Feminism and the Honor Plays of Lope de Vega

Chapter One The Contradictory Constructs of Gender

Chapter One The Contradictory Constructs of Gender Historians have receJ?tly documented the relative equality with men enjoyed by Spanish women1from early: medieval times to the beginning of the modem age (Ortega Costa, Dillard). However , by the time Lope was writing for the theater, the situation of women had deteriorated. The growing restrictions placed on women in'the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were in part a result of new social structures accompanying the consolida,. tion of the early modem state.2 Jose Antonio Maravall and other historians have demonstrated that the early modern state is chara~terized by the alliance between ruler and "individual" (Maravall, Estado moderno 408).3 Ruth EI Saffar clarifies that this individua~ simultaneously needed and controlled by the state is not gender neutral, but specifically the male householder (176). One of the most important changes for women during this time was the strengthening of pre-existing patriarchal power relationships within the family. From the fifteenth and well into the seventeenth century, church and state "provided powerful new theoretical and practical support" for the "reinforcement of the despotic authority of the husband and father" (Stone 151). Patriarchy provided the pivotal structure to organize both the family and the state, establishing a "relation of subordinate correspondence ... between the father who is as Jdng in, the family and the king who is as father in the state" (Barker 31). The arrangement that ensures the absolute power of the king and the autonomy of the male individual "encourages, as part of the agreement, the parallel power of every man over his wife"(E1 Saffar 177). In Catholic Spain, God as King and Father provides the metaphysical authorization of the sovereignty of the father/king in both state and family.4 ' 13 Chapter One In Spain, the great allure of the authoritarian state and the independent individual stemmed from the promise of relief from decades of chaos and anarchy and, on a psychological level, the promise of completion and totality.5 However, as in the psychoanalytic narrative, this sense of autonomy and unity depended on separation from and repression ofthe feminine (El Saffar). The identification of the male individual with the Crown represented a "new definition of belonging" (165) that replaced social origins and "the bonds of home and family around which awareness of self was previously based" (166).6 The break from home and mother led to discourses on gender constructing the male subject as reason, will, and order in opposition towo~an, embodying the reverse. In her study of women and the social changes ofthe sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Mary Elizabeth Perry focuses on the role of gender in official attempts to preserve and restore order (Gender and Disorder).? Ecclesiastical and secular authorities collaborated to maintain a gendered moral order in the service of religious orthodoxy and the developing state (118). The key strategy in the control of women was enclosure, which extended from physical confinement of the body to the closure of its orifices. As male property, women must be controlled by codes that dictate a closed mouth, a closed body, and a locked house (Stallybrass). Enclosure was necessary because of women's supposed vulnerability to the devil and hence inclination to disorder. Religious' and social ideologies further colluded in the association ofenclosure with purity, linking the feminine virtue of chastity with theological purity of faith and the genetic purity required by limpieza de sangre ("blood purity ") (6). The "partnership" of secular and ecclesiastical authorities underwrote the understanding that the social order reflected a divine order; in this schema, hierarchical gender roles are both "natural" and divinely ordained.8 ' Marriage was one of the most effective institutions of social stability through enclosure of women, and it'provided one of the few options ofrespectability open to women.9 As in other preindustrial European countries, marriages in Spain were arranged in order to cement alliances between the men of different families and to transmit family 'property. On the highest levels, marriage was a "crucial diplomatic as well as economic 14 The Contradictory Constructs of Gender instrument ofdynastic forms.of government" (Perry, Crime and Society 128). Social, pOlitical;- and economic interests played a role in the marriages ofthe nobility and the wealthy "bourgeoisie " as well. After marriage, "husbands insisted on female chastity to ensure that all heirs would be legitimate offspring of their respective families" (Vann 199). In Spain, as noted, an additional factor in the insistence on female...