University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
Spring 2016
Traveling women as spectacle: vision, performance,
and female subjectivity in the early modern
Hispanic world
Cortney M. Benjamin
University of Iowa
Copyright 2016 Cortney Marie Benjamin
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/3048
Recommended Citation
Benjamin, Cortney M.. "Traveling women as spectacle: vision, performance, and female subjectivity in the early modern Hispanic
world." PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2016.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/3048.
Follow this and additional works at: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd
Part of the Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons
TRAVELING WOMEN AS SPECTACLE: VISION, PERFORMANCE, AND FEMALE
SUBJECTIVITY IN THE EARLY MODERN HISPANIC WORLD
by
Cortney M. Benjamin
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in Spanish in the
Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
May 2016
Thesis Supervisor:
Associate Professor Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez
Copyright by
CORTNEY M. BENJAMIN
2016
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
____________________________
PH.D. THESIS
_________________
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
Cortney M. Benjamin
has been approved by the Examining Committee for
the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy degree
in Spanish at the May 2016 graduation.
Thesis Committee:
____________________________________________
Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez, Thesis Supervisor
____________________________________________
Denise K. Filios
____________________________________________
Luis Martín-Estudillo
____________________________________________
Adriana Méndez Rodenas
____________________________________________
Ana Merino
To my mom
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First, I want to thank the members of my dissertation committee, Ana RodríguezRodríguez, Denise Filios, Luis Martín-Estudillo, Adriana Méndez Rodenas, and Ana
Merino, for their suggestions and encouragement. I would like to give special thanks to
Ana Rodríguez-Rodríguez for her dedicated work as my graduate advisor and dissertation
director. Not only has she continually challenged me to be a more conscientious scholar,
she has also created numerous opportunities for me to grow as a teacher and colleague. I
am exceedingly grateful for that mentorship. In regard to this project, her careful readings
of each draft have given me motivation and direction. Denise’s insightful questions have
inspired me to a more profound textual analysis. Luis’s suggestions for further theoretical
reading, as well as his invitation to join the Hispanic Issues team, have made me a better
early modern scholar. Adriana’s encouragement and expertise in women travelers and
Ana Merino’s enthusiasm and support were greatly appreciated. I want to thank all of the
faculty and staff in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, but I am especially
grateful to Judy Liskin-Gasparro. She has given generously of her time and her advice,
and her assistance has made me a more knowledgeable teacher and mentor.
I am grateful to the Graduate College, the Division of World Languages,
Literatures and Cultures, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese for the financial
and professional support to finish this project. I received help in the form of the Ballard
and Seashore Dissertation Fellowship from the Graduate College and the Ruth Davis
Fellowship Award from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, both of which
allowed me to devote much needed time to this dissertation. I want to thank Russ Ganim,
Mercedes Niño-Murcia, Elizabeth Guzmán and Gillian Steele for the opportunities they
iii
have given me to improve as both a scholar and a teacher, and I would also like to thank
Matt Lively, Merry Powell, Beth Mellinger, Heidi Van Auken, and the rest of the staff at
Phillips Hall for their patient and friendly assistance.
Over the last 7 years, I have had the privilege of teaching and taking classes with
colleagues that have motivated me to study with an open mind and to teach with more
innovation and creativity. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Jennifer HeacockRenaud, with whom I had the great fortune to go through this program. I am better for
having traveled this road with you, Jennifer. Thanks also to Pablo Rodríguez Balbontín
for giving me encouragement and perspective, and to Amelia Sylvester for making sure I
didn’t become too isolated these last two years (and also for holding me accountable to
my deadlines!). I am indebted to both Jeff Renaud and Brittany Tullis for helping me
navigate these last years of graduate school. To the rest of my friends and colleagues who
have accompanied me in this journey—my sincere thanks.
I do not have words to express my gratitude for the love and support of my
family. To my grandma and grandpa, thanks for inspiring me. Shawn, Karla, Jake, and
Andy, I could not have finished this degree without you. Stan, Karen, Mik, Matt, and Juli,
your support means the world to me. I want to thank Casey and April for sending me
pictures and stories of my nieces. They provided much-needed study breaks. Kyle, your
wise advice helped me push through many panic-stricken moments. Mom, I can’t thank
you enough for giving me the confidence to pursue this career.
iv
ABSTRACT
This dissertation examines narratives of early modern women travelers and the
spectacles these women produced as a strategy to negotiate gender paradigms that aimed
to silence and immobilize women. In María de Zayas’s short novel “La esclava de su
amante” (1647), the protagonist’s journey to North Africa gives her the tools she needs to
publically address her rape. Historia de la Monja Alférez (c. 1626) is the autobiography
of Catalina de Erauso, whose constant movement on both sides of the Atlantic allows her
to construct a spectacle of hybridity that both entertains her audiences and authorizes her
many transgressions. Finally, Viaje de cinco religiosas capuchinas de Madrid a Lima
(1722) highlights the masses of people who clamor to catch a glimpse of the itinerant
nuns, creating a spectacle that reaffirms the women’s importance in the social hierarchy
of the Spanish Kingdom. In these three baroque texts, I highlight the construction of the
female traveler’s body and the suffering it endures while crossing great distances. I
examine the ways in which each text reimagines or reorganizes the traveler’s social
relationships and her place in early modern Hispanic society. Through an analysis of
spectacle based on the mediation of these relationships, I interrogate the image of women
travelers and the power that image has to push back against a gendered social hierarchy.
v
PUBLIC ABSTRACT
This dissertation examines narratives of Spanish women who traveled and
narrated their travels in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I analyze the
strategies women used to justify their mobility in three texts. The first is María de
Zayas’s “La esclava de su amante” (1647), a short novel about a noble Christian woman
who dresses as a Muslim slave to escape her home after she is raped by a family friend.
The second is Historia de la Monja Alférez (c. 1626), the autobiography of a woman who
flees a convent to disguise herself as a man and travel to South America as a Spanish
soldier. The final text is Viaje de cinco religiosas capuchinas de Madrid a Lima (1722),
which includes the memories of five nuns who travel from Madrid to Lima to found a
new convent. As these women travel and write about their travels, they must take into
account the social norms of the time period. During this time, noblewomen were raised to
be silent and obedient, and they were expected to remain inside their homes or convents.
In my analysis of these three travel narratives, I examine the ways that traveling women
present themselves to an audience, and the strategies they use to protect their reputations
and authorize their movement to and through public spaces. These traveling protagonists
frame their narratives and identities in such a way as to persuade their audience to
identify with the women and their sometimes problematic and risky decisions to leave
home.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
SALÍ A VER, Y VI Y FUI VISTA: AN INTRODUCTION TO EARLY MODERN
WOMEN TRAVELERS ..................................................................................................... 1
Gendered Travel during the Expansion and Decline of an Empire ................................ 6
Theoretical Framework: Vision and Spectacle in the Baroque .................................... 12
Chapter Outlines ........................................................................................................... 16
CHAPTER 1: A JOURNEY FROM CHRISTIAN NOBLEWOMAN TO MUSLIM
SLAVE: PUBLIC WOMEN AND PUBLIC TRAUMA IN “LA ESCLAVA DE SU
AMANTE” ........................................................................................................................ 22
María de Zayas, a Woman Traveling in the Public Sphere .......................................... 28
Unveiling Deception in Doña Isabel/Zelima’s Autobiography .................................... 39
Suffering and Trauma as Spectacle: Doña Isabel Fajardo’s Story of Rape .................. 66
Doña Isabel’s Public Declarations: Challenging Noblewomen’s Oppression.............. 77
CHAPTER 2: STAGED MASCULINITY IN THE NEW WORLD: THE TRAVELS
OF CATALINA DE ERAUSO IN HISTORIA DE LA MONJA ALFÉREZ ..................... 91
Gender and Genre in a Transatlantic Context ............................................................. 101
Rehearsing Masculinity .............................................................................................. 118
Constructing Erauso’s Monstrous Body ..................................................................... 134
The Spectacle of Repetitive Violence ......................................................................... 146
CHAPTER 3: AUTHORITY WRITTEN ON THE BODY: TALES OF PAIN AND
SUFFERING IN THE VIAJE DE CINCO RELIGIOSAS CAPUCHINAS DE
MADRID A LIMA ........................................................................................................... 163
Crossing the Convent Walls: Travel and Writing in an Early Modern Atlantic
Context ........................................................................................................................ 173
The Performative Potential of the Habit in Religious Festivals ................................. 182
Seducing the Baroque Public with the Threatened Religious Body ........................... 204
Suffering and Authority in Nun’s Writing .................................................................. 221
CONCLUSION: NEW VISIONS OF TRAVEL WRITING.......................................... 231
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 238
vii
SALÍ A VER, Y VI Y FUI VISTA: AN INTRODUCTION TO EARLY MODERN
WOMEN TRAVELERS
In early modern Spain, social mores—including those established by the Church,
the monarchy, and the patriarchal family structure—encouraged women to stay inside
their homes and have little contact with the outside world. This was especially true for
aristocratic women, though women from lower social positions often met with the same
restrictions. The ideal woman, no matter her religion, social class, or family situation,
secluded herself. At the same time, we know that many women either chose or were
forced to travel across land and water throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Jewish women and their families left the Peninsula in 1492, journeying to various places
in Europe and North Africa, and Morisca women followed in 1609. We know that Queen
Isabella traveled extensively through her kingdoms cultivating ideas of unity and
Christian purity.1 Eventually women were encouraged to travel with their husbands and
fathers to America in an effort to establish stable Spanish families in the overseas
communities. Even the carefully enclosed nuns periodically left their cloisters to found
new convents and participate in a spiritual conquest of the Americas and other parts of
the Spanish Empire. Early modern women’s frequent travel was reflected in literature
from the period. Some examples include María de Zayas’s novelas ejemplares, Lope de
Vega’s comedias, and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote, all of which feature extensive
casts of both traveling men and women. This dissertation examines tales of women’s
travel narrated by women, and the ways in which the protagonists pushed back against
mandates that tried to enclose their bodies and voices.
1
Although my project does not include royal women, there are many documents in the Spanish
archives that detail royal women’s travel either to marry or to reign over certain parts of the kingdom while
the King was busy in another part. It is a topic that calls for further analysis.
1
Women traveling in the Baroque period were aware of being watched. Even more
so than their male counterparts, women wrote about being the center of attention as they
traveled, most likely due to the prevailing edict that women stay away from the public
eye as much as possible. Traveling women were an anomaly and, therefore, a sight to
behold. Women that traveled and then spoke about those experiences put themselves in
front of this “public eye,” and risked the condemnation of public opinion. Thus, it was
imperative that mobile women frame their mobility in a way that emphasized their desire
to be obedient to their families and the dominant social order—at least on the surface.
These texts include layers of meaning and different perspectives for different readers. As
Mary Elizabeth Perry notes, “[M]any women responded to their tension-filled world by
using both silences and words in strategies that empowered them to negotiate their lives,
to survive, and even to resist the patriarchal order” (“Women’s Words” 21). Perry
suggests a palimpsetic model to reveal the “layers of voices and meaning” in women’s
writing (“Women’s Words” 12). I suggest that the narratives included in this dissertation
frame women’s travel so that a superficial reading will not find the women threatening.
However, with a more rigorous examination of the texts and the itinerant women, we will
find that the protagonists act as public spectacles that draw attention from their neighbors
and carefully resist efforts to cage their bodies or silence their voices. The texts create
and frame these spectacles in a way that authorizes the texts, their authors, and the
protagonists’ journeys.
I examine women travelers as spectacle in three baroque texts. The first is María
de Zayas’s first tale in the Desengaños amorosos, published in 1647. Doña Isabel’s “La
esclava de su amante” is a short novel about rape, healing through travel, and finally
2
accumulating the tools needed to verbally express trauma. The second text I analyze is
Catalina de Erauso’s Historia de la Monja Alférez. I approach Erauso’s autobiography as
a hybrid narrative that allows the public to take pleasure in the protagonist’s
uncategorizable identity and text. Erauso’s ambiguous identity is only possible because
the protagonist is rarely stationary. Finally, I analyze a manuscript written by Capuchin
nuns. Ruben Vargas Ugarte published a transcription of the nuns’ account in 1947, and
Sarah E. Owens brought new attention to the manuscript with her English translation,
published in 2009. The Viaje de cinco religiosas capuchinas de Madrid a Lima is a
manuscript written and edited by a community of women, and it details their arduous
journey across the Atlantic, their capture by Dutch corsairs, and their triumphant and
sensational arrival in Lima. These tenacious nuns use their account of voyage and the
corresponding stress on the female religious body to solidify their elite status in early
modern Atlantic culture.
When I started this project, I wanted to know what early modern women’s travel
narratives looked like, how the writers authorized the image of the traveling woman, and
what strategies they used to narrate the topic. Of course, the answer depends on the
specific woman and is contingent on the audience to whom she gives her account. In
three specific travel narratives, I analyze the ways the authors frame the image of the
traveling woman to provide the reader with multiple, and sometimes contradictory,
perspectives on feminine subjectivity. In each chapter, I examine the effects of travel on
the protagonist(s) and how the text views and constructs the transformation that the
traveler has experienced. Keeping in mind the audience that each text addresses, I look at
the ways that the author invites the audience to embark on a journey beside her
3
protagonist. As the reader becomes part of the spectacle, the traveler/author enhances her
authority as a woman that occupies public space.
I do not intend to make sweeping generalizations about early modern women
travelers or the characteristics of their texts. My project includes three different texts with
three distinct experiences and rhetorical styles, but it is limited in the fact that the
protagonists are all white, Christian, and from privileged families. The authors and
protagonists of the three texts in my study are fortunate because they are literate and have
the resources to tell their stories to a wide audience. Yet even with this seemingly
homogenous group of women, the texts present various reasons for travel, an array of
motivations for writing or speaking about travel, and a variety of spaces (both physical
and literary). Through the overarching theories of spectacle and performance, I study the
specific context and rhetorical strategies of each text.
Isabel’s story in “La esclava de su amante” is an autobiography presented within
the fictional setting of the sarao. María de Zayas presents the tale as a novela ejemplar,
or a text meant to both entertain and educate its reader. Erauso’s autobiography, on the
other hand, does attempt to present a correlation between the protagonist, the narrator,
and the author of the text. While some authors have questioned the authenticity of its
authorship, I do believe that the historical Erauso participated in its creation. Due to their
elite status within the Capuchin order, the traveling nuns bring a level of authority to their
text that may not be found in the others. All of the texts in this dissertation fall on a
continuum of real and imaginary, or history and fiction. The divide between fiction and
non-fiction is fluid as travelers will often borrow from other more fictional genres as they
try to make their experiences relatable to a larger audience. The reverse is also true.
4
Writers of more fictional work will often be influenced by accounts based on real life
travel experiences. In the next three chapters, I work on the assumption that there are
both real and fictional elements in each text. Whether or not the protagonist of the text is
based on the author, she is still a character in the literary text. The author invents the
protagonist, rearranges her experiences, and enhances certain characteristics while
erasing others.
The juxtaposition of these three texts under the heading of travel literature makes
my project unique. Texts like Zayas’s exemplary novella, Erauso’s autobiography, and
the nuns’ text detailing the foundation of a new convent are not usually read together.
However, my approach, which focuses on the spectacular elements of travel, can bring to
light new readings of the texts. To read Zayas’s “La esclava de su amante” next to the
Capuchin nuns’ relación enhances the elements of suffering and the traces of
hagiographic literature in the novela ejemplar. The theatrical performances in Historia de
la Monja Alférez can highlight the roles that the “costume” of the habit and veil play in
the nuns’ account. In addition to making possible new readings of these texts, a study of
women’s travel literature in early modern literature adds to a more nuanced
understanding of women’s lives and the roles they played in the Spanish Empire. When
we think about early modern travel literature, we think about male chroniclers such as
Cristóbal Colón and Hernán Cortés and we think about characters like Quijote and
Lazarillo. When we want to study women’s travel, we mostly encounter literature starting
from the nineteenth century and moving forward. In early modern literature, women
certainly did travel, but scholars have rarely focused on this aspect of the texts. This
project aims to contribute to a growing discussion on the diversity of women’s
5
experiences and their agency to resist or accept and reinforce early modern gender
paradigms.
This dissertation develops from and means to contribute to the trend in literary
studies that looks beyond the nation-state as the foundation and organizing principle
around which the literary analysis takes place. This movement looks beyond geographic
borders to larger questions of culture and movement that do not necessarily fit neatly
within politically-drawn borders. As Michelle M. Hamilton and Núria Silleras-Fernández
note in their introduction to the volume In and Of the Mediterranean, this attempt to
move beyond national borders is especially suitable to fields of study focused on material
produced before 1800, “when the notion of the nation-state . . . is clearly anachronistic”
(x). Scholarly volumes like that of Hamilton and Silleras-Fernández or Lisa Vollendorf
and Daniella J. Kostroun’s Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800)
propose an analysis that values connections between spaces and movement between
cultures. My dissertation engages with both the space of the Mediterranean and the space
of the Atlantic through this approach.
Gendered Travel during the Expansion and Decline of an Empire
About a century separated Erauso’s first voyage across the Atlantic from the
Capuchin nuns’ adventurous journey. At this time, it would be prudent to briefly outline
the socio-historic changes that occurred during this period. This is especially important
because one of the lines of inquiry that connects the three case studies that follow is the
extent of women’s participation in Spain’s imperialistic desires in the seventeenth and
continuing into the eighteenth centuries. Erauso traveled and wrote in a drastically
6
different environment and was surrounded by a significantly more optimistic attitude than
Zayas, who published just a few decades later. The Hapsburg dynasty, which ruled the
Spanish Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and witnessed the curious case
of Catalina de Erauso and the wild popularity of Zayas’s novelas ejemplares, gave way to
the Bourbon kings in 1700, just before the Capuchins departed for Lima. We will be
better able to engage with the specificities of each text if we also acknowledge the
changing situations in which the authors wrote.
The end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century in
Spain was marked by economic problems, instability in the organization of the
population and the governance, and constant conflict both within and outside of the
Peninsula. As many historians have noted, there was a sense that the Spanish Empire hit
its peak, and had begun its decline. Due to destructive epidemics, the flow of people to
the New World, and the expulsion of the Moriscos from 1609–1614, the population in the
Iberian Peninsula fell noticeably. The people that remained in Spain saw an upheaval in
the organization of the population. Agrarian communities and smaller towns lost large
percentages of their populations, while Madrid grew exponentially. The rapid changes in
this urban center only compounded feelings of instability and disorientation. This is the
atmosphere in Spain when a young Erauso decided to travel to the New World.
During this period, much of the wealth coming from across the Atlantic only
passed through Spain. The little wealth that the crown had at its disposal was spent
supporting the imperial troops in their many conflicts around Europe, the Mediterranean,
and the New World. The Hapsburg monarchs faced ongoing warfare with the Dutch,
battles with the Islamic presence in the Mediterranean, and ever-changing tensions with
7
the French and the English. The conflict in the Netherlands held special importance
toward the end of the Hapsburg reign. For the Spanish public in the Peninsula, there was
a growing awareness that the imperial forces in northern Europe were not winning. Philip
III eventually signed the Twelve Years’ Truce in 1609 as part of the Pax Hispanica, and
the monarchy was able to focus more attention on the tensions inside the Peninsula. Paul
C. Allen, whose book analyzes these “peaceful” years, cautions that a consciousness of
being at war remained (viii–ix). Henry Kamen adds that many saw these years of peace
as a strategy for Spain’s enemies to build strength and renew their efforts against the
empire (192). After the relatively peaceful period during Philip III’s reign, Philip IV, who
came to power in 1621 at the age of sixteen, and his valido, the Count Duke of Olivares,
oversaw various conflicts across Europe, including the Thirty Years War and the end of
the Twelve Years’ Truce.
As Erauso gambled and fought in the New World, Spain was dealing with its
sense of decline. Some grew tired of war and pushed for peace, while others expressed
their suspicions about peace. Erauso returned to Europe in 1625, just as the Spanish
monarch was celebrating a series of military victories. Kamen points out, “1625 was in
effect a Wunderjahr,” with an important victory for Spain against the Dutch in the port of
Bahia, Spinola’s success at Breda, and a victory against the English at Cádiz (193).
Olivares and the rest of Spain would have been feeling momentarily that Spain could
regain its position as the top world power. Erauso’s text, which emphasizes her role in
military victories in the New World, would have fed off this more optimistic feeling in
Spain. It is possible that these military victories across Europe helped the monarchy, the
8
Catholic Church, and the European public to accept Erauso’s transgressive text and
lifestyle.
Erauso’s unique mix of femininity and masculinity appeared on the public’s radar
during a time that also included many texts from arbitristas and moralists who blamed
Spain’s military losses and economic woes on noblemen who had given up on the prized
noble masculinity constructed during the late middle ages. In her analysis of these
moralizing texts, Elizabeth Lehfeldt cites seventeenth-century authors Juan de Santa
María, Francisco de León, and Lope de Deza, among others, who charged noblemen with
caring too much about their appearances and leisure activities rather than protecting
Spain and Catholicism (“Ideal Men” 463–64). At this time when strategists and
philosophers were nostalgic for a noble masculinity like that performed by King
Ferdinand or the fictional caballero andante Amadís de Gaula, Erauso’s decision to
escape her convent, dress like a man, and fight indios in the New World appeared
courageous rather than disobedient. In many ways, she performed the noble masculinity
that the arbitristas desired.
The protagonists of María de Zayas’s Desengaños amorosos take part in the same
discussion of noble masculinity. Published in 1647, the Desengaños found an audience
that had witnessed even more conflict, political strife, and economic depression. The
Thirty Years War had taken its toll on the Spanish monarchy. Count Duke Olivares’s
attempts to make Philip IV “truly king of a unified Spain” had provoked resistance in
different parts of the kingdom (Kamen 188). The Spanish public witnessed many
rebellions in the 1630s and 40s in Catalonia, Portugal and the Netherlands. Lisis, one of
Zayas’s protagonists and the noblewoman in charge of the sarao, lays the blame for the
9
state of Spanish arms and the mistreatment of noblewomen squarely at the feet of
noblemen. As a closing declaration, Lisis asks, “¿De qué pensáis que procede el poco
ánimo que hoy todos tenéis, que sufrís que estén los enemigos dentro de España, y
nuestro Rey en campaña, y vosotros en el Prado y en el río, llenos de galas y trajes
femeniles, y los pocos que le acompañan, suspirando por las ollas de Egipto?” (505). If
the public perceived a decline in the Spanish Empire and a disintegration of ideal noble
masculinity, this opened a space for women to take up some of the slack. In Isabel’s case,
the men in her family do not protect her from Manuel, and they do not avenge her rape
immediately after it occurs. She must take care of herself by donning a disguise and
leaving her father’s house.
The audience for Zayas’s Desengaños was disillusioned and looking for someone
to blame for Spain’s downfall, but they had lost their primary scapegoat—the Moriscos.
Throughout the sixteenth century, the Moriscos were increasingly persecuted, accused of
covertly practicing Islam and working as spies for the Turkish and North African enemies
in the Mediterranean. With the signing of the Twelve Years’ Truce in 1609, Philip III and
the Duke of Lerma had time to focus on the so-called threat living inside the Peninsula,
communities that outwardly tried to assimilate to the Iberian–Catholic culture but were
accused of remaining Muslim en el alma. The expulsion, which saw 300,000 Christians
methodically torn from their homes and exiled to North Africa, was hailed as the closing
chapter of Ferdinand and Isabella’s Catholic “Reconquest” of the Iberian Peninsula. A
little over thirty years later, Zayas sends her noble protagonist, pointedly named Isabel
10
and dressed as a Muslim slave, to North Africa. In this feminized space, Isabel can take
control of the plot and the other characters of her story.2
With the death of Philip IV and his ineffectual son Charles II, the Hapsburgs’
reign came to an end. When the Bourbons took power in 1700, it became clear that Spain
no longer resided at the top of the hierarchy of European powers. Louis XIV’s French
court had become the center of power, style, and aristocratic activity. During this change
in dynasties, Spain was involved in the War of Spanish Succession from 1701 until 1714,
and in the end, it lost many of its European possessions, including the Spanish
Netherlands and Gibraltar. The Capuchin nuns first set sail in 1710, just as Spain was
getting accustomed to its new ruler. Madre Josepha Victoria edited Madre María Rosa’s
text in 1722 with the professed intention of sending a copy back to her religious sisters in
Madrid.
Keeping in mind Spain’s state of transformation, it is interesting to theorize about
the audience of the nuns’ text. The authors include scene after scene of triumphal
procession. They describe the pomp and circumstance and the luxurious sensations of
religious fiesta. With the loss of much of its European territory, it would make sense that
Spain would want to highlight its still-prosperous American colonies. In the descriptions
of the nuns’ reception in Buenos Aires and Lima, the text demonstrates the influence of
the center in the periphery, and vice versa. It is an example of the power and influence
that Madrid and the Catholic Church still exercised in the distant lands of South America,
2
When I refer to North Africa as a feminized space, I draw from Sidney Donnell’s Feminizing the
Enemy. The title of Donnell’s study refers to attempts to feminize Spain’s enemies, and the corresponding
suspicions that arose around Spanish noblemen’s “effeminate” tendencies. Donnell demonstrates that the
phenomenon of cross-dressing in early modern Spanish theater reflected anxieties of class, gender,
sexuality, race, and culture in the period.
11
and an indication of the importance of those distant colonies in the construction of
Spain’s identity and how they saw their role in the world.
Although written and disseminated in different time periods and to different
audiences, the texts included in this dissertation demonstrate that women did have a role
in the imperial project. The protagonists are imperial agents that exercise power in distant
lands, and they develop the prestige and authority that comes from being from the Iberian
Peninsula. Whether real, fictional, or somewhere in between, the protagonists of these
travel narratives cross boundaries and carry with them messages, news, clothing and
other material goods, and family and community ties from Spain. Their voices return to
the Peninsula with images of distant lands, different cultures, and stories that have the
power to both reaffirm and to question Spain’s imperial desires and the corresponding
hierarchies of power.
Theoretical Framework: Vision and Spectacle in the Baroque
Travel writing is often characterized by the spectacular and unbelievable sights
that the traveler finds in a distant place. In the Segunda carta de relación, Hernán Cortés
reports in great detail on the urban centers he finds in Mexico. He cannot seem to find the
words to describe one of the cities: “La cual ciudad es tan grande y de tanta admiración
que aunque mucho de lo que de ella podría decir dejé, lo poco que diré creo que es casi
increíble, porque es muy mayor que Granada y muy más fuerte y de tan buenos edificios
y de muy mucha más gente que Granada tenía al tiempo que se ganó” (41). In the
dialogue that makes up the Viaje de Turquía, the protagonist talks about la mujer tapada
and homosexual acts, focusing on the exotic and erotic customs the traveler has witnessed
12
in a place far from the Iberian Peninsula (Chapter XIX). In these examples of travel
writing, the traveler looks out and describes what he sees. Kristi Siegel, in her
“Introduction: Travel Writing and Travel Theory” calls this the “view from home” (4). In
an attempt to explain what they see to those at home, travelers narrate spectacular scenes
of exotic cultures. The three travel narratives analyzed in this project, however, have a
different focus. Rather than expounding on the amazing sights they see in North Africa,
the coasts of South America, or on the ships sailing the Atlantic Ocean, the protagonists
of these travel narratives focus on their own images as traveling women and the crowds
that perceive them as spectacle. To push this point even further, I posit that the women’s
narratives actively construct spectacle to manage the travelers’ positions in their
respective communities.
To construct my argument that traveling women create spectacle to navigate
social relationships, I draw on cultural theories dealing with spectacle, vision, and the
importance of one’s public reputation in the baroque Hispanic world. First, Guy Debord’s
definition of spectacle underlies each of the next three chapters. In his 1967 work The
Society of the Spectacle, Debord’s fourth thesis defines spectacle as “a social relationship
between people that is mediated by images” (12). For the leader of the Situationist
International, the surplus of images that mediates social interaction works to create the
unified masses. Debord theorizes that spectacles unite society behind the values of the
existing order. It is a source of propaganda, or “total justification for the conditions and
aims of the existing system” (Debord 13). With his emphasis on images, Debord affirms
the importance of appearing and the increasing impossibility of deciphering any
authenticity behind appearances. Like other scholars, including Jenny Sager, Karen-edis
13
Barzman, David Castillo, and Bradley J. Nelson, I find this analysis of spectacular
contemporary culture to be a logical point of departure for examining early modern art
and literature. As Barzman points out, early modern European cultures are “emergent
societies of spectacle” (285). While I find Debord’s “society of spectacle” helpful in
understanding early modern Hispanic culture and literature, I agree with Barzman that
spectacle is a “site where power is contested, and where subjects are produced” (286). I
believe the travel narratives included in my project harness baroque spectacle to produce
alternative female subjectivities and contest gender paradigms that located women lower
than men on the power hierarchy of early modern social relations.
Debord’s perspectives on spectacle are primarily negative, but I want to highlight
both the pleasure that spectacle can produce and the ways in which it can destabilize the
social order in a productive way. This is especially true for spectacle in Erauso’s
narrative. Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s theories in The Madness of Vision: On Baroque
Aesthetics help to draw out the more positive impact of the sensational and spectacular
images of the seventeenth-century. In contrast to the immobile, objective, all-seeing
spectator of the Cartesian model, Buci-Glucksmann’s baroque spectator is immersed in
the image. The image is multiple, decentered, and subversive, and it draws out feelings of
both melancholy and excitement in the spectator. In many ways Buci-Glucksmann’s
theories complement Perry’s palimpsetic model for reading early modern women’s
writing. Both highlight illegible texts that implicate the reader/spectator in the
text/spectacle.
Early modern women’s texts, especially texts that give accounts of travel, cross
boundaries of private and public, feminine and masculine, passive and active. In his essay
14
“The Baroque Public Sphere,” William Childers elaborates arguments on the distinction
between the public and secret realms in early modern Hispanic society that are useful in
my analysis of women’s spectacle in the public eye. For Childers, the division between
secret and public was an unstable one; he emphasizes the constant fear that one’s secrets
would become public at any time. Though the author does not address gender, a study of
conduct manuals like Juan Luis Vives’s De institutione feminae christianae, Luis de
León’s La perfecta casada, and Luisa de Padilla’s Nobleza virtvosa provides evidence
that every aspect of women’s lives was meant to remain secret. Women’s choices were
limited by the fear that their movements, desires, and words would become public,
staining their reputations and those of their family members. The ideal, of course, does
not always accurately represent the reality. While the code of honra silenced and stifled
the movements of the ideal woman in conduct manuals, the realities of early modern
women were much more complicated.
In the next three chapters I analyze the strategies women use to make their images
and voices public while avoiding public censure. Through the use of spectacle, a woman
could unite public opinion. However, I show that the unified masses were not always
united behind the dominant social order, as Debord argues. My analysis of these three
travel narratives proves that, in some cases, spectacle could unite public opinion behind a
different set of social guidelines—guidelines that did not necessarily require a silent and
immobile female subject.
15
Chapter Outlines
The next three chapters analyzing “La esclava de su amante,” Historia de la
Monja Alférez, and Viaje de cinco religiosas capuchinas de Madrid a Lima do not follow
chronological order. Instead, I start with the text that falls closer to “fiction” on the
continuum mentioned above. I also start with Zayas’s text because, of the three primary
texts, the first desengaño is the one most deeply connected to Spain and Spanish culture.
Zayas probably never physically traveled abroad. She wrote in Spain, and she
participated in literary circles in Madrid. Her immediate audience was Spanish. The
second chapter examines Erauso’s autobiography. Due to its hybrid nature, it acts as a
bridge between the more fictional desengaño and the relación written by the Capuchin
nuns. Additionally, Erauso had a more hybrid role moving across the Atlantic to the New
World and back to Europe. She tells her story both in South America and in Spain. The
Capuchin nuns also travel across the Atlantic, and they declare they are writing for their
sisters in both Lima and Madrid. However, in 1722, when the text is dated, the nuns are
firmly established in colonial American culture and their Peruvian convent.
The first chapter begins with an analysis of María de Zayas as a woman traveling
in the public sphere. Although there is no evidence that Zayas traveled across oceans, it is
safe to assume that she moved a great deal within the Spanish social and literary scene.
From this mobile position, she created stories and characters that similarly champion
women’s movement and the fluidity between public and private spaces. The first narrator
of the Desengaños amorosos is Doña Isabel, a woman who dresses as a Muslim slave,
travels across the Mediterranean to Algiers, and creates a public performance layered
with disguises, deceptions, and surprises. Isabel’s theatrics—she creates a shocking
16
costume, suggestive music, and a tension-filled atmosphere—set the scene and the
standard for the following narrators and their tales of men’s deceit. Her grand entrance
primes the audience, and the readers, to question initial appearances and the idea of fixed
identity positions.
In my analysis of “La esclava de su amante,” I unravel the complicated layers of
deception that Isabel weaves in her narration. She not only tells of her rapist’s lies and
her servant’s treachery, she also explains her own starring role in the theatrical
performance she designed. She highlights moments when she deceives her family and her
noble community, and she shows pride in her ability to surprise the other characters in
her story. As she gives behind-the-scenes details about her many performances, she
invites the other members of the sarao, along with Zayas’s readers, to be an active part of
her spectacle. In my reading of the text, the protagonist demands that the reader join her
in her journey from trauma to healing. I pay special attention to the ways in which Isabel
frames her rape at the hands of Don Manuel, and I argue that through the use of
hagiographic imagery, the text transforms the un-noteworthy topic of domestic violence
into a spectacle that would make the public take notice. The first desengaño portrays
Isabel’s journey as paramount to her healing, thereby justifying her escape from home.
Her travels give her the time and space she needs to confront her rapist. I draw on
Childers’s explanation of the public and the secret to show how Isabel blurs the line
between the two with her travels and storytelling. I argue that through travel and a skill
for creating spectacle, Isabel is able to publically declare her rape—a topic traditionally
relegated to the secret division of society—to an audience compelled to react in a
sympathetic way. Ultimately, Isabel’s story serves as a model for women to enter the
17
public sphere and to participate in the elaborate game of engaño and desengaño expected
of men in early modern Hispanic society.
The second chapter examines the hybrid gender and genre presented in the
Historia de la Monja Alférez. The decision to include Erauso with her fluid gender status
in a project that claims to analyze women authors and women travelers is a deliberate
one. Erauso lives most of her life as a man, and some scholars refer to her with the
masculine pronoun “he.” In the twenty-first century we might consider the protagonist a
transgender man. From the perspective of her seventeenth-century audience, however,
Erauso was a woman who dressed as a man. The text begins with her full name, Catalina
de Erauso, and her birth as the daughter of a noble Basque family. Her contemporaries
reading the text or witnessing her spectacle as she returns to Europe would have
associated Erauso with the popular transvestite theatre. Although Erauso’s self-identity is
ambiguous, it is clear that she did not enjoy the benefits (and responsibilities) of
noblemen in the early modern Hispanic world. Her audience would not read Erauso’s
autobiography the same way that they would read Lazarillo de Tormes or Cabeza de
Vaca’s Naufragios. For this reason, her inclusion in this dissertation is appropriate.
In this chapter, I draw from Buci-Glucksmann’s theories on the “madness of
vision” to highlight the surplus of images of the Lieutenant Nun in the text, images that
resist any understanding or categorization. The text breaks down the frame that
traditionally separates the spectacle from the spectators as the narrator describes Erauso’s
dress rehearsals practicing her performance of masculinity. I analyze the protagonist’s
performance through a social constructionist lens, paying special attention to the ways the
narrator describes her body, her movements, and her gendered activities (e.g. traveling,
18
gambling, and fighting). I argue that the text uses Erauso’s erratic movement and her
undefinable gender to disorient and entertain her audience, allowing Erauso to escape the
consequences of violating traditional gender norms.
I close with the chapter that examines Viaje de cinco religiosas capuchinas de
Lima a Madrid. I look at the image of the nuns behind their habits, veils, and the convent
walls, and how the public would react to that image. On one level, the text explicitly
affirms the role of the habit in the protection of the traveling nuns. The habit often
protects the women from curious onlookers and it acts as a symbolic barrier between the
travelers and their Dutch captors (Chapter VII). Nonetheless, at another discursive level
the barrier that the habit provides is a permeable and fluid one, and through the narration
of seasickness, bed bugs, sunburn, and other harsh consequences of their extended trek,
the text subtly reveals the forbidden religious women’s bodies to the reader (138, 140,
151, 162, 169). The direct reiterations of the habit’s power to separate the nuns from the
outside world preserve the traveling nuns’ reputations and downplay or hide the women’s
and the text’s transgressions. On the other hand, the subtle unveiling of the nuns’ bodies
and the deafening silences surrounding their contact with laymen create a spectacle that
attracts and seduces the reader. The spectacle of the taboo religious body is
complemented by the repeated spectacle of the religious festivals and processions, where
the image of the nuns behind their habits plays a crucial role (28, 30, 84, 198–99).
Throughout the last chapter my analysis centers on the use of spectacle in the
Capuchin manuscript to position the travelers in relation to the rest of Hispanic society on
both sides of the Atlantic. I connect the nuns’ descriptions of seasickness and sunburns to
the more traditional representation of suffering saints and martyrs, a rhetorical strategy
19
that embeds the travel tale in a more acceptable tradition and genealogy of female
religious writers. Like the spectacles in Zayas’s short story and Erauso’s autobiography,
the images of the suffering religious body in the Capuchins’ text arrange social relations
and power hierarchies.
The next three chapters explore three distinctive texts that call attention to the
images presented by women travelers. Though these texts have not traditionally been
studied together, and on the surface, they appear to have little in common, I show that
their linked analysis sheds light on the surprisingly common image of women’s mobility
circulating in the early modern Hispanic world. I argue that the three primary texts do
share certain characteristics. First, as Mary Elizabeth Perry has argued for early modern
women’s writing, there is a palimpsetic quality to these travel accounts that allows for
multiple, varied, and layered interpretations. Furthermore, “La esclava de su amante,”
Historia de la Monja Alférez, and Viaje de cinco religiosas capuchinas de Madrid a Lima
share a preoccupation with women’s bodies, clothing, and movements that emphasizes
the constructed nature of fixed identity positions, especially gender, race, and class. This
emphasis on the images women present to the public derives from a mutual tendency to
include detailed descriptions of other people’s reactions to the itinerant protagonists. For
Zayas’s tale, this includes the reactions of the noblewomen and men at the soirée who
listen to Doña Isabel’s life story (124, 127, 167). In Erauso’s autobiography, it is most
clear toward the end, when multitudes of people follow the Lieutenant Nun around
Europe to participate in her fame (168, 173). Finally, for the Capuchin nuns, the
adoration of the women’s image in religious festivals and processions from city to city
creates a religious fervor and respect in the text that confirms the nuns’ privileged
20
position in Hispanic society (28, 30, 198–99). The spectacle of elite early modern women
traveling to and through public spaces and being looked at by crowds of people is present
in each text, but I show that each work frames these spectacles in such a way as to either
openly justify or hide the transgression. The many, decentered focal points in each text
create a baroque spectacle that authorizes each author and her text to depict
unconventional and often illicit feminine behavior on a public stage.
21
CHAPTER 1: A JOURNEY FROM CHRISTIAN NOBLEWOMAN TO MUSLIM
SLAVE: PUBLIC WOMEN AND PUBLIC TRAUMA IN “LA ESCLAVA DE SU
AMANTE”
As one of the few popular and successful women within the community of writers
in Madrid in the seventeenth century, María de Zayas (1590–?) attracted a considerable
amount of attention.3 She was spectacle as a woman writing and publishing in a public
manner, so it is not surprising to find an array of deviant and unorthodox women
performing public spectacle in her writing. In Zayas’s most famous works, the Novelas
amorosas y ejemplares (1637) and the Parte segunda del Sarao y entretenimiento
honesto [Desengaños amorosos] (1647), the protagonists are women that read and write,
women that fight, women that lie and cheat, women who feel desire, and, most
importantly for my study, Zayas creates women that travel. As an example, in “El juez de
su causa” from the Novelas amorosas y ejemplares, Estela is kidnapped and taken to
North Africa, and when she is released, she dresses as a man to join Carlos V fighting in
the Mediterranean.4 In “La perseguida triunfante” from the Desengaños amorosos,
Beatriz’s husband leaves her stranded alone in the mountains with her eyes mutilated.
With the help of the Virgin, she travels around Poland and Hungary from pastures to
caves before making her way to a convent. In the first desengaño, “La esclava de su
amante,” Doña Isabel travels from Murcia to Zaragoza with her noble Christian family,
she accompanies her owners around Spain and Italy as a Moorish slave, she travels as a
3
Redondo Goicoechea notes, “No sabemos dónde ni cuándo murió a pesar de que Manuel Serrano
aportó dos partidas de defunción con el nombre de María de Zayas, una de 1661 y otra de 1669, pero
ninguna de las dos parece ser la de la autora” (77). Yllera affirms, “A partir de 1647, fecha de la aparición
de su segunda colección de novelas, no volvemos a tener noticias de ella: pudo morir en cualquier
momento después” (15).
4
One has to wonder if María de Zayas found inspiration in Catalina de Erauso’s famous life story.
Like Erauso, Estela lives successfully as a Spanish soldier. Unlike Erauso, Estela does return to her
feminine clothing and a lifestyle more appropriate for a woman.
22
captive to Algiers, and finally, she is sent to live with Lisis in Madrid. Of the many
possible options, I chose to analyze “La esclava de su amante” because Doña Isabel
travels through the Mediterranean, adding another important geographic region to my
study, and because the protagonist narrates her own story within the sarao. She acts as a
bridge connecting the frame tale to the individual tales of desengaño, and she is the first
narrator of the Desengaños amorosos, setting the example for the women following her.
Doña Isabel creates spectacle in order to tell her story of rape, the catharsis of travel, and
transformation.
In the first desengaño, Doña Isabel stands up in front of the noblemen and women
at the sarao to tell her own story of deceit. She begins by removing the mark of slavery
from her face and identifying herself as the daughter of noble, Christian parents. Isabel
tells her audience that she acted correctly when she rebuffed Don Manuel’s initial
advances and insisted that he first approach her father to ask for her hand in marriage.
However, Manuel never talks to Isabel’s father, and instead, he rapes her. As expected in
early modern storylines, Isabel, at first, wants to marry her rapist. When Manuel tries to
secretly leave town to escape his problems, Isabel disguises herself as a Muslim slave
named Zelima to flee her father’s house and follow Manuel. With the help of one of her
other suitors, Don Felipe, who disguises himself as a servant to follow Isabel, she creates
situations that put her in close contact with Manuel. During one of these encounters, the
characters are taken captive by Moorish corsairs. In North Africa, Isabel continues her
ruse and passes as a Muslim woman. In this role, she is able to negotiate the ransom of
her companions. Upon their return to Spain, Manuel still refuses to marry Isabel, and Don
Felipe kills Manuel to avenge her honor. Isabel continues her journey dressed as a slave
23
until she ends up with Lisis, the noblewoman in charge of the soirée that connects the
Desengaños amorosos.
In this chapter I examine María de Zayas’s “La esclava de su amante” and the
protagonist’s circular travel around Spain, to Algiers, and back to Madrid. I posit that
while she narrates her journey and the trauma of rape that precipitated her transformation
and her sojourn in North Africa, she forces her spectators to reflect on the role of
deception and deviance in early modern Europe, especially among the communities of
noble Spanish families. Although women in early modern Spain were conditioned to
keep their dishonor a secret, Doña Isabel/Zelima displays her rape publically multiple
times. Her spectacle as the first narrator of the Desengaños employs her beauty (marked
by seven years as a Moorish slave), her position as a noblewoman, and her connections to
the audience at the sarao in order to earn a favorable reaction to her story of rape, travel,
and revenge. I hypothesize that the noblemen and women present at Lisis’s party embrace
Doña Isabel because they realize how easy it is to be deceived. The partygoers are easily
misled by Zelima’s disguise, and therefore, they cannot judge Doña Isabel for believing
her rapist’s duplicity. Furthermore, Doña Isabel’s decision to make her rape and the
subsequent transgressions public—to make her secrets and her body into a public
spectacle—is a direct challenge to the system of honor in early modern Spain. The
protagonist defies the precept that women, their sexuality, and their trauma should remain
secret, and not public.
To better understand the novela’s commentary on the divide between the secret
and the public, I will refer to William Childers’s essay “The Baroque Public Sphere,” in
which the literary critic argues that before the notion of the bourgeois public and private
24
spheres, the baroque Hapsburg Spain was divided into the public and the secret. With a
focus on Baltasar Gracián’s theorizations on the modern subject and “this play of hiding
and revealing, of donning one or another mask according to context, and of speaking or
remaining silent depending on access to this or that discursive practice,” Childers
illuminates the role of rumor, the system of honor and limpieza de sangre, and the need
for secrecy in the creation of the “baroque public sphere” (169). While Childers’s
analysis centers on religious identity, I will attempt to offer a gendered reading of the
public versus the secret in Doña Isabel’s tale using behavior manuals like Fray Luis de
León’s La perfecta casada (1583), Juan Luis Vives’s De institutione feminae christianae
(1524), and Luisa de Padilla’s Nobleza virtvosa (1637). Gracián advises men to perform a
controlled version of themselves in public and to keep the rest of their identities,
thoughts, and behaviors private, but conduct manuals for women tell us that women were
to let no part of themselves become public. According to these manuals, women, their
ideas and beliefs, their desires, their sexualities, and their trauma should always remain
secret.
I suggest that the first desengaño challenges this double standard for men and
women’s public performances—the spectacles that early modern men and women create
to relate to their neighbors and order their communities. Zayas, through the Doña Isabel
character, carefully constructs a spectacle and an audience so that this challenge will be
received in a sympathetic way. A large part of this spectacle is built on Doña Isabel’s
travels as Zelima through the Mediterranean, to Algiers, and back to Madrid.
Isabel/Zelima’s body and her story are marked by her contact with the space of the
Muslim “Other,” and the traces of a Moorish identity left on Isabel’s body and woven
25
into her story both seduce and captivate her audience. The protagonist’s successful
endeavors to free the Christian captives in Algiers, which include inplausibly effortless
and uncomplicated interactions with Muslim corsairs and captives, contribute to her
sympathetic reception in Madrid’s noble community. In part, Isabel’s opportunity to
publically declare her story comes from her successful “conquest” of North Africa, a
space fraught with anxieties for the Spanish Kindom’s collective imaginary. As Isabel
reinvents the space through her narration, she creates an Algiers that is easily navigated
and controlled by a Christian noblewoman. The Mediterranean allows Isabel a certain
amount of freedom in the construction and transformation of her subjectivity. Similar to
the real and the literary space of the New World that Erauso finds in Historia de la Monja
Alférez, Doña Isabel/Zelima finds a space in the Mediterranean that allows for a greater
flexibility regarding binary identities.
My analysis in this chapter draws from Guy Debord’s theories on spectacle and
how spectacle works to unite certain groups of people and divide others. For Debord, and
other theorists like José Antonio Maravall, spectacle works as propaganda for the groups
who exercise the most power. In the case of early modern Spain, spectacle should work
to unite the population behind the values and interests of white, Christian noblemen.
Keeping in mind Childers’s distinction between secret and public, we can assume that
violence against noblewomen in their homes was a taboo subject—a secret. It was
generally ignored or erased from public consciousness because, as Debord and Maravall
would argue, spectacle from the period generally lauded those at the top of the social
hierarchy. However, there are exceptions to the types of spectacle that these theorists
mention. Some authors resist the hegemonic order, producing spectacles that question the
26
status quo. I analyze Zayas’s text through a feminist lens to show that it does, in fact,
question the baroque divide between public and secret. Through travel and spectacle, “La
esclava de su amante” brings secret trauma to the attention of the public. Instead of
uniting the public behind the interests of noblemen, Zayas’s text creates spectacles that
cause the audience to share in the suffering of noblewomen.
It is important to keep in mind the limitations of a progressive reading of Zayas’s
Desengaños. Given that Zayas wrote to a primarily noble audience, and within the text,
Isabel speaks to white, aristocratic Christians, the slaves and servants in the Desengaños
are constructed as secondary figures. As scholars like Deanna Mihaly, Yvonne Jehenson
and Marcia L. Welles have argued, the servants are often depicted as greedy and
treacherous, and the black characters are synonymous with that which is ugly and evil. In
short, not all women receive the same treatment in Zayas’s text. While I believe the text
does call for a feminist reading of the noble characters, it does not encompass all women
who contribute to early modern Spanish society. In the next section, I contextualize “La
esclava de su amante” and its author with the socio-historical specificities of midseventeenth-century Spain. I examine the success that Zayas had with her traveling
spectacle of a text. Following that section, I explore the many ways that Doña
Isabel/Zelima’s autobiography addresses the topics of deceit and trickery, artifice, and
rumor. The last half of this chapter analyzes Doña Isabel’s suffering and trauma as
spectacle focusing on the protagonist’s public declarations concerning her rape, her
transformations, and the ways that she reframes her transgressions.
27
María de Zayas, a Woman Traveling in the Public Sphere
To analyze the spectacle of the tortured and dying women in María de Zayas’s
Desengaños with any depth, it is necessary to first understand the context in which this
text was written, disseminated, and read. We have to scrutinize the environment in which
María de Zayas lived. As a woman in male-dominated literary circles, Zayas would have
been acutely aware of the discourses of gender and sexuality circulating in her
community. In this section, I consider the circulation of Zayas, her image, and her texts,
and I examine the strategies she uses to exert control over the image she presents to the
public. Zayas manages her image with the private information that she includes in her
texts and, more importantly, with the details she does not include. Furthermore, Zayas
projects an image that depends on the genres she chooses to write and the traveling
protagonists she creates that reflect her own status as a traveling spectacle.
For centuries, literary critics have tried to decipher the mysteries of María de
Zayas’s personal life. The author’s contemporaries wondered about the anomaly of a
woman writing for the public, and doing so successfully. In the twentieth-first century,
critics have posited questions about a woman who could write a forceful proto-feminist
text in the seventeenth-century. Was she married? Was she jilted by a lover like her
protagonist, Lisis? Did she decide to live the rest of her life in a convent? Many critics
have argued that Lisis acts as Zayas’s double in the text, and Zayas speaks through the
character. In Reclaiming the Body: María de Zayas’s Early Modern Feminism, Lisa
Vollendorf argues, “The intense urge to explain Zayas’s existence closely relates to the
voyeurism that often accompanies interest in women intellectuals. . . . In addition to the
obviously troubling conflation of woman with text, it is a testament to Zayas’s unique,
28
and perhaps threatening, status as a popular woman writer that she and her texts have
been the subject of so much curiosity” (21). I agree that Zayas poses a threat to the ways
that we have understood the early modern intellectual scene. It is easier for scholars to
understand Zayas’s place in the early modern world if we can domesticate her. We do
this by positing theories about her personal life, her possible husband and children, and
the likelihood that she spent the end of her life in a convent. The truth is that we know
very little about the author’s personal life, but the little that we do know is sufficient for
the arguments made in this chapter. We know that Zayas was born in Madrid in 1590 to
Don Fernando de Çayas and Doña María de Barasa, members of “la nobleza media”
(Redondo Goicoechea 74). We know Zayas was born to a privileged family, and she was
active in the Madrid literary scene in the first half of the seventeenth century.
Setting aside Zayas’s private life, I am interested in her literary works and her
public reputation. In addition to the Novelas amorosas y ejemplares and the Desengaños
amorosos, the author wrote at least one comedia titled Traición en la amistad, and she
was well-known and praised for her poetry. Alicia Redondo Goicoechea proposes that
Zayas, “[p]robablemente participó en las actividades de los grupos de Medrano y
Mendoza,” and she developed friendships with other authors like Pérez de Montalbán and
Alonso del Castillo Solórzano (75). As evidence of Zayas’s active participation in literary
circles, Alicia Yllera notes that the author wrote “poemas de circunstancias para celebrar
la aparición de la obra de un amigo o conocido (a Miguel Botello en 1621 y en 1622, a
Juan Pérez de Montalbán en 1624, a Francisco de las Cuevas en 1626, a Antonio del
Castillo de Larzábal en 1632) . . . o panegíricos a la defunción de poetas: participó en el
homenaje a Lope de Vega en 1636 y en el de Montalbán en 1639” (12–13). In addition to
29
writing verses to and about other authors, we have the verses that other authors wrote to
and about Zayas. In La garduña de Sevilla y anzuelo de las bolsas (1642), Alonso de
Castillo Solórzano acknowledges Zayas’s talent: “[E]n estos tiempos luce y campea con
felices lauros el ingenio de doña María de Zayas y Sotomayor, que con justo título ha
merecido el nombre de Sibila de Madrid, adquirido por los admirables versos, por su
felice ingenio y gran prudencia, habiendo sacado de la estampa un libro de diez novelas,
que son diez asombros para los que escriben deste género” (94–95). In his Laurel de
Apolo (1630), Lope de Vega similarly celebrates Zayas’s accomplishments:
Los espinos Pangeos
Aprisa desnudad, y de las rosas
Tejed ricas guirnaldas y trofeos
A la inmortal Doña María de Zayas,
Que sin pasar a Lesbos, ni a las playas
Del vasto mar Egeo,
Que hoi llora el negro velo de Teseo,
A Safo gozará Mitilenea
Quien ver milagros de muger desea:
Porque su ingenio vivamente claro
Es tan unico y raro,
Que ella sola pudiera
No solo pretender la verde rama,
Pero sola ser Sol de tu rivera,
Y tu por ella conseguir mas fama,
Que Napoles por Claudia, por Cornelia
La sacra Roma, y Tebas por Targelia. (184–85)
Zayas’s voice and reputation as an admirable author circulated through Madrid, the rest
of Spain, and other parts of Europe. She traveled just as her protagonists do, both through
her own literature and through the literature of others.
In her introduction to the 1983 critical edition of the Desengaños, Alicia Yllera
emphasizes the success of Zayas’s novelas, noting the multiple editions and translations
of the short stories published during the author’s lifetime and throughout the seventeenth
30
century (64). Echoing Augustín G. de Amezúa’s assertions, Yllera confirms, “[D]espués
de las Novelas ejemplares de Cervantes, fueron las suyas las novelas breves españolas
más difundidas en el Occidente de Europa” (64). In a period when women were supposed
to be silent and enclosed, María de Zayas was, beyond question, a public woman. Mariló
Vigil, in her analysis of Fray Martín de Córdoba’s El jardín de las nobles doncellas,
points out that women’s sole objective, according to a Catholic worldview, was to marry
and produce a family (12). Hence, women were defined by their status as daughter, wife,
or mother, and both doncellas and casadas were to be obedient, modest, and silent.
According to Fray Luis de León, “[E]l mejor consejo que les podemos dar a las tales, es
rogarles que callen y que ya que son poco sabias, se esfuerçen a ser mucho calladas” (93).
Juan Luis Vives—who writes for the education of Mary I, daughter of Catherine of
Aragon and future wife of Philip II—echoes these sentiments, arguing that women should
learn for themselves and to teach small children. Otherwise, they should remain silent,
and they should stay in their homes (72). Luisa de Padilla, in her advice to a noble
daughter, says, “No habléis con exageraciones, o encarecimientos: sea poco, y
aprendiendo con callar aquí lo que halléis de hablar en los otros estados. Pues Aristóteles
dice, es de los mejores ornatos de la mujer el silencio” (230).5 María de Zayas broke all
of these rules. She defined herself, not through her husband or her father, but through her
literary creation. She projected her voice to a European public and refused to apologize
for it.
To a certain extent, Zayas controlled the image of herself that she projected to the
world in the ways that she wrote—or more importantly, did not write—about herself. In
5
I have modernized the spelling of the citations from Luisa de Padilla’s conduct manual to make
them accessible to a wider audience.
31
her essay, “Re-Framing Discourse: Women before Their Public in María de Zayas,” Nina
Cox Davis argues, “[B]oth Zayas and her heroine’s voice represent the author’s concern
that women learn to control their position, vis-à-vis their audience, by exercising
deliberate choice in the ‘place’ from which they speak and write” (326–27). Accordingly,
Cox Davis suggests that María de Zayas painted her own portrait for the public and
deliberately obscured information about her private life, thereby controlling the “place”
from where she wrote. In the “Al que leyere,” which serves as the prologue to the
Novelas amorosas y ejemplares, Zayas does not refer to herself as a wife or a mother
(Cox Davis 329). Unlike the nuns writing in the period, she does not attempt to apologize
for her writing by indicating that she was forced to write by a confessor or by God. As
Cox Davis observes, Zayas establishes her identity “within this public domain of print
culture,” which was “counter to the cultural norms affecting the lives of most of her
female contemporaries” (327). Like Cox Davis, I believe that Zayas is calculated about
the way she constructs her identity as the author of the novelas. It is a risky strategy that
leaves the author open to rumors and public condemnation, but, ultimately, it is a position
that mirrors the public declarations made by Doña Isabel in the Desengaños.
It is important that Zayas did not write autobiography. Unlike Erauso in Historia
de la Monja Alférez and the five capuchin nuns in Viaje de cinco religiosas capuchinas
de Madrid a Lima, Zayas did not name her protagonists after herself. She did not attempt
to create any correlation between the protagonist, the narrator, and the author in her
literature. Instead, Zayas followed the genres of the comedia and the novelas ejemplares.
I do not mean to say that Zayas did not ever incorporate autobiographical elements in her
writing because, like other authors including Miguel de Cervantes, Zayas most likely did
32
include scenes inspired by her personal experiences. However, Zayas constructed her
tales as fiction, aligning herself with genres considered more appropriate for male authors
in the period. As I point out in the chapter on Erauso, the autobiographical genres were
considered more suitable for women writers in the early modern Hispanic world. Luisa de
Padilla, in her advice for noble doncellas, is adamant that women should learn to read,
but strict about the kinds of literature that are appropriate. She writes, “Aficionaos mucho
a leer libros de devoción, como las Confesiones y soliloquios de San Agustín, las obras
de Santa Madre Teresa, las de Fray Luis de Granada . . .” (222). For Padilla, the most
appropriate literature for women is religious writing, which keeps the young girl’s focus
on her interior, spiritual life. If the doncella insists on creating her own literature, Padilla
notes, “[P]odréis hacer con vuestras criadas coloquios y comedias ordenadas de propósito
para este fin porque en ellas no haya mezcla de cosa descompuesta, sino historias de
devoción, y lo que moviere a ella, o moralidades ingeniosas” (260). Padilla is firm that
this should be done in the privacy of the young girl’s home with only her servants or
family members. Zayas, who had success writing about women soldiers, magical spells,
and bloody revenge, crossed the line of what was acceptable for women authors. Nieves
Romero-Díaz asserts that Zayas rebelled against social mores that enclosed and silenced
women when she wrote La traicion en la amistad, a comedia meant to be publically
represented (476). I would extend this to the novelas ejemplares, where Zayas tells
stories that go far beyond her own spiritual life and experiences, and her stories travel
farther than a domestic audience.
For an early modern woman, especially from the higher castes, public space was
fraught with danger. A public woman was associated with prostitution, dishonoring
33
herself and the rest of her family. As Mary Elizabeth Perry shows, in Gender and
Disorder in Early Modern Seville, authorities from the church and the crown made a
concerted effort to force women into enclosed and regulated spaces in early modern
Spain. Perry asserts:
The fact that women and men did not always behave according to gender beliefs
did not prevent lay and secular officials from repeatedly invoking these beliefs.
Nor did they hesitate even when their gender ideals seemed completely
incongruous with actual living conditions. In fact, gender beliefs that women
required special protective enclosure seemed to be even more strongly invoked as
men’s preoccupation with wars and colonizing required women to participate
more actively in the life of the city. (9)
Daughters and wives were to remain inside their homes, religious women were to stay
inside the walls of the convent, and even prostitutes were, at times, forced into brothels.
Indeed, women’s bodies were considered dangerous, and Perry shows various laws that
tried to cage those bodies. For example, Perry cites the brothel ordinances in Seville in
1570 (137). By 1596, Perry notes, “the royal council declared that many ‘lost’ and
vagabond women who wandered about Seville should be gathered together in a house
where they could be confined to support themselves by the work of their hands” (141).
Perry also mentions that officials in Seville “periodically” tried to enforce regulations
against women selling food and other goods on the streets (18–20). While I agree with
Perry’s nuanced analysis, I would also emphasize the attempts to enclose women’s
voices. I believe that launching one’s voice into public spaces was just as risky and
transgressive as physically leaving one’s house or convent. Zayas was seen and talked
about in Madrid, and as a public woman, her reputation was in danger. In Spanish, of
course, mujer pública traditionally meant prostitute. For a woman to be present in public
spaces implied that she had no honor. Zayas was, however, one of the countless women
34
who pushed against the gender restrictions; she was able to create a public space for
herself alongside Miguel de Cervantes and Lope de Vega in both seventeenth-century
Madrid and also in twenty-first-century literary canons. This allowed Zayas’s words to
travel through space and time.
In the last few decades, Zayas’s texts have firmly established themselves
alongside Don Quijote and La vida es sueño in the academic literary canons both in the
United States and in Spain. One of the topics that attracts literary critics to Zayas’s
novelas is the complicated, and at times contradictory, feminism present in both the
Novelas amorosas and the Desengaños. At times the novelas seem to call for women to
come together as a community of oppressed peoples, and, at others, the text pits one
woman against another. When Zayas does include conflicts between women, they are
usually from a different class, cultural background, or race, and a male character is
typically at the center of these conflicts. At the same time, the women in Zayas’s
Desengaños are bound together as victims of a violent noble masculinity. In the
seventeenth century, Zayas was already grappling with issues that still plague twentyfirst-century feminists—how does one define the category of “women,” and who is
included and excluded from this identity group? Moreover, at the same time that Zayas
assertively claims a public space for herself in print culture, the Desengaños could be
read as a warning to women who leave the protected space of the home/convent. The play
between the frame and the individual tales often adds to these contradictory
interpretations. The form of the novelas ejemplares and the complicated frame tale that
Zayas constructs give the reader image upon image of traveling, disobedient, and vocal
35
women. It offers an unending variety of perspectives and possible readings. In short,
Zayas chooses the perfect literary genre to represent her spectacle.
The variety of experiences and subjectivities represented in Zayas’s Desengaños
are enhanced by a constant change in setting. The women at Lisis’s soirée tell stories set
all over Europe, allowing the audience of the frame tale to travel to imaginary spaces,
along with Zayas and her readers. “La más infame venganza,” for example, occurs in
Milan, and “El verdugo de su esposa” takes place in Sicily. The characters of “Tarde
llega el desengaño” travel to Flanders and the Canary Islands. In “Mal presagio casar
lejos,” the women travel to Portugal, Italy, and Flanders, and in “La perseguida
triunfante,” the protagonist wanders around Hungary and Poland. In “La esclava de su
amante,” Isabel takes her public on a trip across the Mediterranean to Algiers and back to
Madrid. This layering of different places and experiences creates a spectacle of traveling
women. And though there is no evidence that María de Zayas physically traveled to any
of these places, through literature, she not only explores the imaginary spaces of Italy,
Flanders, and Hungary, but she also contributes to their creation. An early modern
woman who dares to write in a genre dominated by men and creates distant and exotic
places for her audience would certainly be a spectacle in the eyes of a Spanish public
concerned with appearances and propriety.
Lisis’s storytellers create a distance between their stories and the realities of
seventeenth-century Spanish society by narrating many of their taboo subjects in faraway
places. In their focus on the imaginary places of Italy or Flanders, these women create a
narrative space to tell stories of horrific domestic violence, rape, murder, magical
deviance, and even homosexual acts. Space in Zayas’s text, and especially the gendered
36
aspects of space, becomes even more complicated when we consider the cultural and
textual space of the sarao. In Lisis’s lavish sala, the narrators are safe to go on journeys
with the traveling protagonists of their tales. Zayas takes the confined space of a
noblewoman’s sitting room and pries it open. It is no longer domestic or secret. Instead,
the space is a conduit to distant places and radical ideas. In these unique spaces—Zayas’s
textual space, Lisis’s sala, and the imagined space of Europe—Zayas and her narrators
transform the everyday injustices in the lives of noblewomen into spectacle. Zayas
creates the space to narrate rape and murder from a woman’s point of view.
Because the tales of violence in the Desengaños echo tales of gendered violence
in seventeenth-century Spain, some scholars have referred to Zayas’s novelas as
examples of realist literature. However, most recent scholars agree that the Desengaños
are not meant to be a faithful realist portrait of Zayas’s society. Brownlee, for example,
argues that Zayas has no intention of depicting day-to-day life in Spain exactly as it is
(113). Early modern literary theorists like El Pinciano argue that literature should imitate
nature, but not copy it. For El Pinciano, literature “no es otra cosa que arte que enseña a
imitar con la lengua o lenguaje” (91). He continues, “es imitación de la obra, no la obra
misma,” but he does insist on verisimilitude (108). Following this early modern theory on
fiction, Zayas draws from her surroundings for the Desengaños, but she pushes her
representations to extremes and she incorporates elements of the fantastic. Zayas includes
magic and sightings of the Virgin to make her tales astonishing and noteworthy. She also
pushes the common issue of domestic violence to the limit, offering her reader grotesque
images of women wasting away after years enclosed in walls (287), or women who are
left alone in the wilderness with their eyes gouged out (429). These intensified images
37
make the Desengaños shocking and spectacular. Despite the embellished imagery and
supernatural elements, Zayas’s tales do capture the spirit of gendered violence and the
double standard for men and women in early modern Spain. The violence criticized in
Zayas’s novelas was circulating in the period, as evidenced by the popularity of honor
plays like Calderón’s El médico de su honra (1637) and Lope de Vega’s El castigo sin
venganza (1631). Zayas takes the theme and makes it her own by providing vivid images
of traumatized and murdered women. The most innovative element of Zayas’s
representation of violence against women is that she tells the stories from the women’s
point of view. Zayas takes the invisible, daily cruelty faced by early modern women and
transforms it so that it becomes spectacle, worthy of the public’s attention, and shocking
enough to provoke activism. Through this use of spectacle, Zayas’s Desengaños reframe
questions of honor in noble communities and point out injustices caused when women are
left without resources or opportunities to voice their suffering.
Characters like Doña Isabel in “La esclava de su amante,” who leaves her home,
travels the Mediterranean, demands to be treated better by Manuel, and chooses her own
path, call for a more radical reading of the Desengaños. In Mary Elizabeth Perry’s words,
Zayas “is unique in writing ‘love stories’ that told of the violence between women and
men. And she is original in finding the cause of this violence not in personal flaws or evil
individuals but in a gender system so deeply embedded in society that it could not be
changed without shaking the very foundations of her world” (“Crisis and Disorder” 24).
In my reading of the Desengaños, I do believe the text calls for changes at the core of
seventeenth-century Spanish society. As a traveling woman and a public spectacle, Zayas
is in a unique position to create a text that crosses limits and pushes boundaries. The rest
38
of this chapter will examine Doña Isabel’s authority in her performance of spectacle in
the first desengaño, and the ways that she “shakes the foundations” of female subjectivity
in her early modern travel tale.
Unveiling Deception in Doña Isabel/Zelima’s Autobiography
When Zelima takes the stage to tell the first tale of deceit and disenchantment at
Lisis’s sarao, she speaks to an audience primed for tricks, deceptions, masks, and
performances. Both the audience at the sarao, made up of Lisis’s aristocratic friends, and
Zayas’s readers are well acquainted with hypocrisy, duplicity, and disappointment. It
surrounds early modern Spaniards in their economic and military situation, in their
relaciones and comedias, and in their conduct manuals and religious sermons. The
engaño and corresponding desengaño are so embedded in Spanish society that the public
begins to appreciate a well-designed and perfectly-executed deception. The audience
enjoys trying to see behind the mask, they appreciate the machinations of an impressive
theatrical performance, and they laugh at the illusions and scams of the popular pícaros.
In this section I argue that Isabel/Zelima—and Zayas, as her creator—acknowledges the
baroque public’s affinity for deceit, disguise, and performance, but bemoans the double
standard for men and women’s participation on the public stage. The text employs
different layers of private and public spaces to break down the boundary separating the
secret from the public for early modern noblewomen. With a deceptive appearance that
defies expectations and categories, Isabel becomes a model to lead other women to
successfully negotiate the theatrics and spectacles of public interactions.
39
According to historians, the Spanish public’s awareness of deception, decline, and
pessimism expanded in the late sixteenth century with the death of Phillip II, setbacks in
Spain’s aspirations to extend its empire, the plague, and increased poverty in overflowing
urban areas. These feelings only intensified in the ten years between the publication of
the Novelas amorosas in 1637 and the Desengaños in 1647. The Spanish public saw a
difference between the successes of the Catholic kings, Carlos I, and Phillip II and the
perceived weaknesses of Phillip III and Phillip IV. The Spanish Empire that was going to
conquer every corner of the world and become rich from the treasures of the New World
was blasted by moralists who wrote about the weaknesses of Spanish noblemen and the
infirmities of the Spanish monarchy. The relaciones told of Spanish military losses to
Protestant and Muslim enemies. There was a mass exodus of Spaniards from the
countryside, but the people who moved to the cities in search of a better life found
famine, unemployment, and misery. In her essay, “Crisis and Disorder in the World of
María de Zayas y Sotomayor,” Mary Elizabeth Perry touches on all of these perceived
deceptions in Spain and the wider European community. Perry argues, “From an
economic perspective, the world of María de Zayas y Sotomayor can be summarized as
one of disappointments, discontentments, dislocations, and—especially for females—
dependence” (27). She also acknowledges that urban spaces in Spain—spaces that Zayas
featured in her writing—were “expected to be centers of commercial prosperity,” but
instead “were more often places of dissatisfaction” (25). Enrique García Santo-Tomás
adds that the space of the city—Madrid, in this case—could often cause anxiety and
uncertainty. The rapidly changing urban atmosphere destabilized the notion of
public/private and visible/invisible (Espacio urbano 132). The feelings of anxiety, deceit,
40
and disappointment perceived by the early modern Spanish public quickly made their
way into literature and art, featuring prominently in works like Velázquez’s Las meninas
(1656) and Calderón’s La vida es sueño (1635).
With a discontented public who felt the decline of the Spanish Empire, those at
the top of the social hierarchy doubled down on spectacular propaganda meant to
celebrate the Empire, the Catholic Church, and the House of Hapsburg. Debord argues,
“By means of the spectacle the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an
uninterrupted monologue of self-praise. The spectacle is the self-portrait of power in the
age of power’s totalitarian rule over the conditions of existence” (19). A walk through the
Museo Nacional de Escultura in Valladolid offers a lineup of examples of spectacular
sculptures used to draw the masses in a united community for the Catholic Church. One
of the sculptures that has always stood out to me is the Cristo yacente (c.1627) by
Gregorio Fernández. It is a massive and realistic sculpture displayed so that it would be
possible to reach out and touch the many bloody wounds created in polychrome.
According to the museum website, this sculpture “estaba destinada normalmente al banco
de los retablos para poder ser colocado el Jueves Santo y recibir adoración.” People from
all social positions would have lined up to admire this piece of art—men and women,
nobles and laborers, priests and lay people. The spectacle would cause people to forget
their conflicts and feelings of disappointment to make room for religious fervor.
On the other hand, some artists pushed back against the idea of art solely as
propaganda. Instead of uniting the population behind the interests of the elites and instead
of hiding or erasing the deceptions and disappointments of the empire, authors like María
de Zayas and artists like Diego de Velázquez invoked the failures of the Spanish military
41
and the injustices of Spanish society in their art. One of Velázquez’s works that most
illustrates this point is El bufón llamado don Juan de Austria (1632–35). One of the court
jesters playing the role of the military hero of Lepanto taps into the public’s desire for
disguise and performance. The man playing Don Juan is older, and his weapons and
armor are tossed haphazardly at his feet. As a representation of Spain’s bellicose power,
the painting is a nod to the perceived decline of the Spanish Empire. Velázquez’s
depiction of this parody “unsettles the apparently strict rigidity and ideological security of
the official Spanish Habsburg representational regime” (Bass 111). This painting is proof
that there is space for an author like Zayas to resist the spectacles of propaganda that
praised the hegemonic order with a spectacle of her own. Spectacles produced by the
likes of Velázquez and Zayas use the public’s appetite for engaño and desengaño to
destabilize the public’s sympathies for the elites of Spanish culture.
Perhaps inspired by the many engaños in Spanish art and literature, the public
played with their own performances of identity, wearing masks and concealing parts of
themselves during their interactions with others. It became a challenge to know your
neighbor better than he knew you, ensuring the person with more knowledge a more
powerful position in his or her community. The manipulation of one’s identity through
revealing and concealing was often about survival, especially for converts to Christianity,
men and women who transgressed norms of gender and sexuality, and anyone who
threatened the existing order. In this age of the Inquisition and Spanish preoccupation
with honra, appearances were everything. Moralists warned women that it was not
enough to be chaste. In early modern Spain, the appearance of chastity and a spotless
reputation were far more important than any actual indiscretions. For Moriscos living in
42
Spain at the end of the sixteenth century, appearance and reputation were a matter of life
and death. Depending on one’s class, gender, and geographic location, the dangers of
appearing to live as a covert Muslim carried severe penalties. Because appearances were
important, the mufti of Oran encouraged Muslims to eat pork and drink wine in order to
appear to be Christians (García Arenal 43–45). The outward appearances and actions of
converso populations were used by their neighbors to make accusations of cryptoJudaism. In the Proposiçion del daño que pueden causar los Portugueses y mas los
christianos nuevos, que se han difundido por estos reynos de Castilla en el estado
presente (1642), the anonymous author alleges, “We see that they don’t buy possessions
or mingle with the natives of these kingdoms” (qtd. in Muchnik 155; emphasis mine). For
subaltern groups—Moriscos, Conversos, and women—it was important to be seen
complying with the hegemonic order. Women with unconventional lives, women with
extraordinary accomplishments, and traveling women often wrote or gave oral accounts
of their lives in an attempt to curb rumors and control the ways they were seen both by
their neighbors and by the men in power.
To understand the ways that Doña Isabel/Zelima’s spectacle breaks down the
boundaries between reality and appearances and between public and secret, I look to
William Childers’s essay on the necessity of deception, artifice, and performance during
public interactions in early modern Spain. Following Gracián’s seventeenth-century
doctrines guiding public behavior, Childers offers an alternative to Jürgen Habermas’s
theories on the notion of the bourgeois public and private spheres, arguing that in
Hapsburg Spain, there was a “public sphere” and, as a contrast, there were “secrets”
(166–67). He also points out that the separation between public and secret was porous
43
and unstable, and that which was secret one moment could easily become public in the
next (167). In “La esclava de su amante,” Doña Isabel’s performance hinges around this
frontier area between public and secret. I posit that Doña Isabel is exceptional in how she
controls the ways that her secrets become public. Her trauma is not discussed and
manipulated through rumor. Instead, Isabel takes control of the information that she
disseminates. At the sarao, she creates a spectacle for a carefully selected audience.
Although I do want to emphasize Isabel’s agency, I should caution that this agency is
limited. Additionally, Isabel would not be as free in her performance if she did not come
from privilege and if she was not speaking to an audience of her peers. Childers notes,
“[T]he agency of the person who performs in the baroque public sphere is necessarily
fragmented and situational. It is the agency, not of an autonomous, private citizen, but of
a member of a specific status group. The social space in which this agent operates is not a
unified, transparent arena of rational debate, but a maze of distinct possibilities” (170).
Doña Isabel carefully and successfully negotiates this maze. I suggest that at times, she
pushes the boundaries and even creates an alternative path.
Neither Childers nor Gracián attempt to locate women in their mapping of the
baroque public and secret realms. However, a quick review of women’s conduct manuals
will help us establish the paths available to women in this “maze” of possible
performances. It is important to note that not all women had access to the same routes,
masks, and disguises in the public sphere. Moreover, not all women had the privilege to
maintain “secrets.” These options depended on race, class, sexuality, marital status,
religion, and ancestry. For noble doncellas, like Doña Isabel, Lisis, and the rest of their
44
companions, most, if not all, of their lives, experiences, their thoughts and beliefs, and
their identity positions should have remained secret. Fray Luis de León notes:
Como son los hombres para lo publico, assi las mugeres para el encerramiento: y
como es de los hombres el hablar y el salir a luz, assi dellas el encerrarse y
encubrirse. . . . Y assi es que las que en sus casas cerradas y occupadas las
mejoraran, andando fuera dellas las destruyen. Y las que con andar por sus
rincones ganaran las voluntades y edificaran las consciencias de sus maridos,
visitando las calles, corrompen los coraçones agenos: y enmollecen las almas de
los que las veen, las que por ser ellas muelles se hizieron para la sombra, y para el
secreto de sus paredes. (98–99)
Ideally, the only aspect of Doña Isabel’s life that would be public is that she exists as her
father’s daughter. In this way, her father would be able to recruit suitors and eventually
marry Doña Isabel to a family that would provide the most profitable connections. Doña
Isabel’s appearance would be hidden from the public as much as possible; however, it
would be preferable that rumors circulate about her extraordinary beauty. On the
contrary, rumors about any other topic related to a noblewoman would be discouraged.
Women’s thoughts, their bodies, and, most importantly, their sexuality were
protected/imprisoned in the secret realm of early modern society. As Childers points out,
rumor served as the “dominant social discourse of the baroque,” and “a local form of
social control” (171–72). Rumor was also constantly changing, moving, and
transforming. The woman who spreads rumors one moment could, in the next moment,
become the subject of speculation and gossip. The best way for women to keep
themselves and their families safe from rumor was to stay enclosed in their homes or
convents. As we saw in the previous section, and as I will show in the rest of this chapter,
neither María de Zayas nor Doña Isabel complies with these decrees outlining women’s
45
place in early modern society. In fact, both women actively participate in public
spectacle.
These restrictions on women in the baroque public sphere reflected the ideal
characteristics of the noblewoman represented in conduct manuals. But, as Mary
Elizabeth Perry shows in Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville, the ideal did not
always reflect the real. Indeed, the discourse concerning gender prescriptions and
restrictions intensified as women gained more authority and freedom in their day-to-day
lives. Perry points out that moralists and both religious and secular officials repeatedly
called for women and men to lead separate and highly prescribed and controlled lives,
even when these prescriptions were not feasible given the economic and political realities
of early modern Spanish life (9). This tension between the real and the ideal, and the
fluidity between the public and the secret, created a space for women to resist, and
negotiate with, prevailing gender restrictions. The noblewomen and men at the sarao, for
example, take advantage of the space created in Lisis’s sitting room to narrate stories
about secret trauma in a public way. The private and confined space of the sala is opened
up to distant cultures and opposing viewpoints. On top of this transformation of the space
from enclosed to accessible, Lisis takes advantage of the fact that the space is technically
part of her domestic domain to declare that only women are allowed to tell stories during
the event (118). Although the domestic enclosure was meant to silence women, Lisis
turns this intention on its head to privilege women’s voices. In this space between public
and secret, María de Zayas, through Doña Isabel, designs a spectacle that both authorizes
and justifies public declarations of secret information.
46
Firstly, Zayas creates a frame for her Desengaños that includes a tight-knit
community of noblewomen, a space that is both private and public, and a festive and
spectacular atmosphere. In the introduction to the first night of the sarao, Lisis’s guests
and Zayas’s readers are treated to music, food, suspense, and amazement. The narrator
describes elaborate decorations and sumptuous clothing:
Se previnieron músicos, y entoldaron las salas de ricas tapicerías, suntuosos
estrados, curiosos escritorios, vistosas sillas y taburetes, aliñados braseros, tanto
de buenas lumbres como de diversas y olorosas perfumaderas, claros y
resplandecientes faroles, muchas bujías, y sobre todo sabrosas y costosas
colaciones, sin que faltase el amigo chocolate (que en todo se halla, como la mala
ventura). Todo tan en su punto, que la hermosa sala no parecía sino abreviado
cielo, y más cuando empezaron a ocuparle tantas jerarquías de serafines,
prefiriendo a todas la divina Lisis, de negro, con muchos botones de oro; y si bien
la dama no era más linda que todas, por la gallardía y entendimiento las pasaba.
(120)
Zayas’s description takes into account the reader’s every sense, creating spectacle on a
grand scale. The participants in the sarao and Zayas’s reader are ready to be shocked and
amazed, especially because the introduction also warns that the women at the party are
the only ones allowed to narrate their stories: “Acomodados todos en sus lugares, sin que
faltase de los suyos el ingrato don Juan y el dichoso don Diego, y todos los hombres mal
contentos de que, por no serles concedido el novelar, no podían dar muestra de las
intenciones. . . . Y las damas contentas de que les llegaba la ocasión de satisfacerse de
tantos agravios” (120). According to William H. Clamurro, the sarao is an event separate
from the outside world, or a “hiatus” from the characters’ normal responsibilities, and for
this reason, the women are able to tell their stories (46). I agree that the sarao is a
privileged space that offers a hiatus, but I do not want to completely disengage the
Desengaños from the greater early modern Spanish context. Doña Isabel’s spectacle
47
creates a situation that both takes part in early modern Spanish society, and is
simultaneously apart from it. It is a space that is both secret and public. It is secret in the
sense that it begins as a smaller gathering of friends in Lisis’s home, but public because
more and more people arrive at the sarao after hearing about the astonishing women and
their peculiar stories. Obviously the stories told within the domestic space are traveling
far beyond the sala walls. The soirée offers Doña Isabel, and all the women that follow
her, a unique stage on which to play with the frame that separates the narrators from their
tales, the walls that separate the beautifully decorated sitting room from the rest of
Madrid, and the fluid boundary that separates the women’s secrets from public
knowledge.
In addition to the space of the sarao, a crucial event in Doña Isabel’s tale takes
place during carnival. In Zayas’s tale, although Don Manuel had been pursuing Doña
Isabel for some time, it is not until carnival that he is able to find her alone and rape her.
The narrator sets the scene of her own trauma: “Llegóse en este tiempo el alegre de las
carnestolendas. . . . Andábamos todos de fiesta y regocijo, sin reparar los unos en los
desaciertos ni aciertos de los otros. Pues fue así, que pasando sobre tarde al cuarto de
doña Eufrasia a vestirme con ella de disfraz para una máscara que teníamos prevenida . . .
su traidor hermano . . . me detuvo a la puerta de su aposento” (137). Mikhail Bakhtin has
famously described carnival as a ritual spectacle built on feasts, costumes and masks, a
temporary suspension of the social order, and symbols death and violence accompanied
by symbols of birth and renewal (5–10). I am not the first to highlight this particular
timing for Isabel’s story. Yvonne Jehensen and Marcia L. Welles confirm the importance
of the unique time and space of carnival. The authors emphasize the disguises and
48
surprises that one would expect in this “mundo al revés” as well as the “lenton period of
mortification of the flesh and to the prospect of rebirth and resurrection” (178). Doña
Isabel is the first to take the stage in the Desengaños, and she uses the spectacle of
carnival within her spectacle at the sarao to set the stage for her rape. Bakhtin notes that
carnival is defined by “a temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers
among men and of certain norms and prohibitions of usual life,” as well as a special form
of communication not present in ordinary life (15–16). Isabel takes advantage of the
implications of this festive atmosphere to break with expectations of storytelling and
models of acceptable behavior. She speaks about events that she would normally have to
keep secret. Doña Isabel, a noble Christian woman who disguises herself as a Muslim
slave and sells herself into slavery, exploits the upside-down world of carnival and the
space of the soirée where her voice has a greater impact.
We can also analyze carnival in relation to the journey that Isabel begins when
Manuel rapes her. For Bakhtin, carnival is a time for degradation and regeneration:
To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth
something more and better. To degrade also means to concern oneself with the
lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it
therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and
birth. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a
destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one. (21)
By framing Manuel’s violent act during carnival, Isabel takes charge of the scene and
transforms it from a violent one to a regenerative one. She rewrites her trauma so that
instead of just being destructive, it marks the beginning of her transformative journey.
This journey leads her to Lisis’s sarao, where she finds a healing space, a space that
49
values her reproductive capabilities (as an author), and a community of like-minded
women.
For her first narrator, Zayas creates an atmosphere of carnivalesque disguises and
plot twists along with a festive ambiance that privileges women’s voices, both for the
audience at the sarao and for Zayas’s readers. It is a topsy-turvy baroque scene that
enables Doña Isabel to create her own path from the secret to the baroque public realm.
Isabel is not only able to find a way to make her travels—and the trauma that precipitated
those travels—public, but she also manages to take her audience on a journey. The
audience’s journey begins when they first see the Moorish woman, clearly out of place in
their aristocratic, Christian world. Lisis and her friends wait in suspense to hear this
exotic woman’s tale, only to find that they have been deceived. Through her storytelling,
Doña Isabel guides her audience (and Zayas’s readers) through their first tale of deceit,
violence, and disenchantment, setting the model for the following desengaños.
Zelima begins her narration as a younger, naïve Doña Isabel. Her first travels are
sanctioned ones, when she moves from Murcia to Zaragoza with her family. As a young
girl, her beauty was well known in her hometown. According to Isabel, “Partimos de
Murcia, dejando con mi ausencia común y particular tristeza en aquel reino,
solemnizando en versos y prosas todos los más divinos entendimientos la falta que hacía
a aquel reino” (130). When she moved, however, her novelty in the city and her beauty
caused commotion in the public rumor circulation. Isabel admits, “Llegamos a la
nobilísima y suntuosa ciudad de Zaragoza, y aposentados en una de sus principales casas,
ya descansada del camino, salí a ver, y vi y fui vista” (130). Isabel’s first experience with
travel seems to open her eyes to the precarious position of women on a public stage. She
50
narrates her first encounters with the thrill and the danger of seeing and being seen. With
this awareness of the power of seeing and the dangers of the public stage comes the need
to perform, to hide, and to play with one’s identity. Isabel’s desengaño emphasizes the
roles people must perform in their jockeying for position and power on the public stage.
Many characters in Isabel’s tale take part in deception, using disguise,
performative discourse, along with other forms of artifice, but only Don Manuel is the
target of Doña Isabel’s scathing reprimands. For example, when the pair designs a ruse
for Zaida, an elite Moorish woman they meet in Algiers, and Manuel again promises to
marry Isabel, she breaks from narration to exclaim, “¡Ah, falso, y cómo me engañó en
esto como en lo demás!” (160). Given Lisis’s demands of the narrators of the
Desengaños, it comes as no surprise that throughout Doña Isabel’s life story, she
emphasizes the many times that Don Manuel deceives her. When he first meets Isabel in
Zaragoza, he tries to get close to her, and when she resists, he puts on the mask of the
injured victim in order to win over his sister and the servant, Claudia (135). After he
rapes Doña Isabel, he tells her that he will marry her in order to soothe her fury. As a
captive in Algiers, Manuel promises Isabel that he will finally restore her honor as long
as she facilitates his ransom and return to Spain (160). Don Manuel exemplifies the Don
Juan archetype so popular in early modern Spanish literature. However, where Tirso de
Molina’s Don Juan uses disguises and darkness as a mask, Don Manuel uses his words to
deceive Isabel and every other woman he meets, including Claudia, Doña Eufrasia (his
sister), Alejandra (his lover), and Zaida. Don Manuel convinces Claudia and Doña
Eufrasia that his intentions toward Doña Isabel are honorable so that the women will help
him in his schemes. He deceives Alejandra by simultaneously developing a relationship
51
with Doña Isabel, and in this manner, he sets the women against each other as enemies
(142). Finally, he puts Zaida in the middle of his manipulations of Doña Isabel, making
Zaida believe he will marry her if she helps the Spaniards escape captivity in Algiers
(160). Through her spectacle at the sarao and her rhetorical skills in linking Manuel’s
deceitful nature with all of these women, Isabel successfully unites women from different
classes, races, and cultural backgrounds. Her spectacle manages social relations, but not
in the way that Debord puts forth. Her spectacle does not unite the masses in support of
the status quo. It does not stabilize possible fissures in early modern society. Instead, she
highlights the failures of noblemen and unites the masses behind the interests of
noblewomen.
Doña Isabel’s message to the rest of the women at the sarao is that men cannot be
trusted, and women need to learn to protect themselves from men’s deception, artifice,
and their performances. According to Isabel’s story, men perform the role of the devoted
galán, but it is a ruse. To a certain extent, Doña Isabel’s warnings to her fellow
noblewomen are an extension of Gracián’s advice to men. Nicholas Spadaccini and
Jenaro Talens summarize Gracián’s theories on truth and deception: “In the unstable
world of the absolutist court, speaking the truth can often lead to bloody
consequences. . . . Thus, only those who practice a strategy and technique of prudence, of
hiding their true selves, can successfully control their own destinies. . . . Gracián
proposes an economy of language and behavior and a controlled self defined through a
highly pragmatic (and programmatic) action that leaves nothing to chance”
(“Introduction: The Practice of Worldly Wisdom” xi). In my reading of the first
desengaño, Doña Isabel laments the fact that women have been left out of this game of
52
survival involving a “true” self and deception. She tells women they need to be more
aware of possible deception, and she subtly suggests that women should also take part in
this “economy of language and behavior.” In the middle of her tale, she interrupts with
this self-reflective exclamation:
Enamoréme, rogué, rendíme; vayan, vengan penas, alcáncense unas a otras. Mas
por una violencia estar sujeta a tantas desventuras, ¿a quién le ha sucedido sino a
mí? ¡Ay, damas hermosas y avisadas, y qué desengaño éste, si le contempláis! Y
¡ay, hombres, y qué afrenta para vuestros engaños! ¡Quién pensara que don
Manuel hiciera burla de una mujer como yo, supuesto que, aunque era noble y
rico, aun para escudero de mi casa no le admitieran mis padres!, que éste es el
mayor sentimiento que tengo, pues estaba segura de que no [me] merecía y
conocía que me desestimaba. (141)
Given Doña Isabel’s privileged position as a protected daughter of a noble family, she
thought she was safe from deception. Her story serves as a warning for other women in
her position who must prepare to face the falsehoods and masks of others while, at the
same time, cultivating their own masks and performances. She calls on noblewomen to
protect themselves by learning to play the deception game. Women need to be on guard
against deception, but they also need to know how to create their own disguises and
better control their public image.
After Don Manuel rapes and deceives Doña Isabel, she takes control of her
destiny, dressing as a Muslim slave, and leaving her father’s house in order to follow Don
Manuel (151–53). This storyline is not unique in early modern Spanish literature. As
Carmen Bravo-Villasante’s La mujer vestida de hombre en el teatro español
demonstrates, the comedias are full of dishonored female characters who disguise
themselves in order to travel the world in search of the man who inflicted the trauma. The
topic has been studied by many scholars including Melveena McKendrick, Edward
53
Friedman, Sidney Donnell, and Rosie Seagraves, among others. La vida es sueño’s
Rosaura is one of the best-known examples, and Valor, agravio y mujer’s Leonor takes
the injured female character to the next level. Dorotea from Part I of the Quijote is
another unique example of the traveling, dishonored woman. In Doña Isabel’s case, her
storytelling skills, her design and execution of spectacle, and the ways she effects
transformation in herself and those around her make her stand out among a sea of female
characters with the same traumatic history. The biggest difference, however, is Isabel’s
disguise as a Muslim slave. Rather than dress as a man, Isabel stamps the mark of slavery
on her face and dresses in Moorish clothing. More than any other aspect of her
appearance, these marks of Islam capture her audience’s attention.
In most stories that include a traveling dishonored woman, her movements are
restricted by those of her offender. She follows him, and her travel mirrors his. Doña
Isabel does follow Don Manuel from Zaragoza to Sicily, but the power dynamics change
when the pair is taken captive to Algiers. Additionally, Doña Isabel chooses to continue
her travels, even after Don Manuel’s death (164). Thus, although the title of the tale is
“La esclava de su amante,” Doña Isabel is able to break free from the chains that tie her
to her rapist through travel and by revealing her trauma on a public stage.6 During her
travels, Isabel gains the tools to narrate her tale. As she wanders, she learns how to frame
her story of rape through spectacle, and this framing guides her audience to see Isabel as
a clever survivor of violence and Manuel as a devious criminal deserving of his fate.
6
It should be noted that María de Zayas only gave a title to the first desengaño, “La esclava de su
amante.” Yllera notes, “En la edición princeps y en las ediciones siguientes, hasta la edición de Barcelona,
1734, el segundo desengaño aparece fundido con el primero y los restantes van precedidos de la indicación
de Noche segunda, tercera, etc. Hasta la edición de Barcelona, 1734, los relatos, salvo el primero, carecen
de título, por lo que sólo puede atribuirse a María de Zayas el título de la primera novela” (61).
54
Another element of Isabel’s story that separates her from other more defenseless
and dependent victims of the system of honor in Spain is the information she includes
about Don Felipe, who disguises himself as a servant in order to follow the protagonist
(140). Unlike Don Manuel, whose deception is mostly verbal, Don Felipe’s deception is
visual. His costume changes often mimic Doña Isabel’s transformations, and his travels
depend on Isabel’s location. Isabel mentions Don Felipe in the beginning of her story as
one of her many suitors. Don Felipe was handsome and noble, but “[e]ra, en fin, pobre; y
tanto, que en la ciudad era desconocido, desdicha que padecen muchos” (129). As a poor
nobleman, and desconocido in the city, he had no chance to marry the noble, rich, and
virgin Doña Isabel. Don Felipe’s transformation occurs when Doña Isabel first travels to
Zaragoza. Doña Isabel mentions him as an afterthought: “En este tiempo, en lugar de un
criado que mi padre había despedido, entró a servir en casa un mancebo, que, como
después supe, era aquel caballero pobre que jamás había sido bien visto de mis ojos. Mas
¿quién mira bien a un pobre? El cual, no pudiendo vivir sin mi presencia, mudado hábito
y nombre, hizo esta transformación” (140). In Isabel’s life story, the character of Don
Felipe demonstrates the power that Isabel exercises, and the transformations her choices
bring about in others. Furthermore, Felipe’s change in costume, name, and social status
foreshadows Isabel’s journey from Christian noblewoman to Muslim slave. The inclusion
of Felipe’s role in Isabel’s story constructs a spectacle that interrupts, rereads, and
reorganizes the roles assigned to the masculine and the feminine in travel literature from
the period. I also read Felipe’s story as a way to show the wide-ranging effects of violent
noble masculinity. Manuel’s actions do not just negatively affect Isabel, but they extend
55
to the lives of Felipe and even Isabel’s father, who dies of the stress of his daughter
leaving home.
Don Manuel and Don Felipe’s verbal and visual engaños make up only a small
part of the baroque interrogation of truth and deception in “La esclava de su amante.” The
most shocking deceptions come from the protagonist and narrator, Doña Isabel. Despite
warnings from authors and moralists like Luisa de Padilla that women should never keep
secrets or radically alter their appearances, Doña Isabel takes part in the culture of hiding,
disguise, and artifice just as the men in her story do.7 This is especially true after she
realizes that she was not given the tools to recognize Don Manuel’s deceit. She protests
women’s innocence in these matters when she first introduces her interactions with Don
Manuel:
¡Ay, engañoso amante, ay, falso caballero, ay, verdugo de mi inocencia! ¡Y, ay,
mujeres fáciles y mal aconsejadas, y cómo os dejáis vencer de mentiras bien
afeitadas, y que no les dura el oro con que van cubiertas más de mentiras dura el
apetito! ¡Ay, desengaño, que visto, no se podrá engañar ninguna! ¡Ay, hombres!,
y ¿por qué siendo hechos de la misma masa y trabazón que nosotras, no teniendo
más nuestra alma que vuestra alma, nos tratáis como si fuéramos hechas de otra
pasta, sin que os obliguen los beneficios que desde el nacer al morir os
hacemos. . . . Abran las damas los ojos del entendimiento y no se dejen vencer de
quien pueden temer el mal pago que a mí se me dio. (135–36)
Isabel proposes that women be made aware of the spectacle and deceit that they will find
in the public sphere. She accuses those in charge of women’s education because women
are “mal aconsejadas.” Unlike men who are told to play the game of hiding and revealing
their identities in public situations, women’s manuals impractically tell women of all
7
In Luisa de Padilla’s Nobleza virtvosa, she argues, “Afeites, enrubiar, ni todo lo concerniente a
esto no lo uséis jamás, que a más de no excusarlo algunos Doctores de pecado, aun en las casadas arguye
gran liviandad de corazón, y anticipa la vejez arrugando el rostro, y le afea; pues le quita la limpieza, y
natural, que es lo mejor parecido en una mujer, conociéndose, y siendo a todo el mundo . . . abominable lo
artificial” (229).
56
social statuses to avoid public social situations altogether. Padilla, for example, advises
that noble doncellas entertain themselves mostly inside their homes with their sisters and
criadas. She goes as far as to say, “No pongáis los ojos, ni por descuido . . . fijos en
ningún hombre jamás” (230). How is a woman supposed to survive on the public stage
and how will she be able to detect deceit if she is not supposed to look at men? In “La
esclava de su amante,” Isabel suggests that women should learn to participate in public
spectacles, rather than avoid them. To do this, women must be able to play the
hide/reveal game as proposed by Gracián and modeled by Isabel’s Moorish disguise and
public disclosure. They must learn to interact with both men and other women in the
public realm that they will inevitably have to enter.
After she is deceived by Don Manuel, Doña Isabel learns to play the same game
as her offender. She adapts to the baroque public sphere by learning to hide parts of her
subjectivity. Doña Isabel puts on a mask, the marks of slavery, and she disguises herself
in Moorish clothing in order to protect herself from further violence and trauma.
Throughout her tale, Isabel’s engaño plays out at many levels; she deceives her family,
Don Manuel, her “owners,” the other participants in the sarao, and even the readers of
Zayas’s fiction. The reader is first clued into the fact that Zelima may not be exactly what
she appears in the introduction to the Desengaños when the narrator describes the
relationship between Lisis and her new companion. When Lisis finds her slave in tears
and asks about their cause, Zelima responds, “A su tiempo, señora mía, la sabrás, y te
admirarás de ella” (117). We learn that all will soon be revealed when Lisis chooses
Zelima to narrate the first desengaño.
57
As Zelima/Doña Isabel prepares to share her autobiography, Zayas’s reader is
treated to a spectacle that encompasses all of the senses. Zelima has composed some
verses to begin her tale, and while the musicians play, the protagonist and narrator
prepares to make her grand entrance with a costume change. Zayas takes several lines to
emphasize and describe Zelima’s new luxurious clothing: “Traía sobre una camisa de
transparente cambray, con grandes puntas y encajes, las mangas muy anchas de la parte
de la mano; unas enaguas de lama a flores azul y plata, con tres o cuatro relumbrones que
quitaban la vista, tan corta, que apenas llegaba a las gargantas de los pies, y en ellos unas
andalias de muchos lazos y listones de seda muy vistosos.” (123). Everything in the
description is sensuous and lavish, indicating Zelima/Don Isabel’s previous social status.
The narrator of the frame story adds details about Zelima’s long and beautiful hair,
“cogidos por la frente con una cinta o apretadorcillo de diamantes, y luego prendido a la
mitad de la cabeza un velo azul y plata, que todo la cubría” (124). The portrait concludes
with a regal finish: “[L]a hermosura, el donaire, la majestad de sus airosos y concertados
pasos no mostraba sino una princesa de Argel, una reina de Fez o Marruecos, o una
sultana de Constantinopla” (124). The juxtaposition of the Marian-like veil and the exotic
orientalism expressed with Zelima’s hair and ornamentation is the crowning touch on a
supremely baroque image. It is an image that causes wonder and produces confusion, a
hybrid spectacle that immediately ensnares the audience’s attention.
As seen in each chapter of my project, early modern women’s travel narratives
often include an intense focus on clothing. In her essay, “Dress and Redress: Clothing in
the Desengaños amorosos of María de Zayas y Sotomayor,” Amy Katz Kaminsky argues
that the rich descriptions of clothing in Zayas’s writing cannot simply be explained and
58
dismissed as “natural” evidence of her femininity (381). The scholar asserts, “[I]n
Zayas’s Desengaños, and especially in the frame story, the description of clothing is an
economical rhetorical device. The rich visual image, pleasurable in itself, is a synecdoche
evocative of place and circumstance. At the same time, clothing reveals or masks
identity, signals a character’s intention, or serves as a device on which the action turns”
(391). Aside from painting a visual picture with words, the aforementioned description of
Zelima’s clothing signals her contact with both Christian and Muslim worlds and, at the
same time, it hints at the shocking surprises awaiting the audience in Zelima’s narration.
Some of Zelima’s costume is Moorish, including the enticing glimpses of the
protagonists feet in sandals, and other items are European, like the “camisa de
transparente cambray, con grandes puntas y encajes” (Katz Kaminsky 382). We can infer
from the text that Zelima/Doña Isabel meticulously planned this hybrid costume in order
to evoke awe and curiosity in her spectators. Moreover, the costume points to the fact that
Doña Isabel’s travels, especially her time spent in Algiers, are marked on her body and
her identity. Doña Isabel is transformed by her travels in the Mediterranean, and those
transformations are presented visually for the consumption of her audience (and Zayas’s
readers). Isabel is no longer the naïve and innocent Christian doncella. Besides the fact
that she can longer claim to be a virgin, she has spent time in Algiers. She was in close
contact with Muslim men and women, and she successfully navigated the space of North
Africa with, if we are to believe her story, little help from anyone else. She is transformed
as a Christian, and also as a woman. Before she leaves home, Isabel paints her own
portrait as that of an indecisive and easily-influenced fool. In Algiers, however, Isabel is
the puppeteer, influencing others and developing and maintaining the ruse that will allow
59
the Christians to escape their captives (160). These elements combine to effect Isabel’s
transformation as a narrator. Her contact with the Muslim “Other” and her experiences as
a wandering woman combine to compel Isabel to narrate her story through spectacle.
These elements of her story attract her audience because they require explanation.
Zayas effectively creates spectacle for her reader, in large part, because of the
descriptions of the frame character’s reactions to Zelima/Isabel’s spectacle. With the
images of Lisis’s shocked silence and the men’s lustful awe, Zayas draws the reader into
the spectacle. As readers, we sit beside Lisis in the sala, and we react with the same
surprise as Zelima removes her disguise. The narrator of the frame story reports:
Admirados quedaron damas y caballeros, y más la hermosa Lisis, de verla, y más
con arreos que ella no había visto, y no acertaba a dar lugar al disfraz de su
esclava, y así, no hizo más de callar y admirarse (como todos) de tal deidad,
porque la contemplaba una ninfa o diosa de las antiguas fábulas. Pasó Zelima
hasta el estrado, dejando a las damas muy envidiosas de su acabada y linda
belleza, y a los galanes rendidos a ella, pues hubo más de dos que, con los clavos
del rostro, sin reparar en ellos, la hicieron señora y poseedora de su persona y
hacienda, y aun se juzgara indigno de merecerlo. (124)
The participants in Lisis’s soirée have powerful reactions to Zelima’s appearance, which
then cause the reader to feel those same sensations. Furthermore, deception and artifice
play a role in Zelima’s story before she begins to speak. Lisa Voigt explains, “If
disillusionment is a quintessential Baroque theme, the way in which the first narrator
reveals her true identity to the partygoers partakes of the Baroque formal tendency
toward dazzling visual displays. . . . Zelima’s richly adorned attire, described in lavish
detail in the text, nearly blinds . . . and certainly confounds her readers” (213).8 In the
8
Lisa Vollendorf echoes Voigt’s assessment: “Underscoring the multiplicity of her identity,
Zelima immediately deconstructs the initial image she has presented of herself. In doing so, she reveals
herself to be a living example of the Baroque concept of deceptive appearances” (“Fleshing out Feminism
in Early Modern Spain” 97).
60
passage cited above, Zelima’s transformation and her exoticism play into the baroque
readers’ attention to novelty and difference. Vollendorf notes that this difference between
Zelima’s outward appearance and that of her audience is what first captures their
attention, but as Zelima sheds her disguise, the differences are minimized and her
audience (both the attendees of the sarao and Zayas’s readers) begins to identify with the
first narrator of the Desengaños (95). Zelima enhances her exotic status when she first
takes the stage. She purposefully draws attention to herself, to her lavish clothing, and to
that which makes her different from her companions.9 Though, as Vollendorf notes,
Zelima slowly dismantles her identity as a Muslim slave to reveal her previous identity as
a Christian aristocrat. However, I do not believe that she can ever fully relinquish her
performance as Zelima, nor can she completely reintegrate as Isabel, an elite Christian
doncella. Zelima/Isabel moves in a grey space where she both belongs to the community
of storytellers while simultaneously wearing markers of an exoticized difference. She is
located both inside and outside of the noble community of the frame tale.
In her essay, “Visual and Oral Art(ifice) in María de Zayas’s Desengaños
amorosos,” Voigt examines Zelima/Isabel’s performance and concludes that Zayas’s
fictional narrator combines both visual and oral performance to entertain her audience.
According to Voigt, Isabel learns to use engaño and desengaño to her advantage, rather
than remaining simply a victim of deception (226). I largely agree with Voigt’s analysis
of Isabel’s use of deception and performance, and I appreciate her comparisons with
9
Zelima/Isabel’s behavior stands in opposition to Luisa de Padilla’s ideas about noble doncellas.
The countess advises, “No seas inclinada a ver novedades, ni a seguir usos nuevos . . . que como dice
Quintiliano la costumbre y uso que se ha de seguir, es la aprobada primero por los buenos; y en esto os
aued de manera, que aun en los trajes decentes a una Señora no habéis de tomar jamás el extremo, sino
acomodar alguna parte dellos como mejor este a vuestro rostro. Porque total singularidad suele extrañarse”
(236).
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female artists and their self-portraits; however, it is important to problematize the
scholar’s assertion that Isabel eventually reveals her “true identity” (213). I suggest that
rather than leaving the reader with a fixed and coherent vision of Isabel’s subjectivity, her
autobiographical narration leaves the members of the sarao and the reader in doubt of
any “true” identity. This doubt conforms to baroque theories on fluid and difficult
subjectivities. According to Childers, “Since what is ‘public’ is only the tip of the
iceberg, and there is no way any one individual can know how much more is ‘secret,’ the
game of public interaction in the Baroque is always played under the sign of an
uncertainty arising from not knowing how much the other person might be hiding or how
much of what one knows it would be prudent to reveal” (168). Given that Zelima/Isabel
is narrating her own story, the baroque audience has to wonder how much she is hiding,
or what information she decided to emphasize or exaggerate. This is especially true
considering the amount of deception she narrates.
At the level of Isabel’s narrative, she deceives her family about her interactions
with Manuel, she delights in tricking Manuel with her disguise, and she fools each one of
her “masters” when she presents herself as a Muslim slave.10 While Isabel/Zelima travels,
she finds new audiences that she must trick with her public image. These layers of
identity and disguise create a visual and verbal spectacle for her audience of noblewomen
and men at the sarao. At the level of the frame tale, Isabel/Zelima misleads Lisis for
some time before she performs her desengaño for the audience. With the spectacle
Zelima creates in the noble household as a beautifully exotic slave with the ability to
10
Concerning Manuel’s reactions to Isabel’s disguise, Voigt claims, “Isabel’s disguise as a
Moorish slave paradoxically proves to be a demonstration of her agency in both pursuing her own goals
and resisting the victimization suffered by women like Laurela. . . . [H]er disguise, unlike Esteban’s, is
meant not only to deceive but also to provoke an uncanny recognition that will startle and confuse her
fugitive lover” (225).
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dance, sing, and create poetry, the protagonist deceives all of the noble community in
Zayas’s fictional Madrid. Finally, at the level of Zayas’s text, the author deceives her
readers, who do not find out about Zelima’s previous identity as Isabel until she performs
her “unveiling” for the other characters.11 Besides being surprised by the plot twists of
Isabel/Zelima’s narrative, the reader is also deceived by the unstable and porous
distinction between the frame and the individual narratives of the frame characters. At
times it is difficult to determine to whom the characters are speaking—the other
characters in the narrative? The audience at the sarao? Or the reader? Isabel’s position as
a member of the frame and also a character in her own narrative amplifies the readers’
disorientation. The different levels of performance and deception in the first desengaño
underscore the fact that we will never know all of Isabel. Once the reader unravels one
facet of Isabel/Zelima’s character, she only reveals another deception and another
ambiguity. “La esclava de su amante” proves to the baroque reader that there is no “true”
identity.
In addition to the play of hiding and revealing one’s self in baroque social
interaction, it is important to note that the self is always changing. Just as Isabel is
constantly moving, her subjectivity is fluctuating. According to José Antonio Maravall,
movement plays a crucial role in baroque literature. This fascination with movement
reflects the changes and transformations that the baroque writers see in “la crisis de fines
del XVI y primera mitad del XVII, crisis no solo económica, sino social e histórica, con
11
I find it productive to compare the mark of the slave, as Isabel/Zelima uses it, and the polemic
use of the veil in early modern Spain. As with the veil, the S and clavo work to provide the protagonist with
a certain amount of anonymity and mobility. This correlation offers an interesting intersection with the
travel tale of the five Capuchin nuns. For the nuns, the veil can at times be suffocating and unbearably hot.
It causes the nuns to suffer, which they serve as evidence of their devotion to God. For Isabel, the mark of
slavery is an example of self-imposed suffering. That is, the mark of a slave is a punishment she imposes
on herself for being naïve and ignorant of men’s deceptions.
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un cortejo de cambios y desplazamientos, tanto en las mentalidades como en los modos
de vida, en la estratificación social, etc.” (357). Maravall asserts, “Movilidad, cambio,
inconstancia: todas las cosas son móviles y pasajeras; todo escapa y cambia; todo se
mueve, sube o baja, se traslada, se arremolina. No hay elemento del que se pueda estar
seguro de que un instante después no habrá cambiado de lugar o no se habrá
transformado” (367). Maravall’s theories are reflected in George Mariscal’s explorations
of early modern subjectivity. Mariscal argues, “Subject is in fact constituted by multiple
and often contradictory subject positions and thus is always only a provisionally fixed
entity located at various sites (positionalities) within the general relations of production”
(5). As Sharon D. Voros points out, Mariscal’s fluid “subject” is male, but as feminist
readers and scholars, we can extend Mariscal’s theories on male subjectivity to women.
Like other baroque subjects—no matter their gender—Isabel’s subjectivity is always
shifting depending on her costume, surroundings, audience, and the different levels of
fiction and narration. Although Voigt declares, “It is not until Zelima begins to narrate
that her listeners and Zayas’s readers learn her true identity,” (213) I would caution
against assuming that the protagonist’s identity as Isabel Fajardo, daughter of an elite
Christian family from Murcia, is any more authentic than her identity as Zelima,
companion and slave of the noble Lisis.
The reader of Zayas’s tales is especially attuned to Isabel’s many performances
and the material artifice needed throughout Isabel’s life story. In the same vein as
Erauso’s behind-the-scenes narration, the narrator of the Desengaños gives the reader a
backstage glimpse into the making of the performance. Isabel tells us how she
transformed into a Moorish slave, including the brand that she places on her own face
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(153). The audience at the sarao is, of course, amazed when she removes this layer of
artifice in front of them. Isabel gives the audience her Christian name and reveals, “estos
hierros que veis en mi rostro no son sino sombras de los que ha puesto en mi calidad y
fama la ingratitud de un hombre; y para que deis más crédito, veislos aquí quitados; así
pudiera quitar los que han puesto en mi alma mis desventuras y poca cordura” (127).
Following this theatrical scene, the frame narrator takes over and describes the other
characters’ reactions:
Y diciendo esto, se los quitó y arrojó lejos de sí, quedando el claro cristal de su
divino rostro sin mancha, sombra ni oscuridad, descubriendo aquel sol los
esplendores de su hermosura sin nube. Y todos los que colgados de lo que
intimaba su hermosa boca, casi sin sentido, que apenas osaban apartar la vista por
no perderla, pareciéndoles que como ángel se les podía esconder. Y por fin, los
galanes más enamorados, y las damas más envidiosas, y todos compitiendo en la
imaginación sobre si estaba mejor con hierros o sin hierros, y casi se
determinaban a sentir viéndola sin ellos, por parecerles más fácil la empresa; y
más Lisis, que como la quería con tanta ternura, dejó caer por sus ojos unos
desperdicios. (127)
Lisis and her friends are stunned by what they hear Isabel say, but they are even more
amazed by what they see. In this passage Zayas treats both the partygoers and her readers
to a moment of highly stylized drama and pure baroque spectacle. According to Peter
Wollen, “[T]he Baroque was dramatic, not only in the sense of striving for spectacular
effects, but also in acknowledging its own fictiveness and expressing intense emotion”
(11). In her analysis of the “baroque perceptual regime,” Angela Ndalianis adds, “A
condition of the audience embracing the immediacy of the illusion as perceptually real is
that we also (eventually) recognize and applaud the complexities involved in its
construction” (n. pag.). Like the narrator of Catalina de Erauso’s autobiography, Zayas’s
narrator describes Isabel/Zelima’s various transformations and details other people’s
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reactions to those transformations. Manuel’s reaction when he first sees Isabel branded as
a slave is particularly noteworthy. Isabel tells her audience:
[P]uso en mí los aleves ojos y me reconoció, aunque le debió de desvanecer su
vista la S y clavo de mi rostro, tan perfectamente imitado el natural, que a nadie
diera sospecha de ser fingidos. Y elevado entre el sí y el no, se olvidó de llevar el
bocado a la boca, pensando qué sería lo que miraba, porque por una parte creyó
ser la misma que era, y por otra no se podía persuadir que yo hubiese cometido tal
delirio, como ignorante de las desdichas por su causa sucedidas en mi triste casa.
(154)
During this interaction, Isabel begins to take back some power in her relationship with
Manuel. She determines what he sees and when he recognizes her. She throws him off
balance, and she enjoys it. By making her backstage costume and makeup work public
and including details about how others react to her, Isabel draws her audience into her
performance and gains their sympathies. Through her performance that urges the
spectator to take part in the spectacle, Isabel takes her audience on a journey from private
trauma to public healing.
Suffering and Trauma as Spectacle: Doña Isabel Fajardo’s Story of Rape
“La esclava de su amante” is not unique in its representation of white, aristocratic
women’s trauma. All of Zayas’s Desengaños foreground an innocent noblewoman
attacked and traumatized, often killed. Some of the most striking examples include Inés
from “La inocencia castigada,” and Elena from “Tarde llega el desengaño.” Inés is
unknowingly raped every night for a month, and when her family discovers her trauma,
her husband, brother, and sister-in-law confine her in a chimney for six years, feeding her
just enough to keep her alive. When Inés is finally released, her description is terrifying:
“Sus hermosos cabellos, que cuando entró allí eran como hebras de oro, blancos como la
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misma nieve, enredados y llenos de animalejos . . . descalza de pie y pierna, que de los
excrementos de su cuerpo, como no tenía dónde echarlos, no sólo se habían consumido,
mas la propia carne comida hasta los muslos de llagas y gusanos, de que estaba lleno el
hediondo lugar” (287). In “Tarde llega el desengaño,” Elena’s husband is convinced that
she is having an affair with her cousin. He gives all of her riches to their slave and locks
Elena in a small room under the stairs with the skull of the cousin. When Elena is allowed
to leave her prison cell, her image provides a confusing and awe-inducing shock to her
husband’s visitors (236–37). In both of these stories, the image of the traumatized woman
serves to emphasize the violence and injustice of the system of honor as it was embedded
in early modern noble communities. These novelas ejemplares use this violence to create
a spectacle, making the moments of everyday domestic abuse visible to a larger audience.
In her book Dressed to Kill: Death and Meaning in Zayas’s Desengaños,
Elizabeth Rhodes astutely points out the similarities between Zayas’s traumatized and
mutilated women and the images of tortured saints so popular in the early modern period.
Acknowledging the difficulties and contradictions in Zayas’s writing, Rhodes observes:
Similarly disconcerting is Zayas’s penchant for focusing her narrative lens on the
mutilated bodies of the literally dead wives, only to transform those bodies into
paragons of loveliness after the women expire, more beautiful in death than in
life. Her tendency to attach sacrificial features to these characters, using words
such as ‘lamb’ and ‘martyr,’ is discomforting, as is her decision to stylize them as
female saints from Catholic hagiography. These idealized, violently failed lives
that culminate in violently idealized corpses cast a pall over the author’s declared
intention to teach women to safeguard themselves and their best interests. (7)
I agree with Rhodes that Zayas incorporates the maimed female body of Catholic
hagiography as a spectacle for her readers’ consumption. I do not think, however, that
this image necessarily opposes Zayas’s message that women learn to protect themselves.
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Instead, I posit that by adopting popular imagery of tortured female saints, Zayas makes it
acceptable for her protagonists to make their trauma public. The trauma in Zayas’s tales
involves torture and murder perpetrated by husbands, male family members, and other
Christian noblemen. In Isabel’s case, it involves rape by a family friend. This is a trauma
that early modern society would traditionally call on women to keep secret. The trauma
invoked by the image of the suffering female saint, on the other hand, is meant to be
public.
Rhodes includes a selection of images depicting female saints to illustrate her
arguments concerning the suffering female body in Zayas’s Desengaños. She analyzes a
sixteenth-century depiction of St. Lucia, beheaded with blood pouring out of her neck
(80), and a woodcut of St. Eulalia of Mérida, praying as flames engulf her body (95).
These images are meant to provoke emotions—compassion, fury, and an accompanying
religious fervor. Following Maravall’s La cultura del barroco, Wollen observes,
“Absolutist regimes needed spectacle in order to counteract the divisive and centrifugal
tendencies obscured by the doctrine of undivided centralism and the concentration of all
power and sovereignty at the single apex of the monarchy. The baroque spectacle was
therefore intimately concerned with propaganda and the cult of the absolute monarch”
(13). These images of female saints as martyrs worked as propaganda to unite the
heterogeneous population of the Spanish Empire under a unified Christian identity.
Making a connection between Maravall and Guy Debord’s theories on spectacle, Wollen
explains, “The spectacle, Debord argued, provided images of conflict where there was an
underlying unity (as with sports) and images of unity where there was an underlying
conflict (as with class), thereby combining tension and harmony in a way that ultimately
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stabilized, rather than de-stabilized the culture” (15). The spectacle of the martyred
female saint in baroque Spain worked to unify people of different regions, professions,
and social statuses, reinforcing a specific worldview that ultimately supported the
Spanish Empire and the Catholic Church. This brand of propaganda functioned because it
caused extreme emotions and reactions in the spectator. In Zayas’s Desengaños, the
author hints at Catholic hagiography, but the villain—the perpetrator of violence against
the innocent, Christian woman—is no longer the Muslim or the Protestant. The
Desengaños call out Christian noblemen, the most powerful group in early modern
European society. Zayas’s use of hagiographic imagery ensures that her audience will
identify sympathetically with her protagonists’ plight.
Zayas borrows images from Catholic hagiography, but I argue that she subverts
their more traditional use. Following Debord’s arguments on the effects of spectacle, the
violence against the female saints worked to stabilize a society increasingly divided by
feelings of deception and the decline of the Spanish Empire. Different social class,
different genders, different geographic regions, and people of different political
inclinations were united under the guise of Catholicism. The audience’s passions were
united behind the interests of those on the top of the social hierarchy. Zayas’s text, on the
other hand, employs this imagery to disrupt this tenuous unity. Instead of highlighting the
commonalities between different social identities, the Desengaños emphasize the
conflicts—especially the conflicts of gender. Instead of merging the sympathies of the
entire noble community as one homogenous group stirred by their faith and their loyalty
to the Spanish crown, Zayas’s spectacles explore the gender conflict within the noble
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community, ultimately destabilizing the hegemonic order that privileged noble, white,
Christian men and their interests.
Zayas uses the injured, suffering, or murdered female body to capture her readers’
attention, an object for the spectator’s gaze. As a result, Yvonne Jehenson and Marcia L.
Welles’s essay, “María de Zayas’s Wounded Women: A Semiotics of Violence,”
examines “the complex and controversial issue of how Zayas’s positioning of women
relates her to contemporary debates on pornography and the sadomasochistic dynamic”
(178). The scholars interrogate the images of suffering women in Zayas’s tales, looking
for signs that they serve as an object of consumption for the male gaze, or, put simply, a
voyeuristic, or even sadistic, pleasure. Jehenson and Welles conclude, “Voyeuristic
identification gives way, instead, to sympathetic identification—pathos replaces eros—
and the objectification of women gives way to the presentation of women’s subjectivity,
emphasizing her fears, pain, and helplessness, and her superior courage of endurance”
(193). In other words, the spectators made up of Lisis’s friends and family at the sarao
form a sympathetic audience for the protagonists of each individual narrator’s tale. This
“sympathetic identification” occurs, in part, because women narrate the stories, and
before and after each desengaño the narrator guides the audience at the sarao toward a
specific interpretation of the text. Isabel, who chooses to tell her own story, also helps the
audience to realize that the violence that the protagonist describes could happen to any
one of them, to their wives, mothers, sisters, or daughters. Isabel begins her story with
this declaration: “Muchos desengaños pudiera traer en apoyo de esto de las antiguas y
modernas desdichas sucedidas a mujeres por los hombres. Quiero pasarlas en silencio, y
contaros mis desdichados sucesos, para que escarmentando en mí, no haya tantas
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perdidas y tan pocas escarmentadas” (125). Isabel personalizes the stories of violence that
follow her own. As a member of the same group as her audience and a personal friend
and confidant of Lisis, the cards are stacked in Isabel’s favor. The audience is poised to
side with her. Rather than identify with the male family members, Lisis and her friends
relate to the pain, emotional anguish, and shame felt by the innocent victim. In this way,
the women are spectacle and objects of the spectators gaze, but they are also subjects. As
Laura Mulvey has famously shown, the characters with whom the audience identifies in
mass spectacles are important. Rather than just an object to be looked at, Isabel creates
and controls the action of the story she tells. She is persuasive, she expresses desire, and
she exercises power. The audience sees Isabel as a possible version of themselves,
solidifying her subjectivity in Zayas’s text.
For an example of women’s subjectivity that results from trauma or pain, we need
look no further than Isabel’s story. Isabel is not one of the perfect wives murdered by her
husband for a perceived act of dishonor. Instead, Isabel’s trauma, as the audience at the
sarao soon finds out, centers on her rape by a male friend of the family. She is raped in a
private space, after resisting Manuel’s advances and trying to follow the rules for
honorable Christian women (137). In the act of telling her friends about her trauma,
Isabel skips over the actual physical assault, and instead focuses on the anguish and fury
she feels afterward. Isabel describes Manuel’s assault:
[M]e detuvo a la puerta de su aposento, que, como he dicho, era a la entrada de
los de su madre, dándome la bienvenida, como hacía en toda cortesía otras veces;
yo, descuidada, o, por mejor, incierta de que pasaría a más atrevimientos, si bien
ya habían llegado a tenerme asida por una mano, y viéndome divertida, tiró de mí,
y sin poder ser parte a hacerme fuerte, me entró dentro, cerrando la puerta con
llave. Yo no sé lo que me sucedió, porque del susto me privó el sentido un mortal
desmayo. (137)
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As Jehenson and Welles point out, Isabel permits no scopophilic pleasure in this scene.
Instead, she transmits terror and suspense. In fact, she spends more time describing her
feelings and actions after the assault. Isabel declares:
Pues pasada poco más de media hora, volví en mí, y me hallé, mal digo, no me
hallé, pues me hallé perdida, y tan perdida, que no me supe ni pude volver ni
podré ganarme jamás y infundiendo en mí mi agravio una mortífera rabia, lo que
en otra mujer pudiera causar lágrimas y desesperaciones, en mí fue un furor
diabólico, con el cual, desasiéndome de sus infames lazos, arremetí a la espada
que tenía a la cabecera de la cama, y sacándola de la vaina, se la fui a envainar en
el cuerpo; hurtóle al golpe, y no fue milagro, que estaba diestro en hurtar, y
abrazándose conmigo, me quitó la espada, que me la iba a entrar por el cuerpo por
haber errado el del infame. (137)
In this passage, rather than having access to Isabel’s body, the reader instead has access
to her feelings of loss and anger. Isabel’s ability to narrate her emotional state, along with
the image she gives the audience of her own attempt at violence with a sword, contributes
to the spectacle of the scene. These same aspects of the passage encourage the audience,
both men and women, to understand and to feel both shame and compassion for Isabel,
causing the reader to look sympathetically upon Isabel’s consequent actions.
In Elaine Scarry’s foundational work The Body in Pain: The Making and
Unmaking of the World, the scholar explains the difficulties of attempting to express
one’s pain so that others understand. Scarry observes, “For the person whose pain it is, it
is ‘effortlessly’ grasped (that is, even with the most heroic effort it cannot not be
grasped); while for the person outside the sufferer’s body, what is ‘effortless’ is not
grasping it (it is easy to remain wholly unaware of its existence; even with effort, one
may remain in doubt about its existence or may retain the astonishing freedom of denying
its existence [. . .])” (4). For Scarry, this phenomenon is caused largely by human being’s
inability to express pain through language. She asserts, “Physical pain does not simply
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resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state
anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is
needed” (4). In order to share her trauma with the audience of the sarao, Isabel/Zelima
must find a way to make her physical and emotional pain shareable or relatable. The
obstacles to Isabel narrating her trauma are compounded when we think about how pain
is constructed in the early modern period. According to Rhodes, “Failure to represent
pain in circumstances when the body is deeply pained is a standard feature of Christian
martyr accounts and late medieval art, both acculturated systems of representation dating
from times when bodily malaise was associated with guilt and fear. Within this system of
belief, only the sinful suffer illness and pain” (94). For examples, we can look to
Velázquez’s famous Cristo crucificado (c.1632). Christ’s body is calm, almost relaxed,
while hanging on the cross. His face, tilted downward and partially covered by shadow, is
represented with meditative features, rather than features twisted in pain. In José de
Ribera’s San Jenaro sale ileso del horno (1647), the saint has a peaceful expression while
he contemplates the flurry of baby angels represented in the heavens. In contrast to the
other figures painted around him, who are all in agony or distress, the saint appears to
feel no pain. For a textual example, we can look to Lope de Vega’s Los cautivos de Argel
(1647). At the beginning of Act III, a priest is killed by the Moors and accepts his
martyrdom with serene purpose. He does not speak about his pain, but instead tells his
audience, “Vivid bien, ninguno yerre, / ninguno niegue al buen Dios” (III, 165–66). Like
the saint from Ribera’s painting, Lope’s priest looks to the heavens instead of focusing on
any corporeal discomfort. He tells the other Christian captives, “Pues, hijos, / yo salgo de
Argel también, / que voy a Jerusalén / con eternos regocijos. / Uno de la Trinidad / me
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rescató, ya me voy; / con Fe y Esperanza estoy / de ver mi patria.” (III, 169–176).
Following many seventeenth-century examples, it comes as no surprise that Isabel says
nothing of specific corporeal pains after Manuel’s physical and sexual assault. Instead,
the narrator focuses on her transformation and her mourning for her previous self, not to
mention her powerful rage.
When Isabel wakes up to find that Manuel has raped her, she cannot find herself.
She says, “[M]e hallé perdida, y tan perdida, que no me supe ni pude volver ni podré
ganarme jamás” (137). Isabel, the daughter of noble Christian parents from Murcia, is
gone, and the narrator will never be who she was before. She is fundamentally
transformed by trauma. The trauma also irrevocably alters Isabel/Zelima in terms of how
Spanish society sees her and how she fits into the social hierarchy. She is no longer a
virgin doncella patiently and correctly awaiting her father’s decision concerning
marriage. The options and the subject positions available to her are now severely limited.
Isabel has a painful secret that she must keep, while constantly worrying that someone
will make that secret public. If her secret is made public through rumor, her family’s
honor would be ruined, and her chances at building an “honorable” life would be
destroyed. As it stands, Isabel has two standard options after her rape: she can either enter
a convent, or she can marry her rapist. To a twenty-first-century reader, the latter option
seems particularly repulsive, but a seventeenth-century reader would see a “happy
ending” with Manuel as Isabel’s best option. This marriage never occurs, which would
normally be seen as a punishment for the protagonist. Within the context of Zayas’s
Desengaños, however, marriage to a nobleman will only bring about more pain, and
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possibly even death. Doña Isabel escapes this trauma in Zayas’s version of the happy
ending—the convent.
Stephanie Parker Aronson examines archives concerning both law and literature
to give a thorough overview of the consequences of rape in seventeenth-century Spain for
both married and unmarried women. Parker Aronson aptly describes the raped woman’s
status in early European society:
According to Aristotelian and Galenic tradition, woman was sufficiently
“othered” because she was seen as a defective, imperfect man. Judeo-Christian
tradition from the middle ages saw women as inherently evil and responsible for
humanity’s fall from grace. The raped woman was considered even more
monstrous because she was dishonoured, socially stigmatized, literally and
metaphorically disfigured. (530)
According to the scholar, rape highlights the weaknesses of the male members of a
woman’s family because they were incapable of adequately protecting her and unable to
enclose her and control her behavior and movements (530). Parker Aronson’s reading of
Zayas’s Desengaños also highlights the debates surrounding women’s responsibility, and
even complicity, in their own rape given that “the alleged insatiability of women’s sexual
urges was common knowledge” (532). If Isabel makes her trauma public—if she
confronts Manuel, if she involves her family, if she tells her story—she risks an
encounter with an unsympathetic audience. This hypothetical audience—a seventeenthcentury public concerned with rumor, honor, and purity—could decide that Isabel is at
fault and condemn her and her family to dishonor. As Marcia L. Welles points out in her
study of rape narratives in canonical early modern Spanish literature, the idea that women
are somehow responsible for their own rape dates back to ancient history. Welles cites
from book 1 of Herodotus’s Histories: “[N]ow they hold it to be the crime of a wicked
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man, to ravish women; but that of a simpleton, to trouble one’s self about revenge; for
prudent men ought to take no account of such females; since it is evident, that, without
their own consent, they could not be forced” (qtd. in Welles 5). Thus, not only does
Isabel suffer the trauma of rape, she is expected to keep her trauma to herself, a carefully
guarded secret. Doña Isabel is especially susceptible to finding an unsympathetic
audience because she is a traveler. As we know, public movement left early modern
women open to censure and accusations of sexual impropriety.
Although travel could be damaging to Isabel’s reputation, Zayas transforms it into
a source of healing. Like traveling women from other time periods, Isabel leaves home as
a form of catharsis. Manuel rapes her, and she cannot ease any of her pain by telling her
story. Instead, she physically abandons the place of her trauma, leaving behind the
servant and friend who facilitated the rape and her family, who did not protect her. For
Isabel, and for many future European women travel writers, movement has the power to
alleviate pain. A physical journey can distract the traveler while providing perspective.
As women travelers move to new surroundings, they reinvent themselves. This is
especially true when the women begin to give voice to their new experiences, the toils
and dangers of physical travel, and their relationships with their new neighbors. In
Jennifer Jenkins Wood’s study of nineteenth-century Spanish women travelers, she notes,
“In the nineteenth century, as it still is today, the travel cure was not an unusual
motivation for women travelers, many of whom journeyed to escape or distance
themselves from tragedy or to improve their mental of physical state” (69). Jenkins Wood
specifically mentions the travel cure in regard to Carolina Coronado, whom she dubs “a
melancholy traveler” (69). Coronado suffered from depression, and “travel, with its
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movement and change of scene, provided an antidote for her emotional ills” (Jenkins
Wood 69). Jenkins Wood adds that the Spanish author, Emilia Serrano, after the death of
her only child, “turned again to the therapeutic benefits of travel and to writing poetry to
express her grief” (104). Like her nineteenth-century successors, travel gives Isabel the
space and time she needs to heal, at least enough to make her capable of narrating her
story of trauma in a public setting. I find Adriana Méndez Rodenas’s ideas about a
“circular itinerary” particularly useful in understanding the interior journey that Isabel
undertakes. Méndez Rodenas argues that women’s travels can often better be described
as circular, rather than linear, and the journey itself is often more important than the final
destination (9–10). When Isabel first leaves home, her end goal is to find Manuel and
repair her honor. However, even after Manuel dies and that goal is no longer plausible,
Isabel continues her journey. For Isabel, the journey is more important than the final
destination because as she moves about the space of the Mediterranean, she gains the
experiences, the physical markers, and the emotional release she requires in order to
narrate her rape through spectacle.
Doña Isabel’s Public Declarations: Challenging Noblewomen’s Oppression
In the Desengaños amorosos, María de Zayas takes a topic that is traditionally
secret, at least from a woman’s perspective, and presents it for public consumption. Her
protagonist takes a secret trauma and stages it for an audience, multiple times, through
carefully constructed and performed spectacles. In this final section of the chapter, I will
analyze two specific instances in “La esclava de su amante” when Isabel is finally able to
articulate her trauma to a receptive audience. The first scene occurs when Isabel/Zelima,
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Manuel, Don Felipe/Luis, and Zaida return from North Africa. As a captive in Algiers,
Manuel once again gives Isabel his word that he will marry her as soon as she is able to
rescue him. Nonetheless, when the group arrives in the Peninsula, it is clear that Manuel
will once again renege on his promise. For the first time, Isabel confronts her rapist about
the violent act and his lies in front of Manuel’s sister, “la demás familia,” and their
traveling companions (162). She performs her second public declaration at Lisis’s soirée.
At this point, the narrator is prepared to give even more details about her rape and the
aftermath of that violence. I contend that travel allows Isabel to distance herself, both
physically and temporally, from her trauma. This distance empowers her to tell her story,
an essential component of the spectacle that Isabel creates. Furthermore, during her
travels Isabel is able to rearrange her relationship with Manuel and with her family,
placing the narrator in a more powerful position in order to authorize her narrative.
Finally, I suggest that Isabel’s contact with the Islamic world facilitates her staging of
spectacle, and, in the end, helps to mold her audience’s reactions into sympathetic ones,
rather than accusing or shaming.
Throughout the first half of “La esclava de su amante,” Doña Isabel collects a
series of empty promises from her rapist. He repeatedly tells her that he will eventually
speak to her father about marriage (135). In a situation like this in seventeenth-century
Spain, Manuel has all of the power in the relationship because Isabel must keep her
interactions with him a secret. She should show no outward inclination toward any man,
and she should certainly not reveal that she has been communicating secretly with
Manuel. As evidenced by the numerous literary texts on the topic, this play between
secret and public, between truth and fiction, between honor and dishonor, leaves women
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at a severe disadvantage. Because she has no other recourse, Isabel continues to give
Manuel the benefit of the doubt. His last promise comes when he is in a compromising
position, and Isabel holds the key to his freedom. In Algiers, Manuel is held captive,
while Isabel/Zelima has become close friends with Zaida, an aristocratic Muslim woman.
Isabel/Zelima and Manuel conspire to dupe Zaida, and, at the same time, Manuel
continues to lie to Isabel/Zelima about his future plans. Isabel recounts her time in
Algiers to those noblemen and noblewomen present at the soirée:
En este tiempo me descubrió Zaida su amoroso cuidado, pidiéndome hablase a
don Manuel, y que le dijese que si quería volverse moro, se casaría con él y le
haría señor de grandes riquezas que tenía su padre. . . . Dábame lugar para hablar
despacio a Manuel, y aunque en muchos días no le dije nada de la pasión de la
mora, temiendo su mudable condición, dándole a ella algunas fingidas respuestas,
unas de disgusto y otras al contrario, hasta que ya la fuerza de los celos, más por
pedírselos a mi ingrato que por decirle la voluntad de Zaida; porque el traidor,
habiéndole parecido bien, con los ojos deshacía cuanto hacía. Después de reñirme
mis sospechosas quimeras, me dijo que más acertado le parecía engañarla. . . . A
esto añadió que yo la sazonase, diciéndole cuán bien se hallaría, y lo que más me
gustase para atraerla a nuestro intento, que en saliendo de allí, estuviese segura
que cumpliría con su obligación. (160)
This broken promise proves to be the last straw for Isabel, who confronts Manuel upon
their successful return to Spain.
Isabel makes sure to tell her friends at the sarao that she confronted Manuel in
front of an audience. This confrontation is the first time that Isabel makes her secret
public, and it evolves into a violent spectacle—a spectacle of public accusations and
murder within the spectacle at the sarao within the spectacle of Zayas’s text. This
layered display of trauma, confidence, and assertiveness makes Isabel’s presence at
Lisis’s home even more intriguing. Isabel recalls her own subversive reactions:
Era tanta la priesa que Zaida daba que la bautizasen, que se quería casar,
que me obligó una tarde, algo antes de anochecer, llamar a don Manuel, y en
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presencia de Zaida y de su hermana y la demás familia, sin que faltase Luis, que
aquellos días andaba más cuidadoso, le dije estas razones:
—Ya, señor don Manuel, que ha querido el cielo, obligado de mis
continuos lamentos, que nuestros trabajos y desdichas hayan tenido fin con tan
próspero suceso como haberos traído libre de todos a vuestra casa, y Dios ha
permitido que yo os acompañase en lo uno y lo otro, quizá para que, viendo por
vuestros ojos con cuanto perseverancia y paciencia os he seguido en ellos, paguéis
deudas tan grandes. (162)
In front of everyone, Isabel finally speaks about the debt that Manuel owes her. She
emphasizes her own role in his rescue from Algiers, and the fact that she has pursued him
relentlessly since he left her. Again, the choice to make her trauma public is full of risks
for Isabel, and, in fact, Manuel immediately rebuffs her. Sneeringly, he tells her that she
is “una mujer baja” for following him so freely and dressing as a Moorish slave (163).
Isabel explains her reaction: “De la misma suerte que la víbora pisada me pusieron las
infames palabras y aleves obras del ingrato don Manuel,” but before she can do anything
about her anger, don Felipe, disguised as Luis, kills Manuel with his sword (163–64).
Zaida, seeing her Christian lover dead, kills herself with a dagger, adding to the
sensational and dramatic scene.
With this love triangle, Zayas rewrites a plot common in works like Cervantes’s
novela ejemplar “El amante liberal” and Lope de Vega’s play Los cautivos de Argel. This
storyline centers on a Christian couple held captive by Muslims. In these texts written for
a Spanish audience, the honorable Christian man attracts both the Christian woman and
his Muslim captor. With his effortless conquest of Christian and Muslim women, the
Christian man is presented as naturally superior and more capable. In “El amante liberal,”
for example, the Spanish protagonist, Ricardo, designs a plan to deceive the Muslim
temptress Halima and rescue the beautiful captive, Leonisa (105). At the end of
Cervantes’s tale, Ricardo and Leonisa arrive safely on Christian soil and agree to be
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married. Halima also returns to Spain, and she agrees to marry a renegade who facilitated
the escape from captivity (116–17). Zayas’s “La esclava de su amante” includes
considerable changes to this storyline. It is Isabel, and not Manuel, who directs the
captives’ escape, and upon their return to Spain, Isabel and Manuel are not neatly paired
in marriage. Instead, Manuel is killed for revenge, and Isabel’s competitor for Manuel’s
affection kills herself. In Zayas’s interpretation of events, the Christian woman usurps the
role of the Christian man as conqueror and hero.
In her interpretation of this popular storyline, Zayas makes another important
adjustment. Isabel controls the narration of the events of travel and captivity. In other
texts including “El amante liberal” and Cervantes’s “The Captive’s Tale” from Part I of
Don Quijote, upon return to Spain, the Christian man must explain the exotic presence of
his female companion, dressed in moorish clothing. During his narration of events, the
Christian man constructs himself as hero in what could be considered an imperial
conquest of the literary space of North Africa. In Isabel’s story, she, and not Manuel, is
the hero, and the space of Algiers becomes a feminized space, easily controlled and
navigated by a Christian noblewoman.
Isabel narrates these moments of murder and suicide in rapid succession,
overwhelming her audience with the same anger, shock, and overpowered feelings that
guide the characters’ actions. Furthermore, these events keep Isabel’s friends at the sarao
and Zayas’s readers uncertain, awaiting the twists and turns of the unexpected. Instead of
hearing the same story of rape and violence from the man’s perspective, Zayas gives her
readers Isabel’s perspective, even letting us glimpse the seething anger the protagonist
feels upon being yet again laughed at and deceived. When Isabel tells her public that she
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felt like “la víbora pisada,” as readers, we begin to feel the same way. After Don Felipe
kills Manuel and flees the scene, Isabel describes the chaotic sights and sounds: “El
alboroto, en un fracaso como éste, fue tal, que es imposible contarle; porque las criadas,
unas acudieron a las ventanas dando voces y llamando gente, y otras a doña Eufrasia, que
se había desmayado, de suerte que ninguna reparó en Zaida. . . . Yo, que como más
cursada en desdichas, era la que tenía más valor, por una parte lastimada del suceso, y por
otra satisfecha con la venganza” (164). Before the audience has time to process this
spectacle, the chaos, and the extreme emotions, Isabel has stolen Zaida’s jewels and
escaped the house to continue her wandering. Isabel offers her memories of a passionate
spectacle as part of her performance at the sarao, which allows the reader to feel the
tension and energy that Lisis and her friends must be feeling, effectively guiding the
audience to view Isabel’s provocative actions in a compassionate way.
From the beginning of the desengaño until the point of the altercation with
Manuel, Isabel has traveled a physical journey, but she has also carried out an emotional
and psychological journey. Immediately after her rape, Isabel does not go to her family
for support, and she does not tell her story to her friends. She is silenced by Spain’s honor
code. How does Isabel get the courage to challenge Manuel in front of Manuel’s family
and their friends? What experiences does Isabel accumulate during her travels, how does
she change, and how does her situation change so that she can give voice to her trauma?
I suggest that one journey that Isabel undertakes is a journey that rearranges her
relationship with Manuel. As she changes scenery and costume, she travels to a more
powerful position in relation to Manuel. In Zaragoza, Manuel controls the relationship.
He decides when the pair will see each other and under what circumstances. After
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Isabel’s transformation into Zelima, however, the protagonist is able to surprise Manuel
with her appearance and location, leaving him shocked and unsettled. Zelima/Isabel is in
control of this meeting. Isabel reveals to the sarao, “La primera vez que me vio don
Manuel fue un día que comía con mis dueños. . . . [V]ine a traer un plato a la mesa; que
como puso en mí los aleves ojos y me reconoció, aunque le debió de desvanecer su vista
la S y clavo de mi rostro, tan perfectamente imitado el natural, que a nadie diera sospecha
de ser fingidos” (154). Isabel’s converts herself into spectacle, forcing Manuel to see her
in a different context, a context that emphasizes her ingenuity and her persistance.
We know that Debord defines spectacle as a way to manage social relationships.
Isabel uses the spectacle of her appearance as a Moorish slave to reshape her relationship
with Manuel, and she uses the retelling of that moment to enhance her relationships with
those noblewomen and men at Lisis’s soirée. Isabel seems to take pleasure in sharing
Manuel’s comically shocked reaction with her friends and supporters: “Y elevado entre el
sí y el no, se olvidó de llevar el bocado a la boca, pensando qué sería lo que miraba,
porque por una parte creyó ser la misma que era, y por otra no se podía persuadir que yo
hubiese cometido tal delirio” (154). She has successfully rearranged her positioning visà-vis Manuel. During the first moments of their relationship, he pursued her and refused
to leave her alone. He limited her choices, her movements, and even her voice. In Isabel’s
narration of her time as a slave, she is the one that physically pursues Manuel. And in this
first encounter between Zelima and Manuel, her silence is more powerful than any
lengthy speech could have been. Her image, with no explanation or excuse, is powerful.
Doña Isabel continues to author her own transformation, while at the same time
influencing Manuel’s story, when they both are forced to travel across the Mediterranean.
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Due to her disguise, the relationship of power between Isabel and Manuel is even more
unsettled in Algiers. To begin Isabel’s tale of captivity, she is the one that organizes the
outing that leads to the group’s capture. She notes, “Y así, por poder hablar a don Manuel
sin estorbos y decirle mi sentimiento, le pedí una tarde licencia para que con Leonisa
fuera a merendar a la marina, y concedida, pedí a Luis dijera a su amo que unas damas le
aguardaban a la marina” (158). Soon after Luis and Manuel arrive, the group is surprised
by Moorish corsairs (159). Isabel has essentially maneuvered Manuel into a perilously
vulnerable position. His life and freedom are in the hands of the woman that he raped and
repeatedly deceived. According to Isabel’s narration, she told the corsairs, “que era mora
y me llamaba Zelima; que me habían cautivado seis años había; que era de Fez, y que
aquel caballero era hijo de mi señor, y el otro su criado, y aquella doncella lo era también
de mi casa. Que los tratase bien y pusiese precio en el rescate; que apenas lo sabrían sus
padres, cuando enviarían la estimación” (159).12 In short, Isabel’s travels, her ability to
navigate the complicated space of the Mediterranean, and her increasingly skilled
eloquence along with the confidence in those same rhetoric skills give Isabel what she
needs to confront Manuel.
In seventeenth-century Spanish literature, and especially in “La esclava de su
amante,” the space of North Africa is an especially productive one for women.
Isabel/Zelima and Zaida are the protagonists in Algiers, making plans, creating
deceptions, and pushing the plot forward. With actions that mirror those of Zoraida and
12
Isabel is vague about her ability to talk to her captors and pass as a Moorish woman in Algiers. I
would consider this an example of what Barbara Fuchs calls the “intimacy” of the relationship between
Christianity and Islam in the Iberian Peninsula (72). The reader is not meant to question Isabel’s effortless
interactions with Islamic culture while in Algiers. At the same time, her Moorish dress at the sarao is
meant to attract the aristocratic Christians in attendance. The Otherness of the Muslims is, at times,
presented as exotic and seductive, and at others, that Otherness appears to be not so “other” at all. This is an
essential component of the spectacle that Isabel/Zelima performs at the sarao.
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Ana Félix in Part I and Part II of Don Quijote, the women of Zayas’s tale organize and
execute the Christian captives’ escape from Algiers using their own money, creative
authority, and rhetorical skills. Isabel highlights her role in the captives’ capers:
Queríame Zaida ternísimamente, o por merecerselo yo con mi agrado, o por
parecerle podría ser parte con mi dueño para que la quisiese. En fin, yo hacía y
deshacía en su casa como propia mía, y por mi respeto trataban a don Manuel y a
Luis y a Leonisa muy bien, dejándolos andar libres por la ciudad, habiéndoles
dado permisión para tratar su rescate, habiendo avisado a don Manuel hiciese el
precio de los tres, que yo le daría joyas para ello, de lo cual mostró don Manuel
quedar agradecido. (159–60)
Isabel’s influence is amplified in this passage. She has made Zaida’s home her own. She
controls the way that the other captives are treated. She arranges for their ransom, and she
handles the money that will pay that ransom. She directs Manuel’s movements. Once the
corsairs bring the captives to Algiers, the only other person that merits mention in
Isabel’s story is Zaida. Like Cervantes’s Zoraida/María, Zaida writes letters and
organizes transportation. Isabel recalls:
Zaida vino en todo muy contenta, y más cuando supo que yo también me iría con
ella. Y se concretó para de allí a dos meses la partida, que su padre había de ir a
un lugar donde tenía hacienda y casa . . . Zaida hizo una carta en que su padre la
enviaba a llamar, porque había caído de una peligrosa enfermedad, para que el rey
le diese licencia para su jornada, por cuanto los moros no pueden ir de un lugar a
otro sin ella. Y alcanzada, hizo aderezar una galeota bien armada, de remeros
cristianos, a quien se avisó con todo secreto el designio, y poniendo en ella todas
las riquezas de plata, oro y vestidos que sin hacer rumor podía llevar. (160–61)
In Zayas’s text, Algiers is an imaginary space where women control and distribute
wealth, and where women exercise rhetoric to fulfill their own desires. Through her
narration of travel, Isabel creates a space that gives her what she needs to disentangle her
story from that of Manuel. In this space, Isabel has the leverage to make demands on her
offender.
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During her travels, Isabel gains the experience and expertise to construct the
spectacle at the sarao that ultimately allows the protagonist to give voice to her trauma,
with even more detail and in front of a larger audience than her last confrontation with
Manuel. She uses her appearance, her beauty, and the vestiges of her contact with the
Muslim “Other” to attract her audience. She demonstrates to Lisis and to the other
aristocrats at the sarao how easy it is to be deceived. Given that Isabel’s audience is so
easily taken in by the artificial markings on her face and her exotic jewels, in turn, they
cannot blame Isabel, who has little choice but to believe Manuel’s deceitfulness.
Moreover, Lisis and Isabel have conspired to create the perfect conditions for Isabel’s
public declaration. As opposed to the first collection of stories, where both men and
women are allowed to contribute, in the Desengaños, Lisis has declared that only women
are allowed to narrate the stories (118). Zayas has creates a space that has already
authorized women’s voices. Isabel has Lisis’s trust and attention, and therefore, she has
an entire crowd of attentive and compassionate listeners. This environment, in addition to
Isabel’s multilayered transformation and growing self-reliance, allows Isabel to bring her
trauma completely out of the shadows. Concerning Isabel’s transformation, I agree with
Lisa Vollendorf, who argues, “The lack of articulation of her own desire at the start
becomes increasingly ironic, however, for as the tale proceeds she shows herself to be
increasingly autonomous—a woman in control of her identity and in search of justice for
the wrongs done to her” (“Fleshing out Feminism” 98). In this chapter, we have seen how
travel contributes to Isabel’s ability to express herself and how her well-designed
spectacles thwart prescriptions dictating the public/secret divide.
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***
Isabel’s story is extraordinarily powerful because she is the first woman to narrate
a story of men’s deceit in the Desengaños, and she tells an autobiographical tale. She
forces a deeper connection between the frame characters and the stories they tell,
impelling the audience/reader to become more emotionally involved in the theme of the
sarao. Isabel sets the bar for all of the stories that follow, including that of Lisis, the
woman in control of the event and its participants. Isabel’s story is a model for other
women to follow, and inspiration for other women to narrate their own stories of trauma
on a public stage. Amy Katz Kaminsky argues that Isabel/Zelima tells her story as an
example of what not to do, a negative example for the audience and readers, and in doing
so, she returns to her previous identity as Isabel (383). I believe we can complicate this
conclusion taking into consideration the analysis of Isabel/Zelima’s spectacle and her
transformation through travel. In my reading, rather than tell her story as a negative
example, Isabel/Zelima tells her story as an example of survival and triumph. Isabel
suffered a terrible trauma, and following that trauma, she was forced to stay silent about
her pain, in large part because of the system of honor. Through travel, Isabel gains the
tools she needs to tell her story, to make her story relatable. Through the act of sharing
her story, Isabel is able to ease some of her own pain. Isabel/Zelima sets herself up as a
model for feminine behavior because she learns to take part in the engaño and desengaño
of the early modern public realm. Furthermore, I do not believe that Isabel/Zelima can—
or even wants to—take up her previous life as Doña Isabel Fajardo. This is proved when
she declares her desire to enter the convent along with the community of friends and
supporters she has made through the telling of her story.
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Like other travelers in my study, Isabel will never be what she once was. She will
never again be the naïve and innocent daughter, waiting patiently to become a wife and
mother. Zayas’s protagonist knows pain and deep, burning rage. She has experienced
deception and friendship. She has had contact with other cultures. Most importantly, she
has learned how to express herself, to use her voice to shape and narrate her own story.
For this reason, “La esclava de su amante” does not end like other early modern
narratives featuring disguised and dishonored women. Isabel does not marry either Don
Manuel or Don Felipe. On the contrary, Isabel announces:
[P]ues he desengañado con mi engaño a muchas, no será razón que me dure toda
la vida vivir engañada, fiándome en que tengo de vivir hasta que la fortuna vuelva
su rueda en mi favor; pues ya no ha de resucitar don Manuel, ni cuando esto fuera
posible, me fiara de él, ni de ningún hombre, pues a todos los contemplo en éste
engañosos y taimados para con las mujeres. . . . [Y]o, como ya no los he menester,
porque no quiero haberlos menester, ni me importa que sea fingidos o verdaderos,
porque tengo elegido Amante que no me olvidará, y Esposo que no me
despreciará, pues le contemplo ya los brazos abiertos para recibirme. (166–67)
Some have seen the choice to enter the convent in Zayas’s Desengaños as a “retreat”
from the real world (Compte 62) or a “safe haven” that facilitates the protagonists’ escape
from the violence that has invaded other private spaces (Vollendorf, Reclaiming the Body
156). Edward Friedman emphasizes the spiritual elements of the space and calls it “a
compromise or resignation” (“Innocents Punished” 14). I read the space of the convent,
as Zayas constructs it, to be a continuation of the safe space of the sarao. Following
Rhodes’s conclusions that the convent in the Desengaños is a “non-space” (152), I
believe that Zayas creates an imagined space that has little to do with the real, historical
convents of seventeenth-century Spain.
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I argue above that Zayas pries open the space of Lisis’s sala, transforming a
private space to both let the outside world in and to let the women and their voices out. In
the Desengaños, the convent is a continuation of that space. Zayas’s convent is a place
where Lisis, Isabel, and the rest of their companions will be able to continue their
narrations and where they will persist in building supportive relationships with other
women—other noble women. It is a space that encourages travel. The women can expect
physical travel, like that of Doña Estefanía, Lisis’s cousin and a professed nun who
attends the sarao and even narrates a story. At Zayas’s convent, the women can also
expect to take both spiritual and literary journeys. At the end of the sarao, the frame
tale’s narrator declares:
Otro día, Lisis y doña Isabel, con doña Estefanía, se fueron a su convento con
mucho gusto. Doña Isabel tomó el hábito, y Lisis se quedó seglar. Y en poniendo
Laura la hacienda en orden, que les rentase lo que habían menester, se fue con
ellas, por no apartase de su amada Lisis, avisando a su madre de doña Isabel, que
como supo dónde estaba su hija, se vino también con ella, tomando el hábito de
religiosa, donde se supo cómo don Felipe había muerto en la guerra. (510)
With many of the narrators from the sarao at the same convent, the reader has to expect
that the storytelling will continue. Just as information about Don Felipe seeped past the
convent walls to the women inside, we can infer that the women’s stories will travel
outside its walls. Like their author, María de Zayas, the protagonists of the Desengaños
will project their voices and their stories to a wide audience. Even enclosed in the
convent, they will be traveling women.
Lisa Vollendorf claims, “Faced with what she obviously anticipates to be a
resistant reader, Zayas relies on various rhetorical strategies, including a focus on
androgynous corporeality and spirituality and an appeal to chivalry, as a way to lure
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readers into her texts” (“Fleshing out Feminism” 93). I would add Zayas’s use of
spectacle to this list of strategies. As I have shown in this chapter, Isabel’s shrewd use of
spectacle both captures the audience’s attention and shifts their allegiance. She uses
spectacle to negotiate with her noble audience her position both inside and outside of
their community. Through spectacle, she takes the mundane topics of honra and domestic
violence and transforms them into a noteworthy matter. Finally, Isabel’s spectacle
continues to break down the wall that separates the secret from the public, especially for
women. As Isabel finishes her performance, the participants at the sarao and the readers
are firmly on her side. Doña Isabel has explored the notion of engaño from every angle in
her tale, associating these falsehoods and disguises with rumor, honra, and the double
standard for men and women in the baroque public sphere. By introducing the
Desengaños with Isabel’s story, María de Zayas transforms her entire collection into a
safe space for the victim’s voice. She ensures that the reader is in the right state of mind
to receive the even more violent and shocking stories that follow at the same time that she
authorizes women who move and speak in public spaces in front of public audiences.
Zayas’s text is spectacle that works to authorize its author’s voice.
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CHAPTER 2: STAGED MASCULINITY IN THE NEW WORLD: THE TRAVELS OF
CATALINA DE ERAUSO IN HISTORIA DE LA MONJA ALFÉREZ
Neither simply woman nor man, she was both and all, a sexual anomaly, a circus
freak, a symbol of nature undone and amazed, a paradox of boundaries violated
but hymen intact.
Mary Elizabeth Perry, “From Convent to Battlefield: Cross-Dressing and
Gendering the Self in the New World of Imperial Spain”
The Lieutenant Nun (1592–1650) is easily the most famous traveling Spanish
woman, both among her contemporaries in the seventeenth century and in the minds of
twenty-first-century scholars. As with the other traveling women in this project, people
gather to catch a glimpse of Catalina de Erauso: “Hízose el caso allí notorio, y fue
notable el concurso de que me vide cercado, de personajes, príncipes, obispos,
cardenales, y el lugar que me hallé abierto donde quería” (173).13 Her story was wildly
popular in the first half of the seventeenth century, and it continues to draw the attention
of historians and literary scholars alike four centuries later because we still do not have
definite answers about Erauso’s life and identity. We cannot say conclusively that
Catalina de Erauso wrote her own autobiography, and if she did write the text that we
have today, we do not know for what purpose. As Mary Elizabeth Perry points out in her
contribution to the volume Queer Iberia, Erauso was an “anomaly” in more ways than
one. Do we refer to Erauso with masculine pronouns? Was she a cross-dresser or was she
transgender? Maybe she was neither or both. Based on her autobiography, do we have
evidence to say that Erauso was attracted to women or that she had physical relationships
with them? Does her story question the power hierarchies of early modern Hispanic
13
All passages from Historia de la Monja Alférez are from Ángel Esteban’s 2002 edition.
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cultures, or is it propaganda for the Spanish Monarchy and the Catholic Church in
support of the conquest of the New World? Should her text be studied in the context of
colonial Spanish American literature? Is it better categorized as an example of early
modern Spanish literature? Or, to be more precise, should it be considered within the
context of Basque literature? After almost four hundred years and numerous adaptations
of her story, the identity that Erauso constructs for herself still resists conventional
categories, and that is what keeps her and her story relevant to twenty-first-century
readers.
In this chapter, I will examine the ways in which the Historia de la Monja Alférez
attracts and entertains its readers. I argue that the author of the text stages a masterfullyfashioned spectacle of violent masculinity. According to the media scholar Angela
Ndalianis, in her article, “Baroque Perceptual Regimes,” for the audience to fully
appreciate the virtuosity of the baroque illusion, “we must also (eventually) recognize
and applaud the complexities involved in its construction” (n. pag.). Not only does
Erauso represent a spectacle in her autobiography, she also gives the reader details of the
execution of the performance, the creation of the costumes, the scenery, and the suspense.
The reader is privy to the methods that the daughter of a Basque hidalgo family uses to
prepare for her new role as a womanizing soldier in the New World. In his Arte nuevo de
hacer comedias, Lope de Vega argues that writers should keep in mind the audience’s
tastes and create works that feed into those proclivities (362–76). Authors should write to
entertain. The author of Historia de la Monja Alférez creates spectacle to amuse and
attract her audience. These spectacles that entertain the audience also allow both Erauso
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and her readers to navigate early modern literary genres and seventeenth-century gender
paradigms.
Like the early modern soldiers’ vidas and the picaresque narratives, Erauso’s tale
is characterized by constant movement. The Lieutenant Nun begins her narration with her
birth in San Sebastián: “Nací yo, doña Catalina de Erauso, en la villa de San Sebastián,
de Guipúzcoa, en el año de 1585, hija del capitán Don Miguel de Erauso y de doña María
Pérez de Galarraga y Arce, naturales y vecinos de dicha villa” (93). At the age of four,
her parents place her in a local convent with a female relative, but for the protagonist, the
convent is a stifling place of physical abuse (94–95). In her teens, she escapes the
convent in San Sebastián and creates a disguise from her old clothing (95). This disguise
allows Erauso to work with a doctor in Vitoria (95) and as a page in Valladolid (96).
After accidentally meeting her father in Valladolid, she escapes to Bilbao where she ends
up spending a month in jail (96–97). She briefly returns to San Sebastián, but after a brief
encounter with her mother, she begins her wandering once more, first to Sanlúcar, then to
Seville, and finally to the Americas (97–98). Once in the New World, Erauso continues
her picaresque life, working for various masters, and traveling large distances up and
down the western coast of South America. Like many women travelers, Erauso dons
men’s clothing, and during her trek through South America, she takes up the traditionally
masculine professions of soldier and mule driver.14 As many scholars have noted,
Erauso’s continuous travel and her time in the remote American frontier are two
14
In their foundational study on early modern transvestism, Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte C. van
de Pol note, “There are many examples of women who dressed as men for travelling. This was considered a
safety precaution, particularly for longer trips because a woman travelling alone faced considerable danger
in a time where highway robbers were still common in Europe. Masculine attire was also more practical for
travel than long skirts” (8). As evidence, the critics cite the German courtesan Maria Anna Steinhaus and
the Dutch actress Mietje de Bruin (8). It is not hard to think of various examples from early modern
Spanish literature. In Don Quijote, both Dorotea and Ana Félix dress as men for their travels. In Ana Caro’s
Valor, agravio y mujer, the female protagonist travels to Northern Europe dressed as a man.
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important factors that allow the Lieutenant Nun to be accepted by Spanish and Catholic
authorities (Perry, Gender and Disorder 133–34; Myers 141). Erauso’s travels are an
essential component of her story; she would not have been able to perform as her violent
persona if she had stayed in San Sebastián. Erauso needs different scenery for her
theatrical performance.
Catalina de Erauso’s journey has inspired seventeenth-century plays and
relaciones, nineteenth-century novels, and twentieth-century movies both in Europe and
in Latin America. According to Sherry Velasco, Erauso’s story and persona play into “the
public’s taste for scandal, which seems to have endured over time” (The Lieutenant Nun
10). In this chapter, I am primarily concerned with Erauso’s autobiography, Historia de
la Monja Alférez, Catalina de Erauso, escrita por ella misma, although I will
occasionally reference other cultural productions that reread and reinterpret the Basque
soldier’s journey.15 Due to the popularity of Erauso’s story and the various reproductions
of her travels––especially Juan Pérez de Montalbán’s play La Monja Alférez, written and
performed while Erauso was in Europe in the early seventeenth century––critics have
questioned the authorship of the autobiography. The doubt surrounding the text’s
authenticity is only exacerbated by the fact that scholars have still not found an original
manuscript or a copy from the seventeenth century.
In the Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid, scholars have
access to a copy of the manuscript transcribed by Juan Bautista Muñoz in 1784 from a
copy owned by Cándido María Trigueros. The Madrid manuscript is titled Vida i sucesos
15
Throughout this chapter I refer to Historia de la Monja Alférez as an autobiography following
Sonia Pérez-Villanueva’s astute analysis of the text in the context of other autobiographies from the time
period, including La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and the Vida of Alonso de Contreras (1630).
Pérez-Villanueva asserts, “The text is her life, and her life is her text. The experience of her everyday life
forms the language of the narrator of this autobiography and, in turn, the dialogue of the protagonist” (184).
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de la Monja Alférez, o Alférez Catarina, D[a] Catarina de Araujo [sic] doncella, natural
de S[an] Sabastián, Prov[inci]a de Guipúzcoa. Escrita por ella misma en 18 de
Sept[tiembre] 1646 [sic] (Vallbona 3). Joaquín María Ferrer edited and published the
Madrid manuscript in 1829 with the title Historia de la Monja Alférez, Doña Catalina de
Erauso, escrita por ella misma, and Ferrer’s text was quickly translated into an array of
European languages (Vallbona 3). In the introduction to her 1992 edition of the text,
Rima de Vallbona notes that Ferrer made some changes to the Madrid manuscript,
including changes in names, dates, and spelling and grammar errors; however, “Ferrer no
anotó los cambios ni enmiendas; ni siquiera explicó, en ninguna de las ediciones suyas, el
procedimiento de modernización usado en el discurso narrativo” (4). Vallbona argues that
this could explain some of the accusations that the text is a fake autobiography (4). Pedro
Rubio Merino recently discovered two additional manuscript copies in Seville. One of the
Seville manuscripts is untitled and incomplete while the other is similar to the Madrid
manuscript (Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun 3).16 Some of the more recent critical editions
include Rima de Vallbona’s 1992 publication, Ángel Esteban’s 2002 edition, and
Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto’s English translation in 1996.
We know that Erauso submitted her manuscript for publication to the editor
Bernardino de Guzman in Madrid in 1625, but we have yet to find that manuscript or an
original copy (Vallbona 2; Esteban 26). Despite this information, Manuel Serrano y Sanz
and Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo have argued that the autobiography we have today is
apocryphal, suggesting that it is an invention of Trigueros based on several 1625
16
For more details on the history of the Madrid manuscript and an analysis of the differences
between the Madrid manuscript and the two manuscripts in Seville, see Vallbona’s “Introducción” (3–4),
Ángel Esteban’s “Introducción” (25–39), Velasco’s The Lieutenant Nun (2–6), and Sonia PérezVillanueva’s The Life of Catalina de Erauso, the Lieutenant Nun (4–5).
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relaciones (Esteban 29–30). Some scholars have even suggested that the autobiography is
actually based on Pérez de Montalbán play (Vallbona 19). Vallbona addresses both of
these suspicions and concludes that the autobiography must have been written in “una
época cercana y hasta contemporánea a la de Catalina de Erauso” (15). Vallbona points
out that, “la narradora-protagonista . . . se expresa a menudo desde una ‘ahora,’ ‘hoy,’ y
‘aquí’ que connotan la corta distancia espacio-temporal desde la que está escrita la obra”
(15). The editor also confirms, “Es inverosímil que litotes, ambigüedades
morfosintácticas, cacofonías, torpezas de estilo y otros aspectos que en algunos pasajes
del texto empobrecen el discurso literario, puedan porvenir de un autor dieciochesco
atiborrado de reglas retóricas” (19).17
At times, Erauso’s skillful narration has led critics to doubt her authorship.
According to some scholars, Erauso would not have been capable of writing the narrative
on her own, especially in Castilian.18 The nineteenth-century historian Diego Barros
Arana claimed, “La firmeza del estilo, la pureza y elegancia de la dicción revelan una
pluma mucho más ejercitada de lo que debe suponerse la de la monja aventurera, a la
cual no se pueden atribuir ni práctica de escribir, ni gusto literario” (229). Manuel
Serrano y Sanz, on the other hand, suggested that the autobiography had little literary
value and was poorly written, or “una novela escrita sin ingenio y cuyo protagonista
resulta un vulgar tahur y pendenciero” (qtd. in Pérez-Villanueva 2). For scholars in the
second half of the nineteenth century, then, the text was either written too well to have
been created by the “monja aventurera,” or it was written poorly and, therefore, unworthy
17
As further support for her conclusions, Vallbona suggests that, in reality, there are not that
many errors in the manuscript. Additionally, Vallbona trusts Juan Batista Muñoz’s ability to detect any
falsifications (18–19).
18
Vallbona suggests that Erauso would have had only a limited knowledge of Castillian
considering she was born to a Basque family and spent her childhood in a convent run by Basque nuns (8).
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of attention. Due to the numerous publications centered on Erauso since the 1990s, it is
clear that academia is no longer dismissing Erauso’s text. Most scholars now agree that
Erauso participated in some way in the writing process of the autobiography, and, like
most soldiers’ autobiographies from the time period, the text contains both real and
fictional elements (Vallbona 6–11; Perry, “From Convent to Battlefield” 396; Esteban 13;
Myers 146–47; Pérez-Villanueva 2–3).19
The confusion surrounding the veracity of parts of Erauso’s story and the
authorship of her autobiography/travelogue only serves to enhance this character’s
popularity and relevance in the twenty-first century. Erauso appeals to a modern-day
audience that is questioning binary and fixed identities in its own culture. In this chapter,
I pay close attention to the ambiguities that the narrator builds into Erauso’s text. The
lieutenant nun slips from one literary genre to another, just as she slips from one gender
identity to another, and this fluidity, in addition to her physical mobility, helps Erauso
validate her life choices and escape serious punishment. The protagonist’s mixture of
innocence and violence, vulnerability and strength, compliance and rebelliousness creates
a text that actively resists permanent classification or straightforward analysis.
I want to note, however, that Erauso’s identity as Basque and Spanish is never in
doubt. While her gender position is fluid in the autobiography and her body is
constructed in multiple and contradicting ways, she is always Spanish. Her position as a
Basque soldier recently arrived in the New World from the Iberian Peninsula offers her a
certain amount of legitimacy and protection. It is her Spanish identity position, to a large
19
Esteban reminds us that, “[e]l positivismo decimonónico junto con el nacimiento de las ciencias
historiográficas, creó un concepto de historia ciertamente moderno, del que vivimos todavía, y que
contrastaba con el moralismo y pragmatismo de épocas anteriores, que no siempre identificaba verdad con
realidad o dato empírico” (13).
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extent, that allows her to speak to the heads of the Spanish Monarchy and the Catholic
Church and to escape serious repercussions for her gender-bending activities.
In order to examine Erauso’s enigmatic tale, I look to several theories on baroque
vision and spectacle that will help me highlight the text’s ambiguities, and most
importantly, the pleasure the public would take from those ambiguities and
contradictions. As with the other travelers included in my project, I argue that the
narrator/protagonist of Historia de la Monja Alférez creates spectacle to transverse the
exacting and oppressive early modern gender paradigms that worked to immobilize and
silence women. The spectacle of Erauso’s ambiguities allows her to manage her
relationships with men and women who exerted power on both sides of the Atlantic. In
this way, Guy Debord’s elaborations on spectacle are useful to understand Erauso’s
interactions with baroque society and the specific individuals who play supporting roles
in the text, including King Phillip IV of Spain and Pope Urban VIII. For Debord,
spectacle is “a collection of images,” and it is impossible for the spectator to detect any
truth or reality behind the images (12–13). Debord also asserts that spectacle “is a social
relationship between people that is mediated by images” (12). That is, all social
interactions, including the hierarchy of power and prestige in the early modern Atlantic
world, are created, maintained, and negotiated through images. In early modern Spain,
these images are the way that one is seen by the community, or the mask that one wears
when interacting with the public. Reading Erauso’s tale with Debord’s theory of the
spectacle in mind helps the reader recognize the abundance of images that the protagonist
projects and the work that the images do to manage Erauso’s relationships with both the
other characters in the text and the readers.
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To complement Debord’s theory and to enhance our understanding of Erauso’s
spectacles and their effect on the public, I also draw on Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s The
Madness of Vision: On Baroque Aesthetics and Angela Ndalianis’s “Baroque Perceptual
Regimes.” Both Buci-Glucksmann and Ndalianis highlight the early modern transition
from a preference for a centered perspective toward a de-centered, shifting, and
overwhelming surplus of images. It was a move from the platonic to the anti-platonic,
from a preference for works like Raphael’s The School of Athens (1509–11) to an
attraction to complex perspectives like those in Diego Velázquez’s Las meninas (1656).
Angela Ndalianis’s ideas on the framing of images, and the ways that the audience
interacts with spectacle will help us imagine a more active audience for Erauso’s text.
Due to the ways that spectacles are framed for baroque audiences, Ndalianis argues that
the public is drawn into the spectacle (n. pag.). In Erauso’s travel story, the narrator
explains in detail the work that goes into the making of the image of the Monja Alférez.
In this way, the text breaks down the traditionally unyielding border that separates the
spectator from the spectacle, thereby incorporating the public into Erauso’s performance.
The reader begins to feel like she has a stake in the protagonist’s success. BuciGlucksmann also takes into account the reader’s reactions to the baroque surplus of
images, while emphasizing the pleasure that the spectator would feel. Referring to
Gracián’s Andrenio of El Criticón (1667), Buci-Glucksmann explains, “He celebrates
vision as the sense of plurality, infinite multitudes, profusion, and differences—beauty”
(3). However, as the theorist points out, Andrenio quickly learns, “vision that offers such
pleasure is also the site of entrapment and illusion” (3). One of the characteristics of
baroque spectacle is the public’s pleasure at being tricked. To illuminate this point, we
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could consider the popularity of picaresque novels during the early modern period. The
public enjoyed being taken in by the tricks, the trompe-l’oeil, and the disguises of the
pícaros and pícaras. In the case of Erauso’s autobiography, Buci-Glucksmann’s theories
on “the madness of vision” force us to consider the public’s reactions to the protagonist’s
tricks and deceptions. It brings to light the pleasure that the public would feel upon
witnessing Erauso’s journey.
While considering Erauso’s use of spectacle and travel, I argue that both the
protagonist and her text shift from one place to another and from one identity position to
another in the interest of entertaining the public and, in the process, authorizing Erauso’s
transgressions. I begin by contextualizing Erauso’s text with information about the
popular literary trends in seventeenth-century Spain. The way that Erauso’s text
combines and adapts literary genres like the picaresque novel and the comedia de capa y
espada allows the author to narrate the story of a character that resists binary
categorization at every turn. In the next section, like many Erauso scholars, I draw on
Judith Butler’s elaborations on gender performativity and drag to analyze the
protagonist’s transformation from novice in the convent to New World soldier. The
narrator frames this transformation in such a way as to both include the reader and at the
same time confuse and overwhelm her. This transformation, which is never complete or
permanent, is the model for Erauso’s future exploits. Even as Erauso narrates the change
in her appearance and behavior, she seems to hover somewhere between her masculine
and feminine identities. This continues through the last chapter of the text. In the section
“Constructing Erauso’s Monstrous Body,” I examine the ways that the text again locates
Erauso in a grey area between two binary identities. In the travel narrative, the narrator
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creates a body that does not fit in the early modern cultural constructions of either the
female or the male body. Given that Erauso is constructed as both male and female,
sometimes both or neither, she becomes a baroque monster or oddity. As David Castillo
explains in Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities, those with
power often collected and displayed early modern oddities as signs of their prestige and
influence (19). Erauso’s text seems to stage its protagonist alongside these other
seventeenth-century novelties and curiosities. In the last section, “The Spectacle of
Repetitive Violence,” I examine the scenes of violence in Erauso’s autobiography, and I
posit multiple possible readings of these moments. I argue that the protagonist’s violent
acts can be read as supportive of the Spanish Empire’s colonial efforts in South America,
but on the other hand, the graphic descriptions of bloody battle wounds could be read as a
critique of the traditionally revered masculinity of the early modern explorers and
conquerors. Each section of this chapter focuses on the different ways that Erauso and her
text resist most fixed. The ambiguity and confusion in Erauso’s text are ultimately
productive in that these characteristics have made Erauso into a legendary character
whose meaning can be continually altered to serve different messages.
Gender and Genre in a Transatlantic Context
One of the reasons that Erauso is able to escape punishment for her many
transgressions is her ability to weave her tale into an acceptable and convincing story,
tailoring the details for certain audiences. In his text, Literature on the Move, Ottmar Ette
argues that all travelogues are examples of hybrid literature (26). Ette explains, “The
relations especially between travelogue and novel are as intense as they are complex.
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Both genres, each of them shattered into a multitude of subgenres, are literary hybrid
forms, which are able to include the most diverse literary and non-literary text types and
fragments” (26). Of all of the primary works that I examine in this project, this hybridity
is most obvious in Erauso’s Historia de la Monja Alférez. Sonia Pérez-Villanueva
affirms, “This hybrid text––Vida y sucesos––reflects a hybrid life: Catalina de Erauso.
The result is a narrative on the border” (4). Critics have compared the text to the
traditionally male-dominated field of conquest and colonization narratives involving the
New World. Others have noted the influences of the picaresque narrative in Erauso’s
writing. While some argue that the text has more in common with works like Lazarillo de
Tormes, others propose that we look at Erauso’s persona in comparison with pícaras like
the Lozana andaluza and the pícara Justina. Erauso’s tale seems to closely follow the
style of other soldiers’ vidas, like the autobiography of Alonso de Contreras. Finally, we
could take into consideration the elements of the comedia de capa y espada found in
Erauso’s text: disguise, duels, and questions of honor. With admirable skill, Erauso, as
the narrator of her own travel story, combines elements of these different genres in order
to give the reader a behind-the-scenes look at the spectacle of the Monja Alférez.
Aránzazu Borrachero Mendíbil analyzes Erauso’s autobiography within the
context of narratives that detail the “discovery,” conquest, and colonization of the New
World. While comparing Erauso’s text to those written by Colón, Cortés, Las Casas, and
Cabeza de Vaca, the critic argues that all of the authors, “[R]ecrean ciertos sucesos
históricos en sus textos al tiempo que elaboran una imagen de sí mismos que apela
directamente a un lector del que se quiere conseguir una reacción específica” (486).
Erauso, like the male travelers listed above, reorders and reconstructs her time in the New
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World, and, in the process, she defines herself as a protagonist in the conquest and
colonization of Peru and Chile. A comparison between Erauso’s treatment of violence
and disobedience and Cortés’s justification of violence could be particularly enlightening.
Beatriz Pastor describes Cortés’s self-fashioning in his second letter and the narrative
strategies the author uses to create the image of himself as the ideal conquistador.
According to Pastor’s analysis of the second letter:
Violence appears as necessary action, planned as such by Cortés who is presented
as the prototype of a man capable of controlling a difficult situation by
appropriate means. . . . The function of the fictionalization is twofold. It implies
that such violence is justified, and it portrays Cortés as a military leader who may
be relied on to act in the best way possible, in any situation whatsoever. (89–90)
I would argue that, to a certain extent, Erauso follows these patterns regarding violence.
While traveling near Potosí, Erauso narrates a particularly bloody scene: “Habíanse
entretanto los Indios vuelto al lugar, en número de más de diez mil. Volvimos a ellos con
tal coraje, e hicimos tal estrago, que corría por la plaza abajo un arroyo de sangre como
un río, y fuímoslos siguiendo y matando hasta pasar el río Dorado” (127–28). As a
soldier, her violent behavior toward the indigenous groups in South America is framed as
service to Church and Crown, and eventually, this service is rewarded. On the other hand,
much of the violence in Erauso’s autobiography has little to do with Spain’s attempt to
conquer and colonize the New World.
Erauso takes her first trip to jail before she leaves Europe. Shortly after the
protagonist escapes her convent and is able to fool her father with her masculine disguise,
she says:
Pasado un largo camino, me parece como de cuarenta leguas, entré en Bilbao,
donde no encontré albergue ni comodidad, ni sabía que hacerme. Diéronme allí
entre tantos unos muchachos en reparar, y cercarme hasta verme fastidiado, y
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hube de hallar unas piedras y tirarlas, y hube a uno de lastimar, no sé dónde
porque no lo vide; y prendiéronme, y tuviéronme en la cárcel un largo mes hasta
que él hubo de sanar y soltáronme. (97)
This passage, along with many other fights at gaming houses, would make the reader
associate Erauso with pícaros like Lazarillo, or Cervantes’s Rinconete and Cortadillo.
Like the archetype of the pícaro, Erauso never stays long in one location or with one
master. In each town, Erauso finds trouble, especially given her taste for gambling and
knife fights. The reader often witnesses Erauso fleeing from the authorities and traveling
the world looking for fame, fortune, and freedom from incarceration. It is important to
note that Erauso does not follow the pícaro in all aspects of her narrative. While pícaros
are usually from a marginal family, Erauso comes from a respectable and noble Basque
family.20 Pérez-Villanueva notes, “Her family is a clear reflection of the gender roles of
seventeenth-century Spain; her brothers joined the army and fought in the wars of the
America conquest, whereas three of her sisters were sent to the convent and the other
sister lived a married life” (11). Lázaro leaves his house and travels from place to place to
improve his social status. Erauso does not improve her social status in the sense that she
begins life as a member of a noble family, but leaves the convent to be a page,
shopkeeper, soldier, and muleteer. Instead, Erauso is in search of the lifestyle that her
male family members enjoy.
Enriqueta Zafra compares Erauso’s status as a “mujer suelta” to that of female
pícaras in narratives like La Lozana andaluza (1528), La pícara Justina (1605), and La
20
Borrachero Medíbil reminds us that, “el grupo vasco ocupaba un lugar privilegiado en la
sociedad colonial de Potosí, donde se inscriben muchos de los conflictos del personaje” (492). In her book,
In Search of Catalina de Erauso: The National and Sexual Identity of the Lieutenant Nun, Eva Mendieta
analyzes “the Basque element” in Erauso’s autobiography, and “the significance of this text in
understanding the dynamic of the Basque presence in Spain and the New World at the end of the sixteenth
and at the beginning of the seventeenth centuries” (13).
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hija de Celestina (1612) (489). Zafra argues, “[E]l libro de su vida en sí presenta
ambigüedades: por lo pronto, una memoria o historia de vida es algo diametralmente
opuesto a la privacidad y domesticidad que se espera de la mujer; esta no debe buscar la
fama ni la publicidad que se entienden como patrimonio del hombre” (496). She adds,
“[L]a mujer que busca la fama pregona su deshonra y su desvergüenza. Así, por el mero
hecho de hacer públicos sus escritos, se hace ‘mujer pública’ y, por el consiguiente, se
expone a todo tipo de invectivas masculinas” (496). Erauso does not use her sexuality in
the way that the pícaras do, but she transgresses in other ways. Much like the pícaras and
prostitutes, Erauso was a “mujer pública” because she tells the story of her life publicly in
the pursuit of fame, but, as Zafra points out, Erauso is not punished or made to repent like
the pícaras are made to do (500). I posit that Erauso escapes reprimand because she
rehearses her performance of masculinity until she masters the role and she is able to
thoroughly entertain her audience. Her fluid and, at times, contradictory gender identity
allows Erauso to perform spectacle and negotiate her status in early modern society with
her audience and with early modern authorities.
Like her moniker would suggest, Erauso’s life story shares elements with two of
the most common varieties of autobiographies in seventeenth-century Spain—the nun’s
vida and the soldier’s vida. Concerning the nun’s autobiography, Kathleen Ann Myers
observes, “[S]ocially privileged white women were trained to examine their lives and
write about them for confessors who would use the accounts to guide their spiritual
daughters” (4). According to the Historia de la Monja Alférez, when Erauso reveals her
previous identity as a “socially privileged white woman,” she gives an account of her life
to a bishop in the New World. The Lieutenant Nun writes:
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A la mañana, como a las diez, su ilustrísima me hizo llevar a su presencia, y me
preguntó quién era, y de dónde, hijo de quién, y todo el curso de mi vida, y causas
y caminos por donde vine a para allí. . . . y pareciendo estar yo en la presencia de
Dios, y dígole: —Señor, todo esto que he referido a V.S. ilustrísima no es asi; la
verdad es ésta: que soy mujer, que nací en tal parte, hija de fulano y sutana; que
me entraron de tal edad en tal convento, con fulana mi tía. (160)
According to Myers, while Erauso participates in the traditional religious confessional
genre, she manipulates the genre to provide an alternative option to “the path of the
perfecta religiosa” (15). In this way, Erauso’s text could be compared to Teresa of
Ávila’s canonical Vida. As Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau affirm in Untold Sisters:
Hispanic Nuns in their own Works, “Teresa of Ávila bent her needs to the wishes of the
Church in a complex mix of submission and subversion” (10). Both Erauso and Teresa
are dissatisfied with their options in the convent. Teresa, of course, wishes to reform the
Carmelite order, whereas Erauso wishes to escape her order altogether. Both, however,
travel extensively and regularly challenge the status quo. Both must adapt the vida genre
in the interest of self-preservation, and both successfully build their own authority
through these adaptations.
While the similarities between Erauso’s text and Teresa’s Vida are clear, there are
also important differences. In general, the religious women who wrote vidas tended to
focus on their daily habits of prayer and penitence and their personal relationships with
God, topics more suitable to women. Arenal and Schlau argue, “Since nuns, like Hispanic
women in general, were supposed to refrain from public activities, inner-directed
religious experience was considered most appropriate to them, and it was that experience
they wrote about most frequently” (1). Although Teresa does branch out into public
activity, much of her writing centers on internal prayer. Men, on the other hand, and
especially soldiers, wrote about their accomplishments, their participation in specific
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events, and the authority they acquired from their active movement and military
participation. Christopher Kark argues that, “Erauso matches her masculine garb by
dressing up her narrative in a self-representational genre predominantly associated with
the masculine” (528). Kark goes on to note the similarities between Erauso’s text and
“narratives by Jerónimo de Pasamonte (1605) and Alonso de Contreras (1630)” (537). In
her essay “Golden Age Autobiography: The Soldiers,” Margarita Levisi notes that these
military men like Pasamonte and Contreras “write because, from this communicative
effort, they hope for practical gain, be it an economic benefit, the attainment of social
advancement or self-justification. From their point of view, their lives have been useful
ones, they have done something valuable and for this reason they should be heard and
compensated” (113). Like other soldiers, Erauso writes about the battles she has won and
her valor with a sword for practical reasons. She wants permission to continue living as a
man.
In addition to the vidas, elements of the picaresque narratives, and echoes of the
chronicles of conquest, the reader will also find features of the Spanish comedia in
Erauso’s hybrid text. Looking at examples of the comedia de capa y espada, like Tirso de
Molina’s Don Gil de las calzas verdes (1615), Calderón’s La vida es sueño (1635), or
Ana Caro’s Valor, agravio y mujer (c. 1630–1640), it is easy to see why scholars like
Menéndez y Pelayo thought Erauso’s autobiography might have been adapted from a
play. Historia de la Monja Alférez includes disguise and the tension created when that
disguise has the potential to be unveiled. There are often chaotic scenes that play with the
characters’ identities. Like the comedias, Erauso’s autobiography highlights moments of
jealousy and questions of honor. Some of the most theatrical elements of the Historia de
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la Monja Alférez occur when Erauso is in close contact with her brother in the Americas.
While the reader knows of the familial relationship, Erauso’s brother is unaware. When
they first meet, and Miguel de Erauso learns her “nombre y patria,” he embraces her and
asks her questions “por su padre y madre, y hermanas, y su hermanita Catalina la monja”
(112). At one point, Erauso begins visiting her brother’s mistress, and upon learning of
this betrayal by one of his comrades in arms, Miguel de Erauso proceeds to beat his
sister/brother-in-arms, who escapes to move on to her next adventure (113). This
relationship culminates a few chapters later when the protagonist agrees to help another
man in a duel. Erauso successfully kills her opponent, and after she has celebrated her
victory, she asks her adversary’s name. Her companions tell her, “El capitán Miguel de
Erauso” (118). Readers would expect to find moments like this in a corral de comedias,
especially when we know from the beginning that the protagonist is a female dressed in
masculine clothing.
In their recent editions of Erauso’s autobiography, both Rima de Vallbona and
Ángel Esteban point out the possibility that the autobiographical text is a fabricated
account based on Juan Pérez de Montalbán’s comedia, La Monja Alférez, written in 1626
while the real flesh-and-blood Catalina de Erauso was in Rome to see Pope Urban VIII.
Montalbán’s play centers on a love triangle between the protagonist Guzmán (Catalina),
her love interest, Doña Ana, and her friend, Don Diego. In the play Guzmán has various
encounters with her brother, Miguel de Erauso. In the comedia, however, Miguel de
Erauso eventually becomes suspicious of Guzmán’s identity. Meanwhile, Doña Ana,
thinking that she is with Guzmán, mistakenly has a sexual encounter with Don Diego. In
Act III, to save Doña Ana’s honor, Guzmán is forced to admit she is a woman. Although
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the protagonist, under great duress, does admit that she was born a female, unlike other
plays involving cross-dressing, Guzmán does not agree to marry a man at the end of Act
III. In this way, she is different from other cross-dressing characters like Calderón’s
Rosaura or Ana Caro’s Leonor. Instead, Montalbán closes the play with one of the
secondary characters, who declares:
Con aquesto, y pidiendo
perdón, tenga fin aquí
este caso verdadero,
donde llega la comedia
han llegado los sucesos;
que hoy está el Alférez Monja
en Roma, y si casos nuevos
dieron materia a la pluma,
segunda parte os prometo. (Jornada III, Escena IX, 172)
According to the play, el Alférez Monja is still traveling around the world. She has not
settled into domestic life, and the author assumes his character will have more adventures
dressed as a man.
In her critical introduction, Rima de Vallbona addresses the suggestion that at
least one famous episode from the autobiography was adapted from Montalbán’s play.
Manuel Serrano y Sanz, and later, James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, who translated the text to
English in 1908, argue that the episode involving el Nuevo Cid was taken from the
theatrical piece (Vallbona 19). In Historia de la Monja Alférez, Erauso is in Cuzco when
she meets el Nuevo Cid, “que era un hombre moreno, velloso, muy alto, que con la
presencia espantaba, y llamábanle el Cid” (152). While gambling, the protagonist and el
Nuevo Cid engage in a knife fight, both injuring the other multiple times. At one point, as
a severely wounded Erauso approaches el Nuevo Cid, he asks her, “Perro, todavía
vives?” (153). Erauso eventually kills the other man, but not without great risk to herself.
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She has so many knife lacerations that she believes herself to be close to death and asks a
local priest for her last rites. Despite her injuries, Erauso makes a miraculous recovery,
and she lives to fight el Nuevo Cid’s revenge-seeking friends another day. The
aforementioned scene in the manuscript is noticeably theatrical, but as I will argue
throughout this chapter, Erauso’s entire autobiography plays out like a staged production.
Vallbona, after a detailed comparison of the protagonist and the events surrounding el
Nuevo Cid, refutes Serrano y Sanz and Fitzmaurice-Kelly’s assertions that the play
somehow inspired the autobiographical manuscript (Vallbona 19–22). However, the critic
acknowledges, “lo anterior no quiere decir, ni tampoco sostener, que dicho episodio haya
tenido lugar en la vida de Catalina de Erauso. . . . Más bien presenta todos los signos
propios de aventuras ficticias de capa y espada interpoladas en el texto básico, las cuales
contribuyen a darle calidad novelesca” (22).21
The popular trope of the cross-dressed woman in early modern Spain was
common, yet controversial. Mary Elizabeth Perry notes, “Citing the injunction against
cross-dressing in Deuteronomy, Chapter 22, philosophers and moralists warned that
transvestism leads to lasciviousness. They condemned in particular the actresses who
dressed as men both on and off the stage” (Gender and Disorder 133). Elizabeth Rhodes
asserts that the image of a woman cross-dressed as a man is acceptable only in the
particular space of the theatre. She argues, “[I]n structural terms, the comedia follows a
poetics that offers but a restricted space in which male and female characters can suspend
‘natural order’ and temporarily impinge upon the cultural assignments of their generic
other, a dramatic opening in which women can act like men and men like women without
21
Vallbona suggests that Montalbán may have met Erauso when they were both in Madrid, and
therefore, the playwright probably took his inspiration directly from Erauso’s stories (22).
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permanently calling into question their ‘real’ gender” (“Gender and the Monstrous” 270).
According to Rhodes, this transgression is temporary and limited.22 She notes, “Crossdressing, like cross-behaving, was permissible at the beginning of the play, and could
intensify even into the last moment. But by the final scene’s conclusion, the ‘right’
individuals should be wearing the pants and the restitution of order sealed with a
heterosexual marriage or two, to assuage any doubts about the proper order of things”
(270).23 Notwithstanding the limitations on cross-dressing during her lifetime, Erauso is
able to dress and live as a man throughout her autobiography, and in the last chapters, she
receives official permission from both Phillip IV and Pope Urban VIII to continue doing
so. But, how does she escape official censure and punishment?
Many scholars have addressed Erauso’s seemingly unique ability to transgress
early modern gender norms in such an open and transparent manner. Both Stephanie
Merrim and Mary Elizabeth Perry offer various suggestions to explain Erauso’s
exceptionality. Perry argues that Erauso’s acceptance comes from Spain’s unique
position in the seventeenth-century world. She posits that:
[T]he woman who chose to live as a man served to glorify traditional knightly
values and thus to support attempts by the nobility to regain supremacy over a
central monarch. The manly woman’s adventures distracted attention from
economic decline and political unrest in the Hapsburg Spanish Empire. They also
reassured people concerned about the numbers of men who left Spain for the New
22
Dekker and van de Pol echo Rhodes’s observations about cross-dressing: “In the early modern
period there were several occasions where it was customary and sometimes even acceptable for women to
dress as a man for a short time. The main examples of this are transvestism during carnival festivities,
during riots, while travelling or in flight, for the sake of erotic stimulation or carousing” (6). The authors
dismiss these examples, “as the disguise was for a very short time only and was sometimes easy to see
through, or even meant to be seen through” (6).
23
Rhodes acknowledges that one exception to the traditional structure of cross-dressing in the
comedia is Ana Caro’s protagonist in Valor, agravio y mujer (“Gender and the Monstrous” 271). Like
Erauso, Caro’s Leonor fights with a sword and travels dressed as a man. Although Leonor does marry Don
Juan in Act III, she is the one that arranges the marriage.
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World, allowing them to believe that the country had not ‘feminized’ and
consequently gone to the dogs. (Gender and Disorder 133–34)
Stephanie Merrim, following Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte C. van de Pol, affirms, “When
women assumed male dress for patriotic, rather than prurient reasons . . . their actions
generally resulted in reward rather than censure” (185). Although scholars like Sherry
Velasco would take issue with the assertion that Erauso does not cross-dress, at least in
part, for sexual motives, most critics do agree that part of Erauso’s success comes from
her military victories.24
Both Merrim and Perry agree that the Spanish patriarchal society allows Erauso to
become famous because, in the end, she upholds the values of that society. Perry
observes, “Catalina and other manly women in the seventeenth century won approval not
for dressing as men, but for thinking like men, acting like men, and speaking like men”
(Gender and Disorder 131). Merrim adds, “Erauso’s cross-dressing struck a positive
chord: from the androcentric perspective of seventeenth-century males, she has
transcended her lowly condition as a woman and acceded to the superior realm of
masculinity” (188). To a certain extent, it was understandable that a woman would want
to live as a man, due to the gender hierarchy of the time period. Given that the masculine
was valued over the feminine, a person like Erauso would have been praised in some
circles for her ability to overcome her condition as female and to live successfully as a
mujer varonil. We know that the mujer varonil was often celebrated in early modern
Spain, especially if her story was narrated and contextualized in a careful way.25 Erauso
24
In her book The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso,
Velasco argues that Erauso’s performance of aggression is linked to lesbian desire (53–54).
25
Velasco gives a detailed explanation of the complicated place of the mujer varonil in Spanish
society and Spanish literature in her article “Marimachos, hombrunas, barbudas: The Masculine Woman in
Cervantes.” Melveena McKendrick’s Woman and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age: A
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achieves recognition and acceptance through storytelling and the way she constructs her
persona as a mujer varonil.
In Historia de la Monja Alférez, the protagonist and her narration bring to mind
well-established traditions of cross-dressed women including manly saints and the
classical Amazons. The figure of the transvestite saint is relevant when we think about
the particular moments when Erauso invokes her status as a virgin. Stephanie Merrim
notes, “Virginity, together with association of masculinity and virtue which underlies
Erauso’s self-defense, forms the cornerstone of a catholic tradition of transvestite female
saints which dates from the fifth century” (189). As Erauso constructs her persona as the
Monja Alférez—and as others contribute to her infamous character and story—she never
loses the title of monja, despite the fact that she never officially takes vows. In fact,
throughout her autobiography, the protagonist indicates that she has spent a considerable
amount of her life living in convents.
Erauso confesses to spending months or even years at a time in different
convents—either hiding from the law or waiting to hear her fate after she confesses her
previous identity as a woman—but she never describes the space of the convent like the
Capuchin nuns do in chapter 3 of my project. While the Capuchin nuns describe the
grandeur of certain convents, the details of their fellow nuns’ wardrobes, and the lifestyle
and food habits of other religious orders, Erauso skims over those elements of her life.
Nonetheless, there is a continuous subtext of religious life, convents, and clergy members
in the Lieutenant Nun’s autobiography. In this way, the protagonist subtly leads the
reader to position her alongside manly saints like Joan of Arc, the virgin maiden who
Study of the Mujer Varonil is now a classic on the topic. See the Preface of McKendrick’s text for a basic
outline of the mujer varonil in Spanish theatre (ix–xiii).
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fought on behalf of France in the Hundred Years’ War, and Santa Librada, the pious
woman who miraculously grew a beard the night before she was to enter into a marriage
that she did not want.26 In emphasizing her identity as an almost-nun and her associations
with convents, Erauso makes her life as a gambling and bellicose wanderer both more
acceptable and more exceptional.
The link between the aggressive Amazon woman and the New World goes far
beyond the life of Erauso. In Cristóbal Colón’s account of his first journey across the
Atlantic he refers to the presence of an island inhabited by only women (145). According
to Diana de Armas Wilson, “Como parte del equipaje mental de la teratología clásica
traído por los viajeros europeos—el cual incluía a gigantes, pigmeos, cíclopes, dragones,
grifos, sirenas, mujeres barbadas, jóvenes albinos y hombres con cara de perro—las
amazonas resultan, en efecto, indispensables para la comprensión del papel de género
(sexual) en la Conquista” (23). The critic points out that, “[E]l mito griego de las
amazonas afianzó la imagen de la mujer física y moralmente fuerte del Nuevo Mundo,
imagen que a su vez inspiró la de la mujer varonil en el drama del Siglo de Oro español”
(23–24). An early modern European audience would not blink an eye at a description of
Amazon women from the New World, and, in fact, they would have expected that sort of
marvelous imagery. As Armas Wilson points out, the image of the Amazon woman was
entwined with the European views of the Americas and the conquest. The Amazon
woman is uncivilized, almost savage, yet still productive—an apt metaphor for European
26
For the details of Joan of Arc’s life, see Larissa Juliet Taylor’s Virgin Warrior: The Life and
Death of Joan of Arc, and Nora M. Heimann and Laura Coyle’s Joan of Arc: Her Image in France and
America. Merrim discusses the commonalities between Erauso and Joan of Arc (190). Sherry Velasco
briefly addresses “bearded saints,” and particularly Santa Librada, or Wilgefortis, in her article
“Marimachos, hombrunas, barbudas: The Masculine Woman in Cervantes.” Ilse E. Friesen demonstrates
the prominence of the figure of the manly saint in her book The Female Crucifix: Images of St. Wilgefortis
since the Middle Ages.
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views of the Americas. The image that Erauso presents of herself—the warrior woman in
complete control of her own sexuality—supports the larger picture of the New World
presented in literature for a European audience. Erauso’s story contributes to the overthe-top, extreme, and carnivalesque spectacle of the New World.
The ways that Erauso narrates her movement through the space of the Atlantic is
important for the construction of her hybrid identity. Brian Sandberg calls the early
modern Atlantic world a “borderland of the Spanish Empire” where “individuals’
identities seem to have been incredibly flexible and changeable” (7). He also notes,
“Borderlands allow people to discard unwanted identities, whether robber, cheat, rapist,
or murderer” (7). The frontier spaces of the New World appear to be the perfect place for
Erauso’s travels and performances. Simerka explains that the frontier in Chile was
particularly difficult for the Spanish Empire “to pacify.” She adds, “The viceroys of Peru
described expeditions to Chile as highly unpopular assignments” (22). For the audience
in Europe, the “borderlands” in Peru would have been an untamable, chaotic, and wild
imaginary space. Erauso’s autobiography takes place primarily in these kinds of spaces,
and I believe these spaces help her frame her tale as spectacular. In addition to these
geographic spaces, we could add the space of the gambling den. Enrique García SantoTomás affirms that spaces for gambling often had the same effect as the “borderlands”
mentioned above. Identity is fluid while gambling. He argues, “Chance was considered a
type of unnatural equalizer that dissolved boundaries and rank, to the extent that cards
and death were often presented as one and the same” (“Outside Bets” 150). In her
narrative, Erauso occupies spaces that allow for greater freedom in regards to identity
performance.
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Following the mode of other Erauso scholars, in this section I have aligned the
Historia de la Monja Alférez’s protagonist with conquistadors like Cortés and Cabeza de
Vaca. I have likened Erauso to pícaros and pícaras as well as to nuns and saints like
Teresa of Ávila and Joan of Arc. I have also mentioned similarities between our
Lieutenant Nun and soldiers like Alonso de Contreras or warrior women like the mythical
Amazons. Who exactly is the protagonist of this extraordinarily hybrid text? I agree with
Kark’s assertion that:
Erauso’s Historia is a fascinating rejoinder in the vida dialogue inasmuch as she
grasped the performative value of penning a work in that genre. The textual selffashioning in her vida accomplishes what she was unable to do in male garb
alone, notwithstanding two decades of successful cross-dressing: elude convent
life, collect a soldier’s pension, and gain notoriety in Spain and Italy to boot.
What Erauso demonstrates with Historia, then, is that genre potentiates an
expansion of selfhood, of a deictic I, into textual form, thereby bolstering the
writing subject’s agency even under the most adverse of circumstances. (542)
In short, the author of Historia de la Monja Alférez takes advantage of the hybrid textual
form of her autobiography to fashion an ever-changing, and impossible-to-pin-down,
hybrid self.
Erauso’s identity is slippery, and each member of her audience may see a
different identity or a different most-prominent characteristic while witnessing her
performances. For this reason, it is difficult to write about Erauso and her
autobiography/travelogue. Which identity position(s) should the critic emphasize? And,
maybe the more difficult question, which pronouns should one use when referring to
Erauso? In the manuscript, the narrator switches back and forth between masculine and
feminine pronouns. Merrim suggests that she does this “for its shock value, to position
the text in the space of difference” (183). Merrim also notes that the largely gender-
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neutral nature of Erauso’s native Basque language could have contributed to this
confusion in her story (183). I appreciate Mary Elizabeth Perry’s solution to “use both
feminine and masculine pronouns throughout the essay, alternating them between
sentences rather than between paragraphs to avoid the suggestion that certain aspects of
this person’s life were more masculine and others more feminine” (“From Convent to
Battlefield” 395). This style can be difficult for the reader, however, so in this chapter I
will continue to use feminine pronouns to refer to Erauso, following Velasco’s
justification. She explains, “I chose to use feminine pronouns to reflect the fact that the
cultural icon of the Lieutenant Nun was defined first as a nun (noun), who happened to
become (and modified by) a lieutenant (adjective)” (The Lieutenant Nun 8). Because this
project aims to study women’s travel narratives, I will use feminine pronouns to refer to
this complicated and ever-changing character that can never be fully explained within a
system built on binaries. In spite of the confusion, or maybe because of it, this aspect of
Erauso’s persona has only enhanced her status as a cultural spectacle.
To understand Erauso’s plurality and how that plurality contributes to spectacle, it
will be useful to look to Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s The Madness of Vision. The
French philosopher argues, “The baroque eye, with its attention to multiplicity and
discontinuity, is distinguished precisely by its infinite production of images and
appearances, and it emerges at the moment when the Counter-Reformation and modern
science strangely intersect—as opposed to the Fifteenth-Century Eye, when optics and
perspective were still tied to moral and religious interpretation” (5; emphasis in original).
In short, the baroque audience appreciates the complicated, the different, the confusing
and the unclear. According to Buci-Glucksmann, the combination of the Counter-
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Reformation and the introduction of a modern, scientific gaze, creates an unstable and
multiple “madness of vision” in the early modern world. Whereas leading up to this
period, there was one “center” for looking at the world (everything could be interpreted
religiously through the official dogmas of the Catholic church), in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries the world becomes “de-centered” to include several more
individual interpretations and understandings of the world (e.g. Protestantism, humanism,
mysticism, etc.). The multiple performances that make up Erauso’s spectacle, or the
“surplus of images,” appeal to a baroque audience that is experiencing the instability and
uncertainty of this “de-centered” world. Erauso is at once a conqueror, a nun, a saint, an
Amazon woman, a pícaro, a pícara, a noble son/daughter, a gambler, a murderer, and a
hero. Each reader is going to find a different character, and upon each reading, that reader
is going to find a different protagonist. The multiplicity and ambiguity of Erauso’s
identities makes her tale enduring. It creates a thoroughly entertaining travel tale that the
reader cannot stop reading. Finally, this overwhelming surplus of images and
perspectives makes it nearly impossible for the Spanish Monarchy and the Catholic
Church to punish Erauso for any of her transgressions or crimes.
Rehearsing Masculinity
I understand Erauso’s masculinity in Historia de la Monja Alférez as a gender
performance, which, according to gender constructionist theory, is true for all
representations of gender. In Erauso’s autobiography, however, the imitation, the
rehearsing, and the staging of the protagonist’s gender are more recognizable and
straightforward than our own day-to-day gender performances. The work that goes into
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her gender identification is palpable. As part of the spectacle that Erauso is representing,
she gives the reader a behind-the-scenes look at her various transformations. The reader
witnesses Erauso’s costume changes, the ways she manipulates her body and its
movements. Moreover, Erauso explains how she tests her performance on various
members of her family before taking her show on the road, much like a dress rehearsal.
She gauges the reactions of her different family members, and she learns from them. As a
result, Erauso erases the line that separates the spectators from the spectacle. The readers,
the witnesses of Erauso’s spectacle, are drawn into her performance. We become
complicit in that performance, and thus, emotionally engaged.
Judith Butler tells us that there is nothing essential, natural, or fixed about gender.
She argues, “[G]ender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which
various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity
instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (“Performative Acts and Gender
Constitution” 519; emphasis in original). Butler asserts that the body plays a crucial role
in gender performance: “[G]ender is instituted through the stylization of the body and,
hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements,
and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self”
(“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” 519). Most of us are not conscious of the
ways we perform gender with our small movements and actions each day because these
acts have been repeated and normalized to the point that we believe that they are
“natural.” When figures like Erauso manipulate or subvert this “stylized repetition of
acts,” however, they demonstrate the possibility of doing gender differently. Erauso
draws our attention to these small acts of doing gender, de-naturalizing them.
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Drag plays a crucial role in Butler’s explanation of both gender compulsion and
subversion. Following Esther Newton’s Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in
America, Butler argues that drag “mocks . . . the notion of a true gender identity.” In her
foundational book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler
explains:
In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender
itself—as well as its contingency. Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the
performance is in the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between
sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are
regularly assumed to be natural and necessary. In the place of the law of
heterosexual coherence, we see sex and gender denaturalized by means of a
performance which avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural
mechanism of their fabricated unity. (175; emphasis in original)
The protagonist of Historia de la Monja Alférez—who travels the Hispanic world dressed
as a man, but who makes it clear to her readers at the beginning of her story that she was
born a female—allows the reader to recognize the de-naturalization of gender binaries
and the hierarchy that valued the masculine over the feminine in the seventeenth-century
Atlantic world. Furthermore, Butler clarifies, “The notion of gender parody defended
here does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate.
Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original” (Gender Trouble 175; emphasis in
the original). If we accept, then, that the Lieutenant Nun is performing the aggressive and
violent masculinity of medieval knights and early modern conquistadors, it follows that
the protagonist is a parody of the “naturalness” of that identity.
The narrator tells the reader that she entered the convent at the age of four, and
she lives with the sisters until the end of her novitiate period. At that point, Erauso
describes her abuse at the hands of one of the older nuns. Without mentioning the details
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of her decision, Erauso simply admits, “[T]omé las llaves del convento y salí, y fui
abriendo puertas y emparejándolas, y en la última, que fue la de la calle, dejé mi
escapulario y me salí a la calle sin haberla visto ni saber por dónde echar ni adónde ir”
(95). And with this statement, just a couple paragraphs into the first chapter of Erauso’s
story, the suspense begins. As she makes her way through the locked doors of the
convent walls, Erauso sheds the evidence of her previous religious life in the form of her
escapulario.27 The protagonist temporarily leaves the reader with the image of an
innocent, naïve, and mistreated girl, who, after spending her entire life in a convent, is
alone in the world. This image lingers for only moment, however, before Erauso begins
to narrate the construction of her new identity.
At this point, Erauso more urgently develops her masculine persona. I do not
intend to argue here that Erauso woke up one morning and decided, completely of her
own free will, that her life would be better as a man. According to Butler, gender
performativity does not work this way. The gender theorist clarifies, “For if I were to
argue that genders are performative, that could mean that I thought that one woke in the
morning perused the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donned
that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night” (Bodies That
Matter ix). Instead, “[G]ender is constructed through relations of power and, specifically,
normative constraints that not only produce but also regulate various bodily beings”
(Bodies That Matter ix). Due to the pressures of the system of honor in early modern
27
According to the dictionary of the Real Academia Española, escapulario has three definitions.
The first definition refers to a piece of clothing worn by some religious orders. The second refers to a
devotional object worn around the neck. The third is the devotional practice of praying daily to the Virgen
of Carmen. Stepto and Stepto incorrectly translate this as “I shook off my veil” (4). I believe we can
understand it to mean that Erauso “shook off” her previous life, her religious life, her life as an obedient
daughter.
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Spain, it is not plausible for Erauso to leave the convent and continue to act and look like
she did before. Mary Elizabeth Perry offers an explanation of honor and its effects on
women’s lives using Juan de Espinosa’s treatise, Diálogo en laude de las mujeres:
This dialogue, obviously more critical than laudatory, reflects far more than male
distrust and female perfidy. It presents a concept of social order posited on sex
relations that are at once parallel and asymmetrical. One of the proverbs discussed
in the dialogue cautions, ‘Neither broken sword nor wandering woman,’
emphasizing the complexity of these sex relations in a juxtaposition of two
symbols of disorder: the broken sword, representing dishonored man, and the
wandering woman, representing female shame. The social order derived from this
juxtaposition is doubly dependent, first on male honor, which, in turn, depends on
control imposed upon women. Society thus develops an ethos of gendered honor
as well as a sexual economy. (Gender and Disorder 7)
A woman’s honor, and, therefore, the honor of her family, was entirely dependent on her
enclosure and her obedience. In leaving the convent, Erauso has lost her honra as a
noblewoman. She has shown disobedience both to her religious superiors and to her
family’s wishes that she become a nun. Because the space of the convent does not work
for her, if Erauso were to continue living as a woman, one of the few paths available to
her would be prostitution. If, on the other hand, she were to perform masculinity like the
male members of her family, a whole world of travel, action, and adventure would be
open to her.
The reader of Erauso’s tale is able to see, step by step, the path that the
protagonist takes to her performances of masculinity in the New World. This path starts
with her first few steps outside the convent walls. She confesses, “Tiré no sé por
dónde . . . y estuve tres días trazando y acomodándome y cortando de vestir. Corté e
híceme de una basquiña de paño azul con que me hallaba, unos calzones; de un faldellín
verde de perpetuán que traía debajo, una ropilla y polainas: el hábito me lo dejé por allí,
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por no ver qué hacer de él” (95). In this passage, Erauso gives the reader details as to the
work that went into her new costume. She uses the verbs trazar, cortar, and hacer, verbs
that emphasize the physical labor of those three days. As I argued in the beginning of this
chapter, part of the enjoyment and pleasure that the reader obtains from Erauso’s
narration of spectacle comes from this access to the behind-the-scenes moments that
explain the construction of the spectacle. The readers are drawn into the making of
spectacle, and, as Angela Ndalianis points out, this immerses the reader “in an illusion
that breaks down [the] spatial boundaries that separate the audience’s reality from the
representation, making it difficult to fix the boundaries that frame the illusion and
distinguish it from reality” (n. pag.).
Given that the reader of Historia de la Monja Alférez knows the details of the
construction of the protagonist’s masculine personas, it is difficult, or even impossible,
for us to distinguish between the different voices that Erauso uses throughout her
travelogue. Christopher Kark, noting the “slippage” between masculine and feminine
adjectives in the text, claims, “[A]ttempts to determine whether Catalina or Antonio is
speaking and acting in moments of ambiguity displace the cycle of self-fashioning onto
the text itself” (535). Furthermore, the critic asserts, “With no recourse to parse fiction
apart from historical events in the available primary sources, Erauso’s self-fashioning
takes place both in the text and as the text. The narrative I that switches between the
subject of utterance and the subject of enunciation without notice is in essence paralleled
in Historia’s bibliographical history” (530; emphasis in original). For the reader, it is
impossible, as Kark points out, to distinguish Catalina de Erauso’s voice from that of her
many aliases. I agree with Kark that it would be useless to attempt to untangle the many
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layers of voice and identity in the text. Moreover, it would be futile to try to determine
which of the many performances Erauso gives represents her “true” identity. Added to
the multiplicity of Erauso’s voice and identity within the text, we must also concern
ourselves with the possibility that other authors have added to Erauso’s Historia de la
Monja Alférez, due to the fact that we have yet to find the manuscript from 1625. This
multiplicity and illegibility play into Buci-Glucksmann’s theory of the Baroque. In The
Madness of Vision, the philosopher illustrates the dazzling and disorienting effects of
“boundless baroque forms, infinitely multiplying forms, deformed and anamorphic, as if
consumed by the infinite” (121). Erauso’s unstable identities make the reader an active
participant in the narrative while at the same time providing the reader with tensionfilled, entertaining, and compelling spectacle.
Part of Erauso’s spectacle comes from her outward appearance and the many
costume changes throughout the narrative. The narrator(s) of Historia de la Monja
Alférez emphasize(s) clothing throughout the account of Erauso’s travels and adventures.
Indeed, clothing plays a role in my reading of spectacle in each of the primary texts in my
project. Erauso’s clothes, however, provide a marked contrast from, for instance, the
Capuchin nuns’ habits in chapter 3 of this dissertation. While the five traveling nuns
underscore their ability to undertake a lengthy voyage with only one habit per woman,
Erauso plays with a variety of clothing, apparel that conforms to the job that the
protagonist is performing. We know that picaresque narratives are often concerned with
material goods and physical survival. That is, money and food play an integral role in the
plot turns of these texts. A pícaro like Lázaro, for example, focuses on the food his
masters provide or withhold from him. The narrator of Historia de la Monja Alférez, on
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the other hand, adapts the picaresque genre to her needs. Instead of an emphasis on food,
Erauso gives details about her many clothing changes. Her survival depends more on her
ability to live as a man than it does on her next meal, and, therefore, instead of telling the
reader about the food she steals, Erauso informs us of the clothing she receives from the
people she meets along her journey. This emphasis on clothing repeatedly and deftly
reminds the reader of the artifice of the image that Erauso presents. The clothing makes
clear that Erauso is a visual object in her own narrative.
Soon after Erauso arrives in Panama, she began working for Juan de Urquiza,
“mercader de Trujillo” (100). As the two travel, her master sends Erauso ahead to prepare
for his arrival. She describes his reaction: “Llegado, me recibió mi amo con gran cariño,
mostrándome contento de lo bien que lo había hecho: hízome luego al punto dos vestidos
muy buenos, uno negro y otro de color, con todo buen trato” (102). In this passage
Erauso implies that her master gives her new clothing because she has done her job well.
She is successful in her performance as a masculine page boy, and her master rewards her
with nicer clothing. This moment also functions to call the reader’s attention, yet again,
to Erauso’s appearance and the ways in which she disguises her female body to perform
as a man.
Later, when Erauso is traveling through South America, she has various close
encounters with women who want to marry her. In one memorable instance, Erauso
affirms, “Al cabo de ocho días que allí me tuvo, me dijo la buena mujer que me quedase
allí para gobernar su casa. . . . A pocos más días, me dio a entender que tendría a bien que
me casase con su hija, que allí consigo tenía, la cual era muy negra y fea como un diablo,
muy contrario a mi gusto, que fue siempre de buenas caras” (122). Although Erauso has
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no intention of marrying the young woman, she takes advantage of the family’s
hospitality. While Erauso feigns interest and extends the engagement as long as possible,
she declares, “Fui sirviéndola lo mejor que supe; vistióme muy galán, y entregóme
francamente su casa y su hacienda” (122). Again, Erauso narrates her story in such a way
as to suggest that the clothing she receives is a reward for her successful performance.
This is not an isolated incident. In the same chapter, Erauso tells the reader that she had
also met Don Antonio Cervantes, “canónigo de aquella iglesia, y provisor del obispo,”
who proposed a marriage between Erauso and his niece (123). Erauso notes, “Yo me
mostré muy rendido al favor y a su voluntad. Vide a la moza, y parecióme bien, y
envióme un vestido de terciopelo bueno, y doce camisas, seis pares de calzones de ruán,
unos cuellos de holanda, una docena de lenzuelos, y doscientos pesos en una fuente, y
esto de regalo y galantería, no entendiéndose dote” (123). Subtly, Erauso mentions her
clothing again and again in her narration. The reader is not allowed to forget that Erauso
has to work to disguise herself. In her detailed analysis of clothing in Western art forms,
Anne Hollander asserts that the function of a garment, “in the main tradition of Western
dress, is to contribute to the making of a self-conscious individual image, an image linked
to all other imaginative and idealized visualizations of the human body” (xiv).
Throughout Erauso’s text, the protagonist highlights the ways that people look at her, and
she does not shy away from the details of the work that goes into creating and projecting
her own image. Furthermore, Erauso is never finished creating her image, or the version
of herself that she wants the public to see. This is exemplified by the repeated “costume”
changes.
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When Erauso first assumes masculine clothing after leaving the convent, she
begins testing her disguise. We could view these first moments as a dress rehearsal for
her more complex performance in the New World. When she travels to Valladolid, the
narrator informs the reader that she coincidentally encounters her father: “[E]stando una
noche a la puerta con otro paje compañero, llegó mi padre y preguntónos si estaba en
casa el señor don Juan. Respondió mi compañero que sí. Dijo mi padre que le avisase que
estaba allí; subió el paje, quedándome yo allí con mi padre sin hablarnos palabra ni él
conocerme” (96). Erauso measures her father’s reaction, and sees that he does not
recognize her. As soon as her father leaves, Erauso packs her clothing and continues her
wandering. After traveling to Bilbao and Estella de Navarra, the protagonist explains,
“[M]e pasé a San Sebastián, mi patria . . . y allí me estuve sin ser de nadie conocido, bien
vestido y galán. Y un día oí misa en mi convento, la cual oyó también mi madre, y vide
que me miraba y no me conoció” (97). Again, Erauso watches her mother watching her in
order to measure her reaction, and she sees that her mother no longer recognizes her. Her
clothing, and the ways that she has learned to walk and act like a man are effective as she
has successfully passed as a man in front of both her father and her mother. Immediately
after her encounter with her mother in the text, Erauso narrates her travels from San
Sebastián to Seville, and from Seville to the Americas.
To facilitate her rehearsals of masculinity, in addition to manipulating her body
and finding proper clothing, Erauso also hones her storytelling skills. Within her
autobiography, Erauso crafts her story for many different audiences. When Erauso meets
her brother in the New World, he asks about his family at home and his sister, Catalina,
in the convent, and Erauso is forced to narrate a highly fictitious version of her story. She
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claims, “[F]ui a todo respondiendo como podía, sin descubrirme ni caer él en ello” (112).
Throughout her time in the Americas, the protagonist explains her version of events to
the authorities again and again, hoping to avoid punishment for some wrongdoing (116,
131, 136, 150). After first admitting to telling a Peruvian bishop lies about her life, she
confesses to him that she was born a woman, and eventually, she meets with both Phillip
IV and Pope Urban VII, and tells them variations of that story (Chapters XX, XXIII, and
XXV). As a person (born a female) who transgresses the rules governing femininity and
the early modern gender hierarchy, Erauso must account for her actions. She has to
incorporate fiction with her own “truth” in order to navigate the oppressive restrictions on
women’s voices. Erauso’s stories reach extremes that other female protagonists like Ana
Caro’s Leonor or Calderón’s Rosaura could only dream of, probably because there was
more at stake for the historical Erauso than for the theatrical characters.
All authors in the heavily-censured and surveilled early modern period had to take
special precautions to avoid problems with the Inquisition and ecclesiastical authorities.
The danger was exponentially greater for women, and, despite Erauso’s success as a
soldier, she would have still been categorized as a woman in her society. Kathleen Myers
claims, “Erauso slipped through the cracks of Spanish society’s roles for women and
reemerged as a cultural phenomenon, due in large part to her successful negotiation of
institutionalized codes for behavior and the remoteness of the American frontier” (141).
In Historia de la Monja Alférez, and in other instances when she has to give an account of
her life, Erauso navigates these “institutionalized codes.” In the Memorial she wrote
asking for a pension from Phillip IV, she underscored her valor in battle as one of the
King’s soldiers. Perry confirms, “No mention is made in the Memorial of brawls and men
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he had killed. Instead, she explains that for the past nineteen years she had dressed and
lived as a man in the viceroyalty of Peru, fifteen of those years in the kings army, ‘por
particular inclinación que tubo de ejercitar las armas, en defense de la fee católica y
servicio de vuestra majestad’” (“From Convent to Battlefield” 408). In front of the pope,
according to Perry, “she included a description of ‘mi sexo, i virginidad’” (“From
Convent to Battlefield” 408). Assuming that the autobiography that we have today is a
copy of the text Erauso submitted to have published in 1625, she writes exaggerated and
extreme details that would appeal to the general public. In each of these important
accounts of her life, Erauso works around, plays with, and manipulates the
“institutionalized codes” for each specific context. Following Guy Debord’s assertion
that the defining characteristic of spectacle is the work it does to mediate public
relationships, interpersonal networks, and the positioning of people, groups and
institutions within a community, I posit that Erauso constructs spectacle in her narrative
in order to negotiate her social relationship vis-à-vis her varying audiences.
In her autobiography, these moments of spectacle are especially clear when the
narrator takes her descriptions to the extreme, when she exaggerates her valor and her
violence. Buci-Glucksmann argues that, in the Baroque, “everything comes together in an
omnipresent Stage, in theater as metaphor. And everywhere there is ostentation, its
sadness and pleasure, its multiplicity of illusions whether exaggerated or demystified”
(6). Erauso’s life is theatre. In the autobiography, the protagonist’s multiple and unstable
identities, her exaggerated and extreme “illusions,” form a spectacle that would provoke
equally extreme reactions in her audience—reactions of disgust, attraction, and pleasure.
The spectacle that Erauso presents, in addition to simultaneously entertaining and
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confounding her audience, works to legitimize Erauso’s many transgressions. To
accomplish this, Erauso actively cultivates her fame, or, as Merrim affirms, she
“catapulted herself . . . from anomaly to icon” (178). The critic argues, “A theatrical
woman with a flair for the dramatic, Erauso openly courted notoriety: she sat for at least
two portraits with famous artists, wrote several official appeals to the Crown without
trepidation, never ceased her increasingly public transgressions, and told the story of her
life hither and yon” (196).28
In the last few chapters of her autobiography, Erauso describes the crowds of
people following her. After she confesses her previous identity to the bishop in Peru, the
narrator illustrates the difficulties caused by her immediate fame:
En fin, pasados seis días acordó su ilustrísima entrarme en el convento de monjas
de santa Clara de Guamanga, que allí de religiosas no hay otro. Púsome el hábito.
Salió su ilustrísima de casa llevándome a su lado con un concurso tan grande, que
no hubo de quedar persona alguna en la ciudad que no viniese, de suerte que tardó
mucho en llegar allá. Llegamos finalmente a la portería, porque a la iglesia, donde
pensaba su ilustrísima antes entrar, no fue posible, porque entendido así, se había
llenado. . . . Corrió la noticia de este suceso por todas partes, y los que antes me
vieron, y los que antes y después supieron mis cosas se maravillaron en todas las
Indias. (162)
The scene is almost identical to various scenes in the Viaje de cinco religiosas
capuchinas that I discuss in chapter 3 of this project. The five traveling Capuchin nuns
are curiosities like Erauso, but in a different way. It is strange to see a group of Capuchin
nuns outside the convent walls, let alone traveling great distance across oceans and
mountain ranges. For the crowds that surround Erauso when she travels back to Europe,
28
In The Lieutenant Nun, Sherry Velasco analyzes the effects of Francisco Pacheco’s famous
portrait of Erauso produced in Seville in 1630 (78). Sherry also mentions Francisco Crescencio’s portrait,
painted in Rome in 1626 and J.L. Villar’s portrait from 1941 (197, note 111). Pacheco’s portrait has been
used in many critical editions of Erauso’s text, and some scholars have included the image in their analysis
of the Lieutenant Nun. Scholars have yet to find a copy of Crescencio’s image.
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the attraction is a woman who has lived so successfully as a man. Like the religious
women’s habits, Erauso’s masculine clothing acts as a disguise, reaffirming the image
she presents as artifice. The crowd is enthralled by the chance to be duped by the Monja
Alférez.
For Guy Debord, social life is spectacle and spectacle dictates all social
relationships. We see this connection between society and spectacle in the way that
Erauso relates to the community that surrounds her. The protagonist’s status as a hybrid
spectacle, or a baroque monster, allows her access to some of the most powerful people
in both Europe and the Americas. Erauso and the five itinerant nuns have these powerful
connections in common. Bishops, cardinals, nobility, and royalty want to see these
women and they want to be seen with them. As David R. Castillo argues, “Collections
and exhibitions of curiosities played an important role as aristocratic ‘theaters of
reputation’ (to use Gracián’s telling expression) in which the social and cultural elites
traded in honor and fame” (19). To be seen with Erauso, or to help her, is to somehow
add her to one’s collection of absurdities and wonders. In turn, this enhances the elites’
already privileged status. Members of early modern society traded and collected
spectacles, or monsters, in an attempt to one-up their peers. As an example, when Erauso
travels to Spain, she stops along the coast of what is now Colombia, and she notes, “Allí,
hallándose la armada del general Tomás de Larraspuru de partida para España, me
embarqué en su Capitana, año de 1624, donde me recibió con mucho agrado, y me regaló
y sentó a su mesa, y me trató así hasta pasadas doscientas leguas más acá del canal de
Bahama” (166). Erauso is honored by the high-ranking officials until, of course, she joins
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a knife fight, and the general is forced to remove her from the ship. Later, the narrator
explains:
Gracias a Dios llegamos a Cádiz en primero de noviembre de 1624.
Desembarcamos, y estuve allí ocho días. Hízome allí mucha merced el señor don
Fadrique de Toledo, general de la armada, y teniendo allí en su servicio dos
hermanos míos, que allí conocí, y le di a conocer, les hizo de allí adelante por me
honrar mucho favor, teniendo el uno consigo en su servicio, y dándole una
bandera al otro. (167; emphasis mine)
Important men do Erauso favors, get her out of jail, clothe her, and get her meetings with
the King. Their affiliation with Erauso—their connection to the myth, the legend, the
spectacle—is a strategy that reaffirms their own status as important in Hispanic society.
In turn, Erauso drops their names in her narrative in an attempt to trade her relationships
with elite men for authority in her text and escape from repercussions.
These noteworthy people would not be interested in the Lieutenant Nun if she was
only a nun, or only a lieutenant. As Perry points out, “After all, thousands of women in
Spain at this time had preserved their virginity,” and therefore, Erauso’s virginity is not
enough to attract crowds (“From Convent to Battlefield” 407). Likewise, there are
thousands of soldiers who can claim to have acted bravely at some point in their careers.
Thus, while some scholars claim that Erauso completely rejected her female identity, I
would argue that is not the case. Rather, Erauso must embrace both her male and her
female—her masculine and feminine—identities in order to legitimize her choices. Perry,
for example, argues, “In contrast with other manly heroines of this period, Catalina de
Erauso made a complete and total renunciation of her femaleness. It is this quality, and
not the fact that she was a woman and a nun, which set her above the law and accounts
for her reprieve” (Gender and Disorder 128). I understand Perry’s point, and when we
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compare Erauso to cross-dressing character like Ana Caro’s Leonor or Calderón’s
Rosaura, it is clear that Erauso is the more transgressive figure in that she does not adopt
female dress and marry a suitable man at the end of her adventures. Following the norms
for cross-dressing women in theatre, we could say that Erauso refuses to be recuperated
back into the social order. Nonetheless, I agree more with Merrim in this point, who
argues that in the text as a whole, both Erauso’s masculine and feminine subject positions
are crucial (182). Vallbona echoes Merrim’s argument: “Respecto al rechazo constante
que la protagonista hace de su condición femenina en la comedia [de Montalbán], hay
que aclarar que en el texto autobiográfico Catalina de Erauso no se queja una sola vez de
ser mujer, pues sabe que ella se ha ganado el respeto de los valientes y ha alcanzado una
fama que muchos hombres quisieran para sí mismos” (22).
To summarize, in this section I illustrate the ways that Erauso exemplifies the
unstable and multiple baroque subject. She is both man and woman—maybe neither. It is
impossible to know to what extent she identifies with the characters she plays throughout
her life; and throughout the autobiography, it is unclear whose voice is telling the story.
The narrator(s) give(s) the reader a step-by-step account of the “making of” the legend,
the Monja Alférez. Erauso’s autobiography underscores the day-to-day performances of
gender, class, race, etc. in which we all take part, but are generally unaware. Erauso
highlights the work that these performances require. She tells us how she fashioned her
outward appearance, and how that image requires constant upkeep and reaffirmation. She
is transparent about the ways that she gauges her audiences’ reactions and makes the
proper adjustments. I titled this section, “Rehearsing Masculinity,” but I want to make
clear that there is no final performance for Erauso. Her identity is constantly
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transforming. Even when the last pages of the autobiography have been written, and the
flesh-and-blood Erauso dies, her image is manipulated and her legend is transformed by
politicians and scholars alike. For the Hapsburg rulers, she could be held up as a hero of
the Spanish Empire’s expansion. For Catholics, she may represent the ideal woman who
would do anything to protect her virginity. For twenty-first-century scholars, she could be
the champion of queer rhetoric. In this way, Erauso’s tale appeals to a wide audience.
Each reader finds aspects of herself in the protagonist causing the reader to become
invested in Erauso’s journey. As a chameleon, Erauso can temporarily blend into many
different categories, saving her from the wrath of the hegemonic order.
Constructing Erauso’s Monstrous Body
An important component of Erauso’s unstable identity is the construction of her
body in the autobiography. And her body is probably the element of Erauso’s spectacle
that gives the audience the most pleasure, but also discomfiture. As a twenty-first-century
reader, Erauso’s body has been the subject of most of my questions, and I imagine
Erauso’s seventeenth-century audience was both baffled and intrigued by many of the
same doubts. For example, while traveling on a ship across the Atlantic Ocean, how did
Erauso keep her female body a secret from the rest of the passengers? How did she deal
with menstruation? How did she answer questions about her breasts and lack of facial
hair? Did she have sexual relationships with other women? In this section, I examine the
images of Erauso’s body as they are constructed throughout the narrative. I posit that, like
her identity as a whole, Erauso’s body is a work in progress, always transforming in
relationship to her environment. In the end, the portrait that the reader receives in the
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autobiography is the picture of a monstrous body. According to early modern gender
stereotypes, Erauso’s body is athletic and capable, but also eternally vulnerable. If the
protagonist’s body fits into both the male and female categories as they are constructed in
the early modern Hispanic world, she is freer to move about in both the public sphere and
the domestic space. Her body can fit both on the battlefield and in the convent.
Ultimately, Erauso’s body gives her more freedom of movement while also serving as her
escape from official punishment. Her virginity keeps her out of trouble when she is
captured for her violent tendencies, and her effectiveness on the battlefield allows her to
escape the convent.
In the first direct reference to her body, after she leaves the convent and creates
men’s clothing, Erauso writes, “Cortéme el cabello y echélo por ahí, y partí la tercera
noche y eché no sé por dónde, y fui calando caminos y pasando lugares por me alejar, y
vine a dar a Vitoria, que dista de San Sebastián cerca de veinte leguas, a pie, y cansada, y
sin haber comido más que yerbas que topaba por el camino” (95). In this first
transformation of her body, Erauso admits to cutting her hair and changing her clothes,
and nothing else. However, Pedro de la Valle gives a description of Erauso in a letter
written to a friend in 1626:
Ella es de estatura grande y abultada para mujer, bien que por ella no parezca no
ser hombre. No tiene pechos: que desde muy muchacha me dijo haber hecho no sé
qué remedio para secarlos y quedar llanos, como le quedaron: el cual fue un
emplasto que le dio un Italiano, que cuando se le puso le causó gran dolor; pero
después sin hacerle otro mal, ni mal tratamiento surtió el efecto. (qtd. in Ferrer
126–27)29
29
In his introduction to the 2002 edition, Esteban notes, “Sacado de los manuscritos de Trigueros
que a su vez Muñoz recogió y Ferrer utiliza para su edición. Se trata del tercer tomo del viaje realizado por
Pedro de la Valle, y escrito en italiano. Impreso por primera vez en Bolonia, en 1677” (61, note 76).
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While it is very likely that Erauso manipulated her body in the ways that Pedro de la
Valle explains, in her autobiography she only chooses to mention her hair and clothing.
This leads the reader to believe that with some minor aesthetic changes, Erauso convinces
the world that she is a man. In his book Feminizing the Enemy, Sidney Donnell observes:
When actors’ bodies are no longer considered part of the natural realm (in other
words, when their sex no longer determines their gender), the phenomenon
extends to the whole of the play performance. Hence, there is little within its
confines that can be termed ‘natural.’ Everyone and everything becomes artificial
although spectators often believe that they pertain to the natural world while
attending a play. (239)
As Erauso changes her clothes and cuts her hair, her audience is reminded that the socalled “natural” differences between men and women may, in fact, be just artificial. As
Donnell argues, if Erauso’s transformation highlights the artificial construction of gender,
it may also bring to light the artificial character of other categories like race, class, origin,
nationality, etc.
In the passage cited above, Erauso also calls attention to the effects of extensive
travel on her body. This is yet another element of travel writing that Erauso has in
common with the five traveling Capuchin nuns. Though, as I will show later in this
section, Erauso and Madre María Rosa write about the stress that travel causes on their
bodies in distinct ways. In this excerpt from the autobiography, Erauso claims that she
walked close to twenty leagues on foot with barely anything to eat, only herbs that she
found along the way. In the ways that she tells the stories of her journey, Erauso
constructs a body that endures, and a body capable of miraculous undertakings.
Furthermore, Erauso, the narrator, crafts her virgin body in a careful and
purposeful way in the text. As Sherry Velasco argues, “Erauso frequently expresses
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romantic interest in various women in the New World that occasionally results in
physical caressing but that never leads to the discovery of her anatomical identity” (13).
In her analysis of “explicit same-sex eroticism” in Erauso’s autobiography, Velasco
specifically cites a moment in the New World when Erauso was living with her amo,
Diego de Solarte (Velasco 13). The narrator admits she was asked to leave when her
relationship with one of the doncellas in the house crossed a line, and, “un día, estando en
el estrado peinándome acostado en sus faldas, y andándole en las piernas, [Solarte] llegó
acaso a una reja por donde nos vio y oyó a ella que me decía que fuese al Potosí y
buscase dineros, y nos casaríamos” (Erauso 109). This is an undoubtedly sexual scene,
but Erauso does not shy away from including it in her autobiography, the same
autobiography where the narrator places great importance on her virginity.30 For Erauso,
her virginity—her saving grace, especially in front of the pope—is built exclusively on an
intact hymen, not an absence of sexual relationships.
In order to gain an appreciation for the ways that Erauso constructs her virgin
body, it may be useful to compare her life story with that of another gender-transgressive
figure that lived around the same time period. Eleno/Elena de Céspedes, unfortunately,
did not leave an autobiography like Erauso, but s/he did gain some notoriety toward the
end of the sixteenth century. As Israel Burshatin shows, like Erauso, “Eleno’s
significance to a revitalized field of Iberian cultural studies . . . consists precisely in the
multiplicity of voices, bodies, genders, sexualities, and discourses that s/he devised or
appropriated in the face of repeated attempts to normalize her as a subaltern” (451).
30
Velasco observes that this is not an isolated incident in the text. In another example, when
Erauso is staying with her brother, she admits, “Fui con él algunas veces a casa de una dama que allí tenía,
y de ahí algunas otras veces me fui sin él” (113). Without giving too many details, Erauso implies that she
had an intimate relationship with her brother’s partner.
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Unlike Erauso, Eleno/a was brought before the Inquisition of Toledo, and those men
decided Eleno’s transformation from female to male was “a homoerotic ruse, an elaborate
fabrication constructed in order to seduce other women and copulate with them as if she
were a man” (Burshatin 420). A variety of factors contribute to Eleno/a’s punishment at
the hands of the inquisitors, when someone like Erauso is allowed to live her life as a
man and is even praised for her heroic acts. Some of the most important factors center on
Eleno/a’s race, class, skin color, and family origin. Burshatin points out:
Around 1545 Eleno was born female to Francisca de Medina, an African slave
who was in domestic (and possibly, also, artisanal) service to the MedinaCéspedes household. This condition of servitude was inscribed on Eleno’s flesh.
At a very early age, her face was branded with hot coals; the resulting scars would
transform her body into a tablet bearing the familiar record of slavery as written
by Castilians on their human chattel. (421)
Although Eleno/a would later be a free person and a successful surgeon and soldier, the
inquisitors would read and reinscribe on Eleno’s body his previous identity as the
daughter of an African slave woman. This example offers a sharp contrast to Erauso’s
comparatively privileged family origins, and the factors of race and class would be
sufficient to explain the differences between Eleno/a and Erauso’s reception by the
authorities. In Historia de la Monja Alférez, the narrator highlights her Basque family
origins at every possible moment, perhaps to remind her audience that she is not entirely
marginal.
I want to emphasize the differences in the ways that Eleno/a and Erauso articulate
their sexual bodies, activities, and experiences. Both figures dress and behave as men.
Both figures are sexually attracted to women. Both are called on to tell their life stories to
the authorities and both undergo medical exams to determine the “truth” behind their
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tales. Eleno/a claims that s/he was a woman until she gave birth, at which point s/he
became a hermaphrodite with fully working male genitalia. During Eleno/a’s trial,
“[p]hysicians, healers, midwives, surgeons, female lovers, male friends, and
acquaintances all testified that they had been deceived, either by Eleno’s extraordinary
transsexual arts or her business with the devil, when they took Eleno for a man” (428).
Erauso, on the other hand, never marries and never has a child. According to her
autobiography, her sexual encounters with other women do not involve penetration.
As both Sherry Velasco and Judith C. Brown observe, sexual activity in the early
modern period centered on the phallus (Brown 6; Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun 15).
Brown explains, “Europeans had long found it difficult to accept that women could
actually be attracted to other women. Their view of human sexuality was phallocentric—
women might be attracted to men and men might be attracted to men but there was
nothing in a woman that could long sustain the sexual desires of another woman” (6).
Therefore, given that Erauso never claims to be a hermaphrodite, and she never has a
long-term relationship with a respectable woman, she is given the benefit of the doubt.
She escapes the attention of the inquisitors. Furthermore, when she can prove through a
medical exam that her hymen is intact, Erauso aligns herself with other manly saints who
protect their virginity in order to do God’s work.
In her autobiography, Erauso recounts the moments of her medical exam, and the
bishop’s reactions. She reports that, “A la tarde, como a las cuatro, entraron dos matronas
y me miraron y se satisficieron, y declararon después ante el obispo con juramento,
haberme visto y reconocido cuanto fue menester para certificarse y haberme hallado
virgen intacta, como el día en que nací” (161). Erauso goes on to note:
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Su ilustrísima se enterneció, y despidió a las comadres, y me hizo comparecer, y
delante del capellán, que vino conmigo, me abrazó enternecido, y en pie, y me
dijo: —Hija, ahora creo sin duda lo que me dijisteis, y creeré en adelante cuanto
me dijereis; y os venero como una de las personas notables de este mundo, y os
prometo asistiros en cuanto pueda y cuidar de vuestra conveniencia y del servicio
de Dios—. (161)
Once her status as a “virgen intacta” is confirmed, the bishop’s first reaction is to offer to
help and protect Erauso. He promises to worship/adore (venerar) her as “una de las
personas notables de este mundo.” As a virgen doncella, Hispanic society required that
men protect Erauso. Men like the bishop in Guamanga, Peru would have understood the
precarious and vulnerable position of the Lieutenant Nun, and their job, as defined by the
early modern system of honor, would be to shelter and cherish her.
Despite her intact hymen, Erauso’s body would have been covered in battle
wounds and scars, evidence that this was a person who could protect and take care of
herself. De la Valle adds to his description of Erauso, “De rostro no es fea, pero no
Hermosa, y se le reconoce estar algún maltratada, pero no de mucha edad” (qtd. in Ferrer
127). While she does not give the reader great descriptions, Erauso does mention various
wounds that she received throughout her travels because, as Perry shows, Erauso
participated in “rituals of insult, quick retort, and armed response . . . act[ing] out the
warrior ethos that had become somewhat anachronistic in post-Reconquest Spain, but
appeared very appropriate in the frontier settlements of the New World” (“From Convent
to Battlefield” 401). For example, when Erauso is keeping a shop for her amo, she
admits, “Estábame un día de fiesta en la comedia en mi asiento que había tomado, y sin
más atención, un fulano Reyes vino y me puso otro tan delante y tan arrimado que me
impedía la vista. Pedíle que lo apartase un poco, respondió desabridamente, y yo a él, y
díjome que me fuese de allí, que me cortaría la cara. Yo me hallé sin armas, más que una
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daga, salíme de allá con sentimiento” (103). Of course, due to questions of masculine
honra, and in order to fit into this “frontier” world, Erauso cannot let this affront stand
uncontested. She declares, “El lunes por la mañana siguiente, estando yo en mi tienda
vendiendo, pasó por la puerta el Reyes y volvió a pasar. Yo reparé en ello, cerré mi
tienda, tomé un cuchillo, fuime a un barbero e hícele amolar y picar el filo, como sierra”
(103). This is just one violent moment of many in Erauso’s narrative, and there is no
doubt that many of these moments would be forever inscribed on her body in the form of
scars.
In one of the more famous passages from Erauso’s text, she recounts the moments
when she earned her promotion to alférez. During a battle in Chile, Erauso claims,
“Tomaron y asolaron los indios la dicha Valdivia: salimos a ellos, y batallamos tres o
cuatro veces, maltratándolos siempre y destrozando; pero llegándoles la vez última
socorro, nos fue mal y nos mataron mucha gente y capitanes y a mi alférez, y llevaron la
bandera” (113–14). This destruction sets the scene for Erauso to emphasize her acts of
bravery and the wounds she received in service of the Spanish Empire. She describes
how she and another soldier went after the flag: “Llegamos a la bandera, cayó de un bote
de lanza mi compañero. Yo recibí un mal golpe en una pierna, maté al cacique que la
llevaba y quitésela, y apreté con mi caballo, atropellando, matando e hiriendo a infinidad,
pero malherido y pasado de tres flechas y de una lanza en el hombro izquierdo, que sentía
mucho” (114). Erauso creates spectacle with this scene, probably exaggerating her role,
and implying that she was a better soldier than the others. She also leaves the audience
wondering how she takes care of her wounds without revealing her female body. Finally,
Erauso has marked her body with evidence of her violent actions. She can never be one
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of the theatrical characters who cross-dresses for a short while before becoming a married
woman. Her body will always show signs of her life as a man, violent soldier, and
brawler.
In addition to scars from her fights in gambling houses and battle wounds from
her “heroic” actions as a soldier, Erauso describes her body’s athleticism throughout her
travelogue. At one point in her text, Erauso claims, “[E]ra mi inclinación andar y ver
mundo” (110). We see this inclination multiple times in the narration, and specifically, in
the passage I analyze above that shows Erauso walking long distances on foot. Erauso’s
preference for travel transforms her body. Whereas the ideal European woman was fair
skinned and delicate, Erauso was most likely tanned and weathered from her time spent
outside. In another important moment when travel stresses Erauso’s body, she describes
her journey through the Andes with two other fugitives:
Llevábamos nuestros caballos, armas blancas y de fuego, y la alta providencia de
Dios. Seguimos la cordillera arriba por subida de más de treinta leguas, sin topear
en ellas, ni en otras trescientas que anduvimos, un bocado de pan, y rara vez agua,
y algunas yerbezuelas y animalejos, y tal o tal raizuela de que nos mantener, y tal
o cual indio que huía. Hubimos de matar uno de nuestros caballos y hacerlo
tasajos, pero hallámosle sólo huesos y pellejo; y de la misma suerte, poco a poco
y caminando, fuimos haciendo lo mismo de los otros, quedándonos a pie y sin
podernos tener. Entramos en una tierra fría, tanto que nos helábamos. (120)31
Erauso continues to describe the freezing weather, and she notes that at one point the
travelers thought they had encountered other travelers only to approach and find frozento-death cadavers. Again, because of the harsh traveling conditions, Erauso’s body
31
The scene where Erauso and her companions kill a horse for food is strikingly similar to Álvar
Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios (Chapter VIII). According to Beatriz Pastor Bodmer, the
conquistadors eating the horse is evidence of the “demythification” of the conqueror. While comparing
these scenes to Cortés’s letters, the critic argues, “The ‘magical deer’ described to Moctezuma by his
astounded envoys is reduced here to the humble function of providing a supper for the starved followers of
Narváez. This marks symbolically the beginning of the end for the model set by Cortés” (133).
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undergoes transformations and endures pain. It is a strange spectacle for Erauso’s
audience to think of a female body—a Basque hidalgo daughter’s body—subjected to
these unforgiving circumstances.
Again, I find it helpful to compare Erauso’s reactions to the descriptions of harsh
travel in Viaje de cinco religiosas capuchinas. In chapter 3 of my project, I argue that the
Capuchin nuns’ bodies also endure cruel conditions. The five religious travelers, like
Erauso, bear the marks of travel on their bodies. Here, though, I want to emphasize the
differences in the ways the women narrate their time at sea. For Madre María Rosa and
her sisters, their time at sea centers on terrible bouts of seasickness. The women express
their fear during particularly tumultuous storms, and they mention wanting to faint at
different times during their trek across the ocean. Erauso, on the other hand, narrates her
time at sea in a matter of fact way that leaves no room for fear or fainting. She declares,
“De Panamá partí con mi amo Juan de Urquiza, en una fragata, para el puerto de Paita,
donde él tenía una gran cargazón. Llegando al puerto de Manta, nos cargó un tiempo tan
fuerte que dimos al través, y los que supimos nadar, como yo, mi amo y otros, salimos a
tierra, y los demás perecieron. En el dicho puerto de Manta nos volvimos a embarcar en
un galeón del rey que allí hallamos” (101). According to Erauso’s account, she and a few
other men were strong enough to swim to shore, where they immediately found another
ship to sail to their destination. In this passage, the reader sees evidence of Erauso’s
athletic body, a body stronger and more capable than many of the men traveling with her.
Erauso is able to swim to shore while many men perished.
Through her narrative, we have seen that Erauso constructs her body as neither
completely masculine nor feminine. Her body is that of a virgin doncella, fragile,
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vulnerable, and in need of protection. Over time, and at the same time that she maintains
an intact hymen, Erauso transforms her body through travel, fights, and the harsh
conditions of the New World. The reader is left with a body with female genitalia, but
with the scars of a man.32 This body, without facial hair, is athletic and strong like a
conquistador’s body. At the same time, it has endured hunger, thirst, and freezing
weather. The protagonist’s body is a monstrous one.
I am certainly not the first to acknowledge the ways that Erauso plays into the
baroque fascination with the marvelous and monstrous. Stephanie Merrim, for example,
argues, “Erauso reveals a keen awareness of the worth of a singular and prodigious tale”
(192–93). Merrim adds, “[T]he phenomenon of Catalina de Erauso had something of the
‘monstrous’ to it” (193). In her focus on the embodiment, or corporeality, of the
monstrous, Margarit Shildrick concludes that monstrosities—hybrid, deformed,
excessive, or lacking bodies—lead the public to question binaries inasmuch as these
hybrid bodies show the instability of supposedly “natural” categories (9). Through
discourse, Erauso’s text offers the reader the image of a body that combines the
vulnerable virginity of a nun with the rugged, self-sufficient exterior of a warrior,
creating a monstrous spectacle.
Erauso’s travels to the New World and around the Spanish countryside play a
central role in her narration of the monstrous body. Merrim notes, “From the inception of
its existence for the Old World, Spanish America had generated reports of exotic and
marvelous novelties in response to the insatiable desire for information about the new
lands” (194). In the context of the New World, with its cannibals, Amazons, and other
32
Edward Behrend-Martínez explains that the early modern “male” body was constructed as
“hard and not smooth, it was possessed of low-voice, and it had hair”; his humors “made him practical,
reasonable, and emotionally stable” (1076).
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oddities, Erauso’s story and her body are acceptably contextualized. In what he calls the
“politicizing of the landscape,” David R. Castillo notes that early modern curiosities and
marvels were generally found in the countryside, in unpopulated forests and mountains,
and in exotic lands (31–32). Erauso’s time spent in the frontier of the western coast of the
Americas makes her somehow “foreign” when she returns to Europe. This “foreignness”
contributes to her acceptance in Madrid and Rome.
Castillo acknowledges that marvels or “awe-inducing objects” can have
ambiguous meanings in the early modern period.33 Castillo, drawing on José Antonio
Maravall, argues, “In the context of Counter-Reformation culture, curiosity is often used
to spice up doctrinal lessons and to promote the internalization of moral principles. In
Spain and its colonies, priests and teachers incorporated natural and man-made curiosities
in ritual celebrations and pedagogical discourse in order to inspire awe and wonder” (7).
If approached in this way, Erauso’s story could be incorporated into “doctrinal lessons”
that glorify the Spanish Empire’s colonization of the New World. Erauso’s story could
also be manipulated to fit that of the manly saint who adopts masculine attributes to
maintain her virginity and devote her life to God. Castillo also notes, however, that “The
exceptionality of monsters could lead to a further questioning of norms and social
hierarchies, insofar as the social order was grounded on the perceived natural order. Thus,
the ‘monster’ could be seen as material evidence or living proof of the inadequacy of
inherited knowledge and social structures” (21). As I mention above, Erauso’s monstrous
body could lead her audience to question inherent gender identities and roles that defined
33
Given that my project centers on traveling women—women whose curiosity is foregrounded in
their travel narratives— it is interesting to note that curiosity was often associated with the feminine,
especially when that curiosity was being denounced. Castillo observes, “In the eyes of seventeenth-century
moralists and conservative social thinkers, such as Cesare Ripa and the author of La pícara Justina,
curiosity is an essentially feminine passion that threatens the moral and social order” (7).
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women as “naturally” delicate, weak, and less intelligent. Is Erauso transgressive, or does
she reinforce the morals and principles of patriarchy and the Spanish Empire? I believe
that the malleability of her identity is an important factor in the allure of Erauso’s story,
and it is essential to earning the approval of both political and ecclesiastic authorities.
Like Shildrick, I believe that monstrous bodies have the power to dismantle “an ideal
bodyliness . . . that relies on the singular and the unified, where everything is in its
expected place” (10). To bring my analysis back to Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s
analysis of the Baroque’s “madness of vision,” Erauso’s body, as painted in the
autobiography, is illegible and multiple. In Erauso’s text, the narrator describes her own
body in a variety of ways, and she also describes diverse reactions to her body. The
reader faces a barrage of reactions to Erauso’s person, including the dramatic and
emotion-filled reaction of the bishop in Peru, the response of the crowds of people who
line up to see Erauso as she makes her way to the convent, and even the appreciation
expressed by the prostitutes in the last chapter of the Lieutenant Nun’s narrative. As
readers, we see the spectacle of Erauso from many perspectives, and in BuciGlucksmann’s words, we are left “enchanted,” “dazzled,” and “disoriented” by the
spectacle of this virgin warrior.
The Spectacle of Repetitive Violence
Erauso’s travels, like the wandering pícaro and the itinerant soldier, are routinely
interrupted by moments of graphic violence. Throughout her autobiography, Erauso
claims she killed at least eleven men, mostly after these men had allegedly questioned
Erauso’s masculine honor (Esteban 74). This number does not include the indigenous
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peoples that Erauso killed in battle. Moreover, the narrator gives no evidence that the
protagonist will change her ways at the end of the narrative. In fact, Erauso’s last words
are a threatening, although ambiguous, statement to two prostitutes she meets on the
street. When the women ask her, “Señora Catalina, ¿dónde es el camino?,” the
protagonist responds, “Señoras p[utas], a darles a ustedes cien pescozadas, y cien
cuchilladas a quien las quiera defender” (175). Erauso’s violent words and actions are
perhaps the most attention-grabbing moments in her narrative. Not only does the narrator
give the audience the scintillating image of a woman cross-dressed as a man, but this
woman also brawls with knives and kills men with her sword. These images of Erauso
running another man through with her sword incite strong emotions and reactions in the
audience because, in these moments of spectacle, it becomes impossible for the reader to
distinguish between reality and appearance. The reader has to question if Erauso is
exaggerating her aggressive tendencies and her skills with a sword. Does she wear the
disguise of hyper aggressive masculinity only in the narrative? Is it a disguise at all, or
does she “truly” identify with the mask she has fashioned for herself? Can a person who
was born and raised a woman really become a successful soldier? Can she wield a sword
in “real life”?
In Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, the social theorist asserts, “Understood
on its own terms, the spectacle proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts
that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance” (5). For Debord,
any attempt to make a distinction between reality and appearance is futile because there is
no distinction. In reaction to these twentieth-century theories on spectacle, Castillo argues
that, “humans were reflecting on the problematic status of the boundaries between
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art(ifice) and nature, and indeed regarding their bodies as fashion accessories, long before
the recent proclamation of our postmodern and posthuman conditions” (15). Castillo cites
Baltasar Gracián’s reflections on “perfected nature, self-representation, and publicity” as
evidence that the early modern world was aware and acutely attentive to the shadowy line
between nature and art, reality and appearance. This questioning of reality versus
appearance is brought to play in Buci-Glucksmann’s theories on baroque vision. Peter
Wollen summarizes different theories on spectacle in his article, “Baroque and NeoBaroque in the Age of the Spectacle.” Wollen asserts that according to Buci-Glucksmann,
the Baroque, “honours a certain ‘madness of vision,’ which no longer insists on clarity or
lucidity of legibility, but instead pushes representation to extremes, and leaves us
disturbed or exhilarated, rather than reassured, about our place in the world and its own
fundamental stability” (Wollen 9). Erauso’s narrative takes the representation of
masculinity to the extreme. She gives the reader performance after performance of a
variety of masculinities, and any attempt to determine her “real” identity becomes
fruitless. The reader ends up questioning the very idea of a “real” identity, leading to the
conclusion that reality is artifice, a performance. Through her performance of violent
masculinity, Erauso ends up committing violence against the limit between appearance
and reality. She destroys the boundary between truth and fiction, just as she dismantles
early modern paradigms of sex, gender, and sexuality.
Erauso’s performances are destructive, in that they break down notions of truth
and permanence; however, these performances are also productive. As Castillo notes,
“[A]rtifice, performance, and rumor played crucial roles in the social processes of
communication and identity negotiation in the baroque period” (16). In Erauso’s
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autobiography, the narrator constructs layers of performance and artifice, effectively
dazzling her audience and escaping any backlash that would normally occur if a woman
were to leave her convent to travel the world alone. Erauso narrates moments of
spectacular violence alternating with moments of vulnerability and flashes of sexual
impropriety, distracting her audience from any individual wrongdoing. Erauso includes
subject matter characteristic of the entertaining and immensely-popular broadsides in the
time period. In the baroque relaciones, Peter Wollen points out that the emphasis is on
“grabbing public attention,” with “murders, catastrophes, monstrosities, humour,
spectacular political events, physical feats, etc.” (19). Erauso captivates the public in the
ways that she narrates her bizarre and diverse performances. She creates new models of
behavior and alternative avenues for both men and women in the early modern Hispanic
world.
In Historia de la Monja Alférez, the narrator alternates between foregrounding
Erauso’s sexuality and then, almost immediately following these episodes, she includes a
disturbingly violent memory. In this way, as much as the reader is intrigued by Erauso’s
performance of masculine sexuality à la Don Juan, the narrator never gives her audience
enough information regarding these episodes. Instead, she quickly follows these scenes
with a performance of violent masculinity filled with details about how the sword entered
her enemy’s body, and how much blood was involved. These alternating performances
offer a de-centered portrait of Erauso, leaving the reader disoriented and unsure about
where to focus her attention and how to categorize the protagonist, not to mention
perplexed, dismayed, and possibly intrigued, by Erauso’s unconventional life
experiences.
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The first example I want to highlight occurs as the protagonist is traveling with
her amo, Urquiza, down the western coast of South America. Urquiza wants Erauso to
marry a woman named Doña Beatriz de Cárdenas. The narrator informs the reader:
Es de saber que esta doña Beatriz de Cárdenas era dama de mi amo, y él miraba a
tenernos seguros, a mí para servicio y a ella para gusto. Y parece que eso tratado
entre los dos lo acordaron, porque después que fui a la iglesia restituido, salía de
noche, iba a la casa de aquella señora, y ella me acariciaba mucho, y con son de
temor de la justicia me pedía que no volviese a la iglesia de noche, y me quedase
allá; y una noche me encerró y se declaró en que a pesar del diancho había de
dormir con ella, y me apretó en esto tanto, que hube de alargar la mano y salirme.
(104)
This relationship between Erauso, Urquiza, and Beatriz brings to mind the situation of
Lazarillo, acting as the cover for an illicit relationship. This passage highlights Erauso’s
inbetween position. She performs masculinity well enough to be the third person in this
relationship and, perhaps, to attract Doña Beatriz into a sexual encounter. However, in
Erauso’s narration of events, the protagonist plays a particularly passive role in this
scene. Urquiza and Beatriz arrange the relationship, and Beatriz actively pursues Erauso.
Nonetheless, this encounter between Erauso and Beatriz provides a spectacle of forbidden
sexuality for the reader.
Immediately following this scene with Beatriz, the narrator includes a brawl
where Erauso kills a man with her sword. She briefly describes the fight: “Recibímoslos
y fuimos bregando, y a poco rato quiso mi mala suerte que al amigo de Reyes le entré una
punta, no sé por dónde, y cayó. Fuimos batallando dos a dos con sangre de ambas partes”
(106). The narrator does not give the reader time to process her erotic encounter with
Doña Beatriz before she coolly describes murdering a man mid-morning in the middle of
a city street.
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I want to circle back to a passage mentioned above to further illustrate the
overwhelming collage of spectacular moments in Erauso’s autobiography. The
Lieutenant Nun comes across her brother, Miguel, in Concepción, Chile. While the reader
is waiting anxiously for a moment of anagnorisis typical of early modern cross-dressing
narratives, Erauso describes her illicit visits with her brother’s mistress, and finally, her
brother’s reaction to the betrayal. The narrator admits, “[É]l alcanzó a saberlo, y
concibió mal, y díjome que allí no entrase. Acechóme, y cogióme otra vez; esperóme, y
al salir, me embistió a cintarazos, y me hirió en una mano” (113). This time with her
brother is immediately followed by Erauso’s bloody and almost cinematic efforts to
recapture the stolen flag in the battle against indigenous groups in Chile. As is true with
all autobiographies, Erauso strategically chooses which events to include in her narrative,
and how to order those events. Erauso is able to distract the reader from any one
indiscretion by including a deluge of spectacular images. She orders these images to give
the baroque readers the sensational news that they search for, and, at the same time, she
narrates this news in rapid succession so that the public does not have the chance to focus
on one event before they are dazzled by another.
Both of these erotic episodes, one with Urquiza’s mistress and the other with her
brother’s mistress, demonstrate Erauso’s efforts to pass as a man and to belong to a
community of men in the New World. As Behrend-Martínez argues, “[M]anhood clearly
depended on physical attributes: being a sexually intact male. But it also required
continual, or at least occasional, proof of the sexual operation” (1083). While Erauso was
not a “sexually intact male,” she could occasionally participate in erotic encounters with
women and pass as a man in that way. De la Valle described Erauso as “más capón que
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mujer” (qtd. in Ferrer 127). Behrend-Martínez notes that the castrati were known for
being popular with women and were regularly found with women in their beds (1075).
Erauso embraces the identity of a castrated male at the same time that she must embrace
her role as virgin doncella. In this sense, her narration does violence to the early modern
definition of chastity and virginity.
The spectacle of violence in Erauso’s text often works to cover the silences in the
protagonist’s rare moments of vulnerability. The reader would expect Erauso to include
only heroic acts in her autobiography, but instead, the text contains the occasional
instance of weakness or susceptibility—moments when the protagonist is lost, injured, or
her female body is exposed. Not surprisingly, the passages that show Erauso as anything
less than invincible are fleeting and vague. For example, although the protagonist is
injured many times, she often reports that someone took care of her without sharing many
details. The reader has to wonder how Erauso disguised her female body from her
caretakers.34 When Erauso is severely injured recovering the flag, she simply notes,
“Curáronme, y quedamos allí alojados nueve meses” (114). In another instance, after a
fight with an angry husband where the man stabbed Erauso twice in the chest, the
protagonist declares, “[D]os frailes de San Francisco, que es allí enfrente, me pasaron y
entraron allá, ayudando a ello disimuladamente Don Pedro Beltrán, alguacil mayor,
cuñado de mi amo, Juan López de Arguijo. En San Francisco, recogido por caridad, y
asistido en la curación por aquellos padres, estuve retraído cinco meses” (140). Again,
34
Merrim suggests, “[W]henever she is injured and required to undress, priests presumably sworn
to secrecy cure her wounds” (182). This does not explain the scene in Chapter XVII when Erauso is
captured by Dutch sailors and left stranded on the coast of Paita. The narrator casually mentions her nudity:
“Al cabo de [veintiseis días], a mí y a mis dos compañeros nos echaron en la costa de Paita, cosa de cien
leguas de Lima, de donde unos días después, y pasados muchos trabajos, un buen hombre, que
compadecido de nuestra desnudez nos vistió, nos encaminó y avió a Lima” (149).
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Erauso leaves the reader wondering about the gaps, or silences, in these descriptions. The
reader does not have time to speculate for long, though, before the next act of violence
provides a distraction. I would suggest that these brief moments of vulnerability remind
the reader of Erauso’s monstrous body, and her precarious status as a female virgin, while
simultaneously making her acts of violence all the more spectacular.
Julios Ruff observes that early modern Europe was a society far more violent than
our own (2), and in this way, Erauso’s account follows contemporary literary trends. In
his work, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 1500—1800, Ruff contends, “Violence . . .
was part of the discourse of early modern interpersonal relations” (2). During this period,
Spain and the rest of Europe were going through a series of intense cultural changes,
many of which involved violence. Erauso’s public would have seen, read, or heard about
violent acts daily. One of the changes experienced by Erauso’s public centers on religion.
The early modern Spanish and Spanish American public would have access to news
stories and propaganda dealing with the Catholics’ wars against a variety of dissident
groups: the Protestants, Muslims in the Mediterranean, pagans in the New World, and socalled heretics living among them in the heart of the Peninsula. They would be witnesses
to the violence of the Inquisition, including the very public punishments for those who
were exposed by their communities.35 During the Counter-Reformation in Spain, the
Catholic state cracked down on gender relations while emphasizing limpieza de sangre.
Not only does this subject women to brutal treatment in their day-to-day lives, but we
35
For studies on the violence of the Inquisition in relation to women, see Mary E. Giles’s volume,
Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World. For evidence of the brutality of the Inquisition in the
New World, see Patricia Lopes Don’s “Franciscans, Indian Sorcerers, and the Inquisition in New Spain,
1536–1543,” and María Elena Martínez’s “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial
Violence, and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico.” Martínez cites a particularly grisly example of
“thirty-five blacks and mulattos . . . paraded on horseback, shamed before the residents of the viceregal
capital, before all were summarily hanged in front of a large crowd in the central plaza facing the church
and palace” (479).
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also see that domestic violence reflected and displayed in a variety of literature from the
period.36 Erauso taps into the public’s fascination with domestic violence in one scene
where she rescues a woman who claims her husband is going to kill her because she has
committed adultery. Erauso carries the wife away on horseback and describes the
exhilarating chase when her husband comes after them (138–41). The narrator of Historia
de la Monja Alférez plays into the public’s fascination with violence and cruelty.
In addition to—and, in part, stemming from—the turmoil surrounding religion in
early modern Europe, the Spanish crown was engaged in military warfare in many
different and changing locations. In her overview of the conflicts of the Spanish Empire
from the late sixteenth century through the first half of the seventeenth century, Barbara
Simerka notes that Phillip II “inherited both a vast empire and empire-sized problems,”
including, “resistance to direct Spanish rule or a Spanish-dominated European empire
among Protestants in the Low Countries and in England,” “Republican sympathizers in
the Kingdom of Naples, and indigenous rebels in South America,” and “even fellow
Catholics in the papal states and France” (17). Simerka adds, “In addition, this was a
period in which the forces of Islam, embodied in the Ottoman Empire, constituted a
potentially serious risk for the Mediterranean coast of Phillip’s dominions” (17). The
36
Concerning the system of honor in the Counter-Reformation Hispanic world, Nicole von
Germeten notes, “An honorable man had a right to act violently in response to slights, and in their view,
this did not really have anything to do with authority and official litigation; men of honor should not suffer
judicial consequences for acting according to essential Spanish values” (5).
Lisa Vollendorf has written extensively on violence, and especially gendered violence. She
summarizes the violence against women in María de Zayas novellas: “At every turn, women are persecuted
by their male lovers, husbands, and brothers, and through these violations the hypocrisy and misogyny of
the Spanish patriarchy are exposed and exploited” (“Reading the Body Imperiled” 272). In her study of
another famous literary example of domestic violence, Calderón’s play, El médico de su honra, María M.
Carrión notes, “This staggering moment of the text, when the illustre caballero tersely spells out the details
of his wife’s capital punishment, brings to fruition the plot he has designed to restore his honour and thus
reestablish masculinist order” (447–48). Carrión is careful to note the “combination of wonder and terror”
that this brash act of violence instills in the characters of the play and the audience (448).
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Spanish public would receive updates and propaganda about the bloody conflicts in all of
these locations. Through texts like those written by Hernán Cortés, and later Bartolomé
de las Casas and Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the public would witness cruel massacres in the
New World.37 Through captive accounts, the public would hear testimony about the
torture “innocent” Catholics received at the hands of “barbarous” Muslim pirates.38
Attesting to the prominence of violence in early modern texts and images, Ruff claims,
“If many early modern Europeans thus had direct or indirect access to printed materials,
they found in such materials representations of violence that indicate that early modern
publishers had already discovered that the more sensational the news of an act of
violence, the better were sales of the press account” (16). The representation of violence
in Erauso’s text, in part, helps the protagonist fit into the world of conquistadors and
soldiers. And, as Ruff points out, Erauso’s memories of murder, duels, and bloody
battles, would make her sensational account more appealing to an early modern public.
While Erauso’s account of violence in the frontier space of the New World is at
times reminiscent of the texts of other Spanish conquerors, I want to highlight the ways
that her text deconstructs this myth of the hero conquistador. I suggest that the audience
must rethink this myth due to the juxtaposition of different kinds of violence in the
Lieutenant Nun’s text, and the effects of this juxtaposition are only compounded by the
37
Brian Sandberg explores the topic of violence in what he calls the “borderlands” of the New
World in his essay, “Beyond Encounters: Religion, Ethnicity, and Violence in the Early Modern Atlantic
World, 1492–1700.”
38
According to Ana M.a Rodríguez-Rodríguez, the ex-captives returning, mostly from Algiers,
and writing about their time in captivity “son individuos que buscan recrear el cautiverio, acotarlo para la
comprensión de sus lectores, y reproducirlo textualmente con el objetivo primordial y urgente de facilitar
su propia reinserción en el mundo cristiano. Para ello necesitan instalarse en las ideas preconcebidas de sus
receptores, aproximándose a ellos, tranquilizándoles al confirmar la visión del islam y del cautiverio
mayoritaria en el imaginario colectivo hispano” (Letras liberadas 14). Rodríguez-Rodríguez shows,
however, that it is not always easy for the ex-captives to represent their complicated experiences of
captivity solely through the stereotypes of the cruel and violent Muslim “Other.”
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text’s hybrid mix of both genre and gender. In his analysis of another violent colonial
text, La Araucana, Paul Firbas refers to El Pinciano’s Philosophía antigua poética to
better understand early modern readers’ reactions to violence. For El Pinciano, the
courtly reader in an urban setting—the ideal reader—is desensitized to violence, and,
therefore, better able to control his emotions upon reading a gruesome scene in either an
epic poem or a tragedy (Firbas 92). Pinciano also outlines the specific roles that violence
plays in different genres. As Firbas summarizes, “Tanto la tragedia como la epopeya
sustentan su fábula—y los episodios que la acompañan—en la exhibición de acciones
violentas. Sin embargo, parece que la violencia en la tragedia es propia de tiranos,
mientras que en la poesía heroica la ejercen los príncipes legítimos” (94). Depending on
the genre, violence is either justified and legal, or it is a form of cruelty that the reader
would view in negative light. Either way, the reader would learn a lesson from the
violence. In Erauso’s hybrid text, where the narrator blends genres and the protagonist
performs complex masculine/feminine personas, the protagonist participates in justified
violence and cruel murder. I suggest that this spectacle of violence shocks the reader out
of her complacency, de-naturalizing the violence of colonizing literature.
Much of the colonial literature depicting the conquest of the indigenous peoples
of the Americas seems to draw from the epic genre. The violence is presented as
necessary and justified. The leaders are constructed as inherently good. The authors use
elements of this genre to justify the violence that Spanish conquerors perpetrated against
the indigenous rebels. In Hernan Cortés’s accounts of violence, for example, his actions
are justified in that he claims to only use violent force in reaction to a threat from los
indios. Cortés uses rhetoric to create two orderly groups: Spaniards (civilized, Christian,
156
and honorable) and los indios (barbarous, deceitful, and ignorant). In his analysis of
violent narratives in the colonial frontier, David Rojinsky argues, “Prose of this kind is
itself violent in the sense that it reduces the complexity of colonial reality into a series of
clearly demarcated oppositions (law/violence; (just) Spaniard/(rebellious) Indian;
legitimate use of force/rebellion)” (190; emphasis in original). To a certain extent, Erauso
participates in this kind of “violent” prose. In one of many examples, Erauso and her
fellow soldiers murder a young boy who fired upon one of their comrades:
Pasamos adelante, y al tercer día descubrimos un pueblo de Indios, los cuales
luego se pusieron en arma. Llegamos, y en sintiendo ellos el arcabuz huyeron
desatinados, quedando muertos algunos. Entramos en el lugar sin haber podido
coger un Indio de quien saber el camino.
Al salir, el maestre de campo Bartolomé de Alba, fatigado de la celada, se
la quitó para limpiarse el sudor, y un demonio de un muchacho, como de doce
años, que estaba enfrente a la salida encaramado en un árbol, le disparó una
flecha, y se la entró por un ojo y lo derribó, lastimado de tal suerte, que expiró al
tercer día. Hicimos al muchacho diez mil añicos. (127)
Like other conquerors, Erauso creates two groups of people in her account. The
Spaniards are named, and they have individual personalities. The indios, on the other
hand, are a one-dimensional category of people who are represented as fearful and
cowardly (they run from the sound of the rifles), savage (the boy is hanging from a tree),
and treacherous (the boy fires his arrow at a moment when the Spaniard is without the
protection of his helmet). This passage appears to be an example of justified violence.
However, the last line could make the reader uncomfortable. The fact that the boy is only
twelve years old, and the Spaniards mutilate him creates unease concerning the use of
violence by European soldiers on behalf of the Spanish crown.
Erauso’s unique combination of genres, her easy movements from the frontier
space of the New World to the urban centers of Madrid and Rome, and her fluid shift
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from man to woman to man again, allow her to combine both justified violence and
cruelty in her text. In another example, Erauso hangs an indigenous man, a move that
angers her superiors. She brags:
Fui alférez cinco años. Halléme en la batalla de Purén, donde murió el dicho mi
capitán, y quedé yo con la compañia cosa de seis meses, teniendo en ellos varios
encuentros con el enemigo, con varias heridas de flechas; en uno de los cuales me
topé con un capitán de Indios, ya cristiano, llamado don Francisco Quispiguancha,
hombre rico que nos traía bien inquietos con varias alarmas que nos tocó, y
batallando con él lo derribé del caballo, y se me rindió, y lo hice al punto colgar
de un árbol, cosa que después sintió el gobernador, que deseaba haberlo vivo, y
diz que por eso no me dio la compañía. (114–15)
The narrator does not attempt to justify this act. In fact, she goes out of her way to
describe the murdered man as a high-ranking Christian. Her superiors do not sanction her
act either. In Erauso’s autobiography, moments like this murder are combined with
episodes of senseless cruelty at gambling houses. After one tension-filled night gambling,
the narrator tells us, “De allí a tres noches, viniéndome para casa, como a las once, en una
esquina divisé a un hombre parado; tercié la capa, saqué la espada, y proseguí mi camino
hacía él. Llegando cerca, se me arrojó tirándome, y diciendo: ––Pícaro cornudo––.
Conocido en la voz, fuimos tirando, y entréle una punta y cayó muerto” (136). Erauso’s
violence is often unprovoked and undeserved. She seems to celebrate her cruelty.
The courtly reader, as defined by El Pinciano, would not find the expected,
neatly-categorized violence to which he is accustomed. Instead, the reader finds justified
violence mixed with senseless cruelty. These violent moments are made even more
confusing as the reader is repeatedly reminded that the protagonist was born a female and
is performing as a man. Whereas El Pinciano declares that violence in literature serves to
communicate a lesson, the witnesses to Erauso’s journey would be hard pressed to
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articulate any clear message. The use of both justified and gratuitous violence in Erauso’s
text would shatter the reader’s controlled and apathetic response to textual depictions of
violence. Historia de la Monja Alférez reframes colonial violence in a way that shocks
the reader out of her complacency. To use a phrase from Buci-Glucksmann’s The
Madness of Vision, this is an example of “a revolution in the ways of seeing” (8). By
reframing the images of violence, Erauso’s disturbs the reader’s perspective on violence,
justice, and gender roles in the early modern Atlantic world.
Violence in Erauso’s autobiography is multifaceted. It provides a mask for the
protagonist, and it acts as a distraction for the reader. It works to breakdown expectations
of femininity and masculinity, and, ultimately, it causes the reader to question her
perspective on justified violence in the New World. The text feeds into what Peter
Wollen calls the “macabre” and the “gruesomeness” of baroque spectacle (Wollen 17).
Erauso narrates murder after murder in gambling houses and on the battle field. She goes
so far as to narrate the moment when she murders her own brother in a duel (Chapter VI).
These scenes would shock and disgust the reader, but, at the same time, they are thrilling
and exhilarating for an early modern public. These scenes create tension and provoke
strong emotions. Put succinctly, these scenes are the epitome of spectacular baroque
literature.
***
Erauso expresses her inclination to “andar y ver mundo,” which was (and, to a
certain extent, still is) constructed as a decidedly masculine desire. Following
prescriptions for ideal femininity in the time period, Erauso should have stayed enclosed
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in the convent where her family intended for her to live out the rest of her life. Devoting
her life to God and her religious sisters should have been enough for the young Basque
girl. Perry summarizes the early modern obsession with enclosing women: “In this period
of the Counter-Reformation, religious beliefs permeated gender ideology. Enclosure and
purity developed as strategies for defending the faith at this time, for separating the
sacred from the profane, and also for protecting the social order. Women, warned
theologians, were especially vulnerable to temptations of the devil, and they required the
special protection of enclosure” (Gender and Disorder 6). Yet, as Borrachero Mendíbil
argues, Erauso wants the privileges and the freedom of movement afforded to her
brothers (492). In fact, according to her travel tale, she does live the life of an Erauso
man—traveling to the New World as a soldier and performing the role of a hidalgo man
protecting his honor—with more success than the male members of her family could
imagine. In my reading of the text, Erauso’s story works because she creates an illegible
and fascinating spectacle.
As I acknowledge above, Erauso’s autobiography could be analyzed within the
context of baroque propaganda. Phillip IV gives Erauso a soldier’s pension because she
participated valiantly in the expansion of the Spanish Empire, and she earns permission
from the pope to continue living in men’s clothing because she protected her virginity as
a priority during her fight to conquer and colonize the New World, ensuring the
dominance of Catholic norms and values in the Atlantic world. Additionally, her identity
as a Spanish person is never in doubt. She is never confused for an indio, and, in fact, she
reminds the reader of her Basque origins at every turn. Given that Erauso’s story could be
read as imperial propaganda, she is able to escape official punishment for her many
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transgressions because, as David Castillo points out, “The popularity of monsters in news
sources and pedagogical literature can be explained, at least in part, by their signifying
flexibility, which makes it possible to convey political messages and moral lessons with
exemplary effectiveness” (20). Erauso and her text are flexible and slippery, impossible
to pin down. Thus, while her story could be used to propagate a conservative message, it
could also cause the reader to question the “fixed” and “essential” differences between
honor and dishonor, between men and women, between artifice and nature. It is
impossible to view behind Erauso’s mask to understand her real intentions as a result of
the multiple performances she includes in her narrative. This illegibility intensifies
Erauso’s celebrity and helps her to gain approval from court and church officials.
In her autobiography/travelogue, Erauso shows her readers the artifice that goes
into the “making of” her various personas. Erauso narrates her many clothing changes,
name changes, and other transformations precipitated by her constant movement. We see
the protagonist rehearsing her performances of masculinity with family members before
she sails to the New World, where she takes her spectacle to extremes. In my reading of
Historia de la Monja Alférez, I want to emphasize the protagonist’s multiplicity,
flexibility, and illegibility. It follows, then, that Erauso’s body, as constructed throughout
her narrative, would be just as complicated and extreme. The seemingly casual remarks
about the feats her body performs, and the ways she builds strength and endurance over
time combines in a scintillating way with the medical exams that confirm her virginity. In
regard to her body, both the small details she gives throughout the text and the silences—
the obvious questions the narrator leaves unanswered—engage and enthrall the reader.
The public is equally captivated by Erauso’s infrequent performances of vulnerability,
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her dazzling moments as the Don Juan figure, wooing and deceiving women up and
down the New World coast, and above all, her self-fashioning as a bloodthirsty, heartless
murderer. As much as these performances delight and entertain the audience, they are
also confusing and disorienting. Erauso’s narrative draws on the “madness of vision”
(Buci-Glucksmann’s phrase) to give her public the tension-filled, awe-inducing, illicit
subject matter that they crave. The popular image that Erauso creates for herself is
spectacle just as her text is spectacle. Both challenge the idea that early modern women
should remain enclosed in homes and convents and the notion that women did not
participate in the colonization of the Americas. As her audience is entertained by the
spectacle of the Monja Alférez, the text also calls readers to question what they know
about genres, genders, bodies, sexualities, violence and colonial systems of power.
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CHAPTER 3: AUTHORITY WRITTEN ON THE BODY: TALES OF PAIN AND
SUFFERING IN THE VIAJE DE CINCO RELIGIOSAS CAPUCHINAS DE MADRID A
LIMA
Anti-Platonic in its disparagement of lucid clarity and essential form, baroque
vision celebrated instead the confusing interplay of form and chaos, surface and
depth, transparency and obscurity.
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes
In early modern Spain, nuns traveled and wrote more than any other group of
women, and my project would be incomplete without a chapter detailing the spectacle of
traveling religiosas. The Viaje de cinco religiosas capuchinas de Madrid a Lima is an
account written by two nuns who participated in an eventful journey from Spain to the
viceroyalty of Peru, undertaken with the purpose of founding a Capuchin convent in the
city of Lima.39 The authors, Madre María Rosa and Madre Josepha Victoria, made the
trip with three of their religious sisters and their confessor. As the first mother abbess of
the new convent, María Rosa wrote the foundational journey to her fellow Capuchin
sisters both in Madrid and Lima, and in 1722, Josepha Victoria revised and dated the
text.40 Given that their journey required that the nuns leave the safe space of the convent
to cross the Atlantic Ocean, they end up spending countless days in the company of
laypeople, both men and women. The authors must leave an account of those
experiences, in addition to creating a more permanent description of the ephemeral
processions and festivals in which they take part. María Rosa and Josepha Victoria
39
This text can be found in the National Library in Madrid under the title Fundación del
Monasterio de Capuchinas de Jesús, María y José de Lima, en que se contiene la relación del viaje de las
cinco religiosas capuchinas que vinieron del Convento de Madrid a fundar este . . . (MSS.9509); however,
the title page of the text is damaged and reads que se contiene la Relacion del Viaje de las cinco Religiosas
Capuchinas que vinieron del Convento de Madrid a fundar este de Jesus Maria y Joseph de Lima.
40
The catalogue of the National Library of Madrid lists Josepha Victoria as the author of the text.
Sarah E. Owens, in her translation, names María Rosa as the author.
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created a travelogue that entices the reader by walking a fine line between appropriate
behavior for religious women and unsuitable—or even downright dangerous—conduct
and situations.
Throughout the account, the authors are careful to assure the reader that the nuns’
bodies are always protected from the mobs of curious people who follow them during the
journey. Nonetheless, the harsh realities of the expedition present a variety of real
physical hardships for the nuns. I will show that although the narrator claims to hide her
body from spectators during the voyage, she actually paints the female religious body in
great detail with descriptions of the discomfort that the nuns experience en route.
Through a close reading of the Capuchin travel account, I argue that we see strong
evidence of the baroque spectacle, especially the play between “surface and depth,
transparency and obscurity” (Jay 47). María Rosa, with Josepha Victoria’s help, offers an
account full of contradictions, tension, and moments that force the reader to acknowledge
the silences of the text. The women play up the descriptions of their habits and the
carriage curtains, obscuring their bodies, and later they describe the bruises and bug bites
that cover those same taboo bodies (125, 162). The nuns face “barbarous” corsairs, and
they are left alone with strange men for hours, but they never directly defend their
chastity (45, 83, 114–15). Their bodies are discernible in these moments of silence. On
the surface, the nuns present themselves as humble and obedient, examples of the ideal
religiosa; however, I will highlight moments when the nuns reveal their authority and
assert their elite positions in both the Old and the New Worlds.
This travel account was only recently rediscovered by Sarah E. Owens in the
National Library in Madrid, and therefore, the Capuchin nuns’ travels are ripe for
164
scholarly exploration. With respect to the authorship of the manuscript, besides a few
obvious interjections, it is difficult to say with any certainty how much of the text was
written by María Rosa and how much was later added or changed by Josepha Victoria.41
In addition, Owens notes that this foundational account must have been copied at least
twice as she has discovered one manuscript at the National Library in Madrid and one
manuscript with only a few slight differences housed in the convent founded in Lima.
Currently two publications of the text exist: Ruben Vargas Ugarte’s transcription of the
Peruvian manuscript published in 1947 and Sarah Owens’s English translation of the
Madrid manuscript published as Journey of Five Capuchin Nuns in 2009. For my
analysis, I consulted the manuscript at the National Library in Madrid. All passages cited
are from that manuscript.
This is a fascinating foundational account that could be examined through many
different lenses, but I am principally interested in the text within the context of early
modern women’s travel writing. As recent studies on women travelers show, despite the
associations between women and the so-called “private” sphere, throughout history
women have traveled for a multitude of reasons. The Capuchin nuns’ text has much in
common with women travel writers both before and after the early modern period. Both
Adriana Méndez Rodenas and Jennifer Jenkins Wood, in their respective studies on
women’s travel writing, highlight the phenomenon of pilgrimage. Méndez Rodenas
asserts, “Since the Middle Ages, women have shaped their life journeys in terms of
41
One example of an obvious interjection comes at the very end of the manuscript when Josepha
Victoria writes, “Aquí da fin la relación de los principios, medios, y fines de esta santa casa. Algunas cosas
se han añadido acontecidas después que la escribió nuestra santa María Rosa (que goce de Dios)” (207208). Sarah Owens suggests that most of the text is written from María Rosa’s perspective, and seems to
downplay Josepha Victoria’s role. Owens notes, “The narrative is written primarily in the first person from
the mother abbess’s perspective, but there are several instances when Josepha Victoria interjects her own
observations. These are usually short asides that mention whether or not a certain person has since passed
away or had changed rank” (María Rosa Journey of Five Capuchin Nuns 1, note 2).
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religious pilgrimage” (8). According to Jenkins Wood, “The first known Spanish libro de
viajes . . . was written by a woman from Hispania named Etheria or Egeria” (1). Egeria
traveled both “to take a Christian Pilgrimage to the Holy Land,” and because “she was
curious about the world” (1). María Rosa and Josepha Victoria also construct their
voyage as a pilgrimage, or a mission from God to visit holy sites and pray. To give an
example from the manuscript, the nuns remember their arrival in Toledo: “Llegamos a la
iglesia mayor y fuimos a ver y tocar la piedra donde nuestra María Santísima puso los
pies cuando se incorporó con la del sagrario, y dio la casulla a San Ildefonso. Pasamos al
sepulcro del señor cardinal Portocarrero” (32–33).42 The narrator, in keeping with the
tradition of her fellow women travelers, even uses the term peregrinación as she declares,
“Siempre ha quedado en nuestra memoria con gran particularidad este convento que es
uno de los perfectos que tratamos en toda nuestra peregrinación” (67). In her analysis of
women’s travel writing in the nineteenth century, Méndez Rodenas also notes the
emphasis placed on the women’s dress (18) and the ways that women travelers “position
themselves in relation both to the space of the journey and to their own bodies—in
multiple and highly personal ways” (36). Throughout this chapter, I will examine the
ways the Capuchin nuns focus on their dress and their bodies to define their position in
relation to the rest of society on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Viaje de cinco religiosas capuchinas calls to mind a variety of travel
literature from the early modern period. Like others participating in the imperial project,
for example Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, the nuns emphasize the hardships and
obstacles they have overcome in order to do a service for the Empire. As in Cabeza de
42
I have modernized the spelling and punctuation to make this chapter accessible to a wider
audience.
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Vaca’s Naufragios (1542), the five Capuchins face rough seas, a lack of suitable clothing,
and moments of extreme hunger (126, 138, 147). Furthermore, the nuns’ text shares
certain characteristics with the picaresque novels and Historia de la Monja Alférez,
especially the repeated movement of the protagonists who, in each chapter, list which city
they leave and where they will arrive. As in the previously mentioned texts, the
protagonists of our travel account evolve during their travels. The women are changed by
their suffering, and by the contemplation and narration of that suffering. Like other
travelers, the nuns are observers in the places they visit. With our traveling Capuchins,
these places are often the interiors of convents. María Rosa and Josepha Victoria take
great care in their descriptions of the insides of the Portuguese convents and the strange
behaviors of the nuns there (Chapter VIII). In this way, the authors frame the elements of
travel writing within the more stable and acceptable genre of foundational writing.43
Josefina Muriel notes that foundational narratives usually include, “los
prolegómenos de la fundación, el patronato establecido, las aprobaciones conseguidas, y
los incidentes de la realización, la toma de posesión del convento y bendición de la
iglesia” (“Introducción histórica” 14). We see these elements in the first few chapters and
in the last chapter of the Capuchin text. María Rosa and Josepha Victoria narrate the
many prayers and letters necessary to obtain permission for the new convent (2–4). The
women express impatience at the prolonged delays. Finally, the nuns list the names of
43
In Cultura femenina novohispana, Josefina Muriel gives an overview of crónicas written by
nuns. These crónicas often began with a history of the foundation of the specific convent. Muriel asserts
that these texts were often written as an act of obedience to a superior and to contribute to the memory and
history of the nun’s religious order. These foundational texts often combined facts about the convent with
the autobiographical information of la cronista (Muriel 96–97). These texts are also characterized by a
combination of deeds performed by men and women and acts of divine will (Muriel 94). In her essay
“Writing Reform: Gender, Self, and Religious History in Early Modern Spain,” Darcy Donahue gives
characteristics of two of the most famous foundational tales, the autobiographies of Teresa of Ávila and
Ignatius of Loyola. Donahue notes the descriptions of obstacles and setbacks, an awareness of the Church
hierarchy, and, of course, divine will (279).
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their benefactors, the men and women who helped their endeavor financially (Chapter
XVI).44 Beyond the characteristics mentioned above, Muriel observes that the women
who founded the Santa Brígida convent in Mexico wrote about the pain they experienced
leaving their homelands and their struggles with the question of austerity during their
travels (“Introducción historíca” 14). We encounter both of these elements in the
Capuchin text. The Viaje de cinco religiosas capuchinas also shares certain themes with
Teresa of Ávila’s Libro de las fundaciones. Like Teresa, the Capuchin nuns emphasize
God’s will in the foundation of the new convent. Although María Rosa does not include
some of the more picaresque escapades that Teresa’s text contains, both abbesses must
sometimes discuss business and spend time with laymen, usually men in powerful
positions. María Rosa and Josepha Victoria write to educate future generations of nuns,
which is a clearly stated intention of Teresa. Furthermore, María Rosa and Josepha
Victoria, like Teresa of Ávila, detail the religious processions that indicate the close
relationship between the nuns and the rest of society. In her Libro de las fundaciones,
Teresa notes, “Día de Ramos, año de 1568, yendo la procesión del lugar por nosotras, con
los velos delante del rostro y capas blancas, fuimos a la iglesia del lugar, adonde se
predicó, y desde ahí se llevó el Santísimo Sacramento a nuestro monasterio. Hizo mucha
devoción a todos” (88). As we will see in this chapter, the Capuchin nuns narrate similar
scenes, only more ornate and extreme.
María Rosa and Josepha Victoria write to their “Queridas hijas, madres, y
hermanas” after they arrive in Lima and successfully found the Convent of Jesus, Mary
and Joseph (2). The intended readers explicitly mentioned in the text, then, are the
44
Owens gives a concise summary of the last chapter of the Capuchin text as it follows the
formula for foundational accounts (“Introduction” 42–43).
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travelers’ fellow Capuchin nuns both in Lima and Madrid. However, Owens argues
convincingly that María Rosa envisions a larger audience (“Introduction” 16). The
Capuchin authors most likely intended for their document to become part of the official
history of their religious order (Owens “Introduction” 33). It is also important to note the
account’s usefulness as a teaching tool for future generations of nuns in the Capuchin
order, especially for the colegiales that the abbess María Rosa presides over in Lima.45
In this exciting travel saga, the reader finds the expected tropes of humility and
selflessness required in nuns’ writing, but in addition, we encounter a group of women
who regularly question orders from their superiors and express knowledge of the political
tensions of the early eighteenth century.46 The text carefully constructs the nuns’
authority to travel and write beneath the expected tropes of self-effacement and
obedience. It begins with a brief and rather vague description of the Madrid convent’s
efforts to obtain approval for their new foundation in Lima (Chapter I). The authors tell
of the numerous hours that the Capuchin nuns spend praying for a favorable response in
addition to the many letters and messengers pleading the case for a Capuchin convent in
Lima (2–4); these entreaties come from both sides of the Atlantic, from men and women,
from both laypeople and members of the church. After finally receiving permission,
María Rosa narrates the selection of the five nuns to undertake the journey. In this section
45
Madre María Rosa refers to the women in Lima who will take the habit upon the Spanish nuns’
arrival as colegiales. In her article “A Nun’s Account of Death and Dying in a Foreign Land,” Sarah Owens
reads the episode of Madre Estefanía’s death from breast cancer as a teaching manual for the colegiales.
She argues, “Because The Journey of Five Capuchin Nuns supplied many specific examples of death and
dying it served as a teaching tool for the novices” (14).
46
For a clear explanation of the characteristics of nun’s writing, I look to the introduction of the
volume Untold Sisters. I also refer to Myers’s introduction of Neither Saints Nor Sinners. In Women’s
Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America, Kristine Ibsen also provides a detailed analysis of
nun’s writing (22–28).
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of the text (Chapter II), the reader witnesses the humility required of religious women.47
Upon being told that she has been chosen to participate in the new foundation, each nun
repeats that she feels unworthy, but she will take part in the journey if it is the will of
God. María Rosa accepts her nomination with this statement: “Lo admitía no fiando de
las fuerzas propias que eran ningunas” (15). Of course, it would be inappropriate for the
nuns to express their desire to leave the convent walls and reinvent themselves in the
New World.48 In the first two chapters, the reader can already see that the authors take
care to frame every step of the journey in a way that would be acceptable to their
superiors. At the same time, the authors prudently include information that authorizes
their journey. Each of the five nuns was nominated by her fellow sisters, her confessor
and the bishop, which proves that the women are highly respected by their peers and
superiors. The authors conclude that it was the will of God that they take on the quest of
traveling to the New World, and to the reader, it is obvious that these women were in fact
strong enough because despite all of their hardships, the nuns achieve their objective.
While the women explicitly elaborate their unworthiness, if we read between the lines,
we see that the nuns are also asserting their authority as travelers and leaders of the new
convent in Lima.
47
We can compare the humility in the Capuchin manuscript to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s
Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz where she cheekily asks, “Por ventura soy más que una pobre monja, la
más mínima criatura del mundo y la más indigna de ocupar vuestra atención” (40). Teresa de Cartagena, in
Admiraçión operum Dey, declares, “[Y]o, que soy un pequeño pedaço de tierra” (114). In her Vida, Saint
Teresa points out, “Si fuera persona que tuviera autoridad de escribir, de buena gana me alargara en decir
muy por menudo las mercedes que ha hecho este glorioso santo a mí y a otras personas; mas por no hacer
más de lo que me mandaron, en muchas cosas seré corta, más de lo que quisiera, en otras más larga que era
menester” (40). Arenal and Schlau, in their introduction to Untold Sisters, give an overview of the
characteristics of early modern nun’s writing. Margo Glantz, in her article “Sor Juana y otras monjas: la
conquista de la escritura,” also explores the strategies nuns used to make writing an acceptable labor in the
convent.
48
In Chapter V, the nuns narrate the story of Madre María Isabel, who is ridiculed by her mother
abbess for her pride after expressing her desire to leave her convent in Madrid to be a founding sister in
another convent (52–53).
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The nuns begin their travels in January of 1710 under the watchful eye of their
confessor, Doctor José Justo Gallegos. Based on the information that María Rosa and
Josepha Victoria include in their account, it would seem that the nuns participate in a
splendid baroque procession from the moment they leave Madrid. Each time the nuns
enter a new city or leave one of the convents that serve as their temporary shelter the
authors take note of the crowds of people waiting for a glimpse of the travelers. They
describe the nuns from each of the host convents that sing joyous songs upon the arrival
of the five travelers and who weep uncontrollably when it is time for them to leave. In
one instance of many, the narrators describe the scene of their departure:
El día siguiente se dispuso la jornada, y antes de la partida sucedió una cosa
graciosa, y fue que las jovencitas con su maestra (quien les había compuesto unos
romances a nuestra llegada) se pusieron en dos coros cogiéndonos en medio, y
cantaron como unos ángeles. Estando en esta fiesta nos avisaron que nuestro
padre con todos los caballeros de la ciudad nos esperaban a la puerta para que
saliésemos. Esta noticia quitó todo el gusto a mis cantoras, y empezaron a llorar.
(55)
The nuns narrate their journey to highlight the effect they have on others as they travel
through each convent or posada. The protagonists of this text are acutely aware that they
are being watched, and the women are careful to project the right image of themselves
and of the Capuchin order during their travels.
Almost as soon as the voyagers set sail from Cádiz their vessel is captured by
Dutch corsairs, and from this point on, the female religious body becomes an additional
protagonist in the text. The nuns’ bodies are threatened by Protestant corsairs and the
close quarters on the ship (Chapter VII). They suffer seasickness, and their bodies are
tossed about during storms (138). The Capuchin nuns endure hunger and thirst due to the
scarcity of resources during certain portions of their journey (126). Upon their arrival in
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Buenos Aires the travelers realize that one of the nuns, Madre María Estefanía, has been
hiding a tumor on her breast. María Rosa relates the excruciating deterioration of María
Estefanía’s body from breast cancer (142–43). In these harsh environments, it becomes
impossible for María Rosa to continue to hide the female religious bodies in the text.
Instead, as I will argue throughout this chapter, the narrative reframes these descriptions
of the female body to build the authority of both the nuns and their text.
I will look at examples of both the hidden and the exposed female religious body
in the Capuchin nuns’ travel text within the context of spectacle. Guy Debord defines
spectacle as “a social relation among people, mediated by images” (4). Spectacle,
especially in the context of the Counter-Reformation and colonial Spanish America,
works to define social positions. Through their participation in these spectacles and their
interaction with spectacular images, early modern communities aligned themselves with
certain identities and values. Through overly-theatric Catholic religious spectacle, for
example, the public reaffirmed their loyalty to the Spanish monarchy and the Pope.
Throughout this chapter, we will see how the variety of images related to the nuns’
bodies help the reader to position the nuns within the transatlantic Hispanic society of the
early eighteenth century. Through their narration of spectacle, the reader sees the ways
that the nuns relate to each other and to the different people they meet during their threeyear trek. In this chapter, I highlight the nuns’ strategies to navigate and construct “social
relations” through images––the image of the nuns wearing veils and accompanying a
statue of Christ, the image of the nuns held captive by enemy pirates while at sea, or the
image of one of the nuns suffering from a tumor that has grown so large that she can no
longer leave her bed. Together, the images outlined in María Rosa and Josepha Victoria’s
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text define the authors as subjects with experience and influence in the viceroyalty of
Peru who are authorized to tell their truth in writing.
Crossing the Convent Walls: Travel and Writing in an Early Modern Atlantic
Context
It is difficult to form a clear idea of early modern convents and the inhabitants of
those spaces due to the diversity of women and the particular context of each convent. In
a previous chapter, I mentioned the relationship between María de Zayas’s characters and
the space of the convent. For Doña Isabel and the other noblewomen storytellers the
convent is an imagined space that provides protection and a certain amount of freedom to
continue pursuing their creative interests.49 For Catalina de Erauso, on the other hand, the
convent is a prison complete with a detailed description of the confined spaces, the
locked doors, and the limited agency. The environment of a convent could also change
over time. For Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, her Mexican convent started as a place that
nourished her curiosity, but toward the end of her life, the space appears to have become
more oppressive. Octavio Paz argues that, in the later years of her life, Sor Juana was
caught in the middle of political Chruch rivalries and power struggles, including one
involving the Bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, and the Archbishop of
Mexico, Aguijar y Seijas (398). Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell argue, “It is
conceivable that she may have sought safety from further institutional censure, by
appearing to conform to a model of sanctity that was in any case imposed on her” (xv). In
49
Elizabeth Rhodes includes a chapter on the convent in María de Zayas’s Desengaños in her
book Dressed to Kill: Death and Meaning in Zayas’s Desengaños. I agree with her assessment that the
convent is an invisible space in Zayas’s stories (126–27).
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short, the convent offers different opportunities and a variety of restrictions depending on
the location, the specific order, and the changing church leadership, among other factors.
Additionally, each woman is going to experience the space in her own way depending on
her background, her motives for taking the habit, and the relationships she forms both
inside and outside the cloister walls. Mariló Vigil summarizes the multipurpose benefits
of convents: “Eran en parte centros de vida religiosa, en parte guarderías de niñas
pequeñas, en parte internados de señoritas, en parte locales para las sin-casar, en parte
refugios de viudas o residencias de ancianas, y en parte hostales en los que algunas
pasaban temporadas con sus amigas y parientas” (215).
The complexity of the space of the convent increases as we consider its
relationship to the rest of society both in the Iberian Peninsula and in colonial Spanish
America. The convent is separate from, but also intimately attached to, the community to
which it belongs. The social hierarchies of the larger society are reflected within the
cloister walls, but at the same time, the social organization within the walls presents
opportunities to distort that reflection. In some religious orders, the wealthiest nuns had
nice rooms, elegant clothing, and even slaves, thereby repeating the order of the outside
world.50 In other cases the abbess of the convent was able to exercise a fair amount of
authority over both her fellow nuns and other male members of the order, and in doing
so, the abbess disrupts the patriarchal power hierarchy.51 It is important to note that this
50
Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell point out that the nuns in Sor Juana’s Mexican convent were
served by various servants and slaves. They add that Sor Juana also had large individual living quarters (6).
Mary Elizabeth Perry affirms that noblewomen in Seville usually entered the convent with a substantial
dowry that made their enclosed lives significantly more comfortable than the lives of their poorer sisters
(Gender and Disorder 78). Mariló Vigil also enumerates the social hierarchies within the convent in
Chapter 6 of Vida de las mujeres en los siglos XVI y XVII.
51
For an explanation of the hierarchical organization of the “monastic family,” see Chapter 2 of
Claire Walker’s Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe.
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disruption could be temporary, and even though the abbess was able to assert her own
agency, she most likely continued to uphold the patriarchal order in other ways. On top of
offering leadership positions for women, the convent created a community of women
while simultaneously encouraging close relationships between nuns and their male
confessors. The cloister was a space where society felt confident in its ability to control
women’s sexual behaviors, but it is also the space that allowed nuns to write about their
very physical encounters with their “Heavenly Husband.” In short, the convent is an
uncanny or even queer space. It is part of early modern Hispanic culture while also
having the potential to distort that reality.
To better understand the lives of early modern religious women, and more
specifically the surroundings of our Capuchin travelers, it is important to note that the
convent walls were not impermeable. Nuns did develop relationships with both laypeople
and members of the Church inside and outside their convent walls. While there has been
a tendency for scholars to view nuns as completely cut off from the outside world,
especially after the mandates from the Council of Trent (1545–63), critics like Elizabeth
A. Lehfeldt consider the convent walls to be like a “frontier,” due to the “wildness and
fluidity” of the “uncertain boundaries” (Religious Women in Golden Age Spain 217).52 In
her essay “Rethinking the Catholic Reformation: The Role of Women,” Barbara B.
Diefendorf gives a similar description of the complicated boundary between the women
52
For more information on the effects of the Council of Trent on both male and female
monasteries, see Elizabeth Lehfeldt’s “Discipline, Vocation, and Patronage: Spanish Religious Women in a
Tridentine Microclimate.” Alison Weber discusses Trent in the context of Teresa of Ávila’s reforms in
“Spiritual Administration: Gender and Discernment in the Carmelite Reform.” Kimberlyn Montford
explores the effects of Trent on another form of women’s cultural production in “Holy Restraint: Religious
Reform and Nuns’ Music in Early Modern Rome.” Helen Hills examines the effects of Trent on Italian
conventual architecture in “The Veiled Body: Within the Folds of Early Modern Neapolitan Convent
Architecture.” Ulrike Strasser, in “Clara Hortulana of Embach or How to Suffer Martyrdom in the
Cloister,” complicates the power dynamic of Tridentine reforms arguing that women sometimes
participated in these reforms “of their own accord and often quite enthusiastically” (40).
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enclosed in the convent and the outside world. The historian argues, “[W]hile there had
sometimes been lapses in observance of the active enclosure historically required of
professed nuns, the principle of passive enclosure, which forbade entry to all outsiders,
was more frequently ignored” (33). Lisa Vollendorf extends this observation to the
Americas when she adds, “[F]ew, if any, convents in the Catholic world remained
completely closed off from secular society: on both sides of the Atlantic, the comings and
goings of servants, visitors, donors, and male clerics formed a necessary part of everyday
convent life in most instances” (“Transatlantic Ties” 99).53 In the Capuchin nuns’ tale, we
witness both a break with active enclosure, as the nuns obtain special permission to travel
to the viceroyalty of Peru, as well as a failure to observe the dictate of passive enclosure
once the nuns accomplish their goal and are settled in Lima. Their travelogue is a clear
example of the unclear and slippery boundaries between the secular and the religious in
the early modern world. It shows not only the physical contact between the nuns and
outsiders, but it also demonstrates the flow of news, philosophies, politics, and other
ideas across the convent walls through writing.
Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau, in their detailed overview of nun’s writing,
observe that although most prescriptions for appropriate feminine behavior discouraged
women’s education and literacy, Hispanic nuns were often the exception to this norm (1).
Nieves Baranda Leturio and M.a Carmen Marín Pina add that writing was often an
essential part of early modern conventual life (11). Religious women wrote
autobiographies and confessions, foundational stories, letters, and poems and plays, and
they often put pen to paper with the intention that their work be read or performed outside
53
Chapter 5 of Lavrin’s Brides of Christ also discusses the intimate connection between convents
and the secular community and the relative permeability of the cloister walls.
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the convent walls. We know that Sor Juana’s work, for example, was popular among the
aristocracy both in America and in Spain. Going back even further, the Castilian Teresa
de Cartagena directed one of her treatises to a noble couple who supported her literary
pursuits.54 Clearly, the Capuchin nuns are no exception. María Rosa wrote her account of
the foundation of the convent in Lima, which eventually made its way to the National
Library of Madrid. On various occasions, the text also explains that the Capuchin nuns
are still in contact with the other convents and noble families that they encountered
during their journey (35, 58, 110, 124).
The Untold Sisters anthology shows the diversity of religious women’s writing.
The authors acknowledge:
To be sure, nuns’ spiritual autobiographies contain prescribed structures, order,
meanings, themes, and formulas and reflect the hagiographic and biblical rhetoric
of the Church, which could either approve or censor all writing. But when they
are removed from a rigid framework, the Lives, poems, plays, and letters by the
Sisters reveal patterns that contradict their stated intentions and express instead
the authors’ individuality. (2)
Although early modern nuns’ writing, like all women’s writing, was closely scrutinized,
the women found ways to both comply with expectations of humility, ignorance, and
obedience, while at the same time injecting their own personalities into their writing.
Kathleen Ann Myers, in Neither Saints Nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in
Spanish America describes the fluctuating vigilance that surrounded nuns’
autobiographies in colonial Spanish America. Myers observes that women were often
forced to write, and that writing was often judged as either acceptable or deviant by the
woman’s confessor as well as other ecclesiastic men (6). Baranda Leturio and Marín Pina
54
For more information on Teresa de Cartagena’s writing, see the introduction to Dayle
Seidenspinner-Núñez’s edition of Teresa’s two treatises. See also Seidenspinner-Núñez and Yonsoo Kim’s
“Historicizing Teresa: Reflections on New Documents Regarding Sor Teresa de Cartagena.”
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comment on the ambiguous position of the nun whose confessor commanded her to
write: “El mandato de escritura fue a la vez realidad y coartada simbólica, impulso y
freno, porque si por un lado abría la extensión del papel en blanco, por otro estrechaba
sus márgenes con la necesidad de restringirse a las expectativas que había tras esa orden
y que conducían inexorablemente al control de lo escrito” (13). To summarize, women
authors realized the importance of appearing to be completely orthodox, and they
imitated other vidas and hagiography in order to comply. Women learned to write about
their unworthiness, and they imitated the representation of the religious body in their
autobiographies. At the same time that some nuns found authorization in repeating the
tropes of officially sanctioned religious texts, others found the church’s approval through
representing themselves as unique or somehow exceptional. Myers notes, “Teresa de
Avila’s writings about the mystic path––and her Libro de la vida, in particular––allow us
to see how her mystic experience ultimately served as the cornerstone for creating a
church-approved life and narrative” (29). We could add Sor Juana as an example of a nun
who presented herself as extraordinary, especially in regard to her ability to learn. In her
Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, the Mexican nun boasts that she was only three years
old when she was consumed by a desire for knowledge and she tricked a tutor into giving
her lessons (48). She also declares, “Empecé a deprender gramática, en que creo no
llegaron a veinte las lecciones que tomé” (50). In the account of the Capuchin voyage,
María Rosa and her co-writer, either consciously or unconsciously, give the reader a
combination of imitation and originality. In the nun’s account of travel, the reader sees
elements of the vida and hagiography genres, and also elements of travel writing like
descriptions of exotic animals––in Chapter XIV, the narrator mentions víboras and tigres
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(159)––and an attempt to incorporate vocabulary from their new home––she mentions
“una hacienda o chácara (como dicen en Indias)” (153). This is evidence that the nuns
saw themselves as discovering a New World. The women construct a unique text by
emphasizing their roles as traveling women. They create a distinctive combination of
religious vida and account of conquest and colonization, and their authority is built upon
the experiences they have in the New World and their eyewitness accounts of travel—a
characteristic that separates the Capuchin nuns’ text from the experiences of nuns who
remain in Spain.
It is hard to imagine that the five traveling nuns were not familiar with Teresa of
Ávila’s writing before they left to found the new convent in Lima. Teresa’s role as the
founder of a number of discalced convents, her accounts of travel throughout Spain, and
her mystical experiences were well known in the Peninsula by the eighteenth century.
Owens points out that María Rosa only mentions her famous foremother one time
explicitly, but the critic also acknowledges the likelihood that the nuns had encountered
Teresa’s work (“Introduction” 12). In the previous section, I mentioned a few of the
commonalities between the Capuchin text and Teresa’s foundational narratives.
Likewise, Owens highlights the probable influence of Sor María Agreda’s spiritual and
mystical journeys in the account of the Capuchin nuns (“Introduction” 12–13). There is
no doubt that the five nuns who left Madrid in 1710 were well-educated and well-read.
The travelers most likely had access to various vidas and hagiographies, not to mention
texts written about the New World awaiting the nuns in Lima. For example, Owens
convincingly argues that the Capuchin travelers and writers were well-acquainted with
José de Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies (“Introduction” 27–31). We can
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also assume that María Rosa and her sisters had access to letters and other foundational
texts written by Spanish nuns who had previously made the trip across the Atlantic.55
The five Capuchin travelers studied here are not entirely unique in their travels or
in their writing. Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela emphasizes the importance of the
metaphorical journey for nuns and their role as spiritual advisors. She describes various
women who made journeys in their visions, some who were even able to describe their
interactions in the New World in great detail without ever physically leaving their
Spanish cloister (2). Additionally, Sampson Vera Tudela comments on the role of nuns as
mediators between heaven and earth, often traveling across that distance with their
prayers (2). In a more physical sense, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
many nuns made foundational trips to both Mexico and Peru. According to Kathryn
Burns, the European conquerors wasted little time in establishing convents after the
indigenous groups were subdued. She asserts, “[C]onvents were vital to the securing of
Spanish hegemony in Peru and to the erecting of a colonial regime on Inca foundations”
(2). The Spanish American convents and the nuns that populated them performed many
vital functions in colonial society; one of the most important roles was to provide order,
hierarchy, and control in a chaotic region located far from the centers of power in Madrid
and Rome.
The convents protected and separated––at least physically and, most importantly,
sexually––Spanish and creole women from the still not fully tamed surroundings of the
New World. Asunción Lavrin, in her vital study of nuns and convents in New Spain,
55
Lázaro Iriarte tells us that a group of Capuchin nuns from the convent in Toledo arrived in
Nueva España to found a convent there in 1665. He also notes that there was correspondence between the
nuns in Mexico and the convent in Toledo, a convent that our nuns pass through on their way to Lima (67–
68).
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asserts, “The theme of protection runs deeply in petitions for new foundations and did not
seem to run dry even in the late-eighteenth century, because attitudes about the so-called
intrinsic weakness of the female sex did not change much through two centuries” ( Brides
of Christ 7). Moreover, the convent was a symbol of Spanish power and “the triumph of
Christianity over the pagan beliefs of the indigenous peoples” (Lavrin Brides of Christ
21). The Capuchin nuns, their new convent, and their foundational text, then, are
elements of Spanish imperial power. For Spain, the multiple celebrations of the Capuchin
nuns’ arrival in the Americas served as evidence that the conquest was just and the
colonization was successful. Given that these celebrations, like other baroque fiestas,
were momentary ephemera, the nuns created a more lasting artifact in the form of their
written text.56 Through writing, the nuns are able to leave their own mark on the official
imperial story––a history more commonly influenced by Christian noblemen, highranking military officials, or prominent clergymen. The nuns emphasize the role of
convents in the new Hispanic society, and the specific need that the women fulfill as
Capuchin nuns. The colegiales in Lima are eager to devote their lives to God, but they do
not know how to do so. According to the nuns’ text, the Spanish Capuchins are providing
a valuable and necessary service in Lima.
After the conquest, Spain rapidly sent women, both married and single, to the
New World to help create a secure and lasting Spanish society. The Spanish state sent
married women and their children to be with their conquistador husbands in order to curb
immoral behavior with indigenous women, although the success of this endeavor is
debatable. In addition to married women, the Spanish Empire sent nuns to Mexico and
56
Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru comments on the necessity of creating written artifacts to document the
“esplendor efímero” of baroque festivals (26).
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Peru to found convents, many of which took on the function of schools (Fernández
Fernández 95). The mission of Spanish women in general, whether they were cloistered
or married, was to give Spanish and creole children the kind of moral and spiritual
education that they would receive in Catholic Europe. While married women helped to
reproduce Spanish society by having white, Christian children, nuns were responsible for
their own sort of production and reproduction. Not only were the religious women crucial
to the political and economic viability of their communities, but they also spiritually
reproduced Spanish citizens in America. Lavrin succinctly describes the role of New
World convents when she argues that they “reinforced not only the self-esteem of the
European settlers, but also their plans to create a new society, which, albeit different from
the one they left behind, would be built on similar cultural foundations” (Brides of Christ
6). In the next section, I explore the ways that María Rosa and Josepha Victoria deal with
this difference between the Old and New Worlds. I argue that the women negotiate their
position in their new society through the use of spectacular imagery. As the women
describe the lavish festivals welcoming them to Lima and their central role in the
religious image presented to the public, the women redefine and reaffirm their elite status
in Lima and within the Capuchin order.
The Performative Potential of the Habit in Religious Festivals
In the previous section I discussed the complicated and dynamic role of the
convent in both Spain and colonial Spanish America. The convents were essential to the
communities to which they belonged. The large buildings were symbols of the power of
the Catholic Church, and the nuns served both as businesswomen and as intermediaries
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between the rest of the community and the spiritual world. Helen Hills describes this
relationship between the nuns and the rest of the community: “In their churches the
convent met the city, here men and women came to worship and were reminded of the
presence of the nuns above them and around them, but separated from and invisible to
them, in spaces that were contiguous but not continuous with theirs” (278). In this way,
the curious admiration the public felt toward the convent was similar to the feelings of
wonder that the secular world would have had regarding the undefined form of the nuns’
bodies beneath their habits. The convent and the nuns were both palpably present while
also remaining invisible. Asunción Lavrin observes, “The physical but hidden proximity
of the women living in the adjacent cloisters infused nunneries with an aura of respect
and mystery that was lacking in male convents, inasmuch as monks were part of the
world, and their own visibility in the streets made them familiar and accessible” (Brides
of Christ 2). The habits that the Capuchin nuns wore protected the religious women’s
bodies just as the convent protected its occupants. As the Capuchin women left the
comfort of the convent in Madrid, their clothing, along with the carriage curtains,
replaced the cloister walls. In the nuns’ travel story, the habit functions as a protective
shelter for the five travelers. The women can go from one convent to the next without
their taboo bodies being seen by the townspeople. On the other hand, at certain points in
the journey the abbess describes the veil as suffocating in the hot weather and often not
practical for their purposes in the New World (126, 181). During their stay in Portugal,
the narrator complains, “Con la mutación de tierra, y la continuación de los velos, se nos
derritió la cabeza” (99). In these moments, the habit is an obstacle to good health that
limits the women’s activities rather than a tool that contributes to ease of movement. In
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this section, I will discuss the text’s preoccupation with the habit and the image that the
nuns project to position themselves in the Capuchin order and Peruvian society.
I argue that the habit, veil, and carriage curtains play multiple roles in the
Capuchin travel text. These roles reveal the dual nature of the habit and veil in the early
modern period. During some sexually dangerous moments in the text, the habit is a
powerfully protective force. In these episodes when the nuns interact with carriage
drivers and Dutch corsairs, the text downplays the threat with habits and veils that play
the role of an impenetrable wall. On the other hand, these barriers can, at times, act more
like a window to the outside world. The habit, veil, and carriage curtains are, more often
than not, a conduit through which the nuns register a change in environment and a
transformation in their own identities. In this section I analyze examples of the habit as
both impenetrable wall and open window, and I close with an examination of the role that
the image of the habit plays at the center of religious festivals in the Capuchin text.
Following Debord’s definition of spectacle, I posit that the text uses the image of the
habit at the heart of religious processions and celebrations to both reaffirm and rearrange
social positions in early modern Hispanic society. In María Rosa and Josepha Victoria’s
text, the habit creates protagonists that are orthodox and obedient, and simultaneously
transgressive and authoritative.
In the Capuchin travelers’ chronicle, the habit bolsters the nuns’ claim to
orthodoxy. It is acceptable that María Rosa, Josepha Victoria, and the others leave the
convent walls primarily because they were chosen by God and high-level clergymen to
found a convent that will enclose the colegiales (or beatas) in Lima.57 Furthermore, the
57
Chapter 5 of Mary Elizabeth Perry’s Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville examines
the dangers posed by unenclosed beatas and the variety of ways that women resisted enclosure in the early
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Capuchin travelers always have a barrier between themselves and the secular world in the
form of the habit and the veil. The piece of wool acts as a physical boundary enclosing
the women’s bodies just as the convent would. For example, it protects the nuns from the
uncouth behavior of the coachmen. The abbess makes a note in her text that the
coachmen begin their journey taking the Lord’s name in vain and participating in all
kinds of uncivilized behavior. However, as soon as the nuns ask the men to control
themselves, they are better behaved. One of the men assures the nuns, “Madres, ya soy
santo, por vida mía que después que vengo en su compañía, rezo mucho y no juro nada”
(45). To a certain extent, the habit gives the nuns the authority to control their
surroundings.
In what is probably the most striking example of the habit as a protective wall,
when the nuns are captured by Dutch corsairs, they are saved from what would normally
be the fate of a woman caught by pirates on the wide open seas. The narrator
distinguishes between the treatment the nuns receive and the treatment of the other
passengers: “Luego que nuestro capitán pidió al holandés que nos atendiese, puso una
centinela en la puerta de la cámara para que nos guardase. Muy al contrario sucedió a la
señora que venía por Presidenta de Chile quien tenía la media cámara y entraron a
saquearla a ella, y a todas sus criadas las quitaron cuanto tenían” (72). In fact, according
to the text, the Dutch behave quite courteously toward their female monastic captives.
María Rosa and Josepha Victoria explain:
Experimentamos grandes beneficios de nuestro Dios en que unos hombres tan
voraces nos atendiesen con tan gran puntualidad que nada nos faltó; y nos
modern period. Perry notes that women from poor families resisted out of necessity. They had to work to
survive. Others transformed their enclosed spaces into places to help the poor and infirm, and many women
wrote to resist enclosure (178–79).
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enviaban recados el Capitán, y los demás principales: que si les dábamos licencia
entrarían a servir a la mesa. Estimamos mucho su cortejo y les dijimos por el
intérprete (que era un padre de la Compañía) que nuestra regla no permitía que los
hombres nos viesen. (72–73)
Although the Dutch treated the nuns well, the women describe their captors as “voraces”
and “bárbaros,” and they highlight the corsairs’ “depravadas disposiciones” (73). The
women infuse the narration of their captivity with an always present, but never directly
acknowledged, threat to the nuns’ bodies. The travelers knew that this threat existed
before they accepted their quest to travel across the Atlantic and found their convent in
Lima. The women were aware that the seas were full of enemy pirates known for their
violence toward women, but they willingly put themselves in danger––sexual danger––
for their cause. The text shows they are confident in their goal, their ability to withstand
physical danger, and their protected position as Brides of Christ––even when faced with a
Protestant enemy. In the nuns’ narration of events, while the Dutch hold the travelers
captive, the presence of the habit acts as a barricade between the nuns and the corsairs.
Helen Hills connects the role of the veil and the role of the convent, both
necessary to hide the female religious body. She argues, “The collective virgin body had
to be protected––and emphatically separated––from the bodies of potential violators, both
sexual and social. Thus laity and priests, servants and aristocrats, and especially men,
were carefully regulated in terms of access to convents. The possibility of intimate bodily
contact became the focus of surveillance, obstruction, and fantasy” (276). Hills adds that
the nun’s sexuality, her body, and even her face were all reserved for her “Heavenly
Husband.” To see the unclothed female religious body, or even just to gaze upon her face,
was to see the forbidden, and this marked the nun’s body as desirable. According to Hills,
the veil was, “an acknowledgement of the beauty and temptation of the nun’s face
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beneath it. . . . [T]he practice of veiling signified the sexual allure of the enclosed, veiled
nun” (288). If a member of the public saw beneath the habit and veil of one of the
Capuchin travelers, it would ruin the spectacle, and the fantasy, as they both function to
glorify the Catholic Church and to reiterate the importance of the Church to the public.
One aspect of the veil that Hills fails to address is the desire on the part of the nun to
either be part of the fantasy or to break the rules and be seen. It is fascinating to think that
the Capuchin nuns potentially enjoy their status as forbidden fantasy.
For female religious bodies to be a fantasy, they have to be removed from society,
but there also has to be the potential for access. In the Capuchin text, this materializes in
the dual role of the habit as protective door and open window that I mentioned earlier.
Many traveling and writing nuns had to address the amount of contact they had with the
outside world. Sampson Vera Tudela explores the combination of hagiography and travel
writing genres in the foundational texts from New Spanish cloisters to show that this
contact with the outside world was narrated in very different ways. She acknowledges,
“In the Western tradition, the journey of a saint was generally understood to imply an
entry into a different world, and more specifically it meant abandoning civilization for
barbarism, the city for the desert” (5). This idea is complicated, however, in the specific
context of the Spanish New World where Catholics justified the conquest, in part, to
bring “civilization” to the New World in the shape of convents, clergy members, and
nuns (Sampson Vera Tudela 5-6). The need to convey the difference found in the new
place must be negotiated with the desire to portray the Other as open to the
transplantation of Spanish civility. We see this in various texts concerning the Spanish
Empire during the early modern period. Imperial writing is ambiguous in its need to both
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exoticize and simultaneously domesticate both the Other and the space of the Other.58 In
their approach to this ambiguity, Sampson Vera Tudela notes that some nuns who wrote
about travel did so in ways that minimized any significant change or difference (6). In
these texts, the nuns travel from cloister to cloister, and their veils keep them from seeing
anything during their journeys. The critic notes, “The function of this kind of description
is to make clear that the huge distances covered in the journeys elapse outside historical
time, the nuns never entering the world, Old or New, but transporting their cloister and its
special ‘time’ to a different place” (8). Accordingly, the emphasis on the veils and the
carriage curtains in these texts functions to erase change. Thus, nuns do not perceive their
change in place, and the nuns themselves do not change through contact with difference. I
think we will find that in the case of our Capuchin travelers, María Rosa and Josepha
Victoria create a text that permits the nuns to grow and transform throughout their
journey as they perceive the changes in their surroundings. The more that the nuns look
out at the world from their habit and carriage curtains, the more authority they seem to
acquire. For example, toward the end of the journey and the narrative, the reader sees
more evidence of María Rosa’s influence. During their stay in Callao, the townspeople
line up to see the nuns. María Rosa notes, “Tuvimos gran gusto de verlos, y oírlos, y ellos
le mostraron indecible, creyendo que con nuestra llegada se adelantería la beatificación
de su paisano Nicolás de Dios: yo les dije que haría cuanto pudiese en eso, y en todo lo
demás” (182). Later, the nuns visit churches in Callao, including a Jesuit church filled
with Young boys studying. María Rosa claims, “Yo pedí al padre que nos hiciese el favor
58
For more examples of the exoticize/domesticate conflict in imperial writing, see Ana M.
Rodríguez-Rodríguez’s “Old Enemies, New Contexts: Early Modern Spanish (Re)-Writing of Islam in the
Philippines” and Ricardo Padrón’s “The Blood of Martyrs Is the Seed of the Monarchy: Empire, Utopia,
and the Faith in Lope’s Triunfo de la fee en los reynos de Japón.”
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de soltarlos, con el cargo de que rezasen una Ave María” (182). The reader begins to see
the protagonist exercising her influence and asking for favors. Once the nuns arrive in
Lima and begin finalizing plans for the new convent, María Rosa says, “Con la
experiencia de lo que es menester para una comunidad avisé a Su Excelencia de lo que
más falta nos hacía” (190). How does she earn her experience and the authority to advise
the Viceroy? I suggest that she earned this position while traveling across the Atlantic,
being taken captive by the Dutch, and riding a mule through the freezing cold Andes
mountains.
In Colonial Angels, Sampson Vera Tudela cites other cases, for example the life
of Isabel de la Encarnación, that incorporate more of a negotiation with “the ‘difference’
the New World presented” (11–12). These texts, due to their didactic messages, require
the narrators to acknowledge the change in “historic” time and place (Sampson Vera
Tudela 12). This, I believe, is true of the Capuchin nuns’ text. The veil and the carriage
curtains, while sometimes suffocating and unbearably uncomfortable in the heat, rarely
keep the women from seeing and experiencing the outside world. The nuns only mention
a few instances when they do not look out the curtains, mostly due to the crowds of
people waiting to see them. The only time María Rosa admits to not looking due to fear
comes when she is lost and alone with the carriage driver in Portugal. She says, “[V]ino
una tropa de caminantes, y llena de temor por si eran ladrones, no osaba a examinarlo”
(115). Mostly, though, these barriers are like open windows that allow the nuns to
interact with, and be influenced by, the outside world. Throughout most of the text, María
Rosa and Josepha Victoria prove to be more than knowledgeable with respect to Spain’s
religious, political, and social relationships with the Dutch, the Portuguese, and the
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Moors in the Mediterranean. They write within a specific historical time, and they apply
the knowledge they have to the changing scenery that they witness.
In my reading of the text, the nuns are unquestionably aware that they are
traveling through and to a space that is different from the one they know. As the nuns are
preparing to leave Toledo, the authors say, “Habiéndose despedido nuestro Santo Prelado
fuimos prosiguiendo con muchas lágrimas por la consideración de que íbamos dejando
las tierras y personas conocidas y veníamos a tan extrañas solas y pobres sin conocer más
de a nuestro Padre” (40). Although the inside of one convent should be no different than
the inside of another, the nuns show awareness and sadness at leaving their homeland.
Accordingly, this awareness permits the authors to narrate a subtle difference in the nuns
themselves from the point when they begin the journey until they establish themselves, as
a group, behind their new cloister walls in Lima. As an example of this character
evolution, we can look at María Rosa, who, as she sets out from the convent in Madrid is
embarrassed by the attentions the other nuns pay to her as their new abbess. She humbly
admits, “Luego que entramos en el coche mis madres compañeras con su mucha
humildad me dieron la obediencia, que hasta entonces aunque había casi tres meses del
nombramiento no había nos hecho novedad ninguna. A mí me fue de mucha confusión”
(28). When she is preparing the new convent in Lima, however, she seems much more
comfortable with her role. When one of the hermanos, due to his religious fervor tells the
abbess of his desire to die, María Rosa declares “le dije que ya era su abadesa y que le
mandaba no pidiese a Dios se le llevase sino que en todo se cumpliese la divina voluntad”
(185). María Rosa and her fellow travelers evolve throughout the text because of the
contact they have with their carriage drivers, their Dutch captors, the nuns and clergymen
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of other orders, and the politicians they meet along their journey. This contact is only
possible by virtue of the porous and fluid nature of the habit.
To briefly summarize, the Capuchin nuns’ approach to the habit is multifaceted.
In their travel narrative, the narrator sometimes invokes the habit as a barrier that
encloses and protects the nun from strange men, including their carriage drivers and the
Dutch corsairs. Through most of the tale, however, the habit does not interfere with the
women’s view of the world, their interactions with others, and their sense of historical
time and political relations. This presentation of the habit as both closed wall and open
window functions as a strategy to authorize the Capuchin nuns as obedient Brides of
Christ and high-ranking officials in the Church hierarchy. The rest of my analysis in this
section focuses on the image the nuns present, covered in their habits, especially during
the moments of religious festival. In the narration of these spectacular events, the image
of the nuns functions to solidify the Church’s place in Hispanic society.
In La cultura del barroco, José Antonio Maravall explains that the early modern
Baroque period was filled with war, death, poverty, instability, and disillusionment. He
also adds that the feeling of pessimism went hand in hand with the baroque fiesta (318–
19). The most important fiestas for my arguments in this chapter are the religious
festivals in both the Iberian Peninsula and America, including processions, religious
holidays, canonization announcements, and public sermons. Many of these public
spectacles were comprised of plays, poems, or other texts—oral and written—working in
combination with the visual. The image of the religious women dressed in their habits
and veils, in addition to other religious iconography, performed an important function
during these events. In her study The Inordinate Eye, Lois Parkinson Zamora addresses
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the importance of religious images in the Catholic cultures of the Counter-Reformation,
and she notes that this fixation with the visual was transferred to New World Baroque
culture (29). Zamora emphasizes the role of religious images to provoke self-examination
and meditation among the spectators, and particularly the importance of these images in
“the Baroque interrogation of the relation of parts to wholes” (185). That is, the
participants of baroque religious spectacle, upon seeing images of Christ’s suffering––
often imitated by the nuns of different religious orders––would examine their own place
as individuals in relationship to the Catholic hierarchy and the larger Spanish society. In a
similar manner, Maravall argues:
El carácter de fiesta que el Barroco ofrece no elimina el fondo de acritud y de
melancolía, de pesimismo y desengaño, como nos demuestra la obra de un
Calderón. Pero si se ha de partir de la experiencia penosa de un estado de crisis,
como venimos diciendo, y el Barroco la ha de reflejar, también, no menos
obligadamente, a fin de atraer a las fatigadas masas y promover su adhesión a los
valores y personas que se le señalan, esos otros aspectos refulgentes y triunfalistas
tienen que ser cultivados. (319)
For Maravall, this negotiation between the parts and the wholes that Zamora refers to was
a rigidly “guided” experience. According to the Spanish historian’s analysis, the
spectators were encouraged to examine their own role in relationship to the whole of
society, but they were also guided to understand that role in a fixed way. The spectacular
festivals led the spectators to understand the hierarchy that existed in early modern
Catholic society as desirable and even natural.
Maravall and Zamora’s awareness of the utility of baroque spectacle to either
question or reaffirm the makeup of Hispanic society as a whole leads me back to the
definition of spectacle as put forward by Guy Debord in 1967, which puts images at the
center of all social interaction (4). In a move that echoes Maravall’s “guided”
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interpretation of the spectacle, Debord argues, “The spectacle is the existing order’s
uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue” (24). In the early modern
period, the Catholic Church’s public processions, fiery sermons, and impassioned
artwork served to reinvigorate the public’s loyalty toward Catholicism, and consequently
the Spanish Empire, as the two went hand-in-hand in the Hispanic world of the CounterReformation. The Capuchin nuns’ text contributes to the spectacle of the Catholic Church
in the diminished Spanish Empire by describing the lavish religious festivals produced in
honor of the traveling nuns.
The ritual of the procession of María Rosa and her Capuchin sisters from one
convent to the next is repeated multiple times throughout the text. Starting when the
women first leave their monastery in Madrid, María Rosa and Josepha Victoria explain,
“Salimos de la Iglesia con gran trabajo porque la gente no nos daba lugar” (28). Later
when the women travel through Toledo, they add, “Llegamos a esta ciudad adonde salió
mucha gente a recibirnos” (30). This pattern continues throughout the text and culminates
in the great scene when the nuns finally arrive in Lima. The narrator describes the
controlled chaos of their reception:
Desde que entramos en el coche de su Excelencia nos vino acompañando su
guardia, y bien fue menester este resguardo porque era una confusión la mucha
gente que nos cercaba; a que se juntó repique general fuegos y luminarias que
veníamos confundidas de ver el recibimiento que nos hacia esta ilustre ciudad.
Todos clamaban por vernos y así entramos con las cortinas abiertas llevando en
medio el Santísimo Cristo; no se contentaban con ver los bultos y algunos se
determinaban (si no lo embarazara la guardia) a levantarnos los velos. (185–86)
Throughout María Rosa’s travel account, but especially in this last quote, we are
witnesses to baroque religious spectacles. The narrator highlights the public’s desire to
see the religious icons, with the nuns at the heart of the image. The crowd gets carried
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away with religious fervor and curiosity, and it is no longer sufficient to see the general
outline of the nuns. Some spectators even go so far as to try to lift the nuns’ veils. In this
moment, the spectator creates his own spectacle, and the rest of the crowd would be
enthralled with the possibility to see the face that is supposed to be reserved for God. The
spectator becomes part of the spectacle, while the nuns look on, momentarily joining the
realm of the spectator.
Although the bystanders are not allowed to touch the nuns, or see their faces, their
actions––both sanctioned and illicit––played a crucial role in the construction of
spectacle. Festivals, ceremonies, and processions were an essential part of the urban
atmosphere both in Spain and in its colonies throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and into the eighteenth century. These spectacles surrounded the spectators
with an overwhelming combination of sights and sounds. M.a Pilar Monteagudo Robledo
describes the “ruptura de la rutina” and the “alteración de la realidad especial urbana”
with decorations, lights, sounds, and temporary structures. Ignacio Arellano Ayuso gives
us a detailed look at the religious festivals in Madrid, which he says start with “volteo
general de campanas, música de tambores, clarines y chirimías, y gran despliegue
nocturno de luminarias y fuegos artificiales” (197). Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru notes that the
festivals and processions on the other side of the Atlantic followed much the same
formula, but with the added element of the encouraged participation of the indigenous
groups. Gonzalbo Aizpuro comments on the impact of the music, dancing, and fireworks
when she offers the following perceptive summary: “Como una brillante coreografía
teatral, la fiesta ofrecía la imagen de un conjunto heterogéneo y abigarrado, con la
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aparente espontaneidad de expresiones de entusiasmo, fervor o alborozo, que respondían
a un orden propio” (20).
To emphasize the theatrical nature of these spectacles, the text frames the image
that the women present with carriage curtains. These curtains add to the drama of the
image of forbidden religious women’s bodies hidden behind habits, but paraded through
chaotic public scenes. In Chapter IV, while giving details about how the women traveled,
María Rosa praises her confessor and the coachmen for protecting the nuns from prying
eyes. She says that the coachmen would regularly warn the nuns to close the curtains
when there were other passengers. During one particularly exciting incident, the abbess
notes:
Este buen hombre como le teníamos encargado nos guardase un día lo hizo con
tanto empeño que dejó corridas a muchas personas, digo a muchas señoras.
Porque pasando por cerca de un lugarcito donde estaba la corregidora y otras
hidalgas esperándonos en el camino, así que las columbraron nos avisaron para
cerrar el coche, y picaron con tal fuerza las mulas que las hizo ir volando, y todas
las señoras corriendo y gritando para que parase, pero no hicieron ningún caso
hasta que las dejaron muy distantes. (45–46)
This passage, which has the drivers frantically racing away from the noble spectators to
protect the nuns’ privacy, stands in contrast to one of the previous passages that relates
the nuns’ arrival in Lima “con las cortinas abiertas” (186). Zamora’s elaboration of the
use of curtains in baroque art helps us better understand the seemingly small detail of the
open or closed curtains. In her analysis of baroque painting and sculpture, Zamora notes
the proclivity of artists to incorporate curtains “[d]raped gracefully to the side of a
painted scene or framing the windows of a façade, sometimes held by angels” to set the
scene for the spectacle framed within the work of art (32). She argues, “[T]he curtains
point to the role of re-presentation––staging, spectacle––in Catholic Counter195
Reformation practice, and to the nature of the image as artifice” (32). In her description
of the arrival in Lima, María Rosa frames the nuns with the carriage curtains, as if they
were on a stage. The outline of the five nuns in their particular Capuchin habits carefully
covered by their veils and surrounding the image of Christ is staged. Clearly, the women,
probably with the help of their confessor, had thought of the image they wanted to project
upon their entrance to their new home city. This description of the nuns in their habits
framed by the carriage curtains functions as artifice. It is an image repeated not only
throughout this text, but also in other paintings and oral and written texts propagated by
the Church during the Counter-Reformation. It is important to note, however, that the
curtains do not keep the public from interacting with the nuns and the spectacle they
present. Like the convent walls and the habit, the barrier that the curtains construct is not
fixed or impermeable.
María Rosa and Josepha Victoria offer details of the active celebrations that
follow them throughout the Iberian Peninsula and across to Argentina and Peru. In the
final chapter of the travel tale, the nuns describe the spectacle leading up to their
enclosure in the new convent:
La víspera hubo repique general con fuegos y luminarias que era para alabar a
Dios quien parece en algún modo quiso concurrir con demostraciones del Cielo al
regocijo que había en la tierra, pues se vio en él desde las cuatro de la tarde y duró
hasta las ocho de la noche una hermosísima palma cuyo tronco salí de una
nubecita del color de nuestro hábito y junto a ella una cruz de estrellas. Las
Madres Trinitarias nos llamaron para que la viésemos porque a todos hizo gran
novedad y reparaban que del tronco salían cinco cogollos hermosos que esparcían
sus ramas con gran variedad y resplandor, y decía la gente que también el cielo
había puesto luminarias que me causó hasta confusión el oírlo. Al Señor Virrey le
avisaron de dicha palma y dijo muy regocijado: no se asusten pues es señal de
triunfo, en muestra del que ha conseguido Dios contra el Demonio que tanto ha
procurado embarazar esta fundación. (198–99)
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The Capuchin travel account adheres to the general characteristics of procession and
festival. The narrator is overwhelmed by lights and sounds. According to Angela
Ndalianis, the “baroque perceptual regime” engages as many of the senses as possible (n.
pag.). In the spectacles that the nuns narrate, the women, the other nobles and clergymen
who take part in the processions, and the individual members of the audience see the
luminarias, they hear the repique, they feel the amazement at the palma in the sky. As
Ndalianis points out, the boundaries between spectator and spectacle are broken down.
She argues, “[O]ne space extends into another, one medium into the next, the spectator
into the spectacle, and the spectacle into the spectator,” and this produces, “a
participatory, thrilling experience that makes our very being quivers with exhilaration”
(n. pag.). In the Capuchins’ text, the crowd members are sometimes so “exhilarated” by
the spectacle of the traveling nuns that they are moved to be a part of the spectacle.
In the sense that the procession reaches out to the spectator and calls upon him or
her to participate in the display, these festivals require an active audience. Echoing Gilles
Deleuze’s theories in The Fold, Ndalianis argues that baroque representations refuse to
respect the frame, that is to say, there is “a greater flow between the inside and the
outside” of the representation or spectacle, and this flow shifts the center, creating “a
special disorientation that emphasizes kinetic motion” (n. pag.). Peter Wollen agrees that,
“the Baroque preferred coloristic impressions to the delineation of outline, the curved to
the straight, the oval to the rectangle, the dynamic to the static, and decentered
compositions to give them more tension and energy” (11). During the Capuchin nuns’
processions in Lima, which seem to be the most extravagant festivals, the authors narrate
scenes of disorientation and chaos. The authors draw the reader’s attention to the music
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and the lights, and then we are given a description of the nuns with their habits
surrounding the statue of Christ, and later the narrator calls our attention to the throngs of
people, the heat they exude, and the sounds from their applause. The spectacles that the
nuns reproduce in their relación are decentered events that fold the reader into the space
of the spectacle and demand what Ndalianis refers to as “active audience address and
participation” (n. pag.). The audience’s participation in spectacle occurs when a member
of the public tries to lift the nuns’ veils, or when the noblewomen, who are disappointed
when the nuns close their carriage curtains and race away, give up the pretense of
decorum and chase after the carriage. In these moments, the focus of the text shifts from
the nuns to the public who has gathered to see them.
At the same time that the nuns narrate processions with active audience
participation, the women also include spectacles where they hope for a more passive
audience. As the nuns are leaving their Dutch captors, for example, the narrator notes,
“Al salir de la cámara, [the Dutch Captain] salió por delante, hizo descubrir a todos, y yo
tenía gran consuelo no porque a nosotras nos venerasen, sino que como llevábamos el
Santísimo Christo en forma de procesión, deseaba adorasen a Su Majestad aquellos
bárbaros para que en algún modo le obligasen a perdonarlos” (84). In this case, besides
removing their hats, María Rosa does not narrate an active audience. She would prefer
that the Dutch corsairs simply watch and be moved by the procession. In this passage, the
nuns use spectacle for “its power to sway the spectator, by its rhetorical and
propagandistic force” (Wollen 11). In their reflection on early modern theatre as
spectacle, Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis Martín-Estudillo draw on Maravall’s
observations to argue, “[I]t is the repetitive character of these ‘mass-oriented’ products
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that propel the spectator into the realm of the familiar, facilitating a non-discriminating
reception” (xvii). If we consider the repetitive nature of the spectacle of procession in the
Capuchin text, we might see evidence of a more “non-discriminating” spectator. Each
time the five traveling nuns leave one convent, they are sent away with a great show of
music, hugs, and tears on the part of the nuns who acted as hosts. As the travelers step
outside, they are met with groups of onlookers, and again, upon their arrival in the next
city, the women describe the overwhelming crowds of people who watch them arrive at
the next convent. The authors repeat this pattern throughout the text, making the reader
familiar with the pattern, and possibly creating a more passive reception.
The masses of people that appear to see the traveling nuns are accustomed to the
repetition of religious celebrations and processions. Before the nuns arrive, the public
knows what images they are going to see: a suffering Christ, religious women completely
covered by the drapery of their habits, and lavish features that show the grandeur of the
Catholic Church, e.g. the fine carriage that carries the Capuchins into Lima. In these
repetitive moments, the nuns are preparing the crowds and the reader to notice the power
and influence of the Catholic Church as well as the elevated position of the Capuchin
nuns within the institutional hierarchy. To complicate this notion of an active or passive
audience, Spadaccini and Martín-Estudillo note, “The success of any guidance had to
contend not only with an appropriate receptivity on the part of subjects being guided but
also with those who were creating their own spaces of resistance: those who relied on
self-guidance” (xxv–xxvi). The spectator and the reader of the nuns’ tale, instead of
focusing on the Catholic Church’s influence, might fixate on the image of a group of
women traveling together outside of a home or a convent. The receptor may see women
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that interrupt the normative gender hierarchy of early modern Spain and its colonies. The
spectators may see women who are strong enough to withstand a treacherous journey, an
encounter with enemy corsairs, and extreme weather––an image that contradicts
hegemonic gender ideologies that created a weak and cowardly “ideal” woman. Through
the narration of spectacle and travel to the New World, the text both hides and reveals the
nuns’ authority, depending on the reader’s perspective.
During the processions discussed in this section, María Rosa and her companions
know they are being watched, and as such, they perform as expected. Seen from the
outside, they are artifice, or an image used repeatedly to bolster the image of the Church.
The convent walls along with the habits, veils, and carriage curtains play a significant
role in representing the nuns as spectacle. On the other hand, the nuns must also negotiate
with themselves and with their readers their own position or status within the hierarchy of
the Catholic Church and Hispanic society. While the rest of the public is contemplating
their place and their importance within the Spanish Empire––or as Zamora so succinctly
described it, “the relation of parts to wholes” in the fragmented and unstable seventeenth
and early-eighteenth centuries (185)––the Capuchin travelers are doing the same. The
text establishes the nuns’ authority through the spectacles created around specific images
of the nuns carefully enclosed in their habits. These images include the nuns
accompanied by the most elite members of Hispanic society and images of the nuns
interactive with religious women from other orders.
In the previous section, I highlighted the role of the Capuchin nuns’ processions
and their texts in the imperial project. As Linda A. Curcio-Nagy affirms, “[T]hese
European ritual forms allowed Spaniards to take symbolic ‘possession’ of a new society”
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(276). Moreover, these processions, and as an extension, the nuns’ text, allowed those
who exercised power in the viceroyalty of Peru to reaffirm that power and to reiterate
their personal or familial relationships to both the King and the Pope. As María Rosa and
Josepha Victoria narrate their first steps on Peruvian soil, they observe, “Fueron muchos
de todos estados al navío a darnos la bienvenida y para sacarnos de él, el señor General
don Jorge de Villilonga, Conde de la Cueva, y hoy Virrey de Santa Fe. Este caballero
(por orden del señor Virrey) nos tenía prevenido hospicio en el Palacio que tiene su
Excelencia en el Callao” (180). This is an important moment––an “image” in Debord’s
terms––that demonstrates the relationship between the Viceroy and the nuns, the Spanish
state and the Catholic Church. In the case of the five traveling Capuchin nuns, María
Rosa and Josepha Victoria are careful in their narration of the spectacle they present to
the public. While they disclose the details of their processions, I suggest that the nuns
carefully choose which names to mention, and possibly, which names to leave out.
Although the women name-drop several important people who accompany them in these
moments of celebration, the nuns themselves are the allure for the crowds. In the
travelogue, the women repeatedly acknowledge their role as images for the public to see
as part of the religious spectacle. There is a note of pride in María Rosa’s descriptions of
the masses of people who follow the women just to catch a glimpse of the traveling nuns.
In her introduction to the Crónica del convento de Nuestra Señora de las Nieves
Santa Brígida de México, Asunción Lavrin highlights the role of foundational texts and
their authors in the organization of power in the New World. Lavrin argues, “[L]os
trabajos y sufrimientos de las fundadoras, así como la generosidad de sus patrones
valieron la pena, porque extendieron su orden para glorificar a Dios en estas tierras,
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abriéndola a las novohispanas” (“Introducción histórica” 13). The imperial project saw
the presence of various churches, convents, and religious orders in Mexico and Peru as
evidence that the spiritual colonization of these regions was successful. In highlighting
their presence in Lima, the Capuchin nuns were doing their part for the Spanish Empire.
At the same time, their extravagant entrance into Lima, accompanied by powerful
members of the Viceroy’s inner-circle and members of the Spanish nobility living in
Lima, asserts the nuns elevated position in Peruvian society. The five protagonists have
recently arrived from Spain, and they have a close relationship with the Viceroy. Their
processions and their determination to be seen emphasize their privileged position and
help to construct their authority.
Even inside the convent walls of other orders, the Capuchin habit ensures that our
five travelers stand out in a crowd. The particular rules surrounding the Capuchin habit
allow the traveling nuns to both connect with, but also to differentiate themselves from,
the nuns in the convents they visit along their journey. As an observable symbol of the
women’s call to live a cloistered life devoted to God, the habit is also a symbol of
common ground between María Rosa and her companions and the nuns from other
orders, in addition to the colegiales that the women find in Lima. At the same time, the
austere lifestyle regulating the norms for the Capuchin habit sets our five travelers apart.
In some ways, it seems as if the Capuchin habit makes the itinerant nuns superior to their
more rooted and stable hosts. Sarah Owens explains, “The nuns wore a brown or grey
habit made of coarse wool. They had only one change of under tunic made of sackcloth
(a very scratchy material conducive to penance) . . . The nuns also wore a wimple, which
covered their head and neck, and a veil as well, when they were approached by the
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secular population” (“Introduction” 8). This dress differs dramatically from the clothing
worn by some of the Portuguese nuns that the travelers meet after their time in captivity.
The narrator explains:
Los trajes de estos conventos son muy majestuosos; que harto sentíamos ver hijas
de mi Madre Santa Clara tan adornadas, que aunque a la vista causa gusto, a
nuestros corazones nos daban gran pena: pero en cuantos conventos hemos
entrado no hemos visto cosa más garbosa de traje. He dicho todo esto por dar
alguna noticia aunque es muy sucinta para lo que ello es en realidad. (91)
The Capuchin nuns probably could have asked for permission to wear something
different during their long journey, or at least to bring along more than one set of
clothing, but, as Owens points out, “[María Rosa] is proud of their poverty and the fact
that they have only one habit for the entire three-year journey” (“Introduction” 8). The
nuns’ clothing, or the way that they appear on the surface, helps the women to classify
one another. The habit allows the Capuchins to negotiate their own position in the Church
hierarchy through a narration of their own austerity in comparison to other supposedly
discalced orders. The emphasis placed on the Capuchin habit in María Rosa’s text brings
to the foreground the Capuchin order’s poverty and devotion to internal contemplation,
and the nuns’ suffering. Moreover, the habit tells both the people that María Rosa and
company meet along their journey and the public reading their story that these traveling
women are not just any traveling women. They have the authority and protection required
to travel outside of their cloistered space.
Through the narration of travel, the Capuchin nuns’ text demonstrates the
potential of the image of the Capuchin habit to arrange social relationships and to
position individuals and institutions in Hispanic society. Francisco Sánchez and Nicholas
Spadaccini contend, “[P]ower is achieved through confrontation, as the individual
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becomes aware of being both the subject and object of power. Conscious of the
precarious situation in which he finds himself, and of the relativity of language as a
transmitter of truth, the individual searches for strategies which lend themselves to
negotiation within the socio-political spheres” (65). Through an analysis of the habit, we
have been able to track the nuns’ “precarious situation” as both “subject and object of
power.” As members of the cloister and participant in religious festivals and processions,
the nuns’ presence helps to reinforce the strengths of the Catholic state. The image of the
formless nuns in their habits suffering along their long and dangerous journey to Peru
guides the public and helps to naturalize their relations to the Church and Spanish
society. At the same time, the women negotiate their role and position within the
processions and they narrate these moments using techniques that highlight their elite
status in order to form their own subjectivities in relation to that society. The women
write about the habit in a way that protects their orthodoxy and their chastity while at the
same time giving the women authority. In my reading of the nuns’ text, they are careful
to assert their orthodoxy, but this does not detract from the constant presence of the
always threatened and always dangerous female bodies in the text. In the next few pages,
I will show that María Rosa and Josepha Victoria’s text employs the salacious image of
the threatened female religious body to build tension, capture the reader’s attention, and
emphasize the hardships the women willing faced and defeated during their journey.
Seducing the Baroque Public with the Threatened Religious Body
In the previous section, I pointed out certain expectations that the baroque public
would have regarding religious images during processions and other fiestas. It is true that
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certain formulas develop with the constant repetition of baroque spectacle. The same is
true of the texts written about religious spectacle, especially those written by nuns. The
public would have expectations about what they would find in a nun’s text, and those
themes included the feminine behavior described and the humility articulated throughout
the narration. However, it is also true that while repetition was required and certain
formulaic behaviors developed, the baroque period also valued suspense and surprise.
Indeed, Maravall points out, “La técnica del ‘suspense’ se relaciona con la utilización de
los recursos de lo movible y cambiante, de los equilibrios inestables, de lo inacabado, de
lo extraño y raro, de lo difícil, de lo nuevo y antes no visto, etc., etc.” (441). Suspense is
an integral part of the baroque dynamic, and it is what keeps the public interested in the
images, art, literature, and the fiestas. In this section I suggest that María Rosa’s narration
of the Capuchin nuns’ voyage incorporates moments of suspense especially related to the
religious women’s bodies. In this way, the text closely aligns with other tales of travel
from the baroque period and beyond, and while men’s travel writing also included
suspense, the suspense in women’s travel writing most often centered on questions of sex
and honor. By the end of the Capuchin travel text, the nuns’ bodies have been attacked in
a variety of ways, and yet, the text seems to emphasize the women’s endurance and
strength over their weakness thereby proving the nuns capable of their quest.
The nuns’ travel text captures the audience’s attention through the use of
suspense, uncertainty, and anxiety, all of which are common mechanisms of baroque art.
In Lope de Vega’s Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (1609), the canonical
playwright notes the importance of playing with the audience’s expectations and not
revealing the ending until the last act. He explains, “En el acto primero ponga el caso, /
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en el segundo enlace los sucesos / de suerte que hasta el medio del tercero / apenas
juzgue nadie en lo que para; / engañe siempre el gusto y, donde vea / que se deja entender
alguna cosa, / de muy lejos de aquello que promete” (298–304). The element of suspense
is equally important in other genres, genres not performed live on a stage. In the first part
of Don Quijote (1605), for example, the narrator ends one chapter in the middle of a
sword fight (I, 137–38), or he introduces Zoraida at the inn in her Moorish clothing––a
presence which requires explanation (I, 461). In Cervantes’s masterpiece, the reader
constantly finds herself uncertain, anxious, or in need of further explanation. The same is
true for the plastic arts. In the quintessential baroque painting Las meninas (1656) by
Diego Velazquez, the receptor is left in suspense regarding various aspects of the work.
What is Velazquez painting? Where are the King and Queen? What is our own role in the
scene? Who is the man in the back of the painting and where is he going? These doubts
enhance the receptor’s interest in the image. The same is true for María Rosa’s account.
A large part of the suspense in the Capuchin travel text has to do with the slow
and subtle unveiling of the female religious body. I have already discussed in length the
use of the habit and veil in María Rosa and Josepha Victoria’s text, and to a certain
extent, the narrator does insist on hiding, or enclosing, the female religious body. I posit
that while the habit obscures the nuns’ bodies from the public’s view, the narrator
simultaneously paints their portrait in great detail. With her words, María Rosa outlines
her own body’s shape as well as those of the nuns that travel with her. She describes the
food that the women eat, and the tears that roll down their faces at the prospect of eating
that which is normally prohibited (41–42). She sketches the silhouette of overlapping
limbs when the nuns are forced to sleep together in unusually small spaces (49–50, 158).
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During one memorable incident when the travelers are visiting another convent, María
Rosa falls on the stairs, and she writes of the extent of her injuries. She writes:
La Madre Priora por la mañana nos llevó a ver la huerta que era muy linda, y
estando en ella, nos llamaron al locutorio, y para ir a él se pasaba por una escalera
algo oscura por un lado de ella se iba a la bóveda. Yo con la priesa y la poca
práctica del Convento, me caí y fui rodando a caer entre la tumba y hacheros;
procuré levantarme lo mejor que pude buscando la luz para poder salir en busca
de las religiosas, que cuando me vieron tan llena de tierra y telarañas, tuvieron
gran pesar de haber dejado la puerta abierta. . . . Me hicieron algunos remedios, y
les pedí no dijesen nada a nuestro padre, porque no se detuviese el viaje. Yo
quedé muy bien golpeada, y tan descompuesta que parecía me iba a desmayar
cada instante y lo lastimado de un pie y cardenales me duró más de un mes. (125)
In this passage, María Rosa’s readers have access to a description of her body’s
movements and mistakes, as well as the marks left on her body after the fall. This is one
of the many precarious situations that the nuns experience because of their movement
outside of their Capuchin convent walls. María Rosa acknowledges the little practice she
has with this kind of movement outside the cloister and how that inexperience contributes
to her mishap. Nevertheless, the abbess refuses to halt their journey or to be a hindrance
in any way.
Scholars like Kristine Ibsen and Asunción Lavrin (Brides of Christ) argue that the
female religious body was often a palpable presence in autobiographical texts as well as
biographies written by male clergy members about exceptional nuns. Ibsen explains,
“Framed and confined by both the physical enclosure of the convent and the textual
prison of language, the female body became a site of contestation and control as women
attempted to map out their own corporeal and discursive space” (“The Hiding Places of
My Power” 252). She observes that this tension involving control over the female body
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often took the form of self-inflicted pain (“The Hiding Places of My Power” 252).59
Drawing on Ibsen’s argument, Stephanie Kirk connects the self-abuse and denial of the
body to the Church’s strategies to isolate women. She argues:
Church authorities actually encouraged extreme manifestations of penitence, such
as these acts of self-mortification and abjection, as long as the confessor first
granted permission. Acts of extreme penitence, as described by some New World
nuns, served to isolate the nun from other members of the community and thus
fulfilled the Church’s desire to keep the woman in solitude. Moreover, a confessor
whose spiritual daughter committed acts of extreme self-mortification would gain
reflected glory. These acts, when committed in writing at the instigation of the
confessor, became celebrated in society. (39, note 7)
However, not all religiosas followed this path to notoriety, acceptance, and authority.
Kirk suggests that Sor Juana’s writing subtly undermined patriarchal representations of
the female body in pain, which served to either sexualize the suffering female body or to
divorce the body from the mind. Kirk argues, “Through poetic descriptions of Katherine
of Alexandria and Lucretia, Sor Juana forges a bond between female suffering and the
attainment of knowledge and, in doing so, rewrites the meaning inscribed on a female
body so often cast as a site of weakness and lust” (37). María Rosa and Josepha Victoria
use images of the suffering female body in a similar way. Although Owens notes that
some members of the Capuchin order did participate in self-mortification, the authors of
our Capuchin travel text never once include evidence of these practices (“Introduction”
8). Instead, María Rosa and her sisters emphasize the grueling circumstances they face
while traveling across the Atlantic, circumstances they never would have encountered
had it not been for their decision to take part in this foundational voyage. The nuns’ pain
accompanies the women throughout their travels helping the women to construct
59
For an example of extreme self-harm, see Kathleen Ann Myers descriptions of Rosa de Lima’s
penance (Neither Saints Nor Sinners 26–27).
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themselves as subjects with experiences, knowledge, and authority. While the Church
encouraged extreme penitence as a method to isolate women, the Capuchin nuns’
suffering, in fact, creates a sense of community among the five travelers. The itinerant
nuns travel and suffer together for three years, and in the process, they form strong bonds
of unity and sorority.
The reader knows from the beginning of the nuns’ text that the women do finally
make it to Lima and they successfully found a Capuchin convent for future generations of
Creole and Spanish women. To begin their story, María Rose and Josepha Victoria write,
“A petición de mis queridas madres y hermanas de esta Casa de Jesús, María, y Joseph
escribo el viaje que hicimos desde Madrid hasta esta ciudad de Lima, la prisión y otros
trabajos” (2). Yet, we do not know the details of the obstacles the women face along the
way, and we have to be sure that their honor is intact when they finally arrive at their
destination. The narrator keeps her readers in suspense by detailing the dangers that
threaten the religious women during their journey. Sometimes these dangers relate to the
weather or Spain’s tensions with other European powers. Other times, the nuns are faced
with a sexual threat.
Unlike Catalina de Erauso, whose performance of virginity is explicit, the
Capuchin nuns never make direct references to their sexuality. Due to their status as highranking women in a religious order, they do not have to submit to medical examinations
to prove their chastity. Neither do the women write about explicitly sexual, or otherwise
carnal, relationships with Christ. Instead of invoking their bodies and sexualities in these
more common ways, María Rosa and Josepha Victoria include moments when the nuns’
purity is threatened, but ultimately unharmed. One example of this threat comes when the
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nuns are freed from their Dutch captives. The abbess explains, “Yo quedé para la última
y despidiéndome del capitán me tomó la mano y me la quiso besar, pero yo la retiré y le
pedí unas laminitas que estaban en el altar, que pues, no le podían servir, me las enviase,
y lo ejecutó” (83). María Rosa is the last nun left with her captor, and when the Dutch
Captain tries to kiss her hand, she pulls away at the last minute. Not only does the nun
prove herself to be prudent and vigilant in her purity, she also uses the opportunity to
negotiate the return of some of the Spanish belongings that were taken during their time
in captivity. The narration of this event leads the reader to wonder if there is anything
María Rosa chooses not to say about her interaction with the Captain. Given this
suggestive moment, the reader is left to speculate if the nuns had any other close
encounters with men during their journey.
In Mary Elizabeth Perry’s essay, “Women’s Words, Women’s Power: Conflict
and Resistance in Early Modern Spain,” she proposes reading texts authored by women
using the palimpsest model, paying attention to silences and multiple levels of meaning in
women’s words. She argues that silences and a state of incompleteness are inherent
qualities of all texts, and sometimes the silences can tell scholars more than the actual
written words (16). While María Rosa and Josepha Victoria do not write about their
chastity like Erauso does, the nuns’ sexuality plays an integral part in the text through
these silences. After the nuns are released from captivity, they must travel through
Portugal back to Spain. At one point in the voyage, the abbess is cut off from the other
members of her party. She writes:
Prosiguióse la jornada y como en aquella tierra de tantas quebradas y los
caminantes poco prácticos en ella se me perdieron todos, y en más de seis horas
no vi a nadie de la comitiva, solo el calesero, que era Portugués, me acompañaba,
y de cuando en cuando sin hablarme palabra daba gran envión a la calesa para que
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se enderezase, que me asustaba muchísimo. Todo era encomendarme a Nuestro
Señor, viéndome tan sola que no tenía más consuelo que llevar allí el Santo
Christo. (114-15)
The nun remembers and recounts her travels alone through dangerous geography with
only a Portuguese carriage driver. She writes about being alone with this man for over six
hours, yet she does not emphasize her purity. For María Rosa, it is enough to say that
Christ was with her, and she left her fate in his hands. While the silences tell us that the
narrator maintained her distance, at least physically, from the Portuguese man, the whole
story offers her public the tension, suspense, and potential for scandal that an effective
spectacle requires. This episode is a spectacle of fear and taboo fantasy for the nuns’
readers.
Both María Rosa and Josepha Victoria could have erased these episodes from the
Capuchin nuns’ travelogue. These interactions with the Dutch Captain and the Portuguese
carriage driver are hardly acceptable experiences for nuns accustomed to living their lives
behind cloister walls and having no contact with outsiders, especially men not associated
with the Church. So why, then, do the nuns decide to include these incidents of suspense
and sexual danger in their account? I suggest that one of the reasons, either consciously
or unconsciously, is the nuns’ desire to attract the public. The nuns would have been well
acquainted with the literature and art of their time, and they would be aware of the
audience’s desire for thrilling spectacles. In addition to writing a travel tale filled with
intrigue, danger, and suspense, the nuns are writing about a specific task that they were
able to successfully complete. I argue that the narrators include episodes with challenges
and danger to make the reader see their feats as amazing, and to solidify their position of
authority.
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In addition to the threat of sexual impropriety, María Rosa and Josepha Victoria
narrate moments that call into question the austere lifestyle that defined the Capuchin
identity. As the women travel through Spain, Portugal, and the southern cone of South
America, they stop to spend the night at various convents. Sometimes the Capuchin order
is not established in the city they are visiting, and the women must stay with a lesscontrolled order of nuns. In some cases, the traveling nuns do not stay behind cloister
walls at all, and they must instead lodge at a country inn or in the house of a noble
family. In these instances the women come into contact with all manner of luxury and
frivolity. The reader has to wonder if the nuns would be corrupted, or otherwise
negatively affected, by their contact with these undesirable influences. For example,
during their stay at a Portuguese convent, the Spanish Capuchins are shocked when they
see a number of stylish men inside the convent walls. They soon realize, however, that
these men are actually noble Portuguese women visiting their religious family members
in hopes of meeting the now-famous Capuchin travelers. The noblewomen wear
“pelucas,” “casacas a la francesa,” and “corbatas” (104). In another example of the
travelers’ contact with frivolity, at one convent they are welcomed by theatrical works
performed by the sisters they are visiting. María Rosa and her companions narrate their
shock at this spectacular display, providing layers of spectacle within the Capuchin text.
Of course, the protagonists decline to participate in the show (103). This spectacle within
a spectacle is what Angela Ndalianis refers to when she argues that the “baroque
perceptual regime” is characterized by a “multiplication of centers” (n. pag.). At times in
the Capuchin text, the nuns are no longer the center of the spectacle. The center moves,
and the nuns become the spectators. For the reader of the travel tale, these multiple and
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moving focal points leave us disoriented and struggling to make sense of the spectacle
that the authors present. It has the same effect on María Rosa and her sisters who have a
decidedly ambiguous reaction to their host convent’s theatrical representation. While
María Rosa and her companions seem to almost enjoy the entertainment and are flattered
by the attention, the narrator is also careful to note their disapproval.
The Capuchin nuns, as members of a discalced order, lived a life of poverty and
simplicity. The women did not need a dowry to enter the convent, and once they had
taken the habit, they were expected to renounce their previous identity, including any
nice clothing, slaves or servants, decadent food, or other more foolish forms of
entertainment.60 Some readers may have been concerned by the nuns’ account of travel
beyond the Capuchin walls and their inevitable contact with that which was generally
forbidden by the discalced orders. Furthermore, in this period there was a stigma
surrounding those that traveled from Europe to the New World. Amaya FernándezFernández notes, “Los españoles, y europeos en general, tenían la convicción de que
quienes venían voluntariamente a América debían tener algún motivo para dejar España y
con mayor razón en el caso de mujeres solteras” (85).61 The nuns have to be careful not to
appear too willing to travel across the Atlantic Ocean. Their motives could be called into
question. It may appear that they want to escape the suffocating rules of the convent walls
and participate more in the decadence of secular society.
60
Iriarte Lázaro details the evolution of the Capuchin order in Europe and the Americas. For more
information on the order as an austere order, see Chapter 1 “Un renuevo del tallo vigoroso de la orden de
Santa Clara” (Las capuchinas. Pasado y presente 9–15). See also Owens’s “Introduction” (4–10).
61
This is not just the case for traveling nuns. In other literature of the period we see a distrust of
women’s motives when they decide to travel and cross geographical and cultural boundaries. Take for
example Zoraida’s father in Cervantes’s “The Captive’s Tale,” or Doña Catalina’s father in La gran
sultana. We could also consider Captain Erauso’s reaction to his daughter’s escape from the convent in
Pérez de Montalbán’s play.
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Likewise, it was believed that people changed during their travels to the New
World, and this change was not always viewed in a positive light. Elisa Sampson Vera
Tudela cites the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún, who argues, “[L]os que son naturales
españoles, si no tienen mucho aviso, a pocos años andados de su llegada a esta tierra se
hacen otros” (qtd. in Colonial Angels ix). According to Sampson Vera Tudela, although
the nuns were kept within convent walls as much as possible, they were not exempt from
the “contaminating” presence of America and its people (ix). The weather, the distance
from Madrid and Rome, and the contact with the Other could have a damaging effect on
Spaniards. In the case of María Rosa and her four companions, their travels into the
outside world and their interactions with less-strict convents and nobles with extravagant
lifestyles could make them question their commitment to the Capuchin order. María Rosa
and Josepha Victoria detail the nuns’ experiences with these more decadent lifestyles, but
they are careful to contrast the licentious behavior against the Capuchin nuns’ continued
desire to live a life filled with poverty and prayer. The threat of frivolity and luxury is
added to the sexual threat in the nuns’ text. These challenges are present and attract the
reader’s attention, but, according to the text, the nuns painstakingly guard against these
contaminating influences.
No matter the nuns’ rhetorical efforts to remain unchanged by their shift in
location, they are marked by their travels. As I mentioned above, the women must endure
many challenges, especially physical discomfort, during their voyage. In addition to
pirates, unwanted contact with strange men, and the necessary deviations from their
normal lifestyle, the women suffer from bed bugs and seasickness, among various other
hardships. Speaking of the bed bugs, María Rosa notes, “Estos de día no se ve ninguno,
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pero por la mañana amanecimos llenas de ronchas” (162). Just as the women leave
Seville for the New World, the narrator describes the nuns’ severe seasickness at the
moment when they became aware of three other ships in the distance:
Por la mañana se vieron con más claridad, y todos pensaban eran moros con que
no es ponderable la tribulación que hubo con esta [voz?].62 Yo puedo decir de mí
que se me quería salir el corazón de su lugar, y más viendo a tres de mis
compañeras medio muertas, tendidas en el suelo tan mareadas que era lastima.
(139–40)
In these passages we see and feel clearly the toll that the expedition takes on the female
religious body. Later María Rosa describes the discomfort of the mule rides, especially
considering her own rotund body shape. She mentions the fact that the nuns were not
accustomed to riding on mules and neither were they used to the extreme heat and the
threat of the sun’s rays. She recalls that the party was forced to stop and rest for a day,
“porque dos de mis compañeras a una le dio un recio crecimiento y a la otra se le hinchó
la cara notablemente” (164). She admits, “De mis Madres Compañeras las que más
dábamos que hacer era la Madre Bernarda y yo por malas ginetas, y a mí se me agregaba
el ser tan gruesa que las mulas luego se cansaban” (165). Although in their narration of
the voyage María Rosa and Josepha Victoria downplay any change that may have
occurred regarding the women’s belief system and moral way of life, there is no doubt
that the women suffered during their three-year odyssey. As we will see by the end of this
chapter, this suffering inevitably leaves its mark on the women and their text.
The abuse of the female religious body plays many roles in the text, including
attracting the audience through monstrous descriptions. According to Maravall, “El gusto
por lo difícil, que alcanza tal preferencia en la mentalidad barroca, da un papel destacado,
62
According to Vargas Ugarte, the Lima manuscript has “la tribulación que hubo en esta vez”
(339).
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en la estimación de cualquier obra que se juzgue, a las cualidades de novedad, rareza,
invención, extravagancia, ruptura de normas, etc.” (449). The historian argues that in
other areas of Spanish society including religion, philosophy, and the economy, the
system of control and power created by the Church and the Monarchy rejected any sign
of novelty or change. The Spanish public was filled with a sense of tension and anxiety
when faced with the idea of instability or alterations of any kind. However, in early
modern literature and art, that which was new, rare, and monstrous was desirable.
Maravall concludes, “Por eso la novedad interesa tanto al escritor barroco. Es una manera
de hacer tragar, endulzadamente, deleitosamente . . . todo un sistema de reforzamiento de
la tradición monárquico-señorial” (453). In María Rosa’s text, the reader will find more
than a few moments where the monstrous image of the women’s bodies speaks clearly to
a baroque interest in that which is rare, shocking, and never seen before. After the
treacherous journey by mule through parts of the untamed American landscape, the
battered nuns finally arrive at the place where they are to spend the night. The narrator
explains, “El cura deste paraje tenía orden del Señor Obispo para hospedarnos, y lo hizo
muy cumplidamente dos días que descansamos en su casa, y toda su familia se esmeró en
regalarnos compadecidas de vernos tan maltratadas del sol, que parecíamos monstruos
llenas de escamas como pescado” (169). Not only do the nuns describe themselves as
monsters with scales like fish after being tortured by the sun, but they also describe the
feelings of their audience upon seeing the women in this state. The priest and his family
react with sympathy, scintillating curiosity, and perhaps revulsion, just as the reader
would react upon encountering this passage of the text.
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In yet another example of the monstrous female religious body, María Rosa
describes her companion’s suffering before she dies from breast cancer. While the nuns
are on the ship en route toward Buenos Aires, the abbess learns that Madre Estefanía has
a large tumor on her breast. According to the text, the afflicted nun tries to hide her
discomfort for as long as possible before her sickness becomes too much for her to
handle on her own.63 When the women finally arrive in Buenos Aires, the narrator notes,
“Llegamos a nuestro hospicio bien afligidas porque nuestra enferma con el mareo que
tuvo en la barca y lo mucho que lanzó llegó a echar sangre por la boca y se le
acrecentaron los dolores de suerte que todo nuestro cuidado fue recogerla” (151).
Furthermore, Estefanía is unable to enjoy the fresh air on the gallery of the ship, a treat
for the other nuns as the weather becomes extremely warm toward the end of their
journey. According to María Rosa, “En la navegación, especialmente mucha parte antes y
después de pasar la línea, es ardientísimo el temple de forma que las personas seglares se
aligeran tanto de ropa que hasta el cabello se quitaron muchos. Pero nosotras pasamos sin
novedad en nuestros vestuarios durmiendo vestidas como siempre, que se admiraban
todos” (147). Madre Estefanía, confined to her stifling bed, did not want to take off her
habit either. Estefanía performs the role of a model nun in that, “parece hubiera muerto
con el [hábito] si una de las Compañeras no la hubiera engañado mudándola un día se lo
llevó a sacudir y no se lo quiso volver, y aunque clamaba por él, se lo mandaron por
obediencia y con eso se sosegó pues tenía tan abultado el pecho del zaratán que casi no le
cabía en el hábito” (148).
63
Sarah E. Owens, in her essay, “The Cloister as Therapeutic Space: Breast Cancer Narratives in
the Early Modern World,” argues that breast cancer was not actually that rare in this time period and it was
rather common for women to try to hide the tumor for as long as possible. Owens also gives details about
the unique treatment that women received behind cloister walls.
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The tumor altered Madre Estefanía’s body to such a point that her habit no longer
fit over her chest. Due to the breast cancer, the nun’s body became monstrous. It would
have shocked and maybe even disgusted the text’s readers, but the novelty and rarity of
the image—a nun’s chest swollen to such a size that she must survive without the allimportant and symbolic covering of the habit—would also create a powerful message.
The message was, of course, that the nun endured her suffering with grace. She did not
complain, and she did her best to follow Christ’s example. She died an honorable death,
and, therefore, she is an example for future generations of nuns. The intriguing inclusion
of Estefanía’s tumor plays to the morbid fascination of readers not accustomed to seeing
so freely behind the habit, but in the way that the story is framed within the larger
travelogue, the nuns adhere, at least superficially, to restrictions and norms regarding
suffering in nun’ writing.
In Brides of Christ, Asunción Lavrin outlines the different roles that pain played
in the biographies and autobiographies of Hispanic nuns. She argues, “Pain, suffering,
and disease conferred on the flesh the sanctity of the Christian passion and writing about
it had a highly didactic purpose” (184). Lavrin also notes that describing the suffering of
the nuns allowed the writer to enter forbidden territory, i.e. the female religious body. In
other words, like Maravall, Lavrin emphasizes the message, or “didactic purpose” behind
the use of the attractive yet forbidden image of the female body. She notes that nuns’
suffering evoked sympathy in the public (Brides of Christ 184). Thereby, upon reading
the Capuchin travel text, the public would be provoked by the repeated images of the five
nuns facing obstacles and hardships during their journey from Madrid to Lima. The
descriptions of the sunburnt and exhausted nuns, swollen from bug bites and suffering
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from seasickness would trigger a compassionate response in the reader. Especially for
future generations of Capuchin nuns, the explicit intended audience for María Rosa’s
text, María Rosa and her companions would serve as inspiration and models for
acceptable behavior. On the other hand, the text could serve as a model for women who
want to leave their homes, travel the world, and experience other cultures. On the surface,
the nuns’ suffering conforms to Catholic values and early modern gender paradigms, but,
depending on the reader, the nuns’ authority, their descriptions of adventure and
decadence, and their ability to withstand obstacles and hardships could inspire other
women to begin their own journeys.
It is true that Viaje de cinco religiosas capuchinas de Madrid a Lima incorporates
various images of the threatened female body, including the women’s movements,
injuries, and their appearances beneath the habit. I consider this detailed representation of
the female religious body to be an example of baroque spectacle. The public would be
attracted to these forbidden images, and this spectacle could help to disseminate a
conservative message. It would serve as propaganda for the Catholic Church working
together with the Spanish Monarchy and the existing system of power. However, despite
my acknowledgement of the texts’ probable purpose to reinforce hegemonic power
relations, I believe there are alternative readings of María Rosa and Josepha Victoria’s
text that allow for resistance on the part of the women authors. While writing, the authors
position their travels and the obstacles they overcome as stepping blocks to knowledge
and positions of authority in Lima.
At the same time that the traveling Capuchin nuns take part in a baroque religious
spectacle that justifies and naturalizes the existing aristocratic and ecclesiastical state, the
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reader cannot escape the fact that these five nuns travel across the Atlantic Ocean. Not
only do these women travel outside the comfort and safety of the convent walls, they also
write about their travels, crossing the convent boundaries yet again with their words and
ideas. Moreover, in my reading of the role of suffering and spectacle in the text, I posit
that the women are also creating the image of their own authority and strength. Lavrin
argues, “The sickness and the suffering of these virginal brides of Christ became a theme
of discussion in their biographies, which exposed their weakened bodies to the curiosity
of the readers of conventual chronicles, as a source of inspiration to those who read
them” (11). I argue that the bodies in María Rosa’s text are not, in fact, “weakened.”
These five traveling nuns do not faint at the thought of Moorish pirates. They do not give
up their quest after being held captive by the Dutch. Yes, the women write about
suffering, but I believe the text emphasizes endurance and strength over the traditional
weakened female body. The nuns introduce the text by describing the various challenges
they faced before they were even granted permission to begin their expedition. The
authors explain:
Pero nunca las obras grandes se logran sin el contrapeso de los trabajos: calmó la
bonanza, y se levantó una borrasca de contradicciones tan grande que todo lo
dicho se dió por perdido. Porque su Eminencia, habiendo estado tan propicio, de
repente le mudaron los pocos efectos a esta fundación, diciéndole era imposible
viniesen religiosas a partes tan distantes. (6)
It seems that many powerful clergymen thought the trip would be too difficult and
excessively dangerous for the nuns. Instead, through descriptions of challenges and
threats and an emphasis on endurance and strength, the text shows that the women could
handle the expedition. Even the nun who died en route was able to die with as much
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dignity as she could have within the convent walls in Madrid, and in the end, she served
as inspiration for her fellow nuns to complete their voyage.
Suffering and Authority in Nun’s Writing
In the middle of the description of captivity and the Dutch corsairs’ cruelty, the
Capuchin narrator claims, “[N]os alegrábamos de que fuese en tiempo tan santo de
Cuaresma, para acompañar a Nuestro Dulce Jesús en sus penas viéndonos prisioneras por
su amor” (76). The nuns write about their suffering and the suffering of the others
accompanying them as a positive event because it brings them all closer to Christ. In this
passage the narrator makes a direct reference to the desire to imitate Christ’s life,
especially his suffering. In the introduction to Neither Saints Nor Sinners, Kathleen Ann
Myers highlights the importance of imitation in written texts about both nuns and saints.
She calls imitation a “spiritual/textual cycle” because young girls would read the lives of
saints and attempt to imitate those lives. The girls would grow up and become nuns who,
when asked to write their autobiography, would adopt certain elements of the
hagiography genre they read when they were young. In this way, the women would
recreate and reinterpret the lives of saints, and their texts would later serve as a model for
future generations of young women (Myers 5–6).
The imitation of Christ (imitatio Christi) was a particularly important element in
early modern religious texts. According to Myers, “The ultimate goal of devout
individuals and of the church was to create lives that imitated Christ” (6). In fact, the
imitation of Christ’s life was one of the few ways in which religious women could assert
their individuality and their importance within the Catholic Church. A woman who
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compared the suffering in her life to the suffering of Christ made it difficult for the
Catholic Church to judge her life as heretical. In this way, I agree with Myers’
assessment that religious women wrote texts with recognizeable and classifiable themes
and images that “guided” the readers’ interpretations (11). In order to avoid the attention
of the Inquisition, women created texts following specific formulas. This codified writing
guided their male readers (their confessors and other male clergymen) to categorize the
women and their writing as orthodox. A nun that suffered or was ill was hardly a threat to
those who exercised the most power within the Church and Hispanic society in general,
and, when a nun compared her suffering to that of Christ, she elevated her life to a status
that should have been above reproach. As Kristine Ibsen argues, when women wrote their
lives using Christ’s story as a model, they infused their lives with importance and
heroism (Women’s Spiritual Autobiography 83).64
To understand the importance of illness and suffering in nuns’ texts we need look
no further than Teresa of Ávila’s Vida.65 Ibsen notes, “In the vida, illness is nearly always
expressed by conspicuous, public, and sometimes even theatrical inscriptions on the
body: seizures, paralysis, anorexia, vomiting, or unexplained bleeding. Teresa de Jesús
reports that she vomited every morning for twenty years, and that at night she would
often induce vomiting with feathers” (Women’s Spiritual Autobiography 77). In other
examples from her autobiography, Teresa emphasizes her mother’s weakness while she
was growing up. Her mother was always very ill, but she was also extremely devout (21).
In the autobiography, Teresa herself suffers from a terrible illness which she describes as
64
If a woman was too ostentatious with her suffering, however, her confessors could argue that
her illness was the work of demons (Ibsen Women’s Spiritual Autobiography 81).
65
We could also look to Teresa de Cartagena’s texts dealing with her deafness. Yonsoo Kim’s El
saber femenino y el sufrimiento corporal de la temprana Edad Moderna: Arboleda de los enfermos y
Admiraçión operum Dey de Teresa de Cartagena offers an analysis of Teresa’s treatment of illness.
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a gift from God (29, 33). Moreover, Teresa confirms the importance of imitatio when she
says she drew inspiration from images common in the plastic arts. She claims that she
was moved by an image of the Ecce Homo in which she could see the suffering of Christ
(55).66 Lois Parkinson Zamora expands upon the importance of the suffering of various
saints in Counter-Reformation art. Zamora specifically highlights images of the Virgin’s
suffering such as Baltasar de Echave y Rioja’s seventeenth-century La Dolorosa and Juan
Patricio Morlete Ruiz’s eighteenth-century The Sacred Heart of Jesus (193, 197).
Images of Christ’s suffering and the Virgin’s pain and grieving would have been
plentiful on convent walls in both Spain and America, in addition to the ample artwork
portraying the suffering of Catholic martyrs.67 Martin Jay affirms the importance of
images in the Counter-Reformation, especially in reaction to the Reformations conflation
of iconology and idolatry (42). Jay traces the Church’s reliance on images to as early as
the first century, and he argues, “One of the major differences between Judaism and
Christianity . . . was the latter’s faith in the corporeal incarnation of the divine in human
form, which meant that the Mosaic taboo against graven images could easily be called
into question. In its place, there arose a very non-Jewish belief in the visible sacraments
and the visible Church” (36). Jay goes on to illuminate a more practical advantage of the
Catholic Church’s reliance on religious paintings, stained glass, and even religious
theatrical representations. The historian of visual culture asserts, “In a society still
66
In Chapter 6 of Brides of Christ, Lavrin includes an informative discussion on suffering,
including “fasting and flagellation” in texts written by Colonial Spanish American religious women. She
notes that while some scholars insist that the repetition of these elements in nuns’ writing reflects a desire
to imitate Christ, others believe that it comes from the divide between body and soul and an effort to tame
the body and “strengthen the spirit” (177).
67
For example, Christopher C. Wilson, in an essay that analyzes images of Saint Teresa in
Mexico, highlights one particular image in a Discalced Carmelite Monastery in San Ángel. The image is St.
Teresa in Penitence (late 17th–early 18th c.) by Cristobal de Villalpando. The dramatic painting shows
Teresa inflicting harm on herself and kneeling in front of an altar showcasing the crucifix.
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overwhelmingly unable to read, the veneration of images was a useful tool in educating
the faithful. . . . The widespread use of stained glass, bas-reliefs, frescoes, altarpieces,
wooden carvings, and so on, to tell biblical stories and to illuminate––often literally––the
lives of saints and martyrs shows how popular it was” (41). Convents in CounterReformation Spain and the Americas, then, would have housed numerous images of
suffering saints, martyrs, the Virgin, and Jesus Christ to both inspire and teach the
women living under the convent’s roof.
The imitation of pain and suffering would have been second nature for María
Rosa and her fellow travelers. Throughout the text, the women’s suffering due to their
travel conditions is held up as an offering to Christ. Their pain––the sunburn and
seasickness, the worry that follows being captured by pirates, and the discomfort of
riding across rugged territory on mules––is understood in terms of the more traditional
pain suffered by nuns in the genre of the vidas. In this way, María Rosa’s text inserts
itself in a more acceptable tradition for nuns. The text transforms the travel, adventure,
and danger normally deemed unacceptable for women, and unthinkable for nuns, into a
model for future generations of holy women. Mercedes Alcalá reminds us that women
creating art in the early modern period would often insert themselves into a tradition of
women authors and artists in order to create authority. She notes:
[O]tra tendencia muy común en casi todas las escritoras de la época, desde Teresa
de Cartagena a Sor Juana pasando por Ana Caro es crear genealogías de mujeres
ilustres en el que ellas se incluyen . . . Un mecanismo muy parecido se da en el
caso de las pintoras renacentistas y barrocas: a través de sus cuadros se «citan»
unas a otras e incorporan novedades y motivos aportados por sus predecesoras,
dándose en ellas una clara conciencia de genealogía, de tradición recién
inaugurada. (22–23)
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In my reading of the travel text, the imitatio of suffering creates a tradition or genealogy
of religious women authors helping María Rosa and Josepha Victoria to build upon their
own authority as creators and authors within the text. In addition to building a tradition of
women’s authority through imitatio, María Rosa and Josepha Victoria also repeatedly
refer to important women in the history of the Capuchin order, including Saint Clare of
Assisi and Saint Colette (Owens “Introduction” 7).
The Capuchin nuns build authority by inscribing themselves in a community and
tradition of religious women authors. They also authorize their writing as they meet and
surpass obstacles on their way to their final goal—the foundation of the convent in Peru.
Through the descriptions of the nuns’ hardships, we see that Christ guides the women
through their trials so that they are able to found the first Capuchin convent in Lima.
When the women are captured by the Dutch, they follow their confessor’s lead and leave
their fate in God’s hands. María Rosa writes:
El pesar de nuestro Padre es sin ponderación, por hallarse con tantos motivos que
se lo acrecentaban. Pues su primer intento que era la gloria de Dios en esta
fundación la veía frustrada y perdida toda su hacienda. Pero como era tan santo,
se resignaba en la Divina Voluntad, y nos alentaba a que hiciésemos lo mismo;
que bien necesitábamos de su ejemplo y consuelo para llevar tal Golpe que hasta
la salud se nos minoró. (73–74)
Following this episode, the reader finds out that the women are treated unusually well
during their time in captivity, and they are soon released to continue their foundational
journey. The text frames both the challenges and the successes as God’s will, and
therefore, the reader can only assume that God deemed these five Capuchin nuns worthy
and capable of the challenges ahead of them.
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The nuns’ experiences during their journey and the ways that they write their
story emphasize and reinforce the women’s prestige. Whereas in Spain María Rosa and
her four sisters are only five of many Capuchin nuns housed in the convent in Madrid, in
Peru the women are the founding mothers. María Rosa becomes the abbess and the other
four are given specific duties and control over the creole colegiales.68 The pain and
suffering cause others to admire the women, and it makes their story worthy of telling.
For example, when the nuns refuse to alter their habits even as they travel by the equator,
the others on the ship admire their dedication. The women’s fame after captivity is
another example. The news that the religious women were held captive spreads quickly
across the Iberian Peninsula, and the public seeks them out upon their release in order to
catch a glimpse of the nuns who suffered to such an extent. At each convent along their
route, religious women from other convents compete to have the honor of hosting the
itinerant nuns. Because of the sacrifices that the Capuchins make to travel to Lima, they
are held up as models of feminine religious behavior. María Rosa’s text accentuates the
respect and prestige that they receive along their journey.
María Rosa and Josepha Victoria contribute to their authority in the text through
the process of writing autobiography. Mercedes Alcalá, in her analysis of authorship and
authority in early modern women writers of autobiography and women painters of selfportraits, proves that these women, through the process of writing themselves doing or
painting themselves being, establish their ability and authority “de ser, de ocupar un
espacio propio, de convertir esa manifestación de la propia identidad en una prueba
68
The power that the five travelers exercise in Lima obviously comes from more than just their
experience as pilgrims and explorers. Due to their status as black-veiled nuns recently arrived from Europe,
the women hold more prestige than even the white creole nuns born in America. For more information on
the complicated hierarchies built upon race, gender, class, and geography in colonial Spanish America, see
the introduction of Mónica Díaz’s Indigenous Writings from the Convent.
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irrefutable de autoría” (Alcalá 9). As Alcalá explains, “El pintarse supone aparecer, ser
vista, el escribir la propia vida supone tener voz, ser oída, y ambas cosas atentaban
frontalmente con los principios de invisibilidad y silencio que regían la existencia de las
mujeres en la vida pública” (18). And therefore, every woman traveling and writing,
including the seemingly innocuous Capuchin nuns, transgresses the norms of early
modern Spanish society.
I posit that the nuns in the Viaje de cinco religiosas capuchinas de Madrid a Lima
are simultaneously creating both autobiography and self-portraits. The text is not an
autobiography in the traditional sense as it does not focus on only one person throughout
her entire life. Nonetheless, María Rosa and Josepha Victoria are writing about their own
experiences on this odyssey. The women choose which events to narrate and in what
order. Following the arguments of George Gusdorf, Nicholas Spadaccini and Jenaro
Talens contend that the autobiography permits a “recomposition and interpretation of life
in its totality” (“Introduction: The Construction of the Self” 16). As María Rosa and
Josepha Victoria decide which events to narrate, the women give meaning to their travels
and construct their own truth. In the process of writing the narrative of their journey, the
nuns must also establish themselves as trustworthy eyewitnesses to “truth.” The Capuchin
text uses both the rhetorical first person “yo” in reference to María Rosa and the third
person “nosotras” in reference to the group of five traveling nuns. Spadaccini and Talens
argue, “Through the act of enunciation not only does the subject construct itself and the
world as object, but, thanks to a series of textual elements, it locates the text in a context
which it also constructs” (“Introduction: The Construction of the Self” 11). In the
Capuchin travelogue we see the construction of the female religious subjects, their world,
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and its context. In this way, the text is very much an autobiography, and at the same time,
the nuns sketch their bodies with their words. By the time the nuns arrive in Lima, the
reader can picture the scars and bruises that the voyage has left on the nuns’ bodies. The
reader knows how the women dress and how they move. The text is both a narration of
the nuns’ travels and a series of paintings of the women’s bodies, and through this work
of art that is really two, the nuns assert their authority. This conflation of two art forms
plays into Gilles Deleuze’s argument about the “unity of art” in spectacle (Ndalianis n.
pag.). According to Ndalianis, in spectacle, each art extends into the next art, and this
“unity of arts” helps to draw the spectator into the scene. She argues that these multiple
media formats––in our case, autobiography and self-portrait––engross more of our senses
and “heighten the illusion of the collapsing proscenium” (n. pag.). The reader of the
Capuchin nuns’ travel tale not only reads or hears the story, but she can also picture the
events as they happen, and in this way, the reader is more engaged, and her reactions to
the nuns’ pain and suffering are more intense.
***
Through spectacle, Madre María Rosa and Madre Josepha Victoria bring the
spectator into their world. Throughout this chapter, we have seen the different ways that
the nuns position themselves as they project their image to the rest of the world––hiding
their bodies only to later reveal them, exposing the dangers of crossing the Atlantic
Ocean, and giving prominence to suffering as a source of authority. María Rosa and
Josepha Victoria consciously choose to include details of numerous processions, crowds,
and the nuns’ growing fame. This shows that they are aware of the spectacle they produce
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during their parade from Madrid to Lima. Living in Counter-Reformation Spain and Peru,
the women would also be highly mindful of the dangers involved when women project
their voices through the written word. They live in a world where being watched by your
neighbor, by your confessor, by your fellow sisters in the convent is a normal part of life.
Consequently, the image a woman projects to the rest of the community is often more
important than her beliefs and actions behind closed doors. María Rosa and Josepha
Victoria would have learned throughout their whole lives to mold their outward
appearance a certain way, and this text is no exception.
Conduct manuals written for early modern women, like those by Fray Luis de
León and Juan Luis Vives, call our attention to the pressures women faced to appear a
certain way and to comply with proscribed behavior. Not only were women supposed to
remain enclosed in their houses, they should appear content to do so. It was not sufficient
for women to be silent and obedient, but they had to make every effort to seem happy to
live that way. The five protagonists of the travel account examined in this chapter agreed
to leave the safe space of their convent in Madrid to travel through unknown regions and
come into contact with laypeople from all different stations and situations. Not only did
the travelers leave the enclosure of the convent, but once they were safely enclosed again
in the convent in Lima, they projected their voices across the convent walls by writing
about their voyage. There is no doubt that these women pushed the limits of acceptable
feminine behavior. How, then, did they escape the consequences of their transgressions?
In this chapter, I have shown that the women carefully choose which episodes to narrate
and how to narrate them. They emphasize the protection of the habit at certain points, and
they turn themselves over to the will of God in others. The women take advantage of
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their baroque environment to play with their image, to hide their bodies and to reveal
them, to underscore their humility on the surface while subtly bringing to light their sense
of adventure and perseverance, and ultimately, their worthiness. The women manipulated
their tale to transform unacceptable behavior into a heroic and praiseworthy performance.
At the end of the adventure, the reader is left with a sense that these women were capable
of the amazing task they were assigned, despite the reservations of the members of the
clergy who hoped to prevent the voyage.
These five traveling Capuchin nuns accomplished their objective. Although they
came face to face with Dutch corsairs and they suffered through bug bites and
seasickness, the women successfully completed their journey. The details of danger and
suffering that they included served to contextualize the nuns’ account within an
acceptable and authorized history of hagiography and autobiography. The obstacles that
María Rosa and her sisters overcame and the pain they endured gave them the authority
to create this text, to hold positions of power in the New World, to be held up as models
in the Catholic Church, and to teach future generations in the Capuchin order. In turn, the
text authorized their journey.
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CONCLUSION: NEW VISIONS OF TRAVEL WRITING
The three texts examined in this project—María de Zayas’s “La esclava de su
amante,” Catalina de Erauso’s Historia de la Monja Alférez, and María Rosa and Josepha
Victoria’s Viaje de cinco religiosas capuchinas de Madrid a Lima—incorporate the
phenomenon of spectacle familiar to baroque culture, but each text adapts spectacle to its
particular situation and its traveler’s needs. These three women’s travel narratives shape
spectacle for their own uses, chiefly to make the image of mobile and public women
acceptable to an audience indoctrinated by the system of honor to view women outside
their homes as dangerous and contaminated/contaminating. The texts’ construction of the
traveling woman’s image as spectacle provides a literary space to shape how the public
sees and reacts to alternative female subjectivities. Zayas’s first desengaño directs the
audience’s attention to Isabel’s deceptive journey and her ingenuity and perseverance in
the face of trauma rather than her position as a dishonored woman. Erauso’s
autobiography foregrounds the protagonist’s illegibility, obscuring any clear judgement
concerning her murderous tendencies and queer sexuality. The Capuchin nuns’
manuscript composes women’s travel in a way that highlights the travelers’ respected
rank and situation over their questionable encounters with the outside world. In this
project I have demonstrated a rhetorical strategy common to three early modern women’s
travel narratives that opens doors for a more nuanced understanding of Hispanic female
subjectivity in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Appearances were a critical component of women’s reputations in the early
modern Spanish Kingdom. Therefore, it should not be a surprise that each of these three
travel narratives includes details concerning the traveler’s clothing, her figure, and the
231
many bodily transformations that result during prolonged travel. In this project, I have
studied the presence of corporeal manipulations (e.g. Isabel’s stamp of slavery and
Erauso’s hair cut) and their role in the production of specific images for the reader. I have
also traced the toll that travel takes on the voyager’s body. In my analysis of Erauso’s
tale, I highlight the protagonist’s numerous war wounds, her tan and weathered skin, and
her athleticism. The Capuchin nuns’ manuscript does not shy away from descriptions of
the fish-like scales that the nuns develop on their skin or Madre Estefanía’s painful death
from breast cancer. For these travel narratives, the effects of extended transit on the
female form are inescapable. In my reading, the ways that the texts mark the experiences
of travel on the body reflect the interior transformation that the traveler undergoes. The
evidence of suffering and sacrifice left on the body authorizes the travelers’ experiences
and stories.
I show that travel and the texts that construct, arrange, and frame that travel are
channels through which the authors and protagonists build an authoritative and legitimate
voice. In Zayas’s novela, for example, Doña Isabel’s journey to Algiers and the marks of
that journey left on her body provide her a position from which to tell her story. During
certain storytelling opportunities, Erauso frames her travels as service to imperial
expansion. As her narrative constructs her military successes, it also justifies her violent
acts and her right to tell her story to public officials and the general public. When the
Capuchin nuns narrate the times they slept sitting up in a cart pulled by mules, their
severe sunburns, and their capture by Dutch corsairs, the women develop their prestige
and assert their prerogative to write an official chronicle. Because the religious women
suffered—the evidence of which is clear in their text—they justify their right to write
232
about the trip and their experiences. Throughout this project, I have traced the
development of women’s author-ity and authorship. It manifests in different ways in each
text, but I have shown that these three cultural artifacts share a consciousness of women’s
authority and subjectivity.
Due to the nature of baroque spectacle and the trend toward decentered and
ambiguous perspectives, the strategies that the travel narratives employ to frame the
spectacle of the traveling woman are relevant. In this project, I have clarified the ways in
which the works break down the customarily rigid and centered frame and, instead, create
a new frame for the spectacle of women travelers, one that includes the spectator.
Through strategies that fold the spectator into the spectacle, the texts invite the spectator
and the reader to be part of the narratives of travel. These nontraditional approaches to
framing women’s movement and women’s voices also regulate the protagonists’
relationships and their positioning in relation to the rest of Hispanic society. The framing
of “La esclava de su amante” within the sarao reaffirms the protagonist’s noble
associations and her role in a community of women authors and creators. At times,
Erauso’s story aims the reader’s attention toward the protagonist’s Basque origins, her
network of support from that community, along with other elite persons who help her,
offer to host her, or otherwise publically accept her. In this manner, the text frames the
Lieutenant Nun as an accomplished Spanish soldier and a well-connected representative
of Spain’s interests in South America. Of course, this is just one of many possible frames
through which the reader could see the protagonist and her life story. The nuns’ text, on
the other hand, is fairly consistent in depicting the religious travelers within the discourse
of convent life and the Church hierarchy. The nuns’ framing, though, works to elevate
233
their status within that hierarchy by focusing on the image of the traveling nuns at the
center of lavish religious festivals. The text paints this role as crucial to the American
public’s sense of identity as Catholics belonging to the Spanish Empire. By guiding how
the spectator sees and experiences the narratives of women’s travel, these texts harness
the power of spectacle to persuade the reader to accept women who cross the unstable
boundaries between public and private/secret.
In each of the three texts, travel is framed within Spain’s larger imperial project.
As imperial agents, the traveling protagonists carry with them the prestige and legitimacy
that comes from belonging to noble and high-ranking Peninsular communities. In Zayas’s
novela, Isabel speaks to the reader from the privileged position of Lisis’s sarao in the
imperial center of Madrid. Erauso’s Basque identity is reaffirmed throughout her
autobiography so that she is never confused for an indio. The Capuchin nuns, of course,
will always rank higher than their sisters born in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Even as they
travel, the protagonists’ close relationship to the center of imperial power is never in
doubt, and this is an important factor in the strategies the texts use to create authority for
the traveling women. The perceived decline of the Spanish Empire and the feelings of
disenchantment with Spain’s position as a world power, linked with attacks on Spanish
noble masculinity, open a space for women to travel abroad and accomplish literary
conquests against enemies abroad. Although the travelers in these three texts are women,
the thread of early modern Spain’s imperial desires remains intact.
I also find the concepts of framing and spectacle particularly fruitful in that they
encourage a connection between these early modern texts and our twenty-first century
social-media-driven culture. It is easy for today’s readers to engage with the
234
aforementioned travel accounts because we also construct images to enhance certain
aspects of our identities while erasing others. Each time we post an update to Facebook or
send an image through Snapchat, we modify our public image and arrange our social
relationships. Consequently, the contemporary reader can also relate to framing
techniques, and simultaneously creating and living in several different frames. Guy
Debord’s theories on the power of images to arrange social relationships not only helps
us to draw conclusions about some forms of early modern women’s travel writing, they
also force contemporary readers to reflect on engaño and desengaño in the online
relationships that increasingly define self-worth and affiliation in our contemporary,
global culture.
A recent example from the news shows not only the spectacular power of the
media to sway public opinion, but it also reveals the ways in which women push back
against sociocultural impositions through writing and spectacle. The example of the two
Argentine women killed during their trip through Ecuador in early 2016, and the backlash
against women traveling “alone” demonstrates the connections between the Hispanic
baroque culture of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and today’s use of
spectacle to form public opinion.69 According to an article in BBC Mundo, when the news
broke that María José Coni and Marina Menegazzo were killed during their dream trip
around South America, the media began asking questions about the women’s behavior,
including whether they liked to party and dance (“#Viajosola” n. pag.). The tendency of
twenty-first century social discourse to blame women when they are assaulted is an
attempt to enclose them and control their behavior. When young girls see images in the
69
Of course, the Argentine women were not traveling alone. They had each other. They were,
however, traveling without a male friend or relative.
235
news of women who were attacked because they were drinking, they were at a party, or
they were traveling without a male companion, those young girls are guided by spectacle
to stay at home and behave. However, like the traveling narratives in my project, there
were women who took offense to the media’s portrayal of Coni and Menegazzo’s story
and through writing, they pushed back against the message that traveling is dangerous for
women. With the hashtag #Viajosola, women took to Twitter to explain why they travel
alone and to defend the two traveling Argentine women. In this example—a case that
eerily demonstrates that the twenty-first century construction of femininity does not differ
dramatically from that of the seventeenth century—we see how the spectacle of travel
can be employed to control women’s behavior, and we witness the strategies women use
to resist that control.
In addition to making connections between early modern literature and today’s
conflicts and tensions surrounding technology, my project adds to an increasing
awareness of the diversity of early modern women’s experiences, abilities, and societal
roles. Although women travelers are integral to many canonical early modern texts,
scholars have generally refrained from building arguments and conclusions around this
appealing literary topos. This dissertation contributes to a discussion that teases out the
differences between the image of ideal femininity propagated by conduct manuals and
official discourse and other diverse and often contradictory images of women and
femininity circulating in the early modern period.
To further this line of inquiry, it is imperative that we continue to study women’s
travel narratives, along with those of other marginalized groups, in the periods leading up
to the nineteenth century. This dissertation contributes to what can only be described as
236
the beginning of an exploration of women’s journeys and women’s reconstruction of
travel through storytelling. As I pointed out in the introduction, there is a formidable
amount of material in Spanish archives that describes royal women’s movements across
political, social, and moral boundaries. Narratives highlighting journeys of women from
the lower castes of Hispanic society might prove more difficult to find and analyze, but
these studies are paramount to a more complete understanding of the images of gendered
travel circulating in the period.
It is clear that the authors included in my project are privileged in their ability to
respond, in writing, to societal pressures that narrowly defined acceptable female subject
positions for the early modern Hispanic world. It is also apparent that there was no one
unified strategy for resisting or negotiating with those pressures. Rather, this dissertation
shows that, depending on one’s class, race, community affiliations, geographic region,
and a host of other social identities and institutions, there were many paths women
traveled to increase their influence and authority in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
communities. To begin to find a pathway to legitimacy, the authors, narrators, and
protagonists of “La esclava de su amante,” Historia de la Monja Alférez and Viaje de
cinco religiosas capuchinas de Madrid a Lima take advantage of the Baroque tendency
toward performance and spectacle to create a discursive space for alternative examples of
female subjectivity.
237
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