Feminisms and the Honor Plays of Lope de Vega by Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano (review)

290Comparative Drama (1963) to put on screen many of these concerns and Pirandello's innovative ideas for handling the concerns cinematically. JEROME MAZZARO State University of New York at Buffalo Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano. Feminisms and the Honor Plays of Lope de Vega. Purdue Studies in Romance Languages, 4. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1994. Pp. xi + 324. $39.95. In writing Feminism and the Honor Plays ofLope de Vega, YvonneYarbro -Bejarano has faced two formidable challenges: (1) the vast scope of Lope's dramatic output, which has discouraged most critics from undertaking generalized studies of his work; and (2) the patently patriarchal nature of Golden Age drama, that makes feminist criticism run the risk of illustrating the obvious. Yarbro has overcome them both. She has read an impressive number of Lope plays, most of them rarely read by other critics, and thus she enriches our knowledge of his work in breadth as well as depth of focus. And she brings to bear on this corpus a full range of poststructural theory—feminist and gender criticism , psychoanalytic theory, film criticism, and cultural studies from Foucault to Henry Louis Gates and Homi Bhabba. Yarbro examines the manner in which the unequal power relations in early modern Spain are reflected in the portrayal of gender in Golden Age theater. Although similarly deprecatory and restrictive molds for women prevailed elsewhere, she argues that the experience of the Reconquest , the rise of absolute monarchy, and the struggle for national unity exaggerated in Spain the equation of autonomous subjectivity with an aggressive, predatory, and competitive masculinity. This Spanish construction of masculine subjectivity entailed the separation and rejection of the feminine as the radical Other on whose containment depended male "honor." The result, as figured in the honor plays, was a system of homosocial rivalry (and solidarity) operated through private ownership and exchange of women. She details accurately the generally pejorative but sometimes contradictory construction of the feminine, the outlawing of all active female desire, and the idealization of the passive, chaste, enclosed woman who would prefer disfigurement or death to loss of (her husband's) honor to a rival who desires her. Particularly persuasive is Yarbro's explanation of the ambiguity of the apparent feminine active subjectivity, as female characters use deceit and disguise , including cross-dressing, to attain their ends or preserve honor when the male protagonists are paralyzed by conflicting pressures of honor and loyalty to the king or another dominant male. As she points out, such female activity is tolerated provisionally as long as it is expended in the ultimate service of the male subject, not in the fulfillment Reviews291 of active feminine desire. Yet after examining the multiple deceptions generated by women who take on active, public roles through crossdressing , she concludes that even when women's aspirations are finally contained and signed by the Name-of-the Father at the play's conclusion , residual traces of difference remain, of female energies released and not quite fully reabsorbed within the order of the "phallocentric Same." In her fifth chapter, entitled "Rivalry and the Struggle for Dominance ," Yabro paints the system of desire operant between the rival and husband whom he would cuckold, reducing him to a passive, feminized position. She demonstrates that the rival and the husband occupy opposing but complementary positions in the traffic in women as exponents of collective versus private ownership. The rival knows that women only have exchange value in circulation, while the husband attempts to withdraw one woman from that exchange, to fix her value in herself and keep her for his exclusive use. "In both cases," she says, "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" (p. 126). In establishing cognitive transcendence within the dynamics of male homosocial rivalry, sight plays a crucial symbolic role as the primary mode of access to reality, and the movement of the plot is often one from blindness to recovered vision. Yarbro-Bejarano deliberately avoids the "masterpieces" approach to the comedia; by using a large pool of texts (p. 46), she seeks to convey a sense of this drama as a...