De-Witching Female America: The Figure of the Sorceress in the Representation of America
Open Access
- Author:
- Ruiz Tresgallo, Silvia
- Graduate Program:
- Spanish
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- December 14, 2010
- Committee Members:
- Julia Cuervo Hewitt, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Julia Cuervo Hewitt, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
William Robert Blue, Committee Member
Laurence E Prescott, Committee Member
Mary Elizabeth Barnard, Committee Member
Djelal Kadir, Committee Member - Keywords:
- sorcery
religion
transatlantic studies
gender
power
colonial
Latin-American
picaresque
Witchcraft
misogyny
corporeality - Abstract:
- From the discovery of the New World, the European metropolis revealed America as a demonic territory populated by monsters, cannibals, and pagans. Philippe Galle’s engraving America (1500) illustrates the New World in the figure of an indigenous cannibal female, a barbaric and wicked creature. In my dissertation, I associate this perception of America and its territory, feminine and demonic, with that of the woman traditionally related to evil, the sorceress. This dissertation is a cultural and literary study that establishes a genealogy of the figure of the sorceress and the depiction of sorcery in literature, by analyzing the representation of women and evil in the Latin American territory. Chapters follow a discursive chronology in which I examine colonial and Spanish American literary works and their antecedent European texts, particularly from medieval and early modern Spanish literature. In addition, I explore the historic and religious context of such representation, using inquisitorial records and works on the society, especially in the chapters related to colonial times. I also incorporate and analyze engravings, paintings, and sculptures. The theoretical frame of this transatlantic study deals with gender and power, and includes the literary criticism of Julia Kristeva, René Girard, Judith Butler, Barbara F. Weissberger, Michel Foucault, and Mikhail Bakhtin, among other scholars. It is the aim of my dissertation to return to those demonic discourses with which America was conceived to serve the agenda of Spaniards, to reveal European fantasies and anxiety rather than tangible realities, concerning imperial issues of race, gender, and identity. By deconstructing those discourses, I expose the mechanisms of power and the stereotype of women that became the target of the social body from colonial to contemporary times. The accusation of witchcraft is a discourse of otherness applied to those who defy the patriarchal standards of European civilization.