Feminism and the Honor Plays of Lope de Vega

Chapter Five Rivalry and the Struggle for Dominance

Chapter Five Rivalry and the Struggle for Dominance The transaction ofpower between the rival and the husband in the erotic triangle is channeled through the machinery of cuckoldry.As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes, " 'to cuckold' is by definition a sexual act, performed on a man, by another man" (49). In this sense, men's heterosexual relationships in Lope's honor plays function chiefly as strategies of male homosocial desire, tracing the paths by which men may attempt to arrive at satisfying relationships with other men through the bodies of women. In Sedgwick's term male homosocial desire, the word desire does not designate an emotion so much as a structure, analogous to the psychoanalytic use of "libido"-[not] a particular affective state or emotion, but ... the affective or social force, the glue, even when its manifestation is hostility or hatred or something less emotively charged, that shapes an important relationship. (Sedgwick 2) The bond ofcuckoldry differs from other social conformations, such as those mutual ones cemented through marriage or forged between husband and male authority figure at the end of some honor plays.1 It is necessarily hierarchical in structure, involving an active participant in ascendancy over a passive one. Often, the deciding factor in the struggle between husband and rival is cognitive supremacy-who knows more than whom. The rival's cuckolding of the husband entails a dimension of superior awareness ("he doesn't know I'm cuckolding him") that at times cedes to the husband's recuperation of mastery ("he doesn't know I know he's cuckolding me").2 The bond signaled by cuckoldry, then, involves an asymmetrical relation 125 Chapter Five of cognitive transcendence, of dominance and subordination (Sedgwick 66). The rival and the husband occupy opposing but complementary positions in the system ofmale traffic in women. The rival demonstrates his predatory ability to use other men's sexual property, to cuckold, affrrming women's exchange value in circulation . The husband demonstrates his ability to maintain his control over his sexual property, to not be cuckolded, withdrawing a woman as use value from collective to private ownership. In both cases, the ultimate goal is to establish a relationship of superiority over another man. The difficulties attending this process constitute the representation of a crisis of masculinity. The rival understands that women have value only in circulation , a position which is not free ofdangers for the male subject exclusively attached to this understanding. The husband finds himself in the precarious position of attempting to fix his wife's value in herself and keep it for his private use. As Sedgwick phrases it, like dealers in gold and silver who claim that the value of cash is merely assigned by economists while the value of precious metals is inalienable, [he] imagines that he can pick. one element out of the larger stream of exchange and stamp it forever with the value that is really lent to it only by its position in that stream. (54) The increasingly violent extremes to which the husband is driven relate to the difficulty of establishing a stable, private relationship with a woman in the context of transactive circulation . His terror of male encroachment is often directly related to his own experience of the flow of women as exchangeable property among men, either before or after marriage. To be a "man," to consolidate bonds with authoritative males through heterosexual desire, requires the instrumental use of women. Yet both rival and husband run the risk of jeopardizing their position as subject in the relationship of exchange, of being feminized or objectified in relation to other men, by their denial of one of the terms of women's status within the phallic economy. As Sedgwick points out, any attempt to stabilize the systems of symbolic exchange in terms of either private or collective ownership, either the 126 Rivalry and the Struggle for Dominance materiality or the transparency of the objects exchanged, either the heterosexual or the homosocial' aim of desire, brfugs the countervailing, denied term into play. (54) The rival's claims of collective ownership are usually overridden in the affirmation of the husband's right of private ownership , while the husband's murder of his wife both spoils the value of the object and proclaims her public, circulable character . Only the man who is not excessively fixated on either of the terms of the schism in women's status will be successful...