Deception and Truth

DECEPTION AND TRUTH: THE USE OF LETTERS IN THE COMEDIES OF IRIARTE AND MORATIN _______________________________________ A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri-Columbia _______________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy _____________________________________________________ by KATHLEEN M. FUEGER Dr. Michael Ugarte, Dissertation Supervisor DECEMBER 2009 © Copyright by Kathleen M. Fueger 2009 All Rights Reserved The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the dissertation entitled DECEPTION AND TRUTH: THE USE OF LETTERS IN THE COMEDIES OF IRIARTE AND MORATIN presented by Kathleen M. Fueger, a candidate for the degree of doctor of philosophy, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. Professor Michael Ugarte Professor George Justice Professor Charles Presberg Professor Ana Rueda Professor John Zemke This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Jane Fife, who instilled in me a love of reading, and to my husband, John Fueger, for his steadfast encouragement and support. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am, first and foremost, profoundly grateful to the members of my doctoral committee. Professor Michael Ugarte, the supervisor of the committee, has been unwavering in his encouragement throughout the dissertation process and has been instrumental in helping me see perspectives I otherwise would not have considered. His comments have helped me complete not only this project but have led me to consider new approaches for future research. Professors George Justice, Charles Presberg and John Zemke provided comments and suggestions that have likewise permitted me to better this study and to consider aspects of epistolarity that encompass the literature of other epochs and regions. I am indebted to Professor Ana Rueda of the University of Kentucky at Lexington, with whom I first studied literature of Spain’s eighteenth century. Her insightful comments throughout the process and her encouragement have been invaluable in the development of this dissertation and in my future research agenda. I am especially grateful to her for her willingness to serve on my committee after leaving the University of Missouri. I would also like to thank the Department of Romance Languages and Literature of the University of Missouri – Columbia and department chairperson, Dr. Flore Zephir, for facilitating Professor Rueda’s attendance at my dissertation defense. I am grateful to my friends and colleagues of the Ibero-American Society of Eighteenth- Century Studies for their encouragement, their advice throughout this process, and for welcoming me in into their ranks. Finally, I wish to thank Professor Olga Arbeláez of Saint Louis University for her encouragement, advice, and sense of humor, all of which helped make this process not only bearable but a pleasure. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………... ii ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………….. iv CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION Dramatic Letters………………………………………………………………… 1 A Prototype of Plays to Come: Nicolás Fernández de Moratín’s La petimetra: …………………………………………………………………… 20 2. “JUGAR BIEN LAS CARTAS”: THE LETTER IN TWO COMEDIES OF TOMAS DE IRIARTE ..........................................................................................34 El señorito mimado……………………………………………………………... 37 La señorita malcriada …………………………………………………………... 64 3. MISSIVES AND MARRIAGE IN FOUR COMEDIES OF LEANDRO FERNANDEZ DE MORATIN……………………………….………………… 85 El barón ………………………………………………………………………… 91 La mojigata …………………………………………………………………… 103 El viejo y la niña ………………………………………………………………. 118 El sí de las niñas ………………………………………………………………. 134 4. CONCLUDING REMARKS…………………………………………………... 162 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................168 VITA ................................................................................................................................174 iii DECEPTION AND TRUTH: THE USE OF LETTERS IN THE COMEDIES OF IRIARTE AND MORATIN Kathleen M. Fueger Dr. Michael Ugarte, Dissertation Supervisor ABSTRACT This study examines the dramatic and thematic role of staged letters in the neoclassic comedies of Spain’s eminent comediographs Tomás de Iriarte and Leandro Fernández de Moratín. The plays under consideration include Iriarte’s El señorito mimado and La señorita malcriada and Leandro Fernández de Moratín’s El barón , La mojigata , El viejo y la niña , and El sí de las niñas . In these plays the letters are a fundamental means by which the playwrights achieve the objective of enseñar deleitando ; through the role the letters play in plot advancement, character development, and the creation of dramatic irony, suspense, and humor, they are a source of pleasure and dramatic entertainment for the viewing public. At the same time they are instrumental in illustrating the Enlightenment ideal of rational thought and critical thinking. The letters are used in these plays as masks that disguise the identities and motives of the letter-writers and simultaneously bear within themselves the truth they seek to obscure. As vehicles of deception and truth, the letters demand that the onstage characters and the viewing public participate in their interpretation, and in this way, they are the principal means by which the playwrights not only entertain the audience but also achieve their dramatic and ideological objectives of interrogating the errors common to society and advocating virtue and truth. iv Chapter 1 Introduction Dramatic Letters A letter captivates our attention. Whatever its particular form – a scroll encircled with ribbon, a sheet of parchment sealed with wax, an unopened envelope, a folded note, or a new email message in one’s inbox –it immediately provokes in the recipient both an affective and intellectual reaction and requests, or sometimes demands, a reply. Who wrote the letter? What is its message? What response will it evoke? What, if anything, will it change in the life of its recipient? It is dynamic, dialogic and open-ended; that is, it is inherently dramatic. The unread letter is like the unopened stage curtain, momentarily concealing a world of possibilities and existing in anticipation of a response. The following study seeks to “open”, read and respond to the many letters found in the neoclassic plays of Spain’s eminent comediographs Tomás de Iriarte and Leandro Fernández de Moratín. Perhaps the dramatic quality of the letter – its capacity to convey information and to compel a response, its invitation to ongoing communication or action – explains, at least in part, its enduring use. In his study of the epistolary novel, Godfrey Frank Singer traces the letter’s presence and evolution within literary texts as well as as literary texts. The earliest extant letters, Singer points out, are concerned primarily with matters of state: Egyptian cuneiforms dating from the fifteenth-century BC convey news of the war in Phoenicia; King David’s letter to Joab obliges the recipient to deploy Uriah to the frontlines of battle. In the Pauline Epistles, letters serve not just to communicate official matters but offer “exhortations and exegeses” as well (3). Cicero’s letters communicate 1 information while simultaneously revealing the character and philosophy of their author, Pliny’s encompass not only the history of the age but were intended for preservation and as such were “confessed, conscious efforts”; and Ovid’s Heroides are comprised of fictional letters in verse (6). In the European Renaissance, official and ceremonious letters increased in importance and were enthusiastically employed by Petrarch and Erasmus. In England, the Paston Letters of 1424-1526 bore news of social life, and as Singer asserts, “In this respect, in their portrayal of manners, they point forward to the mid-eighteenth century and its usage of the letter” (11). These forms, Singer explains, all evolve eventually into the purely literary epistle, the predecessor of the eighteenth- century ‘epistolary novel.’ A diverse vehicle for conveying information, issuing political mandates, expressing philosophical ideas, and eventually exchanging personal correspondence, and concomitantly a form which reflected greater access to print media, increases in popular literacy, and the shifts between public and private realms, the letter became ubiquitous in both social practice and in literary production – that is, in life and in text – in eighteenth-century Europe. Epistolary prose of Europe, especially that of England and France, has been the object of abundant scholarly attention. Early bibliographical studies enumerating the appearance of letters in prose include those such as Singer’s aforementioned monograph, Frank Gees Black’s The Epistolary Novel in the late eighteenth century (1940), and Robert Day Adams’ Told in Letters: Epistolary Fiction before Richardson (1966). Subsequent studies surpass the necessary tasks of categorization to examine the properties of epistolarity and its function within literature, a focus best exemplified by Janet Gurkin Altman’s study Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (1982), which serves as 2 the theoretical foundation of this study. Other key texts of this type include Elizabeth MacArthur’s Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics on the Epistolary Form (1990) and Thomas O. Beebee’s Epistolary Fiction in Europe 1500-1850 (1999). Further

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