"A Place for Freedom, Not to Vex the Senses but to Please Them": Market Fetishes and Female Desire in Margaret Cavendish's "Convent of Pleasure".

Contemporary feminists routinely argue that "capitalism" is a rapacious monster who harms women by enclosing them within the domestic sphere and seducing them into buying things they do not want. This idea that women are vulnerable Eve-like creatures who are coerced into participating in the market economy is countered by early modern women writers who celebrated the rise of the market economy as a medium through which they could use commodities to fashion selves other than those of wife and mother. The market economy was not something that was done to them but something they helped to do. This article will discuss Margaret Cavendishs' play, The Convent of Pleasure (1668) as one such example. The protagonist, aptly named Lady Happy, envisions and creates an alternative version of a convent—one in which the "sisters" can escape the trials and tribulations of wifedom and motherhood and focus solely on fulfilling their desires for pleasure by consuming goods made available by the global marketplace. Commerce and wealth are not preventatives to women's abilities to escape traditional roles and form alternative female selves and sisterly relations, but rather the precondition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]