Epilogue

This book has dealt primarily with fantasies of female rule created by men, and it is perhaps appropriate to conclude with a glancing consideration of a fictional gynocracy fashioned by a woman. Ana Caro Mallén de Soto’s El conde Partinuplés (probably written in the 1630s or 1640s and published in 1653) invites us to consider how a woman playwright addressed the multiple contradictions implied in the rule of women. The play has endured changeable critical fortunes and was, in fact, ignored or dismissed for a long time, in no small measure because of the sex of its writer. In the last decades, the play has gained steady attention, beginning with the excellent editions prepared by Lola Luna and Teresa Scott Soufas. El conde Partinuplés has gone from being described by none other than Melveena McKendrick as “extremely bad” (Women and Society 172) to being considered a paradigm of feminist writing and contestation. It has benefited from multiple intelligent and provocative readings from critics as diverse as Luna, Soufas, María Mercedes Carrión, Rina Walthaus, J.L. Montoussé Vega, and Jonathan Ellis. ¹