Persephone’s Girdle: Narratives of Rape in Seventeenth-century Spanish Literature by Marcia Welles (review)

Welles, Marcia. Persephone’s Girdle: Narratives of Rape in Seventeenth-century Spanish Literature. Vanderbilt UP, 2000. 272 pp. 5 illus. HB/PB. ISBN 0-8265-1351-4. Persephone’s Girdle reveals Marcia Welles’s profound knowledge, not only of early modern Spanish drama and prose in their social and aesthetic contexts, but also of modern literary theory and principles of cultural anthropology and psychoanalysis. She invites fresh readings both of “old chestnuts” and less canonical works, adroitly crossing disciplinary borders to extend the study diachronically and include a modern account of rape. (The “old chestnuts” also include four previously published essays which have been refurbished). The result is an intelligently conceived dialogue between seventeenth-century Spain and contemporary culture that takes into account historical and cultural differences. In the seventeenth-century (and earlier) texts Welles discusses, rape is explored both as the literal infliction of bodily hurt and as the metaphorical wounding of the social body. Not until the twentieth century is the remaining metaphorical meaning of rape addressed in an exploration of the psychological effects on the victim; unspoken violation is turned inward against the protagonist’s self in Ana María Moix’s novel Julia (177). The author takes five broad approaches to the subject, captured in the book’s chapter headings: (1) “Rape and the Resolution of Class Conflict in Cervantes’s ‘La fuerza de la sangre’”; (2) “Rape and Revolution: The Chaste Lucretia”; (3) “The Gendering of Violence: Women in the Peasant Honor Plays—A Diversionary Tactic”; (4) “Text and Transformation: Mythology and Bible as Source”; (5) “A Contemporary Rape Narrative: Julia—The Prison House of Silence.” The study considers the various narrative functions of sexual violence, viewing it as a prelude to revolution (Lope’s Fuente Ovejuna, Rojas Zorrilla’s Lucrecia y Tarquino); as a corollary to war (Calderón’s El alcalde de Zalamea); as a privilege of class (Cervantes’ “La fuerza de la sangre,” Lope’s Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña). Although order is reestablished after the uprising, these texts portray a dangerous crisis of authority. In Lope’s El príncipe despeñado, the king is not only a wrongful usurper of the throne but also a rapist, thereby mitigating the political impact of tyrannicide at the hands of the afflicted husband (36-37). Welles’s study also addresses the distortion that occurs in the translation of disparate source materials in response to the exigencies REVIEWS CALÍOPE Vol. 8, No. 2 (2002): pages 99-118 100 Reviews D of time-worn honor. The sources may be biblical (e.g., Tirso’s La venganza de Tamar, Calderón’s Los cabellos de Absalón); mythological (e.g., Rojas Zorrilla’s and Guillén de Castro’s Procne and Philomela; Calderón’s El pintor de su deshonra, in which Deianeira’s rape by the Centaur Nessus constitutes the chosen subject); or historical (e.g, Rojas Zorrilla’s Lucrecia y Tarquino). Shaped and limited by what is aptly dubbed “the fetishism of honor,” these narratives are “uniformly deprived of their original force and ambiguity”(37), but not without providing insight into the social construct of seventeenth-century Spain beset by the unspoken obsessions of personal revenge. Noteworthy is the way Welles succeeds in elucidating the earlier texts by drawing on pertinent material from other periods and cultures. She invokes, for example, Jane Campion’s film, The Piano (1993), to illustrate how the main character, from her position of seeming powerlessness as a mute female, triggers the male rivalry that leads to violence (78-79). In this instance, husband and lover do not harm one another; it is she who is doubly mutilated because her husband hacks off one of her fingers with an ax, thereby suppressing her only means of expression as a gifted musician. For Welles, the protagonist’s symbolic castration is emblematic of the fate of speaking women in comedia. Persephone’s Girdle is fraught with such synchronistic connections and allusions that expand the reader’s approach to the drama of early modern Spain and help to render their authors “our contemporaries.” The individual chapters, along with the Notes and Bibliography, provide a gold mine of references that...