See Casalduero, Sentido y forma, p. 191; see also Barrenechea, «La ilustre fregona como ejemplo de estructura novelesca cervantina», p. 202. (N. from the A.)

The character of young Carriazo / «Lope Asturiano» is in itself worth a more extensive commentary than the present study allows. He is, obviously, a kind of complementary expansion or unfolding of the all-too-patient, well-behaved Avendaño; at the same time, while the narrator is at pains (near the opening of the novela) to insist on Carriazo's noble character, good nature, and good judgment (discreción), in his encounters with fellow aguadores and others of the town, the youth shows himself to be rather hot-tempered and violent. And after the second encounter, the reader is apt to wonder how the boy might have fared at the hands of «la justicia» if his aristocratic identity had not, providentially, come to light. For some highly original, and somewhat negative, readings of his character and its implications, see J. Alsina, «Algunos esquemas narrativos y semánticos en La ilustre fregona» and C. Chauchadis, «Los caballeros pícaros: contexto e intertexto en La ilustre fregona». (N. from the A.)

See Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 331ff («The Speaking Person in the Novel») and in particular p. 333 where he states that «The speaking person in the novel is always, to one degree or another, an ideologue, and his words are always ideologemes. A particular language in a novel is always a particular way of viewing the world, one that strives for a social significance. It is precisely as ideologemes that discourse becomes the object of representation in the novel, and it is for the same reason novels are never in danger of becoming a mere aimless verbal play». (N. from the A.)

On this issue, see A. Weber, «La ilustre fregona and the Barriers of Caste», Papers on Language and Literature 15: 73-81. (N. from the A.)

Again, one of Bakhtin's fairly general ideas seems especially relevant to La ilustre fregona, as he notes, speaking of highly dialogic texts: «The plot itself is subordinated to the task of coordinating and exposing languages to each other. The novelistic plot must organize the exposure of social languages and ideologies, the exhibiting and experiencing of such languages... In a word, the novelistic plot serves to represent speaking persons and their ideological worlds» (p. 365). (N. from the A.)

On the curious nature of Costanza's character, Barrenechea states that «para Costanza, que vive en una posada de Toledo, no rigen las convenciones estéticas de lo pastoril, ni la libertad real y literaria de lo gitano; está dentro de las reglas sociales y aún conviene que se extreme su recato como contraste con el tráfago que la rodea. Cervantes ha construido con ella un personaje en hueco, que el lector sólo conoce a través de los otros personajes por el influjo que ejerce en ellos, como un astro que arrastra hacia su órbita a los que se cruzan en su camino» (pp. 199-200). (N. from the A.)

It should be pointed out that Tomás is significantly twisting the truth, with regard to his motives for leaving home in the first place: the one notable -and interesting- lie in an otherwise quite frank presentation of himself and his background. (N. from the A.)

A relationship perhaps all too close to the incestuous, since the senior Avendaño and the Corregidor are said to be primos. It might also be noted that, with these weddings, the three families are now all interlinked by marriage, dramatizing yet again the creation of the new and more tightly united «society». (N. from the A.)

One should add that the apparent respect for the established hierarchies and norms of society manifested in the Novelas ejemplares is not the whole Cervantine picture; Parts I and II of Don Quijote would certainly have to be seen as complicating any notion of a simplistic acceptance, in Cervantes' social vision, of the unquestionable rightness of each and every element of the social structures of his time. Likewise, an ideological perspective that largely accepts aristocratic values and the social status quo is not inconsistent with the idea that the Cervantine vision is essentially «humanist», in the sense of the term employed by A. K. Forcione in his study Cervantes and the Humanist Vision (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982). (N. from the A.)

Deslindes cervantinos (Madrid: Edhigar, 1961), pp. 129 ff. (N. from the A.)