Don Quixote’s Ana Félix: The Virile Morisca Maiden and the Crisis of Imperial Masculinity

As D. Quixote and other characters are being entertained in a galley leaving the port of Barcelona, they receive news that an Algerian corsair brigantine has been spotted nearby. A chase follows, two Spanish sailors are shot dead from the enemy vessel, and finally the brigantine is subdued. As the captain of the Spanish galley wants to punish the one responsible for the death of his two men he asks the crew who the leader of their expedition is. To this question a man answers: “Este mancebo, señor, que aquí veis es nuestro arráez,” and the narrator continues: “Y mostróle uno de los más bellos y gallardos mozos que pudiera pintar la humana imaginación” (525). A moment later, the Viceroy of Catalonia, who had just boarded the galley, takes charge of the examination as follows:

–Dime, arráez, ¿eres turco de nación o moro o renegado?

A lo cual el mozo respondió, en lengua asimesmo castellana:

–Ni soy turco de nación, ni moro, ni renegado.

–Pues ¿qué eres? – replicó el virrey.

–Mujer cristiana – respondió el mancebo.

(526)

This was Ana Félix, who appears first as an enigma, a hieroglyph, a puzzle to be deciphered by the other characters as well as by the reader, whose horizon of expectation is left in suspense, as is manifested by the Viceroy’s question “¿qué eres?” (526). Her passing for a male Turk next to her confession of being “mujer cristiana” challenges interpretation. The baffling quality of what she first confesses sanctions her power to voice her own narrative, which in the viceroy’s words, echoing an expected reader reaction, “más es cosa para admirarla que para creerla” (526). From that moment she attempts to control her own story and to offer her own interpretation of herself as she exposes her male appearance and virile performance to defend her innocence before a court that has already sentenced her both as the killer of the Spanish sailors and as a Muslim.

Before this surprise entrance, the reader had been made aware of the existence of Ana Félix a few chapters earlier when Sancho, returning from his dissatisfying adventure as governor of the fictional Isle of Barataria, ran into an old friend, Ricote, a former neighbor of his and a Morisco. He had left Spain when the first rumors about the expulsion decree started to circulate in order to find a safe haven for his family in northern Europe. He was now returned, camouflaged amidst a group of German pilgrims, in order to recoup the treasure he left hidden in his lands before the expulsion. In his conversation with Sancho, Ricote asked whatever happened to his wife and daughter. To what Sancho responded with the account of how he witnessed Ricote’s family abandoning their town for the north of Africa, and how the town’s folk were extremely distressed by their leaving, especially the male heir of an important Old-Christian local family, Don Pedro Gregorio, who was rumored to be in love with Ricote’s daughter. When the reader encounters the Morisco girl nine chapters later in Barcelona, dressed as a Turkish male and commanding a Turkish galley, the problems associated to the expulsion of the Moricos are brought again to the forefront as she tells her story and how her suitor Don Gregorio remains captive in Africa dressed, for his safety, in women’s clothes.

The episode begs the following questions: What is the meaning of the insistence on the virile construction of the character of the Moorish girl and the feminization of the Old-Christian youth? Is the Morisco woman the agent that weakens the Spanish male as D. Gregorio became “perdido” (527) for her allure? (After all, it was her beauty what led Don Gregorio to a precarious position dressed as a woman and in danger of being sodomized, as Ana’s account implies). Is Ana at all a queer and/or a queering presence as cross dresser (of herself and others) and as an Oriental...