Finding a Room of One’s Own: Veronica Franco and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

During the Renaissance and the Baroque periods, both in the Old and the New World, the patriarchal social structure had created a set of fixed gender rules based on gender roles to control female sexuality, female voices, and their social freedom because it was considered a threat to male superiority. The Venetian Veronica Franco and the Mexican Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz are two extraordinary women from different places and a hundred years apart who, with their elaborated writing and body-related techniques, escape the gender patriarchal constrains and give voice to their new authorial persona in a female liminal environment. Veronica Franco and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz represent the two facets of the same coin that symbolizes the phallocentric patriarchal structure in which these two women happened to live, struggle, and write. These women were pushed to the margins of society, confined in convents, brothels/patrician houses, or the streets, to silence their personae and reinforce their inferiority and, at times, inexistence. There are no works that focus on the comparison between the well-known Mexican nun and the forgotten Venetian courtesan. Therefore, this dissertation aims to analyze the writings of Veronica Franco and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz through the lens of feminist theory (Cixous, Irigaray etc.) and the concept of the body as an instrument of subversion and female liberation. In their respective time and marginal places of confinement (the patrician house and the convent), both women were able to create a liminal space that allowed them to go beyond the rigidity of gender binaries and explore different venues of freedom. In this liminal space both Veronica Franco and Sor Juana stopped “performing” the fixed gender roles imposed by the patriarchal social order and created new female creatures at the margins of patriarchal society; a new type of woman who could, through her body and writing, destabilize the patriarchal gender identities and go from a passive silence object to an active writing subject.