An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain

3. Lesbianism as Dream and Myth

79 CHAPTER THREE Lesbianism as Dream and Myth Oh, what will be the end of me, whom a love possesses that no one ever heard of, a strange and monstrous love? Ovid, Metamorphoses In The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (2002), Valerie Traub argues that in English history women’s homoerotic desire seems to have fallen into a great vacuum of silence and invisibility. It is not simply that female subordination was aggravated by the confinement of women to nonliterary spaces, as current criticism continues to argue. The answer lies in the gaps of literary history and the gaps of the history of sexuality, which are gradually being filled in recent years with the empirical findings noted throughout this book. Although the historical void that Traub mentions has been narrowed by Terry Castle ’s 2003 anthology, The Literature of Lesbianism, early modern Spain and its literature continue to be excluded from such compilations.1 In Spain, although the depiction of female homoeroticism is much rarer and quite different from the highly critical images of male homosexuality discussed in Chapter Two, it is by no means invisible and it is often clearly sensual. Nonetheless, it would seem that lesbian sexual preferences in early modern Spain, as in England, “were considered improbable, impossible, implausible, insignificant. . . . On the other hand, such desires were culturally practiced and represented in a variety of ways, although often according to a governing logic that attempted to reinscribe their impossibility” (Traub 2002, 6). This is certainly true 80 An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain of Golden Age Spanish texts, which exploited the titillation of femalefemale desire while at the same time disavowing it as impossible. It is useful, therefore, to review the historical context of lesbian sexuality in early modern society. The term lesbian, like the term homo­ sexuality, was not commonly used until the nineteenth century, and even then it tended to designate certain acts rather than a distinct sexual identity and social group. It appears that sixteenth-century European men found it difficult to accept the notion that women could be sensually attracted to other women, since the prevailing phallocentric view of human sexuality made it doubtful that a woman could sustain the sexual desires of another. Because of this, in law, medicine, and the public mind, sexual relations between women, although acknowledged, were in general ignored (Brown 1986, 6). As the most hushed aspect of the silent sin, or peccatum mutum, female homosexuality was virtually imperceptible, although not to the extent previously thought.2 Erotic intimacy between women was certainly not unknown during the time of the writers discussed in this chapter; however, transgressors were not allowed to indulge their desires freely. For example, in his Relación de la cárcel de Sevilla (1983), written during the last years of the sixteenth century, Cristóbal de Chaves states that “many women” engaged in sexual relations with each other in the royal prison in Seville.3 In effect, although female sodomy was recognized as a crime against nature by Gregorio López in his gloss to Las siete partidas (Crompton 1980–8, 18–19; see also Las siete partidas [Sanponts y Barba, Martí de Eixalá, and Ferrer y Subirana 1843–44, 4:330–31]), very few of the hundreds, if not thousands, of cases of sodomy prosecuted by civil and ecclesiastical courts in early modern Europe involved women. Moreover, at least when they did not use an instrument for vaginal penetration, women accused of sodomy generally received lighter sentences than burning at the stake (the usual punishment for men).4 However, Thomas Laqueur discusses the condemnation of the tribade , the woman who performed the “man’s role” in lesbian relations, as the partner who was perceived as a threat to the social order, since she played out, literally embodied, “radical, culturally unacceptable reversals of power and prestige” (1990, 53). Traub explores the fact that in the early modern period the clitoris and the tribade were given their first sustained articulation as objects of anatomical inquiry, leading to Lesbianism as Dream and Myth 81 their inevitable linking in cultural history (2002, 190). In the early seventeenth century, in her Razón y forma de la Galera y Casa Real (1608), the women’s prison administrator Magdalena de San Jerónimo strove to establish a penitentiary regimen that equaled women with men in terms of the imposition of punishments and the method...