Apparitions Can Be Deceiving: Ghosts and the Undead in Golden Age Spanish Drama Emmy Herland A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2020 Reading Committee: Donald Gilbert, Chair Leigh Mercer José Francisco Robles Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Spanish and Portuguese © Copyright 2020 Emmy Herland University of Washington Abstract Apparitions Can Be Deceiving: Ghosts and the Undead in Golden Age Spanish Drama Emmy Herland Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Donald Gilbert Department of Spanish and Portuguese Ghosts and the undead are uniquely capable of challenging the nature of truth and reality because they exist in an interstitial space between two extremes. A ghost is living and dead, present and absent, past and present, all simultaneously. As the ghost breaks down the binary states of being which are fundamental to the human experience, it challenges the purpose of such classifications. In Golden Age Spanish drama, an era which is fascinated by the concepts of engaño and desengaño, ghosts sometimes serve the function of obscuring the nature of objective reality and questioning humanity’s ability to perceive it, if it exists. However, ghosts also serve a second, incompatible function, which is to reveal absolute truth. Ghosts and the undead of the Golden Age are often regarded as omniscient, since, by virtue of existing outside of the limits of life, they are imagined to be able to see all of time and space simultaneously. They are frequently called upon to reveal their knowledge to the living. These dual functions are too antithetical to be embodied by the same figure. The theater of the Golden Age therefore shifts from omniscient representations of ghosts to the representation of ghosts as yet another visual deception. This study of the representations of the ghost in Golden Age Spanish theater examines how ghosts aid and reflect the epoch’s conceptions of truth and our perceptions of reality and presence in both time and space. I argue that ghost figures are always destabilizing, even when they represent an absolute truth, as they consistently demonstrate the gaps in humanity’s understanding of the world. Ghosts are born out of and also reflect Baroque society’s growing uncertainty or insecurity regarding humanity’s relationship to the world. Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Haunted Historical Landscapes in La Numancia ................................................... 18 Chapter Two: Mythic Returns in La constancia de Arcelina ....................................................... 40 Chapter Three: Ghostly Visions in El príncipe tirano .................................................................. 60 Chapter Four: The Stone Ghost in El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra ....................... 83 Chapter Five: Phantom Fear in El caballero de Olmedo ............................................................ 103 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 125 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 133 Introduction “The dead have no existence other than that which the living imagine for them” – Jean Claude Schmitt “Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings” – Marilynn Robinson In a 2017 New Yorker article, Kathryn Schulz encouraged the magazine’s readers to rank the plausibility of a list of twenty supernatural creatures from most to least likely to exist. On her list she includes beings such as angels, demons, dragons, mermaids, the tooth fairy, vampires and ghosts, among others, and she takes care to remind us that none of these beings are real. They are all equally nonexistent, and yet some seem more likely to exist than others. Schulz is fascinated with the project of ranking these supernatural creatures, explaining: “What’s odd about this exercise is that everyone knows that ‘impossible’ is an absolute condition.” While it is true that possible and impossible are binary, how we categorize beings and occurrences into the opposing categories in not fixed. Schulz’s article goes on to examine the lengths to which we will go to rank the so-called impossible on a spectrum of believability, countering the absoluteness of the impossible. While we may think or want “impossible” to entirely exclude any notion of “possible,” the range of reactions to the ranking of believability that Schulz explores reveals the underlying truth: we allow the supernatural to “exist” in the interstitial space between the binary extremes. 1 Schulz cites Aristotle when she considers the overlap between plausibility and impossibility. In the Poetics, he expresses his disapproval of the use of the supernatural in literature and theater, but concedes that “Poetic needs make something plausible though impossible preferable to what is possible but implausible” (135). Aristotle’s “plausible though impossible” is an early expression of Schulz’s idea that possibility and impossibility are conceived of on a spectrum. This suggests the inevitable hybridity of all supernatural; it is not necessarily creature-hybridity, although that does apply to much of the supernatural imaginary, but rather a paradoxical coexistence of reality and unreality in the same figure. Each of the beasts Schulz cites contains features of the real – they must, in order to be conjurable in the imagination of a humanity that perceives reality – and is simultaneously of questionable reality.1 While Schulz looks at a wide variety of supernatural creatures, I will focus solely on the representations of ghosts: their believability, their presence, and their role in an understanding of humanity as characterized in Golden Age Spanish theater. The hybridity of ghosts lies not only 1 This hybridity is conceptually similar to Sigmund Freud’s uncanny, and although I do not cite Freud directly in this dissertation, his essay The Uncanny serves as a basis for many studies of ghosts that follow. Freud defines the uncanny, or the unheimlich, as a class of frightening that leads us back to the familiar. He explains how the uncanny might be applied to fiction; because the audience of a work of fiction understands the work with which they are interacting to be fantasy, the uncanny cannot be experienced in the same way that it can be in reality. If uncanny events are framed as normal within the context of the fictional world, the sense of the uncanny is not transferred to the audience. The uncanny can only be experienced outside the work of fiction if the author promises realism or if the character experiences the uncanny. An understanding of the uncanny underlies the appearances of ghosts, since ghosts often create a sense of uncanny by combining the familiarity of a human form–often a loved one—with the complete unknown that is death. Freud’s description of an uncanny experience as a return of the repressed echoes the ghost’s characterization as a return of the dead. 2 in their existence between real and unreal, but also that they necessarily hover between life and death while escaping a complete categorization as either of the two extremes. Jacques Derrida explored these contradictions inherent in the phenomenon in his 1993 text Specters of Marx. This work has been profoundly influential in the growing field of spectral studies, a field whose development Derrida’s text catalyzed; nearly every piece of spectral theory or ghostly criticism has been founded on the concept of hauntology developed by Derrida in his original work. Hauntology, a portmanteau of “haunt” and “ontology,” is employed to describe the paradoxical state of the ghost, whose existence creates contradictions of time and presence. The ghost must exist outside of humanity’s linear construction of time, since it is a figure from the past that exists in the present and, furthermore, has a great impact on the future. A ghost must also be understood to be both present and absent simultaneously; a ghost is a presence that occupies a space of absence. This particular paradox has been beautifully described by Avery Gordon: If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place… The ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course. (8) The ghost is evidence, then, of absence; it is a paradoxically extant demonstration of non- existence. This process of making present something or someone that is absent is what I understand as a haunting; it is the seething presence that Gordon speaks of. It is the looming of a ghost, or of a past or absence. As the ghost breaks down these binary states of being – presence and absence, past and present, real and not real – which are fundamental to the human 3 experience, it challenges the purpose of such classifications and the depth of humanity’s understanding of the world. Ghosts are an especially interesting site of cultural exploration due