The Gendered Taxonomy of Spanish Romance - Project Muse

The Gendered Taxonomy of Spanish Romance
   Barbara F. Weissberger

   La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and
   Cultures, Volume 29, Number 1, Fall 2000, pp. 205-229 (Article)

   Published by La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures,
   and Cultures
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cor.2000.0014

        For additional information about this article
        https://muse.jhu.edu/article/429662/summary

[ Access provided at 19 Apr 2020 06:36 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]

THE GENDERED TAXONOMY OF
SPANISH ROMANCE

Barbara E Weissberger
Old Dominion University
    The word is out: the sentimental romance is dead at the tender young
age of fourteen.1 Its untimely demise was announced in Joseph Gwara
and E. Michael Gerli's long-awaited Studies on die Spanish Sentimental
Romance (1440-1550): Redefining a Genre. Many of the essays in the
volume belie the optimistic project announced in its subtide, beginning
with Gwara's prefatorial lament that "a unified sentimental genre is a
chimera" (vii). In the volume's first essay, Michael Gerii persuasively ar-
gues that the genre's foundational text, Siervo libre de Amor, tradition-
ally linked to the forms and techniques ofLatin and Italian amatory prose,
is most extensively indebted to two fourteenth-century French allegorized
journeys of the soul (3-19). The final exemplar of the genre, Processo
 de cartas de amores, is similarly excised by Marina Brownlee, who states
 categorically that "despite its traditional attribution, I maintain that
Processo, by being exclusively epistolary, could not be further from the
novela sentimentalen narratological terms" (23). In like manner, Louise
Haywood's study of the verse insertions that have sometimes been con-
sidered a distinguishing generic feature concludes that "lyric is not a
generic trait" (202) . Finally, in die case ofJuan de Flores, the writer who
elicits the most interest in the collection (and in sentimental romance
studies as a whole), two of the five essays that exclusively or substantially
treat his output focus on works that have often been considered mar-
ginal to the genre: Gwára's attribution study ofLa coronación déla señora
Gracisla (75-1 10) and Carmen Parrilla García's study of Triunfo de amor
(11 1-24) (see Whinnom, The Spanish Sentimental Romance 6) .

    1 As I discuss below, Ijudge the sentimental romance genre to have been born in 1983,
upon the publication of Keith Whinnom's critical bibliography The Spanish Sentimental
Romance. The Gwara and Gerii volume appeared in 1997.

La corónica 29.1 (Fall, 2000): 205-229

206Barbara F WeissbergerLa corónica 29.1, 2000

    The demise of the sentimental romance should give pause to those
of us who have devoted some time and energy to studying its character
and development. Yet we cannot say that its death comes as a complete
surprise, given the circumstances attending its conception and its frail
constitution.2 This is not the place to give a complete account of the
failed effort to define the genre and uphold its integrity. Suffice it to say
that virtually every characteristic that has been marshaled in this endeavor
-courdy love, autobiographical and self-conscious point of view, incor-
poration of lyrics, episdes, and debate, metafiction and intertextuality,
tragic ending, psychological analysis- has been contested.3 1 will cite just
two examples, striking because they occurred in the same year. In 1989,
Michael Gerii maintained that the central goal of the genre was "to study
passion through the medium of a tragic love story in which the subtie
and intricate workings of the mind are objectified and take precedence
over all else" ("Toward a Poetics" 481), while Pedro Cátedra declared
that "el tono de la exposición erótica doctrinal tiene más lugar en el
tratadismo amoroso del siglo XV que el mismísimo análisis de las pasiones
individuales, que generalmente se ha visto como el fin básico de la novela
sentimental española" (Amorypedagogía 157).
    The very plethora of articles and book chapters -more than two dozen
over the last quarter century- that seek to uphold the generic integrity
of fícción sentimental should alert us to the problematic nature of the
undertaking.4 One of the most ambitious attempts to date is Vicenta Blay
Manzanares's 1992 essay "La conciencia genérica en la ficción sentimen-
tal (planteamiento de una problemática)", which confronts again "la
     2 Cf. Whinnom in 1974 ("the heterogeneity of the tales within this group is such that
the term 'genre' is probably misapplied..." [Diego de San Pedro 79] and Lillian von der
Walde Moheno over two decades later ("No existe un corpus perfectamente delimitado,
hecho que deriva de la misma heterogeneidad del género ... de lo que ha resultado incluso
el cuestionamiento sobre la posibilidad de hablar de género" ("La ficción sentimental", 6).
     3An interesting refinement in the affirmation of the sen timental's generic integrity
is one of Alan Deyermond's current projects, a book examining European works that he
places on the "frontier" of sentimental romance, including several that "al haberse
redactado en castellano después de 1440, hubieran entrado ya en la nómina de la ficción
sentimental" ("En la frontera", 14) . This work is a logical development from his early in-
terest in the interconnections between sentimental romance and a wide variety of other
ancient and medieval texts, among them the Confessions of St. Augustine, Abelard's
Historia calamitatum, the Provençal poets' vidas and razos, Petrarch's Secretum, and
Dante's Vita Nuova. However, Deyermond's blurring of the genre's boundaries can also
be taken as further evidence of its lack ofviability. Cf. Blay Manzanares, "La convergencia".
    4 For a good overview and bibliography, see von der Walde, "La ficción sentimental".
Regula Rohland de Langbehn has continued to wrestle with the generic integrity and
evolution of the sentimental: see her "Fábula trágica", "Desarrollo de géneros literarios",
and most recendy La unidadgenérica de la novela sentimental española.

The Gendered Taxonomy ofSpanish Romance207
perentoria necesidad de redefinir y tornar a hacer operativo el tan
denostado concepto de 'género literario', convirtiéndolo en
'instrumento' eficaz y útil para la investigación de un corpus de entidad
tan problemática cual es el que aquí estudiamos" (206). Her compari-
son of the ill-defined genre to a "cajón de sastre"/ "cajón desastre" (206,
ni) wittily underscores the frustrations critics have felt at trying to relate
Siervo libre de amor to Question de amor, or Grisel y Mirabella to
Processo de cartas de amores?
     In this essay I argue that the death of the genre or sub-genre (the
distinction is important, as I hope to show) of the sentimental romance
should not be taken as cause for regret, but rather as an opportunity for
a much-needed change of direction in the study of late medieval court
literature as a whole, of which romance is a central component. The
change is essential if we are to achieve what has remained elusive to the
present day, a full -by which I mean fully historicized- understanding of
romance's vital social function in late medieval Iberian society as a po-
tent cultural expression of aristocratic masculine roles and identity in
crisis. The first important step toward this goal is the abandonment of
the classificatory division of Iberian romance into two opposed sub-
genres, the so-called "sentimental" and "chivalric" and their fusion into
the single category of romance.
    A reintegration of the Iberian romance corpus makes sense not only
because of the demonstrated difficulties in maintaining the genre's in-
tegrity, but also because, to my knowledge, such a division is not sup-
ported by any modern theory of genre nor maintained in the literary
criticism of any other early modern European national literature. As re-
gards theory, it is interesting to note that the most recent surge of inter-
est in genre theory that occurred during the 1970's (which indirectly
led to the birth of the sentimental romance, as we shall see) used ro-
mance -romance as a whole- as its theoretical paradigm. Inspired by the
work of Northrop Frye on romance, it produced the now-classic studies
by Northrop Frye, Tzevtan Todorov, Hans-Robert Jauss, Jean Genette,
and Fredric Jameson, none of which acknowledge the two modes that
Hispanists have naturalized.6

     5 The obsession with the genre's integrity is responsible for the disproportionate at-
tention paid to Siervo libre de amor, identified as the foundational text of the genre and
especially to its structural integrity, i.e., the completeness of the extant version and the re-
lationship between its quite different framing and embedded ("Estoria de Ardanlier y
Liessa") narratives.
    6 For applications of gender theory to medieval Spanish literature, see Deyermond
"Categorías de las letras" and Garrido Gallardo.

208Barbara F WeissbergerLa corónica 29.,1, 2000

     In this limited space I can neither adequately justify such a radical
reformulation nor fully articulate its implementation. Those are the goals
of a larger project of mine. Here I will concentrate on the cultural con-
ditions that shaped the taxonomy of romance in the early part of the last
century, that is, the ideology that attended its birth.7 I am specifically
interested in how the cultural reproduction of gender identity and roles
affects the creation and study of literary genre. My primary focus will be
on the early twentieth-century Spanish scholars -the fathers of modern
hispanomedievalism- who created the taxonomic division between the
"sentimental" and the "chivalric" that has determined the critical ap-
proaches to Iberian romance up to the present. I do so not only to pro-
pose a new direction for the study of romance in Iberia but also in order
to make sense of the genre's failure to thrive despite abundant critical
nurturing.8 Only at the end, and very briefly, will I sketch several ways
that the reintegration of the sentimental and the chivalric sub-genres
might further our understanding of romance. In all of the above I con-
centrate on the issue of gender because for a series of works considered
to be written in large measure about and for women (although never by
women, an important point that is never mentioned), the feminist per-
spective remains among the least cultivated in its study. A primary cause
of this neglect in my view is that the patriarchal ideology of gender that
is at the heart of the "sentimental" -the same ideology that operates in
the "chivalric"- has been mystified by the former's critical feminization
and isolation.
     The sentimental sub-genre was born to contemporary romance stud-
ies in 1983. Keith Whinnom's critical bibliography The Spanish Senti-
mental Romance, 1440-1'550'served as its midwife. It was a difficult deliv-
ery after a long gestation, as Whinnom himself acknowledged. He

     7 For a similar approach to Spanish epic poetry, see Catherine Brown.
    8 My thinking on this issue has been sparked by two recent books. In the impressive
volume Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, scholars grapple in various ways with the
growing awareness that "'medievalists' assumptions about the past are as historically de-
termined by the framing perceptions of the last century as they are by the artifacts of the
medievalist's study" (2). Similarly, the contemporary reaffirmation of the sentimental ro-
mance genre is shaped by its own set of cultural assumptions, as are, it goes without say-
ing, my own arguments for abandoning that rescue effort. In short, we must not lose sight
of the fact that "such pursuits of theoretical explanation form a genre of their own with
their own distorting mechanisms.. ."(Cohen 269). Also useful has been Simon Gaunt's
Gender and Genre in MedievalFrench Literature, an insightful treatment of how "genres
in medieval French and Occitan literature inscribe competing ideologies ... and that the
distinct ideologies ofmedieval genres are predicated in part at least upon distinct construc-
tions of gender" (1). Gaunt devotes separate chapters to epic, romance, canso,
hagiography, and fabliaux.

The Gendered Taxonomy ofSpanish Romance209

referred to the numerous attempts to formulate the genre since its con-
ception in 1905 in Menéndez Pelayo's Orígenes de la novela, a founda-
tional moment to which I shall return. Whinnom appeared to be none
too confident about the new genre's integrity. He correctiy predicted
that the debate over which exacdy were the sentimental romance's con-
geners would continue, even as he declined to enter the debate himself:
"for the purposes of the present exercise, I have allowed myself the maxi-
mum latitude, including all the short, or comparatively short, love-sto-
ries composed in Spanish between 1440 and 1550; and I have included
some extremely marginal works (such as Flores's Triunfo de Amor and
the anonymous La coronación de la señora Gracisla) which can scarcely
be fitted even into that very broad definition..." (5). Whinnom's list, ex-
tending from Juan Rodriguez del Padrón's Siervo libre de amor ?? 1440
toJuan de Segura's Processo de cartas de amores oía century later (1548),
immediately became canonical. The success of the bibliography in elic-
iting further study, documented by the extensive supplement compiled
by Alan Deyermond, Ann Mackenzie and Dorothy Severin, is surely one
of the most striking developments in contemporary hispanomedievalism.
Whinnom himself later marveled at what his bibliography elicited: "some-
thing astonishing: a cottage industry of medieval Hispanism" (quoted in
Gerii, "Señora" 238) . Why then advocate its dissolution?
     To begin to answer this question we must go back several years be-
fore the birth of the sentimental genre to Alan Deyermond's "The Lost
Genre of Medieval Spanish Literature". It called attention to the neglect
of the romance genre in general by hispanomedievalists, analyzed the
causes of that neglect, and initiated the remedy with an extensive bibli-
ography of scholarly works on the theory and criticism of European ro-
mance, mosdy French and English. In this important article, Deyermond
refers to the "chivalresque and sentimental sub-genres" (241), but only
in passing; his emphasis throughout is on the need to study romance,
"the dominant form of medieval fiction" (232), as a whole.
    Deyermond identified the cause of Hispanists' critical disregard of
romance as twofold: linguistic and psychological. The linguistic obstacle,
the troublesome absence of a Spanish term for romance, the word ro-
mance being otherwise employed, is a deceptively simple one. It is quite
possible in fact that this simple terminological lacuna has contributed
to the genre's ongoing identity crisis, its congeners having been called
many names: tratado, libro, historia, novela, and, most recently, fìcción?

    9 1 myself inadvertendy entered the linguistic debate with my very first publication on
romance, in which I discussed Siervo libre de amoras tractado. See my "Habla el Auctor"

210Barbara F. WeissbergerLa corónica 29.1, 2000

     The psychological barrier is much more complex. As Deyermond
explains, the late nineteenth- and early twentietfi-century philologists and
literary historians who were concerned with classifying and periodizing
Spanish literature were philosophically indebted to the "Generation of
'98".10 In response to the blow to Spain's national pride caused by the
Spanish-American War, that literary cohort sought to revalorize Spanish
history and literature. To do so they interpreted them in the light ofwhat
they deemed fundamental and enduring national characteristics, suggest-
ing that the loss of empire and cultural prestige could not affect the core
identity of Spaniards. Some fifty years later, a member of the next gen-
eration, the philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal published his influen-
tial programmatic statement of those characteristics in "Caracteres
primordiales de la literatura española"." This essay is the source of the
enduring identification of the "popular" and the "realistic" as uniquely
Spanish literary modes. Deyermond notes "it is understandable that a
[romance] genre which emphasizes Spain's European heritage and which
lacks local realism should have suffered in this way..." ("The Lost Genre"
246). True enough, but the erstwhile identification of the popular/real-
istic as uniquely Spanish, which has had a lasting effect on modern schol-
arship on a variety of genres, invites a closer look.12 In particular, an ex-
amination of the terms used by scholars at the beginning of the last
century to establish a literary taxonomy of medieval Spanish romance
reveals their grounding in a thoroughly patriarchal ideology of gender.
    Any discussion of these founding fathers of hispanomedievalism must
begin with Menéndez y Pelayo's enormously influential Orígenes de la
novela (1905). Don Marcelino's evaluation of Spain's protonovelistic
genres is indeed shaped by adherence to the aesthetic of realism, as
Deyermond noted, but it is also explicit about the function of that aes-
thetic: to affirm and reproduce bourgeois morality. He labels European

and Keith Whinnom 's well-founded criticism in "Autorand Tratado. " It is interesting that
the romances labeled chivalric have not suffered from the naming problem; they have
always been, simply, libros.
     '" The "Generation of '98" itself has been a problematic critical construct through-
out the twentieth century. For two recent and conflicting estimations of its validity see Pilar
Navarro Ranninger and José Luis Bernal Muñoz.
     " Originally published in Volume I of Guillermo Diaz-Plaja's monumental Historia
general de las literaturas hispánicas (Barcelona: Editorial Barna, 1949).
     12 Evidence of its influence can be seen in the preferential attention paid by modern
hispanomedievalists to the romancero over the cancionero, mester deJuglar/a over mester
de clerecía, and epic over romance or chronicle. Other factors come into play, of course,
such as the availability of reliable editions, the philological orientation of early twentieth-
century Hispanists, etc.

The Gendered Taxonomy ofSpanish Romance211

romance as a whole as an inherendy decadent form, "una prolongación
o degeneración de la poesía épica" (201). It compares poorly with the
epic, which because it recorded the martial prowess of real knights, con-
stituted "una escuela de viril sensatez y reposada energía" (453) . While
chivalry was a social reality, he maintains, there was no need to idealize
it; when the institution began to decay, and knights became courtiers,
love, which was unimportant in the epics, became the hero's primary
motivation. At that point "el elemento femenino invadió el arte, y Europa
no se cansó de oír durante tres siglos los infortunios amorosos de la reina
Ginebra, de la reina Iseo y de otras ilustres adúlteras".13
   Menéndez Pelayo's view of Amadís, by far Spain's most influential
contribution to the European romance tradition, both in its own right
and in its subsequent Cervantine transformation, is paradoxical. He
deems the work both a unique native contribution to a genre that is fun-
damentally foreign to the peninsula's aesthetic and moral traditions and
the initiator of a new chivalric genre. However, for this new, ethical spe-
cies to emerge, the exotic, erotic seed of European romance had to be
impregnated with a healthy Spanish moral sense: "si en algo se conoce
el origen español del autor es principalmente en esta especie de
transformación y depuración ética que aplicó a las narraciones asaz
livianas de sus predecesores" (354). Even so, Menéndez y Pelayo's admi-
ration for the Amadís and the chaste love of its hero and heroine is not
unqualified. He criticizes its "falsa idealización de la mujer ... la
extravagante esclavitud amorosa, cierta afeminación que está en el
ambiente del libro, a pesar de su castidad relativa" (353) . Paradoxically,
the exaltation of female chastity in romance can lead to a dangerous ide-
alization of women, dangerous because it effeminizes its male charac-
ters and, we may assume, its impressionable readers.
    In Orígenes, Menéndez y Pelayo created the sentimental canon that
with Whinnom's important modifications has remained in place for a
century. Compared to his extensive treatment of the chivalric romance,
however, his discussion of the sub-genre he labels "novela erótico-senti-

       13 One wonders whether Menéndez y Pelayo was familiar with Friedrich Schiller's
 theoretical essay on modern literature, Über naive undsentimentalische Dichtung ( 1 795-
 96) , which has had widespread and lasting impact. Menéndez y Pelayo's separation of the
 real epic from the more idealized chivalric and sentimental romance bears comparison with
 the distinction Schiller makes between the "naive" poet, who is not conscious of the rift
 between himself and nature, and the "sentimental" poet, generally a product of a more
 sophisticated culture, who experiences a tension between himself and the external world,
judges the latter to be imperfect and longs for "a more innocent, harmonious world which
 only exists in his own imagination" (Lesley Sharpe 176-77).

212Barbara F. WeissbergerLa corónica 29.1, 2000

mental" is surprisingly cursory. He situates the essential difference be-
tween the chivalric and the sentimental in the latter's systematic subor-
dination of "esfuerzo" to "amor" and to the "descripción y análisis de los
afectos de sus personajes". These elements represent "una tentativa de
novela íntima y no exterior" (II: 4), a statement that has often been re-
peated to authorize the separation of the private, feminine sentimental
from the public, masculine chivalric.
    In his conceptualization of the opposition between the sentimental
and the chivalric as the contrast between the private and the public, the
interior and the exterior, Menéndez y Pelayo appears to be following the
lead of Pascual Gayangos half a century earlier. Gayangos proposed a kind
of reception theory avant-la-lettre to explain the origins of a genre he
terms "novela caballeresca-sentimental". The difference between the
chivalric and the sentimental is in Gayangos's formulation less one of
substance than of emphasis:
    Natural era que las damas de aquellos tiempos, por más guerreras
    y varoniles que las queramos suponer ... cansadas ya de tanto revés
    y mandoble, de tanto descomunal gigante, de tanto encantador
    malsín, apeteciesen un linaje de libros más en armonía con sus
    sentimientos y ocupaciones.... Así es que muy pronto se creó otra
    literatura que ... se ocupó menos de guerra y de militares proezas,
    y un poco más de amor y galanteos ... representan la vida
    doméstica más bien que la de los campamentos. (Ivi)
Surprisingly, given this statement, the works Gayangos includes in his
catalog bear little resemblance to the sentimental canon as fixed in
Whinnom's 1983 bibliography. It is much longer and more heteroge-
neous, including not only several chivalric romances, but also works as
varied as El moro Abindarraez y la bella Xarifa, Historia de los amores
de Clareo y Florisea, Flores y Blancafìor, Fiometa, and Libro de los siete
sabios de Roma. Nevertheless, the notion that the sentimental romance
somehow was generated by female readers of chivalric romance who were
weary of war and wizards is a crucial one and I shall return to it shordy.
    But first we must take another look at Menéndez Pidal's "caracteres
primordiales" of Spanish literature. For my purposes, the most revealing
section ofhis analysis is not the discussion of "realismo" mentioned above,
but rather the chapter immediately preceding it. In "Austeridad moral"
(79-84), Pidal glorifies Spanish literature on the basis of an invidious
sexual comparison with French literature. He elevates the Iberian
"cantigas de amigo", which he calls "poesía del amor virginal", over the
Gallic rondels and ballades, which he terms, using a telling diminutive,

The Gendered Taxonomy ofSpanish Romance213
"cancioncillas del amor adúltero". But this judgment is mild compared
to his appraisal of poems treating the malmaridada theme: "en Francia
tratan en broma al engañado marido, pero dentro de España ... Ia esposa
infiel pide a su marido el castigo de muerte que merece; y de la general
aceptación de este desenlace da prueba la excepcional popularidad del
citado romance y el sinnúmero de alusiones y glosas a él. .."(83). The
nexus between ética and estética that characterizes Spanish literature is
its representation of -Pidal would say reflection of- marital fidelity, or
more precisely, of female fidelity. This is the same criterion that he ap-
plies to Spain's major contribution to the European romance tradition:
"nuestra Península, al dar su fruto propio en este campo de la ficción,
produjo el Amadís, donde esa novelística cortesana se purifica de su fondo
antisocial para convertirse en la poesía del amor primero, sublimado por
la más inquebrantable fidelidad" (81).
    The separation and hierarchization of history and romance, prow-
ess and love, virility and effeminacy in Menéndez y Pelayo's elucidation
of the origins of the novel in Spain intersects with Menéndez Pidal's
opposition of adultery and monogamy, immorality and morality, French
and Spanish society and culture. These heirs of the anxious Generation
of '98 shared an urgent need to construct an idealized, masculine cul-
tural identity for a nation in political and social crisis. In doing so they
provide a striking example of the gendering of genre.
    The relationship between gender and genre is an ancient one, as
the related etymology of the two terms indicates. Peter Stallybrass and
Allon White remind us that literary taxonomy and social categories went
hand in hand in antiquity. The designation of the prestige and rank of
writers was direcdy linked to the division of citizens according to taxa-
tion categories. Citizens of the first or top taxation category came to be
known as classici, a term then used to designate the most prestigious
authors. As the authors point out,
    This development in the generic terminology of antiquity [at-
    tributed to the work of Aulus Gellius, fl. c. 123-c. 165] had an
    enduring influence on the European system of hierarchizing
    authors and works.... From the first it seems that the ranking of
    types of author was modeled upon social rank according to prop-
    erty classifications and this interrelation was still being actively
    invoked in the nineteenth century. (1-2)
Daniel Seiden notes in a similar way that long after the different literary
genres ceased to fulfill specific social functions in Greek and Roman so-
ciety, they continued to bear marks of status, class, ethnicity, and gen-

214Barbara E WeissbergerLa corónica 29.1, 2000

der. Writers' upholding of the propriety of these distinctions was felt
implicitly to validate a social order. The example Seiden adduces,
Horace's comparison of the way tragedy eschews satiric language to a
Roman matron who chastely avoids mingling with the lascivious crowd
(340) , is surprisingly similar to the terms used by the Spanish philolo-
gists almost two millennia later.
     The creation of the sentimental romance genre and the critical
response to it bear the mark of the noventayochista therapeutic inscrip-
tion of sexual and gender difference on Spam's ailing (masculine) na-
tionhood. The thematic division of the native-produced romances into
a "masculine" genre concerned with martial deeds and a "feminine" one
devoted to mostly chaste love is an extension of the need to separate
and preserve the truly Spanish -the virile epic- from contamination by
the feminine/effeminate romance. That is, their classificatory scheme
hierarchizes literary genres and works on the basis of a moralized patri-
archal hierarchy of gender. The sentimental and chivalric may be sepa-
rate, but they are most definitely not equal.
     It is important to keep in mind that although the generic opposi-
tion of battlefield and boudoir participates in the transhistorical separa-
tion and gendering of the public and private spheres -what Nancy Miller
has called "the division of labor that grants men the world and women
love" (357)- it is also historically variable. Obviously, the social construc-
tion (and cultural production) of gender identity and roles have changed
drastically in the century since the sentimental romance was conceived.
One change that is pertinent to my discussion is the large number of
female Hispanists who are actively engaged in studying sentimental
romance. In fact, sentimental romance studies is the first and only area
of hispanomedievalism in which female scholars predominate. This in-
teresting sociological fact suggests a specific historical context for the
surge of interest in the sentimental romance over the past decade and a
half: the significant increase in professional opportunities for women
within academia as a whole and specifically in Hispanic studies.
Whinnom's "cottage industry" would seem to be partly a product of af-
firmative action in the 1980s.
    Few scholars have speculated on the reason for the sentimental ro-
mances' impressive critical popularity. For Michael Gerii the phenom-
enon is due to "the audacious literary experimentation they embody and
the existential displacements they portray, [that] can only be fully ap-
preciated in a post-modern critical environment" ("Señora" 238) . Given
the frequent faulting of postmodern criticism's elision of gender con-
siderations, this might explain why virtually all of these recent critics

The Gendered Taxonomy ofSpanish Romance215

uphold the patriarchal taxonomy -the generic opposition and subordi-
nation of "novela íntima" to "novela exterior"- created by Menéndez y
Pelayo. Are the female Hispanists interested in studying sentimental ro-
mance the latter-day descendants of the medieval women readers pos-
ited by Pascual Gayangos, those who "apeteciesen un linaje de libros más
en armonía con sus sentimientos y ocupaciones ... que se ocuparon menos
de guerra y de militares proezas, y un poco más de amor y galanteos ... la
vida doméstica más bien que la de los campamentos"? I suggest that in a
way we are the unwitting supporters of Gayangos' condescending con-
struction of those readers of the "bello sexo" (Ivi).14 The increase in the
number of women entering the profession in the 1970's and 1980's (pri-
marily in the United States, but also in England and Spain) might very
well be related to the birth of sentimental romance, marked as "women's
literature" in the ways we have seen. But the fact that women scholars
have been interested in the romances labeled sentimental is in my view,
not to be construed as proof that they express women's "natural" con-
cerns: "amor y galanteos ... Ia vida doméstica" (Ivi) . Instead, it should be
evidence of their professional savvy, their understanding of the status tra-
ditionally accorded the creation or refinement of taxonomic categories.
It is noteworthy in this regard that the female critics of the sentimental -
myself included- have by and large not only supported the generic di-
vide but have been among the most assiduous in attempting to strengthen
it theoretically.15
      Of course we must not expect female scholars to avoid the pitfalls of
a naturalized patriarchal taxonomy any better than male scholars have.
But it is interesting that feminist scholars have also fallen into the sepa-
ratist trap, often as an inadvertent result of their interest in the construc-
tion of the category of difference itself. Shakespearean scholar Ania
Loomba has lamented the outcome of some feminist scholars' insistence
on maintaining the difference between women's experiences and "spaces"
and those of men. The critical separation of the private sphere (court-
ship, marriage, family) and the public (the battlefield, politics) and the
works that deal with each can in fact have an ironic effect whereby "the

     14 In reality it is the male characters and narrators of the romances in question who
appear to be preoccupied with courtship: the women they pursue are often resistant, when
not downright rejecting. It is the women protagonists who bring up the real, i.e., social,
world and its constraints, which affect women more and in more serious ways.
     '¦' Only Maria Eugenia Lacarra has questioned the sentimental's generic integrity-, by
denying the importance of the autobiographical point of view that is generally taken to
be the technical hallmark of the sentimental and of its "análisis de la psicología amorosa
profunda de los personajes" ("Sobre la cuestión de la autobiografía" 366).

216Barbara F WeissbergerLa corónica 29.1, 2000
interconnections between the private and the public are muted, and the
binary oppositions which have historically rendered women invisible are
resurrected" (22).
     The gendered taxonomy applied to romance by hispanomedievalists
has distorted the study of romance in precisely this way. I say distorted
because both thematically and stylistically, the most cursory glance at al-
most any romance negates the separation between battlefield and bou-
doir, between action and words and sentiment, that continues to be up-
held by critics.16 Harvey Sharrer has assiduously traced the stylistic
borrowings between the chivalric and sentimental in the late fifteenth-
century, although his goal differs from mine. The thematic parallels are
much more readily apparent. To cite only a few examples, in many senti-
mental romances the threat of intra-class violence is either raised or de-
flected by the knightiy competition for desirable women, i.e., those who
are superior in status and wealth. But this also holds true for the martial
exploits of the chivalric hero, equally grounded in masculine competi-
tiveness. One of the most insightful modern critics ?? Amadís de Gaula,
José Manuel Cacho Blecua, states that "una de las máximas aportaciones
de la novela consiste ... en haber sabido recrear, hasta los mínimos
detalles, casi todas las aventuras mediante unas reglas amorosas.... La
pasión de Amadís por Oriana constituye uno de los principales ejes sobre
los que se vertebran los episodios más importantes" (408-409). Cacho
Blecua also considers that Amadís's use of "las armas de la retòrica" in
his successful bid for Oriana's hand is simply a continuation of his use of
material weapons in the bloody exploits that enhance his status at court
and lead to the discovery of his true identity (186). The same complex
interaction of love and war operates in Cárcel de Amor, for example,
where Leriano's failed verbal bid for Princess Laureola's hand leads to
the anti-monarchic revolt against King Gaulo, and this event motivates
Laureola's rescue and her subsequent definitive rejection of her ambi-
tious suitor. Furthermore, Alan Deyermond has maintained that the cen-
tral events of Cárcel, especially those leading up to the rescue of Laureola
are based direcdy on the similar rescue of Guinevere by Lancelot in Mort
Artu ( Tradiciones 52-56) .

      "' The illiterate devotees of romance who famously discuss their pleasure in listening
to a libro de caballerías read aloud in Don Quifotel, 32, have no trouble identifying both
elements (and others) there. The innkeeper praises "aquellos furibundos y terribles golpes
que los caballeros pegan", his daughter, "las lamentaciones que los caballeros hacen cuando
están ausentes de sus señoras", his wife, the peace and quiet her husband's embobamiento
which the romances affords her, and Maritornes, "cuando cuentan que se está la otra señora
debajo de unos naranjos abrazada con su caballero".

The Gendered Taxonomy ofSpanish Romance217
     Likewise, the reduction of the theme ofadultery in Spanish romances,
especially those based on Arthurian material -Cárcel de Amor no less
than the Baladro del sabio Merlin, as Deyermond has shown- the "puri-
fication" that so pleased Menéndez y Pelayo and Menéndez Pidal, can-
not be ideologically separated from their preoccupation with the chas-
tity of unmarried women, as indicated by the recurrence of repressive
fathers or relatives who imprison (Cárcel), murder (Siervo), or immure
women in a convent (Processo) to prevent them or punish them for "traf-
ficking" in their own bodies.17 Both are responses to the threat of female
autonomy in an atmosphere of increased normativity in sexual relations
that was aimed, among other things, at preserving ethnic purity, a pillar
of the Isabelline political agenda.18 One romance motif that contains the
threat in sentimental and chivalric alike is the draconian "Ley de Escocia":
"que cualquier que en tal yerro cayese, el que más causa fuese al otro de
haver amado que padesciese muerte y el otro, destierro por toda su vida"
(Grisel 58) . It motivates the double suicide of the eponymous lovers in
Grisely Mirabella, and it is responsible for the abandonment of the in-
fant hero at the beginning oí Amadís de Gaula.19
    The separation and opposition of chivalric and sentimental romance
has done more than mask the stylistic and thematic ties among all of
these works. It has also resulted in a largely ahistorical and idealized no-
tion of the treatment of "woman" and "love" in the sentimental romances
as well as of the relationship of real noble women to romance as charac-
ters, as patrons, and as real and inscribed readers. As feminist critics of
French and British romance since Joan Ferrante have repeatedly dem-
onstrated, the idealization of woman in romance texts is not a simple
reflection of the social and cultural power of "real" noblewomen.20 In-
stead, it refracts that power through the lens of her social function as an
object of exchange in patriarchal alliance politics. These critics have also
established that the ideology of romance denies any female subjectivity

     17I borrow the term "trafficking" from Gayle Rubin's classic application to gender
theory of the anthropological formulation of woman as "gift" in an exchange system.
     18My recently-completed book, Repairing Spain 's Broken Body: GenderIdeologyin
the Age ofIsabel die Caúiolic, identifies these anxieties in a broad range of fifteenth-cen-
tury authors and texts.
     19In Chapter 2 ofAmadís the Ley de Escocia is described as decreeing that the woman
who has sexual relations outside of marriage must be put to death; in Grisely Mirabella,
the same law states that whichever of the two lovers bears greater responsibility for incit-
ing the illicit relationship must die, while the other is exiled for life (337-38) . Cacho Blecua
notes that the motif in Amadís is a deviation from the traditional motivation for such an
abandonment: the prophecy of future disgrace the infant will visit on his family.
     20See, among others, Burns, Finke, Fisher and Halley, Krueger, and McCracken.

218Barbara F WeissbergerLa corónica 29.1, 2000

that is independent of aristocratic male fantasies of desire and power.21
A central project of romance, in Iberia no less than, if differently from,
the rest of Europe, is the appropriation ofwomen's power -their wealth,
beauty, and status- for the construction of masculine identity and status.
It follows that the "love" that romance heroes seek from women and the
"virtue" they praise in them are not abstract or fixed values, nor can we
simply assume that all women shared them (or, for that matter, that all
women resisted or rejected them) .22 This is especially true in Spain, where
not only are the romances labeled sentimental exclusively male-authored,
but many feature a dramatized first-person narrator who is always male,
and often masculinist, an important point I will take up again later.23
     At the same time we must take care not to treat "women" as a homo-
geneous, oppressed group. Some of the educated aristocratic women to
whom the romances were dedicated, and who formed a significant por-
tion of their readership (whether alone or in the company of other
women and/or men) were in a position of significant power in the pub-
lic sphere.24 As regards Spanish romance, for example, it is a seldom noted
but crucial fact that the majority of the so-called sentimental romances,
including the most technically accomplished exemplars, were produced
by writers with close political ties to the court of Isabel the Catholic, and
at least two make direct or indirect reference to her or the ladies of her
court.
    The new historicists have amply demonstrated that works written in
the reign of Elizabeth I of England, works like Sir Philip Sidney's prose
romance Arcadia or Shakespeare's dramatic romance MidsummerNight's
Dream, can be fully understood only if their authors' delicate relation-

     21AsJoan Ferrante put it in a now-classic essay ("Male Fantasy and F'emale Reality in
Courtly Literature") , the woman in most courtly texts is a masculine construct that tells us
more about male fantasy than about the reality' of female experience.
     22See David Aers's brilliant analysis of this dynamic in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.
One example of a noblewoman who seems to have appreciated the masculinist fashion-
ing of femininity in romance is Marina Manuel, whose influence Diego de San Pedro ac-
knowledges in the prologue of Cárcel de amor (80) .
     23The classic case is the "Auctor" of Cárcel de amor, who is both the protagonist
Leriano's go-between in his pursuit of Laureola and the unreliable narrator of the romance.
The most recent in a long list of studies of language and point of view in Cárcel, Dulce
García's analysis based on speech-act theory contains a useful bibliography. The one ex-
ception to the male narrator is Bernardim Ribeiro's Menina e moça (1554), occasionally
included in the sentimental category: see Deyermond, who classifies it as "ficción sentimen-
tal en la frontera de lo pastoril" ( Tradiciones 89) .
      24The role that aristocratic women played in literature and society of the late fifteenth
century is only now being carefully studied. See the forthcoming anthology of essays, ed-
ited by Helen Nader, on the women in the powerful Mendoza family.

The Gendered Taxonomy ofSpanish Romance219

ship with and ambivalent attitude toward their most powerful female
reader are taken into account.25 In Spain, on the contrary, Isabel the
Catholic's presence as patron and reader of romances, or as a fictional-
ized or allegorized character within them has been almost completely
elided. The one important exception is the recent work on the romances
ofJuan de Flores, whom we now know to be one ofIsabel's official chroni-
clers and trusted administrators.26 Two of Flores's romances in particu-
lar, GriselyMirabella and Triunfo de amor, both probably written in the
1470's, are just beginning to be understood as cautionary tales on the
effects of absolute monarchic power and 'justice".27 The "masculine"
public and the "feminine" private are always mutually constructing in
the "foreign" courts imagined by Flores. We need only recall the Queen's
private revenge on Torrellas in Grisely Mirabella, an outrageously trans-
gressive act that defies the repressive "Ley de Escocia" rigidly upheld by
her husband the king, or the subversive "nueva ley" promulgated by the
newly reinstated monarch in Triunfo de Amor, whereby the sanctioned
gender roles of courtship are abruptly reversed, so that women aggres-
sively pursue and seduce men and men struggle to protect their honor
or tearfully lament its loss.28
    A political or regiocentric perspective also helps to contextualize the
most recent trend in sentimental romance studies, the analysis of their
interest in the ambiguities of linguistic signification. The focus on the
uses of language in the sentimental romances dates to Marina Scordilis
Brownlee's 1990 book, ZAe Severed Word. In his review-article of
Brownlee's book, Gerii refers also refers to the late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Spanish philologists I am dealing with, but only briefly
and in order to valorize the sentimental. In Gerli's view, Menéndez Pelayo
and his colleagues scorned the sentimental because their cultural ground-
ing in positivism and realism made them insistent that narrative be mi-
metic: "these critics felt apprehensive about literary works that turned
their backs upon narrative referentiality in order to plumb the uncer-
tain depths of signification and sentimentality". The sentimental ro-

     25The bibliography is extensive; Leah S. Marcus and Louis Adrian Montrose provide
a good starting place.
     26See the impressive detective work done by Carmen Parrilla ("Introducción
biográfica") and Joseph Gwara ("Identity").
     2' See the articles by Gwara ("Another work") , Parrilla's introduction to her edition
of Grimalte y Gradissa, and the two recent monographs on Grisely Mirabella by von der
Walde and Mercedes Roffé.
     28 See my "Role Reversal" and Lillian von der Walde's intelligent critique of it (Amor
e ilegalidad 231 -44) .

220Barbara E WeissbergerLa corónica 29.1, 2000

manees thus became "one more hapless victim of the critical distortions
which have shaped our discipline" (238) . Gerii goes on to validate the
sentimental romances for their premodern articulation of a postmodern
fascination with the collapse of linguistic referentiality and the fallacy of
logocentrism (240). Finding that Brownlee's analysis of this crucial as-
pect of the romances in The Severed Wordis too limited (she traces it to
the epistolarity of the medieval Ovidian tradition and Boccaccio) , he at-
tributes the sentimental romances' sensitivity to the powerlessness of
speech to represent or provoke deeds to the inherent deceptiveness of
all European court culture. In support of this view he quotes C. Stephen
Jaeger's statement that "[n]o courtier who wears his heart on his sleeve
can survive in the conflict with which that institution teems. The first
rule of survival is that the courtier composes a mask, a surrogate charac-
ter, that puts forward a personality and a set of motives conventionally
acceptable to the court and the king ... the life of the court divides hu-
man beings into outer mask and inner man" (239; quoted in "Señora"
248).
    Gerii applies his insights on the sentimental romances' preoccupa-
tion with "the radical contradictions and dissimulations lying at the heart
of late medieval Iberian courdy culture" (242) , first to other late-fifteenth
century literary genres, particularly cancionero poetry, and then to the
whole epistemological environment of Iberian courdy culture, includ-
ing material culture. He maintains that "[o]nce language is employed to
examine itself -when it becomes the object of its own self-interest- its
center ceases to hold and truth becomes unstable. Its epistemological
instability then infects all representation and, turning in upon itself,
language itself becomes the medium for the portrayal of the crisis of sig-
nification" (243) . But the twentieth-century post-Saussurian linguistic cri-
sis invoked by Gerii and the one that occurred in the late fifteenth cen-
tury in a newly formed Spain are two very different phenomena. It is
vital for hispanomedievalists to distinguish between them and to be as
specific as possible in locating the ideological basis of the latter. Not to
do so is to risk not only anachronism, but also the further idealization of
the literature of that critical period, the erasure of its important func-
 tion in a nascent absolutist political culture. A first step is to remember
just whose court it is that fosters such linguistic anxiety. For the linguis-
tic approach of Marina Brownlee, Michael Gerii, Dulce García, and most
recendy, Jean Gilkison, to be properly historicized, it must first be in-
fused with a gendered variant of the regiocentric perspective of Carmen
Parrilla and Lillian von der Walde. That is to say, we must view the
romance's linguistic and political concerns in the light of the historical

The Gendered Taxonomy ofSpanish Romance221

fact omitted by all of these critics: that the absolutist sovereign to which
these authors are direcdy or indirecdy responding was a woman.
    The vast majority of Spanish romances, chivalric and sentimental
alike, and certainly those most acclaimed by contemporary readers and
modern scholars, were published during the triumphant final fifteen years
of the reign of Isabel I and the years immediately following. The years
between 1490 and 1515 saw the publication of all of the works ofJuan
de Flores and Diego de San Pedro, Nicolás Núñez's continuation of Cárcel
de Amor, Luis de Lucena's Repetición de amores, Pedro Jiménez de
Urreas's Penitencia de amor, the anonymous Cuestión de amor, and also
of Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo's Amadís de Gaula and Sergas de
Esplandián, Palmenti de Oliva, Oliveiros de Castilla, Paris e Viana,
Enrique Fi de Oliva, Tristan de Leonís, Baladro del Sabio Merlin,
Demanda del Sancto Graal, and Tirante el Bianco. Spain's most power-
ful female reader, and the profound social and political changes that she
was effecting, were surely on the minds of both the ambitious courtiers
who wrote the Castilian romances and the eager readers who made them
Europe's earliest print bestsellers. The fact, for example, that Diego de
San Pedro was in the service of the powerful noble family of Téllez-Girón,
who switched allegiance rather late in the war of succession from the
losing pro-Juana forces to the victorious Isabelline faction, is not unre-
lated to the anxieties that the inscrutability of Laureola raises in the "for-
eign" Leriano and his "Castilian" intermediary El Auctor. Nor are the
changes that the corregidor Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo introduced
in his fifteenth-century refundición of the fourteenth-century romance
of Amadís. As Cacho Blecua has demonstrated, in Book IV and Book V
(Sergas de Esplandián) , Montalvo placed much greater emphasis than
the original on the hero's rhetorical skill and courtly manners, the very
ones on which the author prided himself. According to the narrator, they
prove "ahún más que el su gran esfuerço, ser él hombre de alto lugar,
porque el esfuerço y valentía muchas vezes acierta en las personas de
baxa suerte y gruesso juyzio, y pocas la honesta mesura y polida criança
porque esto es deuido aquellos que de limpia y generosa sangre vienen"
(III, 74, 823) . At the end of Book III and in Book IV of Amadís, where
Montalvo's changes and additions are most evident, characters prove their
lineage and breeding through elegant conversations, letters, planctus,
and harangues; knights fulfill their function in organized warfare rather
than individual combat; and ample glosses provide exempla and other
edifying material suitable for a wide audience (Cacho Blecua 387-88).
The changing conditions of the knight -"al hombre de armas, en los
dos últimos libros, se ha superpuesto el hombre letrado" (Cacho Blecua

222Barbara F. WeissbergerLa corónica 29.1, 2000

335)- and of his relationship with his sovereign clearly guided Montalvo's
reworking of his source material.
     The changing relations of social and political power at the end of
the fifteenth century is as central to the sentimental as to the chivalric;
both use the instability of gender relations of power to represent, reflect
on, and ultimately either contain or mystify the change. The gender of
the sovereign whose favor Diego de San Pedro, Juan de Flores, Luis de
Lucena, and others sought is one of the most far-reaching of the "radi-
cal contradictions" that Gerii identifies as the hallmark of the sentimen-
tal romances. That very specific disturbance in the cultural logic of late
medieval Castile helps to trigger their preoccupation with the limits of
language and signification. The same condition, however, and this is my
main point, affects the authors of Baladro del sabio Merlin, La demanda
delSancto Grial, and other adapters ofArthurian romance under Isabel.
It is in this ideological context that we must interpret the urgency -and
difficulty- of correcdy "reading" desirable women's desires or intentions,
whether they be historical women (Isabel herself, addressed by name in
San Pedro's Arnalte y Lucenda) , her ladies-in-waiting (Marina Manuel,
whose literary influence San Pedro acknowledges in the preface to that
same work) , the wives of the nobles whom the romance authors served
(the Duchess ofAlba, in the case ofJuan de Flores) , or the fictional "prin-
cesses" like Oriana who hold the key to the hero's identity, success, or
happiness.
     It is instructive in this regard to compare the elegiac tone of the Stud-
ies in the Spanish Sentimental Romance with that of a similar anthology
published in 1985 and dedicated primarily to French romance. In the
introduction to Romance: Generic Transformation from Chrétien de
Troyes to Cervantes, the editors, Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis
Brownlee, set out the dual presuppositions of the volume: first, that ro-
mance has no meaningful existence as a static category, and must instead
be conceived of as a dynamic, transformative process; and second, the
inextricability of romance from the complex, evolving historical situa-
tion that produces it. The first premise is striking for its the untroubled
assumption of the very generic instability and hybridization that has dis-
turbed so many critics of the Spanish sentimental romance. But it is the
second premise, that is, the awareness that "the evolving identity of the
romance genre reflects -indeed, results from- a dialectic with social and
political history involving issues as diverse as inscribed ideology,
sociolinguistic hierarchization, and readership" (1) is most pertinent to
my discussion here.

The Gendered Taxonomy ofSpanish Romance223

    In general, hispanomedievalists have neglected the ideological func-
tion of Spanish romance, namely its important role in reflecting, refract-
ing, and shaping the ambitions and anxieties of the Castilian aristocracy
at a particularly conflictive historicaljuncture, the mid-fifteenth through
the mid-sixteenth centuries, when the hegemony of that class was being
threatened by the growth of the monarchy, the centralization and bu-
reaucratization of power, and the rise of an intellectual class being
groomed to administer the bureaucracy of the nascent state. There have
been approximations to this issue: Regula Rohland de Langbehn has de-
tected moral and political issues relevant to conversos in the romances
of San Pedro and Flores; Gwara and Carmen Parrilla, following up on
the archival work that has placed Juan de Flores close to the very center
of monarchic power at the time he was composing his romances, have
suggested ways that Triunfo de amor deals with the conflict between
monarchic and feudal power. Closer to my own perspective is that of
Maria Fernanda Aybar Ramirez, who stresses that the so-called sentimental
"recogen los ideales, deseos frustrados - y yo diría agresividad militar-
de una aristocracia caballeresco-cortesana condenada por el proceso
histórico de fortalecimiento de la monarquía absolutista y una naciente
economía monetaria y mercantil ... que desequilibra los cuadros sociales
estamentales y el modo de producción feudal" (135). There has been,
however, no sustained attempt to explicate the social function that such
works undoubtedly share with the so-called romances ofchivalry and with
European romance as a whole. We have, in other words, not adequately
addressed these texts as what Stephen Knight calls "potent ideological
documents of the dominant class" (xiv) , nor the specific ways in which
the works play an essentially conservative role in transmitting patriarchal
ideology and class privilege, as Roberta Krueger has done for French
romance.

    In conclusion, eliminating the gendered binary opposition of the
sentimental and chivalric in Spanish romance studies would enhance our
understanding of the ways that Spanish romance writers strive to repro-
duce patriarchal norms of gender and sexuality, and especially of mas-
culine identity and status, in the face of profound and rapid social change.
Readers made this diverse group of romances the European printing
press's earliest, and in some instances most enduring, best-sellers. In this
case, as in many others we critics are sometimes loathe to acknowledge,
readers know best. This is as true of modern academic readers of ro-
mance as of medieval aristocratic ones. I say this because the classifica-
tion of romance into two distinct and opposed sub-genres is not recog-