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In Staging Domesticity, Wendy Wall richly complicates our thinking about early modern domesticity, including the everyday tasks of food preparation, laundering, and pot scrubbing, as delineated in domestic manuals as the art and practice of effective "huswifery." She argues that these seemingly mundane activities shaped evolving ideas of English nationhood, identity, gender, and the playhouse.1 Robert Cleaver, commenting on English domesticity and echoing many of his contemporaries, argues that the husband yields authority to his wife over "those things that belong unto the kitchen, and to huswiferie, and to their household stuffe."2 Falling under the aegis of "household stuff," Wall observes, is "physicke," or medical care, which was among the English housewife's most significant duties. The Galenic body was governed by humours that were constantly in flux, thus leading professional doctors and housewives to treat early modern bodies as systems needing incessant care and maintenance. Wall states that "the early modern body was in constant need of evacuations: enemas, laxatives, and emetics for the lower body stratum; herbs, changes in thermal conditions, and air for upper body 'purges' (vomiting, coughing, burping); blood-letting, exercise, and orgasm for all around purification."3 In his poem A New Anatomie (1605), Robert Underwood compares this open Galenic body to a "mooveable" house, whose "kitchen" is both the repository and principal site of purgation:
And first, the Kitchen seated was,
as nethermost of all,
Whereby it might receive such things,
as from above did fall:
By Vessels, fitting for the same
which long there, did not stay.
The image of the kitchen thus functions simultaneously as stomach, bowels, and anus, which "did convay / By Gutters, Holes, and Channels so" to render the body and the domestic space "hansome, sweete, and cleene."4 Wall's analysis of early modern domestic manuals reveals that purgation of the nation's "kitchen," the unstable early modern body, was a source of national obsession.
We might profitably interrogate this obsession by turning to Shakespeare's Macbeth, a king whose own unstable body-beheaded and obfuscated at the end of the play-functions as a synecdoche for the filth-ridden "kitchen" of the Scottish body politic.5 Although the word "purge" (or variations) occurs only four times in the text (III.iv.77; V.ii.28; V.iii.54 and 57), its conceptual presence...