Visor de obras.

  —24→  

California State University, Long Beach

From its origins in Theocritus and Virgil the pastoral mode, in its many and varied manifestations, has as a predominant element lost, unrequited, or impossible love. The objects of love in the pastoral space are, in most cases, dead, reluctant, or otherwise prevented by societal forces (marriage or parental prohibition) from engaging in fruitful relationships. Golden Age Spanish pastoral literature, influenced by the Virgilian eclogues and Sannazaro's Arcadia, works from and through this premise as demonstrated in Garcilaso's Eclogues, the pastoral romances from Montemayor's Diana to Lope's Arcadia, and Góngora's Polifemo and Soledades. Whether attributed to the manipulations of fate or to personal failure, the impossibility of love becomes the pastoral mode's incipient force, and mourning and lamentation its literary axis. The pastoral space, conceptualized as an idyllic zone in which Nature and Society exist in harmony and peace, is paradoxically manifested through the tears and sorrowful words of its inhabitants. It is not surprising that Cervantes, in his   —25→   quest to surpass the limitations of the genres available to him, did not miss the opportunity to explore and explode the pastoral mode in Don Quixote.

The aim of this paper is to examine Cervantes's negotiations with the pastoral mode in Don Quixote as an evident manipulation of the genre's ideological and gendered constructions. I will link Don Quixote's Golden Age speech, and the idealized feminine communal space that I will argue it constructs, to three pastoral instances in which women play a central role in the text: the Marcela interlude, the Leandra episode, and Don Quixote's and Sancho's failed pastoral endeavor at the end of part II. Following and furthering Don Quixote's lead, I will examine, through a psychoanalytic lens, the male narcissistic subjectivity in these pastoral episodes and how the presence of these three females, as subjects with manifest desires, denies their objectification and disrupts the possibility of what Stephen Rupp and other critics have called a «true» pastoral.

In his assessment of the pastoral interludes in Don Quixote, Stephen Rupp defines the «true» pastoral as follows:

Poetry gives form and meaning to the suffering that has driven the lover to abandon settled society for the pastoral world; poetic achievement offers expression and compensation for grief. This pattern, as central to Garcilaso as to Sannazaro, offers the resolution of the pastoral paradox of the frustrated lover who turns to the harmonious world of nature in order to lament his loss.

(6-7)

Rupp continues to define the «true» pastoral as «the transcendence of amorous loss through poetry» (6). Yet this definition is structured upon the notion that the pastoral space can only be realized through the inaccessibility, absence, or rejection of the object of love -the female object. Poetry can only be produced as a result of such absence or rejection. This «transcendence» (of absence or rejection) through poetic achievement can only be achieved through the negation, the erasure, of that which is presumably loved, the idealized Lady. Otherwise the pastoral structure would lose its central impetus: to produce a space in which the «poetic production and the continuity of the poetic tradition» are secured (6). The pastoral space permits the male subject to construct his self through poetic language as a grieving subject and thus to find a bond in a pastoral community with others like him. In brief, the purpose of the pastoral for Rupp seems to be double: 1) to provide a space for the elaboration and continuation of poetic tradition, and 2) to open a channel for the self-construction of the male members of this community through lyrical   —26→   grieving. In both cases, poetic construction is a mode of self expression that typically is self-laudatory both in content and in form by way of highly cultured poetic technique and language.

Other critics support this general structure by placing the pastoral genre, and specifically its Italian / Spanish manifestations, under a rubric of unrequited love, melancholy, and poetic production. Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, in his pivotal study La novela pastoril española (1974), characterizes Jorge de Montemayor's Los siete libros de la Diana as the preponderant model for subsequent Spanish pastoral novels and singles out melancholy as a determining factor:

La melancolía de la Diana, por ser obra renacentista y bucólica, representa un doble dispararse hacia una perfección ideal inalcanzable y el consecuente y melancólico desilusionarse.

(73)

Nature accompanies this melancholic response through neo-Platonic correspondence and serves as stage and audience to the lover's laments. Similarly, Barbara Mujica considers melancholy the axis of the pastoral space and views its lyrical manifestations as characterized by convention and artifice, qualities which she identifies as the essence of Arcadia (39). Renato Poggioli locates this dynamic between the poet's melancholy and poetic purpose within the realm of the «pastoral of love» where the male lover unites with others of his kind. Within this exclusively male space, frustrated love, and poetic achievement make evident the impossibility of absolute erotic anarchism or the unchecked and unhindered satisfaction of sexual desire -which, for Poggioli, is the root of the desire for an alternative space outside of the polis. This is not to say that the pastoral space is devoid of women, but that women within this locus are objects, created through their counterparts' poetic representations. The women are always young and beautiful, mostly docile, sometimes cruel, always ambiguous, and never as completely portrayed or psychologically complex as their suitors. Thus, Poggioli concludes that «the pastoral is a private, masculine world, where woman is not a person but a sexual archetype, the eternal Eve» (16). Hence, Poggioli, Mujica, and Avalle-Arce's descriptions of the pastoral world fully support Rupp's insistence on the complete absence of Woman from the locus amoenus.

The pattern established by these critics is firmly grounded on the absence (as subject) of the desired other. The requirement for the male subject's self-construction through poetry is that the other, Woman, be lacking. Yet this absence of Woman as subject is not as apparent in the Spanish pastoral novels as it is in Garcilaso de la   —27→   Vega's eclogues or the Petrarchan and courtly models that inform them. Galatea has fled from Garcilaso's locus amoenus, and Elisa dies in childbirth in the Egloga I, Camila defiantly runs away from her suitor in the Egloga II, and Elisa is beheaded in the Egloga III. Their absence opens up the space for Salicio's, Nemoroso's and Albanio's laments. Without such feminine absence, laments as inspired as, «¡Ay, quánto m'engañaba! / ¡Ay, quán diferente era! / y quán de otra manera / lo que en tu falso pecho se escondía!» in the Egloga I could not have been realized (lines 105-08; 72). Though rooted in convention, Salicio's poignant words clearly point towards the shepherd's high poetic skill and, through him, to Garcilaso's mastery of the convention. Salicio's lament and Garcilaso's poetic achievement are, therefore, direct results of Galatea's, the female subject's, absence from the pastoral space. Galatea's absence is a necessary pre-condition for Salicio's lament and Garcilaso's pastoral eclogue.

Galatea's, Elisa's, and Camila's absence in Garcilaso's pastoral eclogues, as in Petrarch's Canzoniere, are required by a poetic structure that depends on memory and melancholy. The beloved is remembered as fragmented parts that never add up to one unity, one concrete and present body. As Nancy Vickers points out concerning Petrarch's love object, «Laura is always presented as a part or parts of a woman. When more than one part figures in a single poem, a sequential, inclusive ordering is never stressed» (266). Because the female body is never visualized as a complete and unified entity, the presence of the female subject is never a possibility. The female object is always scattered and dislocated, constructed by a male subject who is unable or unwilling to recognize one cohesive female subjectivity. Nemoroso's search for his dead Elisa exemplifies this operation as he calls out:

Dó están agora aquellos claros ojos que llevaban tras sí, como colgada, mi alma, doquier que ellos se bolvían? ¿Dó está la blanca mano delicada, llena de vencimientos y despojos que de mí mis sentidos l'offrecían?       Los cabellos que vían       con gran desprecio al oro       como a menor tesoro ¿adónde 'stan, ádonde el blanco pecho? ¿Dó la columna que'l dorado techo con la presunción graciosa sostenía? —28→ Aquesto todo agora ya s'encierra,       por desventura mía en la fría, desierta, y dura tierra.

(lines 267-81)

Thus, within the model established by Garcilaso's eclogues for the Spanish pastoral, the possibility of a full feminine presence in body or spirit is always negated by dismemberment.

In the mode's development in Spain, the pastoral novels appropriate the dismemberment and objectification of the female body as a convention. Yet, contrary to Garcilaso's eclogues, the Spanish pastoral novel is characterized by abundant numbers of female characters who inhabit the pastoral space in the company of their male suitors. From Montemayor's Diana to Cervantes's own Galatea, female pastoral characters are assigned pivotal parts in the novels' plot developments and are frequently endowed with a voice. Their inclusion within the locus amoenus would thus seem to posit some type of unity, singularity, and subjectivity for females. But as we have seen in Garcilaso's eclogues, the case is far from this. In Jorge de Montemayor's Los siete libros de la Diana, Diana and her female companions are, as Mujica puts it, «goddess-like», women who represent the model of virginity and extreme beauty that their male counterparts desire (219). Even more telling is Diana's complete absence from the text until Book V. Diana is (re)presented solely as an image, constructed by the words of her suitors Sireno and Sylvano. When she does appear, her image confirms the abstract physical attributes that characterize the pastoral's conventional female protagonist. Sylvano sings to Diana in Book VI:

Pastora mía, más blanca y colorada que ambas rosas por Abril cogidas, y más resplandeciente que el sol que de oriente por la mañana assoma a tu majada ¿cómo podré vivir si tú me olvidas? no seas, mi pastora, rigurosa, que no está bien crueldad a una hermosa.

(Lines 5-12; 277)

The case of Cervantes's La Galatea is not much different. The female characters are not as complex, either psychologically or in the roles they play, as the shepherds that surround them. For example, Galatea usually is silent when she comes in contact with male   —29→   characters and allows circumstance to dictate her movements. Even as a «mujer esquiva» (an early prototype for Marcela in Don Quixote), Galatea is never fully psychologically or thematically articulated. She is never permitted to present her case or argue reasons for denying her suitors' requests. She is mostly docile and complacent with their insistent requests for company, and ends up soliciting Elicio's protection. Ruth El Saffar sees this element of female representation as the key to Cervantes's pastoral novel:

The absence of women as other than attractive young ladies may be, in fact, the key to the whole work: Cervantes appears unable at this point truly to represent women in their variegated individuality as he is able, to some extent, to present men. Instead he casts them all in a single mold, which must be understood as signalling the archetype of the lovely, inaccessible virgin -the Diana figure... Even when they are not passive, as Teolinda, Rosaura, and Gelasia are not, the ladies of Cervantes' pastoral novel act only in the context of the network of amorous desire in which they are caught and have no other novelistic role to play. Their effort is to sustain the image of inaccessibility and desirability in which they are cast.

(Beyond Fiction 45)

In line with critics' assessments, the resolution of the pastoral paradox lies, accordingly, in the space of lack, in the absence of the fully articulated female subject that Woman's inaccessibility opens. One need only recall the insistent absence, through death or rejection, of the objects of love in Garcilaso's eclogues to highlight the necessity of this element in the pastoral mode and its development in Spanish literature. The shepherds' lovesick laments, and through them their self-definition as worthy lovers, can only be imagined under the objectification, absence, and erasure of the female subject.

My reading of this «paradoxical» simultaneity between erasure, absence, and narcissistic self-identification through poetic language is based on the Freudian and Lacanian concepts of sublimation. For Freud, sublimation is a process which apparently has no connection with sexuality but which is motivated by the force of sexual instinct. First introduced in The Three Essays on Sexuality, the main activities connected to the process are artistic creation or intellectual inquiry (Laplanche and Pontalis 431). It is through the diversion of libidinal energy to an aim that is not sexual that sublimation contributes to both individual development and cultural progress¹. Yet in order for   —30→   libidinal energy to be desexualized, or to exchange a sexual aim for a non-sexual one, the libido must withdraw into the ego, or engage in a narcissistic process². For Freud, therefore, the narcissistic process transforms libidinal energy into sublimated energy, redirecting the sexual charge from an external object to the ego which then again redirects this energy, but now as a reflection of the self.

Sublimation is, for Lacan as for Freud, an operation which is connected to artistic and intellectual activity and which possesses social value through the re-direction of energy from sexual objects to non-sexual objects. Yet the Lacanian concept offers a much more detailed analysis of the effects of sublimation on object-relations. For Lacan the relation of the subject with the sublimated object is a specular one in which the subject sees reflected in the mirror of the other an idealized form of the «I» (moi/speaking ego) or an Ideal-ich. In other words, the ego establishes a highly idealized and desexualized narcissistic relation with the sublimated object. Lacan writes:

You can in fact see it [the problem of object relations in sublimation] emerge in a narcissistic relation, an imaginary relation. At this level, the object introduces itself only insofar as it is perpetually interchangeable with the love that the subject has for its own image. Ichlibido and Objektlibido are introduced by Freud in relation to the difference between Ich-Ideal and Idea-Ich, between the mirage of the ego and the formation of an ideal. This ideal makes room for itself alone... The problem of identification is linked to this psychological splitting, which places the subject in a state of dependence relative to an idealized, forced image of itself.

(98; emphasis mine)

To exemplify this specular relation between the subject and «an idealized, forced image of itself» as reflected upon a sublimated object, Lacan uses the case of courtly love and the construction of the   —31→   courtly Lady as mirror of the ideal ego. In the Lacanian reading of the mechanics of courtly love the Lady, an idealized other who serves as the inspiration for poetic achievement, must be absent from the scene as a desiring subject. This absence is effectuated through the erasure of the female subject by means of sublimation and the specular relation that the male subject establishes with the residue lack from the erasure of the female subject. As Lacan explains:

The object involved, the feminine object, is introduced oddly enough through the door of privation or of inaccessibility. Whatever the social position of him who functions in the role, the inaccessibility of the object is posited as a point of departure... It is impossible to serenade one's Lady in her poetic role in the absence of the given that she is surrounded and isolated by a barrier.

(149)

Because the «inaccessibility of the object» is the «point of departure», the Lady becomes a representation whose presence as a desiring subject is radically erased by the mechanics of sublimation. Lacan concludes, «In this poetic field [courtly love] the feminine object is emptied of all real substance» (149). In other words, Woman ceases to be a real object and becomes merely a refractory device.

The erasure by which the female subject is transformed into a sublimated object necessarily excludes her from the economy of narcissistic self-fulfillment in which the lover immerses himself, or what Lacan designates as the «narcissistic function». The lover, after effectively obliterating the female's subjectivity, reconstructs her as a narcissistic projection of his own ideal ego, which has no connection to the female subject from which it arose. The Lady becomes a speculum upon which the lover's ideal ego is reflected. Therefore, when the lover praises and adores the figure of the Lady as that which has no comparison, he is really talking about an idealization of his own self, of his own ideal ego³.

The mechanics of courtly love as read through psychoanalysis are relevant to the pastoral convention. Historically the connections between the courtly love convention and the pastoral tradition are   —32→   well documented⁴. The overall structure which frames the female subject as an inaccessible object is very similar in both conventions. Either the female is barred by some external social constraint, such as parental or marital commitments, or by internalized social considerations, such as personal honor or pledges of chastity. The response from the lover in the courtly and pastoral modes is also similar in that the shepherd, like the courtly knight, engages in a lyrical lament on his hapless fate in love. And finally in both cases the poetic function is intensified by a constant lyrical recalling of the Lady's beauty and magnificence and the narcissistic self-aggrandizement of the pastoral or courtly lover's ideal ego that such a linguistic exercise generates.

It is in part this operation of narcissistic self-fulfillment through pastoral escape and lyrical production that Cervantes explores, parodies, and explodes from within many of the pastoral episodes in Don Quixote. As Leandra's Anselmo demonstrates: «Teniendo tantas cosas de que quejarse, sólo se queja de ausencia; y al son de un rabel,... cantando se queja» (595; vol. 1, chp. 51). But if this is evident in Cervantes's text it is also true that the critique of pastoral convention and the tension between the humorous and the pathetic are further problematized by Don Quixote's pivotal Golden Age speech (vol. I, chp. 11). To the contrary of what might be expected by any reader anticipating the pastoral patterns mentioned above, the speech sets up a pastoral paradise populated not by poetry-loving shepherds, but by «simples y hermosas zagalejas», free from «la amorosa pestilencia» (156-57; vol. 1, chp. 11); an idealized space that serves as an antidote to the pastoral convention as traditionally formulated. In her discussion of the mythological precedents that ground Don Quixote's Golden Age speech, Ruth Anthony El Saffar comments on the reference to «nuestra primera madre»:

There Don Quixote delivers his Golden Age speech, which reveals him as enveloped in a fantasy of the all-good mother. Although he clearly yearns for a time before the era of father dominance, Don Quixote strips the Great Mother whom he evokes of her dark side. She is all-giving but not all powerful... she retains only those qualities that are described and attractive to men.

(Quixotic Desire 163)

  —33→  

El Saffar's exploration of the Golden Age speech points out the erasure of the Great Mother's «dark side» or irrepresentability and her convenient re-construction as an «all-good mother». However, as I will demonstrate, this representation can also be interpreted as an alternative conception of the pastoral by the knight errant as a feminine space, as opposed to the traditional male world that had been conventionally demarcated for the pastoral. Even more importantly, the speech provides a space against which to measure the presence of women as subjects in the constructions of «true» male pastoral spaces: a subjectivity, we might add, that includes a re-sexualization of the locus amoenus. As Poggioli has pointed out, «the pastoral insists on the preliminaries of love, rather than its final consummation and often reduces passion to the level of courtship» (54)⁵. Avalle-Arce, along with many others, reads this characteristic of the genre under the rubric of neoplatonism and this ideology's emphasis on spiritual, rather than material, consummation⁶. Yet as we will see in the cases of Leandra and Sanchica, female sexuality poses an active threat to the conventional pastoral structure by assaulting the sublimating process that depends on the de-sexualization of the female object in order to enable the subject's engagement with his ideal ego.

Don Quixote's Golden Age speech rejects any direct reference to male presence and its traditional constitutive function as producer and composer of poetry. Other than a vague allusion to the members of the edenic pastoral locus as «los que en ella vivían» and «los hijos que entonces la poseían», there is no direct mention of male subjects within it (155-56; vol. I, chp. 11). All specific naming in the speech concerns only feminine elements: either Nature and its elements or the «zagalejas» and their way of life. Although other conventional characteristics of the pastoral genre are manifest in the speech, this lack of emphasis on male presence serves as an alluring contrast to the traditional male pastoral space and its sublimation of the female   —34→   subject⁷. If the traditional pastoral depends on the inaccessibility of women, on their absence through sublimation, Don Quixote's Golden Age speech constructs a space that directly challenges this paradigm. Instead, what Don Quixote envisions is a space in which the female element seems to be constitutive and even exclusive⁸.

The «zagalejas» of the Golden Age were, in dress and demeanor, simple and honest, unlike their Iron Age courtesan sisters. And as they dressed they also loved, «sin buscar artificioso rodeo de palabras para encarecerlos [los concetos amorosos]» (156; vol. 1, chp. 11; emphasis mine). Clearly, the «artificioso rodeo de palabras» is a direct reference to the high poetic practice that served as the most important activity of the male subject in the pastoral tradition and which Don Quixote wishes to replace in his Golden Age speech by «verdad y llaneza» (156; vol. 1, chp. 11). Such linguistic artifice deteriorates progressively in the Marcela and Leandra episodes until it is finally rendered ineffectual in Don Quijote's pastoral fantasy at the end of part II. But before I move on to these episodes it is important to note how Don Quixote finalizes his description of the Golden Age. The speech ends with a final praise of the «zagalejas»:

Las doncellas y la honestidad andaban, como tengo dicho, por dondequiera, sola y señora, sin temor que la ajena desenvoltura y lascivo intento le menoscabasen, y su perdición nacía de su gusto y propia voluntad.

(157; vol. 1, chp. 11)

This final description, with its emphasis on independence and self-chosen chastity, re-creates woman as a subject with presence and Symbolic substance in the pastoral space and again stands in sharp   —35→   contrast to the exigencies of sublimation and narcissistic self-idealization in the male pastoral world. In Don Quixote's imagination these «doncellas» reveled in a state of innocence that was theirs to pervert («y su perdición nacía de su gusto y propia voluntad»)⁹. In contrast, the traditional pastoral poetic function, through sublimation, effectively erases any possibility of self-determination for women. Regardless of the apparent tameness and docility ascribed to the «doncellas», no reader can disregard Don Quixote's subversion of the pastoral genre which permits his imaginary Golden Age to be constituted by the presence of women and not their absence.

As we advance to a reading of the Marcela, Leandra, and Sanchica interludes, I must emphasize the importance that the Golden Age speech has in setting a problematic and subversive stage for the pastoral interludes in the rest of the text. For Marcela, Leandra, and Sanchica, this speech opens the door within Don Quixote that makes it possible for them to establish their subjectivity beyond male opinion or the absence that they are supposed to constitute.

In an illuminating feminist reading of the Marcela episode Yvonne Jehenson explains how Marcela's own speech near the end of the interlude subverts the male pastoral fantasy:

What Marcela has done is taken the intellectual tools of patriarchy, used them to her cause, and turned them against their inventors... Marcela is encoded within a system, a genre where the female has been silenced: she has either departed, has never existed, or is centralized as object of the males' desire or laments. It is this tradition that Cervantes explodes and he does this through Marcela's act of speech.

(27)

Jehenson's basic premise is that the marginalization of women in the pastoral is subverted by endowing Marcela with a voice (and admittedly   —36→   Marcela is quite eloquent). Thus for Jehenson the interlude portrays a strictly male pastoral space that is only partially subverted by Marcela's «act of speech». Yet, it is my opinion that, beyond a partially subverted conventional pastoral project, the Marcela interlude should be recognized as a pastoral world that corresponds to the knight errant's imaginary recreation of the Golden past where beautiful, young females roamed freely through valleys unencumbered by a sublimating male presence: «andaban las hermosas y simples zagalejas de valle en valle y de otero en otero en trenza y en cabello» (156; vol. 1, chp. 11). From this perspective Marcela's defiant presence in the pastoral space is a return to the Golden Age as prescribed by Don Quixote and would preclude the possibility of a traditional male pastoral.

Pedro, one of the shepherds accompanying Grisóstomo (Marcela's main suitor), relates Marcela's story, telling how she first goes to the countryside against the wishes of those who would want to keep her constrained in her deceased father's town:

Pero hételo aquí, cuando no me cato, que remanece un día la melindrosa Marcela hecha pastora; y, sin ser parte su tío ni todos los del pueblo, que se lo desaconsejaban, dio en irse al campo con las demás zagalas del lugar y dio en guardar su mesmo ganado.

(165; vol. 1, chp. 11)

It is significant that until Marcela's speech other exclusively male voices retell her life and her seemingly inexplicable behavior. This narrative condition is part and parcel of the male pastoral where the female protagonist's story is mostly retold through the words of her male suitors. But in Marcela's case the story these male voices tell is one clouded by bewilderment and annoyance at her unpredictable and disruptive behavior. It is this initial act of subversion -the unauthorized departure from her uncle's house- that propels Marcela into a space very similar to the Golden Age imagined by Don Quixote, which she defends and maintains against the incursion of the courtly shepherds who follow her into it. Marcela joins the «zagalejas» of Don Quixote's Golden Age speech, «en aquella libertad y vida tan suelta y de tan poco o de ningún recogimiento» (165; vol. 1, chp. 12) to tend her own goats. Therefore, her escape is not into the pastoral locus limited by male narcissistic self-identification but into one that symbolically and effectively separates her from unwelcome male influence and control.

With Grisóstomo as their representative, the desiring male subjects who follow her into Cervantes's pastoral try to engage in the   —37→   usual mechanics of female objectification, idealization, and ultimate sublimation by invading Marcela's chosen space and imposing their literary conventions. This is an exercise that, as we have seen, engages itself much more in the construction of an ideal ego as a narcissistic function than in ever truly recognizing the possibilities of the female subject. But the problem is not that Marcela rejects their proposals, for rejection is one of the typical modes of inaccessibility that is built into the courtly and pastoral machinery. Garcilaso's Galatea and her rejection of Salicio is a case in point¹⁰. Rather, Marcela's presence as subject in this space denies, through its constancy, the successful construction of pure male fantasy. As Poggioli has pointed out, Marcela enters the bucolic space only to display more decisively her rejection of the «rule of love» (170). Because Marcela is consistently willing to come into contact with the males that inhabit the locus and offer equitable friendship, their efforts at male bonding are continuously interrupted:

Que, puesto que no huye ni se esquiva de la compañía y conversación de los pastores, y los trata cortés y amigablemente, en llegando a descubrirle su intención cualquiera dellos, aunque sea tan justa y santa como la del matrimonio, los arroja de sí como un trabuco.

(166; vol. 1, chp. 11; emphasis mine)

Although her rejection could serve as the proper impulse for the shepherds' true desire to achieve narcissistic self-identification through poetic practice, her interaction with them confuses their endeavor. Marcela's behavior cannot be easily absorbed into any of the pre-established roles written for women within pastoral convention. A woman who enjoys male company («los trata cortés y amigablemente») but who simultaneously rejects their amorous propositions cannot be controlled by the normative erasure performed by male sublimation. Marcela is not inaccessible. She is not a docile and malleable virginal figure or a cruel harpy. She does not avoid male company, unlike many of her pastoral predecessors. She expects the unexpected: male companionship without male objectification. Due to the inability of the male fantasy to realize itself under such conditions, Grisóstomo has no other choice but to compose trite verse and ultimately to commit suicide, actions that break with the genre's   —38→   commitment to high poetic creation and with the idealized space which depends on male bonding and the community that ensues from it. Although «muerte de amor» is a convention of the genre, its effective occurrence threatens to deplete the male community and introduces self-violence that does not fit in the idealized and eternal springtime of the locus amoenus¹¹. Marcela's speech is, therefore, only a reiteration of what she had already articulated: a refusal to sacrifice her pastoral sojourn, her fantasy, in order to promote its male counterpart¹². In Marcela's words,

Yo nací libre, y para poder vivir libre escogí la soledad de los campos. Los árboles destas montañas son mi compañía, y las claras aguas destos arroyos mis espejos; con los árboles y con las aguas comunico mis pensamientos y hermosura. Fuego soy apartado y espada puesta de lejos.

(186; vol. 1, chp. 14)

She is one with Nature, one with herself, and not accessible to the «rule of love» dictated by the pastoral convention.

Although Don Quixote's reaction at the end of Marcela's speech has been read similarly to Grisóstomo's epitaph -as a further objectification of Marcela- I believe that its connection to the Golden Age speech is relevant¹³. The shepherds attempt to inscribe Marcela as the conventional «esquiva hermosa ingrata». But, because they have to admit that «la mesma envidia ni debe ni puede ponerle falta alguna», that classification is continuously slipping (185; vol. 1, chp. 14). In other words, the shepherds fail either to idealize or demonize Marcela, as her presence as subject continuously subverts her erasure. Marcela impedes her intended role as Lacanian mirror and thwarts the usually smooth machinery of poetic achievement and ideal ego construction. If we then examine Don Quixote's reaction   —39→   through what in the Golden Age speech he had deemed the raison d'etre of the «caballeros andantes» -the demise of the Golden Age-, his protective attitude toward Marcela and her desire to follow her go beyond simple sexual objectification. At the end of his Golden Age speech Don Quixote contrasts the Golden and the Iron Age:

Las doncellas y la honestidad andaban, como tengo dicho, por dondequiera, sola y señora, sin temor que la ajena desenvoltura y lascivo intento le menoscabasen... Y agora, en estos nuestros detestables siglos, no está segura ninguna... Para cuya seguridad, andando más los tiempos y creciendo más la malicia, se instituyó la orden de los caballeros andantes, para defender las doncellas, amparar las viudas y socorrer a los huérfanos y a los menesterosos.

(157; vol. 1, chp. 11)

Don Quixote sees the purpose of the knighthood as protecting from the «ajena desenvoltura y lascivo intento» that which in the Iron Age is constantly threatened: women and their chastity safeguarded in a state of freedom. Within this paradigm, Marcela embodies for Don Quixote the seemingly lost Golden Age of a female subjectivity unperturbed by the corrupting effects of male desire, free to roam the valleys with their hair flowing in the wind. Therefore, what Don Quixote seems to be defending is not the further objectification of Marcela but her right to remain a subject, alone, in unity and freedom with Nature and with the other «zagalejas» of the female pastoral:

Ninguna persona, de cualquier estado y condición que sea, se atreva a seguir a la hermosa Marcela, so pena de caer en la furiosa indignación mía... en lugar de ser seguida y perseguida, sea honrada y estimada de todos los buenos del mundo, pues muestra que en él ella es sola la que con honesta intención vive.

(188; vol. 1, chp. 11)

Don Quixote's position as knight errant, however, precludes his entering this space. His defense seems paradoxical given the conditions that Don Quixote had established for his role as knight errant: to protect women from «el lascivo intento» characteristic of the Iron Age and from women's own weak nature. Yet Marcela (and, we assume, her companions) is not characterized by such a weakness and does not need Don Quixote's protection. She has defended her choices successfully through her demeanor and in her speech. Consequently, Don Quixote's defense of the «zagalejas»' freedom and lifestyle hampers his role as defender of their honor, jeopardizing the necessity of his knight errancy and the sustenance of his own ideal ego. In my opinion, this paradox is not resolved and contributes to   —40→   making the episode contradictory and elusive. But as any reader can acknowledge, this characteristic is constitutive of most of the elements in Don Quixote¹⁴.

As in Marcela's episode, part I's second and last pastoral interlude has at its center a female protagonist who contributes to the undoing of the traditional bucolic space. Leandra, an overwhelmingly beautiful city girl, has, like Marcela, an impressive number of suitors. Many pursue her favors and most are unsuccessful, including Eugenio, the shepherd who recounts the case. Like Marcela, Leandra is supervised by a wavering father figure and no mother. But, in contrast to her predecessor, Leandra does not choose an escape to the bucolic space. Instead, she opts to reject chastity and runs away with Vicente de la Rosa, a charming and adventurous soldier. Therefore, in Leandra's case the conditions are, as far as her actions are concerned, radically different. Leandra, a «doncella» firmly grounded in the Iron Age, chooses the «amorosa pestilencia» and «[da] con todo su recogimiento al traste» in her love affair with Vicente (157; vol. 1, chp. 11). Consequently she is betrayed by the soldier and, with her virginity still intact, is sent to a monastery. Predictably Leandra's inaccessibility promotes, as in any conventional pastoral, a mass exodus of the lovers to the countryside, where they lament her absence and compose verse in her honor. In other words the male pastoral as a fantasy space is opened by the Lady's inaccessibility. She has run away with another suitor and has subsequently been placed in an institution more prohibitive than marriage. Now even more inaccessible, Leandra becomes a perfect object for sublimation; her absence facilitates the further objectification, idealization, and erasure that the process requires.

Yet in Leandra's case the feminine subject is not sufficiently erased for the pastoral lovers to install themselves in poetic lament in perfect unison. It is evident that the shepherds intend to sublimate Leandra's subjectivity in their laments. The traits of erasure and narcissistic ideal ego projections that constitute male sublimation are evident in the episode. For example, the shepherds mourn their own loss and not Leandra's denigration by the soldier and the personal and societal embarrassment that follows. But the shepherds drastically   —41→   disagree as to how to treat her decision to flee with Vicente. After all, Leandra had exercised her own will and desire. She has, in fact, followed Don Quixote's Golden Age speech, «su perdición nacía de su gusto y propia voluntad» (157; vol. 1, chp. 11). This manifestation of desire, sexuality, and subjectivity was never available to the traditional female protagonists of the pastoral genre. We can recall Montemayor's Diana or Cervantes's own Galatea, female pastoral protagonists whose marriages were dictated by parental mandate (usually by the father) and not by self-motivation. In Leandra's case, Eugenio voices his concern with her active participation in the event:

Y como en los casos de amor no hay ninguno que con más facilidad se cumpla que aquel que tiene de su parte el deseo de la dama, con facilidad se concertaron Leandra y Vicente, y primero que alguno de sus muchos pretendientes cayesen en la cuenta de su deseo, ya ella le tenía cumplido, habiendo dejado la casa de su querido y amado padre, que madre no la tiene, y ausentándose de la aldea con el soldado...

(593; vol. 1, chp. 51; emphasis mine)

Despite the mechanics of the traditional male pastoral, Leandra's manifest sexual desire serves as evidence of a subjectivity that cannot be easily assumed under the pressures of sublimation.

As a result Ambrosio and Eugenio's laments are unable to create the conditions required for male bonding. Their versions of Leandra as object clash at their most basic levels. While Ambrosio chooses to ignore Leandra's sexuality, Eugenio fixates on the «weaknesses» of the female condition. Even though both versions are ultimately objectifications that erase Leandra as an individual subject, Anselmo and Eugenio are never able to reconcile them. As Eugenio points out:

Entre estos disparatados, el que muestra que menos y más juicio tiene es mi competidor Anselmo, el cual teniendo tantas cosas de que quejarse, sólo se queja de su ausencia;... Yo sigo otro camino más fácil, y a mi parecer el más acertado, que es decir mal de la ligereza de las mujeres, de su inconstancia, de su doble trato, de sus promesas muertas, de su fe rompida, y, finalmente, del poco discurso que tienen en saber colocar sus pensamientos e intenciones que tienen.

(595; vol. 1, chp. 51)

Ultimately Leandra's will situates her within the pastoral space as a desiring subject that cannot be easily absorbed into a mechanics of idealization. Her sexual desire acts as a residue that cannot be recycled within the world view of the pastoral. Even in her role as   —42→   sublimated object Leandra looms as a presence, as a desiring subject, that forecloses the possibility of a «true» pastoral. In brief, Anselmo and Eugenio cannot form an idyllic male community because they cannot accompany each other in their diverging laments¹⁵. Consequently the episode marks the impossibility of male fantasy to succeed fully in the pastoral world when faced with active feminine desire.

The male pastoral's ideal aim is to satisfy the ego through the narcissistic construction of the self by way of sublimating the female subject. Yet the inability of this process to successfully assimilate the presence of a desiring female subject is again confirmed in Don Quixote and Sancho's effort to imagine a pastoral space in which to bond, once the fantasy of the «caballería andante» disintegrates (vol. 2, chp. 73). Don Quixote proposes an escape to the countryside with the rest of the male protagonists, the priest, the barber, and Sansón Carrasco, where they would all change their demeanor, adopt new names and sing poems in honor of their absent ladies. Although this pending pastoral endeavor has multiple causes underlying its frustrated inception, one of the elements that can be directly related to the themes we have mentioned is Sanchica and her potential incursion into the pastoral space as imagined by Don Quixote and his «escudero». As Sancho savors the delights offered by a pastoral sojourn («Qué de migas, qué de natas, qué de guirnaldas y qué de zarandajas pastoriles» [550; vol. 2, chp. 73]), he poses the necessity, due to his practicality, of Sanchica's bringing them food. After all, poetry alone cannot satisfy Sancho's needs. But immediately after offering his daughter's service, he retracts stating:

  —43→  

Pero, ¡guarda!, que es de buen parecer, y hay pastores más maliciosos que simples, y no querría que fuese por lana y volviese trasquilada; y por los campos como por las ciudades, y por las pastorales chozas como por los reales palacios, y quitada la causa se quita el pecado; y ojos que no veen, corazón que no quiebra; y más vale salto de mata que ruego de hombres buenos.

(550; vol. 2, chp. 73)

Sancho wavers in the possibility of Sanchica's becoming a desiring and desirable sexual presence. Sancho is not able to sublimate his own daughter's desire and therefore is unable to adjust his own understanding of the world to the pastoral convention. According to his assessment of the pastoral world, his daughter would become an active sexual presence in the locus amoenus. As a presence Sanchica would negate a pastoral space in which the female protagonists only serve as an excuse for lyrical production, as mirrors for male narcissistic projections. Her pastoral role would be disruptive in their efforts to bond through lyrical lament. In Lacanian terms, Sanchica's presence, as in the case of Marcela and Leandra, would annul a narcissistic self-fulfillment in which the female subject, with her desire erased by the machinery of sublimation, becomes a mirror for the male's ideal ego.

In Don Quixote Woman as presence, as desiring subject, nullifies the possibility of the traditional pastoral. In my opinion, Cervantes was primarily interested in the pathetic and comic ironies of the male pastoral fantasy, in taking to its limit the pastoral paradox of love as impossibility in an idealized space and hyperbolizing its effects. Nevertheless, Cervantes opens by opposition a space where Woman, as irreducible presence, is crucial. In the absence of the absence of Marcela, Leandra, and Sanchica, the male pastoral fantasy folds under the weight of their irreducibility as present and active subjects. Considering the most salient models for the Spanish pastoral -Garcilaso and Montemayor-, this is a subversion that cannot be ignored. It marks both the progressive undoing of the pastoral tradition during the Baroque and Cervantes's unwillingness to be subdued by the formal, thematic, or ideological limits of any genre. Even more meaningfully, it exemplifies the disruptive power that psychologically complex female characters represent in Golden Age literature. Finally, it opens up the possibility of a multiplicity of «true» pastoral spaces within the critical apparatus of Golden Age literature.

  —44→  

Avalle-Arce, Juan Bautista. La novela pastoril española. 2nd edition. Madrid: Ediciones Istmo. 1974.

Cervantes, Miguel. El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Ed. Luis Andrés Murillo. Madrid: Castalia. 1978.

Cruz, Anne J. «Mirroring Others: A Lacanian Reading of the Letrados in Don Quixote», Quixotic Desire. Ed. Ruth Anthony El Saffar, and Diana de Armas Wilson. Ithaca: Cornell UP. 1993.

El Saffar, Ruth Anthony. Beyond Fiction. Berkeley: Univ. California Press. 1984.

——. «In Marcela's Case», Quixotic Desire. Ed. Ruth Anthony El Saffar, and Diana de Armas Wilson. Ithaca: Cornell UP. 1993.

Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Ed. Angela Richards. Middlesex: Penguin. 1977.

Jehenson, Yvonne. «The Pastoral Episode in Cervantes' Don Quijote: Marcela Once Again». Cervantes, X, 2 (1990): 15-35.

Lacan, Jaques. Book VII The Ethics of Psychoanalisis 1959-1960. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: Norton. 1992.

Laplanche, J., Pontalis, J.B. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. New York: Norton. 1973.

Montemayor, Jorge de. Los siete libros de la Diana. Ed. Francisco López Estrada. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. 1962.

Mujica, Barbara. Iberian Pastoral Characters. Washington, D.C.: Scripta Humanistica. 1986.

Poggioli, Renato. The Oaten Flute. Cambridge: Harvard UP. 1975.

Rupp, Stephen. «True and False Pastoral in Don Quijote». Renaissance and Reformation, XVI, 3 (1993): 5-17.

  —45→  

Vega, Garcilaso de la. Obras Completas. Ed. Elias L. Rivers. Columbus: Ohio State UP. 1964.

Vickers, Nancy. «Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme». Critical Inquiry, VIII, 3 (1981): 265-279.