Cracked commodities, cursed gifts: Transacting women and conceptualizing exchange in early modern England
This study explores the role of exchange in creating, solidifying, or de-stabilizing the bonds and hierarchies structuring social and power relations in early modern England. The symbolic economies of gift and commodity--in social practice and as constructed in treatises and the theater--provided the early modern English with forms for mediating social, sexual, and commercial relations during a period of radical change: the rise of commodity exchange and the move toward capitalism. Given these shifting social and economic modes of organization, gift-giving practices became a highly charged arena of cultural work, and the distinction between gifts and commodities became an important ideological question. In responding to this question, Renaissance drama reveals how contemporary constructions of marriage and female sexuality both participate in and confound the effort to keep gift and commodity exchange distinct. The drama demonstrates the important cultural role of women in generating and absorbing ideological tensions over shifting relations of exchange, as marriage conflicts with other exchange-generated social bonds.
Women's Studies, Economics, Theory, Literature, English
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign