SOURCE: Friedman, Edward H. “The Voiceless Narrator: The Spanish Feminine Picaresque and Unliberated Discourse.” In The Antiheroine's Voice: Narrative Discourse and Transformation of the Picaresque, pp. 69-94. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987.

In the excerpt which follows, Friedman focuses on La lozana andaluza and La pícara Justina as examples of the distinct type of picaresque narrative that features female heroes.

Men, in determining the “acceptable” values and assumptions (which include the inferior status of women), subject women to experiences that men are not subjected to; but men's language structure does not include the ready means for women to express the thoughts and behavior that result from their subjugation.

Cheris Kramarae, Women and Men Speaking

A salient feature of narrative is its paradoxical resistance to historicist principles. As narrative forms proceed historically through time, they both expand the recourses of earlier texts and validate the presence of the...