HERE is a wonderful painting, Vegetable Market in Amsterdam (c. 1661-1662) by the Dutch painter Gabrielle Metsu. It reminds me of a passage in Virginia Woolf’s feminist lecture series, A Room of One’s Own. While describing her meal in the dining hall of a women’s college, a meal which is greatly inferior to the glorious repast at a nearby men’s college, Woolf writes:

Dinner was being served in the great dining-hall. Far from being spring it was in fact an evening in October. Everybody was assembled in the big dining-room. Dinner was ready. Here was the soup. It was a plain gravy soup. There was nothing to stir the fancy in that. One could have seen through the transparent liquid any pattern that there might have been on the plate itself. But there was no pattern. The plate was plain. Next came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes — a homely trinity, suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market, and sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge, and bargaining and cheapening and women with string bags on Monday morning.

Notice that to Woolf, marketing is “cheapening.” This painting suggests that marketing, even at its lowest, can be elevating. The women to the left in the canvas do seem to be cheapened by the experience of bargaining, assuming that is what they are engaged in at the moment. But the woman to the right possesses a calm and tranquility that transcends her surroundings. She seems untouched by the argument and the disorder. And that is because of her inner qualities, the artist suggests. Furthermore, the rooster and the cabbage leaves and the overarching tree make this excursion to buy food an encounter with nature in the middle of the city. It is a merging of country and city so that one imagines the woman returning to her city dwelling with the earth and the fields and the open skies clinging to her cabbage and onions. In comparison, the rummaging among words that must have filled the days of an intellectual like Woolf seems cheapening.

— Comments —

A reader writes:

Please make sure to look up “cheapen” in a historical dictionary. It meant simply to bargain or negotiate the price of something before it acquired the more specific sense of lowering the price. In just the same way, at present the word Sale on a sign in a store probably means “Reduced,” but that’s not always what “sale” means.

Laura writes:

Woolf’s is distastefully referring to the financial transactions of marketing. A woman or vendor is fixated on getting the best price. It is a sordid affair, with mud, cattle rumps, yellowing vegetables. Like much of women’s work, it is a lowering experience.

Even if I improperly read the word in its modern sense, the point is the same.

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

The English verb to cheapen has the same etymon as the German verb zu kaufen or the Swedish verb att köpa, both of which mean “to buy.”  In fact to cheapen used to mean “shopping in the market”; its sense was purely neutral.  A famous street in London is called Cheapside; it began as a market-street.  In Scandinavia whole towns are called -köping, such as Nyköping and Linköping.   An old word for a commercially produced book is a chapbook, which still meant a mass-market paperback book in British usage into the middle of the last century.  Woolf’s employment of the verb to cheapen reflects degeneration in the language, which we can probably trace to the Romantic disdain for the market.  The Romantics had their reasons.  The market is not the only institution in society and must be brought into balance with the others.  Nevertheless, the Romantic attitude toward “getting and spending” (as Wordsworth called it in a famous sonnet) became something of a cliché, as did the simplified attitude that it denoted in its cliché-besotted users.  As my old teacher Eric Gans likes to argue, nothing sells in the modern market like denouncing the market.

 Laura writes:

Thank you for the clarification.

Paul writes:

Fancy or not, the author used emotion rather than reason to conclude the men’s feast was superior to the women’s.  She did not provide the evidence.  There is nothing about beef, greens, and potatoes to suggest the rear end of a cow, which is an attempt to be pejorative.

Curiously, she did not think much of the rear end of the cow, which yields the round, a delicious, lean portion.  And right next to it is the leanest and best portion, the sirloin.  A fancy writer is supposed to be using almost every word and sentence properly.  The author perhaps missed with this paragraph.  We do get that she thinks the women’s feast was inferior to the men’s.

Granted marbling usually is associated with more flavor among many and maybe most beef lovers.  Thus, in her day the rear portions possibly were not the best cuts as they are today with our refined tastes and health concerns.

The author reasoned somehow that women were cheapened by bargaining while performing their jobs to prepare nice meals for their families.  Cheapening and bargaining were synonyms back then.  SeeWebster’s New Int’l. Dictionary (2d ed. 1947).  A fancy author would not use redundant words.  The husband’s role was to bring home the money; he did not have the time to bargain with the butcher.  So the criticism of the dutiful wife is unsupported.

 Laura writes:

It’s too bad  Ms. Woolf is no longer alive and you cannot discuss cuts of beef with her. To be fair, she does vividly make the case that the men’s meals at university were much more lavish, which was almost certainly true at that time. (Today, there is no elegance in academia.)

But many women were dining well at home and at other kinds of society events. The idea that only men had the advantage of elegant meals is false. And the fact is, women did not — and do not — establish great intellectual institutions on their own so there was a reason why the women’s college had less exalted traditions. It is extremely rare for a gathering of women only to involve high-level philosophical or scientific discussion.

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