From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 13.2 (1993): 105-24.

Copyright 1993, The Cervantes Society of America

ARTICLE

The Tyranny of Love in El amante liberal

NINA COX DAVIS

AJOR studies during the last two decades of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares by El Saffar
(Novel to Romance, 1974) and Forcione (Cervantes and the Humanist Vision, 1982) have heralded
growing interest among Hispanists in this rich collection of short narratives, as they have turned our
attention to the problems for interpretation evident in their varied content and generic diversity. In her
view of the novelas as a systematic poetic study of man's quest for transcendence and faith in higher
truths, El Saffar separates what for her are early, realist works whose characters are limited by their
own misdirected acts of volition from later, idealistic narratives whose characters' lives are defined
by faith and the intervention of God in the guise of the narrator. Forcione's study, similarly, focuses upon
the novelas as spiritual allegories, finding in their composition evidence of Cervantes's debt to the
dialogic poetics of Renaissance humanism. In so doing, he focuses upon the discursive and rhetorical
complexities that have been the subject of much recent novelas scholarship:

In the sense that the irregularities of Cervantes's Sileni refuse to allow their reader the comforts of a
stock response and instead burden him with the obligation to cope with unsettling violations of his
vocabulary of genre, the Novelas
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ejemplares stand as one of the fullest literary realizations of the characteristic nonlinear discourse of the
great humanist writers of the sixteenth century, who turned to dialectic, ironic, and paradoxical modes of
exposition in their efforts to explore the complexities of truth, to provoke their readers' collaboration in
that exploration, and to revitalize perceptions blunted by the tyranny of familiarity and appearance (2829).
Other Hispanists have taken up the problems of genre and discourse in studies of individual exemplary
narratives of Cervantes's series, and have pondered the issue of exemplarity itself.1 While many modern
readers admit that personal preference and post-modernist critical orientations have caused them to focus
upon the realist novelas, works characterized by the multivalence, lack of narrative authority, and
murkier exemplarity of the subsequent novel form, others have turned their attention to the idealistic tales,
which appear to be structured upon the clearer formal and ideological principles of romance. Although
their formulaic structure and lack of verisimilitude reveal their affinity to many other examples of
romance, we find that these tales are multifaceted and ideologically ambiguous in ways quite similar to
their more realistic counterparts in the Cervantine novelas.2 The presence of instability in the figurative
systems of romances appearing to be Christian allegories only reinforces the cautionary posture of
Cervantes's more multivocal, discordant, down to earth tales: readers must work to assemble meaning
that is as complex and pluridimensional as is the world in which they live. Representation of the spiritual
in the novelas is in many instances not dissoluble from consideration of the socially pragmatic; nor are the
dictates of religion delineated separately from issues of race, nationality, gender, or class. Cervantine
exemplars must model judgements that readers are to

Sicroff's article (The Demise of Exemplarity) is a recent example of schematic reevaluation of the whole series' didactic
aims.
2
While El Saffar posits a chronological movement in the composition of the novelas ejemplares from the realistic or novel
form to the transcendent idealism of romance, other critics (for example, Riley and Sobejano) argue that in the novelas, as in
his other works, Cervantes continued to experiment with both forms, often producing a strong resonance of counter-genres
within one work. Friedman's recent study of La fuerza de la sangre, especially 153-54, and Johnston's essay on La ilustre
fregona are excellent examples of the increased attention given to this generic hybridization in individual novelas.

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experience as their own critical acts by doing the right thing, often in contexts shaped by
hierarchically intertwined discourses and conflictive systems of value.3
Of the Novelas ejemplares, El amante liberal is one that has been largely overlooked by modern
readers. While commentaries characterize it as a narrative of clear religious exemplarity, El amante
liberal receives poor reviews for its confusing form and unnecessarily elaborate discursive style.4 In
recent studies, however, Hart, Selig, and Daz Migoyo have taken up the issue of the work's Byzantine
composition, demonstrating the importance of its heterogeneous elements in generating that clear
exemplarity for readers and in influencing their response. Hart's detailed analysis of the complex layers of
admiratio in El amante liberal suggests that the work's difficulty represents not an artistic deficiency, but
rather Cervantes's mastery of those precepts that sought to heighten his readers' pleasure in reading.
Although they appear overly contrived by modern standards, the varied, often extravagant reversals of
fortune that make up the plot's peripeteia strive to deleitar by adding variety. The manner in which they
are narrated clearly is intended to intensify that effect. Hart's study of sample lines reveals a narrative
discourse dense with cleverly executed rhetorical figures that Cervantes's educated contemporaries would
have recognized and appreciated (312-13). The in medias res narrative format of the romance itself,
scored by flashbacks, temporal disjunctions, interior narrative frames, repetitions, and parallels, is even
more directed toward exciting the readers, for it drives them whether irritated moderns or, we must
assume, delighted contemporaries to seek reconstruction and closure of the tale's many threads.
Selig proposes that El amante liberal is not, as we tend to view it, an overwrought tale, but more
accurately a mini-Byzantine romance,
3

Spadaccini and Talens argue in Cervantes and the Dialogic World that literature of the Spanish Baroque, however
popular or massified it appears, functions to instill in readers the ideology that privileges specific structures of
institutionalized power (238). Hence, they explain, in Baroque culture the collaboration between text and receiver is illusory
to the extent that the power of interpretation is given to the reader/spectator in order to make the manipulation (and the
persuasion) more viable (240).
4
Among those critics who see this work as clearly exemplary of Christian values, both in its final definition of liberalidad
and in its resolution through marriage, are Lowe, Pabon, El Saffar, Sicroff, Casalduero, Ameza y Mayo, and Forcione. For
reviews of twentieth-century criticism of its style and form, see Ameza y Mayo, 2: 58-59; Lowe, 400; Hart, 306.

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in which many of the elements typical to a full-length work are employed to articulate the basic love
story. His schematic review of such constitutive ingredients includes: a nonlinear and discontinuous
narrative discourse that moves the plot from confusion to restored order; protagonists whose journey
catapults them across a landscape of real geographical places and encounters with coordinates that appear
to be culturally and historically specific, and who are linked by a linguistic hybrid of Mediterranean
languages; repeated reference to material exchange; adjective-formation that, as he hints, may reinforce
the ideological slant with which the text views these coordinates; similarly, the portraiture of characters;

and use of self-referentiality, in the stories within the story the latter, as Selig observes, bringing us full
circle back to the problematics of Byzantine plot (6869).
By concentrating in his analysis specifically upon this provocative narrative procedure, Daz Migoyo
deconstructs in his study the telling of the lover's tale to reveal in its entertaining exemplarity a curiously
pluralistic message, what I would call an ideological echo-effect that resonates like back-talk to the
hero Ricardo's own complacent words. The critic observes that in this novela, as in many others,
Cervantes chooses Christian marriage as the perfect conclusion to the love story, because its sacramental
nature allows it to function as a material and an allegorical signifier of the union that is simultaneously
signified, effecting a neat closure of the multi-linear plot (130). He argues that the representation of this
transcendent ending, however, is achieved with a peculiar procedure, for instead of positing the ideal as
real, it forces us to accept a self-consciously constructed fiction that betrays its own artificiality (130-31).
The most notable example, he argues, is the staging of the story's exemplary generous love as the act of
linguistic creation on the part of the hero, Ricardo, that advances the plot. To clarify, the critic notes that
the first articulation of Ricardo's love, an unliberal or covetous desire for possession of Leonisa expressed
when he finds her being courted by Cornelio, has set the events of the tale into motion well before the
beginning of the in medias res narrative (135-37). The novela itself opens, after Leonisa and Ricardo have
been captured by Turks and separated by turbulent travels, with the lament of the captive Ricardo, who
seeks to free her a duplicate, supplementary discourse of love that appears to be characterized this time
by generosity or amor liberal. Daz Migoyo
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asserts that while the second, apparently reformed, discourse would seem to be a product of the first,
selfish one, as an effect of experience, the disordered chronological juxtaposition of flashbacks and the
use of multiple narrative frames obscure the origination of all references to his past in Ricardo's interested
present-tense voice. As a captive, he still longs for her midway through the plot and until its end his own
words to readers via the interlocutor, his confidant Mahamut, portray Ricardo as an equally desirous
spectator to others' attempts to steal and possess his woman.
Although the heroine eventually agrees to feign pleasure in his company when they meet in disguise to
plot their escape, she warns him that his love for her remains unrequited:
El hablarnos ser fcil y a m ser grandsimo gusto el hacello, con presupuesto que jams me has de
tratar cosa que a tu declarada pretensin pertenezca, que en la hora que tal hicieres, en la misma me
despedir de verte . . . . Contntate con que he dicho que no me dar, como sola, fastidio tu vista, porque
te hago saber, Ricardo, que siempre te tuve por desabrido y arrogante, y que presumas de ti algo ms de
lo que debas (Novelas ejemplares, 173).
When the novela's wanderings are brought to closure by the deception of their captors, and their escape
and return home amidst expected fanfare, Ricardo once again declares his love, this time in an
ideologically correct liberalidad that appears to be motivated by generous self-abnegation (Yo sin
ventura, pues quedo sin Leonisa, gusto de quedar pobre, que a quien Leonisa le falta, la vida le sobra
[186]). He grandly offers to give Leonisa along with his share of their booty to Cornelio, the man she had
originally preferred, only to realize that she is not his to give another: Vlame Dios, . . . no es posible
que nadie pueda demostrarse liberal de lo ajeno: qu jurisdiccin tengo yo en Leonisa para darla a otro?
(186). Ricardo then magnanimously offers her the right to act autonomously, declaring her to be suya,
her own person (186). This declaration reverberates with irony, for her own words have clarified that she
was never his to give. Yet by removing the discourse of love from the realm of exchange, the hero makes
it possible for Leonisa to do the right thing in responding to las obligaciones que como discreta debe

de pensar que me tiene, the obligations of honor made public by Ricardo's very words of denial (186).
The heroine corrects Ricardo's still presumptuous rationale, retorting: Esto
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digo por darte a entender, Ricardo, que siempre fui ma, sin estar sujeta a otro que a mis padres . . .
(187); she is bound only by the constraints of her lineage and class, not by the claims upon her of his
liberalidad. It is for the former in effect, for the motive of representing her own flesh and blood
honorably that Leonisa exercises her autonomy, paradoxically, by accepting to become his: a trueque
de no mostrarme desagradecida, . . . oh valiente Ricardo!, mi voluntad, hasta aqu recatada, perpleja y
dudosa, se declara en favor tuyo (187). As Daz Migoyo brilliantly observes, this acuerdo sinceramente
figurado, armoniosamente contradictorio, literalmente figurado reinscribes the story's exemplary
liberalidad, rendering a correct reading of the text's hidden anagram: RICARDO-CORAZON-DELEON (150). Cervantes's story in this novela thus closes with the double representation of doing the
right thing on the part of both protagonists. The patent theatricality with which the lesson of conjugal
love is staged appears to be in dissonance with the motives for love on the part of Ricardo and his
competitors that have advanced the plot self-interest, desire for domination of the Other, and the lust to
appropriate or possess that which is of value in the Other, in Leonisa's case, her own eroticized symbolic
function as a prime unit of exchange in a libidinal homosocial economy but it is all the more so an
appropriate closure to Cervantes's portrayal of Ricardo as masculine Christian exemplar. After pursuing
the many threads of this highly charged story to its end, readers therefore confront an abruptly
anticlimactic resolution: the desire mobilized earlier by the libidinous representation of Leonisa and the
fantasies of those chasing her is rather unsuccessfully displaced onto Ricardo, who now appears
somewhat ridiculously mythologized as a Christian knight within whose figure she is literally and
figuratively subsumed by consummation of the marriage sacrament (188).
Daz Migoyo's astute recovery of the chivalric subtext in El amante liberal merits careful
consideration, for it signals a major drive in the ideological formulation of the novela, despite the story's
structural appearance of being a Byzantine romance in miniature. Although its idealism and closure
have led some readers to place it among the few narratives of the Cervantine series that may be seen
simply as Christian romances (see my note 4), El amante liberal is indeed another example of the writer's
experiments with the potential for problematizing meaning through counter-genres, this time not romance
versus what we
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call novel, but in a combination of Byzantine and chivalric romance forms. In Allegories of Love, Diana
de Armas Wilson traces both the characteristics and underlying tensions that distinguish these two
romance forms, noting that by the late sixteenth century the Byzantine model had largely supplanted its
chivalric predecessor in Spanish literature, with good reason. The chivalric romance, she explains,
generated by a merger between the cross and the stirrup, served to express the interests of the Church
and of the feudal nobility, idealizing the behavior of the latter (13). In this literary tradition, marriage
an alliance between families is one more expression of class interest; desire is focused beyond its
limits, in a privileging of adultery. As Wilson points out, the chivalric was also an enterprise whose class
solidarity, by the mid-sixteenth century, was rapidly being undermined by nascent capitalism, by a value
system in which the erotics of money and property had begun to displace the erotics of courtly love and
holy war (16). She speculates that renewed interest in the classical Byzantine romance stemmed from
changes in Spanish society and its ideologies in the wake of the expulsion of Jews and moriscos and of its

faltering attempts at capitalism, for this supplanting form is structured upon the travels of exiled and
marginalized characters, and is laden with reference to commerce and exchanges (16-18). The prominent
erotic longing that characterizes the Byzantine form finds resolution in the requited love of a marriage
between two active subjects, which provides an egalitarian structure for closure in this less class-dictated,
quasi-bourgeois narrative form.
I propose that while the exchange based, libertine Byzantine structure and many of its oriental
elements clearly dominate the plot's literal level in El amante liberal, they function in a very complex
fashion to allegorize the latent political and religious message of western, or Christian, chivalric tradition.
In effect, the fascinating multiculturalism, the eroticism, the inviting marginality and transgressiveness of
the Byzantine romance constitute both admiratio and the discursive formulation of dangers requiring the
punitive operations of the work's restrictive chivalric moral, which reveals itself to be religious, racist,
and for us, at least, extravagantly sexist. In El amante liberal we find clear articulation through Ricardo's
voice of what Said terms the Orientalist discourse, as a collective notion identifying us Europeans
against all those non-Europeans that has informed Western institutions and their ideology since the
early imperialist
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expansion of nations such as Spain (6-7).5 By rejecting the allure of difference the oriental Moslem
world, its money, the torpe deseo (174) of his Turkish master's wife, and ultimately the ravishing beauty
of a Leonisa marketed in that world, the male exemplar Ricardo is rewarded in the narrative by a return to
his own religion, homeland, and class, and by possession of her as part of his own flesh. Leonisa's own
exemplification of the knightly Christian ideal of self-abnegation, in marrying him to emulate a familial
and nobiliary honor that is engendered masculine in the text, confirms the hero's drive to sameness,
closing the narrative on a resounding rejection of other lands, their economies, and their religion,
elements that, as I will show, are represented in feminized terms.6 The heroine, the principal motive for
the plot's development until its end, then recedes from view to bear Ricardo's heirs, her will to biological
subjugation being rendered, paradoxically, in the novela's ideology as indication of her heroic that is,
manly virtue. Ricardo's amorous territorial quest thus opens and closes upon the represented topology
of the woman who is, in his own words, para m leona oxymoronic embodiment of the valiant and
fiercely unyielding, as capable of self-abnegation in her decision to value marriage over desire as is the
victor liberal himself (142).
The process through which Leonisa comes eventually to embody the Christian lesson of the tale,
however, is fraught with apparent inconsistencies: for if her person symbolizes the correctness of one
hierarchical system of human correspondence at the novela's end, that same body serves to represent other
configurations of social and political power earlier in the narrative. The eroticism with which it is
represented betrays a desire that
5

In Orientalism, Said dates the formulation of the Orientalist discourse from the great imperial drives of Britain and
France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, he acknowledges the significant contribution to Orientalism of the
Spanish and other smaller empires prior to this (17). Although the Orientalism of the Spanish Golden Age has not been widely
studied as a phenomenon broader than specific racial and religious issues, the construction of literary texts such as El amante
liberal reveals the strong influence and the complexity of its discursive articulations well before those of modern Orientalism.
6
While Paul Julian Smith does not study the representation of Moors and Turks in the Golden Age, he comments in opening
Representing the Other: Race, Text, and Gender in Spanish and Spanish American Narrative (1992) upon the importance of
the largely unstudied Oriental motifs that abound in peninsular literature of the period (2).

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is, in fact, clearly more ideological than specific to her character, for Leonisa is given little voice and less
agency in the narrative (her primary utterances, up to the work's end, consist ironically of deprecation of
the very man whom she finally marries) and her would-be lover Ricardo expresses desire first and
foremost for possession of her undifferentiated body lifeless, if need be. (After describing the
separation of their captors' ships by a storm which splintered the one in which she traveled, he recounts
searching the waves for el cuerpo de la desdichada Leonisa, lamenting mas an no quiso el cielo
concederme el alivio que esperaba tener de ver en mis brazos el cuerpo de Leonisa, que, aunque muerto y
despedazado, holgara de verle, por romper aquel imposible que mi estrella me puso de juntarme con l
como mis buenos deseos merecan [151-52, my emphasis].) In effect, the men of the narrative relate to
each other through her desirable body, and these political tensions are rendered along a series of linked
axes: religious, racial, and simultaneously engendered. While this system of attempted and thwarted
exchanges is organized hierarchically around the fundamental symbol of Ricardo (Christian, European,
masculine), his rivals for Leonisa vary from the same or related race and religion, figuratively engendered
female (Cornelio, the Greek captives), to racial and religious others (Moslem Turks and Arabs, the Jewish
merchant), equally engendered female. Until the economies that operate between them stabilize at the
work's end under the latent but dominant one represented by Ricardo, Leonisa functions as the
multivalent, mediating body through which their struggle for power is carried out. This novela is a
striking example of the eroticism of the body politic, both in Leonisa's variable figurative function and
in the prurience with which her highly public role is scrutinized by the narrative. Although the essays of
the Hunt anthology, Eroticism and the Body Politic, focus upon eighteenth-century France, the conceptual
framework that links them bears consideration here. Stressing that the very fact that political
organization can be imagined as a body leaves open the potential for erotic connotations, Hunt explains
that the special role of women in the transmission of power through their reproductive capacities
guaranteed that their common body was the representational figure of choice (1-2). To clarify, she
observes that this unique role is, more appropriately, an ambivalent position in conceptions of power:
Men could not relate to one another, politically or socially,
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without their relationship to women's bodies. The social and political order cannot be reproduced without
women, but women were almost always imagined as dangerous if they meddled in public that is,
political concerns (2). Cervantes's heroine, Leonisa, is indeed a threat to the stable conceptions of
religious purity and nobiliary honor harbored by Ricardo when she is the object of heated pursuit and
exchange among his rivals, the infidels; yet she also functions to confirm the principles that organize his
world in her will as subject to deny them all both use of her body and the benefits of her desire. It is
precisely Leonisa's lack of meddling in the politics that revolve around her that enables the narrative to
affirm her merits as subject: she, in the end, is not a threat to the transmission of her society's power, but
proves to be quite the opposite.
Readers of this novela are led to anticipate the centrality of the heroine to the captive Ricardo's quest
by the intense yearning that marks his discourse from the start. For the first five pages of the in medias
res plot, however, its force is revealingly displaced in a testy diatribe against the foreign economy in
which, we eventually find, she at present exists, one marked by material exchanges predicated on the
assignation of variable monetary values. The Turks' commercial world of influence peddling, slave
trading, and sexual favors is defined, in the words of Ricardo's male companion, the crypto-Christian
Mahamut, as an evil empire that cannot prevail: todo este imperio es violento, seal que prometa no ser
durable (141). Reference to the heroine whose pursuit launched the hero's adventures in this figuratively
and literally that is, racially dark territory follows, in the form of a eulogy of his homeland, the
Christian Trpana, an exclusive island community whose geographical perfection is manifest in the
legendary beauty of one of its own: una doncella, digo, por quien decan todas las curiosas lenguas y

afirmaban los ms raros entendimientos que era la de ms perfecta hermosura que tuvo la edad pasada
(142). According to the poets who laud the sum of her predictably metaphorized parts (eyes as shining
suns, pearls for teeth, ruby lips, etc.), this physical paragon embodies the ideal harmony of Nature
itself, in effect serving as an emblem of that homeland with which the narrative associates her (142).
This same woman, however, simultaneously functions in a separate economy that will drive the
narrative to develop as a Byzantine romance before reaching its final, precarious return to
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a properly Western, imperialistic ideology. She does not desire Ricardo, but rather Cornelio, the one
inhabitant of Trpana whose attractions are foreign both to Ricardo and the values of his homeland (142).
The hero's narrative brands his rival as mancebo galn, atildado, de blandas manos y rizos cabellos, de
voz meliflua y de amorosas palabras, y, finalmente, todo hecho de mbar y de alfeique, guarnecido de
telas y adornado de brocados (143). Cornelio has the delicate face that Ricardo himself in his
manliness lacks and a body whose excessive adornment hints at transvestism (143). The contempt
manifest in Ricardo's discourse queries the authenticity of his rival's gender as male, and the hero is
smitten with a rabia de los celos (143). Uncontrollable jealousy, he admits, caused him to spy on their
meeting in the locus amoenus of Cornelio's garden and to assault not Cornelio but Leonisa, with a verbal
devaluation of the former intended to destroy her pursuit of the male beauty. In a parody of the metaphors
common to Renaissance love lyrics, she is ridiculed for seeking union with a lover who has no phallic
authority nor the hot humor of a male, a beautiful man whose valor resides not in him at all, but rather in
the money with which his alluring disguise is made possible:
Llgate, llgate, cruel, un poco ms, y enrede to yedra a ese intil tronco que te busca; peina o ensortija
aquellos cabellos de ese tu nuevo Ganimedes, que tibiamente te solicita . . . . Piensas, quiero decir, que
este mozo, altivo por su riqueza, . . . ha de querer, ni poder, ni saber guardar firmeza en sus amores, ni
estimar to inestimable . . . . ? (144).
The very wealth, or monied economy, that enables Cornelio to project such a highly valorized exterior,
argues the hero, is incompatible with what is of true value in love constancy and an esteem for the
transcendent rather than the physical or material assets of the beloved.
This opening scene of triangular desire serves to establish the two series of semiotic coordinates that
will sustain all of the novela's developing tensions: commercial activity and money are rendered foreign,
a rival force to be eradicated, and both exchange and the cultural Other are engendered in female terms;
material poverty (which has, to a relative degree, handicapped Ricardo's attempts to compete directly with
Cornelio [143]) and citizenship in the Christian homeland the text's primary marker of subjectivity,
through Ricardo are, by implied contrast,
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engendered masculine. When she appears to transgress the limits of her role as lady and desired loveobject in the second series of coordinates, by actively desiring a male beauty that reflects her own,
Leonisa herself gives impetus to Ricardo's conquest of those infidel economies that the narrative
represents as having spiritually as well as physically enslaved her. The triangularity of the garden
encounter immediately gives way to the narrative staging of a much more global, symbolic triangularity,
Ricardo's struggle against a foreign menace for the freedom or proper reconstitution of Leonisa.
In this process, the heroine appears to mediate between desiring males, but she is the primary object

or territory upon which the strategic operations against mutual foes are carried out. Because she is
characterized with sufficient ambivalence to represent plural cultural ideologies during the narrative, she
obviates the need of the Christian Ricardo ever directly confronting in combat and hence
acknowledging the true power of his allegedly effeminate enemies. He simply skirmishes against the
manifestations in her of their influence, striving to extract her from the market that has temporarily
redefined her functions. Leonisa's intransitive, yet mediate function allows the triumph of his beliefs to be
inscribed in the narrative from its outset despite the hero's literally subjugated, weaponless state; he need
not slay a Turk, but only win back their prized booty. Her status as medium also allows the development
of her character to parallel Ricardo's own struggles with the terms of desire, toward the exemplary
realization of its most spiritually appropriate manifestations. The correct fulfillment of desire, we find, is
none other than the essentially intransitive behavior represented by Leonisa's love for Cornelio at the
outset of their peregrinations. The proper mirroring of Leonisa's disallowed (implicitly non-procreative),
self-affirming desire for an effeminate male is Ricardo's substitution of lust with the neoplatonic desire
only for what is valiantly leona in her a reflection of himself in her honorable bearing of inheritors to
their faith and caste.
Throughout the travels that buffet them about, Ricardo is confronted with the image of Leonisa both as
the corporeal possession of multiple foreign rivals and as the pure ideal of his Christian fantasies, for
although she is repeatedly exchanged among owners, she is never consumed. When first captured,
Leonisa, like Ricardo, is assigned by her captors a ransom value.
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Ricardo tries to operate in their economy by offering for her exorbitant price his entire net worth, todo
cuanto vala mi hacienda (147). His fortunes prove to be as variable as is the infidels' market, however,
and negotiations are cut short when the Turks set sail to flee Christian ships, separating Ricardo from
Trpana and his cash (148). In the Turkish regrouping of prisoners and booty, Leonisa is taken off by her
first master, Yzuf, a Greek renegado who has deserted the Christian world for greater profit as an infidel
mercenary; she appears to have perished with him in a shipwreck (147). Ten pages and un ao, tres das
y cinco horas (143) later, when the narrative flashbacks of dialogue with his faithful companion
Mahamut catch up to the present, Ricardo is shocked to see her again (157). This time Leonisa is for sale
by a traveling Jewish merchant to whoever bids the highest, the exalted cad who is Mahamut's master or
Ricardo's own current master, the sultan Hazn. After both men compete for the rights to her, in order,
supposedly, to bestow her for favor upon the Gran Seor, the superior to whom they owe their own
authority, she becomes the transitory possession and ward of the Cad. The rest of the plot in captivity
unfolds upon the scheming of both Turks to secretly possess her body before passing it to the Gran
Seor as virginal, the scheming of the Cad's wife to seduce Ricardo (who enters the Cad's service as
Mario), and the scheming of Ricardo and Mahamut to escape this bondage with Leonisa.
Descriptions of the heroine during this period oscillate precariously between the deprecatory system of
references that marks the infidels and idealizing ones that allegorize her Christian virtues. Ricardo
characterizes her first captor Yzuf not only as su nuevo amo but also su ms nuevo amante (150),
thus implicitly questioning the firmness of her morals; when she reappears, it is in the guise of a mora,
with covered face but uncovered feet (157) and unbound hair (160), the latter expressions of sexual
provocation by the standards of her own culture. The excess of pearls and gold that bedeck her do not
bespeak the legitimacy of her rightful class, but rather broadcast the desire of the Jew to inflate her market
value as a sex object. When they begin to meet in the Cad's house to plot escape, the narrator continues,
Leonisa counters Ricardo's guise as his master's procurer with her own as that of her mistress. She
attempts to formulate a strategy with her ardent admirer first by encouraging the possibility of his lust for
Halima and then by advising

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that he comply with the woman's physical demands with whatever imagined interest is necessary for his
successful participation in effect envisioning the seduction of either one or the other (si a l [deseo]
quisieres corresponder, aprovecharte ha ms para el cuerpo que para el alma; y cuanto no quieras, es
forzoso que lo finjas 170). Neither is she ashamed to fan the flames that rage within the Moslem woman,
thereby entering into the complicity of prurient interest and sexual marketing that defines non-Christians
in the narrative: Leonisa acrecent en Halima el torpe deseo y el amor, dndole muy buenas esperanzas
que Mario hara todo lo que pidiese (174, my emphasis). At the same time, the narrative brings the
transcendent, spiritual nature of Leonisa's allure to the readers' attention by repeated use of solar
metaphors in describing her beauty: descubri un rostro que as deslumbr los ojos y alegr los
corazones de los circunstantes, como el Sol (157; a description duplicated on 164). In effect, the
foreigners are shown to be captivated by that aspect of her beauty that defies definition in their economy
her Christian Otherness. The logic of the narrative confirms the primacy of this latter characterization
of the heroine, for she survives her trials con la entereza y verdad que podan poner en duda tantos
caminos como he andado, with her literal as well as figurative virtue intact (173).
The ambivalence with which the captive Leonisa's moral status is represented up to this point is but a
reflection of that larger struggle between the world of Ricardo and that of her captors. If the trials of the
former are characterized by the quest for a positive moral exemplarity, the turbulent schemings of the
latter, as we are fully led to expect, manifest the inverse the negative exemplarity of immorality, in a
political body whose irrational and frenzied couplings, to borrow Brundage's apt description, have
indeed disrupted the transmission of social power (152).7 From the micro-structure of the family to the
7

Brundage's monumental study Law, Sex, and Christian Society, demonstrates the insistence with which canon and then
civil law sought from early Christianity onward to guarantee the stability of social structures by regulating sexual behavior.
The historical shaping of these legislative systems, he argues (152), reveals the belief of authorities that sexual urges . . . must
be curbed and controlled; otherwise they were sure to result in irrational and frenzied couplings that would disrupt the orderly
creation of families and the management of household resources. Edicts and sanctions against homosexual and heterosexual
non-procreative sexual behavior, which increased considerably after the Black Death and sought to ensure repopulation and
secure transmission of structures of power (533), [p. 119] were grounded in the doctrinal argument that desire was
incompatible with spiritual health and could not be allowed as the basis of sexual activity. The difficult corollary was, of
course, the model of Christian marriage as a procreative union without lust, except for that stimulation necessary for its
consummation and productivity. The defusing of erotic energy between the two protagonists at the end of El amante liberal's
plot seems clearly dedicated to the representation of this ideal.

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119

macro-structure of regional government the foreigners are in disorder: their equivalent of the viceroyalty
is in dangerous transition and the only marriage portrayed for readers, that of the Cad and Halima, is torn
by adulterous desires on the part of both members and is without issue. This is not surprising, for the
aging Turk, despite desire for the body of Leonisa (el fuego que las entraas poco a poco le iba
consumiendo [177]), has proven with his wife incapable of more than abrazos flojos (166). The limp
embraces or metonymic impotence that characterizes this Turk are, we find, symptomatic of the
foreigners. Disputes by the Moslem conspirators to possess the body of the exotic Christian beauty, an act
that neither they nor the wandering Jew succeed in consummating, belie the inherent inability of the
Orientals to function procreatively or productively to insure the growth of their race and empire. Not
surprisingly, Fetala, Ricardo's first captor, happily traded rights to Leonisa for the hero himself, four
stalwart rowers, and dos muchachos hermossimos . . . (de lo cual se content) (149). The narrator's
pointed aside foregrounds the symbolic relationship between race and religion on the one hand, and

sexual preference perceived as gender function on the other, that is carefully elaborated throughout
Cervantes's novela to prepare readers for the final triumphant contrast between the lion-hearted Ricardo
and the text's pusillanimous cultural Other.
The quest for truth in El amante liberal takes us on an erotic odyssey that charts the ideological and
political differences of institutions and the people they shape, along the terrain of the engendered human
body. A cautionary tale of that period in our Western cultural formation acknowledged by its own medical
as well as fictive literature to be of single-sex, Cervantes' novela takes up the issue of sovereignty in the
subject Ricardo, examining its ramifications at home in the model family he eventually attains and
on foreign horizons.8 The hero's search for the
8

See Laquer, Chapters 1 and 2, for a discussion of the single-sex theory. Irigaray's radical analysis of the subject in the
wake of Freud brings us full circle back to a more profound understanding of the conception of the subject and its sexual
identity that largely influenced the Golden Age that [p. 120] of the perfected human specimen manifest as a male and the
imperfect specimen constituting an immanent male, whose manifestation is female. See the section Speculum (particularly
Any Theory of the Subject Has Always Been Appropriated by the Masculine), in which she argues that the Other is
conceived by the male subject's desire and molded to his reflection (133-46). Irigaray's language in this essay is at times
striking proof of the profound entrenchment of Orientalism in all Western discourse of the Other, for her own metaphors glide
between sexual and the racial or geographical ones that often characterize this discourse of the cultural Other, as she attacks the
subject's drive to colonize. In one of many examples she writes: When the Other falls out of the starry sky into the chasms
of the psyche, the subject is obviously obliged to stake out new boundaries for his field of implantation . . . . But how to tame
these uncharted territories, these dark continents, these worlds through the looking glass? (136).

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truth of his own existence through the person of Leonisa and the others he encounters is represented in
terms that are simultaneously spiritual, or psychological, and material, geopolitical. The novela's narrative
betrays through Ricardo strong anxiety regarding both the mercenary nature of desire and the desires of
Oriental mercenaries, as it examines the threat of unstable values and the buying and selling of bodies
in the body politic. Perhaps not surprisingly, given our knowledge of seventeenth-century Spain, the
coalition of threats to the subject Ricardo and to social stability from domestic to international is
artistically engendered female, in a series of characters of both sexes.
El amante liberal's exemplarity, ultimately, appears to lie in the authoritative male rendering of its
resolution: the hero marks his freedom from effeminate, libertine commerce and his return to
anticapitalism and hence to moral high ground when with liberalidad he offers the heroine herself. One
of the work's many ironies is the incorporation of Leonisa into the same male-engendered system, when
she finally corresponds to his apparent generosity by marrying him, in effect extracting herself from the
disturbing market in which she has been an object of repeated exchange. Ricardo hence finds his
confirmation in the valiant, or leonine, posture of Leonisa at the end, for she forswears any further
misguided attempts to search for herself, and summons the resolve to marry the man who has relentlessly
insisted upon the priority of his claims to her throughout the novela. Readers cannot help but notice,
however, that this resolution in favor of social stability through the carefully staged representation in the
narrative of a generous, or liberal, affirmation
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of (aristocratic) class, (European) race, and (Christian) religion the work's exemplarity is
accomplished by the very ungenerous construction of those excluded: all women (as subjects), other
religions (Moslem and Judaic), other races (Arabs, Jews, Turks, Greeks), less privileged classes, and the
geography that links the heroes' tiny homeland to the rest of the world. Cervantes's narrative leads us to

doubt the degree to which its heroes' portrayed exemplarity adequately defines the scope of the novela's
lesson, for it resounds with the echoes of misplaced and parodied exemplarity that indeed, to borrow
Forcione's own words about the discursive irregularities of Cervantes's novelas, revitalize perceptions
blunted by the tyranny of familiarity and appearance (29). In reading for exemplarity, we are forced to
reconsider the validity of many stereotypes. While infidels collectively are cast as the perpetrators of
Trpana's sufferings, in the kidnapping of its heroes, individually they often do not fit the cultural models
that we are led to expect; in fact, they betray a number of surprising virtues. Leonisa's first master, the
renegade Yzuf, intends to marry rather than to enslave her (149); upon his death she is saved from the
shipwreck and cared for by a band of Turks who protect her as a sister rather than enacting vile desires
upon her (171); Mahamut proves to be a loyal and disinterested friend to Ricardo despite his brand as
religious mercenary; and Halima loses much of her estate and nearly her life in escaping with Ricardo to
become a Christian and she mistakenly believes marry him. Not only are we surprised to find
repeated narrative evidence of liberalidad among peoples criticized discursively in the novela for
motives of inters. Both the opening and the conclusion of the tale locate the causes of protagonists' trials
in the heart of their own culture, Trpana. The qualities quickly projected onto the cultural Other, infidels
from the East, are initially manifest in the island community's own leading Christians and in the end still
persist among them. Leonisa's beloved Cornelio proves to be a cowardly sensualist whose love of wealth
and himself come first; he flees her foreign abductors and never makes a move to pay her ransom,
although his wealth far exceeds that of Ricardo. Her own parents, who have supported his suit over
Ricardo's, are equally guilty of mercenary motives. The effeminacy with which Cornelio's un-Christian
self-interest is rendered in the narrative even makes an appearance in the description of Ricardo himself
during the escape. While the Turks battle to their own death aboard the
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Cervantes

ship that carries Halima and Leonisa the one narrative context in which the novela's hero may credibly
demonstrate his chivalric valor as hombre cabal he remains hidden, watching from behind a door,
until the Turks kill each other (180).
We are forced by the many representations of liberalidad in Cervantes's El amante liberal to
consider the symbolic nature of that exemplarity itself, as a signifier whose meaning is not clearly
delimited. In effect, we are obliged to consider the ideological motives that constitute the cautionary
allegory at work in the novela. The collision of two literary forms the chivalric and Byzantine romance
and the worlds that they represent leave readers with the nagging impression that the issue of
liberalidad is far from resolved by the return home of the protagonists and the narrative's rejection of
foreign horizons. The problem of exemplarity, rather than being placed in negative relief by their sojourn
among barbarous peoples, begins and ultimately still resides in Ricardo and Leonisa themselves. The
tale's final, abrupt discursive shift to a chivalric register a move to which we are immediately alerted
because it is out of consonance with Cervantes's other literary works is only superficially supported by
the narrative of their behavior, for Ricardo's liberalidad and Leonisa's correspondence through marriage
are for them, as well as for readers, enacted, consciously promoted public postures mercenary in terms
of the work's definition of economy, even as they constitute doing the right thing.9 While the discursive
organization of Cervantes's lover's tale clearly upholds Christian guidelines for social order and mutual
respect, its narrative thus appears simultaneously to question the constitution through liberalidad of
exclusionary discourses that invert its very meaning.

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

I have consciously played upon the use of this expression in Spike Lee's film, Do the Right Thing, for this film
impresses me as an excellent example of a cautionary narrative whose representation of racial, class, and sexual relations
contains elements that are at once visionary and retrograde, in a confusion of discourses that leaves American viewers
anxiously pondering the correct interpretation of the film and its implications for their world.

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Digitized with the help of Kendall Sydnor

Fred Jehle jehle@ipfw.edu

Publications of the CSA
URL: http://www.h-net.org/~cervantes/csa/articf93/davis.htm

HCervantes