Class Conflict In Lope De Vega's Fuenteovejuna

In his play Fuenteovejuna, Lope de Vega presents his audience with a provocative subversion of traditional class dynamics, depicting the peasants of the village of Fuenteovejuna revolting against and then killing the Commander who presides over them. This dramatic disruption of conventional class hierarchies would certainly be shocking to Vega’s original 17th century audience because they would be familiar with the structure of feudal societies such as the town of Fuenteovejuna. On the other hand, a modern audience lacks the necessary knowledge of European feudal politics to truly experience the same impact as an audience from Vega’s era. To remedy this issue, the class conflict in Fuenteovejuna should be portrayed as a Marxist revolution,

The working class--the proletariat--must work to survive. Conversely, the bourgeois own the means of production and exploit the proletariat for their labor as well as the goods produced as a result (Ollman). The characters of Fuenteovejuna fit easily within this dichotomy. The townspeople exemplify Marx’s proletariat class, working tirelessly only to have the fruits of their labor--the crops they have harvested--taken by the Commander and the other nobles. Then, the Commander and his fellow nobles exemplify the bourgeois

Principally, Vega portrays the commodification of the peasant women of Fuenteovejuna. Throughout the playa, the Commander treats the peasant women as his property. During their first conversation in the play, the Commander forcefully asks Pascuala “don’t you belong to me?” after she rejects his sexual advances (Vega 37). Within the same conversation, he takes verbal possession of her by calling her “my wild beauty” (Vega 37). The possessive pronoun “my” demonstrates how the Commander perceives Pascuala as his property rather than as a person. He continues to equate the peasant women with property by declaring to Pascuala and Laurencia “you’re also here as presents/just like the rest!” (Vega 39). By paralleling the women to the food he takes from the villagers, the Commander objectifies them, portraying them as property. In a Marxist staging of the play, this equation would be enriched by the important role property plays in the conflict between the Commander and the peasants. The Commander’s objectification of the peasant women is not only insulting; it represents his further exploitation of the property of the working class. Indeed, Vega parallels the women with food, the property the Commander exploits from the villagers. When Laurencia asks the Commander’s