Veiled Visions: Female Creativity, Persecution, and Oppression in Mar Gómez Glez’s Fuga Mundi

Abstract

This study explores how Mar Gómez Glez’s play Fuga Mundi (2008) foregrounds gender issues and the oppression of women artists in order to further contemporary efforts aimed at rescuing history’s forgotten female figures. Focusing on Juana de la Vega, a protagonist largely inspired by the first female professional sculptor Luisa Roldán (1652-1706), the play is set within the historical context of the Morisco expulsion from Spain. Gómez Glez employs both an all-female cast and the conventions of the historical drama to shed light on how the ramifications of gender anxieties and the persecution of minority populations based on differential notions of race and religion permeated seventeenth-century Spanish society. By drawing on metatheater, intertextual references, and the interpolation of historical documents as framing devices that juxtapose with the action of the play, Gómez Glez stimulates a critical spectatorship geared toward establishing a dialogue between dramatic fiction and historical reality.

Keywords:

• Gómez Glez
• Fuga Mundi
• Morisco expulsion
• Luisa Roldán
• historical drama

Notes

Notes

1 Daniela Flesler writes that “physical persecutions, expulsions, and coerced conversions to Catholicism of Jews and Muslims, as well as the censorship, banning, and burning of cultural artifacts and practices associated with both cultures that took place in the aftermath of the Reconquest have been and are even today accompanied by the refusal to recognize Muslims and Jews as an intrinsic part of Spanish identity” (28).

2 Henry Kamen defines as contributing factors how “[b]irth rates fell from around 1580, and population levels were further hit by major epidemic around 1600” (167).

3 Etienne Balibar points to the “insurmountability of cultural differences” (21) as a principal cause of racist discourse based on perspectives of differentiation not rooted in biological dissimilarities. Flesler likewise calls attention to forced removal as an act geared towards intended national homogenization that would conceptually reframe Spain as similar to its neighboring European countries. If perceived inferiority was brought about through Spain’s “mingling and mixing with Arabs and Jews, the physical and discursive expulsion of that element from the nation would bring it closer to the desired norm” (21).

4 Examples of such measures included “forbidding the use of Arabic, annulling all contracts made in that language, forcing the Moriscos to change their Moorish names, demanding that they wear clothes ‘a la castellana,’ and generally obliging them to observe Spanish Christian mores” (Fuchs 50).

5 In an interview for the Guindalera she reveals that “[m]e interesaba trabajar dramáticamente sobre la diferencia o lo que se concibe como diferencia socialmente, y cómo se gestionan las emociones que nos produce. No encontré la forma de entrar en el tema desde el presente y decidí situarme en el momento histórico en que la península ibérica se convirtió definitivamente en un territorio con una población muy homogénea” (“Palabras”).

6 The cast list of actresses was the following: María Pastor (Juana de la Vega), Chusa Barbero (Prudencia/Sor Paula), Marquesa de Santa Cruz (María Álvarez), Anaïs Bleda (Clara).

7 Molina also quotes Patrick Lenaghan, curator for the Hispanic Society, who states that Roldán is “entre los mejores escultores del siglo XVII. Tiene una sutileza, una elegancia y una gracia que hace que todo parezca absolutamente normal.”

8 Textual citations are drawn from a copy of the script provided by Mar Gómez Glez, to whom I am profoundly grateful.

9 Fear of the spread of rumors and the ramifications for social reputation resonate as a central thematic motif in a number of Spanish plays, perhaps most notably in Federico García Lorca’s La casa de Bernarda Alba. García Lorca’s play also connects with Fuga Mundi with its all-female cast and a site of enclosure (in this case the family house) as the central mimetic stage spaces.

10 E. Michael Gerli locates the date of composition of El retablo de las maravillas as “between 1603–1614, but most likely 1609–1614” (479).

11 As a specific example, the use of the word “invasion” in 1609 explicitly mirrors uses of that very same word found in conservative political rhetoric in 2019.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anthony Pasero-O’Malley

Anthony Pasero-O’Malley is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at Davidson College. His research on theater for social change examines gender, performance, and sexuality in twenty-first century Spanish playwrighting, focusing on works written by women dramatists.