Gendering America: Women and the American Landscape in Tirso de Molina's Trilogía de los Pizarros

Although Spain had been aware of the existence of the Americas since Columbus's journey, early modern Spanish dramatists rarely set their plays there. This scarcity of Golden Age comedias about the New World, together with the difficulty of adapting a distant reality for theater audiences, underscores the importance of the relatively few plays that portray the Americas. In this essay, I argue that Tirso recreated the exotic nature of the New World in the Pizarro trilogy by gendering America's landscape through the creation of remarkable female inhabitants and by breaking the comedia's and Spanish society's gender conventions. Writers have long associated women with nature and lands to conquer, but Tirso grants predominance over nature and over Spanish soldiers to his American women, while making problematic the relationship between men and the natural world. The fate of the American women at the end of the plays seems to leave open the possibility for a new relationship between men and women and between human beings and nature in the Americas. (GHS)