Description
The Woman Saint in the Spanish Golden Age Drama examines the various ways in which male and female dramatists present the figure of the ascetic woman in seventeenth-century Spanish theater. Playwrights depict her not only as the solitary initiate of a rite of passage, struggling to purify herself to approach the divine, but they also focus on the clash between ascetic practice and the desire of family, suitors, and patriarchal society. She may appear as both a forbidden fruit and Christ figure who is ultimately persecuted, scapegoated, and executed by a fearful society. Some writers present her as a representative of the Symbolic Order; invested with sacred powers and ultimate authority, she rebukes transgressors and negotiates the return to God's grace and lawful society. Ritual concepts such as liminality, sacrifice, and communitas mediation guide the interpretation of this complex figure, who marks the site of contention where worldly and ascetic values struggle for control of each play's Counter-Reformation discourse.
