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Abstract
In Thomas Middleton’s 1613 city comedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, a group of women celebrate their friend’s successful labor and delivery of a baby girl. They do so while eating, in excess, a banquet of sugary goods. On the surface, this scene has nothing to do with the formation of racial categories in early modern England. This dissertation, however, argues that fictional scenes of eating, married with scenes of (anti-)reproductive labor, were elemental to the emergent lexicon around white femininity throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England. Situating scenes like that from Chaste Maid within the context of England’s developing investments in the transatlantic slave trade, global capitalism, colonialism, and national identity formation, “Consuming Womanhood” traces how depictions of feminized reproductive labor and consumption were implicated in a wider project of British whiteness.
This project contributes to the growing field of early modern critical whiteness studies. Several scholars have focused on the privileging of fairness in paeans to white women’s beauty and on white women’s roles as the bearers of “correct” sexuality and reproduction; very few have considered the fiction of white womanhood as, in part, a negotiation of “who gets to eat what.” “Consuming Womanhood” argues that early modern thinkers developed a paradigm by which white women were granted racial privileges through their performed or stated right to consume the products, labors, and, in fiction, even bodies of non-white persons and non-British lands. This consumerist privilege was afforded to them because their white reproductive labors were central to and protected under the aims of British settler colonialism and imperial expansion. This racial privilege extends to the present day, as white women continue to be seen as the primary demographic of consumer culture and of “correct” sexuality and reproduction.
Early modern writers mobilized the often punned-upon anatomical analogy of the mouth and the vulva, as well as the proximity of the digestive and gestating organs, to imagine consumption as indexical of sexual reproduction. This misogynistic framework allowed English writers to transform tropes of grotesque female embodiment into marks of privileged white femininity. Fiction, as critical race scholars have pointed out, is the tool by which myths of race and gender persist and become naturalized. Thus, works of fiction are crucial sites for investigating how these ideas are manifested and disseminated for a given population to reframe their identities, privileges, and properties. Across four chapters focused on the genres of city comedy (Thomas Middleton’s Chaste Maid in Cheapside), revenge tragedy (William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus), epic allegorical poetry (Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene), and narrative prose (Hester Pulter’s Unfortunate Florinda), “Consuming Womanhood” illuminates how distinct fictional genres created, perpetuated, and complicated these nascent gendered and racial myths.