The Commodification of Women in By Any Other Name
Jodi Picoult’s By Any Other Name draws a stark line across four centuries to reveal a persistent truth: women’s bodies and talents are treated as commodities, their value set and seized by men. From the Elizabethan courtesan’s chamber to a twenty-first-century Broadway greenroom, the novel traces how patriarchy barters female flesh and creativity, always extracting the maximum profit while denying women ownership of themselves. This theme is not a simple binary of victimhood; Picoult complicates the narrative by showing women who internalize the terms of the market and, sometimes, learn to manipulate them—though never without cost.
The Woman as Object: Emilia’s Bargain of Flesh
When young Emilia Bassano is sent to the house of Lord Hunsdon’s courtesan Isabella, she confronts the fundamental economics of her world. Isabella, the Baron’s mistress, dispels any romantic illusions with brutal clarity: “There is a difference, Emilia, between being kept—like me—and being owned—like a wife. That difference is freedom.” The line draws a chilling distinction between two forms of commodification. A wife is purchased outright through dowry and legal subjection; a mistress is leased, retaining a precarious agency as long as she remains useful. Isabella’s definition of “freedom” is the mobility to walk away, but Emilia will learn that even that conditional liberty is an illusion underwritten by the constant threat of destitution.
Isabella’s tutelage trains Emilia to treat her body as a negotiable asset. Standing before a mirror, Isabella instructs her, “Be sure you make yourself worth keeping. And for that, you must learn how to use your body as a tool. A weapon.” The mirror reflects both the woman and the merchandise. Emilia catalogs her physical attributes—curves, high breasts, dark hair and shadowed skin—and, following the advice of Queen Sophie, glimpses “power.” But that power is merely the ability to attract a higher bid in a transaction she cannot opt out of. The novel underlines the grim alternative: a visit to a brothel, where a coin is tossed onto straw for a whore’s “beast with two backs” coupling, and Isabella warns, “You get what you’ve been served, or you go hungry.” The lesson that a woman must barter sex for survival—whether in a silk gown or on a bare mattress—is reinforced by the rue tucked behind Emilia’s ear, an abortifacient to ensure that intimacy remains a profitable exchange rather than a drain on her body’s value.
Emilia’s later marriage to Alphonso confirms the continuum that Isabella sketched. Sold into wedlock, owned rather than kept, she trades sexual availability and household subservience for the thin security of a roof and name. The marriage bed becomes another marketplace; she orchestrates a campaign of obedience—cooking, silent agreement, sexual compliance—purely to earn the coin of Alphonso’s permission to attend her own play. The commodification of her body is so complete that even a brief outing must be purchased through performed deference.
The Author as Commodity: Selling Words and Silence
If Emilia’s flesh is the first currency she is forced to exchange, her intellect becomes the second. Unable to write under her own name, she strikes a deal with William Shakespeare that mirrors the economics of the brothel. At the White Hart, she proposes: “If you front my work, you can claim authorship. In return I receive half the profit.” Shakespeare bargains her down to fifteen shillings. The negotiation is a straightforward sale of her creative labor, her words alienated from her identity just as her body was alienated from her desire. As Emilia thinks, “Being a playwright was not a prestigious career, but regardless, fame was not the point. It was the work that mattered. … The fact that she had to borrow a man’s name to do that was a small price to pay.”
Picoult stages the consequences of that transaction with exquisite cruelty. Watching The Taming of the Shrew performed at Newington Butts, Emilia experiences the dizzying split between creator and product. The audience roars at her jokes, but they never know her name; they laugh at Katherine’s subjugation without suspecting that a woman shaped the lines. Her husband Alphonso, having paid extra for a gallery seat and a cushion so others would see his status, leans over to explain the plot to her as if she were a simpleton: “That is the shrew,” he says, and, noting the father’s name, “Ho, her father’s name is Baptista, as was yours!” Emilia’s dry reply—“A remarkable coincidence, indeed”—is a triumph of irony, a whispered rebellion inside the cage. Yet her intellectual property is now a public good enjoyed under a man’s banner, her profit a mere fifteen shillings against Shakespeare’s rising shareholdings in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The play’s success does not liberate her; it simply tightens the knot of her invisibility.
The commodification of her pen dovetails with the commodification of her womb and her very image. The miniature portraits that circulate among the powerful men in her orbit—tokens of affection, political currency, silent witnesses to secret liaisons—reduce women to portable, exchangeable icons. Emilia’s body, her writing, and eventually her schoolmistress labor all form links in an economic chain in which she is always the supplier and never the beneficiary. When she is dragged to Fleet Prison for debt, the constable does not care that she runs a school; the only measure that matters is the unpaid rent. Her intellectual capital means nothing when the market demands a coin she cannot produce.
The Modern Playwright: Melina’s Invisible Labor
Four hundred years later, Melina Green inhabits a world that congratulates itself on progress, yet the machinery of commodification grinds on. The novel’s contemporary timeline dissects the theater industry as a case study in how women’s stories are weighed, priced, and too often discarded. In a pivotal exchange with theater critic Jasper Tolle, Melina articulates the cycle: “So stories about complicated, wholly realized men get put onstage and stories about complicated, wholly realized women don’t…which reinforces the belief that men, and their experiences, matter more.” The result, she argues, is a market that assumes only male experiences will sell tickets, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of exclusion.
Jasper’s colleague Andrea sharpens the economic critique with statistics that could have been lifted from a corporate ledger. She points out that since 2002, almost every male Pulitzer winner in drama has seen a commercial Broadway production, while female winners like Lynn Nottage and Suzan-Lori Parks fought years for the same platform. “That’s not real change. It’s tokenism,” Andrea says, exposing how even celebrated women remain undervalued in the marketplace. And the irony runs deeper: “Nearly seventy percent of seats sold on Broadway were bought by women,” Jasper acknowledges, yet the supply side—the decision-makers, the critics, the gatekeepers—remains overwhelmingly male. Female consumers bankroll an industry that refuses to reflect them.
Melina’s personal predicament embodies this commodification. Her apartment lease is in her ex-boyfriend Andre’s name, leaving her homeless and stripped of her possessions after a fight. She has written a play under a male pseudonym to secure a production, exactly mimicking Emilia’s contract with Shakespeare. When Jasper offers to write a New York Times piece revealing her true authorship and framing it as a feminist conversation starter, she recognizes the bitter echo: “Even if she gave Jasper the benefit of the doubt, there was something about hiding behind his name and influence that felt defeatist.” The help she needs to regain agency comes packaged in a man’s voice, a commodity she must accept because her own voice alone cannot cut through the market noise. Her talent is undeniable, but its value cannot be realized without a male broker to vouch for it—an arrangement that is the modern heir of the fifteen-shilling deal.
Complicity and Contradiction: Navigating the Cage
Picoult refuses to let either timeline rest in simple outrage. The novel is rich with moments where women internalize the system, find leverage within it, or confront the messy compromises required to survive. Isabella, the worldly courtesan, teaches Emilia not only to accept her commodification but to exploit it, slipping her fingers between her thighs in the mirror and instructing, “Women are given nothing … You must learn how to take what you want.” For Isabella, the performance of desire is a strategic market move, a way to retain some control over the transaction. Yet her mantra—“We know what we are, but we know not what we may be”—carries an undercurrent of hope that Emilia later transfers to her student Maria, urging her not to accept a life reduced to “keep house and squeeze out babes.” That hope, however, is always shadowed by the kestrel trapped inside the palace, beating against the window until it breaks its neck.
Melina’s decision to trust Jasper is another such tightrope walk. She wonders, “What if this was how change began—one mind at a time?” Her acceptance of his help is realistic rather than heroic, and the novel leaves open the question of whether a system built on commodification can be reformed by the very instruments that enforce it. Jasper himself begins to question his own critical blind spots after Andrea’s rebuke, but he remains a white man with a platform, the same structural advantage that made Emilia depend on Shakespeare. The contradiction is stark: women’s creative liberation often still requires a male patron.
Emilia’s old-age reflection to Maria crystallizes this ambivalence. She nearly admits that she “published … plays that the whole world loved” but stops herself, because that truth would only prove the point—the world loved them when they wore a man’s name. Instead, she offers a vision of incremental fracturing: “Escape may not be possible in my lifetime. Mayhap I am like that bird, beating against the window for naught. But you—or your daughter, or your daughter’s daughter—may be the one to fly through the hole.” The commodification of women is presented as a structural flaw in the window frame, a crack that widens only through repeated, violent collisions across generations. The novel does not offer the comfort of a shattered pane, but it insists that the crack is there, and that the next woman may slip through.
Study Questions and Answers
1. How does Isabella’s definition of being “kept” versus being “owned” illustrate the novel’s economic view of marriage and mistressdom? Isabella draws a legal and economic distinction: a wife is property transferred through a marriage contract and cannot negotiate her exit; a mistress retains a precarious autonomy so long as she remains profitable. Both, however, are forms of commodification, with the woman’s body and labor serving as the asset. The novel shows Emilia experiencing first the “freedom” of the mistress role and then the imprisonment of wifehood, collapsing Isabella’s distinction into a continuum of male ownership.
2. In what ways does Emilia’s transaction with William Shakespeare mirror her earlier sale of her body? Both transactions involve a bargain in which Emilia’s contributions are hidden and undervalued. She trades her plays for a fixed, reduced sum exactly as she trades sexual access for security. In each case, a man reaps the public benefit—Shakespeare’s fame, Hunsdon’s pleasure—while she remains nameless or is discarded when her utility wanes. The parallel reinforces the novel’s thesis that women’s physical and intellectual labor are commodified under the same patriarchal logic.
3. How does Melina Green’s experience as a female playwright in the twenty-first century echo Emilia’s 16th-century struggles? Melina, like Emilia, must conceal her gender behind a male pseudonym to get her work produced. She depends on a male critic’s platform to secure public recognition, mirroring Emilia’s reliance on Shakespeare’s name. Both women face an industry where male gatekeepers decide which stories are profitable, and both wrestle with the defeatist feeling of achieving success only by surrendering authorship to a man.
4. What role do economic pressures play in both timelines regarding women’s autonomy? In Emilia’s era, poverty forces her into Lord Hunsdon’s arrangement and later into a marriage of convenience; her debtor’s imprisonment underlines that a woman without funds is utterly disposable. For Melina, the loss of her apartment and the precariousness of her job as an assistant keep her tethered to male-controlled resources. Economic vulnerability is not an accidental backdrop but the engine of commodification—women without independent wealth must continually barter themselves to survive.
5. How does the novel use the miniature portraits to symbolize the commodification of women’s identities? The miniature portraits act as a literal currency of affection and political alliance, exchanged among powerful men and displayed as tokens. They reduce women to portable, gazeable objects whose value is set by the men who wear them. In Emilia’s world, the portrait of the Earl of Southampton placed beside her own image hints at the tragic romance that, too, is traded and managed as an asset. The portraits encapsulate the theme: a woman’s most intimate self becomes a commodity, detached from her personhood and owned by those who can afford to look.