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Sacrificial Lambs and DomesticGoddesses, or, Did Cervantes WriteChick Lit? (Being a Meditation on Women and Free Will)Theresa Ann Searsicture this: a lady, beautiful (of course), young (proba-bly mid-twenties, although she clearly believes thattime is running out on her chance to carpe that diem),wealthy, noble, and a widow. She has, of course, manysuitors; but although a duke eventually tosses his hat into the ring, only two of the others stand out. The odds-on favoriteof the moment is a studmuffin: abs and buns of steel, flashy dresser,flashy talker. The lady does not know that he also strings womenalong for the sense of power it gives him; she is also unaware that heis a compulsive prevaricator and that an ugly streak of brutality runsthrough his character. The lady, it goes without saying, is in love, soshe finds it difficult to pay much attention to the other contender:our hero, the Regular Guy. He understands perfectly that his attrac-tions pale beside those of the Hunk. Both he and the lady tell us thathe is plain of face, that his body is unlikely to light anyone’s fire, and4748 Theresa Ann Sears Cervantes1Alarcón, Act I, 936–41.that he likewise lacks an impressive fortune. He is, however, intelli-gent, gallant, sincere, and generous of heart.Whom will the lady choose? She believes it will be the Hunk; sheis determined that it shall be. The name that she hears, however, justafter midnight on the feast of St. John, that pagan fertility festivalnewly clad in Christian garb, is (gasp!) that of the Regular Guy! Thelady, it seems, has a quarrel with destiny. First, she tries legalistic dis-putation: all right, it was our hero’s name, but the voice that pro-nounced it belonged to the Hunk. Finally, the lady declares herfreedom from all deterministic systems such as fate:¿Qué importará que el destinoquiera, si no quiero yo?Del cielo es la inclinación:el sí o el no todo es mío;que el hado en el albedríono tiene jurisdicción.1So, at the end, whom does she choose? The Regular Guy, of course,and she believes that she has done so freely, in spite of ancient fer-tility rites, in spite of literary convention, in spite of the ruthless wayin which all of the Hunk’s substantial shortcomings are exposed, inspite of the palpable desire of her creator to construct a system inwhich Regular Guys such as he can win the romantic prize. TheHunk, in fact, never had a chance, for the system is rigged to guar-antee that, logically and inescapably, the lady will “freely” choose asshe has been led to do.This is, of course, the plot of Ruiz de Alarcón’s Las paredes oyen,and it provides a useful opening for our topic here, for it deals ex-plicitly with the problem of women’s right to choose, and it also re-veals the myriad ways in which that supposed freedom isconditioned, especially in literary works, so that the subversive orrevolutionary possibilities it might imply simply never arise. Cer-vantes’s heroinesdefendtheirfree will no less vociferously than doesAlarcón’s lovely, logical doña Ana, but their choices rarely representa challenge to the socioliterary system that they are meant to exem-plify. This is nowhere clearer than in the master’s Byzantine adven-ture novel, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, in which Cervantespresents us with as complete a gallery of the feminine character aswe can find in any individual work, as well as with the possiblechoices a woman may make and their inevitable consequences.20.1 (2000) Women and Free Will 49The PersilesTo begin with, we must admit that the Persiles is a weird story, inall of the meanings of the word: it involves fate and prophecy, en-chantments and the supernatural, and things that are just plainstrange. Compared to the Persiles, Don Quijote is pure realism and theNovelas ejemplares—talking dogs and all—are reportage. Teemingwith incident, yet often tedious(whichCervantes,withannoyingpre-science, helpfully points out to us, hoping thereby to disarm us, andlargely succeeding), the Persiles testifies to the ultimate incapacity ofnarrative to present the whole of anyone’s experience. Looping backupon itself time and again as it tries to bring each new character’s lifeup to date, and to apprize that person of the lives of the other pilgrimsup to the moment of their chance encounter, it nevertheless sustainsa mystery at its very core. Repeatedly, until the end, it eludes the ques-tion of identity and origin: just who are Periandro and Auristela, andwhere did they come from? When we finally find out, we are left withanother, less respectful query: So what?As allegories, of course, as pilgrims, where Periandro andAuristela are going and what they will become is more important thanwhere they started, but they also make a curious pair for allegory. Un-settlingly androgynous, surpassingly skilled at lying and deception,supremely unconscious of the incestuous overtones that result fromthe combination of their love and their masquerade as brother and sis-ter, they seem to generate from their own slippery nature an entirepanoply of Cervantean lovers, liars, oddballs, and prodigies. Whenwe reach the end of their story, which is also the beginning, for that iswhen their identities are finally revealed, we know little more than weknew before the long-withheld revelation, and the resolution seemsless exemplary than breathless and forced. Because of this, and be-cause the text is at least in part conceived as a Christian allegory, it be-comes a test case for the existence and function (literary, as well astheological, social, and philosophical) of free will.Theories of Free WillIt seems to me peculiarly appropriate that we consider the con-cept of free will as it is used in narrative, for its importance andprominence arise out of the explanatory force that it possesses in thenarrative context. Christianity, as well as the other so-called “reli-gions of the book,” and significantly, unlike the pagan religions thatpreceded them, is both historical and narrative, in the sense that at a given moment in time, individuals had to choose to believe in its50 Theresa Ann Sears Cervantes2“To explain sin he must introduce another faculty besides desire or reasonto initiate this act, something which has the power to say no to the best adviceof reason and thus to confound the proper order between reason and desire. Hemust introduce the will” (Stone 262–63).3Modern theologians can be even blunter and more explicit.


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