Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation analyzes the relationship between fathers and daughters in seventeenth-century Spanish theater. While scholarship has examined female characters in their role as daughters in individual works, this study represents the first treatment of this social identity across the genre. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theories of kinship cite the father-daughter relationship as the primary locus of exogamy, the practice of inter-group marriage that purportedly forms the foundation of culture. The diverse sociocultural correlates of this particular filial relationship explain its continued presence in Western literature as a vehicle through which writers have explored the nature and limits of patriarchy and social convention. The ability of the father-daughter plot to dramatize and comment on the individual’s relationship to society was significant in the comedia given the wide reach of the Spanish crown’s reactions to changes in European socioeconomic organization and religious thought. This dissertation elucidates how playwrights engaged the private-public dimensions of the father-daughter relationship to comment on the major political, economic, legal, and religious issues of the period in a number of contexts, including peasant honor drama, palace privanza plays, and theological drama. Contrasting paternal reactions to a daughter’s dishonor in Luis Vélez de Guevara’s La serrana de la Vera (1613) and Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s El alcalde de Zalamea (1640) lead to larger discussions of hierarchy, gender expectations, and the administration of law and justice. The question of rule by privanza lies at the heart of Francisco Rojas Zorrilla’s Casarse por vengarse (1636) and Calderón’s La vida es sueño (1635), plays that comment on the empire’s economic crises and the limits of monarchy, respectively, through their depictions of family conflict. Finally, divergent depictions of daughters in El esclavo del demonio (1612) reveal Antonio Mira de Amescua’s position on the grace and free will debate, while Tirso de Molina’s La Santa Juana (1613) and Lope de Vega’s La bienaventurada madre Santa Teresa de Jesús (1614) shed light on contemporary views of female monasticism and women saints.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2015)
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Citation
Betancur, Bryan,
"Fathers and Daughters in Early Modern Spanish Theater"
(2015).
Hispanic Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z01C1V8G
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Hispanic Studies Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Hispanic Studies department....