Confounding Convention: 'Women' in Three Golden Age Plays

While it is a truism that the Renaissance was not a renaissance for women, three canonical Spanish plays —El burlador de Sevilla, La vida es sueño, and Fuente Ovejuna— provide a number of disturbances to the conception of complete male dominance and female subjugation during the Golden Age. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, this essay examines how sexed and gendered indentities are conventionalized in the plays as naturalized, "regulatory" constructs. Attention will be paid to those moments in which these identities betray the very conventions that aim to contain them as meaningful. The analysis of El burlador focuses on the responses of the play's women to Don Juan's unsettling of gender and class relations. The women's readiness to surrender to their desires, and their actions to seek redress for perceived wrongs, reveal a range of imaginative and counter-conventional responses. In the analysis of Fuente Ovejuna, the role of Laurencia is regarded as transgressing a male preserve: the violent avenging of women's lost honour and the recuperation of sullied reputation. Laurencia's discursive transvestism succeeds in disturbing both the performative operations of gendered identities, and the regulatory uses to which those identities have been put. Transvestism and role-changing identities in La vida provide the essay's final focus. Rosaura's conscious adoption of fictive personas and genders, and her destabilization of Segismundo's ontological and erotic security, challenge the idealized passivity prescribed for women. Despite the powerful constraints that circumscribed social and erotic opportunities for women, both on and off the stage, women in each of these plays sometimes slipped through conventional constraints to embody new possibilities.