Shakespeare and The Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (review)

Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture. By Catherine Belsey. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and London: Macmillan, 1999. Pp. xviii + 203. Illus. $26.00 cloth.

Catherine Belsey's new book might be read as a sequel to Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (1994), where she pursued the elusive logic of desire in a variety of texts ranging from medieval chivalric romance to contemporary psychoanalytic theory and popular fiction. Moving from love stories to stories about marriage and family relationships, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden continues Belsey's Lacanian exploration of the problematics of desire and signification, now focusing her historical sights on Shakespeare's England and the conflicted origins of modern family values. Here, as in the earlier book, Belsey's interest in her subject is more than academic. As she writes in the preface to Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden, "The proposition that family values emerged at a specific moment in the history of Western culture represents a refusal to accept the inevitability of certain norms" (xiv):

We are the direct heirs of the early modern construction of family values, incited by politicians and moralists to believe, in the teeth of considerable counter-evidence, that the family will make us whole, both as individuals and as a society. But at the same time we are also . . . acknowledging the limitations of the proposition that there is only one proper way to arrange our sexual relations, and in the process of learning from the statistics how commonly unhappiness can follow from the obligation of loyalty to those who have the greatest opportunities for brutality towards each other.(xiii-xiv)

In Belsey's analysis sixteenth- and seventeenth-century visual representations of the Eden myth, with their emphasis on the Fall and on images of death and violence, reveal the unease that shadowed the construction of the ideal and idealized image of a loving marital union as a kind of earthly paradise. The baffling proclivity of Shakespearean husbands such as Othello, Leontes, and Posthumus to succumb to unjustified jealousy "might leave seventeenth-century audiences less mystified than we are," she suggests, because, although sermons and didactic literature celebrated matrimony and compared it to life in the Garden of Eden, contemporary household objects that depict Adam and Eve implicitly signal "a precariousness" and "instability" in early modern understandings of marriage (59). She cites a marriage chest, the carvings and embroidered decorations on beds, and an earthenware dish probably designed as a wedding gift, all depicting Adam and Eve with images of the Fall, to argue that "the early modern account of the conjugal relation in the culture at large is less naive, less utopian, than the official position might lead us to suppose" (61). Perhaps, she speculates, in a world where domestic living arrangements were less private than our own, and the institution of marriage was not yet "fully sanctified," the jealousy and violence that are now concealed "behind respectable closed doors" were more visible than they have subsequently become (107).

As a study of early modern concepts of marital and family relationships, the book makes a substantial contribution to cultural history, but it does much more than that. The opening chapter deserves to be widely read in graduate seminars, because although the practice of cultural history has become a familiar exercise, Belsey's exposition of its theoretical basis is truly exemplary. Along with an explanation of her own methodology as "history at the level of the signifier" (5), the chapter includes thoughtful critiques of a number of contemporary historical projects, ranging from the "living history" offered at such sites as Colonial Williamsburg and the reconstructed Globe to social history and new historicism, as well as a general critique of historiographic practices that attempt to "translate . . . the past into the present" (4), erasing the act of history-making and eliding the...