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225 4 Convent In/Verse A Dramatist of Female Religious Life (Marcela de San Félix) T he life of Marcela de San Félix (1605–87), which spanned an extraordinary century of Spanish cultural history, illuminates four important issues: illegitimacy and self-legitimation, the problems and benefits of being the daughter of a famous father, censorship and self-censorship, and asceticism as a structure for autonomy and sublimated sensuality. Although Marcela de San Félix has only recently become known to even most Spanish-language readers, nineteenth-century critic Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo and twentieth-century critic Francisco García Lorca claimed that some of her verses rival those of her father, the great Golden Age dramatist and poet Lope de Vega.1 Most of the people who have heard of her are familiar only with a poem Lope de Vega wrote on the occasion of her profession as a nun.2 If she has a claim to fame in her own right, however, it is for her six coloquios espirituales (spiritual colloquies), seven loas (poem-dialogues that precede plays), many romances (ballads) and other poems, and her short biography of a Sister nun. The sensuality, drama, and excess of the Lope de Vega family during the first sixteen years of Marcela’s life did not suddenly disappear when she became Marcela de San Félix and embarked on a quest for Christian perfection through ascetic practice. Rather, throughout the remaining sixty-five years of her life, they endured as one extreme of a polarity that found its synthesis in her own literary work. Having grown up in the household of one of the greatest luminaries of the Spanish Golden Age, she took many of its forms and values with her when she decided to leave the world and enter a cloister. More evident than the continuity and directness of her father’s influence, however, is the contrapuntal nature of her vision and her style. That is, she counters in her writing most of what she knew of her father’s life, which he continuously turned into literature. He delights in the garden of earthly pleasures; she finds joy in sacred pastures. He feeds appetites; she mortifies them. He accepts contention and sin; she demands obedience and virtue. He is self-indulgent; she praises self- 226 cHapTer fOur abnegation. He speaks in the plural—A mis soledades voy (To my solitudes I go); she speaks in the singular—En ti, soledad amada (In you, beloved Solitude). He has many women; she has one Beloved. From Illegitimacy to Self-Legitimation If Marcela de San Félix’s illegitimate birth made her childhood troubled and precarious , it definitively colored both her interest in and her prospects for an advantageous marriage. The turbulent household in which she was raised must have made her quest for legitimating circumstances, stability, and honor all the more urgent. Her search led her to insist on a betrothal to Christ. Within the convent, as her artistic vocation developed, Madre Marcela claimed legitimacy as Lope de Vega’s literary heir. She was the daughter of the man whom Cervantes nicknamed “el monstruo de la naturaleza” (a prodigy of nature).3 Both implicit and explicit aspects of Madre Marcela’s life and texts reveal how the problems and advantages of being a daughter of a famous writer influenced her passage from illegitimacy to self-legitimation. Often she recognized her literary heritage by means of a joke or a denial (knowing that her listening Sisters would understand the game). In one of her loas a “cold-lipped” nun asks a university student who has come begging for food to write a loa in honor of the final vows of one of the Novices. After instructing him about what to include (a theme to which we shall return), she insists, Y que nos haga una Loa (and compose for us a Loa tan acabada y perfecta of such perfection and polish que no la pudiera hacer that even Lope de Vega tan linda Lope de Vega. (366) could not make it so lovely.)4 Further along, the student, projecting the completion of his tasks, says, que yo en prosa las diré (for I, in prose shall tell them, que al Coloquio se prevengan to prepare for the Colloquy con benévola atención with their most kindly attention, que le ha compuesto Marcela (368) for it was composed by Marcela) The road to this self-conscious recognition and legitimation began...

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