From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
2.2 (1982): 155-164.
Copyright © 1982, The Cervantes Society of America
Bearded Waiting Women, Lovely Lethal Female Piratemen: Sexual Boundary
Shifts in Don Quixote, Part II*
HE HUMAN BODY
changes, in its fictional presentation, in the second part of Cervantes'
masterpiece.1 The overplus of beautiful maidens
is gone. There is no luscious cluster like Zoraida, Dorothea, Luscinda, and
Doña Clara de Viedma, so important in the inn-scene climax of Part
I; the relatively simple grossness of Maritornes is gone and we have some
really grotesque and some subtly re-sexed female creatures. One of the few
beautiful women in Part II is the Duchess, whom we meet at first in the chivalric
conceit of The Fair Huntress, but who we later learn is the perpetrator of
a cruel hoax on Don Quixote where he is attacked in his room by a batch of
clawing cats; her “fair” appearance is also undermined by our learning
that she has
* For
a reaction to this piece, see Cesáreo Bandera,
“Healthy Bodies in Not-So-Healthy Minds”,
Cervantes 2.2 (1982): 165-70. For Arthur
Efron's response, see “On Some Central Issues in
Quixote Criticism: Society and the Sexual Body”,
Cervantes 2.2 (1982): 171-80.
-F.J.
1 Revised from
a presentation given at the December, 1981, MLA Convention, in New York.
After years of work on the Quijote, I learned much of what the present
paper has to say in a graduate seminar I gave on satire, SUNY-Buffalo, 1981,
in the Department of English. My thanks to Ann Skrzec, Joe Moxley, Paul Jayes,
Elizabeth Sommers, Roberta Hooks, Margaret Mariacher, and Cass Clarke, the
members of that seminar.
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two “fountains” one springing from each of her legs; these fountains,
scholars tell us, are irrigations to drain some festering sores she has in
her body.2 While the beautiful female bodies
are no longer emphasized, death as a bodily reality draws near the surface
of the text, with Sancho actually grasping the feet of a hanged man —one
among many, in fact—, in a scene where “all the trees were full
of human feet and legs” (p. 856). Killing rather than the more abstract
topic of death becomes part of the action in a much more immediate way than
it had been in the reported deaths of Part I, and it is placed in a generalized
context of social reality; it is not limited to the special fields of chivalry
or military valor. The bodies dangling from the trees have nothing to do
with chivalry.
Killing is juxtaposed as well, not with sex,
but with sexual boundary changes. Two women who are involved in killing are
not only disguised as men, they are taken as lovely by the men in the story.
One of these women, with the wonderful name of Anna Felix, is taken as most
attractive even while she is still seen by everyone as a Turkish man. The
Viceroy of Barcelona (along with everyone else who hears her story) readily
forgets that due to her disguise in the role of a pirate, there has been
a minor sea battle in which two Spanish sailors have just been killed. The
other of these women, Claudia Gerónima, hears the rumor that her betrothed
is about to marry someone else, and without troubling to confirm the report,
rides out at once disguised as a man, carrying an arsenal of five lethal
weapons: she/he enters the narrative as “a youth of apparently twenty,
dressed in green damask breeches and a loose coat braided with gold, with
a hat turned up in the Walloon fashion, tight-fitting boots, and gilt spurs,
dagger and sword. He carried a small firelock in his hand and two pistols
by his sides” (p. 858). This “handsome figure” (in close narrative
proximity to all those bodies hanging from the trees) immediately tells that
he is a she, and one who has just shot her lover with three guns. The man
she tells this to, a robber chief named Roque Guinart, discovers that indeed
her lover is on the point of death, and also that the shooting had been an
error: her
2 Cervantes,
The Adventures of Don Quixote, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1950), p. 778. Further references to this edition will be
given parenthetically. In several instances I have also inserted the Spanish
original, as a way of keeping in touch with Cervantes' wording.
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lover had not been about to marry someone else, and it must have been
“ill-luck” that gave her such wrong information (pp. 856-60). Claudia
cries and laments so convincingly that the robber, “though he was not
used to weeping,” gets a moist eye, and “The servants
wept . . .” too.
These deaths are of a different tone than the
deaths reported in battle of the Captive's tale in Part I (a matter of our
side, the Spaniards, versus their side, the Turks), nor are they much like
the death of the poet, Grisóstomo, who has already committed suicide
for love, in Part I, when we first learn of him as we meet people on the
way to his funeral; nor are the deaths of Part II buffered through literary
convention, as in the easy write-off in death, unemphasized, of all three
of the protagonists in the Tale of Foolish Curiosity in Part I. Here people
are actually getting killed.
These changes in the presentation of the human
body are bound to have an emotional impact upon readers; they give the novel
a different feel or texture than it had in Part I, not merely a different
formal arrangement of sequences, such as Casalduero pointed out. In my own
book on the Quixote,3 I ignored this
difference, but I'm sorry I did.
The momentous body change early in Part II
—that of Dulcinea into the coarse peasant girl that Quixote sees, under
the guidance of Sancho— is followed by deeper changes later on: Dulcinea
in Quixote's dreamcave vision, where she is a mocking, immature, money grubbing
woman placed in close proximity to a morbid ritual of a woman attending on
a knight whose body is dead except for his voice, and whose heart has been
cut out and preserved in salt. This is followed after other adventures by
the reappearance of Dulcinea in the elaborate charades or burlas performed
at the Duke's palace; this time she is again an extremely beautiful young
woman, but she appears cheek by jowl with a male figure “plainly the
very shape of Death, fleshless and hideous” (patentemente . . .
la mesma figura de la Muerte, descarnada y fea), an appearance that disturbs
Quixote, Sancho, and even the Duke and Duchess —but over which no one
troubles to make the overwhelming visual connection, namely that Dulcinea's
sensual beauty is now directly juxtaposed with this gruesomeness. No one
comments either on the incongruity of this
3 Don
Quixote and the Dulcineated World (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1971).
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“silvery nymph,” Dulcinea, speaking “with a masculine assurance
and in no very lady-like tones” (p. 701). Further on, Cervantes takes
care to point out that the impression was based on something more than
masquerade: Dulcinea is played in this burla by “un paje”
—plainly male, a page (p. 708). No one questions the disparity of this
man / woman proclaiming herself to have the appearance of “a distressed
beauty” (like all other distressed damsels, p. 702). Again, the
juxtaposition is not death and sex but death and sex-change.
The male-toned Dulcinea reinforces the command
that Sancho lash himself on his buttocks, 3300 times, an appeal that is followed
by another one that Sancho just cannot turn down, this time by the character
who claims to be a countess, but wears a long beard, the result of an
enchantment. Her dozen waiting women likewise have beards. Again, the
explanations of the burla cannot cancel the emotional impact: it feels
different from anything in Part I to have a dozen heavily-bearded waiting
women, “all thick with beards, some fair, some black, some white and
some grizzled,” around a bewhiskered countess (p. 720). Moreover, where
Cervantes could have had a simple narrative report providing beards through
a wave of Merlin's wand, he chooses to give a peculiarly tactile sense of
sex-change perceived from inside the waiting women's bodies:
“. . . the very instant he [Merlin] finished speaking
we all felt the pores of our faces open, and a sensation as if we were being
pricked all over them with needlepoints.” (p. 720). The object of such
realism cannot be mere verisimilitude; if Cervantes wanted to impress upon
us how convincing the bearded waiting women's hoax was, he would not also
at the same time nearly give the joke away at the onset, as the pretend countess
begins her speech by referring to herself, in a voice “rather coarse
and rough than subtle and delicate,” as “this your waitingman —I
should say waiting-woman” (p. 714). Instead of a clear case of a man
cleverly disguising himself as a woman, we are given an unconvincing disguise
that blurs sexual boundaries but is taken for real despite —or perhaps
because of— the blur.
Although the pretend Dulcinea failed to convince
Sancho to accept the whipping, the bearded woman persuades him to take a
dangerous ride to attain her disenchantment; as in the later episodes of
Claudia Gerónima and Anna Felix, “she drew tears from the eyes
of all the spectators, and even filled Sancho's to the
brim . . .” (p. 726). This is a change of heart after
Sancho's first reaction, which was less sympathetic: “Wouldn't it have
been better and more fitting to their
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case to have cut off half their noses from the middle upwards, even if it
had made them talk with a snuffle, rather than to have clapped beards on
them?” (pp. 721-22; “¿Cómo y no fuera mejor, y a ellas
estuviera más a cuento, quitarles la mitad de las narices de medio
arriba, aunque hablaran gangoso, que no ponerles barbas?” ). There may
be an echo here of “Melisendra desnarigada,” the de-nosed Melisendra,
a woman character in the puppet show who got in the way of Don Quixote's
rage.4 It was his way of rescuing her from
the Moors.
Now Sancho has to come to the rescue not only
of the bearded waiting women but of his master's ladylove, Dulcinea. By whipping
himself, Sancho will enable Dulcinea to return to her ideal form, a result
that never occurs, although Cervantes could have made it happen if he had
so chosen. What we are presented with is the repeated image of Sancho's buttocks,
juxtaposed somehow with Dulcinea's fair cheeks, and in the context of Quixote's
need to get on with the whipping. The connection on this basis between Sancho
and his master is the most prominent body relationship to develop in the
last half of Part II. No sooner does Sancho protest that he doesn't see
“what my buttocks have got to do with these enchantments,” than
his master threatens, “I will bind you to a tree, naked as your mother
bore you,” and apply twice as many lashes as have been prescribed (p.
701). This expression is in body language, some of it female. Sancho's own
language in response to this new proposal increases the sexual boundary confusion
and the potential emotional impact: “my lord and master, who should
be stroking my neck and wheedling me to make myself soft as wool or carded
cotton, says that if he catches me, he will bind me naked to a tree and double
the dose of lashes” (p. 703). And as soon as Sancho agrees to undergo
the lashing, “Don Quixote hung on Sancho's neck, giving him countless
kisses on his forehead and his cheeks” (p. 705). There is no escaping
the body-to-body direction of all this imagery. A few chapters later, pressed
by Quixote to apply the whip while the two of them are seated on a wooden
bench, waiting to take off into the skies on a fearful adventure, Sancho
protests again in unmistakably sexual language: “As the saying has it,
‘you see me pregnant and you want me a virgin.’ Moreover, here
I
4 See
my “The Problem of Don Quixote's Rage,” Denver Quarterly
16 (Fall, 1981), 29-46.
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am sitting on a bare board, and you want me to skin my buttocks.”
5
By this point the emphasis on Sancho's “two
most ample buttocks, both to the air exposed” (Cohen, p. 701; “ambas
sus valientes posaderas, al aire descubiertas” ), has been established
in the context of changing body boundaries and changing sexual divisions.
As the fake Dulcinea points out, her pronouncement of the sentence against
Sancho brings Quixote's body into a state of vulnerability quite unusual
in the whole novel: she tells Sancho that if he will only look, he will see
that his master's soul is visibly “stuck in his throat, not ten inches
from his lips . . . .” Quixote promptly confirms
this, in some alarm: “On hearing this, Don Quixote felt his throat and
said” to the Duke: “By God, Sir, Dulcinea has spoken the truth,
for here is my soul sticking in my throat like the nut of a crossbow”
.6 In the very same speech in which Dulcinea
makes this observation, she also refers to the compassionate bowels (las
entrañas piadosas) of all who hear her story, and then urges Sancho
to look closely at her eyes, “and see them weep thread by thread and
skein by skein, making furrows, tracks and channels down the fair fields
of my cheeks” (p. 702; “. . . los hermosos campos
de mis mejillas” ). The close-up view has the effect of enlargement,
and more effectively brings into superimposition the two images, Sancho's
buttocks and Dulcinea's cheeks. And these buttocks are to be exposed not
merely to the air but to the whip. Again, I remind you that I am talking
about how it feels to read all this body imagery, and not to the explaining
away of the burla nor even to Sancho's eventual evasion of the
lashes.
Sancho does not really get whipped, but Quixote
does get pinched —painfully, and in large part by the Duchess herself,
in a silent invasion of his room at the palace. Cide Hamete Benengeli, not
a very accurate commentator, tells us that the pinching occurs at just that
point when the Duchess heard the waiting woman, Doña Rodríguez,
“expose the secret of her garden of fountains,” those drains on
her
5 Quoted
from the Samuel Putnam translation, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote
de la Mancha (New York: Viking Press, 1949), p. 771, with my own paraphrase,
of: “esto es como aquello que dicen: ‘en priesa me vees, y doncellez
me demandas!’ ¿Ahora que tengo de ir sentado en una tabla rasa,
quiere vuesa merced que me lastime las posas?”
6 Cohen trans.,
p. 744. Putnam, p. 745, and the new Norton Critical Edition (Ormsby trans.,
revised, ed. by Joseph R. Jones and Kenneth Douglas; New York: W. W. Norton,
1981) p. 625, translate “el alma” as “heart.” But why?
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legs I mentioned earlier. When the Duchess heard this secret given away,
” neither she nor Altisidora,” another of the unlovely women of
Part II, “could bear it; and so they burst into the room, in a great
fury and spoiling for revenge, to pinch Don Quixote and slap the waitingwoman
in the manner described” (pp. 789-90). The fury and lust for revenge
are there all right, but the actual break-in occurs later than Cide's
recapitulation would have it. What intervenes between revelation of the secret
and pinching and slapping in terrified silence, is Quixote's reaction to
the news of his Duchess's two “issues” or “fuentes.”
“Can my lady the Duchess possibly have two such drains?” The
“fuentes,” a somewhat poetic or at worst a medical term, are downgraded
to a couple of mere drains, “tales desaguaderos,” which give out
liquid amber (“ámbar líquido” ). The contrast of
bad humours with this liquid (pp. 778-79) shows that probably Quixote meant
to say “ambergris,” rather than “amber,” and the translator,
J. M. Cohen, gives him the benefit of the doubt. What the Duchess hears,
however, is an unidealized description of her body, made all the harder to
accept by Quixote's Sancho-like efforts at deploying idealized vocabulary.
What Quixote “should” be doing is to manfully deny the reality
of the Duchess' body; what he finally says is that it is important to open
“issues” for health, tacitly accepting that the beautiful Duchess
is on the unhealthy side. Only then, at that point, does nearly a half hour
of pinching begin. It is as if the great secret has been given away, not
merely the secret of the fountains / drains, but that of the actual body
in its grossness, vulnerability, and indifference to social class. To make
the Duchess realize even fleetingly that she is an ordinary body is to question
her entire life-rôle as the ostentatious actress of privilege. But
it is not merely the Duchess who does not want, or dare, to realize the fact
of the human body: it is virtually the entire cast of characters, whether
of high or low status, with the exception of Sancho.
I will try to draw some implications of my
argument together by offering a set of tentative conclusions. In the first
place, let me acknowledge my method, which is to follow a maxim that I have
given myself in reading the Quixote or other literature: pay attention
to the body. Doing so often shows the body as a radical element. I believe
this has been borne out once more. Second, Cervantes was writing about the
body in a way more complicated than we have recognized. Shakespeare, his
contemporary, also dealt with the implications of women disguised as men,
in such plays as Twelfth Night, but
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he seems superficial in this regard when compared to Cervantes. Third, I
propose that the increased body boundary confusion and its intermix with
violent death is functionally related to the increased exploration, in the
last part of the novel, of social authority. We have many chapters placed
at the home of the Duke, and others with the Viceroy of Barcelona, while
the story of the outlaw Roque Guinart is set against all those bodies hanging
from trees by virtue of law and order. Body idealization in the meantime
goes on merrily, notwithstanding its simultaneous denial. Don Quixote can
believe in some virtuous potency of Dulcinea's, “stored within her”
(p. 681, “encerradas” ) that will produce a great fortune and a
lineage to be compared with the best that society has to offer. This praise
of the woman's body is actually a condemnation, since the female body (or
for that matter the male) can hardly fulfill the expectation that it enclose
and finally supply the abstract values of class. No real woman, in other
words, has any wonderful “vein” or part or “jirón”
of that kind, and never could, to improve her blood (“adoban la
sangre” ). The thorough confusion of the body with social metaphor and
social control is consummately and critically presented by Cervantes. The
implication, less comforting than the cautionary thought that social climbing
in an aristocracy is a fool's occupation, is that those women who have a
position in high society are in possession of the bodily virtue of lineage,
or rather, that they are valued for this fantasy which they act out, not
for their lives. Cervantes was not intent, in other words, on showing
miscellaneous misbehavior and meanness in the society of Part II; instead
he created a series of presentations of the body that show exactly what his
fictional society cannot accept, and why: the human body itself.
Fourth, dealing with the body in The Quixote
obviously requires going beyond the maxim, to pay attention to the body,
and toward an aesthetic that makes conscious assumptions about the body and
about body-text relationship. It is my contention that any responsive reader
of Cervantes will eventually have to learn something about this area of theory,
no matter how foreign it appears to be from the perspectives of the already
practiced critical disciplines, and whether or not the critic chooses to
adopt any of my own approaches to the problem of the body in literature.
Here I must first mention Octavio Paz, who
has shown in his book, Conjunctions and Disjunctions, that in art,
the buttocks are often a
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kind of alternate face to the face we all
show.7 Paz draws his example from Quevedo,
Góngora, and from the famous painting by Velázquez, “The
Toilet of Venus,” among others, but not, strangely enough, from Cervantes.
Paz's analysis is designed to provide a basis for the comparison of the health
of cultural epochs, whether in the Western or Eastern world; but his particular
assumptions need not be accepted in order to grant the pertinence of his
observations concerning buttocks and face, and to register the prominence
of this conjunction / disjunction in the Golden Age.
In my own work with the problem of the body
in literature, I have come to rely more and more on the still controversial
thought of Wilhelm Reich
(1897-1957).8 In Reichian terms, energy
periodically moves from upper torso and head to lower torso and genitals,
and back again, in a continuous rhythm that is healthy functioning. Cervantes,
however, seems to have shown the kind of body life that results from civilized
pressure: he arrives at a masculinized female head and the male buttocks,
to the accompaniment of sentimental tears, much laughter, and killing. These
parallels are what Reich called “functionally equivalent” ; that
is, the society depicted in the novel would not hold together without the
bodily and sexual dislocations which sustain it. Clearly, any such relationship
of society and body in the Quixote leads directly to a radical questioning
of the highly destructive costs of civilized existence, irrespective of whether
Cervantes or anyone else has an alternative to offer. My point is that the
question is posed.
I have not forgotten that Don Quixote himself
dies, peacefully, and as a restored Christian. He leaves behind him all the
body
7 Octavio
Paz, Conjunctions and Disjunctions, trans. Helen R. Lane. (New York:
The Viking Press, 1974), pp. 3-15. Spanish edition: Conjunciones y
disyunciones (Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz, S. A., 1969). The “Rokeby
Venus,” as the Velázquez painting is also called, is the first
painting reproduced and mentioned in Kenneth Clark's The Nude: A Study
in Ideal Form. (New York: Pantheon 1956). The painting, which dates from
about 1650, is important in the study of the aesthetics of the body.
8 See my
“Beginning a Reichian Approach to Literature,” Energy &
Character: The Journal of Bioenergetic Research, 10:3 (Sept., 1979),
pp. 1-12; and 11:1 (Jan., 1980), pp. 82-85. See also my article, “The
Mind-Body Problem in Lawrence, Pepper and Reich,” Journal of Mind
and Behavior: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 1 (1980), 247-70.
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imagery I have been discussing. This imagery may suggest why many of Cervantes'
readers prefer to think that the pious deathbed can simply cancel the
disturbances, personal and social, portrayed vividly in the previous one
hundred and twenty-five chapters.
| STATE UNIVERSITY OF
NEW YORK, BUFFALO |