S/Z in the Hispanic Context: Castration and Otherness in the Female Characters of Miguel de Cervantes and María de Zayas

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

In S/Z (1970), an ambitious semiotic study of Honoré de Balzac’s “Sarrasine,” Roland Barthes analyzes the ideological oppositions behind this graphic differentiation based on observing an unexpected deviation from the norm in the male protagonist’s name. This article reveals that Barthes’s analysis is applicable to Cervantes’s and Zayas’s novellas, abounding as they are in female Moorish characters whose names begin with the letter Z. The presence of this Z is best understood, not in phonological terms, but from the perspective of the cultural fabric of seventeenth-century Spain, where the Z becomes the stamp that unequivocally denounces the otherness and social castration of the female characters.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)463-480
Number of pages18
JournalRevista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos
Volume45
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 2020

Keywords

  • María de Zayas
  • Miguel de Cervantes
  • Roland Barthes’s S/Z
  • female Moorish characters
  • otherness

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'S/Z in the Hispanic Context: Castration and Otherness in the Female Characters of Miguel de Cervantes and María de Zayas'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this