Silence in the Education of Women in La dama boba de Lope de Vega

Abstract

In the XVIth and XVIIth centuries there were doctrinal treatises addressed to a feminine public, which gathered rules of behaviour for those women whose first aim was marriage. The moral speech that predominates in these treatises praises modesty, obedience, sweetness and silence as dominant qualities in a woman. Silence had on one hand the support of the Aristotelian ideas on the humors, and on the other hand, the one of the speech of the Bible in Saint Paul's letters. A woman, in order to be a good wife, would have to follow strictly what moralists at the time were expecting from her. In The Stupid Lady (La dama boba), Lope presents an everyday scene: two maidens of marriageable age and their father's worry for marrying them. In this work, the model of a good wife, for whom silence was a necessary virtue, is little by little woven among laughs, lessons, sonnets, gallantries and the peculiar school of love.