The Calculating Woman in Cervantes’ La fuerza de la sangre
1987; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/1475382872000364101
ISSN1469-3550
Autores Tópico(s)Early Modern Spanish Literature
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: CERVANTES SAAVEDRA, MIGUEL DE (1547–1616) NOVELAS EJEMPLARESFUERZA DE LA SANGRE, LA [M. DE CERVANTES]MYTH/MYTHOLOGYNOVELAS EJEMPLARES [M. DE CERVANTES]WOMEN/GENDER ISSUES — SPAIN & PORTUGAL Notes 1. Covarrubias defines rumbo as ‘… cada uno de los 32 espacios en que se divide la rosa de los vientos … de donde luego “dirección que se toma para encaminarse a un lugar” ... en el sentido de “pompa, ostentación”… antes “fama, prestigio”… viene del rombo como signo mágico, con sentido propio de “embrujo o encanto”; de ahí “prestigio”, “pompa”, luego “ostentación rufianesco o rameril” ‘; Manejo: ‘Término de los que enseñan cavallos, y el tal ejercicio se llama manejo, a manu, porque les hazen volver a una y otra mano, y esto es manejarlos. De ahí se dixo manejar un negocio, tratarle con destreza o liberalidad’, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, ed. Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: Horta, 1943), 785, 1535. 2. Ruth El Saffar correctly assesses the difficulty in discovering the woman's true motives in El casamiento: since the story is told by the duped Campuzano, his account is necessarily unreliable. Critical Guide to El casamiento engañoso and El Coloquio de los perros (London: Grant and Cutler, 1976), 33. 3. In his analysis of the structure of romance, Northrop Frye associates romance with comedy, noting the multiple possibilities for irony inherent in its structure. The pretence of morality and the policy of deceit are the heroine's staple techniques for defending her honour. The resolution of complication by some surprising event overtly saves the woman, but also absolves her from the need to tell the truth about her scheming. The Secular Scripture. A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard U.P., 1976), Chapter 3. E. C. Riley supports Frye's view that the parodic element ‘seems to be latent, potentially present for exploitation, in romance itself’, ‘Cervantes: A Question of Genre’, Medieval and Renaissance Studies on Spain and Portugal in Honour of P. E. Russell, ed. F. W. Hodcroft, D. G. Pattison, R. D. F. Pring-Mill, R. W. Truman (Oxford: The Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1981), 74. 4. Bruce W. Wardropper, ‘La eutrapelia en las Novelas ejemplares de Cervantes’, Actas del Séptimo Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas (Roma: Bulzoni, 1982), 153–69. 5. Leo Lowenthal states that the figure of woman, from Cervantes to Ibsen, ‘has been treated as an individual closer to her nature than are men, since man is indissolubly bound up with the competitive processes of work, in contrast to the enforced removal of woman from professional activity. Not accidentally does Cervantes use Dulcinea as symbol of human creativity’, Literature and the Image of Man: Sociological Studies of the European Drama and Novel, 1600–1900 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 41. 6. Cervantes, Obras completas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1965), 890. All subsequent references will be to this edition. 7. The ambiguous use of calidad raises the question about the nature of Rodolfo's deviation: do his acts offend his public or private virtue? Evidently the narrator is indicating the youth's split between his image and his self. 8. The father's defensive attitude naturally leads the reader to consider the parallel with the pseudo-convert, whose self-preservation depended on reticence and dissimulation. Recent theories about the author's origins are impossible to substantiate, but his fiction's practice of bringing together through marriage members of different social backgrounds has far-reaching implications for the ethos of his exemplary tales. See Marthe Robert, Origins of the Novel (Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1980), 132–38. 9. The reader is constantly alerted to the characters’ ‘histrionic self-awareness’, and of its equivalence to the narrator's gesturing as speaker. In this sense, all of Cervantes’ fiction deals with a single process, the examination of roles. See Walter R. Davis, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1969), 47–48. It may not be coincidental that the collected Novelas are framed by La gitanilla and Coloquio de los perros: singing and dancing, in the first, and speaking, in the last, are the histrionic arts which determine thematically the entire novelistic action. 10. Marthe Robert views Don Quijote's author as a revolutionary, not a reactionary caught up in a dream of the past: ‘If we consider the chivalric romance no longer from the angle of its historic situation, but rather as the object of Don Quixote's devotion … the result is a subterranean displacement of genre whereby the profane romance is endowed with the exclusive characteristics of sacred or didactic literature. Don Quixote himself behaves less like a common maniac than a foolish believer.’ The Old and the New. From Don Quixote to Kafka. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977), 56. 11. John J. Allen, ‘El Cristo de la Vega y La fuerza de la sangre’, MLN, LXXXIII (1973), 271–75. 12. Alban K. Forcione's discussion of La fuerza as a ‘secularized miracle’ interprets the symbol of the cross in a similar manner. Cervantes and the Humanist Vision. A Study of Four ‘Exemplary Novels’ (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1982), 380. 13. The application of the ‘ley del encaje’, the discretionary use of judgement without consideration for the disposition of the law, reflects the same ambiguity with which Cervantes imbues this novel's moral concepts and symbols: honour, the cross, blood and marriage. The family's behaviour is consistent with social conventions only in so far as it is based on an illusion; their total awareness that civil and moral law may be altered by the demands of existence makes that illusion the only possible, and substantial, reality. 14. This is a much more useful rephrasing of the critical commonplace regarding the difference between appearance and reality. See Walter L. Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel. The Quixotic versus the Picaresque (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), 5. 15. The curious omission of a strong mother figure has been noted by Ruth El Saffar, 'Tres imágenes claves de lo femenino en el Persiles’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, III (1979), 219–36. 16. Walter L. Reed sees the polarization of high and low classes in Spain's Golden Age reflected in the novelistic forms of that period. The antagonism of an idealistic imagination and a materialistic world constantly threatens to engulf the weak middle class; in contempt of commerce and manual labour, it opts to ensure its survival by throwing in its lot with the upper classes: An Exemplary History of the Novel, 34–35. 17. Marcel Bataillon, 'Cervantes y el “matrimonio cristiano” ', Varia lección de clásicos españoles (Madrid: Gredos, 1964), 238–55. 18. In discussing Giambattista Vico's philosophy of aut'hority (The New Science, 1744), Edward Said points out that the original meaning of the word ‘authority’ is ‘property’, since auctor comes from autos, which equals propius or suus ipsius. Vico's view is that human authority, in the full philosophical sense of the phrase, ‘is the property of human nature which not even God can take from man without destroying him … This authority is the free use of will, the intellect, on the other hand, being a passive power subject to truth’. Vico's philological account astutely validates his own worth as an autodidact, for self-teaching itself is realized with the authority of its humanity (Beginnings: Intention and Method [New York: Basic Books, 1975], 358). 19. Wardropper, ‘La eutrapelia en las Novelas ejemplares …’, 165: ‘Tales ejemplos de tropelía se multiplican en cada una de las Novelas ejemplares. No hay en ellas ninguna conversión auténtica-ni de rango social, ni de personalidad, ni de especie biológica’. 20. ‘Será forzoso valerme por mi pico … para decir verdades, que dichas por señas suelen ser entendidas’, Prólogo al lector, Novelas ejemplares, op. cit., 769. 21. The research for this article was accomplished during the 1981 NEH Seminar on ‘Comedy in the Drama of the Spanish Golden Age’ under the direction of Bruce W. Wardropper. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Wardropper for his inspiration, guidance, and careful reading of the work.
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