Post-feminist Complacency in Context –
A Comparative Analysis of The Taming of the Shrew and Vinegar Girl
Lisa Reitz S2163683
Dr Hans Jansen
25 August 2017
Word Count: 16.468
Master’s Thesis Writing, Editing and Mediating, code LEX998M20.
Degree Programme MA Literary Studies. University of Groningen.
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Table of Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS ... 2
ABSTRACT ... 3
INTRODUCTION ... 4
CHAPTER ONE: EARLY MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY CONTEXTS ... 9
CHAPTER TWO: THE TAMING OF THE SHREW AND VINEGAR GIRL ... 25
SILENCE, CHASTITY, OBEDIENCE & TACT, RESTRAINT, DIPLOMACY ... 31
THE PATRIARCHAL HOUSEHOLD THEN AND NOW ... 37
GENDERED ECONOMIC ROLES ... 39
THE MARRIAGE IMPERATIVE ... 40
EARLY MODERN TAMING AND CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL STRAIGHTJACKETING ... 42
FINAL SPEECHES ... 49
CONCLUSION ... 52
WORKS CITED ... 55
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Abstract
Shakespeare’s works have been performed, read, and retold for more than 400 years.
The latest attempt at updating Shakespeare’s work for the modern age is the Hogarth Shakespeare project, which has acclaimed contemporary writers retell Shakespeare’s works in prose adaptations. This dissertation will focus on the women in one of the most recently published novels of the project (2016) and its original Shakespearean counterpart in their respective socio-historical contexts: Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl, a twenty-first-century retelling of The Taming of the Shrew. The comparative analysis of a literary reinvention such as Vinegar Girl offers insights about both gender politics and actual social practice in the disparate worlds in which both texts have been originally written and retold. The differences between the original and its prose remodelling can offer insights about the actual progress in female emancipation during the last 400 years and sets the issue of post-feminist
complacency in context. As Vinegar Girl has been only recently published, this research is intended to be an interesting contribution to the existing body of academic work concerned with Shakespeare’s female characters.
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Introduction
Shakespeare’s female characters enjoy a formidable reputation as early modern pioneers of feminism, as ‘generations of women have found a source for their own empowerment in the power of Shakespeare’s writing and in the cultural authority it carried’ (Rackin 72).
Therefore, his work has generated abiding interest with feminist critics. Since the women’s suffrage protests in 1909, Shakespeare’s works have become not only matter of feminist discussion but also engaged in the conversation about ‘real’ women’s histories (Hodgdon 95).
Shakespeare, according to Mary Cowden Clarke, his first female editor, ‘has best asserted womanhood’s rights’ (qtd. in Rackin 72). Feminist approaches to Shakespeare criticism form an impressive body of scholarly work. Since the 1980s, the field has made significant gains in researching Shakespeare’s female characters and their historical understanding over time.
Among many others, feminist critics of the late 20th and 21st centuries include Lynda Boose, Lisa Jardine, Gail Paster, Jean Howard, Peter Erickson, Phyllis Rackin, and Madelon
Sprengnether. Nowadays critics generally tend to consider them timeless models of female rebellion to patriarchy. However, each time period perceives Shakespeare’s women through a different lens of gender politics. This can partially be explained by the distinction between sex and gender. Sex refers to biological differences between male and female bodies, while gender refers to the meanings originating from this anatomical division, hence to the
attributes considered appropriately ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. Whereas sex is rather static, as it is by nature predetermined to a large extent, gender is dynamic, since it is constructed by specific societies. In other words, ‘what it means to be a woman or a man … varies from culture to culture and changes historically’ (Traub 129). Accordingly, the understanding of Shakespeare’s women is dynamic and changes with prevailing gender ideologies.
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Shakespeare’s works have been performed, read, and retold for more than 400 years.
Each period, each new generation, has reinterpreted them in a myriad of forms and ways.
Also, and especially, Shakespeare’s female characters have been reinvented and updated to new conceptions of women’s nature and women’s roles many times. The latest attempt at updating Shakespeare’s work for the modern age is the Hogarth Shakespeare project. In 2015, the Hogarth Press has launched this project, having acclaimed contemporary writers retell Shakespeare’s works. Thus far, five of the planned ten literary transformations have been published (Hogarth Shakespeare). Although Shakespeare’s women have received much scholarly attention already, the literary transformations of the Hogarth Shakespeare project open up exciting possibilities for additional research in the field. This dissertation will focus on the women in one of the most recently published novels of the project (2016) and its original Shakespearean counterpart in their respective socio-historical contexts: Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl, a twenty-first-century retelling of The Taming of the Shrew.1 This Shakespearean comedy revolves around the genre-defining subject of marriage and
contextualises both early modern gender politics and its actual practice in the social rituals of wooing, winning, and wedding. In other words, the play illustrates an early modern shift in conceptions of gender and sex relations, on the one hand displaying Elizabethan ideas about gender hierarchy in households and marriage, and on the other implying Jacobean notions of more companionate relations between the two sexes. The play’s theatrical negotiation between gender politics and early modern women’s lived experience stipulates it as an excellent starting point for a twenty-first-century enquiry into the progress of gender politics during the past 400 years.
Its multilayered textual and performance histories illustrate how The Taming of the Shrew ‘has been and continues to be a texte combinatoire’, which now involves Anne Tyler’s
1 Further referred to as The Shrew
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Vinegar Girl as well (Hodgdon 37). Due to The Shrew’s intricate textual condition, the exact date of composition remains inconclusive. Scholars agree that the text was written between 1589 and 1596 (Hodgdon 27-35, Dobson and Wells 460). Regardless, as an early modern work, The Shrew cannot be thought of as an integral text, written only once at one specific time. Instead, it should be considered a dynamic entity responsive to its context on various scales: playing companies and their venues, changes in theatrical taste and playing styles, but above all shifts in societal conventions (Hodgdon 36). The Shrew, as one of Shakespeare’s most popular comedies, a favourite of critics, producers, and audiences alike – has spawned numerous reactions, reinterpretations, and retellings, creating an intricate fabric stretching through its textual history. From its very beginnings, the play has generated numerous offspring in a great variety of forms including adapted plays and stagings such as Sauny the Scot by John Lacey, Catharine and Petruchio (1756), David Garrick, contemporary theatrical reactions like the anonymous The Tamer Tamed (c.1611), later musicals and film productions such as Kiss Me Kate (1948) with lyrics and music by Cole Porter, and 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), Gil Junger, or television series such as Shakespeare Retold (2005) by the BBC, as well as literary transformations such as Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl (2016) (Hodgdon 46). Each of these reinventions provides a different take on the matter of gender politics.
Each period has perceived The Shrew through its own lens of gender expectations, thus bringing forth various Katherinas, Biancas and Co – all appropriated to the respective periods’ notions about women’s roles and nature.
The female characters we encounter in the retellings of Shakespeare’s The Shrew are not the same ones that appeared in the originals. As contemporary productions, readings, and interpretations of the original play are adaptations, its more modern retellings generally
‘represent the end product of over 400 years of modernization’ to redefine women’s roles in gender politics (Rackin 112). The women have been updated, some having been more
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drastically reshaped than others, in order to smooth the apparent gap between the roles they originally had and the roles contemporary readers and revisers imagine more recognisable for our twenty-first-century understanding of gender relations. The nature of these changes then displays the changing gender politics that shapes contemporary conceptions of women’s accepted roles (Rackin 113). In other words, the comparative analysis of a literary
reinvention such as Vinegar Girl offers insights about both gender politics and actual social practice in the disparate worlds in which both texts have been originally written and retold.
But how big is the gap between the original Katherine and her twenty-first-century counterpart Kate? How drastic a reshaping is really necessary for Shakespeare’s women to be successfully placed in the twenty-first century? Supposing literature to be a manifestation of society, evaluating the extent of the changes made to the female characters, can in fact tell us a great deal about the actual progress in female emancipation. After the Western
emancipation movements set off in the 1900s and after several waves of feminism, we are tempted to look back at Shakespeare’s time through a lens of post-feminist self-
aggrandizement to assure ourselves of the grand accomplishments regarding gender equality during the past 400 years. Therefore, we easily indulge in rather grim ideas about the terrible state of early modern gender politics and women’s role in society. However, with a
comparison of the early modern original The Shrew and its reinvention Vinegar Girl in their respective socio-historical contexts, this thesis will show that, contrary to what the twenty- first-century reader might expect, the progress in women’s emancipation is not as great as one might like to believe. In her novel Vinegar Girl, Tyler demonstrates a timeless
universality of Shakespeare’s original female characters which illustrates how the tension between gender politics and actual social practice continues to exist in our society today. By representing us with a successfully ‘tamed shrew’ in the twenty-first century, Tyler, like
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Shakespeare, holds up a mirror for her readers confronting them with the actual progress made in women’s emancipation during the past 400 years.
As Vinegar Girl has been only recently published and has not received much scholarly attention yet, this dissertation will hopefully be an interesting addition to the existing body of scholarly work concerned with Shakespeare’s female characters. Chapter 1 will explore the socio-historical context of The Shrew with regard to early modern gender politics and social practice. Chapter 2 presents a comparative analysis of Vinegar Girl and The Shrew placing both texts in their disparate social contexts. Uniting socio-historical contexts, literary criticism, close reading, and a feminist perspective, this dissertation also contributes to the debate about how contemporary culture defines female emancipation and gender equality.
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Chapter One: Early Modern and Contemporary Contexts
‘Like mutes she signs alone must make, And never any freedom take:
But still be governed by a nod, And fear her husband as a God:
Him still must serve, him still obey, And nothing act, and nothing say, But what her haughty lord thinks fit, Who with the power, has all the wit.
Then shun, oh! shun that wretched state, And all the fawning flatt’rers hate:
Value your selves, and men despise, You must be proud, if you’ll be wise.’
- Lady Mary Chudleigh, 1703.
Pivotal to comprehending gender politics during Shakespeare’s time is the concept of patriarchy, or more specifically, the early modern patriarchal household governed by the father and a woman’s assigned part within it. In early modern England, the term patriarchy referred to the absolute authority of the father over all members of his household - including not only wife and children, but possibly also other relatives, servants, and apprentices (Traub 129). Unlike our modern understanding of a household as the home of a family unit, the patriarchal household was in essence a complex enterprise involving family members, servants, and apprentices in economic production alike. Indeed, the majority of the economic production of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was generated in businesses run by family households, making the patriarchal household the centre of both the economic and
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political order of early modern England (Dwyer Amussen 85). The Puritan writer William Gouge compares the household to a political aggregate hegemonised by the father, ‘a little commonwealth… a school wherein the first principles and grounds of government and subjection are learned’ (qtd. in Dwyer Amussen 86). In fact, the father of the household was generally perceived in analogy to the ruler of the realm and ‘a well-ordered household was supposed to run like a well-ordered state’ (Traub 129). Family households and patriarchal marriage were the cornerstones of early modern society, as they ensured ‘the legitimate succession of the father’s genealogy and the productive consolidation of wealth, land, and labour power’ (Traub 134). Since patrilineal authority can only be transferred through women’s reproductive bodies, they are essential to this concept of the family, and hence posed a serious potential threat to economic and political order. Women stepping out of line would have jeopardised the system, as ‘patriarchal authority within the family was … the ultimate, “natural”, justification for obedience to the state: to reject either was to threaten the entire social and political order’ (Underdown 117). Considering this imminent female threat to male authority, the ruling power imposed measures to prevent disruption and preserve the common order. In other words, women had to be controlled and were thus assigned a clearly stipulated role in the patriarchal order of society, one inferior to men. Accordingly, Gouge brusquely insists that a wife yield herself to her husband as ‘a King to governe and aid her, a Priest to pray with her and for her, a Prophet to teach and instruct her’ (qtd. in Stallybrass 126).
In early modern England, regardless of their economic status or social rank, women were generally believed to be less rational than men and the weaker link in society, hence deemed in need of male protection and necessarily placed in an inferior position under the rule of men. Generally, the entry into adulthood was marked by marriage for both girls and boys. Each marriage resulted in the emergence of a new household and was thus a necessity
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to maintain the social, political and economic order. However, the imperative of marriage was fundamentally stronger for women. Girls would be raised in an awareness of themselves as sinners by birth and learn that they could only redeem themselves by following their highest calling, established by God before the Fall: ‘house and riches are the inheritance of the fathers but a prudent wife is of the Lord’ (Proverbs, xix: 14). Marriage was considered a woman’s natural lot, as each possible stage in a woman’s life - maid, wife, widow - referred to her marital status (Erickson). Beyond that, ‘woman’ was articulated as passive property and ‘man’ as active agent in legal discourse. In fact, a woman’s legal existence was
subsumed under the identity of her male protector (Rackin 38). Marriage, then, was an active exchange of property: the male protector or ruler of the maid, her father, bestows her onto a new male protector, her husband, whose wife she becomes in turn. Legally, married women were regarded as femme covert whose legal and economic rights were few: not only her identity was subsumed by her husband’s but also her property completely came under his control (Traub 130). In his 1619 wedding sermon, A Bride Bush, William Whately indeed defines a woman’s position in relationship with her male protector, as is fit for sovereign and subject, proprietor and property: ‘The whole duty of the wife is referred to two heads. The first is to acknowledge her inferiority: the next to carry her selfe as inferior’ (qtd. in
Stallybrass 126). Ideas about the male-female relationship even exceeded that of a ruler and his subject. In 1610 Robert Snawsel advises common methods of ‘wife-taming’ and
compares them approvingly with techniques ‘to tame lions, bulls, and elephants’ (qtd. in Stallybrass). He equates women only with extremely wild, strong, and dangerous animals.
Herein he does not only recognise the potential female threat to prevailing male power structures, but also reflects a certain degree of male anxiety about a possible female
disruption of the common order, which might explain even more radical measures to control women.
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The social and political need to control the female threat to the patriarchal order shaped early modern ideas about the ideal woman. In order to restrain women in their inferior position to men, they were not only expected, but also instructed to strive for three major virtues: obedience, chastity, and silence. Society’s surveillance was concentrated on women’s obedience to their male protectors, their confinement to the threshold of the house, the idea of chastity, and constraints on female speech. This concept echoes throughout prescriptive literature for early modern women. Peter de la Primaudaye, for instance, summarises in The French Academie (1618): ’Wives must be modest, wise, chaste, keepers at home, lovers of their husbands, and subject unto them … It is an honor to a woman to obey her husband’
(qtd. in Hull 141). Besides the comprehensive concept of female obedience, absolute silence and chastity are repeatedly mentioned and emphasised as crucial to a virtuous woman: ‘…let her kepe silence. For there is nothing that doth so much commend, avaunce, set fourthe, adourne, decke, trim, and garnish a maid, as silence’ (qtd. in Hull 142). Peter Stallybrass encapsulates these prescriptive measures of patriarchal doctrine in the phrase ‘the body enclosed’ which concurrently refers to ‘a woman’s closed genitals, closed mouth, and her enclosure within the home’ (126). These three areas were perceived as mutual correlates - one indicating the other, logically intertwined: ‘There is nothing that becommeth a maid better than sobernes, silence, shamefastnes, and chastitie, both of bodie & mind’ (qtd. in Hull 142). ‘Loose in body and tongue’ was a common judgement on an ‘unruly woman … who was exercising either her sexuality or her tongue under her own control rather than under the control of a man’ (Traub 130; Boose 167). Indeed, female sexual transgression was
associated with scolding, as silence was considered a sign of chastity. Silence and chastity, in turn, correspond with a woman’s confinement to the house. What in fact makes the woman in Samuel Rowland’s poem “Salomons Harlot” a harlot, is that in her ‘brutish filthynesse’ she is
‘full of words’ and shows herself in ‘the streets frequent’ (qtd. in Stallybrass 127). Women
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were commonly judged according to these criteria - obedience, chastity, and silence were major determiners for not only a woman’s character, but also her social status.
Early modern gender politics, promoted and upheld by the leading elite, stipulated all women to be ‘modest, wise, chaste, keepers at home, lovers of their husbands, and subject unto them’ (qtd. in Hull 141). In other words, the discursive practice of patriarchal power structures fully indoctrinated society with the normative ideal of a woman as chaste, silent, and obedient. Generally, many women knew little else than this beau idéal and being a sinner by default, born with a debt to redeem themselves. Indeed, due to Eve’s sin, her first
autonomous use of language, her descendants ‘perpetually guilty, perpetually disorderly, perpetually seductive’ problem of society (Boose 177). Therefore, many women would strive to become this virtuous woman. Some women even seem to have partaken in the promotion of society’s image of the ideal woman, such as Elizabeth Carey with her closet drama Tragedy of Mariam2:
‘’Tis not enough for one that is wife To keep her spotless from an act of ill, But from suspicion she should free her life, And free herself of power as well as will.
’Tis not so glorious for her to be free
As by her proper self restrained to be.’ (qtd. in Greer 114)
The concept was applied to all women regardless of their social or economic status and the region they lived in. However, women’s daily life varied according to their class and region, and so did the mechanisms of social control they were subject to. Those factors actually determined the room for both female resistance and adherence to this archetype. Although
2 The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry is a closet drama written by Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, and was first published in 1613. The passage quoted here is taken from the chorus which represents patriarchal ideals of femininity.
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examples of female aspiration for strict adherence to this concept certainly exist, the daily lives of most early modern women were practically incompatible with the very idea of the normative woman.
Queen Elizabeth I is a prime example for female resistance to the stereotype of the virtuous early modern woman. In her response to the Commons’ petition (1563) that she marry, Elizabeth explains: ‘The weight and greatness of this matter might cause in me, being a woman wanting both wit and memory, some fear to speak and bashfulness besides, a thing appropriate to my sex. But yet’, she continues, ‘the princely seat and kingly throne wherein God … hath constituted me, maketh these two causes to seem little in mine eyes’ (qtd. in Bell 95). In her defence to a woman’s imperative lot, marriage, Elizabeth refers to the other two major female duties, silence and obedience, only to rebuke them all together with her position as a monarch. She presents herself in a position of male authority by referring to her rightful place being the ‘kingly throne’. In fact, she does not need a husband, as after the death of her father, the ‘princely seat and kingly throne’ have become her male protectors. First of all, this explanation illustrates how the ideal of the normative woman was generally applied to all women, regardless of social status or rank. Even Queen Elizabeth was expected to marry - indeed, people even felt they had the right to petition for the cause – not only because she was a woman, but also due to her position as ruler and responsibility to ensure the royal lineage. She does admit silence and obedience to be general female duties. However, this example also illustrates how the general assumption of the early modern normative woman and male superiority is an oversimplification, as her position as monarch invalidates any other premise. In fact, women could be perceived in two different manners. Firstly, women would be categorised by gender, hence perceived as the same. Secondly, they would be categorised by class and therefore differentiated (Stallybrass 135). This coexistence of a gender hierarchy on the one hand and a hierarchy of status and rank on the other produces an
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infinitely complex position for women in early modern England.Rationalised by religion, reinforced by social customs, and sanctioned by law, both hierarchies were firmly rooted in early modern culture. As a result, not ‘every woman was subordinate in every way to every man’ (Rackin 27). Certainly, Queen Elizabeth I is the prime example of an early modern woman occupying a position of power, as her state would be considered extraordinary even today. There is, however, historical evidence of various other ways in which women of all ranks asserted authority or claimed a position of equality – despite the general acceptance of male superiority.
The early modern concept of marriage, in practice, left more room for female agency and autonomy than gender politics theoretically presumed. Marriage, as one of the
cornerstones of early modern society, was a vitally important matter for Elizabethans.
Marriage arrangements for young people were deemed too significant for a prosperous community to be left entirely to themselves (Rackin 93). Parents, other kin, and neighbours alike concerned themselves with matchmaking and their constant surveillance was to ensure that appropriate marriage prospects would remain untampered with. Although fathers, as the patriarchs of a lineage, ideally had the last word on a union, mothers mostly pursued marriage bargaining for their children (Rackin 20). In fact, Elizabethan England was inhabited by more marriageable women who were fatherless than whose fathers were alive and actually able to secure a match for them (Greer 43). Marriage for love was considered infatuation and disapproved of. However, parents would usually consult with their children before finalising a match, as it was generally known that marriage without any mutual affection would spell disaster (Dwyer Amussen 93). Indeed, marriage then should be thought of as a continuum, from the free choice of a partner to entirely arranged matches, depending on social status: the lower the status, the freer the choice. Most marriages during Shakespeare’s time were
somewhere in the middle of this scale, ‘with a balance between the viewpoints of potential
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partners and their parents’ (Dwyer Amussen 95). Even though the rising puritanism rather enforced patriarchal authority in the long run, its emphasis on the aspect of partnership in marriage produced a sense for greater equality in the relationships of spouses (Underdown 136). Actual evidence is scarce, but happy marriages certainly did exist at the time. The explanation for scarcity in evidence is simple: perfectly happy marriages neither turn up in court records nor are they popular in drama or literature. Certainly, Shakespeare’s comedies, for instance, usually conclude with marriage, but the core of the plot describes the often complicated path towards marriage instead of marriage itself. Within this patriarchal structure of marriage, in some cases ‘husband and wife did find a way to work and live together with respect and affection’, as they had to run their own little commonwealth and were judged on the basis of how well they supported that model (Dwyer Amussen 89-90). In the end,
however, in Shakespeare’s time fewer women married in England than today (Greer 269).
Many women were in service and were either unable to gain their employer’s permission to marry or had insufficient funds for a dowry and to set up a household of their own (Dwyer Amussen 92). Women over the age of twenty-one were not only able to marry without the consent of their parents, but even free to decide against marriage altogether (Greer 42). In contrast to a married woman, for example, an unwed woman above twenty-one could earn a living and choose to spend or keep her own money as she pleased. Living an independent life by virtue of gainful employment, many women must have simply felt no need to surrender their legal identity, right to property, and personal freedom to the rule of a husband.
Married or not, everyone was expected to be member of a household. Examples of women living and working independently did exist. This lifestyle was frowned upon, as unmarried women were supposed to either take responsibilities in the family business or go into service. However, this should be considered a gender neutral circumstance, as ‘after 1563 it was illegal for unmarried women or men … to live out of service’ (Dwyer Amussen
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87). In other words, women and men alike were expected to be part of someone’s household.
As soon as they were married, a couple was supposed to set up their own household. Similar to how the women of a household were indubitably subordinate to the men, a wife was subordinate to her husband. However, a household was run by both husband and wife: ‘the Governors of families … are first the chief governor, which is the Husband, secondly a fellow-helper, which is the wife’ (qtd. in Dwyer Amussen 86). Although there certainly is an established hierarchy, the husband is not considered the sole governor of the household, as the wife shared in much of the economic responsibility for it. No less than men, women were generally expected to take responsibility for their own needs and play a part in the economic well-being of the household (Rackin 35). Women were not only responsible for ‘feeding and maintaining the household’, but also in charge of the servants as well as apprentices and accountable for organising the merchandise of ‘self-generated produce such as eggs, butter, cheese, or wool’ (Dwyer Amussen 86). It is wrong to presume that the Elizabethan wife played no part in the household business. On the contrary, she made significant contributions to its economic welfare and often even took on responsibilities of her husband’s. Indeed, it was common that a wife would manage the household, hence running the family business, on her own in cases of the husband’s ‘failure’. If the husband, for instance, due to illness or virtual absence, ‘could do less and less, then she must do more and more, supervising the apprentices, seeing that the orders were fulfilled; or even by some employment … she must supplement a failing business’ (Delony qtd. in Greer 35). Due to a wife’s legal status as femme covert, historical evidence of economic activities is slim. When women assisted their husbands in or even took over the management of the family business, they must have done it under the name of their husbands. Therefore, the wife’s name seldom appears in official business documents (Greer 37).
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Although there were gender-specific tasks and responsibilities within a household, the sexual division of labour and modern concept of the ‘housewife’ were not yet established in pre-capitalist England. As we have seen earlier, unlike today, the Elizabethan household was a rather complex enterprise in which the entire family, including male and female members of the family as well as male and female workers, did not only live but also work together (Rackin 34). The term ‘housewife’ was not yet understood in the sense that is now regarded as traditional - the housewife confined to the domestic, private sphere, while her counterpart roams the public sphere to provide for the family. Indeed, the post-industrial division of private and public sphere was not practicable in early modern society. In contrast, the title of
‘housewife’ referred to an official profession upon which girls could be apprenticed - whether they had marriage prospects or not (Greer 168). Certainly, the learned skills were gender specific, but it is only fair to mention that not only girls could be apprenticed to
‘housewifery’ but also boys were commonly apprenticed to ‘husbandry’ (Dwyer Amussen 92). Unlike today, ‘housewife’ did not refer to a marital status, but rather expressed a relationship to and contributing position in a household. Although the most desirable duo running a household were husband and wife, housewives were not necessarily married and did work in the houses of other families - of widowers or married men whose wives were ‘too grand or too ignorant or too young’ to manage a household (Greer 168).
In Shakespeare’s England, women had considerable economic power, not only on account of inheritance from fathers and husbands, but above all ‘by virtue of their own gainful employment’ (Erickson). As far as ‘career’ is concerned, the Queen was certainly an exceptional woman. However, she was not the only Tudor woman, married or unmarried, who occupied a crucial economic role. Indeed, in Shakespeare’s England, female
employment was universal and ‘housewife’ was by far not the only profession women pursued. Although opportunities were limited and actual payment scarce, both were by no
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means non-existent. Next to domestic service, wet and dry nursing, or a position as either governess or a gentlewoman in waiting in a greater household, many single and married women would provide for themselves and support their households by remunerative labour in a variety of designated crafts and trades (Rackin 35). In fact, more than half of all apprentices to crafts and trades in Elizabethan London were women (Greer 169). Most commonly they pursued tailoring, upholstery, millinery, embroidery, and similar domestic professions (Plowden qtd. in Greer 162). However, there were also plenty of female innkeepers, bakers, confectioners, fishmongers, and other street vendors, as well as some women who pursued trades which are today regarded as masculine, such as brewers, ironmongers, carpenters, plumbers, housepainters, and saddlers (Plowden in Greer 162; Rackin 35). Women of higher social rank would have been equally occupied assuming an economically active role. Only the nature of their employment would differ and include activities such as ‘collecting rents, reviewing accounts, and paying bills as well as preparing food and medicines, providing for guests and attending to the sick’ (Rackin 36). In the end, many early modern women
exercised considerable authority in family businesses or households, and some even had substantial economic power and gained financial independence. What they lacked - except for the unique example of the Queen - was political authority. Although some women who were freeholders were occasionally allowed to vote due to their material wealth, they were only able to do so alongside their husbands and examples hereof are remarkably exceptional (Rackin 20-1).
It is an oversimplification to assume that the social theory about the role of the woman was literally put into practice. Considering the historical facts explored above, it is impossible to believe that the concept of the normative woman was culturally operative in a way incompatible with daily life – regardless of their social rank, women must have had a de facto independence of their male protectors. Neither the political leader nor the household
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manager could have afforded to act submissively or obedient when negotiating either the lot of a kingdom or the prices of produce, and naturally they would not have succeeded in doing so by remaining virtually silent. Additionally, they would have had to leave the house
occasionally to perform their duties – the housewife to purchase or sell goods, the domestic servant to run errands, the independent working woman to practice her trade, and even the gentlewoman would have had to frequent the streets to collect rent or attend to the sick. It is evident that the Tudor woman had to have some degree of independence to perform her daily routine, irrespective of both marital and social status. Indeed, it was most probably common knowledge that the ideal of the chaste, silent, and obedient woman was incompatible with reality. Although we are looking at an ultimately ideological configuration, it was applied to actual women living an actual life, making it impossible for them to either fit the profile or function as a member of their society. This ultimately ideological concept had real effects on real women, as it was very efficient to denunciate a woman as either a scold or a whore, condemning them as criminals and sinners, in order to uphold male authority.
In an attempt to control the female threat to the persisting patriarchal order, women stepping out of their highly ideological roles were - often officially - sanctioned and harshly punished. Early modern court records illustrate a collective preoccupation with women who posed a potential threat to the patriarchal system. The general offence of an unruly woman was first and foremost disobedience in different forms: ‘women scolding and brawling, [sexual offenders], and wives dominating or even beating their husbands’ (Underdown 119).
If women had to talk at all, they were at least expected to ‘have a sweetenesse in language’
(Castiglione qtd. in Hull 32). Deviation from this ideal was considered unruly female speech, which in turn was linked to female insubordination in the stigmatisation as a ‘shrew’ or
‘scold’. Although men were occasionally presented for scolding, it was a mostly female offence (Traub 130). There were various methods for the official punishment of scolds. One
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of the most common mechanisms was the ducking-stool or cucking-stool: a see-saw-like contraption in which the victim was publicly ducked in water. Another common instrument was the rather barbaric ‘scold’s bridle’ or ‘brank’: an iron collar with a bit to physically silence the bearer (Underdown 123). There are also records of offending ‘domineering wives’, who were traditionally punished by collective shaming rituals, often a theatrical re- enactment of the actual offence involving the entire neighbourhood (Underdown 129).
Female disobedience was almost innately intertwined with sexual transgression: ‘the dominated husband, it was generally assumed, was almost certainly being cuckolded, and vice versa’ (Underdown 127). ‘Erotic transgression referred not only to adultery (extra- marital sexual intercourse) and fornication (premarital sexual intercourse), but any erotic behaviour that lacked the sanction of father and church’ (Traub 130). The Elizabethan female sex offender had to face persecution and social isolation ‘so intense that it verged on
savagery’ (Greer 80). Suspicion was often sufficient for conviction. Once a recognised offender, a woman’s reputation was ruined: ‘A person whose credit was destroyed could not function as a citizen’ (Greer 281). These public attacks on women stepping out of their assigned roles as silent servants of society often efficiently kept patriarchal structures intact.
Early modern England’s public obsession with gender politics, female disobedience, and sexual transgression illustrates the perceived threat to patriarchy, which might have emanated from a female de facto independence. Not only the large number of related court cases but also the period’s cultural output reflects this general male anxiety about a growing female independence, or what David Underdown defines as the ‘crisis of order’. According to him, the growing market economy created more room for female independence on all scales, changing societal structures and creating tensions and, necessarily, anxieties: ‘It could no longer be safely assumed that all Englishmen and women were bound together in that interlocking network of households and communities on which, according to the prevailing
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orthodoxy, stability depended’ (Underdown 116). ‘Even the patriarchal family, the linch-pin of the whole structure of order, appeared to be threatened’ (Underdown 116). This disruption of the patriarchal order and the rising anxiety resulting from it may have caused a
reinforcement of abidance to patriarchal gender politics in order to avert danger of total chaos or, at the least, a major shift in gender and hence power politics. Not only the public attention for ‘scolding women, domineering and unfaithful wives’, but also the period’s cultural output was preoccupied with gender politics. A vast amount of not only prescriptive literature such as sermons and handbooks, but also popular literature such as The Cruell Shrew, Hic Mulier, or the Man-Woman deal with the ‘female problem’. The relentless repetition of or almost obsession with such platitudes would certainly have been redundant had there not been general uneasiness about too many too independent women endangering the ‘natural’ order of society.
As we have seen in this chapter, the obsession of early modern society with
patriarchal gender politics and the normative woman must have stood in stark contrast with actual gender relations as practiced and experienced by Elizabethans in their daily lives.
Although ‘early modern women were wrapped in stereotypes as strait-jacketing as the
punishments worked out on them’, ideological prescriptions for the normative woman should not be considered descriptions of actual social practice (Hodgdon 48). This disparity most certainly generated a considerable tension and social ambiguity people had to deal with on a daily basis. This tension manifests itself in the cultural output of the era having ‘the hierarchy of the patriarchal household and the negotiation of cultural meanings of masculinity and femininity’ as its main and most animating concerns (Traub 132). Indeed, many Elizabethan as well as Jacobean writers picked up on this notion and dealt with the intricate position of the early modern woman, often contrasting female independence or rebellion with confining gender roles. Shakespeare did not form an exception. As dramatic action depends on conflict,
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Shakespeare’s works also focus on the disruption of or social tensions in familial, social, or political contexts, particularly often in moments of death, genealogical succession, or – as in the case of The Shrew – marriage. The courtship plot, characteristic for Shakespearean
comedy, is not merely a generic convention, as marriage was one of the basic building-blocks of early modern society and gender identity.
Naturally, the role of women has changed drastically in the course of 400 years. The rise of capitalism, already emerging in its early form of mercantilism towards the end of the Elizabethan era, alongside a multitude of changing religious, economic, and political factors caused a widening division between public and private life (Rackin 39). This division
constituted a disruption of the former traditional family economy which ultimately resulted in the modern idea of the housewife. ‘The household was redefined as a private, feminized space, separated from the public arenas of economic and political activity’ increasing a domestication of women and restriction of their economic freedom (Rackin 39). Women came to be primarily ‘defined by their “natural” vocation as wives and mothers’ confining them to the domestic sphere and excluding them of crafts and trades which had come to be distinguished as male professions (Rackin 134). Generally, the emergence and growth of capitalism has helped ‘to bind women even more completely into a redefined order’
(Underdown 122). Since then two major feminist movements have attacked both official and unofficial inequalities. The Enlightenment period raised a general awareness of issues such as legal equality, freedoms, and political rights, and hence formed an early impetus for the first wave of feminism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which focussed on legal issues, came to an end before the Second World War, and culminated in women’s suffrage in the 1920s in the United States and the UK (Genz 52). During the war women were
encouraged to support the war effort and became active participants in the economy. After the war, however, media started to aggressively promote conservative gender roles, urging
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women to retreat from the public sphere and return to their ‘natural habitat’, the household, in order to reinstate patriarchal power structures. This backlash became the main impetus
behind second wave feminism, which focussed on de facto gender inequalities and strove to defeat the ‘happy housewife myth’ (Genz 52). Today we consider ourselves beyond second wave feminism, in an era of post-feminism. The prefix indicates that contemporary Western society supposedly embraces gender politics beyond both official and unofficial gender inequality, and beyond the female epitome of non-identity and passivity in the modern housewife (Friedan 264). Instead, we generally seem to believe in the idea of the free, emancipated woman living life self-consciously and in her own right (Genz 32). Although many scholars and activists both recognise and criticise a backlash in contemporary gender politics, the post-feminist era has also fostered a notion of feminist optimism: ‘Everywhere you look, you see individual women who are freer and more powerful than women have ever been before’ (Walter 1). Indeed, some critics seem to deny the stagnation in the process of female emancipation, assuming that nowadays all ‘women [officially] have the power for self-definition and simply need to exploit it’ (Genz 64). However, this convenient optimism might be considered slightly naive, as the apparent freedom in contemporary society is not uncompromised and gender stereotypes prevail. Many critics, such as the American journalist Susan Faludi, acknowledge how far the feminist struggle still has to go and criticises
postfeminist optimism as a devastating backlash against the ground gained by feminism. In the end, gender politics remain ever complicated, as the following chapter will illustrate how, similar to The Shrew, its contemporary remodelling Vinegar Girl also negotiates the
conundrum of gender expectations and social practice.
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Chapter Two: The Taming of the Shrew and Vinegar Girl
‘… the purpose of playing whose end,
both at the first and now, was and is to hold as 'twere the mirror up to Nature to show Virtue her feature, Scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.’ – Hamlet (3.2.20-26).
The contentious, yet perennially popular play begins with two preluding scenes, the induction, depicting how the drunken tinker Christopher Sly becomes the target of a practical joke by a local lord. Unconscious, Sly is taken to the lord’s lodgings, where he is finely dressed and convinced that he himself is a lord when he awakens. Together with his ‘wife’, a page disguised as a lady, he watches the comedy about the wealthy Baptista Minola from Padua and his two daughters, Katherina and Bianca. The younger of the two has many suitors eager to compete for her hand. Baptista, however, insists that she will not be promised until his elder daughter, shrewish Katherina, is betrothed. Bianca’s suitors, Lucentio, Grumio, and Hortensio, convince Petruccio, a gentleman of Verona, to court Katherina for her dowry.
Meanwhile they themselves embark on an intricate game of disguise to secretly woo Bianca.
After the horrid wedding of Petruccio and Katherina their marital life ensues. Petruccio intends to ‘tame’ Katherina by playing tricks of inversions on her mind and depriving her of food, sleep, and sumptuous clothing. In the meantime, Lucentio and Bianca elope and
Hortensio marries a rich widow. All plots resolve in a triple wedding feast where the recently married husbands wager on who has the most obedient wife. Petruccio and Katherina win the competition with her dramatic closing speech on the righteous necessity of wifely
submission.
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Regardless of how The Shrew is specifically read, performed, or retold, it reflects, as a mirror, the disparity between gender politics and social practice – exploring the relations of women and men in patriarchal structures and the dynamic meanings of femininity and masculinity throughout time. As mentioned in the introduction, from its origin in early modern England, The Shrew has spawned numerous and varied adaptations worldwide. It has been perceived through various lenses of gender politics during the past 400 years, each period producing a different retelling with its respective ideological imprint. Various periods have brought forth retellings and performances with adapted plot meanings, conveying changing gender ideologies throughout time – each generation attempting to recreate a
‘Shakespeare they wish to recognize as their own’ (Dobson 195). Indeed, the ways in which The Shrew has been read, performed, and retold are as various as the perspectives possibly reflected in a mirror. The play has been celebrated for its comic artistry, read and staged as an exuberant fantastical farce without any connection to the reality of either the early modern or any subsequent society (Hodgdon 104-105). It has equally often been condemned as ‘brutally sexist polemic’, a historical record ‘disgusting and offensive’ to later generations – a
sentiment spurring more critical responses and performances (Hodgdon 6). It has also been excused for the harshness of its taming plot, retellings and stagings alike, presenting The Shrew as a romantic comedy of fulfilled desires (Hodgdon 5). Possibilities seem endless and opinions remain divided, due to the apparent lack of the play’s own resolve about how Petruccio’s ‘taming’ of Katherina should be understood (Dobson and Wells 462).
The play-within-the-play or the taming plot in itself is without question unacceptable from a feminist point of view. One of the very first retellings, a theatrical reply to The Shrew in Shakespeare’s lifetime, The Tamer Tamed, explores proto-feminist notions by reversing terms and presenting Petruchio’s metamorphosis into a ‘new man and loveable husband’
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(Hodgdon 73). After Katherina has died, his new wife Maria assumes the role of the tamer,
‘insisting to remain a ‘free haggard’ unless he meets her conditions’ (Hodgdon 73). This proto-feminist voice is, however, partially absorbed in the finale which promotes marriage as an undertaking of companionship and equality, as Maria concludes that the play is ‘being aptly meant / To teach both sexes due equality; / And, as they stand bound, to love mutually’
(Tamer Tamed, epilogue 6-8). Naturally, since the early twentieth century, along with second wave feminism, The Shrew has generated harshly critical responses, performances, and reinterpretations exploring radical feminist notions (Dobson and Wells 463). In 1973, for instance, Charles Marowitz portrayed marriage as the legitimization for mental and physical abuse of women in a shocking theatrical adaptation of The Shrew involving chains, mental institutions, and anal rape on stage. Phylida Lloyd’s all-female production from 2016 is a more recent example of a feminist take on The Shrew, presenting all women living in a state of captivity, harshly criticizing the persistent idea of women as market commodities in the twenty-first century.
Although The Shrew clearly lends itself as ‘a test site for examining the abrasive relations among early modern contexts and contemporary feminisms and post-feminisms’
and has often been explored as such, Anne Tyler’s twenty-first-century prose remodeling of the play, Vinegar Girl, apparently ignores this potential (Hodgdon 72). When Tyler was approached for the Hogarth Shakespeare project, she hesitated, emphasizing that she hated Shakespeare’s plays, especially The Shrew (Charles par. 12). The goal of the project is not, however, to adhere closely to the original plays. As a result, one might expect that with Vinegar Girl Tyler has recreated a Shakespeare of the twenty-first century radically changed and adapted to or maybe even promoting post-feminist gender politics. 400 years later, after two waves of feminism, the reader expects a fully emancipated Kate who has freed herself from both male control and the obligation of heterosexual marriage. In other words, we
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expect a Shakespeare appropriated to contemporary gender politics, displaying a changed plot and character developments relatable to the post-feminist reader. However, Tyler’s take on Shakespeare surprises, as it is not one a truly emancipated twenty-first-century reader would wish to recognize as his or her own.
Kate Battista, a sour pre-school teacher, lives at home with her father, a scientist, and her younger sister Bunny. Dr Battista is on the verge of a scientific breakthrough when the visa of his brilliant lab assistant Pyotr is about to expire. His simple solution to the problem is a green card marriage to his elder daughter Kate. At first she is furious about her father’s outrageous plan, but she is gradually won over by Pyotr’s courting campaign and finally marries him on her own account. In fact, Vinegar Girl presents intact patriarchal structures, an arranged marriage, and a ‘tamed’ Kate in a perfectly plausible twenty-first century setting in America. Considering Vinegar Girl as the mirror showing the reality of our time should be rather confronting for modern feminists. By means of demonstrating the universality of The Shrew’s female characters and its taming plot, Tyler probably leaves at least the feminist reader shocked, if not affronted. Tyler, indeed, seems to intentionally create this effect of shock. Using a method of confrontation, or for that matter, Hamlet’s mirror, in order to stir self-critical awareness which might lead to further action, the novel urges the reader to contemplate the following: if the contemporary female struggle, the gender relations, politics, and ideologies we, as twenty-first-century readers, recognize in Vinegar Girl are not
essentially different from those displayed in The Shrew, we might want to ask ourselves whether it is not high time we get up from the comfortable chair of post-feminist
complacency.
One of the most debated questions about The Shrew is whether the play accepts or rejects the patriarchal values of early modern England. While Shakespeare’s comedies are generally known for their rather unconventional portrayal of gender relations, The Shrew
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provides Elizabethan gender politics at its best: the successful taming of a non-conforming woman, a shrew, culminating in her final speech encapsulating the essence of female obedience, silence, and chastity (Macdonald 347). However, the framing narrative renders The Shrew a play in a play which allows for a reading of the play as a critical representation of early modern gender politics. The two scenes that preface the ‘play proper’, mostly referred to as the induction, begin with an incident ‘right out of early modern daily life’
(Hodgdon 1). Indeed, the alehouse hostess and the drunk tinker Christopher Sly scolding each other could certainly be the basis for one of the court reports mentioned in chapter 1.
Although the title promises one shrew, the framing narrative opens with two public offenders – a woman and a man displaying unruly conduct, both behaving like scolds. Considering the historical facts explored in chapter 1, this opening is a fundamentally more realistic scenario for early modern England than the embedded play staged for Sly. As a result, one may regard the induction as a mirror for the original audience and the play within this play, the taming plot, a mirror for the utterly chauvinistic Sly. Due to the existence of the framing narrative, one may thus conclude that the taming plot is not to be understood as a realistic imprint of gender politics at work in early modern England. Instead, The Shrew as a whole depicts the tension between gender politics and the actual realities of gender relations in Shakespeare’s time rather than plainly promoting this society’s patriarchal values. In other words, The Shrew confronts its original audience with the gap between persistent ideas about gender and actual relations between men and women. Ever since its first production, The Shrew’s meta- dramatic framework has been variously interpreted as either an essential part of the play or deemed unimportant and discarded all together (Hodgdon 25). Anne Tyler chose to do the latter for her retelling; Vinegar Girl does not feature an induction or similar prefacing framing device. Consequently, the novel is not ‘a play within a play’, which eliminates the possibility to read it as a farcical representation of contemporary gender politics. Instead it
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has to be considered a mirror confronting the reader with the natural world of the twenty-first century. Although Tyler provides a realistic setting in Baltimore, the alarming reflection is not one we would wish to recognize. However, the subjugation of a woman in the twenty- first century can hardly be considered a suitable subject for comical treatment.
A fundamental difference between The Shrew and Vinegar Girl lies in form. While The Shrew is a play intended to come to its full potential only on stage, Vinegar Girl is a prose remodelling that offers the reader not only deeper insights into the characters, but also a more definite resolve. With the prose form comes a narrative perspective that a play lacks. The Shrew’s only substitute are soliloquies – thoughts spoken aloud revealing a character’s feelings, intentions, and nature to the audience. Petruccio and Baptista Minola are the only characters employing soliloquies in The Shrew. In fact, in most of them they directly address the audience simply saying what they intend to do, without ever explaining why,
unfortunately. Consequently, the character insights the soliloquies offer are not only few and superficial, but also provide an exclusively male perspective. In Vinegar Girl, however, the third-person limited narrator with Kate as the central consciousness makes the reader exclusively witness her thoughts, feelings, and intentions. The focus has shifted from a mainly male perspective in the original to an exclusively female one in the retelling. This diversion of perspective coincides with Tyler’s intention to ‘figure out what really happened’
with Katherine in The Shrew, as the original play seemed to her ‘such a crazy story [with]
people behaving so inexplicably that you just know there’s another side to it’, a female one, in this case, that is (Tyler qtd. in Charles).
