Subtle Subversions: Reading Golden Age Sonnets by Iberian Women

5. Women’s Love Sonnets

C H A P T E R 5 W O M E N ’ S L O V E S O N N E T S women Who ComPoSed love PoetRy stepped into a masculine field, bound by tradition, where the female was the silent and idealized object of unrealized love, merely a rhetorical exercise carried forward from the courtly love mode. when Malón de Chaide discusses the ideal of a love that must be given freely, he is not talking of love in the modern, post-Romantic sense.1 He describes that neoplatonic ideal, a chimera of female excellence, where a woman’s perceived lack of intellect, coupled with her physical beauty, provides her with spiritual gifts above those of man, enabling her to rise above the masculine norm and communicate with the angels (I. Maclean 24). According to Malón de Chaide, the lovers’ souls are united both in human terms and in the divine: “[E]l amor llamase potencia unitiva, que une al amante con el amado, sacándole de sí y llevándole a lo que ama y allí lo transforma y hace uno con él ..... síguese que el amado es señor de todo el amante, y el amante se transforma en el amado” (69; Love may be called a unitive power that joins the lover with the beloved, taking him out of himself and carrying him to that which he loves and there transforming it and making it one with him ..... it follows that the beloved is entirely the 194 E 1. Malón de Chaide (1530–1589) was an Augustinian mystic, a brilliant author, preacher and writer. A student of Luis de León, his most famous work is La conversión de la Magdalena, published in Barcelona in 1588. master of the lover and that the lover is transformed into the beloved). In this he differs from other Renaissance theorists of divine love, such as St. Francis de Sales, for whom the comparison of divine and human love is simply a simile. writing of Castiglione’s influential Book of the Courtier, Joan Kelly notes Castiglione’s likening of the beloved lady to the prince, in his theory of neoplatonic love. However, she also notes that in a structured hierarchy of superior and inferior, though the lady appears to be served by the courtier, the theory causes her to become symbolic of the reversal of domination, wherein the prince comes to serve the interests of the courtier. The Renaissance lady “is not desired, nor loved for herself. Rendered passive and chaste, she merely mediates the courtier’s safe transcendence of an otherwise demeaning necessity” (195). As with the Renaissance lady, so too with the dama of the Baroque, where women served as the bartering tool for socially desirable marriages and to smooth the path of patronage. In addition, and bound up with the Counter-Reformation, is the change from the freer troubadour tradition to more repressive attitudes toward women, their education, and their relationship to men. Michel Foucault locates a change in European attitudes to sexuality in the seventeenth century, when sexuality became more repressed, bound to language , and subjugated in a discourse that defined and delimited sexual practices (17). Cruz, however, discovers this repression in Spain a full century earlier, due to “the supposed threat of miscegenation posed by the country’s ethnic and religious minorities” (“Juana” 89). These social and ideological changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries robbed Hispanic women of a poetic voice that had sung of love in the kharjas of Al Andalus, if only to an internal public of other women (Bergmann and Middlebrook 146). Furthermore, Ana navaro observes that the reduced margin of freedom afforded by the limits of women’s education deprived them of the free expression of emotion, while inflexible literary models robbed their literary expression of spontaneity. This latter assertion is perhaps too sweeping in light of recent scholarship and of the poetry discussed in this book. However, as navaro also observes, “es difícil encontrar entre las poetisas de la Edad de oro manifestaciones de la intimidad emocional como la expresaron las musulmanas de la Edad Media” (51; It W o m e n’S l o v e S o n n e t S 195 is difficult to find among the women poets of the Golden Age manifestations of the emotional intimacy expressed by the Muslim women...