"Girl Gets Boy": A Note on the Value of Exchange in the Comedia

The Spanish picaresque novels foreground the ironies of first-person narration and the illusion of authority, as manifested in a dialectic of sorts between the narrator/protagonist and the implied author. The feminine variation of the picaresque, with women (and women's voices) created by men, offers especially strong markers of the author's presence in the text as manipulator of story, discourse, and message production. In the theater, there is, of course, no narrator. Perspective must stem from direct discourse, which does not necessarily mean that all voices are equal. Male dramatists and a male-oriented society mediate the speech of women and the direction of the plays. Even in the comic works of the Golden Age, the aggressive female and what Bruce Wardropper calls a feminist perspective may lend themselves to deconstruction. A case in point is Lope's La dama boba, in which success may be a losing battle. (EHF)