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Overview
By utilizing theories of deviance, sexuality, and gender; the rhetoric of eroticism; and textual criticism, An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain historicizes and analyzes the particular ways in which classical Spanish writers assign symbolic meaning to non-normative sexual practices and their practitioners. It shows how prostitutes, homosexuals, transvestites, women warriors, and female tricksters were stigmatized and marginalized as part of an ordering principle in the law, society, and in literature. It is against these sexual outlaws that early modern orthodoxy establishes and identifies itself during the Golden Age of Spanish letters.
These eroticized figures are recurring objects of contemplation and fascination for Spain's most canonical as well as lesser known writers of the period, in a variety of poetic, prose and dramatic genres. They ultimately reveal attitudes towards sexual behavior that are far more complex than was previously thought. An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain thoughtfully anatomizes the interdisciplinary systems at the heart of the varied sexual behaviors depicted in early modern Spanish literature.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780826515797 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Vanderbilt University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2008 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain
By Adrienne Laskier Martín
Vanderbilt University Press
Copyright © 2008 Vanderbilt University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8265-1579-7
CHAPTER 1
Prostitution and Power
Es lícito permitir las rameras, en la República, por evitar otros males mayores. —Enrique de Villalobos, Manual de confesores
[It is licit to allow prostitutes in our Republic, in order to avoid greater evils.]
In his 1625 handbook for priests who were charged with administering the sacrament of confession, Enrique de Villalobos grapples with the institutional, social, moral, and humanistic concerns that surround sex for sale. His endorsement of prostitution as a remedy against graver and unspoken sins (homosexuality) reveals that the trade did not always occupy a well-demarcated or stable socioethical territory. As a source of ongoing preoccupation for the church, theologians, moralists, and civil authorities, "the oldest profession" also surfaces in an inordinate number of medieval and early modern literary texts.
In his Pragmática que han de guardar las hermanas comunes, Francisco de Quevedo, one of seventeenth-century Spain's greatest satirists and no stranger to prostitutes as objects of representation, addresses prostitutes as follows: "Y porque sabemos la suma desorden que se ha introducido en vuestros alojamientos, mandamos que nadie llame a vuestras posadas, casas, sino tiendas pues todas sois mercadería" (quoted in Profeti 1994, 204). [And because we know of the great disorder that has been introduced into your dwellings, we order that nobody call your lodgings houses but shops, since you are all merchandise.] Such diminishment of women into marketable flesh (and a source of social disorder and disruption) is a necessary discursive step in the process of exclusion to which the structures of power and control in early modern Spain attempted to submit prostitutes by enclosing them in licensed brothels. In Sexo y razón, Francisco Vázquez García and Andrés Moreno Mengíbar point out in this regard that
el status forzado de la ramera, definido claramente por las ordenanzas, es el de la extraña, exterior al orden de la ciudad y al orden de las alianzas.... La manceba es, pues, arrojada a la exterioridad de la ciudad, entendida ésta como colectivo y como espacio, pues la mancebía se ubica siempre en las afueras, lejos de los barrios populosos.... Es extraña, extranjera, elemento singular en un universo que se ampara en la colectividad, la que lleva sobre su figura y sobre sus ropas la tacha de la diferencia, de lo otro. (291–93)
[The forced status of the prostitute, clearly defined by legal ordinances, is that of stranger, outside the order of the city and the order of alliances.... The prostitute, then, is cast out of the city, which is understood as a collective space, since the brothel is always located on the outskirts, far from populous neighborhoods.... She is strange, foreign, a singular element in a universe that protects itself through community, one who carries on her person and clothing the mark of difference, of the other.]
In spite of her social marginalization, however, the prostitute is a popular literary subject in Spain's Golden Age. La Celestina, La Lozana andaluza, and La pícara Justina are the obvious templates, and the greatest prose writer of the period, Miguel de Cervantes, was not only well aware that prostitution thrived but also knowledgeable of the long literary tradition that centered on the problems elicited by venal love. However, his complex and alternative take on the sex trade differs substantially from the overwhelmingly misogynistic socioliterary norm of the time. His more tolerant view of working girls can be appreciated in the brief novella La tía fingida and in the memorable character Maritornes, the servant girl and occasional prostitute at Juan Palomeque's inn, from Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605).
La tía fingida is an enigmatic and intriguing novella receptive to a wide variety of critical approaches, from traditional sociohistorical or philological/stylistic analyses to the most recent theoretical methodologies that serve as an interpretive palimpsest for the twenty-first century. Paradoxically, most critical studies of this brief yet complex narrative have, up to this writing, neglected its content to focus exclusively and obsessively on resolving the inevitable and persistent question of its uncertain authorship. This focus has sidetracked other possible interpretations that would locate the text within the abundant current of Spanish literature that centers on sexual traffic. By attempting, above all else, to prove or disprove the novella's attribution to Cervantes, critics have paradoxically provided closure or foreclosure for a text that calls out for an amplification of its context and nuances. Thus, it is not without irony that this story—which, among other literary constructions, questions truth, social legitimacy, and power relationships—has been the source of biographical fallacies that derail the text. As noted in subsequent chapters of this book, the critical emphasis on exteriority is a result of the normative nature of Spanish literary history as written to date. This fact notwithstanding, and although it is not my purpose here to engage in the authorship debate, I find La tía fingida to be overwhelmingly Cervantine. Its content, themes, style, and tone clearly identify the author as Cervantes. In fact, the protagonist of this novella embodies one more species of prostitute among the diverse cast of semi-doncellas who populate the prose and dramatic works of Cervantes and who are discussed in the following pages.
Discourse and the Poetics of Transgression
Given the critical dead-end mentioned previously, it seems more fruitful to excuse the authorship question for the moment in order to concentrate on the conceptual ramifications of the story itself. In a way, I find myself at the formalist crossroads of revealing the device without totally obliterating the author. To this end, my own reading of this provocative story draws more from the generally poststructuralist notion of Cervantine discourse than from the author-ity of the empirical Cervantes. Therefore, I analyze prostitution in his works within the general framework of Foucauldian notions of discourse and the Peter Stallybrass and Allon White theory of transgression posited in their study The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986). As a consequence, I view the narrative fiction of La tía fingida as a mediated reflection of the high/low dichotomy that Stallybrass and White explore in the symbolic socioliterary hierarchies of the time. Throughout my text, "discourse"—the totality of relationships, units, and operations understood as utterances that involve subjects who speak and write—represents a central human activity and not a general text or universal. These discursive practices are interwoven with social practices by the circulation of power. It should come as no surprise, then, that in La tía fingida discourse is constituted by the antagonistic relationship between a desire for openness and the institutions that support the notion that discourse is formed through constraint and control.
Despite my initial proviso, I should mention that in their study Stallybrass and White discuss the origin of the notion of the classical author. This idea cannot be applied very satisfactorily to the Cervantes of the Renaissance, but it can be illuminating for current critical receptions of his texts that incorporate prostitution and for works discussed herein. According to Stallybrass and White (1986) and Curtius (1973, 249–51), the notion of the "Classic author" derives from ancient taxation categories, which separated the elite from the proletariat. Under this system the citizens of the first taxation category, called classici, formed the model for literary categories. In effect, authors and works of literature were classified according to their social rank. Stallybrass and White note that
the ranking of literary genres or authors in a hierarchy analogous to social classes is a particularly clear example of a much broader and more complex cultural process whereby the human body, psychic forms, geographical space and the social formation are all constructed within interrelating and dependent hierarchies of high and low.... The high/low opposition in each of our four symbolic domains ... is a fundamental basis to mechanisms of ordering and sense-making in European cultures.... Cultures "think themselves" in the most immediate and affective ways through the combined symbolisms of these four hierarchies (1986, 2–3).
As occurs with the human body and geographic space, these socioaesthetic poles of high and low are never totally separable. The early bourgeois subject, Stallybrass and White continue, defines and redefines itself constantly by excluding what it designates as "low" in terms of filth, repulsion, noise, and contamination. This very act of exclusion is constitutive of the bourgeois subject's identity, since it internalizes the low under the sign of negation and disgust. However, because repugnance always bears the imprint of desire, the expelled domains return as the object of nostalgia, longing, and fascination (1986, 191). Thus, the exclusion necessary to the formation of social identity at the level of the political unconscious is simultaneously a production at the level of the imaginary (193). It is for this reason, Stallybrass and White argue, that what is socially marginal is so frequently symbolically central to the construction of subjectivity. As we will see, the negotiation of this exclusion/dependence dichotomy (aided and abetted by power relationships) in society and literature is fundamental to a proper interpretation of La tía fingida, whose very title codifies the presence of disputed conceptual territories.
Stallybrass and White conclude that the poetics of transgression reveals the disgust, the fear, and the desire that inform the dramatic self-representation of a given culture through the contemplation of the "low Other" (1986, 202). This theory can be observed at least in all Western literatures that represent society's marginal sectors (among these the prostitutes, transvestites, homosexuals, and sexual tricksters who are the object of study of this book) and in a particular manner in La tía fingida. The prostitute and the literature of prostitution—the social and literary frames for the texts examined in this chapter—are obvious examples of the low socioliterary category, but, as indicated by Bubnova 1996, it is impossible to separate the prostitute and her historical referents from ideological state apparatuses such as the church, the state, and the university. This socioliterary sphere of the prostitute is also inseparable from legal discourses, as we will see. More pointedly, the prostitute commercializes the lower part of her body; precisely that which is farthest from the head, the spirit, reason, and the soul composes the center of her existence and her literary portrait. In that regard, following the transcription of the Francisco Porras de la Cámara manuscript, which Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce used in his edition of La tía fingida (1982), the subtitle—which reads "cuya verdadera historia sucedió en Salamanca el año de 1575, y demuestra quanto perjudican las terceras" [whose true history occurred in Salamanca in the year 1575, and shows how much harm is done by go-betweens]—not only codifies a way of reading but also grapples with the notion of fact versus fiction.
Woman as Marketable Flesh in La tía fingida
Unlike most canonical Renaissance works, La tía fingida has been marginalized in part because its fable is relatively unknown. The novella is a particularly lively narrative, which, according to the subtitle, actually took place in Salamanca in 1575. In a way, it can be said that Cervantes is providing a ripple to the notion of the Italian Renaissance cortigiana onesta, generally an "honest," high-class prostitute who worked at home rather than in a brothel, whose services were expensive, and who was selective in her clientele. Thus, Cervantes's tale begins when two young Manchegan students come upon a known house of ill repute, whose blinds, curiously, are drawn. The students learn that the house is inhabited by a certain venerable old woman and her beautiful young niece and imagine that the two are courtesans. When the old woman (Claudia) and her niece (Esperanza) arrive, the students are captivated by the niece's beauty. They enlist the help of a young ne'er-do-well gentleman friend, Don Félix, who agrees to conquer the damsel for them at any cost (the exchange and symbolic value of this attitude does not escape the reader). Don Félix subsequently bribes Grijalba, one of Claudia's dueñas, and she reveals the truth: Esperanza has already been sold three times as a virgin.
A feeble cloak-and-dagger strategy is enacted when Grijalba hides Don Félix in Esperanza's room that evening, explaining that she and the niece have arranged a liaison without Claudia's knowledge in order to avoid having to share the profits with her. In the meantime, in an adjoining room, Claudia launches into a litany of advice about how her niece can make a more profitable career of prostitution. Esperanza insists that she will not succumb to the needle and thread repair that Claudia intends to make to the young woman's hymen in order to sell her "virginity" for the fourth time. (This situation, of course, echoes back to the most famous hymen mender in Spanish literature, Celestina.) The craft of repairing a torn hymen allows for the ultimate deception and pretense in Golden Age society and its literary representation, by restoring a woman's most treasured and valuable asset: her virginity. Thus, the hymen mender wields a discourse of profoundly subversive power. Consequently, perhaps, Esperanza finally accedes, agreeing to do as her aunt wishes. At this point in the narrative, Don Félix experiences an inopportune sneezing fit and is discovered by Claudia, who indignantly protests his presence in her house. Don Félix informs Claudia that he has overheard her previous conversation with Esperanza and is willing to pay any price for her niece. Grijalba excitedly places Esperanza's hand in Don Félix's. An altercation ensues between Claudia and Grijalba, and the racket attracts the local corregidor, who marches Claudia and Esperanza off to jail. At this point in the text, the gathering of voices common to early modern narratives (again reminiscent of La Celestina) and the intersection of gossip, rumor, and hearsay come to the fore.
The two Manchegan students witness the arrest of the women and manage to free Esperanza and spirit her away to their lodgings. There the men argue when one attempts to claim the fruits of his labor, to "gozar" [rape] Esperanza. When the other man prevents the would-be violation, threatening to kill his companion if he persists, the first man resolves the impasse by offering Esperanza his hand in marriage. Esperanza delightedly accepts, and the student carries her off to his father's home, where they are married. It is finally revealed that Claudia was not really Esperanza's aunt; she is then charged with sorcery and pandering and is sentenced to the corresponding punishment: four hundred lashes and caging in the town square. The tale ends happily with Esperanza winning over her father-in-law with her discretion and beauty, even though he has been duly informed of her shameful past. The story's moral pleads for similar punishment for evil women such as Claudia and highlights the fact that few prostitutes experience the same good fortune as Esperanza. As I argue with respect to other texts examined herein, the type of narrative used in La tía fingida is too orderly for comfort and seems constrained by the very Cervantine ending in which the "innocent" female protagonist is rewarded by acceptance into the wider community. Her past misdemeanors are overlooked, thus concealing the social disorder that she embodied as an itinerant prostitute. The moral, of course, has nothing to do with the truth of the situation. In fact, it could be interpreted as nothing more than the writing of power, which Michel Foucault ("The Discourse on Language" [1972]) prefers to see as the violence that we do to things or, in any case, a practice that we impose on them.
It is evident that the fictional narrative embodied in La tía fingida plainly underscores the simultaneous existence of disgust and fascination as poles of a process in which a political imperative to reject and eliminate the low in society and in literature (represented in this supposedly exemplary tale by a prostitute and an aunt who exploits her) conflicts powerfully and unpredictably with the desire for this "low Other" (the young and desirable courtesan). Claudia and Esperanza, differentiated embodiments of the low, are situated on the periphery of early modern Spanish society. And, in the mapping of Salamanca in terms of dirt and cleanliness, it is not difficult to ascertain which pole they represent. In spite of her marginalized status, however, Esperanza is not only the object of desire for the men who compose an important sector of that specific fictionalized society—the Salamancan university—but also the symbolic nucleus of the novella.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain by Adrienne Laskier Martín. Copyright © 2008 Vanderbilt University Press. Excerpted by permission of Vanderbilt University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments, ix,Preface, xi,
ONE Prostitution and Power, 1,
TWO Homosexuality and Satire, 43,
THREE Lesbianism as Dream and Myth, 79,
FOUR Wild Women and Warrior Maidens, 114,
FIVE Eros and the Art of Cuckoldry, 169,
Notes, 203,
Works Cited, 225,
Index, 249,