True Relations by Dolan Frances E.;

Author:Dolan, Frances E.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Of Domesticall Duties

At 700 pages, William Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties is one of the longest printed books of domestic advice; it has sometimes been called the best or at least the best seller.81 The table of contents alone is twelve closely printed pages. Gouge reassures his reader at the outset: “Though for such a matter as is handled in these Treatises, the worke may seeme at first sight to be too copious, yet I hope the observant Reader will not finde it too tedious. It is the variety of many, not the prolixity of few points, which hath made this booke to swell to that bignesse which it hath” (2v–3r). It is so big that it is most often represented through extracts.82 While William and Malleville Haller praise it as “encyclopedic,” they also call it “authoritative, exhaustive, compendious, systematic, and dull.”83 As I will show, Gouge’s aggressively copious text undermines many of the dichotomies through which it is most often understood. Gouge builds assumptions about practice into his prescriptions, thus destabilizing an opposition between the two; he demands and instructs active readers, opening up the possibility that they will apply his lessons in ways he does not predict; and, in what has become the most discussed, but I think least understood, feature of his book, he builds resistant female readers into his text, establishing them as alternate sites of authority. At the center of the oppositions and tensions in Of Domesticall Duties, we often find the figure of the wife, whom Gouge has installed there, I will argue, as a kind of countertheorist of domestic life.

In an epistle dedicating the book to his parishioners, Gouge addresses an active reader, whom he urges to amend printers’ errors “with a pen” (sig. A1r) and for whom he facilitates a selective reading process, offering that detailed table of contents as well as his parallel listing of duties at a glance so that “you may the more readily finde out such particular points as you desire most especially to read” (4v). In discussing his own method, Gouge refuses the prescription/practice divide by claiming that he modeled his recommendations on behavior he observed. He then moves from observation to what he calls “disposition,” which the OED defines as “The action of setting in order, or condition of being set in order; arrangement, order; relative position of the parts or elements of a whole.” If Gouge installed his observations of lived relations in his textual relation, through disposition he relied on his own apprehension of relatedness, of how one thing follows from another and implies the next, as a principle of organization and a spur to inclusion: “My method and manner of proceeding brought many things to my minde, which otherwise might have slipped by. For by method sundry and severall points appertaining to one matter are drawne forth, as in a chaine one linke draweth up another.”84 For Gouge, chains or threads of association should guide the memory as well as the composition of a text: “As method is an helpe to Invention, so also to retention.

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