It is in this context that Veblen’s assertion that the housewife’s “manipulation of the household paraphernalia” renders her no less a commodity, or “chattel,” of her husband becomes problematic. For the housewife’s consumption of cates, which Veblen views as thoroughly domesticated, was in the early modern period thought to be something wild, unruly, and in urgent need of taming. If The Shrew’s taming narrative positions Kate as a “vicarious consumer” to ensure that her consumption and manipulation of household cates conforms to her husband’s economic interests, it nevertheless points to a historical moment when the housewife’s management of household property was viewed as potentially threatening to the symbolic order of things. Before attending to the ways in which the shrew-taming comedy seeks to elide this threat, we should therefore take the threat itself seriously. Only then will we be able to chart with any clarity Kate’s passage from “chat” (i.e., the material and linguistic forms of excess characteristic of the shrew) to “chattel.”
IV
At the start of the play, as Newman asserts, Kate’s fretting is represented as an obstacle to her successful commodification on the marriage market. When Baptista finally arranges Kate’s match to the madcap Petruchio, Tranio remarks: “’Twas a commodity lay fretting by you, / ’Twill bring you gain, or perish on the seas” (2. 1. 321–32). Baptista’s response, “The gain I seek is quiet in the match” (2. 1. 323), underscores the economic dilemma posed by Kate’s speech: her linguistic surplus translates into his financial lack and, consequently, her “quiet” into his “gain.” Yet Kate’s fretting refers not only to what comes out of her mouth (to her excessive verbal fretting), but to what goes into it as well (to her excessive consumption). The verb to fret, which derives from the same root as the modern German fressen, means “to eat, devour [of animals];… to gnaw, to consume,… or wear away by gnawing” or, reflexively, “to waste or wear away; to decay” (OED). Kate’s untamed, animal-like consumption, Tranio’s remark implies, wears away at both her father’s resources and at her own value as well. In describing Kate as a “fretting commodity,” as a commodity that itself consumes (and consumes itself, its own value), Tranio emphasizes the tension between Kate’s position as a cate, an object of exchange between men, and her role as a consumer of cates.
To grasp the threat posed by the early modern housewife’s consumption of cates, as this threat is embodied by the figure of “Kate,” however, we must first consider more closely what Baudrillard terms the “relative social class configurations” at work within the play. For the discourse of objects in The Taming of the Shrew becomes intelligible only if read in the context of its “class grammar”—that is to say, as it is “inflected” by the contradictions inherent in its appropriation by a particular social class or group.34 In general terms, The Taming of the Shrew represents an embourgeoisement of the traditional shrew-taming narrative: Petruchio is not a humble tradesman, but an upwardly mobile landowner. Unlike the cooper’s wife, Kate is not of “gentle kin”; she is a wealthy merchant’s daughter. The play casts the marriage of Petruchio and Kate as an alliance between the gentry and mercantile classes, and thus between land and money, status and wealth, or what Pierre Bourdieu terms symbolic and economic capital.
Petruchio is quite straightforward about his mercenary motives for marrying Kate: “Left solely heir to all his [father’s] land and goods,” which he boastfully claims to “have better’d rather than decreas’d” (2. 1. 117–18), Petruchio ventures into the “maze” of mercantile Padua hoping to “wive it wealthily … / If wealthily, then happily in Padua” (1. 2. 74–75). Likening his mission to a merchant voyage, he claims to have been blown in by “such wind as scatters young men through the world / To seek their fortunes farther than at home” (1. 2. 49–50). Petruchio’s fortune-hunting bombast, together with his claim to have “better’d rather than decreas’d” his inheritance, marks him as one of the new gentry, who continually sought to improve their estates through commerce, through forays into business or overseas trade, and by contracting wealthy marriages.35 If Petruchio seeks to obtain from his marriage to Baptista’s mercantile household what is lacking in his own domestic economy, however, the same can be said of Baptista, who seeks to marry off his daughter to a member of the landed gentry. The nuptial bond between the two families holds forth the promise of a mutually beneficial, chiastic exchange of values for the domestic economies of each: Petruchio hopes to obtain surplus capital (a dowry of “twenty thousand crowns”), and Baptista the status or symbolic capital that comes with land (the jointure of “all [his] lands and leases” [2. 1. 125] Petruchio promises in return).36
Kate’s commodification as a cate on the marriage-market thus proves to be mutually beneficial to both her father’s and her future husband’s households. It is conversely the case, however, that her consumption of cates is represented, at least initially, as mutually detrimental. At the start of the play, as we have seen, Kate’s excessive consumption or fretting renders her an unvendible commodity. Baptista is unable to “rid the house” (1.1.145) of Kate, and is consequently unwilling to wed his younger daughter, Bianca, to any of her many suitors. Kate’s fretting represents perhaps an even greater threat to Petruchio’s household, however, although one of a different order. To comprehend this difference, one must comprehend the place occupied by cates within the two domestic economies. Petruchio’s parsimonious attitude toward cates, as evidenced by the disrepair of his country house and the “ragged, old and beggarly” (4. 1. 124) condition of his servants, stands in stark contrast to the conspicuous consumption that characterizes Padua’s mercantile class. Gremio, a wealthy Paduan merchant and suitor to Bianca, for example, describes his “house within the city,” as “richly furnished with plate and gold” (2.1. 339–40):
My hangings all of Tyrian tapestry.
In ivory coffers I have stuff’d my crowns,
In cypress chests my arras counterpoints,
Costly apparel, tents, and canopies,
Fine linen, Turkey cushions boss’d with pearl,
Valance of Venice gold in needlework,
Pewter and brass, and all things that belong
To house or housekeeping. (2.1. 342–49)
If housekeeping at Petruchio’s country estate involves little more than keeping the “rushes strewed” and the “cobwebs swept” (4.1. 41), in Gremio’s city dwelling it is an enterprise that centers on the elaborate arrangement and display of cates. Each of Gremio’s “things” bears testimony to his ability to afford superfluous expenditure and to his taste for imported luxuries: his tapestries are from Tyre (famous for its scarlet and purple dyes), his apparel is “costly,” his linen “fine,” his “Turkey cushions boss’d with pearl.” His household is replete with status objects, literally “stuff d” with precisely the kind of cates described by William Harrison in the previous chapter (“great provision of tapestry, Turky work, pewter, brasse, fine linen, and thereto costly cupboards of plate,” etc.).
The stark contrast between the two men’s respective notions of the “things that belong to house [and] housekeeping” underscores the differing attitudes held by the minor gentry and mercantile classes in the period toward “household cates.” For the mercantile classes, conspicuous consumption served to compensate for what we might call, borrowing Baudrillard’s terminology, a “true social recognition” that evaded them; the accumulation of status objects served to supplement their “thwarted legitimacy” in the social domain.37 For the upwardly mobile gentry, however, as Lawrence