Desire and domestic economy

Abstract

In seventeenth-century Holland female buyers and sellers dominated the visible commerce of the cities' marketplaces. Those marketplaces had come to bear the burden of symbolizing a nation's values, rooted in the activity of economic exchange. Paintings of the market were opportunities for this society to categorize, scrutinize, and question the nature of women's desire in the public sphere, a desire that balances uneasily between the erotic and the material. These images negotiate conflicting ideals concerning the material wants of women as consumers and women's status as alluring (yet ideally virtuous) performers in a public spectacle of femininity. © 2001, College Art Association of America, Inc.