The Return of the Domestic in Coriolanus: The Return of the Domestic in Coriolanus

Ann C. Christensen, University of Houston

I

Critical responses to Coriolanus tend to concentrate on two dominant issues: the political and the maternal. Approaches to the former typically address the play's representation of the polis, the conflicts between patricians and plebeians, and draw on Shakespeare's historical sources of Plutarch, Livy, and Machiavelli as well as contemporary contexts such as the food shortages and Midlands enclosure uprisings of the early seventeenth century.¹ Understandably, maternal issues—from milk to mildness—dominate psychoanalytic and gender studies of the play and focus on Volumnia—her curious attitude towards nurture, her role in forming her son, his responses to "feeding and dependency."² Of course, neither approach wholly neglects the other.³ Stanley Cavell neatly summarizes the two critical strains while noting that both recognize the play's central concern with nurture: "the play lends itself equally, or anyway naturally, to psychological and to political readings: both perspectives are, for example, interested in who produces food and in how food is distributed and paid for. From a psychological perspective .. . the play directs us to an interest in the development of Coriolanus's character. From a political perspective the play directs us to an interest in whether the patricians or the plebeians are right in their conflict."⁴ The present study poses a third term, the domestic, to encompass both the political and maternal issues raised by the play, along with feeding and nurture. In Coriolanus, home is a place and an idea which localizes the diffuse conflicts in family and state.⁵ A category at once more narrow than "politics" and "gender" and more general than "maternal," the domestic accounts for the complex interplay of gender, power, nurture, family, and state by addressing the play's convoluted estimations of "home" and not home. The Shakespearean household houses the family, while serving as a metaphor for the early modern state.⁶ By domestic I mean both literal households and the people, objects, and activities associated with the place where one lives; for the purposes of this essay, the category covers both home and homeland, "[t]he country, our dear nurse" (V.iii.110). Because it conveys a sense of location, "domestic" is especially suited to address this play so rich in architectural metaphors and so dependent upon the physical boundaries—city gates and thresholds—of homes, Rome, and Corioli/Antium.⁷

Read the rest of this Criticism with our The Return of the Domestic in Coriolanus: The Return of the Domestic in Coriolanus Access Pass.