Corinne S. Abate, ed., Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early
Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), ix + 204pp, ISBN
0754630439.
Over the past two decades, complementary and largely interdisciplinary
work on material culture and gender in early modern England has resulted
in increasing interest in the domestic, interior worlds and experiences of
early modern women. Spaces such as the household, the kitchen garden,
the stillroom, and ladies’ closet have been re-examined and remembered.
Processes such as healing, cooking, distilling, spinning, and sewing have
been acknowledged as important sites for the creation of meaning. And
female-authored texts – samplers, tapestries, perfumes, receipts, sweetmeats,
and cosmetics – are shown to perform philosophical, cultural, social, and
political work. This research all points towards the fact that the private,
domestic spaces of early modern women constitute and reveal personhoods
that are at least as sophisticated and complex, as fragmentary and fissured as
those of early modern men.
The essays in Corinne S. Abate’s Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early
Modern England represent an innovative contribution to this work. The ten
essays are prefaced by a valuable introduction by Abate and Elizabeth
Mazzola. As the locus classicus for the various readings of women’s privacy
and domesticity considered in this book, Abate and Mazzola use Edgar’s
exclamation in King Lear: ‘O indistinguished space of women’s will’. For
Abate and Mazzola, the ‘indistinguished space’ of early modern women
‘describes a female world inaccessible to male reason, and not entirely
interested in it’:
… a place where the established order of things has become inconspicuous, a
place that is, as a result, unfettered by patriarchal constraints and unschooled by
its syntax. In the early modern period, this place is frequently located in domestic
settings with their own set of material practices and material goods. It includes
segregated, sometimes secluded, places for primarily female activities like nursing,
sewing, cooking, and caring for children and the sick. […] The “indistinguished
space” Edgar apprehends has its own codes and sentiments, and what Virginia
Woolf calls its own “little language unknown to men.” (p. 2)
Abate and Mazzola also use the Introduction to challenge Lawrence Stone’s
influential model of privacy as something produced in the eighteenth
century, largely as a consequence of architectural innovations, and instead
locate the development of privacy in ‘the unstructured and fluid quality’ (p.
3) of the female sphere as it was being produced throughout the early
modern period.
Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England is divided into
three parts. The first part, ‘Concealing Continents: Settings for Intimacy
and Resistance’ features explorations of the ‘physical or philosophical
settings typically assigned to women’ (p. 9), and includes essays by Lisa
Hopkins on the interiors of The Duchess of Malfi, Corinne Abate on The
Taming of the Shrew, and Katherine Pratt on Mary Wroth’s Urania. Part 2,
‘Hospitable Favors: Rituals of the Household’, focuses on daily household
activities and chores, and features Nancy A. Gutierrez on Ford’s The Broken
Heart, Theodora A. Janowski on poems by Margaret Cavendish and Andrew
Marvell, and Catherine G. Canino on The Faerie Queene. The final part,
‘Scanted Courtesies: Family Dynamics and Dispositions’ explores human
interactions and relationships in the feminised worlds of privacy and
domesticity, and includes essays by Elizabeth Mazzola on Queen Elizabeth
I’s quasi-maternal relationship with Sir Philip Sidney, Sheila T. Cavanagh on
female supernatural narratives in Urania, and Cristina León Alfar on King
Lear.
The contributors to this volume predominantly work within English
literature, and all offer satisfying and subtle readings of representations of
feminised interiors and domesticity within literary texts. This disciplinary
focus is at once the strength and, perhaps, the chief weakness of this
publication. Of all the essays, only three give consideration to writing by
early modern women; two of them consider the same writer, Mary Wroth,
who wrote in the ‘elevated’ literary genre of the prose romance. Perhaps
with the notable exception of Janowski, who considers the poetic quality of
cookery receipts, none of the essays give consideration to non-canonical
literature and texts produced by women not simply within the household,
but as a part of their household work. It is in these household texts, I think,
that we might more fully witness Edgar’s ‘indistinguished space’ and read
Virginia Woolf’s ‘little language unknown to men’ (p. 2).
Jayne Archer
University of Warwick