Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

by Abate,Corinne S.

• ISBN13: 9780754630432
• ISBN10: 0754630439
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-04-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The ten essays in this collection explore the discrete yet overlapping female spaces of privacy and domesticity in early modern England. The texts discussed in the volume include plays not only by Shakespeare but also Ford, Wroth, Marvell, Spenser and Cavendish, among others. Through the lens of literature, contributors consider the unstructured, fluid quality of everyday female experience as well as the dimensions, symbols, and the ever-changing politics and culture of the household. They analyse the complex habits of female settings the verbal, spatial, and affective strategies of early-modern women's culture, including private rituals, domestic practices, and erotic attachments in order to provide a broader picture of female culture and of female authority. The authors argue through a range of critical approaches that include feminist, historical, and psychoanalytic that early modern women often transformed their confinement into something useful and necessary, creating protected and even sacred spaces with their own symbols and aesthetic.

Table of Contents

Introduction: 'indistinguished space'

'Concealing Continents'

Settings for intimacy and resistance

With the skin side inside: the interiors of The Duchess of Malfi

Neither a tamer nor a shrew be: a defense of Petruchio and Katherine

'Wounds still curelesse': estates of loss in Mary Wroth's Urania

'Hospitable Favors'

Rituals of the Household

Trafficking in John Ford's The Broken Heart

Good enough to eat: the domestic economy of woman-woman eroticism in Margaret Cavendish and Andrew Marvell

'Thy weaker novice to perform thy will': female dominion over male identity in The Faerie Queene

'Scanted Courtesies'

Family dynamics and dispositions: 'Natural' boys and 'hard' stepmothers

Sidney and Elizabeth

Mystical sororities: the power of supernatural female narratives in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania

Looking for Goneril and Regan

Index

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