Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama

Wendy Wall. Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modem Drama. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv + 292.

It's not often that the academic reader is tempted to call up friends and read them passages from a scholarly work over the phone; but then, how often do we run across a passage like this one?-"Remedies that were not necessarily painful may simply have been perceived as uncomfortable. People were urged to drink concoctions made of rancid milk left to steep for weeks, place fresh warm dog excrement against sore throats, bind dead pigeons to the soles of their feet, and sip broths composed of animal flesh that had been buried for days, exhumed, and ground into cullises or jellies" (171). In revivifying the everyday labor of early modern English housewives to keep their charges fed, healthy, and well-behaved, Wendy Wall's finely-wrought sentences coordinate the delights of a grade-school gross-out to those of a handsome analytic style, demonstrating in themselves how the "household stuff" of early modern domesticity can be at once familiarly comfortable and exhiliratingly, luridly strange.

But comfortable to whom, and strange to whom? It's Wall's thesis that the historical alienation that provokes the fascinated discomfort of twenty-first century readers encountering this material was to some degree paralleled by a contemporary, psychological alienation experienced by men attempting to think about female labor in their own homes, and perhaps at moments by housewives themselves. The book's conceptual apparatus, as Wall delineates it in her introduction, is an assimilative one, in which an insistence on the remoteness of historical detail can give rise to vivid psychoanaly-tic readings (rather than precluding such insight by defining historical distance and difference); and Wall's rhetorical method pushes her readers to inhabit the conditions of early modern female labor as our own "fantasy," most vividly in the passage introducing the argument of her first chapter, which tells a typical day in the life of a London housewife in the second person, present tense-a surprising and effective interpolation.

"Fantasy" is the category through which Wall coordinates literary readings to historicized context and thus to a larger cultural imaginary from which "English identity," a fantasy position, can be generated. Her first focus is on sixteenth-century housekeeping...