Disguise, Deceit, and Character Development in Cervantes’s Prose Scott Douglas Youngdahl A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Languages (Spanish). Chapel Hill 2008 Approved by: Marsha Collins Frank Domínguez Carmen Hsu Bill Maisch Jay Smith ©2008 Scott Douglas Youngdahl ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT SCOTT DOUGLAS YOUNGDAHL: Disguise, Deceit, and Character Development in Cervantes’s Prose (Under the direction of Marsha Collins) In this dissertation I examine Cervantes’s use of characters’ trans-social disguise in his major prose works. Through their use of disguise, the characters gain invaluable experiences that offer them insights into themselves and grant them freedoms of movement and association that they would otherwise never have. By using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival, I associate successful trans-social disguises in terms of the carnivalesque elements in their creation: a liberation from static social boundaries, comicity, and characteristics of carnival’s “world upside down.” Others Cervantine characters, however, choose disguises so lowly in nature that they entrap rather than liberate. Rather than ending their lowly disguises on their own terms, the characters ultimately are rescued from their plights. Don Quixote and Sancho are unique in that their disguises as knight-errant and squire/governor both liberate and entrap, yet in the end both voluntarily end their disguises on their own terms. The protagonists of Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda use trans-social disguises that offer Cervantine alternatives to the classic heroes of Byzantine romance, while embodying human frailties with otherworldly devotion that speak to the importance of faith in all. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To my wife, who fills me with inspiration. To Marsha Collins, for her constant support, feedback, patience, and positivity. To my sister Karie Youngdahl, for her acute eyes and diligence. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter I. THE SEEKERS……………………………………………….....14 Rinconete and Cortadillo, Avendaño and Carriazo of “La ilustre fregona”…………………………………..…....….....14 Don Juan Cárcamo of “La gitanilla”………………………….....34 II. THE ENTRAPPED…………….…………………………...…..53 Rutilio and Ambrosia Agustina of Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda …………………….…….55 Silerio of La Galatea …………………………………............….66 III. DON QUIXOTE AND SANCHO……………………………...78 IV. PERSILES AND SIGISMUNDA …………………………….131 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………......169 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………….......174 v INTRODUCTION In the prologue of the Novelas ejemplares (1613), Miguel Cervantes writes that one of his goals in writing the book is to provide for the Spanish nation a type of billiard table, to which each person may come for entertainment without fear of interference. Cervantes clearly sees his work as providing an important social function, and as an outlet for people from all walks of life. His literary creations, not surprisingly, include characters from virtually every conceivable background: nobles, ruffians, gypsies, Moors, Christians, Jews, soldiers, poets, prostitutes, and prisoners. Cervantes himself experienced life in many different incarnations: student, soldier, prisoner, author, grain requisitioner, and tax collector. Cervantes’s work is replete with characters who embody the different roles that the author himself played in his life, and an array of Cervantine characters employ disguises that place them in different socioeconomic strata, often highlighting individuals’ struggles to become, evolve, and maintain control over their destinies. This dissertation studies Cervantes’s use of disguise as a key element of character development. Characters who experience freedom of association and mobility undergo similar positive transformations in themselves, while other characters’ disguises entrap and act as an obstacle to self-knowledge and fulfillment. Cervantes’s two most famous characters, Don Quixote and Sancho, experience both liberating and entrapping moments as knight and squire as their disguises come under control of others. Persiles and Sigismunda, of Cervantes’s final work, use trans-social disguises to manipulate others and maneuver toward their goal of Catholic marriage in Rome, though in so doing, they offer a more human and vulnerable alternative to the heroes of classic Byzantine romance. At the beginning of Don Quijote (1605), Alonso Quijano takes on the identity of a knight-errant by attempting to dress and act the part. He spends almost the rest of his life in this assumed identity, dressed and performing as a knight-errant in a world in which chivalry and chivalric romances are anachronistic. Throughout Cervantes's prose, disguise is a recurrent motif. But Cervantes's use of a specific type of disguise, one in which characters adopt a mask or identity that alters their social status or function, proves particularly interesting. In his works, young nobles frequently adopt a sort of social camouflage in order to temporarily live the lives of muleteers' assistants, inn servants, gypsies, pilgrims, or people of the opposite sex. Such disguises are a tried-and-true convention of prose romance and theater of the time, but in this dissertation I show that Cervantes uses this convention in a complex way to explore the characters. Furthermore, this work demonstrates that the characters' experiences in their disguised mode play a key role in their own self- determination. The point of departure for my study is a term coined by Guillermo Carrascón, in his study of disguises in Lope de Vega's theater. According to Carrascón, the disguised character invents his new personality trans-socially by placing it in a social class different from his own. This work studies trans-social disguises in Cervantes's prose, from the pastoral romance La Galatea (1585), to 2 several short stories in the Novelas ejemplares (1613), to Don Quijote (1605, 1615), ending with his version of the Byzantine romance in Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1616). Many characters in each work employ disguises, and this work shows how Cervantes uses trans-social disguises in ways that show how his characters are profoundly changed by their new roles. Furthermore, the attendant freedom or lack of agency that each character faces in the disguised role is the single- most important factor in the solution of the conflict he or she confronts. While many Golden Age authors include cross-dressing in a number of their works (Lope, Calderón), or employ characters pretending to belong to a different social class (Pablos’s many attempts at social climbing in El Buscón [1604], Don García’s posturing in La verdad sospechosa [1620]), Cervantes’s trans-social disguises represent more profound changes than a man portraying a woman or a poor squire wearing a nobleman's sword. Cervantes’s disguised characters are often able to find the solutions to their problems while in “masked” mode. Moreover, the disguises are frequently identified with self-actualization and self-realization, as the characters discover new aspects of themselves that allow them to become more complete human beings. Oddly enough, many times the trans-social disguises of the noble or high-born as a muleteer’s boy, servant, or priest’s assistant are liberating, in that the characters experience an openness and freedom that were denied to them in everyday life. In some of the following cases, the appropriation of the disguise forms an integral, if not essential, part of the person the character eventually becomes. The mask acts as a catalyst to deeper personal understanding and fulfillment, and the freedom that the 3 characters discover in their disguises plays a vital role in the formation of their identities. In some instances, however, the disguise entraps Cervantine characters, and they are unable to overcome the perceived limits of their “new” identity. In these cases, the characters, rather than experiencing a type of liberation through the masking, are constrained by their false identities, and their growth as individuals is stunted rather than enhanced. Disguise, of course, is a convention common to the pastoral tradition in general, and to romance literature in particular. Northrop Frye writes that in romances from The Odyssey to Heliodorus's Ethiopica , the guile and disguises of the protagonists aid them in their successful journeys (68, 72). Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European playwrights, poets, and prose writers often used disguise in their works to structure plot, to generate comedic dialogue, and to expand psychological characterization. Especially popular during this period were pastoral romances, quite possibly due to the utopic nature of pastoral worlds, which many viewed as an image of the Golden Age (Iser 47); they provided a welcome artificial escape from the harsh realities of a Europe experiencing continual religious, economic, and armed struggles. Wolfgang Iser writes that the pastoral romances popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were direct descendents of Virgil’s Eclogues , in which the poetic boundaries of the pastoral were interwoven with the historical realm (29). Iser affirms that an integral part of Virgil’s pastoral poetry is its artificiality, which at the same time is made relevant by its coupling with the real world: “[T]he relation between poetry and world is moved