Dorotea’s Displacement: Performing the Possible in Early Modern Spain

Abstract

Mancha. The two-part novel is a keen representation of the economic, social, and psychological displacement that was experienced by early modern Spanish subjects as a result of what José Antonio Maravall termed "the diphasic schema of a social crisis" ("From the Renaissance" 2). The phenomenon of displacement-conceptualized here as the movement away from a normative subject position to another, alternative subject position-could and did occur (both by coercion and choice) as people reacted to and dealt with the crisis and the absolutist State's increasingly restrictive response to the expansive tendencies of the sixteenth century. Indeed, Cervantes's novel is a sustained exploration of the displacement of Alonso Quijano as he attempts to distance himself from the restrictive subject position of hidalgo and create an alternative space in which he can construct himself as an individual. In other words, the normative role of hidalgo available to Alonso Quijano within the dominant discourses of Habsburg Spain (primarily, through blood and lineage) had ceased to produce what Judith Butler terms "a livable life," a life in which the physical and psychic survival-or both-of the subject is possible. 3 Although Quijano is the wandering subject par excellence, he is not the only character in the text with the dream of distancing himself from an unviable subject position, with the fantasy of being something or someone else. Much like the famous hidalgo, Dorotea, the dishonored farmer's daughter whom we first meet in part one, chapter twenty-eight of Cervantes's novel, also seeks to fulfill her dream of escaping an unliv-3 I base my conceptualization of a "livable life" on Butler's work in Undoing Gender. In this text, Butler deals extensively with the concepts of performance and viability. Seeking to respond to critics who have charged that gender performance is not political and/or that gender performativity, especially drag or gender parody, is only playful and fun (read, inconsequential to serious theoretical consideration), Butler explores not only the political effects but also the ethical obligations involved in gender performance. In an imagined back-and-forth, she states, "So what if new forms of gender are possible, how does this affect the ways that we live and the concrete needs of the human community? […] I would respond that it is not a question merely of producing a new future for genders that do not yet exist. […] It is a question of developing, within the law, within psychiatry, within social and literary theory, a new legitimating lexicon for the gender complexity that we have always been living. […] The conception of politics at work here is centrally concerned with the question of survival, of how to create a world in which those who understand their gender and their desire to be nonnormative can live and thrive not only without the threat of violence from the outside but without the pervasive sense of their own unreality, which can lead to suicide or a suicidal life" (219).