Sugar and Femininity in Early Modern Drama

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Sweetness and femininity are entwined in our language. Women are 'honey-traps', 'sweethearts', 'sugar-babes'; girls are made of 'sugar and spice and all things nice'. This is an extreme manifestation of theanthropologist Mintz's assertion in 'Sweetness and Power' (1985) that 'sweet things are, in both literal andfigurative senses, more the domain of women than of men'. My research will investigate the gendering ofsugar as it crystallized in the early modern period, specifically as it is exposed in an under-examinedphenomenon, the sweet banquet. While the queering of sweetness has been explored by scholars as asynaesthetic lexicon historically tied to the structures of sex and gender, the emergent relationshipbetween sugar and femininity in the period has not been interrogated. I argue that banquet sceneson-stage are dramatic crucibles in which women and sugar-work are elided. Playwrights such as Middletonand Shakespeare respond to a proliferation of cultural ephemera which conceptualised womensimultaneously in three distinct ways: as creative agents, as sweet consumables, and as voraciousconsumers of sugar. This formed a complex web of signification that fed into larger ideological anxietiessurrounding female agency, the body, and wayward appetite. The field of food history has come to fruitionin recent scholarship; cultural historians are addressing the significance of food practices as bothconstitutive and reflective of gender construction, but little scholarship has been published on itsrefractions in early modern literature, especially in the theatres. My research will interrogate thecomplexities of female appetite as performative. This will lead onto an enriched understanding of howwomen share an impulse to use appetite and food as a focus of their symbolic language. Female appetitewill be revealed as a phenomenon which, far from being natural, is a culturally codified construct, a signifierof autonomy, sexuality, and shame.