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2 3 Empire Unmanned: Gender Trouble and Genoese Gold in “Las dos doncellas” Much like the Ana Félix episode in Don Quijote, the novella “Las dos doncellas ” provides a powerful example of an apparently conventional romance narrative that disguises its engagement with political and social controversies under the cloak of transvestism. The plot features two young women who set off on the treacherous path of the cross-dressed romance heroine to follow the same truant lover. The ostensible conceit—beautiful wronged maidens passing as young men—is revealed in the very title of the narrative, a red herring that suggests a tale of tame gender transgressions in the service of a marriage plot.1 As if the giveaway title were not enough, Cervantes immediately teases us with the description of a mysterious lone traveler urgently undoing the buttons of “his” tight doublet—“desabrochándose muy apriesa los botones del pecho”—and then quickly doing them up again.2 This introduction to the young caminante (walker), with its suggestive emphasis on the ambiguous chest/breast, conspicuously exhibits her imperfectly disguised body and announces the central role of voyeurism in the narrative. Beyond the requirements of an opening in medias res, the excess of information at the start— which pre-empts a satisfying anagnorisis when the true gender of the two travelers is disclosed—suggests that there may be more going on here than simple romance cross-dressing. After all, if the point of the story were to tantalize , why not entitle it “Los dos viajeros” (The two travelers) or “Los casamientos engañosos” (The deceitful marriages)? I argue below for a symptomatic reading of the more profoundly disturbing transgressions that underlie the two damsels’ transvestite quest. “Las dos Empire Unmanned 47 doncellas,” I suggest, mounts a romance critique of epic ambitions, exposing the internal anarchy—gendered and otherwise—of a masculinist imperial Spain. By analyzing the larger repercussions of the damsels’ transvestism, the historical context of Spain’s fraught European empire,and the literary allusions in the narrative,I show how Cervantes challenges generic conventions in a tale of gender transgressions and how these breaches of decorum complicate the Spanish imperial project that frames the main events of the narrative. “Las dos doncellas” was first published in 1613 as part of the collection of twelve “exemplary novellas” by Cervantes. The Novelas ejemplares occupy an interesting place in his oeuvre; they appeared between publication of parts I and II of Don Quijote (1605 and 1615, respectively) and feature a wide range of formal experimentation that both echoes and anticipates the more famous novel’s problematization of genre.3 In his prologue to the Novelas ejemplares, Cervantes emphasizes the originality of these tales in a Spanish context: “Yo soy el primero que he novelado en lengua castellana, que las muchas novelas que en ellas andan impresas,todas son traducidas de lenguas extranjeras,y éstas son mías propias, no imitadas ni hurtadas” (I.52) (I am the first who has written novellas in Spanish, for the many novellas now printed are all translations from foreign tongues,and these are my own,neither imitated nor stolen).Perhaps because of Cervantes’s protestations of originality, critics have paid attention to the novellas that foreground realism and particularly Spanish literary innovations—such as the picaresque—while typically dismissing the more idealizing or Italianate ones.4 As the neglected novellas have come under greater critical scrutiny, however, it is apparent that under the veil of romance they in fact address specifically Spanish social and political concerns. “Las dos doncellas” in particular combines formal and thematic elements of the Renaissance romanzo of Ariosto and of medieval romance.Fleeing damsels in distress, transvestism, moral and physical wandering (errare), a hero diverted by love, the postponement of naming, the quest toward a deferred goal, the idealizing tone—all these suggest a clear generic identification.5 Yet the interest of the text lies in how it transforms genre into an active and unstable category. In the first place, the text foregrounds the literary history that pits romance against epic. In its simplest form, Virgilian epic and the subsequent tradition are aligned with the public goals of nation formation, an ordered history,and the teleological exploits of a synecdochic hero,while romance signifies the derailment of the epic project—in both literary and political terms—through error, wandering voyages, and the seductiveness of female “enchantresses.”6 Historically,early modern Spain relied heavily on the Aeneid tradition and the...

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