Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain (review)

In Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain, Georgina Dopico Black examines anxieties about the significance of bodies in early modern in Spain and America. She argues that wives' bodies had a fundamental instability as signifiers: that is, that wives' bodies were the focus of intense surveillance because it was so difficult to read women's status as "perfect" or "imperfect" wives from surface appearances. To demonstrate this, Black makes use of three texts: Fray Luis de León's La perfecta casada, Pedro Calderón de la Barca's El médico de su honor, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's Los empeños de una casa. Each of these works benefits individually from Black's critical reading. Yet the real brilliance of this book comes from the comparative analysis that Black provides, which demonstrates that ideas about wives' bodies were inextricably linked to cultural constructions of Self and Other, to current political concerns, and even to contemporary theological debates about the surface appearance and essence of the Eucharistic wafer (the body of Christ and Tridentine refinements of transubstantiation). This is a significant book, lucidly written, and one which will be of use to scholars in literature, history, gender studies, and cultural studies, as well as to advanced undergraduates.

The first chapter presents Black's argument that there was an uneasy relationship between the categories "woman" and "wife," and that anxieties regarding the wife's body paralleled anxieties regarding bodies of cultural Others. These parallel anxieties, she argues, involve a "triple displacement" (p. 7). First, the threats posed by the excesses of wives' bodies coincide with the concern about the illegibility, or impossibility, of knowing a body or text in itself. This concern, reflected in both Luis de León's conduct manual for women and Calderón's honor-vengeance tragedy, also mirrors contemporary debates regarding the status of the Eucharist as a sign. Second, anxieties about a disjunction between surface appearances and deeper realities in the period's cultural Others—converted Jews and Muslims—could be displaced back to women's bodies, and in particular the difficulty of "reading" adultery on wives' bodies. Third, Black notes a certain fluidity between the wife's body and the body of the converso or morisco, an instability "that renders explicit the pervasive and provocative intersection . . . of the discourses of race and gender" (p. 7).

The remaining chapters successively analyze the author's three chosen texts. Chapter 2 argues for the continuity between La perfecta casada and Luis de León's other works, both in their methods of reading scripture and in the suggestive reflection of the author's own experiences in La perfecta casada. For Black, the fundamental illegibility of wives' bodies that seems to trouble de León is parallel to the difficulties of legibility in the inquisitorial setting, such as he personally experienced during his years of investigation by the Holy Office. Chapter 3 deals with Calderón de la Barca's El médico de su honor, reinforcing the parallel challenges of reading wives' bodies in honor-vengeance plays, and reading witnesses undergoing inquisition. The chapter further demonstrates the displacement between the Otherness of the adultress and the Otherness of the non-Christian. Finally, chapter 4 incorporates a New World woman's perspective (albeit a highly individual one) through an analysis of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's Los empeños de una casa. Black argues that Sor Juana's emphasis on the constructedness of wives' bodies, particularly through the transvestite character Castaño, is highly resonant of the instability of the wife's body as signifier in the early modern Hispanic world.