The “Beauty” of Suffering: Representations of Violence against Women in Spain—from María de Zayas to Alicia Luna and Icíar Bollaín

Abstract

The persistent problem of violence against women in Spain has often been obscured by the representation of female pain and suffering as a form of beauty. The film Te doy mis ojos provides an important critique of such historical, patriarchal representations of women in art and literature by portraying a unique female perspective of gendered violence in all of its brutality. This article studies Te doy mis ojos from three perspectives. First, it provides a historical context of violence against women through an examination of the Spanish legal system from medieval times to the present. Second, it analyzes the film as a response to the politics [End Page 125] of the aesthetics of violence in early modern Spain. Finally, it compares the film with the unique female voice of seventeenth-century writer Maria de Zayas. These three perspectives demonstrate an idiosyncratic female dialectic of violence that is important for understanding the portrayal of domestic violence in Spain, its relation to the legal context, and how it might be that we now perceive historical misrepresentations of violence against women as something sensual and beautiful.