Counter/acting the Body Politic: Leonor de la Cueva's "La firmeza en la ausencia"

Although women protagonists in male-authored Spanish comedias were cast in pivotal roles, they remained as objects for which the male protagonists competed and contended. It has not been until recently that women playwrights have been studied by feminist critics, who have shed light on the reestablishment of the relational union of men and women. Nonetheless, while these female-authored comedias counter male authority, they often seemed to act out the part of the patriarchy. My analysis of Leonor de la Cueva’s La firmeza en la ausencia intends to measure the impact of women’s destabilizing force as it is introduced and asserted in the play. Through the female protagonist’s constancy, Cueva’s play counters the political authority as it is represented by the male protagonists—her king, her lover, and her lover’s friend. Moreover, in its geopolitical proximity to Cueva’s own time, the play acts out its realism, inverting the male-authored comedia’s motifs of honor, homosocial bonding, and mirror of princes. In the end, it is her body that disrupts the political and moral order, acting as both destabilizing factor and catalyst that calls the political body to order, and that is itself mirrored in the body of the text as poetic difference.