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Description
During the seventeenth century, María de Zayas, Ana Caro and Sor Juana Inés became the three most significant women authors writing in Spain and her colony, New Spain. Their subversive voices prevailed in patriarchal societies where women were oppressed, contained and marginalized in order to fulfill certain gender roles and social expectations. Both in Spain and New Spain early modern gender constructions defined masculinity as the superior, active and strong gender, whereas femininity was the inferior, passive and fragile one. In this thesis, I demonstrate how these three authors represent this binary gender difference as unfounded and incongruous, and therefore, women can invert and break gender roles, thus validating their intellectual capacity, sagacity, courage and self-determination. Chapter 1 provides the theoretical overview of Spanish early modern gender construction, including a discussion of Fray Luis de Leon's, La perfecta casada. It also sets forth the theoretical argument for the thesis. I argue that these authors' gender subversion strategy was intended to demystify the binary construction in order to prove to their readers that women possesses their own agency to think, feel and act accordingly to their goals and interests. In the subsequent three chapters, I explore their works: El prevenido engañado by Zayas; Los empeños de una casa by Inés de la Cruz; and Valor, agravio y mujer by Caro by analyzing in their texts how both women and men do not reinforce the gender constructions and how women, in particular, are the ones who defy and overthrow the androcentric culture. I conclude that the relevance to their defiant discourse is to provide solidarity to those women that cannot break the chains of gender roles.
