Shakespeare's Domestic Economies. Natasha Korda
activity, had begun to move outside the home to the market, becoming the province of “skilled” (male) professionals.7 Washing and spinning, while still considered “womens work,” were becoming unsuitable activities for middling-sort housewives, and were increasingly being performed by servants, paid laundresses, or spinsters.8 The housewife’s duties were thus gradually moving away from the production of use-values within and for the home and toward the consumption of market goods or “cates,” commodities produced outside the home. The available range of commodities, as discussed in the previous chapters, was also greatly increased in the period, so that goods once considered luxuries, available only to the wealthiest elites, were now being found in households at every level of society.9 The Taming of the Shrew may be said both to reflect and to participate in this cultural shift by portraying Kate not as a reluctant producer, but rather as an avid and sophisticated consumer of market goods. When she is shown shopping in 4. 3 (a scene I will discuss at greater length below), she displays both her knowledge of and preference for the latest fashions in apparel. Petruchio’s taming strategy is accordingly aimed not at his wife’s productive capacity—not once does he ask Kate to brew, bake, wash, card, or spin—but at her consumption. He seeks to educate Kate in her new role as a consumer of “household cates.”
While the ideological redefinition of the home as a sphere of consumption rather than production in sixteenth-century England did not, of course, correspond to the lived reality of every English housewife in the period, the acceptance of this ideology, as Susan Cahn points out, became the “price of upward social mobility” in the period and, as such, exerted a powerful influence on all social classes.10 The early modern period marked a crucial change in the cultural valuation of housework, a change that is historically linked—as the body of feminist-materialist scholarship that Christine Delphy has termed “housework theory”11 reminds us—to the rise of capitalism and development of the commodity form.12 According to housework theory, domestic work under capitalism is not considered “real” work because “women’s productive labor is confined to use-values while men produce for exchange.”13 It is not that housework disappears with the rise of capitalism; rather, it becomes economically devalued. Because the housewife’s labor has no exchange-value, it remains unremunerated and thus, economically, “invisible.”14 Read within this paradigm, The Taming of the Shrew would seem to participate in the ideological erasure of housework by not representing it on the stage, by rendering it, quite literally, invisible. The weakness of this account of the play, however, is that, while it explains what Kate does not do onstage, it can provide no explanation for what she actually does.
In continuing to define the housewife’s domestic activity solely within a matrix of use-value production, housework theory—in spite of its claim to offer an historicized account of women’s subjection under capitalism—treats housework as if it were itself, materially speaking, an unchanging, transhistorical entity, which is not, as we have seen, the historical case. For while the market commodity’s infiltration of the home did not suddenly and magically absolve the housewife of the duty of housework, it did profoundly alter both the material form and the cultural function of such work, insofar as it became an activity increasingly centered around the proper order, maintenance, and display of household cates—objects having, by definition, little or no use-value.
Privileging delicacy of form over domestic function, cates threaten to sever completely the bond linking exchange-value to any utilitarian end; they are commodities that unabashedly assert their own superfluousness. It is not simply that cates, as objects of exchange, are to be “distinguished from” objects of home production, however, as the OED asserts. Rather, their very purpose is to signify this distinction, to signify their own distance from utility and economic necessity. What replaces the utilitarian value of cates is a symbolic or cultural value: cates are, above all, signifiers of social distinction or differentiation.15 Housework theory cannot explain The Shrews departure from the traditional shrew-taming narrative, because it can find no place in its strictly economic analysis for the housewife’s role within a symbolic economy based on the circulation, accumulation, and display of status objects, or what Pierre Bourdieu terms “symbolic” (as distinct from “economic”) capital.16 In the previous chapter, I examined some of the ways in which the presence of status objects, or cates, within the non-aristocratic household transformed, both materially and ideologically, the “domesticall duties” of the housewife. In this chapter, I shall argue that it is precisely the cultural anxiety surrounding the housewife’s new role as a keeper of household cates that prompted Shakespeare to write a new kind of shrew-taming narrative.
II
To provide a theoretical framework within which to analyze Shakespeare’s rewriting of the shrew-taming tradition, we will need to turn from housework theory, to the theorization of domestic leisure and consumption, beginning with Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. Like the housework theorists, Veblen maintains that the housewife’s transformation from “the drudge and chattel of the man (both in fact and in theory),—the producer of goods for him to consume”—into “the ceremonial consumer of goods which he produces,” leaves her no less his drudge and chattel (if only “in theory”) than her predecessor.17 For Veblen, however, the housewife’s new form of drudgery is defined not by her unremunerated (and thus economically invisible) productivity, but rather by her subsidized (and culturally conspicuous) nonproductivity itself. The housewife’s obligatory “performance of leisure,” Veblen maintains, is itself a form of labor or drudgery: “the leisure of the lady … is an occupation of an ostensibly laborious kind … it is leisure only in the sense that little or no productive work is performed.”18 Just as the housewife’s leisure renders her no less a drudge of the man, according to Veblen, her consumption of commodities likewise renders her no less his commodity, or chattel, insofar as she consumes for her husband’s benefit and not her own.19 “A wife how gallant soever she be,” a contemporary legal theorist similarly maintained, “glistereth but in the riches of her husband, as the Moone hath no light, but it is the Sunnes.”20 The housewife’s “vicarious consumption” positions her as a status-object, the value of which derives precisely from its lack of utility: “She is useless and expensive,” as Veblen puts it, “and she is consequently valuable.”21
When it comes to describing what constitutes the housewife’s nonproductive activity, however, Veblen is rather vague, remarking only in passing that it centers on “the maintenance and elaboration of the household paraphernalia.”22 Jean Baudrillard offers a somewhat more elaborated account in his Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, a text strongly influenced by Veblen. With the advent of consumer culture, he asserts, “the cultural status of the [household] object enters into direct contradiction with its practical status,” and “housekeeping has only secondarily a practical objective (keeping objects ready for use)”; rather, “it is a manipulation of another order—symbolic—that sometimes totally eclipses practical use.”23 Like Veblen, Baudrillard views the housewife’s conspicuous leisure and consumption as themselves laborious, though for the latter this new form of “housework” is more specifically described as the locus of a “symbolic labor,” defined as the “active manipulation of signs” or status objects.24 The value of the housewife’s “manipulation” of the “cultural status of the object,” Baudrillard maintains, emerges not from an “economic calculus,” but from a “symbolic and statutory calculus” dictated by “relative social class configurations.”25 For both Veblen and Baudrillard, then, the housewife plays a crucial role in the production of cultural value in a consumer society.
It is in the early modern period that the housewife first assumes this new role within what I shall term the symbolic order of things.26 The figure of “Kate” represents a threat to this order, a threat that Petruchio seeks to tame by educating her in her role as a manipulator of status objects. To say that Kate poses a threat to the symbolic order of things, however, is to signal yet another departure from the traditional shrew-taming narrative, in which the shrew is characteristically represented as a threat to the symbolic order of language. This linguistic threat is not absent