The final chapter of the first part of this book explores representations of the feminine in satire, one of the most successful literary genres in late colonial Spanish America, and further enquires into the relational complexities of gender (vis-à-vis class and race), as is evidenced so far in the work of Echeverría. It then goes on to suggest how women writers might resist.

Satire flourished in neoclassical Spain and the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and has continued until today. As we have seen, it appears in Echeverría's writings and to some extent in Bolívar's. A principal structural device of satire is misogyny: Quevedo, ‘master of grotesque female portraiture’ (Johnson 1993: 130), provided a model of notoriously virulent representations of women for later writers. Satirists were keen to criticise the women of their societies, as well as other social sectors (primarily blacks, mestizos and indigenous), although their main concern was not women per se but society at large. Satire used as a political weapon aims to undermine discourses of power and authority by drawing attention to discursive strategies and incongruities. As Johnson has convincingly argued, colonial Spanish American satirical writings constitute a counter-discourse employed to contest the sacrosanct official image of the New World utopia, which was shaped and controlled by metropolitan Spain. Satirists pinpointed what they viewed as the appalling disparity between appearance and reality, myth and history. The effectiveness of their writing depended on the skilful use of literary techniques (irony, parody, understatement, hyperbole, punning and so on) and a competent public able to read between the lines and identify both the official version and the counter text.

Central to this agenda and literary discourse was the figure of woman as trope. If in the bucolic and Petrarchan traditions, which continued throughout the colonial period, woman signified ethereal beauty and harmony, in satirical writings woman denoted the obverse: the grotesque and monstrous. In colonial texts written by educated male creoles and visiting peninsulares, the figure of woman, functioning metaphorically (directly or indirectly) as image for the source of corruption and social decay, encapsulates the physical and moral dissolution of colonial society.