The play articulates these cultural tensions by envisaging the domestic sphere alternately as impoverished and potent. "Home" is less a staged locus than an insult in the play, more often used adverbially than nominally.²⁷ Volumnia herself equates action or productivity with a necessary absence from home when she claims to prefer the noble death of eleven (hypothetical) sons in battle "than [have] one voluptuously surfeit out of action" at home (I.iii.21-3). The congenital phobia of eating in Marcius and Volumnia as well as the consumptive nature of "home" having been ably treated elsewhere, I am concerned with the dual evaluations of "home" as both constitutive force integral to the public sphere and a debilitated, second-best place where only the weak reside: for example, Marcius fights abroad, while the people stay home; Menenius, the notably mild patrician, is a "perfecter giber for the table than a necessary bencher in the Capitol" (II.i.74-6).²⁸

The twin offenses of being a Volscian or a homebody register the ambivalence of the domestic. Marcius equates "retire[ment]" or retreat with otherness. "He that retires," challenging his army at the gates of Corioles, "I'll take him for a Volsce" (I.iv.28), eventually bidding the Romans, "Mend and charge home, / . . . we'll beat them to their wives" (lines 38, 41). While most editors gloss "home" as an adverb, meaning "to the utmost," the fact that Marcius's charge yokes "home" with "wives" lends a sexual, and specifically domestic cast to the image. Marcius's invocation of the wives of the enemy—a category of person mentioned frequently in the play (IV.iv.2, II.i.168, V.vi.150)—specifies the association of home with female relations and, like Volumnia's fantasy, shows the preference for manly action against the "voluptuous surfeit" of home-dwelling.

Household objects themselves as well as domestic activities take on a negative cast and seem irrelevant to those of the political world; yet the play's central conflict over the price and availability of corn reminds us of the political valence of ordinary domestic items such as tools and foodstuffs. The first citizen calls the others to action: "Let us revenge this with our pikes ere / we become rakes; for the gods know I speak this in / hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge" (I.i.20-22). Marcius fails to see the political import of pikes and bread. He refuses the spoils awarded him, and is baffled by the Roman soldiers looting "[c]ushions, leaden spoons, / Irons of a doit" while he himself remains ready for further battle: "My work hath yet not warmed me" (I.v.5-6, 17). To "keep at home" is one way to express surrender, as when Menenius wavers in his campaign to address Marcius in his banishment (V.i.7).²⁹ The ability of domestic discourse to comprehend the public life in the streets, senate, and on the battlefield appears in Menenius's theory of the value of a hot meal: "He was not taken well; he had not dined" (V.i.50). While Menenius's assumption does not apply to Marcius, we should not fail to notice that the play supports the belief that domestic comforts, including meals, have the positive power to soften and the negative power to emasculate their consumers. Menenius pursues his humors theory, noting that without adequate nourishment,

We .. . are unapt
To give or to forgive; but when we have
stuffed
These pipes and these conveyances of our
blood
With wine and feeding, we have suppler souls
Than in our priest-like fasts.

(lines 52-6)

The "suppler souls" of well-fed householders compare favorably, in Menenius's metaphor, to the rigidity of fasting priests. In this image, home life implies satiety, emotional exchange ("to give or to forgive"), erotic fulfillment, family, and nurture—a vision challenged in the alternative domestic discourses of the play.

As if returning home were a type of "retirement" from politics, the patricians continually command the people home, off the public streets, out of the political fray. So Menenius tells the homely tale of the belly in an effort to send the people home. In the confrontation between the people and Marcius in act III, Menenius and senators alike urge one another home (III.i. 230, 234), and Brutus orders Marcius pursued "to his house" and plucked thence while bidding his co-agitator to meet in the market-place: "Go not home" (lines 308, 330). When things get too heated, the tribunes Sicinius and Brutus repeat their wish to dismiss the people home (IV.ii.1, 5, 7) just before Volumnia makes her invidious comparison between the Capitol and "[t]he meanest house in Rome" (IV.ii.40)—a rhetorical foray which Menenius celebrates: "You have told them home" (IV.ii.48). Going home means giving up political action.

In this play, which climaxes in the mutual banishment of citizens and hero (III.iii.117-24), the ejection from home—whether literal or metaphorical—is equally fraught. For example, Marcius verbally alienates the people by expressing his belief that they are barbarians rather than native Romans (III.i.238-40). The ultimate manifestation of this insult is Volumnia's taunt that her son is in fact a Volscian bastard, a point to which I return below (V.iii. 178). "Home" then alternately images the Roman and non-Roman, the plebeian and patrician, the familiar and barbaric, weakening surfeit and strengthening nurture.

That the positive values of domestic experience such as comfort, familiarity, and nurture have a place in Roman civic life inflects the language men use to express public matters. As noted, Marcius tries to deny the authority of the domestic sphere by denying his affiliation with it, "As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin" (V.iii.36-7). Yet such a statement depends on the very assertion of kinship, on the inescapable ties to a realm of personal history. In the use of this rhetorical posture he is joined by both Volscian and Roman men. Coriolanus, Cominius, and Aufidius independently cast their military relations in terms of their own wedding days (and nights!) and family ties, thereby acknowledging the crucial power of the domestic aspect of their lives, as they pretend to disown it.³⁰

Masculine relations in the Senate and on the battlefield are figured not only as heterosexual (marital) relations, as Adelman has argued, but also in terms of the whole of "private" life.³¹Coriolanus flattens out Shakespeare's "division of experience," showing that the public sphere of war and statecraft is meaningless without reference to private, domestic foundations. Just as the debt to a foreign host is seen to supersede paternal protection in Cominius's rhetoric, and just as the compulsion of hate transcends Aufidius's brotherly bonds, so are other domestic relations deployed as ironic standards against which to measure non-domestic commitments. In a quasi-romantic moment of battle, Cominius calls Marcius the "Flower of warriors" (I.vi.32); as they embrace Marcius exclaims:

O, let me clip ye
In arms as sound as when I woo'd, in heart
As merry as when our nuptial day was done
And tapers burnt to bedward!

(lines 29-32)

Comparing the experience of camaraderie in combat to his courtship and consummation of marriage, Marcius shows how fundamental (and handy) domestic metaphors are in conveying other experiences. The "arms" and "heart" that won Virgilia now serve the state and join him to comrades. By accretion this figurai speech establishes the domestic not so much as a vehicle for metaphor but as a realm of experience upon which other, extramural relationships are based.

In similar situations Cominius and Aufidius find rhetorical capital in the invocation of family ties. Cominius responds to the news of his friend's banishment with overwhelming patriotism:

I do love
My country's good with a respect more
tender,
More holy and profound, than mine own life,
My dear wive's estimate, her womb's increase
And treasure of my loins;

(III.iii.111-5)

This testimonial to public spirit depends on the sanctity of the domestic economy (see "estimate," "increase," "treasure"). Similarly, Aufidius relates his alliance with Coriolanus to his desire for his wife when crossing the threshold into domestic space. Momentarily, this public affiliation supersedes even the essential pleasures of sex, home, marriage:

Know thou first,
I lov'd the maid I married; never man
Sighed truer breath. But that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold.

(IV.v.114-9)

As if to substantiate his assurance to Marcius, Aufidius welcomes him over his "threshold" and "makes a / mistress of his guest (IV.v.197-8). Aufidius resubscribes to the code of hospitality once broken by setting Coriolanus "at upper end o' th' / table" (IV.v. 195-6). The rendering of political bonds in terms of domestic union furthers the play's insistence that the two spheres are integrated.

This pattern whereby politico-military alliances are forged on the model of domestic bonds is emphasized by the strategic repetition of "threshold"—that potent liminal space between inside and outside, which can be captured in performance.³² Entryways and gates of all sorts signal transformation in the play as when Caius Marcius enters and emerges bloody from the city gates of Corioles and is renamed for the conquest (I.ix), again when he is reborn under Aufidius's roof as traitor to Rome (IV.v), and differently when Virgilia follows the other women to her husband's encampment (V.iii). Interestingly, the term threshold occurs twice in this play (and only six times altogether in the Shakespeare canon).³³ It is first used by Virgilia in lines already alluded to as she refuses to budge over her threshold onto the public streets (I.iii.71-2). Second, it is uttered at this reunion by Aufidius who remembers his bride entering his threshold—a memory invoked in order to ennoble the present occasion.³⁴ This word is in each case uttered from within domestic settings as if to suggest that its transformational power originates there. Although these two domestic thresholds of the play are circumscribed spatially (cf. Valeria's judgment of Virgilia, "Fie, you confine yourself most unreasonably" [I.iii.73]) and temporally (Virgilia's self-elected place is in the home until her husband's return, Aufidius's domestic identity is chiefly a past-tense construction, remembered "when . . . first" he married), in fact, the private, interior spaces of the play help to define that "world elsewhere" which Marcius seeks.

The repeated attempts to deny the power of domestic space extend to the troubling representations of household inhabitants: Virgilia, whose commitment to keeping house is derided by the older women; the wineswilling Menenius; the futilely-spinning Penelope. The literal fact that widows and orphans are necessary results of warfare heightens the rhetorical force of unmaking domestic ties, and the play frequently dwells on "broken families."³⁵ Rather than boast of how many men he has killed, Coriolanus focuses on his destruction and division of families: the wives and boys in Antium, the "widows in Corioles" and "mothers that lack sons" (II.i.168-9).³⁶ Returning to the city he invaded, Coriolanus addresses Antium with a mixture of pride and fear:

Tis I that made thy widows. Many an heir
Of these fair edifices 'fore my wars
Have I heard groan and drop. Then know me
not,
Lest that thy wives with spits and boys with
stones
In puny battle slay me.

(IV.iv.2-6)

In this instance of Shakespeare's keenest irony, it seems unlikely that Marcius doubts the outcome of a "puny battle" waged by housewives and children. Yet he knows he is vulnerable, at the moment unarmed, undefended, unallied. Having denigrated the private citizens of Rome, he arrives here and subjects himself to a foreign version of the same danger. The spit—the same symbolic kitchen tool envisaged in popular iconography and contemporary drama—is indeed potent as the symbolic hub of the household and as a weapon.³⁷ An ordinary household tool like the pikes, "stiff bats and clubs" of the Roman commoners, the spit can be used for political ends. The fact that a confluence of "widows" and "people" "tear[s] him to pieces," crying vengeance for their families—"He killed my son!—My daughter!—He killed my / cousin Marcus! He killed my father!" (V.vi.119-21)—asserts the real threat the domestic sphere poses to a soldier whose "work" destroys family bonds.

Although the Volscian people kill Marcius, in many ways they constitute the "collective double" of the Romans, and on stage the same actors almost always play both crowds.³⁸ The people of Rome share their dual representation: they, too, are feminized and domesticated; they, too, pose a real political threat to Marcius. As Adelman notes, "The crowd, then, is both dependent, unmanly, contemptible—and terrifyingly ready to rise up and devour Coriolanus."³⁹ In II.i, amidst the "Flourish" and "cornets" of Marcius's return, Brutus grudgingly reports on the people's making a spectacle of the victor:

Your prattling nurse
Into a rapture lets her baby cry,
While she chats [chatters about] him; the
kitchen malkin pins
Her richest lockram [cheap linen] 'bout her
reechy neck,
Clamb'ring the walls to eye him.

(lines 195-9)

Brutus's characterization of his own constituents in the lurid detail of their smothering up "walls . . . [s]talls, bulks, [and] windows" signals his disdain for the working classes but also his awareness of their political importance (H.i.199). His description of these working-class women, the nurse and the malkin—both entrusted with domestic nurture—as representatives of the people, serves to identify the crowd with the alternately devalued and empowered domestic sphere.⁴⁰ This logic denies the political efficacy of the people, attempting to divorce the domestic sphere from the political machine. Fearful that Marcius's power will slacken "our office," Brutus sets up an opposition between, on the one hand, private citizens like nurses and slatterns, whose presence on the streets is obscene, and, on the other, political leaders like himself who deserve to rule (II.i.211-2).

One act later Marcius similarly figures as inconsequential the "virgin voice / That babies lulls asleep" (III.ii.114-5); he likewise denigrates the speech of harlots, eunuchs, schoolboys, and beggars—all associated with domesticity, sexuality, and powerlessness. The "voice[s]," "tear[s]," and "tongue[s]" of the inactive are incompatible with "[his] throat of war" (line 112). His disdain vents against the plebeians' carnality, contingency, and dependence; he despises their "desire, be it desire for food, for spoils, for a voice, for a vote."⁴¹ Significantly, the desires of the androgynous lower-classes associate them with consumption and with the domestic, from which the hero distances himself. Aufidius's indictment of Coriolanus presents with ironic force the power of the domestic sphere. He reports to the Volscian heads of state:

He has betrayed your business and given up,
For certain drops of salt, your city Rome—
.. . to his wife and mother;
Breaking his oath and resolution like
A twist of rotten silk; never admitting
Counsel o' th' war; but at his nurse's tears
He whined and roared away your victory.

(V.vi.91-7)

The reigning opposition is here laid bare: the entitlements of war—"your business," "your city Rome," "your victory"—are traded to women for tears, metonyms for the emotional hold of domestic affiliations. The private sphere represented by mothers, wives, nurses, slatterns, and babies is thus seen to be vital to political and military business, and its resurgence to the ruin of Marcius.

When the domestic is seen broadly to encompass not only Volumnia's overbearing motherhood but all forms of nurture, affection, and family relations, the hero's characteristic abstemiousness ("better to starve, / Than crave the hire which first we do deserve" [II.iii.108-9]) is a function of his politically disastrous renunciation of domestic hospitality—the source of comfort and communal feeding. Significantly, it is only among strangers that Coriolanus eats, and by them instated as the foundation of their ritual: Volscian "soldiers use him as the grace 'fore meat, / Their talk at table, and their thanks at end" (IV.vii 3-4), but in his own country, he promised to starve, like his mother, supping upon "anger."

Adelman's reading of Coriolanus's reception into "a safe male world" in Antium contributes to my own sense of the problem of the play: men view women's domestic authority as threats to their own identity and to the workings of the public sphere. She explains: "Here, far from Rome, Coriolanus at last allows his hunger and his vulnerability to be felt, and he is given food . . . But here in Antium, the play moves toward a fantasy in which nourishment may be safely taken because it is given by a male, by a father-brother-twin rather than a mother."42 In the context of the domestic, then, it is not nourishment per se that Coriolanus rejects, nor only that nourishment dispensed or withheld by his mother, but all the associations of food, nurture, familiarity, and family with the domestic sphere. Seen in this way, the domestic is political.⁴³