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Copyright by Ryan Thomas Schmitz 2009 The Dissertation Committee for Ryan Thomas Schmitz Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Deceit, Disguise, and Identity in Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares Committee: Cory Reed, Supervisor Madeline Sutherland-Meier Michael Harney Douglas Biow Susan Deans-Smith Deceit, Disguise, and Identity in Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares by Ryan Thomas Schmitz, M.A., B.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May, 2009 Dedication Para Denise Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Cory Reed for his untiring direction throughout the research and writing of this dissertation. I am also indebted to the helpful feedback and encouragement of my committee: Professors Madeline Sutherland-Meier, Douglas Biow, Michael Harney, and Susan Deans-Smith. I would also like to thank Nicolas Poppe and Brian Price for their consistent advice in academic matters. Finally, I thank my family without whose support this dissertation would have been impossible. v Deceit, Disguise, and Identity in Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares Publication No._____________ Ryan Thomas Schmitz, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2009 Supervisor: Cory A. Reed One of the most salient characteristics of Cervantes’s literary production is his fascination, one might even say his obsession, with the human capacity for transformation. Nearly all of his plays, novellas, and novels feature characters that adopt alternative identities and disguise or dissimulate their true, original selves. The Novelas ejemplares (1613) encompass a veritable cornucopia of characters that pass themselves off as another. There are women who pass as men, Christians as Turks, Catholics as Protestants, and noblemen as gypsies, among many others. Identity, or at least its appearance, is represented as fluid and malleable. By creatively controlling the signs that they project in public, the characters of the novellas demonstrate a remarkable ability to adapt to innumerable contingencies. Similarly, subjects of the Spanish empire, driven particularly by ethno-religious and socio-economic motives, utilized craft and guile to conceal their identity or simulate another. On a theoretical level, both in Spain and vi throughout Europe, intellectuals explored the human capacity for transformation, and there emerged a new sense of interiority. As Stephen Greenblatt observes, in the Renaissance, “there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process” (2). In this study I examine the abundance of deceit and disguise in Cervantes’s collection of twelve novellas within the work’s sociohistorical context. Specifically, I analyze how the novellas are embedded in two particular threads of cultural discourse on human identity: Spanish social history and early modern European intellectual history. vii Table of Contents List of Illustrations..............................................................................................ix Introduction............................................................................................................1 Chapter One: An Exemplary Model Among the Savage Other: Honor, Virtue, and Caritas in La gitanilla .................................................22 Chapter Two: Prudence, Sincerity and the Body’s Betrayal of the Dissimulated Self..................................................75 Chapter Three: Transformations of Identity in the Novelas ejemplares...........................................................................112 Chapter Four: Cervantes’s Meditation on Artifice: The Demystification of Life and Literature in El casamiento engañoso and El coloquio de los perros.............................159 Conclusion..............................................................................................................210 Bibliography............................................................................................................223 Vita..........................................................................................................................230 viii List of Illustrations Illustration 1: Sincerità ................................................................................221 Illustration 2: Cardsharps .............................................................................222 ix Introduction Deceit, Disguise, and Identity in Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares One of the most salient characteristics of Cervantes’s literary production is his fascination, one might even say his obsession, with the human capacity for transformation. Nearly all of his plays, novellas, and novels feature characters that adopt alternative identities and disguise or dissimulate their true, original selves. The Novelas ejemplares (1613) encompass a veritable cornucopia of characters that pass themselves off as another. There are women who pass as men, Christians as Turks, Catholics as Protestants, and noblemen as gypsies, among many others. Identity, or at least its appearance, is represented as fluid and malleable. By creatively controlling the signs that they project in public, the characters of the novellas demonstrate a remarkable ability to adapt to innumerable contingencies. Similarly, subjects of the Spanish empire, driven particularly by ethno-religious and socio-economic motives, utilized craft and guile to conceal their identity or simulate another. On a theoretical level, both in Spain and throughout Europe, intellectuals explored the human capacity for transformation, and there emerged a new sense of interiority. As Stephen Greenblatt observes, in the Renaissance, “there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process” (2). In this study I examine the abundance of deceit and disguise in Cervantes’s collection of twelve novellas within the work’s sociohistorical context. Specifically, I analyze how the novellas are embedded in two particular threads of cultural discourse on human identity: Spanish social history and early modern European intellectual history. 1 In his study Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe, Perez Zagorin defines “dissimulation” and “simulation” as two sides of the same coin: In the Latin from which they derive, both have virtually identical meanings. Dissimulatio signified dissembling, feigning, concealing or keeping secret. Simulatio also meant feigning or a falsely assumed appearance, deceit, hypocrisy, pretense or insincerity. The two words might therefore be used interchangeably, each denoting deception with the further possible connotation of lying. For precision's sake, however, we can also say that in a strict sense dissimulation is pretending not to be what one actually is, whereas simulation is pretending to be what one actually is not. (3) In early modern Spain there was an abundance of both dissimulation and simulation. Due to numerous sources of intolerance and persecution, subjects of the Spanish empire actively engaged themselves in disguising their beliefs and/or ethno-religious ancestry. On the other hand, being recognized as nobility brought with it important privileges, honor, and power; thus, socio-economic motives also functioned as a catalyst to simulation and dissimulation. Throughout medieval and early modern times in Spain a central point of discourse on identity revolved around blood and descent. As Teofilo Ruiz observes, throughout the fifteenth century a common cultural myth, spun by poets, chroniclers, and other learned men, “was based on the notion of an uninterrupted line of descent from the Visigoths” 2 (68). Ancestry was a powerful element in the formation of the collective identity of Iberians, as Ruiz explains: The Visigothic lineage, which played a significant role in legitimating kingly power and the Reconquest from the ninth century onwards, was appealed to with a vengeance again in the late Middle Ages. In short, descent from the Visigoths—as opposed to mixed descent from Moors or Jews— conferred nobility. It gave those who could claim Gothic ancestry a clean and pure bloodline, which then became associated with valour, honour, and other chivalric virtues in the fifteenth century. (69) Throughout the late fifteenth and sixteenth century the estatutos de limipieza de sangre, or blood purity statutes, illustrate the existing preoccupation with blood, race, and nobility. Ruiz notes that, “Essentially, these laws banned anyone of Jewish descent from certain public or ecclesiastical positions, even though they might have been faithful Christians for more than a century” (69). Later, the blood purity statutes become the criterion for admission to religious orders, to the colegio mayores of universities, and to the prestigious Military Orders. Perez Zagorin observes how subjects of the time utilized methods to counteract the statutes’ influence: “blood purity became an obsession among Spaniards, giving rise to its own brand of dissimulation as aspirants to honors and positions sought to prove their eligibility by fictitious genealogies concealing any stain of Jewish ancestry” (42). As with the Inquisition, investigations into the purity of one’s ethno-religious ancestry often depended on denunciation. Thus, how one appeared to his or her peers 3 was of paramount