The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes (review)

Wagschal, Steven. The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2006. The notion of jealousy has been mostly ignored in studies of Spanish Golden Age literature, perhaps because there is such an intense interest in questions of honor, and because it seems such a prevalent, obvious and yet slippery concept. Steven Wagschal thus fills an important void in Golden Age studies, examining this compound emotion that is represented in a varied and paradoxical manner: “It was a tempest, thunder and lightning, but also fog, cloud and air; a plague, rabies, poison, monster, but sometimes just lowly mud” (2). Wagschal’s book ranges from Cervantes’ prose works to Góngora’s complex poetic experiments and from Lope de Vega’s comedies to his more disturbing honor dramas and tragedies. In this thoughtful and intriguing study, Steven Wagschal addresses the aesthetics, epistemology and morality of the period, as well as issues of race, class and gender. Wagschal’s analysis moves with ease from early modern conceptualizations of jealousy (Descartes, Vives) to contemporary approaches to this compound emotion. He even turns to classical antiquity to develop motifs from Ovid and Virgil and to unravel classical myths that impinge upon the works discussed. Wagschal thus evolves complex and enlightening responses to these issues, raising topics relevant to both the early modern period and our contemporary situations, while at the same time focusing on the question of amorous jealousy. The book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1 turns to two classic “honor plays” by Lope, Los comendadores de Córdoba and Peribáñez, in order to show how Lope includes jealousy as an integral component of honor and “frequently motivates the protagonists’ change of mental state between the polar opposites of Spanish Baroque epistemology,” that is, from engaño to desenga ño. But Wagschal clearly shows that jealousy is not the purview of the protagonist. In Los comendadores de Córdoba, for example, Beatriz is jealous of her husband’s absence because she is “transposing her awareness of her own illicit desire to her husband’s consciousness” (28). And, the play also goes beyond questions of honor and rationality in order to mirror the historical and political situation of the period, where the kings were in the process of consolidating power. The play thus demonstrates “that the king’s word is to be upheld no matter how gruesome the crime and how intuitively ‘unjust’ it may be” (4041 ). Taking as its cue Beatriz’s emotions, Chapter 2 examines women’s jealousy in La celosa Arminda and El perro del hortelano. As opposed to men, women never murder for jealousy. Indeed, these plays evince, for Wagschal, the relationship between power and gender in the Spanish comedia. Thus, he links Armida to the Roman Juno, who was constantly jealous, “but never a match for Jupiter” (61). As for Diana in El perro del hortelano, she merely desires what others want. Both women protagonists show women’s weakness and Reseñas 109 irrationality. For Wagschal, the representation of jealousy in these plays help to support the hegemonic order, particularly in terms of gender. Chapter 3 concludes the analysis of Lope’s plays by contrasting La discreta enamorada with El castigo sin venganza. The purpose of this chapter is to show that jealousy can be portrayed very differently not just in cases of gender, but also of genre. While in the first play the emotions of jealousy are trivialized, in the second they acquire great depth and complexity. Chapters 4 and 5 analyze Cervantes’ El celoso extremeño and Persiles y Sigismunda respectively. The fourth chapter includes an innovative and provocative analysis of Cervantes’ famous novela. For Wagschal, the tale represents the old married man as a Jewish converso, a non-Christian Other. Thus, Cervantes parodies the ending of Lope’s honor plays such as Los comendadores de Córdoba . In his novela: “Cervantes attempts to portray jealousy as neither honorable nor befitting a hero of the Christian reconquest such as Lope’s Veinticuatro ; rather, for Cervantes, jealousy is an obsessive feeling experienced by a cruel, old Semite” (119). While Cervantes seems to condemn jealousy as a vice, this negative...