—176→
Dept. of Modern Languages
Denison University
Granville, OH 43023
garcia@denison.edu
This book is about reading, of both words and bodies. Georgina Dopico
Black's analyses of three texts, Fray Luis de Leon's La perfecta casada, Calderón's
El médico de su honra, and Sor Juana's Los empeños de una casa, are
approached from elegant theoretical and historical perspectives. They lead
her, and us, to reevaluate these texts (and others) in light of the cultural
contexts and anxieties they reveal. Her discussions begin with broad
readings of Body and Soul -«a site subject to the scrutiny of a remarkable
array of gazes: inquisitors, theologians, religious reformers, confessors,
poets, playwrights and, not least among them, husbands»
(xiii-xiv), in order
to discover the intersections of these readings of Self and Other, of body as
text, and the legibility or illegibility of signs, moving from somatic to semiotic.
For Dopico, the enormous volume of conduct manuals in sixteenth-century
Spain and of adultery-honor plays in the seventeenth-century
must signify more than a popularity of the genres. Rather, their prevalence
points to a way of seeing, a way of reading signs in the world, and are
connected to it in a more complex and closer way than one might have
supposed before reading this extraordinary book. The anxieties that the
texts reveal about women's bodies point to «larger cultural and political
questions, to the difficulties and the dangers of reading, to the tenacious
interconnectedness of gender, religion, race, nation, and interpretation»
(xiv).
In Chapter 1 («Visible Signs: Reading the Wife's Body in Early Modern
Spain») Dopico sets forth her principal premises, theories, and methods of
inquiry. She discusses the central role of three sacraments of transformation
and their importance to Counter-Reformation theology, politics, and
aesthetics: the one-flesh doctrine of matrimony, the transubstantiation of
the Eucharistic host, and the Jewish or Moslem conversion to Christianity,
all three of which are subject to inquisitorial surveillance and discipline.
The problem in each of these three transformations is that they either do
or could conceivably retain vestiges of their former self. The married
woman loses the identifier of virtue -her virginity- and therefore any
infidelity cannot be immediately detected via her body. Although she has
become «one» with her husband and through marriage to him has acquired
a status of virtue and honor, she also acquires the capacity for
«adulterous agency» because of the illegibility of her body in this regard.
In a similar way, although the host is transformed from bread to the body
of Christ in the sacrament of the mass, it still retains a «breadlike» appearance
—177→
that can cast doubt on its essence. Similarly, the religious convert
could possibly retain an essence of his former religious self even after he
has converted, although appearances might indicate that his conversion
has been complete and sincere. In each of these cases -wife, host, converso-
what were particularly threatening were «the doubts these violations
cast on the efficacy of the sacrament»
(adulterous agency, breadlike
properties, impure blood) as vestigial traces of an Otherness. Throughout
her study, Dopico Black traces and analyzes shifts in reading, which go
from the somatic (the body of the wife) to the semiotic (the illegibility or
indeterminacy of signs and what is concealed beneath the surface), to an
intersection of the two in the politico-cultural sphere (a substitutability
between the wife's body and the converso/morisco body). If the body is
treated as a text or an institution, then concerns over the excesses of
interpretation and the impossibility of really knowing a body or a text must
arise, especially in the body of a wife. Although it adapted to changing
circumstances, the Inquisition served as the instrument of national centralization,
and maintained certain basic constants: «a preoccupation with
uncovering hidden truths, often achieved through reading and/or disciplining
the body, the use of informants, secret proceedings, appeals to
rhetoric of contamination and cleansing, confessional imperative, and,
above all, a compulsion towards surveillance as most reliable means to
contain Otherness»
(4).
In Chapter 2, «'Pasos de un peregrino': Luis de León Reads the Perfect
Wife», Dopico discusses La perfecta casada as a paradigm of the conduct
manual, but situated within the context of newly emerging cultural
identities, and centered in the concept of the early modern subject/agent.
If a conduct manual is to help a woman refashion herself, this perfectibility
presupposes an agency which is in itself troublesome. By emphasizing the
artificiality of makeup, for example, Fray Luis warns that it makes a woman
into something «other» than what she is in essence. His preoccupation
«betrays his critical anxieties over reading and misreading... Charges of
adultery, whorishness, and monstrosity imputed against the made-up,
wandering casada -changes that can readily be applied to the text itself-
are all reducible, at some level, to charges of illegibility»
(58). However,
Dopico proposes to read La perfecta casada as a «meditation about interpretation
and its mirages... and what is more, a reflection on interpretation vehemently
grounded in a historical moment in which the stakes of reading
were remarkably high»
(52), as Fray Luis himself well knew. Dopico points
out inconsistencies in Fray Luis's ordering of sources and, especially, in his
problematic use of similitudes and analogies, which involve «a precarious
crossing... of the tenuous line that separates essence from appearance»
(78).
In other words, by linking «parecer» and «ser» in an intent to «facilitate
—178→
legibility»
, «the conflation of the two terms... instead mask[s] a prioritization
of appearance (or even accident) over essence that could be extremely
disruptive for the treatise as a whole»
. This of course has grave consequences
when translated to the body of the wife, since «el ser honesta/
perfecta»
can be confused with the appearance of being so, or vice versa.
Dopico points out that in giving instructions on how to become like a
perfect wife, Fray Luis provides «instructions for succeeding at just this
type of deception.»
(81). The chapter is rich in suggestive mis/readings and
comments on Fray Luis's analogies and tropes, culminating in a compelling
commentary on the manual's final exemplary figure, Judith, as exemplary
agent, «mujer varonil»
, and «castradora»
(105-07). Dopico Black summarizes
her own reading of La perfecta casada as a «defiant test in its advocacy of
interpretive plurality and in its challenge to inquisitorial norms of reading»
(107), while at the same time maintaining an appearance of orthodox
adherence.
In Chapter 3, «The Perfected Wife: Signs of Adultery and the Adultery
of Signs in Calderón's El médico de su honra», Dopico examines the aforementioned
play as a paradigm of the adultery/honor drama «genre», and
brilliantly applies her arguments along two lines. In the first, she follows
earlier work that applies to the husband a role of inquisitor, whose attention
is focused on the «diseased» body of the wife, who «enacts the role of
inquisitor reading for limpieza de sangre»
in «a three-stage trajectory (containment,
inquisition, textualization)»
(116). Then Dopico takes on the
problem of il/legibility of the signs that the husband mis/reads, and in so
doing underscores the inherent problems of any inquisitorial undertaking.
She argues that Calderón's theater did not reinforce or support the dominant
social ideologies of limpieza de sangre, inquisitorial tactics, and honor,
but rather contested them.
In Chapter 4, «Sor Juana's Empeño: The Imperfect Wife», Dopico turns
to Sor Juana's play for an «Americanist» rereading of the problems of
marital and racial purity, of honor, of desire, and of the legibility or illegibility
of the Other's body. This chapter was less compelling than the previous,
perhaps because she seemed more to suggest than to argue her points.
Dopico offers readings of Los empeños that uncover strategies of resistance
through «gender illegibility»
(174), exemplified by the cross-dressing
Castaño in Los empeños de una casa. Dopico suggests that anxieties over boys
playing women on the early modern Spanish (and by extension Colonial)
stage points to a same-sex desire between Pedro and Castaño that is
«almost impossible to overlook»
. The point is less convincingly presented
than others, especially in terms of the contemporary context of the play,
which would convey more comicity than desire, not necessarily «threatening,
at some level, to the stability of a heterosexual code of desire and
—179→
binary signification»
or even suggesting that «not only gender but also sex»
is a «superficial inscription that does not go beyond its performance or
remit to an unconstructed natural given»
(197). Dopico suggests that «the
title of Sor Juana's play can already be read as a kind of transvestism of the
title of Calderón's 1650 comedia, Empeños de un acaso»
, and is more than a
«seemingly insignificant linguistic shift»
but rather «exploits the dramatic
possibilities of the early modern analogy between the female body and the
house that contains her»
(183); the concept is intriguing, but one wonders
if a contemporary of Sor Juana would have read it so. The many questions
Dopico raises suggest future revisions of literary categories and periods,
not to mention mechanisms of interpretation and reading, in particular, for
reading the bodies of wives and Others in both European and American
contexts.
Dopico began Chapter 1 with a lengthy quote from Don Quijote I, 33,
a fragment of Lotario's attempt to persuade Anselmo of the power of the
sacrament of marriage to unite two different persons into one single flesh,
two souls into one will: «Aunque Dios creó a nuestro primer padre en el
Paraíso Terrenal... así el marido es participante de la deshonra de la mujer
por ser una misma cosa con ella»
. Although Dopico's study does not deal
with any Cervantine text in detail, it nonetheless suggests new perspectives
on the themes of marriage, the female body, and the legibility of somatic,
semiotic, and cultural signs that will prove illuminating and highly pertinent
to many of Cervantes' works, such as the «Curioso impertinente», «El
celoso extremeño», and others.
Throughout this fascinating book, Georgina Dopico Black elegantly articulates and outlines the complicated questions, connections, cruxes, and cross-sections involved in proving her theses. The intricacy of the critical apparatus and the necessary terms pertinent to her arguments do not obfuscate her insights. The book is clearly written, the result of clear thinking. The author's reiterations and clarifications guide the reader through her arguments, highlighting connections between her points, and clarifying the premises that serve as the basis of her discussion, so that readers who do not enjoy complete familiarity with the texts or the contexts should be able to make good use of this book, one which should be on everyone's «must read» list.