Woman as Text in Othello and in Calderon’s Dramas de Honor Jesús López-Peláez Casellas UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID A s it usually happens with every discourse that results in opression, misogyny has been able to effa- ce its presence by inserting doubts on its own existence into the community in which it works. However, certain inevitable contradictions within patriarchalism have made possible some rea- dings denying the hierarchy male/female, in spite of the degree of acceptance that such a “common sense” attitude has amongst many societies. The plays that we study here offer an expected ambivalent position, regardless what part of the most conservative criticism has wanted to see in them; on the one hand, these plays certainly reproduce the terms of the dominant cultural environment, and although much has been said about the terrible position in which women are placed in these texts, perhaps somet- hing could be added in relation to the way they are scripted by males. But, secondly, we perceive what seems to be an uneasy incorporation of the process of construction of the notions of gender in these texts, which force a sort of intervention that questions, although with not much strength, this discourse. Dympna Callaghan reminds us of the difficulty of dealing with this topic in some kind of texts: While we must remain wary of simplifying the complex nature of either woman’s subordination or the privileged cultural representation of that subordination in tragedy, we cannot hedge about the historical fact that women were (and for that matter, remain) the diverse victims of multiple patriar- chal strategies (41) 1 . Woman has been explained, once she has been characterized as ‘unknown’, not as an independent entity, but from man, who sets what is ‘normal’, or ‘natural’, and from where woman is defined as her opposite. According to this it shouldn’t surprise us that Don Lope de Almeida, in A secreto agravio, secre- ta venganza 2 , when trying to praise his newly wed wife before the king, states that she is “noble” and “varonil” (III,445b). In the same way that the body politic of the Prince is privileged in relation to the subject, Louis Adrian Montrose points out how the dominant structures of thought and belief, ... also privileged the male body in relation to the female body. The versions of woman produced by such discourses as those of medicine, law, religion, and domestic economy were almost invariably imperfect versions of man - constitutionally colder, weaker, less stable than he. (308) 3 Othello presents a woman who appears to be, up to a certain point, free from male prohibitions. Desdemona, or what some authors have called “the first Desdemona” (in the first act and part of the second), is defined, significatively by Brabantio, as “half the wooer”, that is, active, self-sufficient and not reduced to a role. Her guilt-free erotism, her strong personality, that allows her to face the most conspicuous repre-