Fathers and Daughters in Early Modern Spanish Drama
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Fathers and Daughters in Early Modern Spanish Theater by Bryan Betancur B.A., Providence College, 2007 A.M., Brown University, 2011 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2015 © Copyright 2015 by Bryan Betancur This dissertation by Bryan Betancur is accepted in its present form by the Department of Hispanic Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date: ___________ ________________________________ Laura Bass, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date: ___________ _______________________________ Stephanie Merrim, Reader Date: ___________ _______________________________ Coppélia Kahn, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date: ___________ ______________________________ Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii CURRICULUM VITAE Bryan Betancur was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1985. He graduated Summa cum Laude from Providence College in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and Psychology. He received a master’s degree in Hispanic Studies from Brown University in 2011. While a graduate student he received the Aaron David and Ruth Kossoff Prize for Leadership in Teaching. He will be an assistant professor of Spanish at Furman University beginning in the fall of 2015. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the wisdom and encouragement of my professors, the moral support of my friends, and the boundless love of my family. I especially owe a debt of gratitude to my advisor, Laura Bass, whose erudition and patient guidance has helped a hastily-written seminar paper mature into the present dissertation. I am also grateful to Stephanie Merrim for her infinite kindness and her invaluable advice on academic writing and professional development. Special thanks are also in order to Coppélia Kahn, whose seminar on Renaissance tragedy proved an invaluable reference point for the present study. I dedícate this dissertation to my mother, my first and greatest teacher who did not require rubrics, books, theses or coloquia to teach me the most valuable lessons of all: love and humility. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………………….1 CHAPTER 1 Fathers and Daughters in Peasant Honor Drama………………………………………...21 1.1 “¡Hija de Giraldo al fin!” Family Crises and the Parallels Between Private and Public Spheres in Luis Vélez de Guevara’s La Serrana de la Vera……..……...25 1.2 “la justicia más rara / del mundo:” Violated Daughter, Inviolable Law in Calderón’s El alcalde de Zalamea...............................................................................59 CHAPTER 2 Father and/or Valido? Filial Conflict in an Aristocratic Setting…………………………90 2.1 “este misero objeto:” Commodified Daughter and Economics of Marriage in Rojas Zorrilla’s Casarse por vengarse………………………………………………96 2.2 “una dama / que padre no ha conocido:” Unstable Identity, Unstable State in Calderón’s La vida es sueño………………………………………………………..129 CHAPTER 3 Fathers and Daughters in Religious Drama…………………………………………….162 3.1 “esclava de su padre:” Obedience to God and Father in Mira de Amescua’s El esclavo del demonio……………………………………………………………..166 3.2 “tratar con Dios y con el mundo:” Filial Discord and the Religious Woman’s Rejection of the Secular World in Tirso’s La Santa Juana and Lope’s Teresian Plays………………………………………………………………………………...196 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………228 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………..235 vi INTRODUCTION ¿Qué deshonra, mal o daño / por mujer no sucedió, / de cuyo error torpe y ciego / que su ser flaco acompaña? […] ¡Ay, hijas!, ¿quién os desea? / No sin causa entristecéis / las casas donde nacéis. / ¡Mal haya beldad tan fea! —Luis Vélez de Guevara, El príncipe viñador (vv. 2056-65) I am no viper, yet I feed / on mother’s flesh which did me breed. / I sought a husband, in which labour / I found that kindness in a father. / He’s father, son, and husband mild; / I, mother, wife, and yet his child. / How they may be, and yet in two, / as you will live resolve it you. —William Shakespeare, Pericles, Prince of Tyre (vv. 65-72) The fifth book of Valerius Maximus’s voluminous Factorum et Dictorum Memorabilium (Memorable Deeds and Saying), an anthology of nearly one thousand anecdotes from the ancient world, highlights two tales as especially representative of filial devotion (De Rynck 152). In the first story, a Roman woman faces the death penalty for committing an unspecified crime. The jailer takes pity on the condemned prisoner and decides not to kill her. After some time passes, he begins to wonder why the woman has not died of starvation. The jailer’s subsequent investigation reveals that the prisoner’s only visitor, her daughter, has been “taking out her breast and lessening the pangs of her mother’s hunger with her own milk” (180). News of the astonishing act travels up the chain of command until a committee of jurymen commutes the woman’s sentence. Maximus hails the daughter’s heroism and bids his readers to forgo judgment: “Someone might think that this action was against the laws of nature; but in fact, to honor one’s parents is the greatest law of nature.” Maximus’s second example of dutiful filial action nearly replicates the first tale but changes the parent’s gender. The latter anecdote tells of Mycon (Cymon in other accounts), an old man who “suffered the same misfortune [as the mother in the previous 1 story] and was likewise sent to jail.” In order to save her father, Mycon’s daughter, Pero, “took his head to her breast and nursed him, as if he were a baby.” The writer references a painting that captures this moment of the story to speak on the function of visual art: “When people look at a painting of this deed, they are amazed and cannot take their eyes away. As they admire the representation in front of them, the reality of what happened so long ago is brought back to life.”1 The story of the daughter who kept a parent alive with her own milk, which came to be known as “Caritas Romana” (Roman Charity), inspired artists for centuries to come. During the early modern period in particular, some of Europe’s foremost painters immortalized the daughter’s bold action on their canvasses (Slatkes 82). Peter Paul Rubens, for instance, composed at least five versions of the subject (De Rynck 152). The ancient tale of exemplary filial love spoke to artists’ religious sensibilities because it afforded an opportunity to illustrate, in one fell swoop, three of the seven corporeal works of mercy, namely, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, and visiting the captive (153). Scenes of “Caritas Romana” filled many an early modern frame; however, artists depicted only one of the two daughter-parent tales from the Factorum, the much shorter story of Mycon and Pero, father and daughter. Patrick de Rynck suggests that the influence of classical texts such as the Factorum upon Renaissance and Baroque artists led early modern painters to focus on Mycon and Pero in their respective renditions of “Roman Charity” because Maximus did so as well in his discussion of visual art. After highlighting the aesthetic merits of the “Roman Charity” painting, Maximus suggests that the story of Mycon and Pero would elicit just as much admiration “if the 1 A number of frescoes depicting the tale of Mycon and Pero may have existed in ancient Rome. Three such frescoes were discovered in Pompeii in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century (Thürlemann 32-34). 2 even more effective art of painting in words” were used to “visualize such ancient deeds” (180). As if taking a cue from the first-century writer, theater, which combines the “art of painting words” with visual representation, has also made frequent use of the father- daughter relationship as a focal point, particularly during the early modern period. Why have artists from different centuries and artistic mediums been so drawn to fathers and daughters? What distinguished this specific pair from other combinations of family members and rendered it particularly worthy of representation on canvas and on stage? These questions provide the theoretical and sociocultural base of this study, which analyzes the depiction of fathers and daughters in early modern Spanish drama. Figure 1 Peter Paul Rubens, Caritas Romana (c. 1630) In one of his Caritas Romana (Fig. 1), Rubens depicts Pero baring her breast for her shackled father while two soldiers secretly observe from behind the bars of the prison window. The scene’s figures highlight the most salient features of the father-daughter relationship as structuralist anthropologist Claude-Lévi Strauss posited in his influential work on kinship. Based on an understanding of the human species as a composite of biological and social influences, Lévi-Strauss posed a fundamental question: “Where 3 does nature end and culture begin?” (Elementary 3-4). The anthropologist sought an answer in the internal dynamics of the family. Specifically, Lévi-Strauss identified a phenomenon that he believed stood alone among social norms as common to all cultures: certain individuals derived from the same kinship group are prohibited, on legal and/or moral grounds, from having sex (“Family” 276; Elementary 8-9). Societies have varying criteria for determining which degrees of consanguinity render sex permissible or illicit, but ultimately no social group exists that indiscriminately allows all types of marital unions. The apparent universality of restricting sexual behavior to conform to socially- constructed obligations led Lévi-Strauss to consider the incest taboo “the fundamental step because of which, by which, but above all in which, the transition from nature to culture is accomplished” (Elementary 24; “Family” 278). Rubens’s aforementioned painting captures the liminal space between biology and culture that Lévi-Strauss’s work sited in the incest taboo. Caritas Romana depicts the biological act of breast-feeding in a context that appears to violate social norms.