“I found her skinny, old, toothless, wrinkled and very different in her appearance” (II, 3, 6): Feminine agency and senescence in Guzmán de Alfarache

Abstract

The fate of Marcela, mother of Guzmán de Alfarache, is a broken mirror where the times of splendor and decadence merge, it is a reflection of what she was, and could have achieved, and a bitter anticipation of any further limitation that the rogue son will experience. Since the tragic nature of the second abandonment in which the mother will be exposed and unprotected by her son reverberates guilt in the evocation of the galley slave writer of a biblical paraphrase (Luke, 23, 31) that he only judges relevant to him when he falls, much younger, in disgrace: 'if this is how I feel about this job, if this happens on the green wood, what will the dry one do?'(II, 3, 8).

In the throes of the narrated biographical adventure, the contextual and elusive figuration of the elderly mother whispers that the fading of a differential discourse about her old age must be refined from multiple angles: the gender difference, the diverse assessment of the family constituents and the age distance of each. Since in this constellation of significant tensions what is settled, with Marcela's vignettes decrepit, are the margins of freedom and agency that each culture is willing to pay tribute to their elders.