| Both modern and early modern literature construct privacy as a pleasurable freedom from certain kinds of observation, but early moderns also used the word “private” to indicate the shared freedom of familiarity. The modern critical focus on subject formation pits the “private” individual against the social order, the family, or the symbolic order of language. But the now-obsolete meaning of “privacy” suggests that we may locate its early modern form in modes of intimacy, as well as in the isolated self.; Early modern texts imagine the household not as a retreat from society, but as an object of surveillance and the imposition of norms. This public aspect of households has led literary critics to argue that early modern culture recognized the household only as a mirror of the hierarchical structure of the state. My dissertation shows that in early modern texts the household is characterized by embattled “privacies,” in the early modern sense, created within its “public” spaces. “Public Privacies” focuses on service and marriage, which, I argue, were constructed as parallel, though sometimes oppositional, forms of intimacy.; In the texts I address, treatments of household relations are in dialogue with the expectations that genre establishes. I focus on experiments with genre; in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, authors freely combined genres and invented new forms, and in doing so, they produced new visions of the household. My chapter on All's Well That Ends Well addresses Shakespeare's use of romance and ballad conventions to portray the effects of household surveillance on male and female dependents. This chapter reveals the high stakes of household intimacy and the paradoxical nature of public exposure, which may constitute either reward or punishment. The following chapters demonstrate the impact of “public privacies” such as Shakespeare envisioned on debates over the value of service relations, servants' intimacy with masters and mistresses, and the place of wives in the household in texts including family history, household ordinances, portrait miniatures, Mary Wroth's Urania, Arden of Faversham, and plays by John Fletcher, Francis Beaumont, Nathan Field, and Philip Massinger. |
