—26→
University of Hartford
| (Mary Elizabeth Perry: 1990: 177-8) | ||
Cervantes'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»
—27→
(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 crisis10. 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
—28→
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.
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 happen11. In fairy-tale
fashion
—30→
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 attention12. 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
—31→
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 ciudad13»
. 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
—32→
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 instinct14. Stasis,
—33→
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
—34→
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... 15». 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
—35→
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
—36→
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»
—37→
(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)16.
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,
—38→
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
—39→
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
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