Black Faces, White Hands: La celosa de sí misma and the Negotiation of Race

Tirso de Molina's La celosa de sí misma (c. 1620–21) is in many ways a perplexing text.¹ It requires all of the playwright's dazzling ingenuity to sustain a plot that depends on a woman being jealous of herself, while her suitor fails to recognize her in various guises, over the course of three action-packed jornadas. Although the title focuses on the paradox of Magdalena's feelings as she realizes that Melchor loves her only when she is unknown to him or deliberately disguised, the play is arguably as much about Melchor's inability to see what is right in front of him. This essay explores the metaphorics of vision and transparency in Celosa, to argue that it is a text obsessed with the legibility of identity and deeply ambivalent in the face of an expanded and increasingly mixed world.² The play's concern is not primarily with ferreting out the racialized religious difference of Moriscos and conversos, as in Cervantes's famous Retablo de las maravillas or Lope's La villana de Getafe. Rather, it is with race itself—blackness, or the threat of mestizaje—as a taint that haunts Madrid and that the city dangerously dissimulates. This essay reads Celosa in a transatlantic context, to suggest that its perplexing refusals to see make most sense when considered in relation to the complex dynamics of interracial unions, in the New World and on the Peninsula, by the early seventeenth century. While Tirso's connection to the Americas has been abundantly explored in relation to his Pizarro trilogy, my reading of Celosa suggests a broader trace in his work of the Mercedarian's time in Santo Domingo and, concomitantly, a more central place for New World concerns in the comedia.

Marriage à la Madrid

The play opens as Melchor and his friend Ventura arrive in Madrid from León so that the former can carry out his arranged marriage to Magdalena, the daughter of a rich perulero recently returned from the New World. We are thus in medias of a geographical and historical progression, from a Gothic northern Spain associated with medieval reconquista to a cosmopolitan Madrid at the heart of a transatlantic empire. The symbolic force of the union seems clear: Melchor is to enter a new economic order, in which New World wealth determines the course of affairs.³ As Quevedo bitingly puts it in his "Don Dinero":

Nace en las Indias honradodonde el mundo le acompaña;viene a morir en Españay es en Génova enterrado;y pues quien le trae al ladoes hermoso aunque sea fiero,poderoso caballeroes don Dinero.⁴

(674)

In Tirso's play, the gender dynamics are inverted: instead of the perulero's money serving to arrange his own union to an aristocratic lady, it purchases an acceptable husband for his daughter. As Jerónimo, Magdalena's brother, explains:

Tengo un padre perulero,que de gobiernos cansado,treguas ofrece al cuidado,y empleos a su dinero.Ciento y cincuenta mil pesostrae aquí con que casaruna hija, en quien lograrintereses y sucesosque en Indias le hicieron rico.⁵

(185–193)

Melchor's emasculation in this transaction—he is clearly the one being bought—may account for some of his apprehension vis-à-vis Magdalena, but cannot fully explain it. At his most intransigent, Melchor vows he will not marry her "si despojara a Potosí de sus pesos" (2781–2782). The question is why he resists her so staunchly; the answer, I propose, lies in Melchor's suspicion of whom exactly he is to marry, and what her association with the New World might signify.

Magdalena's father's identity as a perulero or indiano—terms used interchangeably for returnees from the Viceroyalty of Peru and the New World more generally—invites this suspicion. As George Mariscal has noted: "although the majority of real indianos were native-born Spaniards, aristocratic writers would consistently represent them as 'ethnically other' on the basis of somatic features, linguistic practices, and non-traditional styles...