The Maternal Imaginary in Early Modern Hispanic Culture

Looking beyond Don Quixote and the popular theater, this study brings together non-canonical works from Spanish and Spanish American colonial writers in diverse genres, to illustrate the multi-faceted possibilities and the cultural limitations of representations of mothers and mothering in this period. An introductory chapter examines Hispanic representations of the maternal in light of approaches to history of the family in Europe and current theorizing about motherhood as institution. The first chapter focuses on problems of language and the maternal body in light of the centuries of Spanish conquest and colonization on the peninsula, in Europe, and in the Americas. The second chapter traces how Valdés’s metaphor of the ’mother tongue’ disappears, as does the mother herself, in Gracián’s mid-seventeenth-century allegorical fiction El Criticón, in which a shipwrecked man from the metropolis teaches language, culture, and religion to a feral child, Andrenio. The third chapter provides a new perspective, that of the Spanish obsession with ’purity of blood,’ regarding the advice repeated in European conduct manuals, that mothers should nurse their own children. Chapter four addresses the highly popular iconography of the ’Education of the Virgin,’ usually depicted in polychrome figures of the seated St. Anne with her young daughter reading a book at her mother’s knee. Chapter five presents the range of nurturing relationships between mothers and children under the extraordinary circumstances of captivity and war in three plays by Cervantes.

Emilie Bergmann is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.