Profession, Vocation Or Duty?

Resumen del Libro

While the occupations of fictive male characters have often been addressed in literary criticism, there is very little on the representation of womens work in early modern Spanish literature despite their frequent appearance in period texts. This thesis examines how women and their relationship to labor are depicted in early modern Spanish cultural products. I analyze how female characters are portrayed as perceiving and performing their function as workers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the context of the historical transformations caused by the development of the modern Spanish state. Using a historicist and feminist approach I demonstrate how womens work is featured in economic and moral treatises as key contributors to the fast emerging pre-capitalist Spanish economy. Of equal importance, I explore how the depiction of feminine labor in literary texts such as baroque drama, the female picaresque, Cervantes Don Quijote and the Novelas ejemplares, and women writers literary production offers a textual reconfiguration of the categories that define the social function of women, both in the public and the private sphere. The portrayal womens labor and production, as well as their administration of the domestic economy, creates a textual space for female agency and subjectivity that has not been studied sufficiently in the critical corpus and which I here explore.