An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain

Preface

xi Preface Gerard Ter Borch the Younger (1617–1681), creator of the painting that graces the cover of this book, was not only one of the finest northern baroque Dutch portraitists but also an exquisitely refined artist of daily life. In 1654 he produced this magnificent genre painting first known as Paternal Admonition. In it a father admonishes his daughter; the mother casts her eyes downward in embarrassment and silence. The effect produced by the dazzling conjunction of luxurious fabrics, the complex play of light, and the natural air of the man’s rather quizzical expression reveals the influence of artist Diego Velázquez. (The painters, who were contemporaries, undoubtedly met when Ter Borch visited the Spanish court in the 1630s.) But what is the true image reflected on this canvas? By the postVictorian mid-twentieth century, art historians no longer saw in it a commonplace domestic scene; instead, they saw a representation of a high-class brothel (Kettering 2004, 114). Renamed The Gallant Conver­ sation, the painting is thought to depict a military officer/client possibly proffering a coin, an elderly woman/procuress, and a young woman who could be a courtesan. Adding to the complexity of the probable messages of the work, a dog turns its back on the group gathered around the bed to conduct (according to the new view) a presumably sordid business transaction; the animal appears burdened with shame. To what do we owe, we might wonder, this change in perception? As a result of this revised perspective on the part of viewers, The Gal­ lant Conversation, sensual and enigmatic, presents a myriad of tantaliz- xii An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain ing interpretive possibilities. Its portrayal of sexuality is nuanced and highly expressive: the candor of the girl’s exposed neck, the blatantly sensual folds of her shimmering oyster satin gown, the officer’s extravagantly feathered hat and oversized foot seemingly poised to penetrate the female space, the old woman’s dainty grasp of the wine glass. The central figure in the painting has her back to the onlooker, her face averted, in a gesture of demureness or aloofness, perhaps shame or powerlessness, or quite probably resignation. Indeed, The Gallant Conversation can serve as a general metaphor for the types of texts that compose the raw material of this book—which feature a still unheralded sexual and erotic content—and for their unsettled and until now incomplete critical reception. These works, whose marrow is sexual alterity, have also been avoided, veiled, and misrepresented , and their subject matter has been outrightly rejected, reactions that are surely related to not only the social, cultural, and historical spheres of their time but also our rather prim critical tradition. In recent years, precisely because of changes in artistic interpretation, an upsurge in serious scholarly interest in previously marginalized or willfully misinterpreted literary works has been recovering them for, and therefore changing our conception of, Spanish literary history. Like Ter Borch’s painting, the works discussed in the chapters that follow can be elusive and ambiguous; their revelation of the complexity of erotic behaviors and prevalent attitudes of their age poses challenges that this book takes on. It goes without saying that pleasure, desire, and sexuality are tenacious components that shape literature and our lives in fundamental ways. At the same time, popular and critical receptions of works riveted on sexuality and eroticism—that is, the depiction of the physical aspects of sexual passion and love—have swayed between fascination and revulsion, revelation and restraint, exclusion and production, especially when those texts revolve around non-normative sexualities. In spite of historical reticence and prudery, however, the efforts to study sexual practices as integral parts of literary, cultural, sexual, and historical processes can be productive in the revision of what Frank Kermode has called critical “used thinking,” in order to arrive at a greater understanding of early modern mentalities and literature. In an essay on sodomites and Western culture, Randolph Trumbach argues with respect to a subsequent historical period: Preface xiii We ought to study the historical forms of sexual behaviour not simply because they are interesting in themselves, but rather because sexual behaviour (perhaps more than religion) is the most highly symbolic activity of any society. To penetrate to the symbolic system implicit in any society’s sexual behaviour is therefore to come closest to the heart of its uniqueness (1977, 24; my emphasis). Sadly, in...