Gender, Translation, and Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists: Elizabeth Griffith’s The School for Rakes (1769) and María Lorenza de los Ríos y Loyo’s El Eugenio (1801)

This essay uses gender to analyze translation and cultural influence in eighteenth-century drama by comparing two translations/adaptations of Beaumarchais’s Eugénie (1767): The School for Rakes (1769) by British writer Elizabeth Griffith (1727-1793); and El Eugenio (1801) by the Spanish ilustrada, María Lorenza de los Ríos y Loyo, the Marquesa de Fuerte-Híjar (1761-1821). By adapting the secondary role of the female go-between, the women playwrights critique gender roles and express ambivalence about the advantages of matrimony for women. Ríos and Griffith use nationalistic discourse to invoke the role of translation as cultural colonization.