Imagining Domesticity in Cervantes' Novelas ejemplares and Don Quijote

Abstract

This article discusses the role of the home in both Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quijote and his Novelas ejemplares. The first half of the article addresses the relationship between the idea of wandering and the idea of home, showing that multiple characters understand Don Quijote's vagrancy as the key manifestation of his madness. Moreover, the knight's homelessness connects him to another wandering character: the Morisco Ricote. A historical and textual understanding of home and homelessness thus opens an interpretive space, one that registers Don Quijote's and Ricote's inability to wander as emblematic of the frustrated promise that modernity presented to Spain. Moving on to the Novelas ejemplares, we delineate in El celoso extremeño the identification of the private sphere with patriarchal values of honour, wealth, sexual control and legitimate offspring, and how these are undermined by the representatives of the public sphere. The same is shown to hold in four other stories as well.

Key words:

• Miguel de Cervantes
• Don Quijote
• Novelas ejemplares
• home
• vagrancy
• homelessness
• Ricote
• El celoso extremeño
• private sphere
• patriarchal values
• public sphere

Notes

1 For more on this topic see, for example, Anne Cruz & Mary Elizabeth Perry, ‘Introduction’, in Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain, ed. Anne Cruz & Mary Elizabeth Perry (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1992), ix–xxiii.

2 See José Antonio Maravall, La cultura del barroco (Barcelona: Ariel, 1981). See also Nieves Romero Díaz, ‘Revisiting the Culture of the Baroque: Nobility, City, and the Post-Cervantine Novella’, in Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context, ed. Luis Martín-Estudillo & Nicholas Spadaccini (Nashville: Vanderbilt U. P., 2005), 162–87 (p. 166). Drawing on the work of cultural materialists to offer a reading of María de Zayas, Romero-Díaz states: ‘we cannot accept that cultural authority exercises its power without any kind of resistance’ (‘Revisiting the Culture of the Baroque’, 164). For more articles that debate the work of Maravall, see Hispanic Baroques, ed. Martín-Estudillo & Spadaccini.

3 Lisa Vollendorf, The Lives of Women: A New History of Inquisitional Spain (Nashville: Vanderbilt U. P., 2005), 26.

4 This understanding does not, however, run counter to recent research that shows that religious minorities endeavoured to use what privacy they could find within their homes in order to continue practising Judaism or Islam after these religions were outlawed. See especially Mary Elizabeth Perry, The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2005).

5 This number is the approximate one given by L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain: 1500–1614 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006), 12. Much has been written recently on how Spanish literature was affected by Muslim expulsion. See, for example, Mary B. Quinn, The Moor and the Novel: Narrating Absence in Early Modern Spain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

6 Nicholas Howe, Home and Homelessness in the Medieval and Renaissance World (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 4.

7 Regarding the topic of poverty in picaresque literature, Anne Cruz has argued that Lazarillo de Tormes is a novel both about poverty and Spain's fraught relationship with its poor. Cruz argues that Lazarillo is: ‘a tale of poverty, not merely of Lazarillo's, but of poverty itself, of the relationship between society and its poor, and of the changing ideologies that leave the two groups no longer beneficially interrelated, but in conflict with each other’ (Anne J. Cruz, Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1999], 4). The present study makes a similar argument for Don Quijote, suggesting that the novel depicts a vagrant, the knight himself, and simultaneously depicts society's problematic relationship with vagrancy.

8 John Hollander, ‘It All Depends', in Home: A Place in the World, ed. Arien Mack (New York: New York U. P., 1993), 27–47 (p. 36).

9 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. & notas de Francisco Rico, 2 vols (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2004), II, 792; emphasis added. All subsequent references are to this edition; page numbers will be given parenthetically.

10 Carroll B. Johnson, Cervantes and the Material World (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2000).

11 Paul Ocobock, ‘Introduction', in Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective, ed. A. L. Beier & Paul Ocobock (Athens, OH: Ohio U. P., 2008), 1–34 (p. 2).

12 See Ocobock, ‘Introduction', 1.

13 Linda Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Hapsburg Spain: The Example of Toledo (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1983), 19. We shall follow Martz in quoting from Castile's 1540 Poor Law, and also from other sixteenth-century Spanish laws, in English translation.

14 Domingo de Soto & Juan de Robles, El gran debate sobre los pobres en el siglo XVI, ed. & estudio introductorio de Félix Santolaria Sierra (Barcelona: Ariel, 2003), 57–58.

15 Soto & Robles, El gran debate sobre los pobres, ed. Santolaria Sierra, 58.

16 Soto & Robles, El gran debate sobre los pobres, ed. Santolaria Sierra, 58–59.

17 Soto & Robles, El gran debate sobre los pobres, ed. Santolaria Sierra, 143.

18 Soto & Robles, El gran debate sobre los pobres, ed. Santolaria Sierra, 143.

19 Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Hapsburg Spain, 30.

20 Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Hapsburg Spain, 32.

21 Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Hapsburg Spain, 33.

22 Elena Maza Zorilla, Pobreza y asistencia social en España (Valladolid: Univ. de Valladolid, 1987), 60–61, n. 91.

23 Maza Zorilla, Pobreza y asistencia, 61.

24 Maza Zorilla, Pobreza y asistencia, 61.

25 Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Hapsburg Spain, 12.

26 This is true even in the Early Modern period when, according to Michael McKeon, such distinctions between public and private were newly formed. See Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Univ. of Maryland Press, 2005), xix.

27 Nancy Duncan, ‘Renegotiating Gender and Sexuality in Public and Private Spaces', in BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality, ed. Nancy Duncan (London/New York: Routledge, 1996), 127–46 (p. 128).

28 Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española, <http://dle.rae.es/?w=moharracho&o=h> (accessed 29 October 2015).

29 Rico's edition notes that while franchote means French, the general sense here is simply foreigner (II, 960, n. 11).

30 According to Francisco Márquez Villanueva: ‘ni cristianismo ni islam son para Ricote esenciales, porque lo que para él cuenta como un absoluto sin fisuras es su amor a su familia y a la tierra que le vio nacer, acrecentado ahora por la expulsión y no al contrario'. He goes on to argue that ‘Ricote es sin duda tan manchego como su amigo y vecino Sancho Panza'. See Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Moros, moriscos y turcos de Cervantes: ensayos críticos (Barcelona: Bellatera, 2010), 226, 230.

31 These sentiments are perhaps best summarized by Don Quijote's comment, made on the open road once he has left the castle of the Duke and Duchess: ‘La libertad, Sancho, es uno de los más preciosos dones que a los hombres dieron los cielos. Con ella no pueden igualarse los tesoros que encierra la tierra ni el mar encubre. Por la libertad, así como por la honra, se puede y debe aventurar la vida. Y por el contrario el cautiverio es el mayor mal que puede venir a los hombres' (II, 984–85).

32 Hollander, ‘It All Depends', 36.

33 In his essay, Toward Perpetual Peace, Immanuel Kant states that the ‘conditions of universal hospitality’ are a right of all mankind. He clarifies that ‘hospitality signifies the claim of a stranger entering foreign territory to be treated by its owner without hostility [ … ] He has a right of visitation' (Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay, trans., with intro. & notes, by M. Campbell Smith, with a preface by L. Latta [London: George Allen and Unwin, 1917], 138; available at <http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/357> [accessed 29 October 2015]).

34 Miguel de Cervantes, Novelas ejemplares, ed. Harry Sieber, 9^th ed., 2 vols (Madrid: Cátedra, 1987), II, 107. All subsequent references to the Novelas ejemplares are to this edition.

35 Shifra Armon, ‘The Paper Key: Money As Text in Cervantes's “El celoso extremeño”, and José de Camerino's “El pícaro amante” ', Cervantes, 18:1 (1998), 96–123 (pp. 98, 101).

36 Nina Cox Davis, ‘Marriage and Investment in El celoso extremeño', Romanic Review, 86:4 (2004), 639–55 (pp. 642–43).

37 Davis, ‘Marriage and Investment in El celoso extremeño', 639.

38 See Luis F. Avilés, ‘Fortaleza tan guardada: casa, alegoría, y melancolía en “El celoso extremeño” ', Cervantes, 18:1 (1998), 71–95 (pp. 76, 73).

39 Myriam Yvonne Jehenson, ‘Quixotic Desires or Stark Reality?', Cervantes 15:2 (1995), 26–42 (p. 26).

40 Edwin Williamson, ‘ ‘‘La bonita confiancita”: Deception, Trust and the Figure of Poetry in La gitanilla’, in Spanish Prose Fiction from Cervantes to Baroja and Beyond: Essays in Honour of C. Alex Longhurst, ed. James Whiston & Julia Biggane, BSS, LXXXVIII:7–8 (2011), 25–38 (p. 28).

41 Adrián J. Sáez, ‘De soldados, putas y sífilis: modelos y géneros literarios en torno al alférez Campuzano en “El casamiento engañoso” ', Cervantes, 34:1 (2014), 41–57 (pp. 48–49).

42 Melveena McKendrick, ‘The Curious and Neglected Tale of La señora Cornelia', BHS, LXXXII:5 (2005), 701–15 (pp. 710–12).

43 Edwin Williamson, ‘Challenging the Hierarchies: The Interplay of Romance and the Picaresque in La ilustre fregona’, in Cervantes: Essays in Memory of E. C. Riley on the Quatercentenary of ‘Don Quijote', ed. Jeremy Robbins & Edwin Williamson, BSS, LXXXI:4–5 (2004), 655–74.

44 Christina H. Lee, ‘La Señora Peregrina as Mediatrix in “La ilustre fregona” ', Cervantes, 25:1 (2005), 45–68.

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