Women in the Discourse of Early Modern Spain

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 2004 by Anne J. Cruz

Joan F. Cammarata, ed. Women in the Discourse of Early Modern Spain.

Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. viii 304 pp. index. $59.95. ISBN: 0-8130-2578-8.

This anthology comprises fifteen essays first presented as papers at various meetings of the Northeast and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. Its five sections propound women's self-fashioning, the appropriation of feminine identity, constructs of the feminine psyche, linguistic strategies, and transformations of conventional genres. As Joan Cammarata asserts in her helpful introduction, the essays may be categorized under the broader terms of "woman" and "writer," inas-much as they investigate women's characterizations in fiction and non-fiction by male authors and women's actual writings.

The majority of the essays contribute significantly to these categories. In the first, two stand out for their perceptiveness. Carolyn Nadeau takes a clear-eyed look at normative conduct manuals for women, especially nursing mothers, to propose that those by Pedro de Lujan, Antonio de Guevara, and Luis de Leon impose state needs on what was previously understood as family behavior. William Clamurro revisits Cervantes's La gitanilla to argue that what counts most in the narrative are the economies of its two seemingly opposing groups, since it is money's pervasive power that compels both social systems. Although too generalized to offer more than a summary of Cervantes's female characters, Sara Taddeo proffers good insights on women's use of language and its absence, silence. Her reading of the play El laber-into del amor reminds us of how little attention is still paid to the author's non-canonical works.

Yet this essay, like several others in the collection, exudes an air of deja lu. By now amply studied, the male-authored fiction analyzed in the anthology has accumulated a lengthy critical bibliography whose revisionary impact should be taken into account, even--or especially--if to argue against it. However, some essays either uncritically rehearse or altogether dismiss these positions. For example, Taddeo's approach to Cervantes's La espanola inglesa hinges on the assumption that the novela is best understood as romance, a view put to rest by Carroll Johnson in his article "La espanola inglesa and the Practice of Literary Production" (Viator 19 [1988]). And, instead of proposing an unproblematized rendition of female subjectivity in La lozana andaluza, John Parrack might have challenged my and Edward Friedman's studies of the female picaresque as examples of male ventriloquism. One essay entirely out of place here is Joseph Ricapito's allegorization of Gongora's Fabula de Polifemo y Galatea. Without alluding to Spanish translations of the Ovide moralisee or, more importantly, to the poet's other usurpations of mythology--and against the editor's affirmation that the essays "destroy simplistic notions about women's passivity or activity" (3)--Ricapito clings to the belief that Galatea's presumably sinful "fall" in turn represents "an age-old problem of sexuality and its concomitant repercussions morally, religiously, and theologically" (175).

The essays dedicated to women writers are by far the most suggestive. Frederick de Armas's study of Angela Azevedo's play Dicha y desdicha del juego delves into Renaissance notions of astrology and oneiric phenomena to highlight her defense of women's enhanced ability in interpreting divine will. Sharon Voros investigates Ana Caro's poetic account of public spectacles, Relaciones de fiestas, smartly teasing out covert meanings from her appropriation of this commissioned genre. Although its commonplaces rhetorically bind the author to her patrons, the Relaciones also bespeak her desire to let her voice be heard. Monica Leoni addresses this same desire in her analysis of Caro's play Valor, agravio y mujer, noting that women's silences on the stage reveal how the playwright effectively controls discourse. Barbara Mujica's hypothesis that skepticism impelled Teresa de Avila's "combative stance" enriched my knowledge of this philosophical movement, if it did not quite convince me of the saint's own awareness of the same. Of the essays devoted to Maria de Zayas, Susan Paun de Garcia's exploration of the author's ideal of the masculine advances the most intriguing argument. By tracing the seventeenth century's loss of manliness through Zayas's depictions of changing male fashions, she shows just how effectively a materialist analysis illuminates Zayas's often contradictory notions of gender, class, and nationalism.

Readers will agree with Cammarata that, in shifting the parameters of early modern Spain's economic, legal, political, and religious systems, the best essays in this collection reinforce our ongoing reassessment of women's agency.

ANNE J. CRUZ

University of Miami