Through the Cellar and From the Window: Urban Domesticity and Literary Creation in Early Modern Spain (1583-1663).

Abstract

This dissertation looks beyond the putative equation between domesticity and nineteenth century modernity, to study the literary and cultural conceptualizations of urban aristocratic domesticity in Early Modem Spain, with particular emphasis on Madrid, the center of Spanish urbanization since 1561. Analyzing the social commerce of images on the aristocratic noble home in manuals of female conduct, urban comedies, and short novels, this thesis conceptualizes pre-modern domesticity as a set of gendered conducts expressing complex notions of spatial interiority, subjective inwardness, and relations of power. I argue that the interplay of gender, material culture, space, and economy in early modern Madrid results in disorderly everyday practices that ultimately shape female and male behaviors and expectations. Chapter one is the keystone around which the dissertation is organized. In this chapter, I analyze manuals of female conduct by fray Luis de León and Gaspar de Astete. I read these manuals as rhetorical devices (topoi) which isolate the domestic from other spheres of daily life and normalize the family into a social unit of production. Thus, I argue that these manuals afford Spanish pre-modernity a discursive utopian space for expressing male fantasies of domestic economic improvement and female containment. Chapters Two, Three, and Four revisit the trite topoi used in conduct manuals to uncover how theater and literature refashion existing domestic utopias in the new context of the Court of Madrid. I claim that courtly Madrid imbued noble homes with new attitudes towards the domestic that create dystopian and heterotopian imaginaries. Chapter Two explores Tirso de Molina’s comedias madrileñas, where patriarchal surveillance of the public/private divide is thwarted as a sign of the dystopian nature of domesticity. Chapter Three develops the notion of heterotopia by examining the masculine practices of academicism and consumption of home décor as represented in the work of Salas Barbadillo. Lastly, Chapter Four studies how the topical, utopian, dystopian and heterotopian portrayals of the noble home found in the work of male authors play into the work of writers María de Zayas and Mariana de Carvajal.