Dorotea’s Case — Middlebrook
By Leah Middlebrook | Published on November 8, 2021
This is a position paper about a subject position. A new project I am beginning to work on examines the consistency of the role played by the White bourgeois female subject in the modern social imaginary. This consistency is so marked that (for example) key theses from a book published just last month by Kyla Schuller, which analyzes White women’s entitlement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, describes, nearly to the gesture, the behavior of a great number of characters in early modern literature. In the writing of Cervantes and Maria de Zayas, in dramatic works by Lope and Calderón, in writings by sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (somewhat more ambivalently), White bourgeois women appropriate the emotional labor of Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color; they propose alliances that cross boundaries of class, caste, race, and ethnicity, only to realign themselves with the dominant orderonce they have achieved their ends; they collude with patriarchy at the expense of women’s interests, such as the safety of female bodies, the protection and support of girls, the affirmation of the value of female human life. Anchored in contemporary research on whiteness, and on the identity and agency of the White bourgeois woman as a subset within that category, this project, which I am tentatively calling, Damas in Distress, extends an analysis of White bourgeois femininity “back” to the 16th and 17th centuries (the “early modern period”) to demonstrate that “White, bourgeois female” is a subject position which is fundamental to and coeval with a Western modernity structured by capitalism, imperialism, extractivism, and coalescing discourses of whiteness.
Before I move on, I should emphasize that my interest here is in a subject position. That is, I draw a distinction in this project (and generally) between living human beings (people); characters (who are set at play in a novelistic field); and subject positions (which are functions of discursive regimes organized to support specific political frameworks and dispositions of power). The reading practices I am developing in this project seek to expand our capacity to think through women’s experience and women’s lives by holding the latter (the subject position of the White, bourgeois female) separate from the former (women, characters). A growing facility with this analysis weakens the dominance of this subject position as the norm that structures how female life is represented, recognized, talked, and written about (perhaps especially in academia and scholarship). Evidence of female life as it is lived in its multiplicity and variety can come into focus and make new sense for us, show us new dimensions of an early modern world we might think we know. I recognize that this is not a new aspiration; it follows Gender Trouble fairly closely. But there is still significant work to do in the area of early modern literary studies; moreover, that work offers to contribute to twenty-first century Feminist projects, even as it opens up rich new terrain in our own fields.
This project is in its preliminary stages, but I can offer two examples, both from Don Quijote:
Marcela, the free-spirited, intelligent, and self-confident woman we encounter in chapters 12–14 of Part 1, rejects the terms upon which her society recognizes female agency. She makes her case against a willful misreading of her desires and her behavior on the part of Grisóstomo, Anselmo, and their community; and she explains, patiently and in a well-crafted argument, the life she seeks to pursue. After making her speech, she vanishes from the novel.
My next example is Dorotea, a character who bears resemblance to her forerunner, in that she is witty, beautiful, wealthy (all qualities Marcela possesses). Like Marcela, Doroteafeels entitled by those qualities to seek to both control her own narrative and exercise agency over the shape and direction of her life.
In other ways, Dorotea is more conservative. Whereas Marcela seeks a life free from the burdens and the constraints society imposes on women, Dorotea actively seeks them out.Rosilie Hernández has analyzed Dorotea’s construction as a subject and points out that her most pressing desire is not simply that Don Fernando fulfill his promise to marry her, but rather that she be publicly recognized as Don Fernando’s wife.Building from Hernández, I would suggest that what Dorotea is seeking in this novel is captured by the term “subjectivation,”the English word Judith Butler coined to describe Foucault’s (asujetissement), a word relevant to Dorotea because the agency and fulfillment she enjoys by the time she exits the narrative in chapter 47 are not entirely of her own conjuring. Rather, they correspond to what Butler calls, “power on loan”: the limited agency granted to subjects when they accept primary subordination to a dominant regime and receive, in return, measures of power, and the authority to subordinate others.
Dorotea’s trajectory follows this process: she demonstrates an embrace of subordination on the basis of her gender, her social rank, and her sexuality (she is not a virgin), while she cannily assesses how and where she can prevail, given the constraints that delimit (but also define) her power and mobility. And she successfully uses those she observes to be her inferiorsin the social hierarchy to advance her progress toward her goals.
For example: in speeches in chapters 28, 29, and 36, Dorotea crafts deft rhetorical performances in which she concedes the authority of social codes and accepts them with prudent grace, humility, and charm. As a result, she wins sympathy, assistance, and a position within the community she seeks to join. In chapter 30, however, Dorotea re-assesses the hierarchies that shape this community and makes a calculated decision to align herself with social norms and subordinate don Quijote and Sancho, respectively.
The second element of Dorotea’s journey (and the one that links her most evidently to the topics under discussion in our seminar today), has to do with the strange detour she takes —a detour she is required to take? A detour she volunteers to take? The terms under which Dorotea assumes the role of Micomiconaare as ambivalent as the process of subjectivation itself. But in order to accomplish her goal, Dorotea travels through an identity not her own. She assumes the role of Micomicona, the African princess, an identity the priest conceives of as a ruse, presented as the trick by which to bring Don Quijote home, and one Dorotea appropriates in chapter 29, perhaps because she recognizes that playing Micomicona will integrate her into a group who will help her in her search for don Fernando. She continues this masquerade, moving in and out of Micomicona as an alternate identity, until she and don Fernando exit the novel inchapter 47.
A number of questions arise for me here; chief among them: Why is Africa introduced at this juncture of the novel, and why via Dorotea?
My own answer, as might be foreseen, given the orientation of my project, is whiteness. Dorotea enters the novel at a crucial point in the novelization of the text, a literary feat she helps accomplish when she successfully “crosses over” from a side plot to the main one. She joins Cardenio in expanding the story’s scope, but unlike Cardenio, Dorotea plays an additionalinstrumental by assisting in the worlding of the novel. In her expanded role as Dorotea-Micomicona, she transforms a tale whose scope up to this point has been confined to regional, Castilian affairs, supplemented by Alonso Quejana’s chivalric fantasies, into one that encompasses the African continent and, shortly thereafter, the Mediterranean and the Spanish American vice realms, as Zoraida and the members of the Viedma family find their way to the Inn over the course of chapters 37- 42. Dorotea contributes actively to accommodating these characters and their stories within the novel’s digesis: the resolution of the Cardenio — don Fernando — Luscinda love triangle inaugurates the series of reconciliations through which Zoraida, Ruy Pérez de Viedma, Pedro de Aguilar, Juan Pérez de Viedma, doñaClara, and don Luis find their places in a rapidly expanding novelistic habitus. In addition, Dorotea extends herself to draw the erstwhile strangers into community. As a consequence, she is instrumental in incorporating the various regions (León, North Africa, Greece, Albania, Mexico) — as well as the colonial, imperial, and merchant-trader relationships by which the members of the company engage with those regions— into the community of the Inn, Cervantes’s metaphor for imperial Spain.
Within this cosmopolitan, imperial Hapsburg habitus, the subject position of the bourgeois female incorporates a new dimension: Dorotea becomes Christian and White, the latter con letra mayúscula because it is an identity that overlaps with but is not fully or even principally accounted for by skin color. This is a power relationship, or what might also be thought of as a caste relationship, in terms broached by Isabel Wilkerson (and before her, by Anthony J. Cascardi, albeit with different emphasis and focus). But it is the voyage through the identity of an African princess that inscribes color and Christianity as dimensions of this subject position.
So if we keep our focus trained on Dorotea, the Micomicona masquerade adds complexity to this character’s journey to fulfillment, to subjectivation, and to the satisfaction (whatever the compromises) of her desire: what is required of her is not simply an initial subordination to power, followed byacceptance of the terms the power scheme offers her for acting and being. She must also contribute to the elaboration of a dominant political caste, the Christian, White Spaniards who by virtue of divine grace, as well as enhanced reason and sober judgement, rule over the diverse peoples and regions of the Mediterranean and the globe, including Africa.
But here we encounter both an aporia in my critical approach and an ethical impasse. The aporia is that my analysis and methodology reproduce the gesture my larger project seeks to dismantle. In framing Dorotea as Cervantes’s way of inscribing a subject position he intuits or recognizes as fundamental to the political apparatus that underwrites Hapsburg early modernity (the White, bourgeois female subject), I exclude a possibility of female Iberian life —a life, moreover, whose signs are omnipresent throughout these chapters: the black African-descended Iberian woman. That is, there is evidence in Don Quijote that Micomicona points to a specific modality of Iberian/Spanish life, if we know how to read her.
Following on this self-reflection, the ethical situation emerges: the conventions of academia favor single-author publication; however, the questions I have found myself asking about Dorotea would not have emerged if I had not been working with some very smart graduate students, among them, Cornesha Tweede, who in her dissertation grapples with the affordances and the limitations of what she calls the “white lens” that tends to determine how we approach early modern Iberian texts. Tweede’s reading practices, which follow on the ground-breaking theoretical and methodological interventions introduced by Nicholas R. Jones in his recent work, open the way to drawing Micomicona forward as a character in her own right, one who incorporates traces of black African female presence and life in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Iberia.
It is possible to cite Jones’s work, because it has appeared in print. When working with unpublished scholars and methodologies; however, the situation is more delicate. Cornesha Tweede’s and my solution —and I am indebted to her generosity and good will here— is a co-authored publication, DoroMicona, in which we employ a dialogic structure to call attention to reality of both characters, the White bourgeois woman and the black African one. So I will leave off my remarks here, to make way for the different and specific discussion Micomicona requires.
