Legislating "Middle-Class" Morality in the Marriage Market: Ester Sowernam's Ester hath hang'd Haman

• Published in: English literary renaissance 1994, Vol.24 (1), p.154-183
• Main Author: MATCHINSKE, MEGAN
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Chastity; Contracts; Esters; Husbands; Marriage; Marriage law; Men; Renaissance literature; Theater; Widows
• ISSN: 0013-8312; 1475-6757
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-6757.1994.tb01420.x

Ester Sowernam's Ester hath hang'd Haman turns marriage into a system of fair market exchange, demanding financial obligation from men and promising in return the construction of an internalized code of conduct for women. Drawing parallels between contract law and marriage practice, Sowernam's account reveals current cultural anxieties about marriage as a reorganization of "middle-class" property and also foreshadows a later concretization of those anxieties in emended civil legislation. While Sowernam's tract loosely parallels other early Stuart texts in its recognition of English marriage law as a site of cultural instability, it reinterprets those predominantly masculine-centered accounts, including William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Sowernam's valorization of female chastity as an obligation in marriage necessarily rewrites much of the masculinist ambivalence that occurs simultaneously, securing for women a real and saleable "value" in pre-nuptial negotiations. But that success regulates as it revises. In a contractual catch-22, Sowernam advocates for women a program of chaste behavior that codifies greater and more precise categorizations of female regulation, categorizations that are called to service as the English state begins to embrace the private and the domestic as sites of potential invigilation and control.