The ambiguity of the term keep worked to mask the ideological tensions and contradictions inherent in the wife’s role as “keeper”; for the word could “stretch” (to borrow Swinburne’s term) to signify either activity or passivity, labor or leisure, production or consumption, possession or mere custody. These conflicting significations could be marshaled in the service of residual, dominant, and emergent ideologies that were competing to make sense of changes brought about by the nascent market economy and to position household subjects (differentially) in relation to it.54 The task of unraveling these contradictions is crucial, however, if we are to understand their shaping influence on female subjectivity. In the remainder of this chapter, I will attempt to unravel what I consider to be the three main contradictions that the trope of the wife as keeper presents in the following ways: (1) the contradictions posed by keeping as both active and passive, labor and leisure, production and consumption, will be examined within the broad context of the transition from feudal to nascent capitalist modes of production, with particular attention to changes in both the material form and the ideological function of housework; (2) the contradiction of keeping as custodianship versus possession will be examined in relation to women’s formal and informal (de jure and de facto) property relations; and (3) the contradictions of keeping as at once supervising, being supervised, and self-supervision will be situated in relation to the disciplinary apparatuses through which female subjectivity was constituted, including both state apparatuses (political, legal, religious, etc.) and more subtle or coercive modes of discipline, including self-discipline.
II
[T]he Hus-wife hath finisht her labour …
—Gervase Markham, The English Huswife (1615)
The ideological redefinition of the home as a sphere of consumption rather than production, and of the husband and housewife as getter and keeper respectively, clearly did not correspond to the lived reality of every English housewife; most women continued to work productively, both within and outside the home, throughout the early modern period. Housework did not simply disappear with the rise of capitalism; rather, it was devalued in ways and for reasons that I shall discuss in the following chapter. Nevertheless, it is important to stress that both the material form and cultural function of housework were profoundly transformed with the development of the commodity form. This process of transformation, and the contradictions to which it gave rise, may be glimpsed in Gervase Markham’s The English Huswife (1615),55 which seeks to offer a comprehensive account of the material practices of huswifery.
Markham’s treatise is of interest in that, unlike the treatises discussed in the previous section, it is more concerned with the housewife’s practical than with her theoretical role. Addressed to the “gentle and general reader,” it is designed to instruct wives of the country gentry, yeomanry, and perhaps of agricultural wage-earners,56 in all “the inward and outward vertues which ought to be in a compleate Woman: as her Physicke, Cookery, Banqueting-stuffe, Distillation, Perfumes, Wooll, Hemp, Flax, Dairies, Brewing, Baking, and all other things belonging to an Houshold.” Its focus, it would seem, is thus on production, rather than consumption.
Yet the first chapter of Markham’s treatise, which aims to describe the housewife’s character or subjectivity (“the inward and outward vertues which ought to be in a compleate Woman”), introduces the term “consumption,” if only as something to be shunned. The housewife’s corpus of domestic skills is organized around the chief virtue of temperance, which is defined first “inwardly,” covering “her behaviour and cariage towards her Husband,” and then “outwardly,” charting “her apparrell and dyet” (3). The inwardly temperate wife, we are told, is able to govern her own temper, shunning “all violence of rage, passion and humour,” and “appearing … pleasant, amiable and delightfull” to her husband, even in the face of his own “misgovernment” (3). If his bad behavior induces her “to contrarie thoughts,” she is instructed “vertuously to suppresse them” (3). Opposed to this image of contained choler is the figure of the intemperate wife or shrew, who gives in to the temptation to express her violent, “contrarie” thoughts in words. The shrew’s “evill and uncomely language,” Markham warns, is “deformed though uttered even to servants, but most monstrous and ugly when it appeares before the presence of a husband” (3). The housewife’s inward temperance would thus appear to be primarily a matter of outward show.
If the good housewife’s inward temperance concerns what comes out of her mouth, her outward temperance centers on what goes into it—on what and how she consumes. She is instructed to “proportion” her “apparrell and dyet … according to the competency of her husbands estate and calling, making her circle rather straight then large, for it is a rule if we extend to the uttermost we take awaie increase, if we goe a hayre breadth beyond we enter into consumption” (3). The intemperate housewife’s “consumption” is here implicitly linked, through the figure of the enlarged circle, at once to the shrew’s big mouth, to the wantonness or “want” of female sexuality (“circle” being a cant term for the female genitals), and to the threat of an unbridled, unproductive expenditure that is cast at once in sexual and economic terms. Her domestic “circle” likewise evokes her role as keeper; it functions as a container or vessel which saves, preserves, and nourishes whatever her husband puts into it. The prodigal wife who spends beyond her husband’s means, whose “circle” is enlarged beyond the scope of his “competency,” usurps his position as phallic extender/expender within the gendered economy of the household. Female “consumption,” like female sexual incontinence, threatens the integrity of the home. The intemperate wife’s “lavish prodigality” is excoriated as “brutish,” and her “miserable covetousnes” as “hellish” (3).
Markham casts the shrew’s appetite for strange and rare commodities as an insatiable, denaturing craving that threatens to spoil her “natural” inclination for familiar and familial, home-grown goods. To counter this craving, Markham exhorts the housewife to dress “altogether without toiish garnishes” and “farre from the vanity of new and fantastique fashions” and to temper her appetite for costly, edible “garnishes” (3):
let her dyet … be rather to satisfie nature than our affections, and apter to kill hunger than revive new appetites, let it proceede more from the provision of her owne yarde, then the furniture of the markets; and let it be rather esteemed for the familiar acquaintance shee hath with it, then for the strangenesse and raritie it bringeth from other Countries. (4)
Markham exhorts the housewife to make do with the “provision of her own yard,” to feed only wholesome, natural appetites that are produced by, and therefore satiable within, the domestic economy of the household. The market commodity is figured as that which introduces lack into domestic economy; its consumption produces not satiety, but only renewed want—making a famine where abundance lies. Markham’s ideal, domestic economy is portrayed as a closed circle that knows no lack because its bounds extend no farther than what is produced within the home; the “strangenesse and raritie” of market goods, and especially those brought “from other Countries,” open the housewife’s circle, inciting “new appetites” that extend beyond the bounds of the domestic sphere and her husband’s sexual and economic “competency.”
This portrait of a totally self-sufficient household economy is curiously contradicted, however, by the practical advice Markham gives in his own manual.57 In the chapter on weaving, for example, we find that the housewife’s skill is put to use not as a producer, but rather as a consumer of goods:
Now as touching the warping of cloth, which is both the skill and action of the Weaver, yet must not our English Housewife be ignorant therein, but though the doing of the thing be not proper unto her, yet what is done must not be beyond her knowledge, both to bridle the falshood of unconscionable workemen, and for her owne satisfaction when shee is rid of the doubt