Writing out of the Margins: Women, Translation, and the Spanish Enlightenment

By analyzing María Romero's 1792 Spanish translation of Madame de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne (1747), this article demonstrates how one woman utilized translation as a vehicle for expressing her own views in a time when women writers were still discouraged from publicly circulating their work. A study of Romero's translator's note, footnotes, and text alterations shows that she both built on the gender critique embedded in Graffigny's text and subverted the French author's political message about Spain's barbarity in the conquest of the Americas. The article also evaluates Romero's calls for religious renewal to show that not all Enlightenment thinkers saw religious passion and critical reasoning as opposites. Such analysis challenges the dichotomy of reason and passion inherent in much Enlightenment scholarship and argues for the importance of its deconstruction in situating women in Enlightenment society.