El mayor monstruo del mundo and the Subject of Tragedy

The essay focuses on the subject position of Queen Mariene in El mayor monstruo del mundo. The thesis is that the queen occupies an intermediate space between the female protagonists of the Calderonian honor plays and the precociously assertive heroine of Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam (1613). Because in El mayor monstruo Calderón takes recourse to the fate of classical antiquity, Mariene is doomed from the start, but she gains a victory of sorts by separating herself from her husband Herod and by speaking her mind. An analysis of the particular rhetoric of Mariene's discourse reveals an incipient subjectivity, lacking in the women of the honor dramas, who cannot cease to be functions of their husbands' (and society's) obsessions. Using essentially the same plot materials, Cary, for her part, moves beyond the spiritual triumph to draw attention to key feminist issues of her own time and place. (EHF)