From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
15.2 (1995): 27-42.
Copyright © 1995, The Cervantes Society of America
Quixotic Desires or Stark Reality?
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Counter-Reformation attempts to restore order required a separation
of the sacred from the profane. . . . To protect the
pure from the profane, order depended upon a program of enclosure
. . . Needing protection not only from outside influences,
but also from their own weaknesses, women were told to stay in the
‘natural’ confinement of convent, home, or brothel. |
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| (Mary Elizabeth Perry: 1990: 177-8) |
ervantes's novela,
El celoso extremeño, provides a means of access to codes, myths,
discourses, and ideologies that give it socio-cultural as well as literary
meaning. Different gender and generic subjectivities are implicated in the
novela and in the characters' construction, making them a battleground
of competing categories. My reading focuses on the relationship between behavior
and “belief systems,” and is based on the following premises: that
El celoso betrays a powerful set of cultural gender-coded assumptions,
that the characters enact discursive systems inherited from their cultural
milieu, and that they act out “patterns of perversely repetitive strategies
that [are] the outcome of dominant western gender assignments”
26
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(Waller, 84). Nevertheless, resistant subtexts in the novela challenge
these discursive systems thereby attesting to the reality of deep social
ruptures and of patriarchy in crisis.1 It
is, consequently, within the context of contesting discourses that I will
read El celoso extremeño as a perverse gender-coded fairy
tale.
I use the adjective “perverse” in
Louise Kaplan's sense. “Perversions,” she explains, “insofar
as they derive much of their emotional force from social gender stereotypes,
are as much pathologies of gender role identity as they are pathologies of
sexuality. . . . Socially normalized gender stereotypes
are the crucibles of perversion” (Kaplan, 14). In calling the
novela a gender-coded fairy tale, I use “fairy tale” in
Iona and Peter Opie's sense of the term as a story that “is not one
of rags to riches, or of dreams come true, but of reality made
evident” (Opie, 13: emphasis mine); and I depend on Lutz Röhrich's
tripartite model for the fairy tale's modus operandi. Röhrich
has pointed out that fairy tales function as illusion, allusion, and paradigms.
As illusion, fairy tales suggest that events may develop according
to a pattern that diverges sharply from the narrator's, the reader's, perhaps
even the author's expectations. Allusive use of fairy tales frequently
involves social institutions and, for Jungian analysts, “a deep
psychological reality generally hidden from view” (Bottigheimer, xii).
Lastly, fairy tales function as paradigms in understanding both a
given community and the individual's behavior within that community (xi-xii).
Unlike popular romance, fairy tales are not enactments of Quixotic desires,
or dream wishes (Opie, 14). Instead, stark reality suffuses them. Parents
are viewed as wholly untrustworthy. In Snow White and
Cinderella, for example, the magic lies in the women's being restored,
not raised, to positions of which their own parents had formerly deprived
them. In a number of variants, the story of Cinderella is more threatening.
She has been obliged to leave her royal home and take kitchen employment
elsewhere because her father, in search of the only woman who is as beautiful
as his dead wife, is determined to marry his own daughter (Opie, 15-16).
In Hansel and Gretel cannibalism is added to the theme of parental
abandonment and threat. Rape, even necrophilia, are present in these fantasies.
In fact, they form the very crux of the original fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty
before it was “purified” by Charles Perrault in 1697. It is rape,
not a princely kiss, that the various Prince
1 For
a study of sixteenth-century Seville as a city of “sharpening
conflicts,” of patriarchy in crisis, see “Neither Broken Sword
Nor Wandering Woman” in Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder
in Early Modern Seville, 3-13.
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Charmings bring to the catatonic beauties of earlier versions. The original
tale of Sleeping Beauty seems to have first appeared in the fourteenth-century
anonymous and vast prose romance Perceforest printed in France in
1528 and translated into Italian in 1531. In chapter LII, the “Histoire
de Troïlus et de Zellandine,” Troïlus rapes and impregnates
the catatonic Zellandine who delivers the child while still in a stupor.
The anonymous Catalan version written, according to P. Meyer, in the XIV
century, Frayre de Joy e Sor de Plaser, includes the same ungentlemanly
behavior (and consequences). Frayre de Joy also rapes the catatonic Sor de
Plaser during her trance-like slumber (Perceforest XVII-XXIX). In
Giambattista Basile's Il Pentamerone, published posthumously in 1674
but circulating much earlier, the sleeping Talia of the Fifth tale of Day
Five is raped by a married king who happens to be hunting near the palace
where she lies sleeping. Her subsequent pregnancy and the “great league
and friendship” she shares with her lover the king occasions the queen's
homicidal hatred of her and of her children (Opie, 102-102). Such grim originary
versions have left gender-coded traces even on Perrault's domesticated
late-seventeenth century tale. Here the betrayed wife of earlier versions
of Sleeping Beauty becomes a female ogre who is also the mother of
the young and handsome prince. As jarring as this makes Perrault's tale,
it serves the interest of patriarchy and thereby saves the text. In his version,
no adulterous act, no rape, is attributed to the idealized male visitor of
the sleeping beauty. The onus falls, instead, on the evil female queen who
vents her wrath on another female, the innocent Sleeping Beauty. Yet both
women in earlier versions have been the victims of the king's deception.
It is clear, then, that fairy tales, as constructed and promulgated in the
west, are gendered discourses. A misogynistic ideology makes women natural
enemies and splits them into bad or good entities: wicked stepmothers / sisters
harm good stepdaughters / siblings, and, good or bad, women are portrayed
as potentially destructive to the social order. They are seen as objects
of conflict between women (Cinderella; Snow White), as objects
of rivalry and enmity between men (The Yellow Dwarf), or as ideally
pure and so sexually threatened and threatening (Rapunzel;
Thumbelina). Women's natural weaknesses and propensity for disorder
therefore requires their special protection and enclosure. These gendered
subjectivities, as well as those of class and race, are implicated in El
celoso extremeño. Its allusive and paradigmatic function, and
Cervantes's uniqueness of treatment, can best be appreciated in comparison
with fairy tale prototypes in which such categories become irrelevant.
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The story that most resembles El celoso
can be found in the earliest European storybook to include fairy tales, and
one which was immensely popular in Spain during the time Cervantes was writing.
It is Le Piacevoli Notti (The Delightful Nights) of Giovan
Francesco Straparola da Caravaggio, published in Venice in two parts, 1550-1553.
In the Spanish translation of Straparola, the Spaniard Francisco Truchado
had tried to moralize the not-so-moral tales because, as he states in the
preface, “sabéis la diferencia que hay entre la libertad italiana
y la nuestra” (Pabst, 193). Truchado titled his translation of Straparola,
“Primera y segunda parte del honesto y agradable entretenimiento de
damas y galanes.” The Notti were published in 1583 in Granada,
and 1598 and again in 1612 in Madrid (Pabst, 193). It is the First Fable
of the Ninth Night that most resembles El celoso. In it, Galafro,
an old king of Spain, is wed to a young woman by whom, a chiromantist informs
him, he will be deceived. The frightened king shuts his young wife in “a
strong and massy tower,” and places her “under the most jealous
guard” (Straparola, 186-187). The report comes to the ears of the young
prince Galeotto who, like Loaysa, sees this as a challenge to his
industria. He, apprised of “the angelic beauty of the young queen
and the advanced age of her husband, and the manner in which he let her pass
her days, keeping her shut up a close prisoner in a strong-built tower, resolved
to make an attempt to put a trick upon this king” (Straparola, 188).
Galeotto disguises himself as a poor merchant and pretends to sell beautiful
cloths. He is immediately given access to the tower by the young queen, and
they make love. As in El celoso, repressed sexuality, deceit and
rationalization emplot Straparola's tale. The young queen, like Leonora,
mentally compares her husband and the younger man and “marked that the
merchant was well seeming and pleasant to look upon” (191). All are
aware that the stranger's disguise is fake, that “this man could not
possibly be of mean condition,” yet their curiosity wins out (192).
The successful Galeotto subsequently chants in the streets, “I know
well enough all about it, but I have no mind to tell” (198). The king
innocently repeats the catchy refrain to his wife. She confesses and is forgiven
her indiscretion because “heaven” had willed that this should
happen.2 In fairy-tale fashion
2 It is
interesting to note that Américo Castro posits Carrizales's similar
utterance,“mas no se puede prevenir con diligencia humana el castigo
que la voluntad divina quiere dar a los que en ella no ponen del todo en
todo sus deseos y esperanzas . . . ” (Celoso, 133),
as emerging instead from a “viva tradición islámica.”
Hacia Cervantes, 445. What is culturally significant, however, is
how meaning is produced through translation / publication strategies. In
the Italian [p. 30] version, Straparola ends
his fairy tale simply, with the victory of Galeotto and the conventional
“they lived happily ever after” of the king and queen: “Ed
in quel-l'ora fece spianar la torre, e pose la moglie in libertá,
con la quale allegramente visse; e Galeotto, nel fatto d'arme vittorioso,
con le sue merci a casa fece ritorno.” Le piacevoli notti, 100.
In the French and English versions, however, shame / honor prescriptions
are added to the original thereby producing new and gendered meaning. As
Leocadia's father had advised her that “es mejor la deshonra que se
ignora que la honra que está puesta en opinión de las gentes”
(“La fuerza de la sangre,” 79), so do the listeners react in the
frame story of the English and French versions. They are delighted with the
tale, but “were much astonished that the queen should have been led
to bring to light so easily her hidden fault, holding that she would have
done better to suffer death a thousand-fold than to take upon herself such
a scandalous disgrace.” The Facetious Nights, 200-201; “la
compagnie, qui s'esbahissoit assez comme la royne avoit esté si simple
de descouvrir si légèrement son fait, attendu qu'elle se devoit
plustôt offrir à la mercy de mille morts, qu'encourir un blasme
tant scandaleux . . .”. Les facetieuses nuits, 176.
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the king thereafter gives his wife “full liberty to do whatsoever she
would,” and “they lived happily and joyfully” (200).
In Straparola's tale, all the characters are
of princely lineage and categories of gender, class, and race are irrelevant.
In El celoso extremeño, however, these conflicting codes
problematize the story. James Fernández, in his New World reading
of El celoso, elides the issue of gender and focuses instead on categories
of class and race, that is, on the relations of subordination produced by
Carrizales, the indiano governor of an ínsula,
“inhabited by a racially diverse group of natives” (972). Genre
issues too, which are similarly irrelevant to Straparola's fable, continue
to elicit critical attention.3 In her recent
study of the figure of the deceived husband, Alison Sinclair reviews some
generic subjectivities implicated in El celoso extremeño, and
focuses on two generic types on which the figure of Carrizales is modeled:
the Cuckold as developed from the fabliaux into the tradition familiar to
us in Boccaccio's Decameron (1350) and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
(1387- ); and the Man of Honor, a different but complementary tradition of
the wronged husband, of which known prototypes are found, of course, in the
wife-murder plays of Calderón, Lope, Rojas Zorrilla (Sinclair, 50-172).
It is common knowledge that Carrizales fits the type of the inadequate husband
in the proverbial January-May relationship, and that he tries to enact the
Man of Honor, “the model or epitome of vigilance,” as he prepares
a “speedy and effective retaliation” at the sight of the sleeping
lovers
3 George
Cirot's work on El celoso extremeño is still essential for
the study of the sources of both El celoso and the
entremés of El viejo celoso. See Works Cited.
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in the novela (Sinclair, ch. 4). As Röhrich points out in his
explanation of the tripartite function of fairy tales, however, fairy tales
can be said to be illusive precisely because they diverge sharply from the
narrator's or the reader's expectations. Sinclair herself acknowledges that
Carrizales's actions fit neither generic expectations. She therefore makes
him the model of a new category, namely, that of Man of Distinction which
suggests “the reality of the suffering and vulnerable human being
underneath” both types of the Cuckold and the Man of Honor (Sinclair,
256). Informed by object-relations theory, Sinclair concludes that Carrizales
ultimately emerges from a paranoid-schizoid position where fear, denial,
and splitting mark the personality to the depressive position at the end
of the novela where he is at last capable of understanding and
forgiveness. Sinclair does in one page, and primarily as an aside, what Alison
Weber had already done ten years earlier in her fine article on a Kleinian
approach to El celoso (Weber: 1984). Both affirm, in their own ways,
that Carrizales ultimately achieves the ability to be prompted to actions
and to attitudes of reparation. This is not my position. I believe, instead,
that Carrizales's final act of forgiveness is but a vengeful and effective
wielding of power. My argument is that Carrizales, a nouveau riche, paranoid,
and ageing bourgeois, encodes himself and the characters in a self-empowering
script. He constructs women in two abstract discourses, chastity and
lasciviousness. They are either ideally pure but sexually vulnerable, or
they are sexually dangerous. Carrizales then proceeds to decode their sexual
vulnerability and, in so doing, emerges triumphant and grandiose, rather
than repentant, at the end.
When we first meet Carrizales, he is a loner.
His class affiliation is blurred (Dunn, 99). From hidalgo he has become a
bourgeois indiano like “otros muchos perdidos en aquella
ciudad.”4 He has no social connectedness:
his friends and parents are dead. Having squandered his money, he is a
“Pródigo” with no home to which he can return. Moreover,
he is filled with a sense of failure because of “el mal gobierno que
en todo el discurso de su vida había tenido,” and overwhelmed
with paranoia as a result of “los muchos y diversos peligros que en
los años de su peregrinación había pasado”
(Celoso, 100). Carrizales is simply a man who lacks situatedness.
Bruised by his past experiences with women, he has formed a
4 “El
celoso extremeño,” p. 100. I will be referring throughout to
the Novelas Ejemplares, ed. Harry Sieber (Mexico: Cátedra,
1988), II: 99-135. References will be to Celoso with page numbers
in parenthesis in the text.
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deep-seated belief in women's weaknesses and their propensity for disorder.
He will spend twenty years in the New World putting order back into his life
by caring for “la hacienda que Dios fuese servido de darle” and
by proceeding “con más recato que hasta allí con las
mujeres” (Celoso, 100). Twice in the novela, however,
his attempts at ordering his life are constructed in order to validate his
ideological bias. Carrizales goes to the New World “engaño
común de muchos y remedio particular de pocos” (Celoso,
99), explicitly to make money and to change his negative attitude about women.
But the land he chooses in order to change his negative fantasy of women
is actually “añagaza general de mujeres libres” (99). Not
surprisingly, then, Carrizales returns from the New World as paranoid and
as distrustful of women as he was in the Old twenty years earlier. On his
return to Spain, now empowered by newly-acquired wealth, he is beset by two
powerful conflicting needs. For his “quietud y sosiego,” he needs
to leave his fortune to a wife and heir. For that same “quietud y
sosiego,” however, he needs to avoid women and their disturbing potential
(Celoso, 102). His second attempt at ordering his life is also constructed
so as to validate his ideological bias. Just as he had chosen the Indies,
“añagaza general de mujeres libres,” to change his negative
view of women, so he now chooses, not his harsh, impoverished native city
but opulent Seville, instead, known in the sixteenth century as “the
Great Babylon of Spain” (Perry: 1980: 1). Driven by contradictory desires,
Carrizales makes an economic arrangement designed to satisfy his conflicting
needs. He will buy a young girl whom he can control: “encerraréla
y haréla a mis mañas, y con esto no tendrá otra
condición que aquella que yo le enseñaré” (102),
and he will build a foolproof structure within which he can enclose her.
In order to be in control, the former
Indiano now inscribes his new identity of husband in a discourse whose
central psychocultural trope is the perversion of fetishism. He devivifies
the girl at the window and in the freeze-frame of his gaze, makes Leonora
into a non-threatening fetish, according her attributes object status wholly
separate from her totality. She is reduced to abstract paradigms: beautiful,
poor, young, malleable (Theweleit I, 89). He then proceeds to further unsettle
the threatening boundaries between the real and the not-real by constructing
a walled-in enclosure designed to guarantee her chastity and to deflect his
fear of the death instinct.5 Stasis,
5 Kaplan,
119. It is because Carrizales senses the imminence of death that he wants
to leave his wealth to a wife “después de sus días,”
and rationalizes that [p. 33] in marriage “el
gusto alarga la vida” (Celoso, 102). Psychologists have pointed
out that, “A man who is driven by a perverse fantasy is terrified of
open, ambiguous spaces . . . He prizes strong, upright, sturdy
structures that inspire in him feats of daring and prowess” (Kaplan,
74).
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control, infantilism will henceforth mark Leonora's existence as her sartorial,
ludic, and religious needs are met. Making and playing with dolls, baking
and eating sweet pastries, constitutes her life in a Jungian dream world
of infantile happiness and child-likeness, the classic perversion of “a
Garden of Eden where there are no real or significant differences between
the adult and child generations” (Kaplan, 113). Infantilism of this
kind has often been feminized as natural and enviable. Jean Paulhan, in his
preface to the twentieth-century model of perversion, the Story of O,
of Pauline Réage (Dominique Aury), expresses genuine envy of O's voluntary
enslavement and of the sexual humiliation to which she has consented. It
represents, he says, that longed-for and lost childhood which is not allowed
to men: “Women at least,” he gushes, “are fated to resemble,
throughout their lives, the children we once were.” In this way are
gender assignments naturalized, and in this way perverse scenarios are played
out as normal. Once of the fundamental paradoxes of our social life, Paul
Willis reminds us, is the fact that “when we are in roles that look
the most obvious and given, we are actually in roles that are constructed”
(1979: 184).
In order to appreciate how porous are the
boundaries between the textual and the contextual, and to show how texts
are primarily products of discursive practices, it is appropriate to move
outside the text in order to look at some constituent elements that are the
producers of meaning in El celoso. González Amezúa had
claimed long ago that everything in the novela had been taken from
the reality of sixteenth-century Seville (II: 245ff), and Mary Elizabeth
Perry has shown how, in early modern Seville, the order-restoring function
of gender becomes normalized. Secular and ecclesiastical officials increased
their powers of social control as they responded to all kinds of crises and
schisms. By the end of the sixteenth century, Seville had become the fourth
largest city in Europe with a population of more than 100,000, excluding
vagrants and transients. This highly commercial city was uncontrollable.
On the one hand, hustling prostitutes, procuresses, potion makers and fortune
tellers cluttered the city to the consternation of the city officials. On
the other hand, visionary women, healers, and prophetesses worried the
ecclesiastical authorities (Perry: 1980: 123-125). In the ensuing crisis
for
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patriarchal control, both secular and religious, “[e]nclosure and purity
developed as strategies for defending the faith . . . [and] women
. . . required the special protection of enclosure” (Perry:
1990: 6). Religious beliefs permeated gender ideology. Juan de la Cerda advised
fathers of marriageable daughters to “cerrar a cal y canto, todas las
puertas, todas las portillas, por donde le pueda venir algún
peligro”; and Fray Luis de León naturalized such actions: “Como
son los hombres para lo público, así las mujeres para el
encerramiento” because “la naturaleza . . . hizo a las
mujeres para que encerradas guardasen la casa . . .
”.6 Fray Luis would have the “prudent
husband” bar his wife from any contact with other women, even from receiving
visits in her home, because when women talk together, it “always leads
to a thousand evils” (228: Perry 1990: 68). The innate fallibility of
women, already constructed by such treatises, became linked with a particularly
conservative ideology around 1525 due to increased male emigration to the
New World. As a result, women lost autonomy and influence, gender restrictions
were legitimated, and masculine power and control was effected (Perry: 1990:
177-180). There is, then, nothing in Carrizales's obsessive behavior that
would have seemed abnormal or unnatural in sixteenth-century Seville. Even
his fortress-like house is modelled after the emparedamientos or convents
in Seville which actually presented “to the streets a face without
windows” (Perry: 1990: 75). The presence of servants and slaves in these
emparedamientos was also common. Carrizales's branding of his four
“white slaves” and not the two black ones may be a bit unusual
but not the branding of slaves, in general, who were destined for domestic
service in the city's household (Pike, 176-177). In one case, that of the
Convent of the Incarnation in Seville, the presence of slaves was found
disturbing only because the nuns were perceived as thereby overspending their
original endowment (Perry: 1990: 80). Contextual reality, then, shows Carrizales
to be a construct of discursive systems inherited from his cultural milieu
and it also explains the women's acquiescence as they too act out patterns
of perversely repetitive strategies of subordination that match Carrizales's
of domination. For Leonora, her enclosure constitutes a mere “advertido
recato,” the natural modus vivendi of newly-weds (Celoso. 106).
The servants
6 Juan
de la Cerda, Libro intitulado vida politica de todos los estados de
mujeres (1599); Juan de Soto, Obligaciones de todos los estados y
oficios (1617); Fray Luis de León, La perfecta casada (158,
154). All quotes come from Alison Weber, “Pentimento: The Parodic Text
of La Gitanilla,” pp. 61-62, 67.
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and slaves, “[p]rometiéronle . . . de hacer todo aquello
que les mandaba, sin pesadumbre, con prompta voluntad y buen
ánimo” (105: emphasis mine). The parents are satisfied because
of “las muchas dádivas que Carrizales, su liberal yerno, les
daba,” and the narrator tells us, approvingly, that “todos le
querían bien, por ser de condición llana y agradable, y, sobre
todo, por mostrarse tan liberal con todas” (106). As Antonio Gramsci
has reminded us, cultural domination is achieved —not by force or coercion,
but secured, instead, through the consent of those it ultimately
subordinates.
The very ubiquity and persistence of gender
prescriptions prohibiting women from having contact with both men and other
women signal, however, deep ruptures in the social fabric of the sixteenth
century (Perry: 1990: 9), ruptures that are present in the novela,
and that provide a discursive field in which cultural myths and their function
as effective ideologies are contested (Barthes, Mythologies). Resistant
subtexts in El celoso both suggest alternative structural possibilities
for Carrizales and historicize what the women accept as givens, thereby making
the novela a site of two contesting discourses: that of acquiescence
and that of transgression. The transgressive discourse is sometimes articulated
explicitly. Leonora's parents, for example, accept Carrizales's economic
arrangement but also tearfully express their awareness “que la llevaban
a la sepultura” (Celoso, 104). Mass cultural texts compete with
the dominant text. The dominant text describes the house as a Bower of Bliss,
suffused with light from ubiquitous skylights, and built in the midst of
running water and orange trees. Loaysa and the women, however, sing popular
coplas that contest the security of the bower: “Si la voluntad por sí
no se guarda, / no la harán guarda / miedo o calidad”
(Celoso, 126); and that warn against the enclosure of women: “que
si yo no me guardo, / no me guardaréis” (Celoso, 125).
Lope's well-known ballad, the “Star of Venus” and the popular songs
of Abindarráez, and Abenámar in El celoso are all texts
dealing with “the passions and frustrations of youthful love, tyrannical
oppression of a maiden, and the theme of confinement” (Forcione: 1982:
36). Less explicitly, but just as transgressive, refracted echoes of horstexte
realities of Biblical and Classical origin serve as caveats and resistant
subtexts. It makes narratorial sense, for example, to equate the jealous
and vigilant Carrizales with Argus. The remainder of Argus's untold story,
however, warns of what happens to the most vigilant of Arguses in the hands
of more cunning musicians. The description of Loaysa as Absalom is another
instance. It may well refer to the former's comeliness, as Harry Sieber has
pointed out, but
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the reference nevertheless provides access to a fearfully-relevant analogy.
The Absalom-Amnon-Tamar story is, after all, the story of another violation
of the sanctity of a home and a woman, and Tamar's shame-filled enclosure
for the rest of her life, like Leonora's, provides a compelling subtext.
The off-hand reference to the “nuevos adúlteros enlazados en
la red de sus brazos” (Celoso, 130), also serves as a contestatorial
fragment, displaying the consequences brought about by a spurned Jupiter's
marrying off young Venus to his deformed son Vulcan. Even the simile used
to compare the fleeing servants who think that Carrizales has awakened echoes
transgression. They are fittingly compared to doves eating “sin miedo
lo que ajenas manos sembraron” (Celoso, 126-127).
Such subtexts, although they constitute resistant
fragments, however, do not constitute discourses of power in the text. It
is only Carrizales who ultimately wields power. Once the house is invaded,
and he dishonored, he reproduces in dying what he had produced in his lifetime:
discursive systems of control. His reaction to the supposed adultery runs
the gamut of homicidal rage, to contempt for the hypocritical Leonora, to
a calm and deliberate “venganza.” Carrizales has the legal right
to kill the couple. It is common knowledge that the law provided that a wronged
husband could execute his wife and her lover, privately or publicly. In 1565,
for example, before an approving public, an innkeeper stabbed his wife and
her lover (Perry: 1980: 140). Not surprisingly, then, the narrator of the
novela anticipates the reader's support for wife murder as
“determinación honrosa y necesaria” (Celoso, 130).
But this is not Carrizales's way. “La venganza que pienso tomar desta
afrenta,” he emphasizes, “no es ni ha de ser de las que ordinariamente
suelen tomarse” (Celoso, 133). In a self-serving and grandiose
gesture, he has the parents, the dueña, and Leonora summoned before
him so that he can disclose Leonora's shame and his dishonor. The gesture
also provides a means of access to ideologies that give it socio-cultural
significance. We know that in early modern Seville, the dueña or older
woman was constructed as a Celestina, dangerous to the morals of innocent
Melibeas / Leonoras. Historical records abound in such cases (Perry: 1990:
56). Twice the “evil dueña” and Leonora are put on the same
level. First, as both, prostrate on the floor, are complicitous in deceiving
Carrizales, and secondly, in the recognition scene as the shame and disgrace
of both women is exposed. What Helena Percas de Ponseti says of the first
instance applies equally to the second: “Leonora se pone al mismo nivel
que la dueña, representación gráfica de la bajeza del
engaño. En ese momento son hermanas espirituales”
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(146). That the dueña and Leonora should be together in the recognition
/ exposure scene therefore constitutes a powerful signifying practice. It
positions Leonora, if not as an adulteress, then certainly as not sexually
innocent. In a Biblical sense she has lusted in her heart for Loaysa. In
an Augustinian context her plea, “sólo te ofendí en el
pensamento,” is already theologically damning. As a sin of intentionality,
it constitutes a sin in actu (The City of God I.19). Moreover,
whether or not Leonora is guilty of adultery, she has succumbed to temptation
and has failed Carrizales. She has disobeyed her husband's only request,
that she let no one into the house. It is she who administers the soporific.
It is she who enthusiastically readies the wax in order to duplicate the
key that facilitates Loaysa's ins and outs. The person who is ultimately
responsible for Carrizales's death is Leonora. She cannot, under any
circumstances, be considered blameless (Percas, 146). The reader may be able
to concede irony in Carrizales's uncontested pronouncement that he has made
her his equal in all things, but the reiteration of all he has done for her
cannot be contested. It merely makes her ingratitude even more heinous and
his magnanimity thereby more significant. He doubles her dowry with the proviso
that she marry the virote, and, in a paternalistic gesture, forgives
her because of her natural weakness, “su poco ingenio”
(Celoso, 133).7
It seems appropriate to move briefly outside
the text once more for two intertextual resonances that enrich my reading
of Carrizales's so-called magnanimous gesture: one is cultural, the other
literary. In 1624 an adulterous couple were brought to the Plaza in Seville
to be executed. The wife threw herself at her husband's feet begging for
forgiveness. After one hour of this public spectacle the husband forgave
her because the scene had established his honor and ensured forever both
her guilt and her social humiliation (Perry: 1980: 142). In 1607 Thomas Heywood's
A Woman Killed with Kindness was published. In Heywood's play, the
virtuous husband, Franford,
7 For
virotes, the young blades who threatened secular and ecclesiastical
authority, see Mary Elizabeth Perry, Crime and Society in Early Modern
Seville, pp. 155-157. Women often manipulated the image of the woman-easily
deceived to their advantage (Davis, 68), and used their “natural”
weakness as a weapon against patriarchy. One of the most renowned instances
of this is the case of the adulterous wife, Bertrande de Rols, in the celebrated
sixteenth-century story of Martin Guerre. The clever Bertrande, who lived
with the imposter Arnaud du Tilh (Pansette) for over three years as his wife,
was not prosecuted for fraud or for adultery because “the judges agreed
to accept her good faith; the female sex was, after all, fragile”
(Davis,90).
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MYRIAM YVONNE
JEHENSON |
Cervantes |
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described as such by critics, as Carrizales is often described as forgiving,
as a Man of Distinction, tells his adulterous wife Anne that he will neither
martyr her nor dishonor her name. Instead he will isolate her and “with
usage / Of more humility torment thy soul, / And kill thee, even with
kindness” (13. 155-157). Franford's Spanish counterpart is just as
insightful and wields as much power when he implements his “estremada
venganza.” Carrizales has succeeded in decoding publicly his misogynistic
script. The ideally-pure Leonora as well as the sexually-dangerous dueña
have both validated his view of women as sexually vulnerable. He emerges
triumphant and vindicated at the end as everyone else is rendered disordered
and dysfunctional. The once-confident Loaysa is depicted as “despechado
y casi corrido” as a result of this experience with women
(Celoso, 135). Because of Leonora he has become Carrizales's enemy
and has been defrauded of his expectations. His end, en route to the Indies,
as Carrizales had been at the beginning of the novela, suggests the
cloning effectiveness of Carrizales's misogyny. As A. F. Lambert has pointed
out, “Loaysa, it is clear will . . . [become] a Carrizales,
as Carrizales had been a Loaysa” (Lambert, 225). Marialonso, who had
been initially encoded as “dueña de mucha prudencia y gravedad”
(Celoso, 104), has now been decoded into one more “falsa”
Celestina, natural enemy of another woman, namely, the once-innocent Leonora.
Leonora's parents, who “quedaron tristísimos” at his death,
will never be the same (Celoso, 135). A shamed daughter and a dishonored
son-in-law are the legacy women's propensity for disorder has left them.
The narrator himself wonders about women and, as a result, is confused and
rendered unreliable. Is Leonora sexually innocent or are Leonora and Loaysa,
instead, “nuevos adúlteros” as he himself labels them. No
one, however, internalizes Carrizales's negative view of women as does Leonora.
This experience has simply decoded for her the “truth” of Carrizales's
script: women's weaknesses, their sexual vulnerability, and their propensity
to disorder. The lesson she has learned is that the only effective way to
protect women is to confine them within even more secure enclosures. And
so she decides to spend the rest of her guilt-filled life in “uno de
los más recogidos monasterios de la cuidad” (Celoso,
135).
Ruth El Saffar, for whom Leonora's choice at
the end is self-defining (as it is for Forcione), in referring to another
aspect of the novela writes that “Carrizales is simultaneously
Leonora and Loaysa” (47, 43). It is clear that I see Leonora's
“choice” not as self-defining but as constructed. However, El Saffar's
quote is valid in
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another sense. If Carrizales can be said to be the product of his cultural
milieu, so Leonora and Loaysa can be seen as products of Carrizales's belief
system. This makes the ending, as it has the entire novela, a continuing
site of contested discourses. It is not the discourses of acquiescence and
transgression, however, which are contested this time, but the discourse
of humanism, on the one hand, with its insistence on the free agency of the
individual, and the counter discourse of socialism, on the other, with its
awareness of individual experience as culturally and politically constrained.
We are left in El celoso extremeño, as in so many of Cervantes's
works, with what Umberto Eco calls an opera aperta, that is, a work
that admits of a multiplicity of possible readings in which meaning must
ultimately be negotiated between mutually contested positions
simultaneously.8
8 Especially
pertinent to the myriad interpretations El celoso extremeño
has elicited, is Eco's emphasis on the ambiguities that must necessarily
arise from a work of art because of the differences in sensibility, education,
cultural background, and intelligence of readers. Opera aperta. 7th
edition. Milano: Bompiani, 1989. First published in 1962.
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1988. II: 99-135.
——. Novelas Ejemplares. “La fuerza de la sangre.”
Ed. Harry Sieber. Mexico: Cátedra, 1988. II: 77-95.
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Bulletin Hispanique 31 (1929): 1-74.
——. “El celoso extremeño et l'Histoire de Floire et
de Blanceflor,” Bulletin Hispanique 31 (1929): 339-46.
——. “Quelques mots encore sur les ‘maris jaloux’
de Cervantès,” Bulletin Hispanique 42 (1940): 303-306.
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Harvard University Press, 1983.
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41 |
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El Saffar, Ruth. Novel to Romance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
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MYRIAM YVONNE
JEHENSON |
Cervantes |
|
Réage, Pauline. The Story of O. Tr. Sabine d'Estrée.
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Prepared with
the help of Sue Dirrim |
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