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 the anthropologist Mintz’s assertion in ‘Sweetness and Power’ (1985) that ‘sweet things are, in both literal and figurative senses, more the domain of women than of men’.
My thesis examines the emergent relationship between women and sugar in the early modern period (c.1590-1642), and how this connection is registered in dramatic performance. Sugar was becoming an increasingly visible product in early modern people’s lives in domestic and commercial spaces as early colonial economies developed abroad. My research uncovers the shifting metaphorical and material dimensions of sugar in textual and performance cultures and consider how they intersect and ratify contemporary cultural constructions of femininity. Using recipe books, domestic manuals, and dietaries alongside surviving material objects such as banqueting trenchers and still lives, I unpack the gendering of sugar in global, national, and domestic spheres. Researching plays by Middleton, Fletcher, Webster, and Shakespeare, I examine women’s close involvement with and symbolic ties to sugar, revealing how they became associated with interconnected ideas around creativity, artifice, sexual desire, class aspiration, racial othering, and global exploitation. This thesis is interdisciplinary, contributing to the work of material culture, food history, gender studies, critical race studies, and performance studies.
