Diskurs und Deformation. Vergewaltigte Körper in María de Zayas’ Desengaños amorosos (1647)

Abstract

This article analyses three cases of rape in María de Zayas’s Desengaños amorosos (1647), and the forms of deformation that the female bodies of Isabel, Camila and Inés undergo as a consequence of sexual violence. This article does not only describe the diverse mechanisms of male control represented in those cases but it particularly examines Zayas’s use of emblematic Early Modern discourse traditions and strategies as a means of depicting the raped female body. While the act of rape itself is not allowed to be rendered discursively, the deformed female body as a consequence of rape, on the contrary, is described and intensively discussed. This corresponds to other, particularly baroque discourse traditions, which take the body as a reflection of the epoch’s instabilities; it also caters to the audience’s predilection for monstrous and deformed objects and bodies.