Urban Space and Material Goods: The En-gendered City of London in Epicene and The Roaring Girl

초록

This article takes up two Jacobean city comedies, Epicoene (1609) and Roaring Girl (1611), as a way of investigating the cultural geography of early modern London in which cultural and sexual (ab-)normality was materialized in terms of spatial movement and re-arrangement. I would argue that the issue of gender in these city comedies is circumscribed by and imbricated with the matters of space and materials. While launching a kind of hermaphroditic challenge, the transvestites of the plays—Epicene and Moll Cutpurse—certainly put a question to the idea of gender identity, the geographical boundary of the city and the court, and the social order of consumption and possession. Such a challenge is often substantiated in the plays by materials in circulation among them, which point to a new emerging way of constructing individuality—or early modern subjectivity. For instance, if Morose’s secluded residence is “a negative example of domesticity,” Moll’s streets do certainly offer an image of urban space that mills against feminine domesticity. The urban locations, in tandem with possessive materiality, serve to reveal the ways in which identity politics lends itself to the new social order of urbanity in early modern England.

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