Marianismo
""Marianismo"" originally referred to the devotion to Mary (). The term was first used by political scientist Evelyn Stevens in her 1973 essay ""Marianismo": The Other Face of "Machismo"". It was in direct response to the male word "machismo" and was meant to explain the phenomenon in Latin America in which women were either "saints or whores". It is the supposed ideal of true femininity that women are supposed to live up to—i.e. being modest, virtuous, and sexually abstinent until marriage—and then being faithful and subordinate to their husbands. In essence, marianismo is the female counterpart to machismo, and as such, probably originated during the time of the Spanish colonization of the Americas.
Marinism
The following discussion is based on Mirollo's analysis.
The Marinist poet never hesitated to embark on a long string of comparisons with nature, most of them couched as metaphor rather than simile because this allowed for more striking statements. "There was hardly an area of human experience that could not be pressed into service for a comparison." Nevertheless, Marino leans heavily on both classical mythology and Christian imagery, adapting it freely to create a huge number of memorable word-pictures: "gems, minerals, and precious metals [...] flowers (especially the rose and the lily), birds, fire, snow, the seasons, the sea, and, above all, sun and stars [...] milk, ivory, parturition, the arts and sciences, and a variety of actions and emotions useful for personification."