Shakespeare's Domestic Economies by Korda Natasha;

Author:Korda, Natasha;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 7. Woman with handkerchief. From Wenceslaus Hollar, Ornatus muliebris Anglicanus or The Severall habits of Englishwomen, from the nobilitie: to the contry woman, as they are in these times (London, 1640). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Mareess description implicitly chastises the oeconomic extravagance of European housewives, who, we infer, do keep “more Household-Stuffe then they have need of,” who do “goe abroad to prate with their neighbours” when they should remain “at home in their houses,” and who are not“more sparing” than their men. The passage evinces a markedly ambivalent attitude toward “Household-Stuffe”: its limitation to bare necessities is first viewed as a sign of female frugality among Guineans (a frugality which puts European women to shame), but then as evidence of the fetishistic nature of their relation to material objects. For in spite of the fact that they “have but few Chests or Cubbords,” they “hang Keies” and other slight wares, including fetissos, at their Girdles, because it makes a “faire shew.” In this, however, they are not so different from European housewives, who, as we have seen, were likewise wont to carry keys and other trinkets such as handkerchiefs “evermore about” them.

Thus, if the handkerchief, as a sign of civility, distinguishes Desdemona from barbarous women who carry at their girdles “a Mat made of barkes of Trees” or “a piece of Carpet,” her excessive attachment to it and its stigmatization as a mere “trifle” suggests a point of resemblance to the African fetish. The cultural anxiety motivating this estranging resemblance between “our” women and “theirs” surfaces at the end of Marees’s description, when he notes that in Guinea it is women, rather than men, who “carrie the Purse” and “have the government of their Houses.” While this observation is ostensibly marked as a sign of difference, it may also register an underlying resemblance to the oeconomy or household management of European housewives.

Yet Othello does not simply recycle, and thereby reinforce, these likelihoods; rather, it importantly reveals Desdemona’s extravagance to be a construction wrought by Iago, a construction that the play ultimately proves false. For Desdemona is not Adriana or Kate; she is not a jealous or extravagant shrew. Nor, however, is she the diligent housewife that the merry wives prove themselves to be; for she displays a marked lack of vigilance in attending to household affairs and household stuff, as evidenced by her “haste” (1. 3. 149) in dispatching “the house affairs” (148) when Othello woos her, by her decision to leave home and accompany him to Cyprus, and by her “negligence” (3. 3. 315) in losing the handkerchief. Indeed, it is Desdemona’s concern with affairs of state, rather than those of the household—with political, rather than domestic, oeconomy—that both accords her tragic stature and ultimately brings her to a tragic end. For Iago’s slander is abetted by the shrewish attributes Desdemona displays at the start of the play, when she vows to keep her beleaguered husband awake at night in pursuing Cassio’s suit and to

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