Subtle Subversions: Reading Golden Age Sonnets by Iberian Women

Introduction: Revisiting the Baroque

I N T R O D U C T I O N Revisiting the Baroque [N]othing is known about women before the eighteenth century....... Here I am asking why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age ..... any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. (woolf 45) ViRginia Woolf wrote these words in her celebrated work A Room of One’s Own in 1929, expressing her frustration at the lack of women’s voices in history and literature. yet, unrealized by woolf, across western Europe women were writing in all fields of literary endeavor and trying to make their voices heard, even in that “Elizabethan” era. we have only to think of Mary wroth or Aphra Behn, in her own country ; Louise Labé, in France; Gaspara Stampa or Moderata Fonte, in Italy; and Maria de Zayas, Ana Caro Mallén de Soto, or Mariana de Carvajal in Spain to see a small but distinctive body of literature written by women. nevertheless, it was not until the excellent scholarship of the last quarter century began to address the lacunae left by a historiography written within a masculine framework of reference that women began to discover and celebrate the extent of their own history and cultural production. Thanks to this scholarship, we are becoming increasingly aware of the wealth of cultural activity by women, produced in spite of long-cherished masculine notions of biological determinism. whatever the authors of moral trea1 E tises and preachers wrote and said about women’s lack of reason, women have shown across time that given the opportunity and the education, they are equal in reason and intelligence to their male counterparts and are only too keen to seize the opportunity to express their capacity for independent thought. If we consider the artworks of the likes of Artemisia Gentileschi, we can see that this equality extends also to the plastic arts. Furthermore, and as will be seen in the course of my analysis of their sonnets , the women I discuss here did not consider themselves to be in any way inferior to their male counterparts; instead they saw themselves as rational , confident, and important members of their social milieu. The purpose of this book is to further the study of both women’s history and their artistic production through a contextually based exploration of sonnets of love and friendship by seventeenth-century women in the Iberian Peninsula. I study principally the works of five women: four Spaniards, Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán, Leonor de la Cueva y Silva, Sor María de Santa Isabel, who wrote under the nom de plume Marcia Belisarda, and Doña Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza; and a Portuguese , Sor Violante del Cielo. In choosing these five poets, I am able to situate their works in relation to the widest possible sociohistorical background , for their lives span part of the sixteenth and almost the whole of the seventeenth century, and encompass both the religious and the secular worlds. Their works all show a clear awareness of and engagement with the argument about women, patriarchy, class differences, patronage , love, and the value of friendship. They therefore serve as a representative sample of the writings and attitudes of seventeenth-century Iberian women. At the same time, by restricting the scope of my study to five poets, I am able to provide a deeper appreciation of both their own attitudes and those that informed their thinking that would not be possible were I to produce a broader based selection. In the course of this study and through the words of these women, I shall address the concerns raised by Gerda Lerner that women have always been forced to prove to themselves and others that they are capable of abstract thought and full humanity. Lerner contends that this necessity has skewed the intellectual development of women as a group, as they have had to turn their intellectual endeavor to counteracting pervasive patriarchal assumptions about their inferiority and human incomplete2 R e v i S i t i n g t h e b a R o Q U e ness (Consciousness 10–11). Moreover, literate women wishing to write always found themselves in an anomalous position: female loquacity was associated with...