Naturalizing politics metaphors of loss in Catharine Trotter's Agnes de Castro

In the long eighteenth century, metaphors of loss, primarily seen as a mental process (Lakof, 1993), express what is fundamentally at stake in the individual quest against an unfair world, refecting thereby the ideology of individualism and, at the same time, accounting for the rise of an emotional community (Rosenwein, 2010) of the tragic. Te loss they convey is always concerned with losing someone, or something, one deeply cherishes, e.g. a lover, a parent, freedom, etc. In Catharine Trotter’s Agnes de Castro (1696) the use of these metaphors takes the meaning of the discourse further, making for the invalidation of gender naturalization (Daston, 1992) as a strategy to display and emphasize political naturalization instead. In other words, the collapse of a set of established diferences between men and women is thought to favor the dissemination of a strong contrast between two rival nations, Portugal and Spain. Terefore, although the play classifes itself as a tragedy based on the Portuguese History, rightly settled in Coimbra, it does not ft in with the Portuguese dramatic trend about Agnes de Castro (Ferreira, 1587; Quita, 1766), since virtue and moral value are systematically on the Spanish side.