“And if you want to be happy, marry...”: constructing female agency around marriage in the mosaics of Manuela Villarán De Plasencia in La Alborada

Abstract

This paper focuses on the construction of female agency around marriage in three mosaicos by Manuela Villarán de Plasencia in La Alborada. Using this minor format, the author manages to shape a model of female agency related to marriage through anecdotes that serve as counterexamples for women, especially at the moment of choosing a future husband. Through these short stories, Villarán draws her readers’ attention to the unhappy relationships they could find themselves in if they do not know how to choose whom to marry. She therefore analyzes how the texts are intended to cultivate a series of lessons that will enable them to achieve a good quality of life within the paradigm of hegemonic femininity. Using the category of “tricks of the weak” proposed by Josefina Ludmer, this paper will examine the discourse that Manuela Villarán present: despite not breaking with the vision of women as bourgeois wives, it can be argued that she undermines male domination over women by teaching them to choose in a way that is beneficial to themselves, rejecting the blind and passionate love that would lead them to misfortune.