"Un retrato me has pedido": Gender, Beauty, and the Female Gaze in the Spanish Golden Age

This dissertation explores the construction, negotiation, and subversion of the female gaze in early modern Spanish literature. In a period defined by ocularcentrism, where vision was closely tied to knowledge, power, and morality, the gaze operated as a potent mechanism of control—particularly over women, who were more often the object of vision than its agents. Drawing on feminist theory, visual culture studies, and baroque aesthetics, this study traces how women writers—and select female characters—resisted or reconfigured the dominant visual economy of the period. Rather than positioning the female gaze as a simple inversion of the male gaze, I argue that it emerges in early modern Spanish texts as a multifaceted and unstable practice marked by ethical discernment, affective complexity, and rhetorical play. Through close readings of works by Lope de Vega, Ana Caro de Mallén, María de Zayas, and Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán, I examine how women looked: not only at men, but at themselves, each other, and the visual and social systems that sought to define them. From the stagecraft of Lope's heroines to the epistemological strategies of Caro's protagonists, from Zayas's trauma-inflected narratives to Ramírez de Guzmán's satirical self-portraiture, each chapter reveals how the female gaze disrupts aesthetic norms and moral ideologies. Ultimately, this dissertation proposes a genealogy of early modern feminine visual agency that foregrounds the relationship between beauty, resistance, and self-representation in a culture that sought to render women both silent and seen.