Rent from DeepDyve- Unruly Women: Performance, Penitence, and Punishment in Early Modern Spain by Margaret E. Boyle
Margaret Boyle’s Unruly Women: Performance, Penitence, and Punishment in Early Modern Spain approaches the theatrical depiction of “bad” women in the Comedia alongside discourses of the real-life entities that worked to rehabilitate them in seventeenth-century Madrid. The inclusion of historical documentation of custodial institutions as well as fictional depictions of deviant women rehabilitated on stage highlights the crucial role of public performance to both. Indeed, as the author points out, the two institutions were even economically bound to one another, given that the revenue from the public theater would have supported the custodial houses (5). Perhaps more conspicuously, Unruly Women signals the fundamentally contradictory nature of rehabilitation inherent in the policing of women in both realms. At once reliant upon criminality and the public exposure of the unruly woman for survival, the custodial institution professes containment and piety for the purpose of rehabilitation. The term recogimiento, for example, encapsulates a meditative, spiritual introspection along with a forced incarceration. Likewise, the public theater holds up its variants on the deviant woman—the widow, the vixen, and the murderess—as exemplary and in need of transformation. The book, though limited in scope, is a fascinating study of the gendered discourses that competed to construct early modern criminality and reform practices in Spain.
Unruly Women is divided into two parts. Part One includes Chapter 1, “Gendering Recogimiento in Early Modern Madrid,” which analyzes the extant institutional literature pertaining to the Casa de Santa María Magdalena de la Penitencia (a 1777 manual authored by Don Manuel Recio), together with the introduction to a proposal written by Madre Magdalena de San Jerónimo in 1608, a petition to King Felipe III to create a women’s prison in Madrid. Part Two focuses on three full-length comedias that feature, and rehabilitate, three forms of the unruly woman. Chapter 2, “Stage Widow in Pedro Calderón de la [End Page 223] Barca’s La dama duende,” argues that Calderón’s play carves an imaginative space to feature the widow’s own creative (and metatheatrical) response to the physical and economic containment wrought by widowhood. Chapter 3, “Dramatizing Women’s Community in María de Zayas’s La traición en la amistad,” reassesses Fenisa’s designation as a “bad” woman to correct the critical idealization of the community of women represented in the play. Chapter 4, “Women’s Exemplary Violence in Luis Vélez de Guevara’s La serrana de la vera,” analyzes the comedic facets of Gila’s persona as influenced by the larger-than-life cultural presence of actress Jusepa Vaca. The author notes that Gila’s unconventional response to dishonoring, her mass violence, succeeds until she infringes upon the confines of the honor code itself, at which point the play’s act of rehabilitation (her execution) crosses over to punishment. In all three examples, the comedia works to transform the protagonists’ deviance, but in the process of the depiction of that transformation, there is revealed “a more fluid negotiation of status in ways that frequently disrupt the clear social categories used to describe their outcomes: married or single, comic or tragic” (98).
The monograph concludes with a call for more archival research to uncover the points of view of women actually housed in custodial institutions during the early modern period. The perspectives offered by those in control of those spaces, as reflected in the primary documents included in Part One of the monograph, open the door to contextualizing another aspect of the reality of women’s lives in early modern Spain beyond the ideal of passive femininity.
The division of the book into two parts seems unnecessary, given that Part One constitutes one chapter with two primary texts that provide limited (though fruitful) perspectives on the ideology and functioning of Magdalen houses and galeras. The insistence on the strict separation of these historical documents from the dramatic fiction leaves potentially useful points of contact unexplored. For example, while the...
