Defleshing jealousy: An ideological device in Shakespeare, Cervantes and Zayas

Ana Maria Gomez-Laguna, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation studies the ideological constitutions of the honor-code from the non-traditional point of view of jealousy. Here, jealousy is not understood as a pathology but as a social anxiety against subjects for reasons of gender and race. As a social scheme, the jealous plot is mainly constituted through four social narratives: the emergence of the modern state, the courtesan model of love, a manipulation of morality, and a latent subtext of racism and misogyny that permeate the before mentioned. I propose an ideological approach for jealousy, one that allows us to reveal the underlying contradictory criteria displayed by the English and Spanish society of the seventeenth century. From this perspective, jealousy becomes a screen that hides or silences the moral or ethical inconsistencies that according to Michel Foulcault or David Goldberg are intrinsic to the foundations of our modern society. The works by Shakespeare, Cervantes and Zayas studied here were not chosen because these authors exemplify the working of jealousy as a corrective mechanism, but rather, because they expose the flaws of the honor-code, its moral inconsistencies. These works not only exhibit husbands or suitors who are censored by their jealous condition (in one way or another they all are punished by it), they also elicit the ideological critique of a society that refuses to acknowledge any kind of honorability not based on the honor code. As Cervantes's famous sentence anticipated and summarized, “cada hombre es hijo de sus obras” [“each man is the son of his own deeds”] each man should be the one and only responsible for the honorability of his acts and his persona, and so he proves in El celoso extremeño [The Jealous Old Man from Extremadura]. Shakespeare and Zayas agreed and implemented such a statement, extending it to the ethnically-marked man in the case of Shakespeare's Othello, and to the overprotected woman in the case of Zayas's El prevenido engañado and La inocencia castigada. From an ideological point of view, jealousy becomes not only the means that justifies particular expectations and exemplary punishments but also the powerful argument that leaves the door open to abuses and manipulations committed in the name of morality. In sum, the jealousy studied in these works is one of the subtlest devices that patriarchy counts on to reinforce its ideological constituencies.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Ganelin, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Comparative literature|Literature|British and Irish literature|Romance literature|Theater

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