Discourses of Empire: Counter-Epic Literature in Early Modern Spain

3 Liminal Identity and Polyphonic Ideology in Indiano Drama

I would like to thank participants in the AHCT listserve who suggested relevant indiano plays, especially Charles Ganelin, Bob Blue, Alix Ingber, and Valerie Hegstrom. 1. See also my earlier studies of indiano drama, “The Indiano as Liminal Figure in the Drama of Tirso and His Contemporaries,” Bulletin of the Comediantes 47, no. 2 (1995), and “The Indiano Senex as Subaltern Figure in Tirso’s Marta la piadosa and Por el sótano y el torno,” Romance Language Annual 11 (1999). This chapter recontextualizes and expands significantly upon the ideas offered in those two articles. Liminal Identity and Polyphonic Ideology in INDIANO Drama The celebration (or condemnation) of the quincentennial anniversary of the first European encounter with America gave rise to a reconsideration of Columbus’s legacy and a much-needed examination of the comedia’s representation of the New World and its inhabitants. This examination, however , tended to focus on the Spanish presence in the Americas and on the peoples encountered there. Comparatively little critical attention has been granted to the effects of the colonial enterprise as mediated in peninsular Spanish cultural productions, even though a significant number of Golden Age dramas feature an indiano character who plays a crucial role in the dénouement of the action that takes place in Spain.1 In his study of the role of this character in Tirsian drama, Alfonso Urtiaga distinguishes between indianos, who were born in Spain, spent time in the Americas, and then returned to Spain to seek a position in court society, and criollos, who were born in 39 3 Mexico or Peru. In the plays themselves, though, the epithet indiano is used to refer to both groups of people, and this chapter follows their lead, for it is not the birthplace of the characters but their acquisition of wealth in the New World that marks them as Other. An important factor noted by George Mariscal is the typically “nonaristocratic” social category from which the indiano emerged.2 Edith Villarino writes that more than thirty Siglo de Oro dramas portray indiano figures. This chapter limits its focus to two representative and easily accessible works by Lope de Vega—El sembrar en buena tierra (Cultivating in Good Soil) and El premio del bien hablar (Rewarded for Courtesy)—and four by Tirso de Molina. The Tirsian works are La villana de Vallecas (The Provincial Woman from Vallecas), La celosa de sí misma (Her Own Rival), Marta la piadosa (Pious Marta), and Por el sótano y el torno (Through Nooks and Crannies). All six feature an indiano protagonist who seeks to marry a peninsular Spaniard as part of the process of being accepted into court society. Early modern Spanish plays that foreground indiano characters as protagonists can be viewed as counter-epic texts, even though they neither directly address or represent imperialist military activity nor serve as reinscriptions of classical epic plots and stylistics. Instead, they offer insights into an alternative subgenre through which the early modern stage mediated the Spanish colonial enterprise. Indiano drama addresses the issue of empire through its representation of colonialization’s consequences for the early modern Spanish “metropolis.” Many of the debates concerning imperial ideology and practice waged in the sixteenth century focused upon issues that are directly relevant to the real-life indiano, including doubts about the morality of Spanish appropriations of indigenous minerals and labor (as voiced by Las Casas, Soto, Vitoria, and others) and pragmatic considerations of the relative benefits and drawbacks associated with obtaining , ruling, and defending an extensive empire, expressed most strongly by Vázquez de Menchaca. This examination of dramatic representations of the dynamics between peninsular metropolis and American colony is grounded in the insights offered by Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. Said’s study addresses the overlooked significance of the colonial issues present in nineteenthand twentieth-century European texts whose plots do not directly take up imperialist expansion. His readings of the novels of Kipling, Austen, Sartre, Discourses of Empire 40 2. George Mariscal, “Can Cultural Studies Speak Spanish?” in English Studies/Culture Studies: Institutionalizing Dissent, ed. Isaiah Smithson and Nancy Ruff (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 69. and others point out the way the colonial experience—and contact with the “native”—marks the modern European experience and its cultural productions . In both Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, Said argues that colonial discourse is not a neutral description of observed phenomena; instead, it creates...