Living with Rodolfo and Cervantes's "La fuerza de la sangre"

"La fuerza de la sangre," the sixth of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares, is widely recognized as a problematic text. In it, the nobly-born youth Rodolfo abducts, blindfolds, rapes, then completely forgets Leocadia, a lovely sixteen-year-old of the impoverished nobility. Dissimulating the family shame, Leocadia's supportive parents raise the child born of the rape as their nephew, and the narrator consistently represents the boy as a blessing. In the end, the perpetrator and his victim marry, further reproduce, and live happily ever after, to the delight of their four parents and the ongoing consternation of readers.

The story's ending leaves one wondering why Cervantes weds his endearing protagonist to a man who clearly does not deserve her, and why he allows the rapist to reach the novella's end with everything he wants and nothing he deserves. As Ife and Darby protest, "[Rodolfo] is not required to show any remorse for the crime he committed against Leocadia, nor does he volunteer any… No punishment is expected or extracted" (175). Lappin puts it more acutely: "Can one talk of exemplarity and unpunished rape in the same breath?" (148).¹

Indeed, if read literally, "La fuerza de la sangre" could be an apology for rape, evidence of what wondrous things happen to the victim in its wake, for on the surface Leocadia's fortunes ultimately do nothing but rise as a consequence of Rodolfo's having violated her: her honor is restored, aristocrats legitimize her son, she and her family ascend from the poor nobility to the wealthy upper class, supported by in-laws who embrace the young wife and a husband who does as well. Along such lines, González Echevarría contends that the novella endorses "the positive power of evil, incarnated in sexual desire and the acts that it induces" (192).² The narrator's repeated insistence that the heroine and her parents were thankful for the child born of the assault, and Leocadia's final proclamation that it was all worth it ("lo doy por bien empleado," 409), make the entire business very hard to swallow today.³

Ironic readings of the text have made it possible to live with Rodolfo and Cervantes as his creator.⁴ At the same time, an ironic reading—the text says one thing, but means something else—tends to obviate the need for archival research, investigations that can open up spaces for understanding something that is otherwise incomprehensible. Nonetheless, positioning the text inside its own social and literary context makes it possible to reconsider its three main stumbling blocks: Leocadia marries Rodolfo, she falls in love with him and weds him happily, and Cervantes appears to leave the rapist unrepentant and unpunished.⁵

It bears mention that the fictional mode of the tale exacerbates readers' discomfort, for Cervantes wrote "La fuerza de la sangre" dripping with the features of romance, which is to say wish-fulfillment fiction. Those features include heavy doses of symbolism, such as the cross Leocadia takes from Rodolfo's bedroom, loud narrative echoes of the romance vita of St. Leocadia, insertion of the divinity at crucial moments in the plot, and perfect structural symmetry.⁶ He padded the narrative with unusually dense epithets, pre-placed adjectives signaling high expectations, opening with "anciano hidalgo," "deshonesta desenvoltura," "malos gustos" and "crueles entrañas," to cite a few (387; 388; 388; 389). The lexicon droops with the weight of symbolic hyperbole: Rodolfo and his prowling cohorts are wolves, Leocadia's family the sheep; the former are headed down a dark incline whereas the latter are headed up; Rodolfo leaves Toledo three days after raping Leocadia and returns when their son is seven years old, for example. The heroine's exclamations immediately following the rape, stylized, very long, and highly self-conscious, can hardly be called verisimilar, and the happy ending, as robust as it is superficial, closes the case with the resonance of a judge's gavel.

These romance markers, combined with Leocadia's hyper-heroic features, lead readers to surmise that Rodolfo will suffer, in accordance with...