Constructions of Gender in the 18th Century Spanish Novel

Abstract

For the longest time, Spain used to be considered the “country without enlightenment”, and the 18th century was only assigned a marginal position in Hispanic Studies in Germany, compared to the large number of studies on the Siglo de Oro darstellte. However, this tendency has recently changed. Two dissertations on 18th century Spain have just been published; both works are comparable in terms of their corpus and the research questions they investigate. If, following the Goncourt brothers (La femme au XVIIIe siècle, 1852), the 18th century has repeatedly been called the century of the woman, it does not seem all that surprising that both dissertations deal with “concepts of gender” (Kilian) and the “image of the woman” (Hertel-Mesenhöller) in the Spanish novel. Spain did not only contribute to the European enlightenment (even though the enlightenment turned out to be a patriotic and Christian top-down Ilustración), but it also contributed to an overarching change in the constellation of gender roles, a process which later came to be called the “naturalisation of gender differences” in gender studies. Both authors examine the discursive manifestations of this process in the novel and discuss whether and how the respective images of femininity followed corresponded to a specific programme of enlightenment. Kilian and Hertel-Mesenhöller both draw on current developments in theory, but use these theories in very different ways.