An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain

4. Wild Women and Warrior Maidens

114 CHAPTER FOUR Wild Women and Warrior Maidens Los hombres que han sido afeminados, han sido torpísimo vituperio en el mundo. Las mujeres que han sido varoniles, siempre fueron milagrosa aclamación de los siglos. Francisco de Quevedo, Marco Bruto [Effeminate men have been reviled as an obscenity in the world. Throughout the centuries, manly women were always acclaimed as a miracle.] Evidently, religious, societal, and even aesthetic injunctions have done little to prevent non-normative sexual representations from seeping into the fiber of early modern Spanish culture. In current times, with transnational , transhistorical, transgendered, and transideological figures and themes being eagerly pursued, tales of young women who disguise themselves as men to seek independence from institutions or individuals , to go to war, to uphold family honor or to redress their own honor, to seek adventure, or to otherwise attain the freedom normally associated with the male sex are intensely appealing. Indeed, the motif of the transvestite warrior maiden or female fighter has not only a particular and lively intertextual relevance across centuries and national traditions but also tremendous popular interest, as the commercial success of films such as China’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon attest. As cross-dressed women who successfully pass as men, warrior maidens were (especially in the early modern period, with its fixed gen- Wild Women and Warrior Maidens 115 der expectations and norms) and are both sexually transgressive and often potently erotic to both sexes. In other cases, especially on the early modern stage, the adoption of male dress as a symbolic means of assuming masculine identity and identifying with the male value system serves paradoxically to intensify female beauty. This chapter explores the literature and the myth of the female fighter, focusing on several legendary figures: the doncella guerrera [warrior maiden] celebrated in European balladry; Catalina de Erauso, known as the lieutenant nun and a real-life adventuress in the New World; and several literary incarnations of the serrana [wild mountain girl]. All these women can be viewed as linchpins in a historical and thematic continuum that traverses fantasy, popular legend, song, and folklore: the genre-blurring mixture of fact and fable, history and fiction, lyric and drama, Spain and the Americas. The Warrior Maiden in Iberian Balladry The popular songs of the doncella guerrera, or warrior maiden, received consistent critical attention in William J. Entwistle’s foundational study European Balladry (1939). Classical scholars such as Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (1900), Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1968), Américo Castro (1924), and Francisco López Estrada (1985) have also written about the doncella guerrera, and Stith Thompson (1989) provides a plethora of connections from the folk tradition.1 This scholarly interest is prima facie evidence of the great popularity of the ballad of the doncella gue­ rrera—one manifestation of the mujer vestida de hombre [cross-dressed woman] so ubiquitous in Golden Age literature—in European and other folklore from at least the sixteenth-century forward. Many hundreds of versions have been found not only throughout all regions of Spain (including Castile, the Canary Islands, León, Aragón, Galicia, and Catalonia), Spanish America, Portugal, the Azores, and Brazil but also in practically all Sephardic communities, including those in Morocco , Bosnia and the Balkans, Hungary, Greece, Asia Minor, and Palestine .2 The breadth of the geographic area encompassed makes it difficult to establish origins and even more difficult to date the ballad (Delpech 1986, 58). It is for these reasons, in part, that the songs and tales of the doncella guerrera appear as a crossroads of subjectivities, themes, topics, and traditions—sometimes as high literature and sometimes 116 An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain folkloric, typically of rural provenance—that were concentrated around the Mediterranean basin at least as early as the end of the Middle Ages (Delpech 1986, 61). Although the ballad was known as early as the sixteenth century, it was not printed until the nineteenth century.3 Why, then, is it of interest to us today? One reason is that the doncella guerrera family of ballads, in spite of its widespread provenance, exhibits an underlying pattern or structure that functions formulaically and thus establishes fairly permanent cultural bridges. The ballad is a type whose hundreds of variants function as permutations of a recognizable tradition (see Dugaw 1989). In its most typical form the romance and Sephardic versions of the doncella guerrera ballad sing the tale of...