A Woman Not Fit to Rule: The Gendering of Jealousy in Lope de Vega's Arminda Celosa

The jealousy of the powerful female protagonist, Queen Arminda, is disparaged and greatly feared by other characters in this play by Lope de Vega. But these characters need not fear. Unlike their male counterparts in similar situations in Lope's plays, such jealous women never kill anyone. Rather, the women are made to look irrational for their jealousy, even when it is rationally justifiable (as in the case of Queen Arminda, whose husband is a philanderer). Such representations of women's jealousy propagate cultural stereotypes of women's weakness and especially their irrationality, and tend toward the conservative side of the early modern political debates on the suitability of queens as rulers. Furthermore, the contradictions in the text demonstrate the need for a philosophical re-appraisal of the emotions and of their representation in literature.