The Economics of Gender Relations in London City Comedy
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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- abstract
- This thesis examines the influence of nascent capitalism on gender interactions in three London city comedies—Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl, and Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside— to reveal men’s commodification of women as a defining feature of the genre. By charting the ways in which the men of these plays frame the women as commodities, I propose that city comedy stages a fraught condition for the contemporary female subject: men insist upon her visibility as a good circulated within the marketplace, while simultaneously asserting her invisibility as a productive laborer within the economic sphere. Heightening this tension, women’s appearances outside of the home are increasingly associated with prostitution, as if to form a link between abstinence from economic activity and chastity; yet at the same time, the men of city comedy frame female chastity as a valuable commodity made visible within the public marketplace. All three of these plays ends with a festive marriage celebration as if to mask or erase such contradictions, but a thorough examination of their gender relations ultimately demonstrates city comedy’s role in exposing these tensions rather than resolving them.
- subject
- contributor
- Hogan, Sarah (committee chair)
- Valbuena, Olga (committee member)
- Harlan, Susan (committee member)
- date
- 2015-06-23T08:35:42Z (accessioned)
- 2015-06-23T08:35:42Z (available)
- 2015 (issued)
- degree
- English (discipline)
- identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10339/57116 (uri)
- language
- en (iso)
- publisher
- Wake Forest University
- title
- The Economics of Gender Relations in London City Comedy
- type
- Thesis