‘Laid in Earth’: Physical Touches in Valera's Pepita Jiménez

Abstract

Valera is often thought of as a very refined writer, with a decided interest in the loftier pursuits of metaphysics and religion, and given the subject matter of Pepita Jiménez, it is inevitable that theological and ecclesiastical issues surface in it. His novels, although noted for the rather high-minded tone of their discourse and ideas, also give due weight to the physical, earthly circumstances of the protagonists, as exemplified in this article by an analysis of Pepita Jiménez. The famous phrase ‘laid in earth’, adapted from Nahum Tate's libretto for Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, is applicable to the way in which Valera in Pepita Jiménez prepares us for its denouement. By presenting us from the beginning of the novel with examples from the physical world, of touching and kissing, and from social, cultural and sporting encounters that require physical involvement, Valera sows the seed for the commitment of the protagonists to a life grounded in the daily social round and in the earthly, and earthy, environment that they inhabit.

Key words:

• Juan Valera
• Pepita Jiménez
• Nahum Tate
• Henry Purcell
• Dido and Aeneas
• physical touching
• physical sporting activity
• earthy environment

Notes

1 See David Hopkins, ‘Tate, Nahum (c.1652–1715), Poet, Playwright and Translator’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online ed., Jan 2008, <http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/26986> (accessed 11 December 2014). Readers may be interested in Peter Strickland, Dido's Lament, Or the Willing Librettist (London: 77Books, 2009), an account, in the form of a fictional autobiography, of how Tate came to write the libretto of Dido and Aeneas.

2 Juan Valera, Pepita Jiménez, ed. James Whiston (Nürnberg: Clásicos Hispánicos, EDOBNE, 2013), 268 [epub]. All quotations from the novel are taken from this edition.

3 Janet Schmalfeldt points out that Dido's phrase ‘my wrongs’ could refer to the wrongs ‘that have been done to her, rather than to her own mistakes [ … ] In short, Purcell's Dido may express no blame whatsoever’ (see ‘In Search of Dido’, The Journal of Musicology, 18:4 [2001], 584–615 [p. 611]). While allowing for this interpretation, the weight of meaning would suggest what the phrase says: that Dido is referring to ‘my sins’. (I should add that Professor Schmalfeldt is giving the opinion of a colleague here, which the thrust of her article goes against.)

4 Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas. An Opera Performed at Mr Josias Priest's Boarding School at Chelsea by Young Gentlewomen. The Words Made by Mr Nahum Tate. The Musick Compos'd by Mr Henry Purcell, libretto available at <home.olemiss.edu/∼mudws/dido.html> (accessed 11 December 2014).

5 Quoted in Manuel Lombardero, Otro don Juan. Vida y pensamiento de Juan Valera (Barcelona: Planeta, 2004), 217.

6 Manuel Azaña, ‘Prólogo’, en Juan Valera, Pepita Jiménez, ed. & prólogo de Manuel Azaña (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1967), ix–lxxii (p. lxi).

7 Carmen Martín Gaite, ‘Prólogo’, in Juan Valera, Pepita Jiménez, prólogo de Carmen Martín Gaite (Madrid: Taurus Ediciones, 1988), 9–25 (pp. 10–11).

8 José F. Montesinos, Valera o la ficción libre (Madrid: Gredos, 1957), 109.

9 Benito Pérez Galdós, Lo prohibido, ed. & intro. James Whiston (Madrid: Cátedra, 2000), 227.

10 For more on this topic, see James Whiston, ‘Campo, huerta, jardín, estufa: la domesticación de la naturaleza en Pepita Jiménez’, in Actas del primer congreso internacional sobre don Juan Valera, coord. Matilde Galera Sánchez (Cabra: Ilustrísimo Ayuntamiento de Cabra/Córdoba: Excma. Diputación Provincial de Córdoba, 1997), 265–74; Gabriel García Bajo, ‘La naturaleza domesticada en Pepita Jiménez de Juan Valera’, Anales Galdosianos, 35 (2000), 65–77; Toni Dorca, ‘The Return of the Native: Pepita Jiménez As Provincial Idyll’, Anales Galdosianos, 37 (2002), 113–24.

11 Romero Tobar in his edition of Pepita Jiménez (Madrid: Cátedra, 1996), borrowing from María del Pilar Palomo's edition of the same novel (Barcelona: Planeta, 1987), explains that the cupido was an ‘especie de amuleto protector [ … ] consistente en un pequeño corazón de fieltro, atravesado por una espada’ (195). DRAE goes further, describing it as having ‘la forma de un niño desnudo y alado que suele llevar los ojos vendados y porta flechas, arco y carcaj’. Chaucer, of course, had linked the pilgrimage to Canterbury with the coming of spring, and its ensuing animal and vegetable vitality:

Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,

And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open ye

(so priketh hem Nature in hir corages);

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

(quotation taken from <http://www.bl.uk/learning/images/changing/new/transcript4959.html> [accessed 30 September 2015]).

In more recent times, Lorca has linked the romería with fertility rites and the mating game, in the last act of Yerma.

12 The incorporation of St John's Eve into the plot, when the women and boys go off to collect ‘verbena, ramos de romero u otras plantas, para hacer sahumerios mágicos’ (264), gives Valera the opportunity to associate Luis’ impending visit to Pepita with an atmosphere reminiscent of La Celestina. Indeed, Martín Gaite claims to see five Celestinas at work in Pepita Jiménez, calling it ‘una novela de celestineo’ (Martín Gaite, ‘Prólogo’, in Valera, Pepita Jiménez, 12), albeit mostly from more high-minded motives than Rojas’ protagonist. The five are Don Pedro, the Dean, the parish priest, Pepita's maid Antoñona, and the way that Valera depicts the natural surroundings of the Andalusian spring and mid-summer (12–24). Martín Gaite's complete Prologue to Pepita Jiménez runs from pages 9 to 25, so one can see from the previous page references that it is mostly devoted to the reminiscences therein of La Celestina.

13 James Whiston, ‘Nature and Culture in Pepita Jiménez’, Anales Galdosianos, 47 (2012), 55–69.

14 The first edition, published in Revista de España, XXXVII, 13 de mayo de 1874, reads ‘Espiritu’ [sic] (39) (facsimile copy available at Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, <http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor-din/pepita-jimenez--0/html/> (accessed 11 December 2014). The latter's transcription of the novel's first edition in book form also capitalizes ‘Espíritu’.

15 Sir Philip Sidney, Apologie for Poetrie, ed., with notes, illustrations & glossary, by Evelyn S. Shuckburgh (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1951 [1st ed. 1891]), 8.

16 Jo Labanyi, in her stimulating chapter on the novel, ‘Making caciquismo Respectable’, labels the purchase of the statue by the couple ‘commodity fetishism’ (in her Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel [Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2000], 265–98 [p. 290]). The nouveau riche element is certainly present; interestingly, in Virgil's Book IV (the fate of Dido and Aeneas) Venus is portrayed as a quiet, accommodating character, who ends up getting her wish with regard to Aeneas, as against the more aggressive and truculent Juno, whose schemes are foiled.

17 For some of Valera's really ‘earthy’ stories, see The Green Bird and Other Tales. El pájaro verde y otros cuentos, trans. Robert M. Fedorchek (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2013), which contains ‘La reina madre’ and ‘La muñequita’.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.