Deadly Gaze and Divine Object: Marcela’s Representation in Don Quijote

• Luis F. López González ^[1]
  1. [1] Vanderbilt University

     Vanderbilt University

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, ISSN-e 0277-6995, Vol. 41, Nº. 1, 2021, págs. 107-134
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen
  • español

    Este estudio explora las otras maneras en las que Cervantes representa el personaje de Marcela en su obra maestra, Don Quijote. Tradicional, aunque no exclusivamente, la crítica cervantina ha interpretado la caracterización de Marcela como una figura protofeminista cuyo discurso durante las celebraciones fúnebres de Grisóstomo critica las inequidades contra la mujer. Este artículo argumenta que el personaje de Marcela tiene otras funciones dentro del entramado dramático de la obra. Ella contiene características de la tradición dialéctica del amor cortés cuya vertiente más tradicional tiende a representar a las mujeres como figuras de polos opuestos, divinamente hermosas y matadoras

  • English

    Vision and optical illusions are media through which Miguel de Cervantes outlines and builds the aesthetic edifice of his masterpiece Don Quijote. The author’s dramatic emphasis on cognitive perception is primarily rooted in Don Quijote’s psychiatric disorder, which distorts the experience of the “real” world, thus challenging and creating new modes of perception. The semantic instability of things (bacía-yelmo or venta-castillo) and people (Aldonza-Dulcinea or Don Alonso Quijano-Don Quijote) becomes not only the foundation of the work, but also a pretext to invite the reader to visually examine and engage with the objects and people in the text. Female characters, even the idealized portrait that Don Quijote contrives of Dulcinea in chapter 13 of part one (1605), are often represented to connote, in Laura Mulvey’s terminology, “to-be-looked-atness”, riveting beauties displayed for the pleasure of the male audience. Save for a few female characters, such as Maritornes or Dulcinea whose unsightly appearance counterbalances Marcela’s otherworldly beauty and serves a comical function with the novel, women are rarely fashioned as characters with whom the female reader can identify. The strategy of Marcela’s characterization is in consonance with the author’s aesthetic fascination with female beauty, thus deploying it as a mechanism to heighten the erotic impact on his male audience. Marcela embodies a symbol of male sexuality, coded as an avatar of beauty fashioned simultaneously to captivate and destroy those who dare to look at her with lust.