Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity (review)

Like the author's Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam and European Identities (2001), this volume concerns itself with the ideology of literary representation and with the historical subsoil of fictions. Fuchs approaches the issue of national identity from a more tightly drawn perspective here, looking at "unreadable subjects . . . who effectively perform another gender or religion," thereby challenging attempts, by a nascent modern state and its church, "to identify and categorize 'proper' Spanish subjects" (3). Focusing on gender and religious identity in crisis on the frontier between Christianity and Islam, she sees Cervantes's "open Mediterranean" with permeable borders and fluid subjects undoing "orthodox narratives of homogeneous and fully realized national identity put forth by the Spanish Crown" (10).

The volume's introductory chapter documents actual sixteenth-century border crossings and surveys romance and theatrical conventions of transvestism along with recent scholarly work on genre, gender, and ideologies. In the analytical chapters that follow, the author analyzes episodes from Don Quijote and so-called "idealist" texts including the Persiles, three Novelas ejemplares, and one versecomedia. Chapter 2, "Border Crossing: Transvestism and Passing in Don Quijote," examines four episodes (Dorotea-Micomicona, Diego de la Llana's children on Sancho's island, Claudia Jerónima, and Ana Félix) where cross-dressing appears against the backdrop of ethnoreligious diversity. Chapter 3, "Empire Unmanned: Gender Troubles and Genoese Gold in 'Las dos doncellas,'" known to readers of PMLA, proposes that the novella's "apparently conventional romance narrative . . . disguises its engagement with political and social controversies under the cloak of transvestism" (46). Chapter 4, "Passing Pleasures: Costume and Custom in 'El amante liberal' and La gran sultana," shows Cervantes imagining "cultural and religious transactions of Spanish subjects at the frontiers of Christendom" (63), representing "masculinist Christian identity" (80) in greatest danger within Christian territory and voicing "an oblique reproach" to Spanish exclusion of moriscos and conversos (80). In her final chapter, "'La disimulación es provechosa': The Critique of Transparency in the Persiles and 'La española inglesa,'" Fuchs reads Cervantes's last novel as "a transvestite text" which "complicates the literary conventions of anagnorisis" (87–88) by privileging assumed identities over real ones so as to critique genealogical and religious essentialism.

Tight focus has its rewards and its price. Every page of Passing for Spain rewards the reader with penetrating readings powered by a vivid and supple critical idiom: a keen eye for generic motifs, rhetorical figures, classical and Renaissance intertextualities, the materiality of history; and vigorous engagement with current scholarship on genre, gender, and ethnicity in European (particularly Elizabethan) literature. Discussions of the androgyny of Ricote's daughter Ana Félix and the ironic naming of truant Marco Antonio make especially fine use of these resources. These readings offer convincing support to the book's most suggestive proposal, that Cervantes's "texts about passing" not only "cloak [beneath romance tropes]a minute engagement with pressing historical and social questions of gender, nation, and empire" (18) but also "are often passing themselves, as their form reproduces the protective strategies of disguise and dissimulation described in their content" (17).

At the same time, strict limitation to gender and ethnoreligious transvestism scripts out other relevant instances of impersonation. With Don Quijote, exclusion of "real" dress-up by Knight and Squire (whose gender-bending has been read brilliantly by Maurice Molho), of Aldonza-Dulcinea's male-to-female transformation and Moorish patria, and of border crossers like Ruy Pérez de Viedma and Zoraida (very much a part of a fluid Mediterranean, as Francisco MárquezVillanueva has demonstrated) seems arbitrary. This reader would welcome probing attention to two premises which shape the study's conclusions. The allegedly monolithic work of national identity formation, which stands as something of a straw man waiting to be toppled by more attractive subversive writings, deserves to be confronted in historiographic, ecclesiastical, and official texts. Similarly, the romance genre itself, which...