of lowly subjects. By evoking unprecedented sympathy for a middle-class woman, the multiple early modern versions of her story define an exogamous alternative to historical tragedy that crosses forbidden lines of status rather than of consanguinity. The difference between the private and the public realms is undercut even as historiography attempts to exclude the personal from national histories.

Adulterous Alliances repositions Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor as a struggle between the court and the "local-cum-domestic" (62). Helgerson reads the wives' vengeance on their would-be courtly seducer, Falstaff, as an intersection of literary and material references. The wives' stratagems for hiding the rebuffed Falstaff invoke and invert the traditions of fabliau and novella. Their buck basket conceals not an ardent lover but a ridiculous suitor abundantly punished by his immersion in bourgeois dirty linen and a muddy ditch. Helgerson's reading of the second device is more forced: the disguising of Falstaff as Mother Prat, the Witch of Brainford, he claims, evokes the world of witchcraft as a challenge to state power. Yet within the context of threatened adultery, the main target seems to be domestic patriarchy. Mother Prat recalls the Continental tradition of the bawd or Celestina as much as the English fear of witchcraft. Helgerson attributes to the wives a great deal of agency and independence that, he notes, they use mainly to protect their chastity, yet they remain subordinate to the queen, whose stage representative takes over the rebuke of the courtier at the end of the play.

Dutch genre...