Being Vendible: Commodification and Agency in All’s Well That Ends Well

Economic calculation and acts of exchange permeate All’s Well That Ends Well in its entirety, though this economic logic is frequently encoded within political, religious, and gender discourses. In a period before the formalization of an economic language, these other discourses serve to figure a nascent, and therefore conceptually unstable, economic value system. This intertwining of categories and discourses is evinced in the opening scene, when Helena and Paroles hold a conversation that is at once a discussion of female sexuality and a treatise on the nature and value of the commodity in a market society. According to Paroles, Helena’s preservation of her virginity not only goes against marriage custom but also violates economic rationality. Her virginity is “a commodity that will lose the gloss with lying: the longer kept, the less worth. Off with’t while ’tis vendible” (1.1.141–42). Paroles pressures Helena to “answer the time of request,” encouraging her to submit as a passive object of male desire (1.1.144–45). That Paroles goes on to compare her virginity to goods that have gone out of fashion like “the brooch and the toothpick” stresses the ephemeral value of virginity as a commodity (1.1.147). The way Paroles frames his exhortation, however, leaves open a space for ambiguity and resistance. After all, just how Helena answers the request or responds to demand requires a certain agency on her part. This ambiguity or tension between passivity and activity, objectification and subjectification, is in fact built into the multiplicity of meanings associated with the early modern usage of “commodity.” The term could, according to the OED, refer to “A thing produced for use or sale; a piece of merchandise; an article of commerce,” which would seem to be Paroles’ intended meaning. But it could also indicate “The quality or condition of being convenient, suitable, or useful,” a connotation that leaves room for agency to the extent that such a quality is a matter of perception, and perception is not static but open to manipulation. And thirdly, a commodity could also designate a prostitute, an association certainly implied by Paroles’ reduction of virginity to an object of commercial exchange and consumption (“Commodity, n.”). How Helena situates herself within this nexus of possible meanings about her status as a commodity shapes how we understand her role in the play.