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Suburbs, Supplementarity, and Transvestism in the Roaring Girl1 Suburbs, Supplementarity, and Transvestism in The Roaring Girl 45 Feminist Studies in English Literature Vol. 19, No. 3 (2011) Suburbs, Supplementarity, and Transvestism in The Roaring Girl1 Jaecheol Kim (Inha University) I What Jacobean city comedies most emphatically assert is the irreducible cultural heterogeneity of metropolitan London. The rise of “city comedies” as a subgenre reflects the expansion of London, whose population swelled to more than 180,000 around 1600, second only to Paris and Naples in Europe (Howard 1). The other face of the rise of city comedies, however, is the silence of the countryside as a “foreign” space. In sixteenth-century English, “alien” and “foreigner” were descriptively synonymous, but, as Frank Kermode maintains, in metropolitan London’s legal terms, the word “alien” or “stranger” meant people from foreign countries including Scotland and Ireland 1 This essay is extracted and updated from my doctoral dissertation entitled “Staging Nationhood: Topographical Liminality and Chorographical Representations in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama” (University at Buffalo, SUNY). 46 Jaecheol Kim while “foreigners” usually meant “persons from outside the city” or “those who were not freemen of the city” (2). This suggests that the countryside, as a “foreign” realm, becomes a subtext or absent Other of early modern city comedies. If, as Raymond Williams puts it, what we now call “metropolitanism” is nothing more than an extended relationship between the “country” and the “city,” the silence of the outer space of the urban enclosure is an unmistakable sign of 2 metropolitanism. Yet one should also be aware that insofar as early modern London is concerned, spatial relations are not easily reduced to a city-countryside binary, and the region outside the city wall was never a cultural homogeneity: the London suburbs, located in-between the city and the country, become sites of cultural negotiations -- at once embracing and rejecting the alterities of foreign lives formed outside of the city wall. Dekker and Middleton’s Roaring Girl, in this regard, best illustrates how the city proper deals with the cultural liminality of the metropolitan margins open to foreignness. In this essay, I shall explore metropolitan geographies, in particular, the in-betweenness of the London suburbs, focusing on their relations to transvestism in Dekker and Middleton’s Roaring Girl. 2 For Williams’s own notion of metropolitanism, based on the extended relationship between the city and the country, see “New Metropolis” (279-88) in The Country and the City. Suburbs, Supplementarity, and Transvestism in The Roaring Girl 47 II Even though class mobility is the prime concern and narrative framework of The Roaring Girl, as the manifest class antagonism between Sir Alexander and Guy Fitzallard reveals, Moll, 3 as a transvestite, has no distinctive class identity. In addition, because she is not in disguise, her gender-bending is readily discernable: as Marjorie Garber points out, despite her cross-dressing, she is almost always read as a woman or virago by other characters 4 of the play. If her gender is the only category that her cross-dressing is intended to express, her first appearance in “a frieze jerkin and a black safeguard” (2.1.180-81) reveals that her cross-dressing is imperfect because while “jerkin” is masculine apparel, “safeguard” is 5 obviously feminine. What her identities as a transvestite express, I would argue, is involved with a spatial-topographical category. In other words, insofar as Moll’s cross-dressing or gender-bending is 3 Stephen Orgel points out that, in early modern England, “roaring” itself was an upper class or gentry habit, claiming their aristocratic privilege; but he generally understands Moll as a “lower-middle-class” subject (13). Yet in my reading, apart from her lumpen-like behaviors, the text never directly indicates her estate or even means of living. 4 Garber points out that “She [Moll] is always read as a woman” unlike other transvestite characters of Renaissance theater. The narrative effect of this is that because she is already a woman “she does not, will not, cannot disappear into the fictive ‘real’ identity of woman she is supposed to be” (231). 5 In seventeenth-century English, “safeguard” means “An outer skirt or petticoat worn by women to protect their dress when riding”; “Safe-guard, n..” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford UP, Web. 14 Mar. 2000 <http://www.oed.com>. 48 Jaecheol Kim concerned, the play seems interested in the London “suburb” and its cultural heterogeneity it expresses. The Prologue of the play geographically delineates Moll’s identity as a suburban roarer against the city proper and patriarchal property controls: One is she That roars at midnight in deep tavern bowls, That beats the watch, and constables controls; Another roars i’ th’ daytime, swears, stabs, gives braves, Yet sells her soul to the lust of fools and slaves. Both these are suburb roarers. Then there’s beside A civil city roaring girl, whose pride, Feasting, and riding, shakes her husband’s state, And leaves him roaring through an iron grate. (Prologue 16-24) In early modern London, suburbs along with liberties were often locations for subcultural activities such as theft, drinking, theater- 6 going, cutpursing, bear-baiting, and, in particular, prostitution. The 6 The geopolitical implications of London “liberties,” and in particular its liminality are studied in depth by Steven Mullaney. He says, “Between city and country stood an uncertain and somewhat irregular territory where the powers of city, state, and church often came together but did not coincide.” Like French “banlieux” those places were at once “where the law was made known” and “places of exile or banishment” (21). Also, Susan Wells discusses in detail the relations between London liberties and city comedies, focusing on their carnival-like aspects (37-60). Yet, we need to distinguish London liberties from suburbs. These two tend to overlap, but a liberty such as Blackfriars is Suburbs, Supplementarity, and Transvestism in The Roaring Girl 49 Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “suburb” as “residential parts belonging to a town or city that lie immediately outside and 7 adjacent to its walls or boundaries,” and John Stow, perhaps the most avid early modern London chorographer, terms it the “ward of London without wall,” meaning outside the wall (358). Both definitions stress its liminal features -- existing at once both inside and outside the city. The prefix of the word, “sub,” also denotes its “supplementarity” or “adjacency,” and it has “disseminating” political effects. Even though it is outside the city proper, supplementing the said area, it still forms the city, and through its porous boundaries with the city proper, the London suburb disseminates all cultural transgressions as well as plagues and French diseases to the city proper. Thus what the suburb troubles is not the 8 city in general but its proper part. How to contain this “foreign” area was one of the prime political concerns for the Jacobean state. For example, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure reflects James’s located within the city wall, while the suburb usually means spaces outside the mural enclosure. 7 “Suburb, n..” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford UP, Web. 14 Mar. 2000 <http://www.oed.com>. 8 Recently, Kelly J. Stage has discussed the early modern London space for women represented in The Roaring Girl. Even though, in her essay, she does not develop any detailed discussion based on the supplementarity of “suburb” in relation to the “city proper,” she points out Moll’s lack of “a proper locus” (418). Her argument is based on Michel de Certeau’s claim that “‘a calculated action determined without official power of a place’ is a tool of the Other” (qtd. in 418). But her reading does not illuminate the inseparable relationship between topographical in-betweenness and gender liminality in the play. 50 Jaecheol Kim “proclamation” (1.2.76) which issues that “All houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down” (1.2.78). This threatening topographical in-betweenness of the London suburbs becomes the very topos of Moll’s transvestism. As a metropolitan chorography, The Roaring Girl is complete with the names of suburban places and their representations. Places such as “Bankside” (1.2.207), “Tyburn” (2.1.283), “Marybone Park” (3.1.4), “Smithfield” (3.1.11), “Islington” (3.1.32), “Chick Lane” (3.1.167), “Bedlam” (3.3.85), “Holborn” (3.3.185), “Shoe Lane” (3.3.225), “Saint Kathern” (4.1.110), “Clifford’s Inn” (4.1.192), “Cold Harbor” (4.2.169), and “Isle of Dogs” (5.1.120) indicate the marginal spaces of London with their lumpen-proletariat lives and seedy neighborhoods. In the play, “Brentford,” “Staines,” or “Ware” (2.1.285-86), as London’s outer spaces, are frequently referred to as places for incognito sexual diversions, in which one’s urban identity completely disappears, and the places work as only the absent others in the text. Yet the play also directly engages the threatening in- between presence of the topographical liminality of London suburbs. Among them, “Marybone Park,” “Chick Lane,” and “Clifford Inn” are inseparably associated with Moll’s topographical identities as a cross-dresser. For example, when Laxton requests his Coachman to drive “to the hither end of Marybone Park,” he thinks that this is “a fit place for Moll to get in” (3.1.3-4). This short conversation figures indeed an overdetermined cultural signification of her suburbanity along with her cross-dressings. Andor Gomme’s text glosses that Marybone Park was “well-known as the burial ground for whores and panders because it was near Tyburn” (54). The notoriety of Suburbs, Supplementarity, and Transvestism in The Roaring Girl 51 Marybone continued until somewhat recently; for Karl Marx, who modeled capitalism on nineteenth-century England, and who certainly knew about its topographical effects such as creation of slums and wretched lives in the city margins, Marybone was a 9 perfect spatial archetype of these effects.
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