The Artifice of Syphilitic and Damaged Female Bodies in Literature

Abstract

This chapter examines the literary depiction of the broken and contaminated corporality of female prostitutes as illustrated in Francisco Delicado’s La Lozana andaluza [Portrait of Lozana: The Lusty Andalusian Woman] (1528), Miguel de Cervantes’s Casamiento engañoso [The Deceitful Marriage] (1613), La tía fingida [The pretended aunt], a novel attributed to Cervantes, and Francisco de Quevedo’s satiric poetry written in the first half of the seventeenth century. These works share a common representation of syphilis as a gendered metaphor of physical and moral decay that functions in opposition both to male embodiment and to the ideal of the integrity of the female body, expressed in the concept of virginity and chastity. Furthermore, they exemplify the development of the syphilitic trope through the century as well as the diverse solutions to taming alterity.