Traveling women as spectacle: vision, performance, and female subjectivity in the early modern Hispanic world

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.