the Hus-wife hath finisht her labour: for in the weaving, walking, and dressing thereof shee can challenge no propertie more then to intreate them severallie to discharge their duties with a good conscience; that is to say that the Weaver weave it close, strong and true, that the Walker or Fuller Mill it carefullie,… and that the Clothworker or Shereman burle and dresse it sufficientlie, whereby the cloth may weare rough, nor two low least it appeare thrid bare ere it come out of the hands of the Tailor. (90)
Notwithstanding Markham’s agoraphobic injunction to abjure the “furniture of the markets,” his treatise clearly caters not only to the gentry’s growing dependence on nascent capitalist industry, but its appetite for “strangenesse and raritie” as well.
This appetite is apparent in Markham’s chapter on cookery, which displays a marked preference for small, delicate, and costly dishes. Almost all of the recipes he records require exotic, imported spices and seasonings. Indeed, the ingredients of some of the dishes seem almost to have been chosen for their expense and rarity alone, such as the “strange Sallats,” which, Markham instructs, “are both good and daintie” and serve to satisfy the “curiositie,” and for “the finer adorning of the table” (42).58 Other sallats are described as “for shewe only” (42), and are designed not to “satisfie nature” or “kill hunger,” but rather to satiate the “new appetites” for rarities he had earlier warned the housewife to shun; such dishes, we are told, are “of great request and estimation in Fraunce, Spaine, and Italy, and the most curious Nations” (43). The early modern break with medieval cookery was itself linked to the growing commercial economy and expansion of trade. With the shift from sheer quantitative display at the medieval banqueting table to the qualitative refinement of “conceited” dishes, Stephen Mennell argues, “knowledgeability and a sense of delicacy in matters of food” had come to function as markers of elite status.59 It was precisely this new emphasis on styles of cooking and serving that created a demand for domestic manuals such as Markham’s.60
Created to furnish the demand for such delicacies, The English Huswife is in a sense itself a kind of conceited dish or newfangled commodity, engendered by and for the marketplace; it teaches the housewife not only how to produce goods, but how to be a good consumer, redefining her role within a household economy that was itself being redefined by an expanding market of consumer goods. A downwardly mobile member of the nobility, Markham had himself sought unsuccessfully for much of his life to make a living off the land.61 Unable to eke out an existence through husbandry, he decided to gain extra income by writing books on the subject. His dependence on the book-trade to prop up his own domestic economy seems to have extended, however, beyond the scope of his “competency,” for it appears that he flooded the market with such books, and in 1617 was required to sign a memorandum by the Stationers, stating, “I Gervase Markham of London, gent., do promise hereafter never to write any more book or books to be printed of the diseases or cures of any cattle, as horse, ox, cow, sheep, swine, goats, etc.”62 Markham himself was thus not immune to the attractions of the marketplace. While his book yearns nostalgically for a simple past or future perfect world of land-based values, it also bears testimony to the market’s infiltration of the ideally self-sufficient domestic economy of the country estate.
In promoting itself as a newfangled commodity that no good housewife could do without, moreover, The English Huswife introduces into domestic economy the very lack or “want” it eschews. In the 1615 edition of Countrey Contentments, a volume containing The English Huswife and a companion treatise on husbandry, Markham tries to persuade his prospective readers of the necessity of purchasing his latest book, arguing that it contains
neither epitomy, relation, extraction, nor repetition either of mine owne, or any other Author whatsoever, but a plaine forme of doing things by a neerer and more easie and safer way then ever hath hitherto beene discovered, drawne from our latest experiments in true Art, and finding a neerer way to our ends by many degrees: for what before could not be done in divers yeeres, here you shall see how to effect … in few weekes. (sig. A2v)
Markham’s product clearly answered to a considerable demand for such books: Countrey Contentments went through five editions by 1633, and was included in a collection of Markham’s most popular works, brashly entitled A Way to Get Wealth. This collection also contained Markham’s purported Farewell to Husbandry, a book that itself went through some five editions. The “farewell” to books on husbandry Markham promised in 1617, it would seem, was not to be, for the market in books of husbandry, rather than husbandry itself, had become his livelihood, his “way to get wealth.”
During the long period of transition from feudal to nascent capitalist modes of production, the residual ideal of the self-sufficient housewife who produces what she consumes competed with the emergent ideal of the passive and obedient keeper who mothers the goods her husband provides. The former was frequently deployed in an effort to resolve the contradictions posed by the latter through a nostalgic return to the past. The latter presented an image of the wife as idle consumer that certainly contradicted the reality of ordinary women’s lives; yet this image exerted an influence even on ordinary women, insofar as its acceptance became for them the “price of upward social mobility.”63
III
The “marriage” of marxism and feminism has been like the marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: marxism and feminism are one, and that one is marxism.
—Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism” (1981)
My study of the housewife’s role as keeper within the context of nascent capitalism and emergent forms of commodification utilizes both materialist and feminist modes of analysis. Yet it is important to acknowledge that these two modes of analysis have not always been considered entirely compatible.64 While the reasons attested for what Heidi Hartmann famously termed the “unhappy marriage” between them are many,65 one aspect that has received insufficient scrutiny is the governing trope of the “traffic in women” that has come to stand as a kind of emblem of materialist feminist analysis.66 Materialist feminist criticism of Shakespeare is no exception; indeed, early modern England’s patrilineal property regime is often cited as a particularly egregious example of women’s status as objects, rather than subjects, of property. Significantly, Hartmann’s own explanation of the “unhappy marriage” invokes this governing trope through its reference to the English common law doctrine of coverture,67 under which a woman’s legal identity and right to own property were “veiled … clouded and overshadowed” by her husband during marriage.68 So too, Hartmann argues, has marxism “subsume[d] the feminist struggle into the ‘larger’ struggle against capital”69
While I agree wholeheartedly with Hartmann’s assertion that materialist feminist criticism must account for both “the development of western capitalist societies and the predicament of women within them,”70 I would suggest that as a crucial first step in this process, we need to subject the all-While I agree too-familiar trope of women as objects of property to historical and theoretical scrutiny. The law of coverture, an exemplary example of this trope, is perhaps a good place to begin. Coverture’s looming yet adumbrated presence within feminist discourse is problematic in that it uncritically reflects the rhetoric of the doctrine itself: that of a monolithic, all-encompassing, obscuring, legal entity. Hartmann’s evocation of the term is no exception; it conceives of the law as a totalizing, unified system that mirrors and serves to protect the interests of the dominant class—here, ironically, represented by the totalizing tendencies of marxism itself, which in Hartmann’s view leaves feminism in its shadow.71 In defense of