| Popis: |
Fray Luis de Leon's La perfecta casada (1583) belongs to the corpus of works in which sixteenth-century Christian humanists prescribed norms of conduct of married women within their marriages and the confines of the home.The kind of discourse presented in this work can be interpreted as a means to discipline women within the home, but it also aimed to produce the emergence of the moral conscience and body needed by the perfect married woman. The disciplinary code that Fray Luis stipulated imposed controls on the productive and reproductive potential of married women, on their appearance, sexuality and mobility, fostering also the intellectual and linguistic aspects that allowed the social order to be inscribed in and ensured through their bodies.I have divided Fray Luis's advice to married women into three types of discipline: (1) practices aimed at overcoming the "inherent weakness" of the female body, increasing women's strength and efficiency through domestic work; (2) practices aimed at controlling female attractiveness, eliminating from the bodies of married women the possibility of enticement or the display of beauty, and confining female sexuality to marriage; (3) practices that restrict the presence and action of married women to the domestic sphere, silencing their voices, and ensuring their subordinate status within the hierarchy of power in marriage.My study also investigates the discursive sources of the various ideas about women and their bodies that his work disseminates, showing how Fray Luis appropriates and manipulates them for his own rhetorical purposes.Finally, my dissertation emphasizes how the discourse in La perfecta casada suggests an attempt at gender transgression, which, paradoxically, cannot be put into practice without ratifying the stigma regarding the natural inferiority of women, and without confining the possibility of overcoming and perfecting the female status to the private space of the home and the exclusive occupation in domestic chores. |
