Blood, Bile, and Blessings: Normative Hierarchies in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Women's Writing

Abstract

This dissertation explores early modern literature in its historical context, in particular the writings of three authors at the intersection of marginalized and privileged identities and how these writers navigate hierarchy: María de Zayas (b. 1590), Feliciana Enríquez de Guzmán (b. 1572), and Ángela de Azevedo (b. c. 1600). These writers, particularly the first, have enjoyed considerable attention from feminist scholarship for the ways in which their works engage questions of gender. This project builds on the work of feminist literary scholars and literary historians by bringing an explicitly intersectional perspective to their work, focusing on how the framework of gender influences and disrupts other hierarchies: author/reader hierarchies, protonational and racial hierarchies, class hierarchies, and religious hierarchies. I approach these texts on a paratextual, narrative, and thematic level, drawing on new historicism and feminist literary criticism.

Through my synthesis of close-reading and history, I have developed new insights into the works of these writers. In my first chapter, I read María de Zayas’s oft-cited prologue alongside one of her novelas. Considering the two alongside each other shifts my reading of the prologue as not simply a defense of women’s writing but as a destabilization of authorial authority. In my second chapter, I explore how Enríquez de Guzmán fosters authorial authority by reinforcing protonationalist and racial anxieties and placing the responsibility for maintaining “pure” bloodlines in women’s hands. In my third chapter, I read Ángela de Azevedo’s plays while paying particular attention to how shifting understandings of class and an emphasis on new forms of capital affect women. In my fourth chapter, I continue my analysis of Ángela de Azevedo’s plays, reading them as theological commentary disguised variously as a retelling of a Marian miracle and a hagiographic play.

The writers I have chosen differ considerably in their writing styles and their approaches to hierarchy; but reading them together brings a richer texture to our understanding of the techniques writers use to address the hierarchies which kept them in place in positive, negative, and ambivalent ways.