Wounding the Body of Language

The Feminine Construction of Eroticism in Two Poems by Sister Violante del Cielo

Abstract

In the literary circles of the Golden Age, the poetic code was limited to referring to women as beautiful objects, objects of display contemplated through crystallized metaphors of their faces as flowers or precious metals (Gutiérrez, 2019: 275). Within this particular distribution of subject and object roles determined by gender, some Golden Age female authors developed various ways of appropriating amorous rhetoric to reposition the feminine in the realm of agency. Sor Violante del Cielo embodies this shift of women toward the construction of a subject recognized as a desiring individual. With the aim of analyzing the transgression of male erotic lyricism in poems IX and XVII of the critical edition by Boyce and Olivares, Tras el espejo la musa escribe. Lírica femenina de los Siglos de Oro (Behind the Mirror the Muse Writes: Female Lyric Poetry of the Golden Age), we will study the implications of the vocative “homicida” (murderer) when referring to the object of female desire. For this purpose, the theoretical contributions of Boyce, Olivares and Navarro Durán are essential to describe the discursive strategies of authority construction in the golden age literature written by women.