Description:
Unhappily Ever After explores the self-consciousness of Cervantes’s marriage tales. In Las dos doncellasone sees metafictional devices such as wordplay, names and naming, doubling, ironic discourse, and anawareness of the role of the narrator, among others. La ilustre fregona seems to be aware of the importanceof signs and interpretation of signs, of the creation and transfer of meaning. Intertextuality alsofigures prominently with playful references to Pedro de Urdemalas, to Lope de Vega, and to biblicalcharacters. Carnivalistic elements are displayed as the text draws attention to the similarities betweenand life and fiction. La se ora Cornelia is a story about how (not) to create a romance.

Multiple levels ofnarration complicate the structure of the novel, while at the same time, the authority of the storytellersis undermined by their actions. Ideal society is disrupted by a picaresque presence that threatens to breakdown narrative and social conventions. The similarities between the heroines of idealistic fiction and theanti-heroines of the picaresque are exposed. In La fuerza de la sangre, male violence and irresponsibilityare supplanted by female ingenuity and self-determination as Leocadia directs her own play, converting - apparently - a tragedy into a comedy. In La espa ola inglesa, both the narrator and the charactersundermine idealistic conventions, casting doubt on the bliss of the final union. Likewise, the non union,as in the case of Marcela, and the troubled unions of characters such as Camila, Dorotea, and Luscinda,rend the veil of marital paradise, serving as models for later writers such as Maria de Zayas.

Most of these novellas and episodes end in or point toward marriage, but the unions often seem to bemore cosmetic than justifiable from a logical perspective. If romances are supposed to end happily and topresent ennobled characters, these stories seem to highlight their non-conformity to the generic convention.A marriage is slapped on at the end, but the story leading up to the marriage often reveals problems that needserious consideration. In these stories marriage is more of a bandage than a cure: the idealism is deceptive.

Unhappily Ever After does not attempt to examine all Cervantes’s marriage stories nor to exhaustall the possible manifestations and interpretations of the deceptive devices that they enclose; it does,however, encourage readers to (re)engage the marriage tales and the interpretations that they havespawned over the centuries.


TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Acknowledgements......9

Introduction......11

1. Metafiction: The Word and the Concept......19

2. Approaches to the Novelas ejemplares......29

3. Las dos doncellas: Double Lives, Double Talk......63

4. La ilustre fregona: The World Turned Upside Down......77

5. La señora Cornelia: Deconstructiong Romance......97

6. La fuerza de la sangre: Deisre and Deception......113

7. La española inglesa: Truth and Fiction......123

8. Negative Exemplarity in Marriage Plots: Cervantes and Beyond......131

Conclusion......141

Workd cited......145

Index......151