Daughter of Night, Daughter of Light: The Imagery of Finea's Transformation in La dama boba

DAUGHTER OF NIGHT, DAUGHTER OF LIGHT: THE IMAGERY OF FINEA'S TRANSFORMATION IN LA DAMA BOBA RONALD E. SURTZ Princeton University Previous critical evaluations of Lope de Vega's La dama boba have singled out several aspects of the play's imagery. Bruce W. Wardropper studies the use of mirror images, Donald Larson discusses the image of the chess game, Robert ter Horst analyzes food and profit motifs, and Aurora Egido traces the notion of love as teacher. ' In this paper I discuss a series of images that is specifically associated with Finea as her transformation from boberia to love is paralleled by a transition from nocturnal to solar imagery. During Finea's first appearance in the play, her tutor Rufino twice calls her a bestia, for her boberia is such that her rational faculties have remained at a subhuman, animal level/ Shortly afterwards, Finea's animal-like nature is again suggested through her association with a cat. Clara, Finea's maid and companion in boberia, enters to announce that their cat has just given birth to six kittens. Appropriately cast in the form of a romance, the narration begins with an evocation of dawn in Madrid in which Lope refers to the excrement dumped on the city streets during the night. The scatological reference is playfully related to a series of Carnival images (Carnestolendas, naranjas, gritos): Salía, por donde suele, el Sol, muy galán y rico, con la librea del rey, colorado y amarillo; andaban los carretones quitándole el romadizo que da la noche a Madrid, aunque no sé quién me dijo que era la calle Mayor el soldado más antiguo, pues nunca el mayor de Flandes 161 162Bulletin ofthe Comediantes presentó tantos servicios; pregonaban aguardiente, agua biznieta del vino, los hombres Carnestolendas, todos naranjas y gritos, (w. 413-428) The romance introduces a set of related images that Lope will employ throughout the play. The cat is, of course, a nocturnal creature, whose immediate association with Finea recalls her bestial nature. Her intellect is figuratively submerged in the darkness of night. 3 But the cat that gives birth at dawn and the light of the rising sun prefigure Finea's future mental enlightenment through the power of love. She will eventually assume her place in society as wife and mother and in turn give birth to her own children. This process is what Donald Larson, following Suzanne Langer, has called the comic pattern of life renewing itself. ' The scatological reference in the romance is thus not fortuitous. Excrement, as Mikhail Bahtin has shown in the case of Rabelais, is often symbolically associated with birth, fertility, and renewal/ The scatological image, although not echoed elsewhere in the play, nonetheless serves to underscore the essential comic pattern of the forward movement of life in an eternal cycle of death and rebirth. The notion of giving birth is echoed in several other passages in the play. When Otavio, Finea's father, and his friend Miseno comment upon the extremes oí discreción and boberia that Nise and Finea incarnate, frequent childbirth is one of the elements in the portrait of the «perfecta casada» that they create (vv. 221-224 and vv. 2135-2137). And in effect, as the play ends, the approaching marriage of Finea and Laurencio promises to produce the offspring desired by the older generation and prefigured by the birth of the kittens in Act I. Birth is connected with the notion of deception in Act III when Finea tells Laurencio that dissimulation is a quality inherent in the female sex: Cuando estamos en el vientre de nuestras madres, hacemos entender a nuestros padres, para engañar sus deseos, que somos hijos varones; y así verás que, contentos, acuden a sus antojos con amores, con requiebros, y esperando el mayorazgo tras tantos regalos hechos, sale una hembra que corta la esperanza del suceso. Según esto, si pensaron Surtz163 que era varón, y hembra vieron, antes de nacer fingimos, (vv. 2499-2513) The anecdote about something turning out quite different from what it seemed to promise is an obvious parallel to Finea's unexpected transformation through the power of love. In her...