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ОглавлениеChapter 2
Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew
Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew has frequently noted that the play’s novel taming strategy marks a departure from traditional shrew-taming tales. Unlike his predecessors, Petruchio does not use force to tame Kate; he does not simply beat his wife into submission.1 Little attention has been paid, however, to the historical implications of the play’s unorthodox methodology, which is conceived in specifically economic terms: “I am he am born to tame you, Kate,” Petruchio summarily declares, “And bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate / Conformable as other household Kates” (2.1. 269–71). Petruchio likens Kate’s planned domestication to a domestication of the emergent commodity form itself, whose name within the play is identical to the naming of the shrew. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, cates are “provisions or victuals bought (as distinguished from, and usually more delicate or dainty than, those of home production).” The term is an aphetic form of acate, which derives from the Old French achat, meaning “purchase.” Cates are thus by definition exchange-values—commodities properly speaking—as opposed to mere use-values, or objects of home production.2
In order to grasp the historical implications of The Shrew’s unorthodox methodology, and of the economic terms Shakespeare employs to shape its novel taming strategy, we must first situate more precisely the form of its departure from previous shrew-taming tales. For what differentiates The Taming of the Shrew from its precursors is not so much a concern with domestic economy—which has always been a central preoccupation of shrew-taming literature—but rather a shift in modes of production and thus in the very terms through which domestic economy is conceived. The coordinates of this shift are contained within the term cates itself, which, in distinguishing goods that are purchased from those that are produced within and for the home, may be said to map the historical shift from domestic use-value production to production for the market.
I
Prior to Shakespeare’s play, shrews were typically portrayed as reluctant producers within the household economy, high-born wives who refused to engage in the forms of domestic labor expected of them by their humble, tradesmen husbands. In the ballad “The Wife Wrapped in a Wether’s Skin,” for example, the shrew refuses to brew, bake, wash, card, or spin on account of her “gentle kin” and delicate complexion:
There was a wee cooper who lived in Fife,
Nickety, nackity, noo, noo, noo
And he has gotten a gentle wife …
Alane, quo Rushety, roue, roue, roue
She wadna bake, nor she wadna brew,
For the spoiling o her comely hue.
She wadna card, nor she wadna spin,
For the shaming o her gentle kin.
She wadna wash, nor she wadna wring,
For the spoiling o her gouden ring.3
The object of the tale was simply to put the shrew to work, to restore her (frequently through some gruesome form of punishment)4 to her proper, productive place within the household economy. When the cooper from Fife, who cannot beat his ungentle wife on account of her gentle kin, cleverly wraps her in a wether’s skin and tames her by beating the hide instead, the shrew promises: “Oh, I will bake, and I will brew, / And never mair think on my comely hue. / Oh, I will card, and I will, spin, / And never mair think on my gentle kin.”5 Within the tradition of shrew-taming literature prior to Shakespeare’s play, the housewife’s domestic responsibilities are broadly defined by a feudal economy based on household production, on the production of use-values for domestic consumption.6
As we have seen in the previous chapter, however, with the decline of the family as an economic unit of production the role of the housewife was beginning to shift in late sixteenth-century England from that of skilled producer to savvy consumer. Household production was gradually being replaced by nascent capitalist industries, making it more economical for the housewife to purchase what she had once produced. Brewing and baking, for example, once a routine part of the housewife’s 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 from Shakespeare’s version of the narrative and has received substantial critical commentary. I will now briefly consider two compelling accounts of the shrew’s linguistic excess, in order to relate it to the material excess represented by Kate’s consumption of cates.
In Shakespeare’s rendering of the traditional topos, Joel Fineman points out, the shrew’s linguistic excess becomes a threat not of too many words, but rather of too much meaning. Kate’s speech underscores the way in which language always “carries with it a kind of surplus semiotic baggage, an excess of significance, whose looming, even if unspoken, presence cannot be kept quiet.”27 The semantic superfluity of Kate’s speech, Fineman argues, leads to a series of “fretful verbal confusions” in which the “rhetoricity of language, is made to seem the explanation of [her] ongoing quarrel with the men who are her master.”28 The example he cites is Kate’s unhappy lute lesson, recounted by her hapless music master, Hortensio:
Baptista: Why then, thou canst not break her to the lute?
Hortensio: Why no, for she hath broke the lute to me.
I did but tell her she mistook her frets,…
“Frets, call you these?” quoth she, “I’ll fume with them.”
And with that word she struck me on the head. (2.1.147–53)
Fineman sees Kate’s shrewish “fretting” as a direct result of the rhetorical excess of her speech—in this case, her pun on frets. Karen Newman similarly argues that Kate’s “linguistic protest” is directed against “the role in patriarchal culture to which women are assigned, that of wife and object of exchange in the circulation of male desire.”29 Kate’s excessive, verbal fretting turns her into an unvendible commodity. Yet while Newman emphasizes Kate’s own position as an object of exchange between men, she specifically discounts the importance of material objects elsewhere in the play, subordinating Petruchios manipulation of things to his more “significant” manipulation of words: “Kate is figuratively killed with kindness, by her husband’s rule over her not so much in material terms—the withholding of food, clothing and sleep—but in the withholding of linguistic understanding.”30
In contrast to Newman, Lena Cowen Orlin, in an article on “material culture theatrically represented” in The Shrew, foregrounds the play’s many “references to and displays of objects, and especially household furnishings.” Orlin does not simply invert the terms of Newman’s reading and insist upon the significance of res in the play at the expense of verba. Rather, she maintains that both material and linguistic forms of exchange, far from being opposed within the play, are specifically and repeatedly identified. Drawing on Lévi-Strauss, Orlin argues that the play “synthesizes” the three “forms of exchange that constitute social life,” namely, the exchange of wives, goods, and words.31 While I agree with Orlin’s claim that the play draws very explicit connections between its material and symbolic economies—particularly as these economies converge on what I have called the symbolic order of things—I resist the notion that Kate’s position with respect to this order is simply that of a passive object of exchange. Kate is not figured as one more cate exchanged between men within the play; rather, it is precisely her unvendibility as a commodity on the marriage market that creates the dramatic dilemma to be solved by the taming narrative. The question concerns the relation between Kate’s own position as a cate and her role as a consumer of cates. For Kate’s unvendibility is specifically attributed within the play to her untamed consumption of cates.
III
At the start of the play, Kate’s consumption is represented as a threat that Petruchio, in his novel way, will seek to tame. Both Newman and Fineman take Petruchios first encounter with Kate, perhaps the most “fretful” instance of verbal sparring in the play, to demonstrate that the shrew-tamer chooses to fight his battle with the shrew “in verbal kind.”32 “O, how I long to have some chat with her” (2. 1. 162), he utters, in anticipation of their meeting. The content of Petruchio’s punning “chat” with Kate, however, is principally preoccupied with determining her place within the symbolic order of things. The encounter begins with Petruchio stubbornly insisting upon calling Katherina “Kate”:
Petruchio: Good morrow, Kate, for that’s your name, I hear.
Katherina: Well have you heard, but something hard of hearing;
They call me Katherine that do talk of me.
Petruchio: You lie, in faith, for you are call’d plain Kate,
And bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst;
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom,
Kate of Kate Hall, my super-dainty Kate,
For dainties are all Kates … (2.1.182–89)
If Petruchio’s punning appellation of Kate as a “super-dainty” cate seems an obvious misnomer in one sense—she could hardly be called “delicate”—in another it is quite apt, as his gloss makes clear. The substantive dainty, deriving from the Latin dignitatem (worthiness, worth, value), designates something that is “estimable, sumptuous, or rare” (OED). In describing Kate as a “dainty,” Petruchio appears to be referring to her value as a commodity, or cate, on the marriage market. (He has just discovered, after all, that her dowry is worth “twenty thousand crowns” [2.1.122].)
Yet Petruchio’s reference to Kate as “dainty” refers not simply to her status as a commodity or object of exchange between men, but to her status as a consumer of commodities as well. For in its adjectival form, the term dainty refers to someone who is “nice, fastidious, particular; sometimes over-nice,” as to “the quality of food, comforts, etc.” In describing Kate as “super-dainty,” Petruchio implies that she belongs to the latter category; she is “over-nice,” not so much discriminating as blindly obedient to the dictates of fashion. Sliding almost imperceptibly from Kate’s status as a consumer of cates to her own status as a cate, Petruchio’s gloss (“For dainties are all Kates”) elides the potential threat posed by the former by subsuming it under the aegis of the latter. His pun on Kates/cates dismisses the significance of Kates role as a consumer by effectively reducing her to an object of exchange between men.
The pun on Kates/cates is repeated at the conclusion of his “chat” with Kate (in the pronouncement quoted at the beginning of this chapter), and effects a similar reduction: “And therefore, setting all this chat aside, / Thus in plain terms,” Petruchio proclaims, “I am he am born to tame you, Kate, / And bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate / Conformable as other household Kates” (2.1. 261–62, 269–71). And yet, in spite of his desire to speak “in plain terms,” Petruchio cannot easily restrict or “tame” the signifying potential of his pun. For once it is articulated, the final pun on Kates/cates refuses to remain tied to its modifier, “household,” and insists instead upon voicing itself, shrewishly, where it shouldn’t (i.e., each and every time Kate is named). In so doing, however, it retrospectively raises the possibility that “cates” may themselves be “wild,” that there is something unruly, something that must be made to conform, in the commodity form itself. This possibility in turn discovers an ambiguity in Petruchio’s “as,” which may mean either “as other household cates are conformable” or “as I have brought other household cates into conformity.” The conformity of household cates cannot be taken for granted within the play because cates, unlike use-values, are not proper to or born of the domestic sphere, but are produced outside the home by the market. They are by definition extra-domestic or to-be-domesticated. Yet insofar as cates obey the logic of exchange and of the market, they may be said to resist such domestication. Petruchio cannot restrict the movement of cates within his utterance, cannot set all “chat” aside and speak in “plain terms,” because words, like commodities, tend to resist all attempts to restrict their circulation and exchange.
The latter assertion finds support—quite literally—in Petruchio’s own “chat.” The term chat, as Brian Morris points out in a note to his Arden edition, was itself a variant spelling of cate in the early modern period (both forms descend from the Old French achat). The term chat thus instantiates, literally performs, the impossibility of restricting the semantic excess proper to language in general and epitomized by the shrew’s speech in particular. In so doing, however, it also links this linguistic excess—via its etymological link with the signifier cate—to the economic excess or superfluity associated with the commodity form in general, and with cates, or luxury goods, in particular. Within the play, the term chat is the name given to both material and linguistic forms of excess as they converge on the figure of “Kate.” It refers at once to Kate’s “chattering tongue” (4. 2. 58) and to her untamed consumption of cates. Kate’s verbal frettings are repeatedly linked within the play to her refusal to assume her proper place within the symbolic order of things: she cannot be broken to the lute but breaks it instead. It is not so clear, however, that her place is simply that of a passive object of exchange. For to be broken to the frets of the lute is to learn to become a skilled and “active manipulator” (to recall Baudrillard’s term) of a status object.33
It is in this context that Veblen’s assertion that the housewife’s “manipulation of the household paraphernalia” renders her no less a commodity, or “chattel,” of her husband becomes problematic. For the housewife’s consumption of cates, which Veblen views as thoroughly domesticated, was in the early modern period thought to be something wild, unruly, and in urgent need of taming. If The Shrew’s taming narrative positions Kate as a “vicarious consumer” to ensure that her consumption and manipulation of household cates conforms to her husband’s economic interests, it nevertheless points to a historical moment when the housewife’s management of household property was viewed as potentially threatening to the symbolic order of things. Before attending to the ways in which the shrew-taming comedy seeks to elide this threat, we should therefore take the threat itself seriously. Only then will we be able to chart with any clarity Kate’s passage from “chat” (i.e., the material and linguistic forms of excess characteristic of the shrew) to “chattel.”
IV
At the start of the play, as Newman asserts, Kate’s fretting is represented as an obstacle to her successful commodification on the marriage market. When Baptista finally arranges Kate’s match to the madcap Petruchio, Tranio remarks: “’Twas a commodity lay fretting by you, / ’Twill bring you gain, or perish on the seas” (2. 1. 321–32). Baptista’s response, “The gain I seek is quiet in the match” (2. 1. 323), underscores the economic dilemma posed by Kate’s speech: her linguistic surplus translates into his financial lack and, consequently, her “quiet” into his “gain.” Yet Kate’s fretting refers not only to what comes out of her mouth (to her excessive verbal fretting), but to what goes into it as well (to her excessive consumption). The verb to fret, which derives from the same root as the modern German fressen, means “to eat, devour [of animals];… to gnaw, to consume,… or wear away by gnawing” or, reflexively, “to waste or wear away; to decay” (OED). Kate’s untamed, animal-like consumption, Tranio’s remark implies, wears away at both her father’s resources and at her own value as well. In describing Kate as a “fretting commodity,” as a commodity that itself consumes (and consumes itself, its own value), Tranio emphasizes the tension between Kate’s position as a cate, an object of exchange between men, and her role as a consumer of cates.
To grasp the threat posed by the early modern housewife’s consumption of cates, as this threat is embodied by the figure of “Kate,” however, we must first consider more closely what Baudrillard terms the “relative social class configurations” at work within the play. For the discourse of objects in The Taming of the Shrew becomes intelligible only if read in the context of its “class grammar”—that is to say, as it is “inflected” by the contradictions inherent in its appropriation by a particular social class or group.34 In general terms, The Taming of the Shrew represents an embourgeoisement of the traditional shrew-taming narrative: Petruchio is not a humble tradesman, but an upwardly mobile landowner. Unlike the cooper’s wife, Kate is not of “gentle kin”; she is a wealthy merchant’s daughter. The play casts the marriage of Petruchio and Kate as an alliance between the gentry and mercantile classes, and thus between land and money, status and wealth, or what Pierre Bourdieu terms symbolic and economic capital.
Petruchio is quite straightforward about his mercenary motives for marrying Kate: “Left solely heir to all his [father’s] land and goods,” which he boastfully claims to “have better’d rather than decreas’d” (2. 1. 117–18), Petruchio ventures into the “maze” of mercantile Padua hoping to “wive it wealthily … / If wealthily, then happily in Padua” (1. 2. 74–75). Likening his mission to a merchant voyage, he claims to have been blown in by “such wind as scatters young men through the world / To seek their fortunes farther than at home” (1. 2. 49–50). Petruchio’s fortune-hunting bombast, together with his claim to have “better’d rather than decreas’d” his inheritance, marks him as one of the new gentry, who continually sought to improve their estates through commerce, through forays into business or overseas trade, and by contracting wealthy marriages.35 If Petruchio seeks to obtain from his marriage to Baptista’s mercantile household what is lacking in his own domestic economy, however, the same can be said of Baptista, who seeks to marry off his daughter to a member of the landed gentry. The nuptial bond between the two families holds forth the promise of a mutually beneficial, chiastic exchange of values for the domestic economies of each: Petruchio hopes to obtain surplus capital (a dowry of “twenty thousand crowns”), and Baptista the status or symbolic capital that comes with land (the jointure of “all [his] lands and leases” [2. 1. 125] Petruchio promises in return).36
Kate’s commodification as a cate on the marriage-market thus proves to be mutually beneficial to both her father’s and her future husband’s households. It is conversely the case, however, that her consumption of cates is represented, at least initially, as mutually detrimental. At the start of the play, as we have seen, Kate’s excessive consumption or fretting renders her an unvendible commodity. Baptista is unable to “rid the house” (1.1.145) of Kate, and is consequently unwilling to wed his younger daughter, Bianca, to any of her many suitors. Kate’s fretting represents perhaps an even greater threat to Petruchio’s household, however, although one of a different order. To comprehend this difference, one must comprehend the place occupied by cates within the two domestic economies. Petruchio’s parsimonious attitude toward cates, as evidenced by the disrepair of his country house and the “ragged, old and beggarly” (4. 1. 124) condition of his servants, stands in stark contrast to the conspicuous consumption that characterizes Padua’s mercantile class. Gremio, a wealthy Paduan merchant and suitor to Bianca, for example, describes his “house within the city,” as “richly furnished with plate and gold” (2.1. 339–40):
My hangings all of Tyrian tapestry.
In ivory coffers I have stuff’d my crowns,
In cypress chests my arras counterpoints,
Costly apparel, tents, and canopies,
Fine linen, Turkey cushions boss’d with pearl,
Valance of Venice gold in needlework,
Pewter and brass, and all things that belong
To house or housekeeping. (2.1. 342–49)
If housekeeping at Petruchio’s country estate involves little more than keeping the “rushes strewed” and the “cobwebs swept” (4.1. 41), in Gremio’s city dwelling it is an enterprise that centers on the elaborate arrangement and display of cates. Each of Gremio’s “things” bears testimony to his ability to afford superfluous expenditure and to his taste for imported luxuries: his tapestries are from Tyre (famous for its scarlet and purple dyes), his apparel is “costly,” his linen “fine,” his “Turkey cushions boss’d with pearl.” His household is replete with status objects, literally “stuff d” with precisely the kind of cates described by William Harrison in the previous chapter (“great provision of tapestry, Turky work, pewter, brasse, fine linen, and thereto costly cupboards of plate,” etc.).
The stark contrast between the two men’s respective notions of the “things that belong to house [and] housekeeping” underscores the differing attitudes held by the minor gentry and mercantile classes in the period toward “household cates.” For the mercantile classes, conspicuous consumption served to compensate for what we might call, borrowing Baudrillard’s terminology, a “true social recognition” that evaded them; the accumulation of status objects served to supplement their “thwarted legitimacy” in the social domain.37 For the upwardly mobile gentry, however, as Lawrence and Jeanne Fawtier Stone observe, “the obligation to spend generously, even lavishly,” as part of their newly acquired social status, “implied a radical break with the habits of frugality which had played an essential part in the[ir] … upward climb.”38 The lesser gentry could make it into the ranks of the elite only by being “cautious, thrifty, canny, and grasping, creeping slowly, generation after generation, up the ladder of social and economic progress, and even at the end only barely indulging in a life-style and housing suitable to their dignity and income.”39 If conspicuous consumption functioned as a necessary (though not always sufficient) means to elite status for the mercantile classes, for the lesser gentry it was an unwished-for consequence of it.40
In marrying the daughter of a wealthy merchant, Petruchio exposes his frugal household economy to the threat of superfluous expenditure. Arriving at their wedding in tattered array and astride an old, diseased horse, Petruchio proclaims: “To me she’s married, not unto my clothes. / Could I repair what she will wear in me / As I can change these poor accoutrements, / ’Twere well for Kate and better for myself” (3. 2. 115–18). As if to prove his point that Kate’s extravagance will leave him a tattered pauper, his self-consuming costume seems to wear itself out before our eyes: his “old breeches” are “thrice turned” (3. 2. 41), his boots have been used as “candle-cases” (3. 2. 42), his “old rusty sword” has a “broken hilt” (3. 2. 44–45), etc. His horse is half-consumed with diseases: it is “begnawn with the bots” (3. 2. 52–53) (“bots” being parasitical worms or maggots), and, even more appropriately, “infected”—as, he insinuates, is his future wife—“with the fashions” (3. 2. 50). The term fashions (or farcin, as it was more commonly spelled), which derives from the Latin farcire, meaning “to stuff,” denotes a contagious equine disease characterized by a swelling of the jaw. Kate’s taste for fashionable cates is likened to this disease of excessive consumption, which threatens to gnaw away at her husband’s estate.
Following their espousal, Kate’s excessive consumption seems to result in her swift reduction to the status of “chattel.” After professing to have no time for “chat” (3. 2. 119), Petruchio whisks his bride away, announcing to the stunned onlookers:
I will be master of what is mine own.
She is my goods, my chattels, she is my house,
My household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything,
And here she stands. (3. 2. 227–31)
Petruchio’s blunt assertion of property rights over Kate linguistically performs the very act of domestication it declares; reduced to the status of an object of exchange (“goods and chattels”), Kate is abruptly yanked out of circulation and sequestered within the home, literally turned into a piece of furniture or “household stuff.” The speech follows a domesticating trajectory not unlike the one outlined by housework theory: it circumscribes Kate within a matrix of use-value production. For within Petruchio’s particular “class grammar,” the relationship of “household stuff” to “household cates” would appear to be that of mere use-values to exchange-values, or commodities properly speaking. The OED defines stuff as “the substance or ‘material’… of which a thing is formed or consists, or out of which a thing may be fashioned.” In this sense, it may be identified with the use-value of the object: it is “the physical body of the commodity,” according to Marx, “which is the use-value or useful thing.”41 Entering into the process of exchange “ungilded and unsweetened, retaining their original home-grown shape,” commodities are split into the twofold form of use-value and value proper, a process Marx calls Stoffwechsel—literally, the act of (ex)change (Wechsel) that transforms mere stuff (Stoff) into cates.42 In transforming Kate from an object of exchange into the home-grown materiality of mere stuff, into a thing defined by its sheer utility, a beast of burden (“my horse, my ox, my ass”), Petruchios speech seeks to reverse the processes of commodification. Reducing Kate to a series of increasingly homely things, it finally strips her down to a seemingly irreducible substance or stuff, whose static immobility (“here she stands”) puts a stop to the slippage of exchange evoked by his list of goods. The self-evidence of her deictic presence seems to stand as the guarantee of an underlying, enduring use-value.
As a member of the gentry, Petruchio stands for the residual, land-based values of a domestic economy that purports to be “all in all sufficient” (Othello, 4. 1. 265). The trajectory traced by his index of goods moves not only from exchange-value to use-value, but from liquid capital, or “moveables” (“good and chattels”)43 to the more secure form of landed property (“house … field … barn,” etc.). Yet Petruchio’s portrait of an ideally self-sufficient household economy in which the value of things is taken to be self-evident and not subject to (ex)change, is belied by the straightforwardly mercenary motives he avows in marrying Kate. Paradoxically, in order to maintain his land-based values, as we have seen, Petruchio must embrace those of the marketplace.44 (In this sense, his career follows a logic not unlike that of Gervase Markham, discussed in the previous chapter.) In seeking to arrest the slippage of exchange, his speech implicates its speaker in an expanding network or maze of equivalent value-forms (“goods … anything”) whose unending slide threatens to destabilize the hierarchy of values he would uphold, insofar as any single thing in the series may stand for anything else (“my any thing, / And here she stands”). If Petruchio succeeds in mastering Kate, his position as master is nevertheless qualified by his own subjection to the exigencies and uncertainties of the new market economy. In his endeavor to domesticate the commodity form, one might say, Petruchio is himself commodified, himself subjected to the logic of commodity exchange. As Gremio so eloquently puts it (in response to the above speech): in taming Kate, Petruchio is himself “Kated” (3. 2. 243).
The contradictions inherent in Petruchio’s class status make his task as shrew-tamer a complex one: he must restrict his wife’s consumption without abolishing it entirely, must ensure that it adequately bears testimony to his own elite status without simultaneously leading him to financial ruin. The difficulty, yet urgent necessity, of maintaining a proper balance between expenditure and thrift in the elite (or would-be elite) household and the perceived danger of delegating this task to the housewife are underscored in the following mid-seventeenth-century letter of advice, written by the Marquis of Halifax to his daughter:
The Art of laying out Money wisely, is not attained to without a great deal of thought; and it is yet more difficult in the case of a Wife, who is accountable to her Husband for her mistakes in it: It is not only his Money, his Credit too is at Stake, if what lyeth under the Wife’s Care is managed, either with undecent Thrift, or too loose Profusion; you are therefore to keep the Mean between these two Extreams…. when you once break through these bounds, you launch into a wide sea of Extravagance.45
At stake in the housewife’s proper management of money or economic capital, Halifax suggests, is her husband’s credit, or symbolic capital. “Symbolic capital,” Bourdieu maintains, “is always credit, in the widest sense of the word, i.e. a sort of advance which the group alone can grant those who give it the best material and symbolic guarantees”.46 It is not simply that economic capital serves to buttress symbolic capital when it is spent on “material and symbolic guarantees” such as status objects. Symbolic capital in turn attracts economic capital: “the exhibition of symbolic capital (which is always very expensive in economic terms), is one of the mechanisms which (no doubt universally) make capital go to capital.”47 Yet symbolic and economic capital are not always mutually reinforcing. Indeed, insofar as “symbolic capital can only be accumulated at the expense of economic capital,” the two are often at odds.48 In the case of the upwardly mobile gentry in early modern England, the effort to balance the two was an ongoing struggle.
