Leaky Vessels

During early modern England, women were often portrayed as “leaky vessels” because the weaker female sex was thought to lack control of their bodies. Gail Kern Paster, author of The Body Embarrassed, depicts how women were portrayed as leaky vessels due to their body’s “material expressivenesss” of producing fluids to a disturbing or shameful extent [25]. Hence, the lack of bodily control or “uncontrol” represented in women was thought to be a function of gender. A woman’s leakiness not only reflected the constant drip of a woman’s menstruation, breast milk or urination, but also her level of deviance. The whore was the leakiest of all female vessels in part because of her tendency to linguistic overflow, in part because her vaginal cavity, full of her customers’ seminal outpourings, was moister than other women’s. The whore’s “unchaste” body is “grotesquely open and hypereffluent. A more obscure connection between whores and urine is to be found in the practice among prostitutes of urinating after copulation as a contraceptive measure” [25].

However, uncontrolled urination was a behavior different types of women were guilty of, usually while they were intoxicated. For example, the gossips in Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, urinated on the floor during the celebration of the Allwit baby’s christening. During this chaos, Allwit told a servant, “Hyda, a looking glass: they have drunk so hard in plate,/ That some of them had need of other vessels” [22]. The women consume so much alcohol that they are “overflowing” with liquids to the point where one of the gossips loses control and urinates. When a woman urinates, not only does she lose control, but she also releases many of the virtues she possessed prior to her looseness. When the gossip loses control of her bladder she feels no shame for publicly urinating on her guest’s floor. In “The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng” by John Skelton, a whore in Elynour’s alehouse “with a barly hood--/ She pyst where she stood./ Than she began to weep…” [30]. The urinating women in both of these texts demonstrate what is considered to be grotesque and appalling conduct by surrounding others; however, these women do not show any shame in their behavior. In fact, the release of their bodily fluids is liberating. It is as if they are purging themselves of the manners they are expected to uphold. Gail Kern Paster claims, “A woman who leaves her house is a woman who talks is a woman who drinks is a woman who leaks…” [25]. The gossips and the bawds in the alehouse are all showing a female independence found to be threatening to men because they are leaving their female realms, the household, to drink and be disorderly in a public setting. This behavior was not only disallowed during Renaissance England, but it was also deemed revolting, for it was detestable for a woman to be showing such freedom.

Nevertheless, a portion of the leakiness women were accused of is not as literal as urination. Women’s relationship with liquid is representative of their unpredictable nature. Gail Kern Paster describes the Renaissance woman’s association of women and water as “not only to insinuate womanly unreliability but also to define the female body even when it is chase, even when it is virgo intacta, as a crucial problematic in the social formations of capitalism—an instance of corporeal waste of the female body…” [25]. Skelton’s repulsive alehouse character, Elynour Rummyng, has a constant nosedrip. “Her nose somedele hoked/ And camously croked,/ Never stoppynge/ But ever droppynge…” [30]. The idea that women never stop dripping exhibits the idea that women consume in excess, and thus, they flush themselves out constantly. Skelton describes another whore, “Her paunche was so puffed/ And so with ale stuffed,/ Had she not hyed apace,/ She had defoyled the place” [30]. This woman had indulged herself in alcohol so much that she surrendered to restraint and released her fluids along with her self-respect.

In A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Allwit gives away his wife’s self-respect by exchanging her body for financial stability provided by Sir Walter. Sex can be thought of as the exchange of fluids. Thus, Allwit is contributing to his wife’s over-consumption and leakiness, which was a very dishonorable trade amongst unmarried couples. Allwit admits, “As what affliction nature more constrains,/ Than feed the wife plump for another’s veins?” [22]. Allwit allows Sir Walter to replenish his wife’s fluids with his own without feeling jealous. This is unlike the typical husband because he is allowing another man’s fluids to mix with his wife’s; however, he is treating sex as a commodity. In other words, he is prostituting his wife to benefit himself. In Thomas Dekker’s The Honest Whore, Bellafront’s father, Orlando, proclaims, “Sieves can hold no water, nor harlots hoard up money; they have many vents, too many sluices to let it out—taverns, tailors, bawds, panders…” [9]. A whore's consumption referred not only to her intake of alcohol, but also to her collection of money for her sexual deeds; however, a whore was accused of being a "sieve" because all the money she earned, she would spend on alcohol or give to her pimp or other men in her life.