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Chapter 3 Judicious Oeillades: Supervising Marital Property in The MerryWives of Windsor If the housewife's role as a keeper and caretaker of household cates in The Taming of the Shrew remains in the wings, in that it is merely prepared for, in The Merry Wives of Windsor it takes center stage and is rendered fully—and quite literally—visible. Not only is the housewife's active, managerial role in domestic affairs staged as a pivotal part of the play's action, it is spoken of throughout in specificallyvisual terms. Housewifery , in The Merry Wives of Windsor, is depicted as a task requiring a particular kind of gaze, one that is both vigilant and discriminating. The threat posed by the wife's managerial control over household property is tamed in this play not by an enterprising husband, however, but by the industrious wives themselves; in so doing, they prove that they are not in need of spousal supervision. In this play,the husband's disciplinary intervention in his wife's domestic affairs is portrayed as meddling, and he is ridiculed for it. Like The Tamingof the Shrew, The Merry Wives marks a shift away from the violent forms of punishment found in medieval shrew-taming literature toward more subtle economic forms of spousal coercion. In The Merry Wives this shift is more specifically cast as a move away from the spectacle of the public shaming ritual toward a more discreet mode of domestic discipline, one that prophylactically wards off the gaze of the community through the housewife's successful self-supervision; the disciplinary gaze of husband and community are here depicted turning back upon a newly reflexive female subject. The emergence of this self-reflexive subjectivity, I shall argue, is tied to women's contrafactual ("as if") property relations under coverture, insofar as the depth and thoroughness of the wife's selfscrutiny is driven by the contradictory injunction to oversee her household stuff as if it were her own. Female self-supervision thus heralds not the advent of the individual (from the Latin in-, not + dividuus, divisible), I contend, but rather a radically divided female subjectivity whose reflexive, Marital Property in The Merry Wives of Windsor 77 self-scrutinizing gaze—however scrupulous—can never overcome the contradictions inherent in wives' contrafactual property relations. Early modern domestic manuals and marriage sermons are emphatic about the specifically visual dimension of the wife's role as keeper of household stuff, frequently employing visual metaphors to exhort the housewife to "often tymes over looke her house & householde stuffe,"1 and to "busie herselfe in viewingand surveighing such things, as she charged to be kept."2 We may recall as well that Xenophons Treatise of Householde compares the housewife's active, supervisory role to that of a military commander who must "averse the stuffe, vessell & implements of [the] house, none other wise than the captaine of a garison overseeth and proveth the soudiours."3 Yet the implementation of this supervisory role requires an interiorized "oeconomy" that centers, aswe have seen, on the housewife's memory or recollection . This interiorized oeconomy is depicted as perpetually anxious or fearful of that which is unseen and therefore, potentially lost. The importance of the housewife's scrupulous gaze in maintaining this disciplined oeconomy is depicted in Richard Hyrd's translation of Juan Luis Vives's Instruction of a Christen Woman: I wolde the wyfe shulde be ignorant of nothyng that is in her house but loke upon all thyng often tymes that she maye have them redye in memorie: leste whan she shall have nede of them either she shall nat knowe of them or els have moche trouble in sekyng of them This diligence shall encrease moche her householde store There is nothing that kepeth an house longer or better than dothe a diligent eieof the good wyfe.4 The housewife's role as keeper of household stuff crucially depends on her anxious looking "upon all thyng often tymes"; yet this supervisory role entails not only the watching of external objects, but keeping these "thyng[s]" ever in her mind ("redye in memorie"), where they are stored, ordered, and re-collected according to the rules of oeconomy. One of the more elaborate descriptions of the wife's duties as a domestic overseer, and of the dangers attendant upon her insufficient vigilance, appears in Robert Cleaver's popular treatise, A Godlie Forme of Householde Government of 1598 (later amended with John Dod): She must lay a diligent eyeto her...

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