Santa Teresa and the Problem of Desire
1980; American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese; Volume: 63; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/341006
ISSN2153-6414
Autores Tópico(s)Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism
ResumoSANTA TERESA of Avila has always been ranked as one of the great figures of Spanish literature. Yet her position as a writer, as opposed to an icon, has been consistently problematical. Many years ago, in a seminal article, Am6rico Castro remarked that Teresa's readers and commentators were either her pious devotees, philologists interested in her colloquial style as a specimen of sixteenth-century Spanish language, or psychologists who considered her writings as a psychopathological case history.' With the exception of Castro's article and perhaps one or two other studies,2 this situation still prevails. As a result, Teresa's texts function primarily as pretexts for discourses on one or another phenomenon that is basically extrinsic to her own discourse.3 Teresa's most widely read text, the Libro de su vida, will be studied to reveal its fundamental literary expression. It will be seen that Teresa's selection of incidents, her ordering of these, and her imagery in general are tailored to the solution of a fundamental and difficult human problem. In this regard, Castro's most judicious insight into her writings serves nicely as a preface to my own reading of her text. In Castro's opinion, Teresa's most valuable contribution as a writer was to insert into a well-established fund of mystical discourse her own feminine temperament no renuncia a nada, cuando pretende renunciar a todo.4 In this essay I will illustrate how and why this process functions in her autobiography. As a confessional autobiography, Santa Teresa's Libro de su vida seems vague. The reader who turns to Teresa's text expecting the type of revelations found in other works of the same genre-those of Saint Augustine or Rousseau, for example-is bound to be disappointed. While Teresa is fond of berating herself for her sins, she gives the reader few specific examples that would justify her bad conscience. In view of the fact that her Life is divided roughly into two sections, the chapters which deal with her life previous to her divinely inspired conversion on the one hand, and those that describe her new life of grace on the other, it is surprising that she does not take the opportunity to utilize the first section as an exemplary catalogue of sinful activity. On the contrary, those chapters which concern her life before taking up her religious vocation are the vaguest of all. Even though we are given to understand that the life described in the first nine chapters of the text is ridden with sin, Teresa's ambivalence about such sins is remarkable. She repeatedly implies that she was not to blame for those sins, and shifts the culpability elsewhere: to her cousins, to books of chivalry, to her father, and to her confessors. While on occasion Teresa does admit responsibility for one sinful lapse or another, most of the time such admissions are followed by a retraction. For example, she may declare, .. y no debia ser suya la culpa, sino mia only to tell us later in the same paragraph: Y pues nunca era inclinada a mucho mal, cosas deshonestas naturalmente las aborrecia . . . mds puesta en la ocasi6n, estaba en la mano el peligro (Vida 11, 65, my emphasis). Although Teresa tells us that she resists complaining about her parents, porque no veia en ellos sino todo y cuidado de mi bien (Vida I, 8) she promptly complains about them for allowing her to fall prey to temptation. In this vein Teresa implicates her parents in an incident which she insists was largely r sponsible for her youthful life of sin (Vida 11, 2). While Teresa typically gives us no details about the incident, other than to say that her cousins were involved, she does conclude her reflections on her sin with an indirect reproach of her parents: Si yo hubiera de aconsejar, dijera a los padres que en esta edad tuviesen gran cuenta con las personas que tratan sus hijos; aqui estai mucho mal que se va nuestro natural antes a lo peor que a lo mejor (Vida 1n, 3). This Teresian ambiguity, which arises out of her refusal to accept full responsibility for her acts even as she recognizes these as constituting part of her being, is tantamount to a fundamental denial. While Teresa ruefully realizes that her desire is sinful, she is not willing to give up. This
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