MARIA CRISTINA QUINTERO “Con ansia estrema de mirar”: Another Look at the Gaze in Spanish Golden Age Poetry Ic has become something of a cliché in recent years to speak of the male gaze, a term used in broad terms to refer to a social construc- tion of vision that is internalized from a masculinist point of view and that tends to objectify the feminine form. Feminist approaches to con- temporary film criticism have been emphatically concerned with theo- rizing and refining the meaning of the term; and lately, it has been supple- mented by other expressions such as “the look,” “the eye,” “the screen.” Despite the pervasiveness of its application, the term and related bywords continue to provide a useful “perspective” in approaching literary texts. A case in point would be the amatory poetry cultivated in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, a poetic practice which at one level ap- pears to be about verbalizing the male gaze and staging what Freud would call “scopophilia”—the pleasure of looking at another as an erotic ob- ject? The poetry of the Golden Age, like much European poetry of the time, contains an insistent emphasis on seeing, viewing, and con- templating the form of a desired woman. The recurring imagery of light and colors, veiling and unveiling, the frequent references to portraiture, and the fragmentation of the woman's beauty privileging certain parts of the body, such as the eyes, the hair and the mouth—all constitute the repertoire and rhetoric of the gaze. Renaissance neoplatonic views on the importance of sight and the keen Baroque interest in perspectivism and the science of optics explain only partially the insis- tence on surveying the feminine form. This paper, which takes as its point of departure a handful of poems that are relatively well-known, represents a consideration of how theories of the gaze contribute to the study of Golden Age poetry and its preoccupation with the dynamics of desire, subjectivity, and self-fashioning. The association between sight and desire is an ancient one, for even Plato in the Phaedvus called love “a disease of the eye” (105). In the Middle Ages this relationship was expressed by Andreas Capellanus Revista de Estudios Hispanicos 34 (2000)490 Maria Cristina Quintero (12th-century), among others, who in The Art of Courtly Love states: “For when a man sees some woman fit for love and shaped according to his taste, he begins at once to lust after her in his heart .. . Presently he begins to think about the fashioning of the woman and to . .. pry into the secrets of her body, and he desires to put each part of it to the fullest use . .. This inborn suffering comes, therefore, from seeing and medi- tating” (28-29, my emphasis). The eye's role in engendering love is also a recurrent topos in Arabic love poetry, for example in Ibn Hazam's The Doves Neck Ring. Later, in the Renaissance, neoplatonism developed elaborate theories of the optics of desire. Every love, Ficino tells us, be- gins with sight. For him, as for other neoplatonists, love was engen- dered through the eyes of both the seer and the seen, before taking its residence in the soul. In the seventh book of his Commentary, he quotes (or perhaps paraphrases) Apuleius: “For me, [Apuleius] says, you your- self are alone the whole cause and origin of my present pain, but also the cure itself. . . For those eyes of yours gliding down through my eyes into my inmost heart, are producing a furious fire in my marrow” (161). Ic is no wonder that in Spain, Herrera called sight “el més amado de todos los sentidos” (Gallego Morell 329). Continuing a tradition in- herited from Classical, Arabic, Provengal, and Italian sources, the con- nection between looking and desiring is overtly articulated in the seri- ous amatory poetry of the Golden Age as well as the poetry with a frankly licentious content (often circulating anonymously) that was so prevalent in the era. Indeed, as I argue elsewhere, it is at times difficult to separate the two types of “erotic” or love poetry, as they both par- take of the same rhetorical strategies to portray similar attitudes toward women, love, and sexuality.’ It is significant, for example, that even the most canonical of poets, Garcilaso de la Vega, in the process of estab- lishing the model for subsequent lyric poetry in Spain, also provided a paradigm in castellano for the repertoire of the look in all its erotic am- biguity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the well-known sonnet “Con ansia estrema” where the conventional lyric longing for the ab- sent beloved is also a frankly voyeuristic fantasy of penetration: Con ansia estrema de mirar qué tiene vyuestro pecho escondido alld en su centro yversialo de fuera lodedentro * en aparencia y ser igual conviene,Con ansia estrema de mirar 491 en él puse la vista, mas detiene de vuestra hermosura el duro encuentro ‘mis ojos, y no passan tan adentro que miren lo qu'el alma en si contiene. Y asf se quedan tristes en la puerta hecha, por mi dolor, con esa mano, que aun a su mismo pecho no perdona; donde vi claro mi esperanza muerta y el golpe, que en vos hizo amor en vano, non esservi passato oltra la gona. (58) The words “mirar,” “ver,” “apariencia,” “vista,” and “mis ojos” insistently call attention to the poetic surveillance of a beautiful woman. The poetic “I”/eye is looking at the woman's breast, the part of the body which according to Kathryn Schwarz not only “marks a limit to what can properly be mentioned” but also “transgresses the boundaries of what can properly be seen” (151). The speaker gives as justification for this aggressive look the longing to understand the beloved woman's soul, to penetrate beyond the outward appearance and thereby come to “know” her very being: “ver si a lo de fuera lo de dentro / en apariencia y ser igual conviene.” The allusion to two ways of seeing—with the “ojo cor- poral” and the “ojo del entendimiento”—was common to the literature of the time. In a lesser-known poem by Hurtado de Mendoza, the poet justifies his desire to own a portrait of the beloved in similar terms: - «por s6lo gozar de tanta gloria, sefiora, con los ojos corporales, ‘como con los del alma y el deseo. (82) There are philosophical underpinnings for the association be- tween seeing, desire, and knowledge. Plato states in the Phaedrus that sight is “the keenest mode of perception vouchsafed us through the body” (93). In Neo-Platonic epistemology, human consciousness begins with empirical knowledge acquired through the senses, for “the first encoun- ter of the Soul with the outside world is the perception of a corporeal object through the five senses” (Kristeller 234). Of the senses, the eyes were the most important for they stood in for the mind and to see was, in essence, to know. For Renaissance philosophers such as Nicholas of Cusa, the science of perspectiva was a science not only of visual percep- tion but of visual cognition (Freedman 15). The eye, which itself was492 Marfa Cristina Quintero considered a “fenestra anima,” is the means by which knowledge is ac- quired; and at the same time, the body—in Garcilaso’s sonnet metonymically invoked through the allusion to the woman's breast— represented the gateway to knowledge. In the Baroque the study of op- tics reinforced the association of vision with cognition, nowhere more eloquently than in Tesauro’s Jd Cannocchiale Aristotelico where Tesauro tells us that “il mirar con gli occhi, & il contemplar con I’Intelleto, son due specie Analogue di Conoscenza” “To look with the eyes and to con- template with the intellect are two analogous types of knowledge.”* We can also find a different correspondence with the study of physiology and anatomy in early modern Europe and the importance placed on the observation and study of the human body through dissection. There was a prevalent view that prying or opening the human body was cen- tral to the process of obtaining knowledge since the outward and the inward were intrinsically connected. In 1603 John Davies of Hereford, for example, makes the connection between knowledge and the break- ing open of the body in words that are remarkably reminiscent of Garcilaso’s poem: “Some so desire to know that faine they would Breake through the Bounde that humane knowledge bartes, To pry into His brest which doth infold Secrets unknowne.”> Garcilaso’s poem, however, as Ignacio Navarrete in an excellent reading tells us, goes beyond epistemological exploration and fully ex- ploits the erotic potential of the specular situation: “Garcilaso’s sonnet too is ultimately about a frustrated act of voyeurism, and the woman quickly covering her body recalls [the Diana] myth and thus underscores the degree of violation implicit in the poet’s ocular desire” (94). Words like “ansia estrema,” “vuestro pecho,” and “duro encuentro” suggests a penetration that goes beyond the avowed platonic desire to understand the woman's soul. Particularly significant is the slightly altered quote from Petrarch’s canzone 23 which concludes the sonnet: “non esservi passato oltra la gona,” “never having passed beneath your garment.” Whereas Petrarch was alluding to his own gown—“non essermi passato oltra la gona’—which had not yet been penetrated by the rays of love (Durling 61), Garcilaso takes the line and transforms the poet's gown into the woman's own dress furthering the fantasy of sexual/specular pen- etration. In Garcilaso’s sonnet, as in all the amatory poetry of early mod- ern Spain, feminine beauty is conceived of as a social spectacle, so much so that it seems that female identity manifested itself in this poetryCon ansia estrema de mirar 493 through the male perception and surveillance of the woman's beauty. Implicit in this dynamic is a gendering of the look since both the po- etic speaker and his implied reader are positioned as male, the bearers of the look, while the bodies, or rather the bodily parts, that they gaze upon are female. The figure of the woman is central to specularity, the articulation of desire and what we can identify as the self-fashion- ing of the poet. Several feminist critics have elaborated on the psycho- logical reasons for the obsession with surveying a female body. For one thing, women provide a real or symbolic foil against which men can define themselves. In essence, woman functions as the “other” whose lack, according to Laura Mulvey, “gives order and meaning” to a masculinist/phallocentric narrative (14). There is, therefore, an intrinsic dependence on the figure of the woman in the construction of a poetic subjectivity. The gaze is the registration within the field of vision of the dependence of the male social subject upon the female other for his meaning (cf. Silverman, Threshold 134). Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical literary theory have been particularly concerned with the connections between vision, desire, knowledge and the fashioning of identity or subjectivity. Desire, as psy- choanalysis tells us, is crucial in the formation of the self, and it is no coincidence that much amatory poetry—beginning, in early modern Europe, with Petrarch’s Canzoniere—is precisely about the construction of the self through the poetic reenactment of desire and the obsessive chronicling of frustrated spectatorship.” Petrarchan poetry may be seen at one level as a symbolic representation of subjectivity, indeed as a po- etics of self-fashioning and subjectivity. This is not to say that this po- etry represents an authentic sentimental autobiography of the poet. As Joel Fineman asserts in his study of subjectivity in Shakespeare: “the lit- erary history of the Renaissance sonnet does not really demonstrate an increasingly subjective poetics, not if this is understood to mean a po- etry that is increasingly expressive of a personal and individuated poetic self” (9-10). On the contrary, this poetry is intrinsically formulaic and repetitive, in the imitation and transformation of inherited imagery and topoi. Nevertheless, it is possible to claim that there is a subjectivity that manifests itself through rhetorical effects; and that the poetic first person consciously presents itself “in terms of what is understood to be a merely literary figure of a self” (Fineman 10). This fictional figura- tion or fashioning of the self is dramatized through the insistent sur- veillance of a woman's body.494 Marfa Cristina Quintero Parallels can be established between the dynamics of scopophilia (again, broadly defined as the pleasure of looking at another as an erotic object) as Freud described them and the type of self-fashioning of the self that takes place in much of this poetry. In “Instincts and Their Vi- cissitudes,” Freud records the different stages of reversal in the voyeur’s gaze (129-30). Initially, scopophilia is an activity directed toward an extraneous object associated with desire. There is, however, a second stage where what transpires is the “giving up of the object” and the turning of the scopophilic instinct toward the subject’s own person (129). That is, the subject himself who was doing the looking now wishes to be looked at and becomes himself an object. In the third and final stage we have the introduction of a new subject to whom the voyeur dis- plays himself in order to be looked at. The result is that the original viewing subject himself becomes part of the gaze that is external to him. If we apply these stages to the amatory poetry of the Golden Age, we can suggest that while initially this poetry seems to be about surveying the form of the beloved who represents the desired “other,” what is re- ally being constituted is the poetic persona who wishes to display him- self before the gaze of the (presumably male) reader through an elabo- rate rhetorical apparatus and through the confrontation with pre-exist- ing poetic traditions and conventions. That is, through their authorial self-display the poetic subjects presented by Garcilaso and other Golden Age poets are clearly caught up in this generalized spectatorship of the female body not only as viewers but also as objects themselves. Jacques Lacan and Lacanian critics have expanded and com- mented on Freud’s theories. In Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan es- tablishes a difference between the societal construct of the gaze, which is often identified with a masculine point of view, and subjective in- stances of what he calls the “eye” and others such as Kaja Silverman call the look. According to Lacan, the subject is not responsible for the gaze because it is outside the subject: “What determines me [the subject], at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside” (106). That is, the “I” does not possess the gaze, and indeed, there is always an otherness to the gaze, which can be described as the “presence of others as such” but is specifically identified with any individual viewer or group of viewers (Silverman, Male Subjectivity 130). The gaze thus issues from all sides, whereas the eye sees only from one point. The gaze as such would seem to belong to a societal construction, and the look would be the individual transactions. Applying this to the poetry of the GoldenCon ansia estrema de mirar 495 Age, then, we can say that these poems dramatize individual instances or “looks” in which beautiful women are displayed; but the surveillance of the feminine body was part of a broader cultural phenomenon or gaze that exists outside the viewer and the viewed. The intrinsic dependence on the figure of a woman creates anxi- ety (we see it clearly in Garcilaso’s “ansia” which can be translated as both “desire” and “anxiety”); and in this poetry the need to circumscribe and even negate the power and authority that this dependence would seem to bestow on women is often expressed. The surveillance as a rehearsal to possession may be viewed as the need to reassert authority and domi- nation, or put in psychoanalytic terms, as a “defense against castration anxiety, a means of mastering the female subject” (Silverman, “Frag- ments” 141). The psychological need to reestablish authority certainly had a historical parallel in early modern Spain in the obsessive concern with containing women's dangerous sexuality through watchful control. According to Elizabeth Perry: To protect the pure from the profane, order depended upon a program of enclosure that went far beyond cloistered convents . .. This defensive posture was nowhere more evident than in the lives of women, Needing protection not only from outside influences, but also from their own weak- nesses, women were told to stay in the “natural” confinement of convent, home, or brothel. Such enclosure protected men as well. (Perry 178) It can be argued that poetry—particularly the sonnet with its tigid metric and syllabic framing—together with the typical rhetorical strategies for describing the beloved also serves the function of symbolic vigilance and containment as determined by the cultural gaze. Nowhere is the circumscription of the female object in this poetry and its subse- quent anxiety more obvious than in the rhetorical techniques used to present the poet’s “beloved.” In most amatory poetry of early modern Europe, feminine presence is articulated through the double strategies of hyperbole and fragmentation, as Veronique Nahoum-Grappe has pointed out (96). Amatory poetry is primarily epeideictic in nature; and the praise of women is manifested through the exaggeration of their beauty and, to a lesser extenct, their virtue. In the aforementioned poem by Hurtado de Mendoza, for example, he refers to the beloved as “muestra de todo el cielo retratada.” Hyperbole is also the rhetorical manifestation of the psychological need to idealize the other, in this case the beloved. Idealization is important in psychoanalytic terms because496 Marfa Cristina Quintero it goes hand in hand with desire in the process of constructing a subjec- tivity. According to Silverman, there is an insistent desire to idealize in the human psyche: “there can be no sustainable existence without those idealizing . . . representations through which we attempt to give feature and substance to our ultimately unspecifiable desire” (Threshold 69). The insistence on the beauty and moral superiority of the beloved woman who is unattainable is the poet’s verbalization of a desire, a lack that in effect defines him. Garcilaso often expresses in his poetry the intrinsic connection between his own existence or self-fashioning and the ideal- ized figure of the beloved. The well-known sonnet “Escrito est4 en mi alma vuestro gesto” is perhaps the most remarkable in that it expresses clearly, albeit through exaggerated terms, the dependence of the speaker's very existence on the idealized object of desire. This reliance on the fe- male “other” is made patently clear in the last verses: “por vos nacf, por vos tengo la vida / por vos he de morir, y por vos muero” (41). The thetoricity of praise is also self-conscious because like the look, as de- scribed above, it ultimately has more to do with the speaking subject than the object of praise. In amatory poetry the idealization of the be- loved is clearly determined by literary tradition in that the poet inherits a repertoire of images and conventions for describing the female “other.” That is, each poet confronts the conventions of praise for the absent beloved, makes them his own, and attempts to inscribe himself both as a continuator of the tradition and as an original voice, thereby fashion- ing a poetic persona or subjectivity.® The process of constructing a subjectivity, dependent as it is on the simultaneously desired and feared body of woman, is extremely un- stable and, as stated before, constantly fraught with anxiety. Women's bodies and their sexuality were suspect and as a result, the reigning atti- tude toward women might be characterized as an ideology of enclosure. There was, furthermore, a marked discrepancy between the discourse about women that we find in the conduct books, whose primary pur- pose was to control the pernicious feminine influence, and the discourse of amatory poetry whose praise of feminine beauty was a rhetorical strat- egy of persuasion and seduction. In this poetry we are reminded of the psychological definition of anxiety as the longing for what we fear. Thus it is not surprising that hyperbolic idealization in lyric poetry goes hand in hand with the process of fragmentation, which becomes a way of fetishizing the body that can never be truly possessed. Turning again to psychoanalysis, fragmentation and disintegration result from the impos-Con ansia estrema de mirar 497 sibility of sustaining an identification with ideality; and indeed, they rep- resent the opposite of ideality. What Lacan calls “the fantasy of the body in ‘bits and pieces” is manifested through the rhetorical fragmentation of the woman's body.’ In Garcilaso, for example, the initial impetus to idealize the beloved by invoking her through a series of abstractions— “hermosura,” “apariencia,” “ser”—dissolves into the reference to one spe- cific part of her body—her breast. In what is perhaps his most famous sonnet, “En tanto que de rosa y d’azucena” (59), the woman is made partially visible through the allusions to the “color de vuestro gesto”— suggested by the red rose and white lily—“cabello, que’n la vena del oro sescogié” and “el hermoso cuello blanco, ” discreet bodily parts that, as Nancy Vickers points out in another context, can never be completely re-membered (“Diana Described”). Just as praise through the use of hy- perbole rebounds back on the poetic persona, so does fragmentation re- veal an intrinsic instability in the construction of the poetic self. One of the most explicit exploitations of hyperbole and frag- mentation in the self-fashioning of the poetic persona is Luis de Géngora’s well-known “Mientras por competir con tu cabello,” a poem that has been frequently studied precisely in conjunction with Garcilaso’s “En tanto que de rosa y d’azucena.” In this sonnet the beautiful body that is being surveyed has been divided up into separate pieces, each of which is praised in turn through initially familiar metaphors but made strange through exaggeration and images of strife: her blond hair com- petes with gold burnished in the sun, her lips vanquish in their redness the carnations, the lily sneers at the whiteness of her forehead, etc. Mientras por competir con tu cabello oro brufiido al sol reluce en vano; mientras con menosprecio en medio e! llano mira tu blanca frente el lilio bello mientras a cada labio, por cogello, siguen més ojos que al clavel temprano y mientras triunfa con desdén lozano del luciente cristal tu gentil cuello, g072 cucllo, cabello, labio y frente, antes que lo que fue en tu edad dorada 079, lilio, clavel, cristal luciente, no sélo en plata o viola troncada se vuelva, mas ti y ello juntamente en tierra, en humo, en polvo, en sombra, en nada. (230)498 Marfa Cristina Quintero The poem contains only two explicit references to the act of seeing (in verses 4 and 6); but there is no doubt that through the use of catachresis or the exaggerated use of metaphor and the imagery invoking precious materials (“oro brufiido,” “cristal luciente”) and through specific allu- sion to light (“sol,” “telumbra,” “luciente”) and colors (“oro,” “blanca,” “sfole”), the poet is making a special appeal to the sense of sight. The poem repeatedly deploys the figure known as enargeia or evidentia , the function of which as Paul Julian Smith tells us, is “to place things be- fore the eyes” through the use of self-consciously artificial language “Rhetoric” 224), According to Smith, “those exorbitant linguistic traits which modern critics tend to find ‘distancing’ are precisely those tech- niques recommended by Renaissance theorists for the achievement of graphic immediacy” (240). The sonnet’s graphic force is underlined by literally appealing to the eye of the reader through devices such as antithesis, chiasmus (e.g., “mira tu blanca frente el lilio bello”), and the hyperbaton which forces the eyes of the reader to follow the words just as the “ojos” of the poem follow the carnation: “mientras a cada labio, por cogello, / siguen mds ojos que al clavel temprano.” The sonnet in question is a good example of how Géngora’s poetry engages visual perception beyond the specific references to seeing and looking. As Aurora Egido has stated of Baroque poetry in general: los aspectos tipogréficos no deben ser... desestimados. No sélo porque la palabra escrita conticne a la hablada, sino porque la escritura invadié los espacios de la pagina y dibujé sobre ella grafismos arquitecténicos y pictéricos, (“Hidra bocal” 80) ‘As far as the representation of the female body, the almost math- ematical construction of the poem underlines what has been called the “logic of fragmentation” (Hillman and Mazzio xi). The list of physical features follow the typical order in describing idealized feminine beauty, with the movement from top to bottom. Specifically, the beautiful body has been partitioned and fetishized into four parts, and each is equated to either a precious substance or a flower: “cabello” = “oro brufiido,” “blanca frente” = “lilio bello,” “labio” = “clavel temprano,” “gentil cuello” = “luciente cristal.” These entirely canonical comparisons are exagger- ated and presented in equal measure in the quartets, through the use of the anaphora with “mientras” at the beginning of every second verse.Con ansia estrema de mirar 499 The four parts reappear twice in the first tercet, this time parallelistically and chiastically inverted in the ninth and eleventh verses: goza cuello, cabello, labio y frente, antes que lo que fue en tu edad dorada oro, lili, clavel, cristal luciente . .. The four components are then reduced to two, as “lilio” and “clave” become the “viola,” and “oro” and “cristal” become “plata” in the last cuartet. In the final gradation we have five nouns which correspond to the four components in no particular order—‘tierra,” “humo,” “polvo,” “sombra” plus one: the final negating “nada.” In Géngora’s poem what predominates, what truly “catches the eye” of the presumably male reader, is the ostentatious display of meta- phoric language. On a general level the intense deployment of meta- phoric language was clearly associated in the Baroque with concepts re- lated to optics, as Barbara Freedman among others has established. In- deed, metaphor was a privileged figure in Baroque poetry and was con- sidered essential in making poetic language more brilliant, ornamental, and visual. Fernando Herrera in his commentaries to Garcilaso’s poetry had presented metaphor (which he calls sraslacién) as an indispensable poetic tool to appeal to the senses, particularly the eyes: . «toda la traslacién, que es hallada con razén alguna, se llega y acerca a Jos mismos sentidos, mayormente de los ojos, el cual es agudisimo sentido. Porque el olor de la cortesanfa, la blandura y terneza de la humanidad, el murmorio del mar, y la dulaura de la oracién, son deducidas de los demas sentidos. Pero las de los ojos son mucho mds agudas y de mayor eficacia y ‘yehemencia, porque ponen casi en la presencia del dnimo las cosas que no pudimos mirar ni ver. (Gallego Morel 319) Later, Baroque treatises, prominently the Cannocchiale Aristotelico by Emmanuele Tesauro assert that metaphor creates a mode of compre- hension that is best understood in terms of visual experience. Indeed, Tesauro compares metaphor to the theater (claiming that the latter is in fact a sophisticated form of metaphor) because they are forms that as- pire to be both verbal and visual at the same time. Géngora’s sonnet is a particularly self-conscious exercise in rhe- torical exhibitionism and as such appeals as much to the intellect (“ojo del entendimiento”) as to the senses, particularly the eyes. Géngora’s po-500 Marfa Cristina Quintero etry has often been characterized as cerebral, coldly intellectual. The as- sociation of the eye lust expressed and the lust for knowledge seems par- ticularly acute in Géngora’s poetry. We know that he prided himself in the difficulty and obscurity of his verse, the reading of which was in- tended to be an intellectual exercise for the few learned readers who un- derstood “que tiene utilidad avivar el ingenio, y eso nacié de la oscuridad del poeta” (Obras 896). Géngora is credited with creating a distinct po- etic idiom, and as such, represents an intense example of poetic self- fashioning and individuation. That he is consciously competing with poetic tradition is made clear by the word “competi” which appears in the very first line of this sonnet, alluding to mastery and domination not only of the beloved but also of poetic tradition through the con- struction of a poetic persona. We have stated that subjectivity manifests itself through the fictions and rhetoric created by the poets. Through the fragmentation of the female body, Géngora exaggerates the conven- tions of Petrarchan amatory poetry, subjecting to scrutiny the poetic tra- dition in which the female body is idealized but presented primarily as a linguistic or metaphoric construct. The extreme artificiality of his idiom establishes him as both continuator and destroyer of a tradition that had, by the time he wrote this sonnet, virtually exhausted itself. The materiality of the images in Géngora’s poem results in a reification that further distances us from an actual female presence. That is, as the poet partitions the body, the woman as object of desire be- comes decentered, less and less “real,” even as the poetic “I” address each part: “Goza cuello, cabello, etc.” Any individuality or humanity that the beloved might have possessed is negated in the intense metaphorization and dismemberment of her body. There is, furthermore, a repeated in- sistence on the negative characteristics of hardness and coldness (unfeel- ing gold, cold crystal) representing the cruelty, pride, and disdain of the beautiful but distant dama. In Géngora’s poem feminine beauty is por- trayed as a destructive force that vanquishes nature. It is almost as if she herself needs to be vanquished, “disappeared” in essence; and the poem ends precisely in the absolute negation of all presence: “nada.” As stated before, the perils and threat of feminine beauty had long been identi- fied in the moral treatises of the sixteenth century, for example. Juan Luis Vives states in his Jnstruccién a la mujer cristiana: “considere en su pensamiento la mujer honesta y virtuosa, que muchas veces la hermosura y riquezas han ensalzado a las mujeres en gran presuncién, y de all’ lasCon ansia estrema de mirar 501 han derribado hasta el profundo, con perdimiento de su vida y honra y muchos que las siguieron . . . han hallado fatigas, pesares, muertes, ¢ infamia” (77). There is a similar message embedded in many of these poems. Dividing women into discreet bodily parts and objectifying these parts through exaggerated comparisons with precious objects, and ulti- mately controlling them to the point of annihilation, presents a poetic answer to Vives's dire warning about the dangerous effects of feminine beauty. In another poem Géngora would exclaim “amantes, no toquéis si queréis vida” (Sonetas 135). The double strategy of idealizing and attempting to persuade a woman to succumb to his embrace (this is a carpe diem poem, after all) while at the same time fragmenting her and ultimately negating her very existence is indicative of the double bind the poet finds himself in. He needs the feminine “other” to construct his poetic identity as a writing subject, but at the same time, the dependency creates an anxiety that manifests itself through fragmentation and negation. Ultimately, son- nets like Gdngora’s are about desengaho, the malaise that comes from confronting the ephemeral nature of beauty and existence and the treach- ery of the senses. We might add that the poet is also confronting the treachery of poetic conventions, the betrayal by his own rhetoric, the themes and topoi of the Petrarchan amatory tradition. Thus there is a level at which the poet himself, who has identified with the idealized other, is compromised in this fragmentation and negation. Both sub- ject and object are destabilized. Another poet who seems singularly concerned with the dialec- tic of looks and the ambivalence in constructing a poetic subjectivity is Francisco de Quevedo. For one thing, his poetry in general seems re- markably concerned with the optics of love and the rhetoric of synes- thesia. In the following sonnet, for example, he makes an association between sight and taste as he elaborates a fantasy of ocular possession: Si mis parpados, Lisi, labios fueran, besos fueran los rayos vistiales de mis ojos, que al sol miran caudales dguilas, y besaran mds que vieran. Tus bellezas, hidrépicos, bebieran, y cristales, sedientos de cristales; de luces y de incendios celestiales, alimentando su morir, vivieran.502 Marfa Cristina Quintero De invisible comercio mantenidos, y desnudos de cuerpo, los favores gozaran mis potencias y sentidos; mudos se requebraran los ardores; pudieran, apartados, verse unidos, yen piblico, secretos, los amores. (495) The first lines of this sonnet invoking the “rayos visuales” seem to hark back to a theory (associated with Plato) that had probably al- teady been discarded by the time Quevedo wrote this poem, namely that light emanated from the eye of the viewer and it was this light that permitted the object to be seen."° The implication is that the subject constitutes the object through the act of viewing it. From the begin- ning, however, he establishes a connection based on the visual similar- ity in the shape of eyelids and lips, as Paul Julian Smith has pointed out (Quevedo 166). During the Baroque era, as we have seen, sight was considered the most important of the five senses, “el mds agudo,” as Herrera claims. Nevertheless, in this poem Quevedo deftly conflates see- ing (“parpados,” “rayos visuales,” “ojos,” “miran”), tasting (“besaran,” “bebieran,” “alimentando”), hearing (“mudos se requebraran”) and touch- ing (‘comercio,” “atdores,” “unidos”). Through this expression of multi- sensory synesthetic desire, the poet also incorporates, in strikingly para- doxical terms, many of the Baroque era’s concerns with optics, the role of light (“luces,” “incendios”), and the play of appearances. Indeed, with the lines “pudieran, apartados, verse unidos” seems to be describing the optical illusion created by perspective or by viewing an object through a telescope which eliminates distance and space so that separate objects become united in the eye of the viewer. One of the important lessons that Baroque optics taught our poets had to do with the role of per- spective and the mastery of the object. Freedman, in her work on the gaze and Elizabethan theater, speaks of “a spectator consciousness, an epis- temological model based upon an observer who stands outside of what she sees in a definite position of mastery” (9). There is no doubt that there is a rehearsal of mastery in this deeply erotic poem. The “I” is in a clear position of dominance as it spins out this fantasy of specular copu- lation, as four of the senses are invoked in the act of possession, indeed of ravishment. Nevertheless, as in Géngora’s poem, the lady for all in- tents and purposes vanishes, in essence becoming a blank canvas for the projection of the poet's scopophilic fantasy. Discussing another sonnet by Quevedo, Paul Julian Smith states that “the portrait (of the woman]Con ansia estrema de mirar 503 is so abstracted, so dependent on the periphrastic elaboration of pre- existent motifs, that the presence of an actual woman (‘the beloved?) is all but obliterated” (Quevedo 85). What achieves presence, as a coun- terbalance to the woman's absence, is the spectacle of the poet's autho- rial display in the ingenious play on words and particularly the play of concepts. The traditional separation between cultismo, associated prima- tily with Géngora, and conceptismo, identified with Quevedo, is no longer valid. Nevertheless, just as we see a type of “signature discourse” in Géngora’s poem through its intense metaphorization and obscurity, so too do we find a rhetorical self display in the verbal and conceptual agility and exhibitionism of Quevedo’s poems. Quevedo’s wit, his ingenio, seems particularly sharp when he pre- sents not just the male perspective but also, curiously, women who them- selves possess (more or less) the look. In the sonnets we have seen thus far, the feminine look is either ignored or is at best alluded to indirectly. However, in a series of poems that overtly deal with a woman's look, Quevedo’s offers a notable (if ironic) exception to this absence. At the same time that he dramatizes the woman’s look, he also enacts the re- sulting male anxiety over a woman’ ability to hold the gaze and assume a position of power and authority. In this particular sequence of son- nets, we are presented with women whose look is compromised in one way or another: one woman covers her eyes with her hand, another is cross-eyed (bizca), one has only one eye (tuerta), and the final one is completely blind. There is in this series a steady momentum toward controlling (albeit in a humorous manner) the disturbing presence of beautiful women who see and who are thereby in a position of domi- nation with the power to objectify the male viewer. In “A Aminta, que se cubrié los ojos con la mano,” we have a reiteration of Petrarchan clichés (the use of contraries, particularly in the antithesis of fire and snow, for example) and the conventional tropes and lyric situations: Lo que me quita en fuego, me da en nieve la mano que tus ojos me recata; y no es menor rigor con el que mata, ni menos flamas su blancura mueve. (344) Again we find the double strategy of idealization and fragmen- tation in the extreme beauty of the disembodied hand and eyes. In other poems these strategies have had the function of displaying mastery over the disquieting beauty of women. There is, however, a subtext in this504 Marla Cristina Quintero poem chat enacts a psychodrama in which the woman assumes a posi- tion of mastery, resulting in the subordination of the male subject. This is made evident by phrases such as “no es menos el rigor con el que mata” and, later in the poem, “Si de tus ojos el ardor tirano / le pasas por tu mano por templarle.” These phrases suggest an exaggerated reversal of the look; and here the woman is clearly associated with the mythic ba- silisk whose look was lethal. This representation of the woman's look as deadly is hardly original with Quevedo. Donaldson Evans has stud- ied what he calls the “aggressive eye topos” and tells us that it can be traced back to Hesiod in the 8th C. BC, is featured in Arabic and Provengal poetry, and would ultimately become a favored topos in Petrarchist lyric. What is striking in Quevedo’s poem is the intensifica- tion of this conventional image and the conceptual difficulty of its elabo- ration in this group of poems. The title of the next poem, “A una dama bizca y hermosa,” alerts us to the deeply held ambivalence toward the beloved, as a physical char- acteristic with comic connotations (“bizca”) is juxtaposed with the at- tribute of beauty (“hermosa”). The poem begins with the same idealiz- ing antithesis of fire and snow that we saw in the previous sonnet, but in the second quartet the woman's look (“‘mirar”) is called “zambo” (which can be translated as both “cross-eyed” and “half-caste”), “zurdo,” and “delincuente.” The lethal power of her eyes is clearly transgressive, and this is furthered emphasized by the designation of the light emanating from her eyes as “engafiosa.” It is in the tercets that language specifically associated with power and conquest is introduced: “despojos,” “conquista,” and “premios”; and it becomes particularly explicit in its association of seeing with domination and transgression in the last in- genious tercet: {Qué ley, pues, mover pudo al mal jurista a que, siendo monarcas los dos ojos, Jos llamase vizcondes de la vista? (351) Behind the witry wordplay—particularly the pun based on the homo- phonic association of “vizcondes,” “bizcos,” and “vista’—we have the deliberate invocation of power and hierarchy (“ley,” “monarcas,” and “vizcondes”) associated with sight. Metaphors of power based on the body were common in the era, and we need only mention the preva- lent notion of the “body politic,” a notion that often assigned to dif-Con ansia estrema de mirar 505 ferent components of the state characteristics associated with one or an- other part of the body. For example, Saavedra Fajardo claims that royal advisors should function as the eyes of the monarch who is the head of the body politic (Davis 35). Quevedo makes the eyes themselves the “monarchs” because of the power they wield over the hapless lover. At the same time, this language evoking a female look that is decidedly compromised by the woman's ocular affliction borders on the burlesque, again attenuating if not effacing feminine agency. ‘The imagery of political power and even an implied rhetoric of empire are incorporated into these poems. In the next sonnet, “A una dama tuerta y muy hermosa,” we again have the malady announced first in the title, before the idealizing term. Thus, as in the previous poem, the poet expresses both praise and derision as the woman is fetishized and disfigured simultaneously, Ironically, the very feature that disfigures her is that which gives her even the slightest hint of individuality. In the tercets the poet establishes once more the correspondences between power and seeing. The poetic “I” tells us that were the lady to have sight in both eyes, nations now in the dark would be vanquished: Si en un ojo no mds, que en vos es dia, tienen cuantos le ven muerte y prisiones, al otro le faltara monarquia. Aun faltan a sus rayos corazones, victorias a su ardiente valentia yal triunfo de sus luces aun naciones. (351) Here the poet goes beyond the association of sight and hierarchy, and ascribes to the female look the ability to annihilate and conquer other “nations.” Not only does he attribute to the lady's eyes military prow- ess, but these verses encode the religious and racist underpinnings of the imperial enterprise. When he states in the last verse that light is missing from certain nations, we are reminded of the prevalent view in the sev- enteenth century that nations that did not possess the Christian faith lived in darkness. There may also be an echo of the word “zambo” in the previous sonnet referring to dark races who needed to be dominated. During that time, there was a clearly binary view regarding the sexes, and women were usually associated with unruly nature and men with culture. In another reversal of the authority of the look, the woman in Quevedo’s poem is presented as the metaphorical bearer of civilization who brings light, “luces,” to the unruly dark world.506 Maria Cristina Quintero In the last sonnet in the sequence, “A una dama de igual hermosa y del todo ciega,” the image of monarchy and the power motif reap- pear, this time in a destructive key as the femenine look is accused of wreaking havoc on nature itself: A poder vos mirar, la fuente fria encendiera cristales en centellas; Viera cenizas sus espumas bellas, tronara fulminando su armonia. Although this particular lady cannot see, she is still nevertheless capable of wounding/penetrating her lover, ultimately blinding and castrating him: Hoy ciega juntamente y desdefiosa sin ver la herida ni atender al ruego, vista cegtis al que miraros osa. (352) This and the previous sonnets invite us to address the question of power associated with the gendering of the eye. We have said before that for the most part in amatory poetry, the reader is positioned as a male look- ing upon a partitioned body that is female. The opposite of what we might expect occurs here, as the male and his look are presented as pas- sive victims wounded and dominated by the beloved’s look.!! Thus, the eye can be gendered either way and women themselves can assume what we might characterize as the penetrating “masculine” eye while the male lover becomes a passive “feminine” receptacle. This situation sug- gests the instability in the position of subjects and objects, and again points to the male subject’s anxiety. It also implicitly questions the binarism—female-passive/male-active—that informs the gendering of social authority. Marfa Grazia Profeti indicates in La serittura e il corpo that these particular sonnets are difficult to classify, oscillating as they do between the laudatory (and as such, belonging to the category of “poesia amatoria’) and the burlesque (30-31). The ambivalence of genre in these poems may be related to the equally ambivalent gendering of the eye; and the genre/gender confusion may be considered a structural manifestation of anxiety. These poems force us to wonder just who is really doing the looking, the penetrating, who is assuming the position of dominance. Ultimately, of course, the control given to women turnsCon ansia estrema de mirar 507 out to be illusory for, despite the insistence on the woman's ability to dominate, the real mastery comes in the form of wordplay on the part of the poet. Quevedo, like Garcilaso and Géngora, has entrapped the woman in his rhetoric; and it is his eye/I that prevails. In other poems Quevedo's tone turns decidedly more bitter in the poetic persona’s desire to establish his domination over the female object. In the poetry we have seen so far, the dual impulses of fascina- tion and repudiation toward the female body are presented indirectly through the rhetorical techniques of hyperbole and fragmentation, the exaggerated metaphorization, and ironic portrayal of the female look. In other poems, such as “Venganza de la edad en hermosura presumida” and “Venganza en figura de consejo a la hermosura pasada,” the repu- diation of women becomes most prominent. Quevedo turns his satiri- cal gaze on another spectacle, not of feminine beauty but rather its loss, as the poetic speaker seems to revel in the decay of the female body. The very use of the word “venganza” in both sonnets suggests violence against the female body which once held the power to entice: Cuando tuvo, Floralba, tu hermosura, uantos ojos te vieron, en cadena, con presuncién, de honestidad ajena, los desprecié, soberbia, ra locura, Persuadiste el espejo conjetura de eternidades en la edad serena, y que a su plata el oro en tu melena nunca del tiempo trocarfa la usura. Ves que la que antes eras, sepultada yaces en la que vives; y, quejosa, tarde te acusa vanidad burlada. Mueres doncella, y no de virtuosa, sino de presumida y despreciada: esto eres vieja, esotro fuiste hermosa. (366) Quevedo begins by reminding his female interlocutor and his male readers of the sadistic power of feminine beauty with its capacity to capture the male look and imprison it. Again, he is enacting the al- leged danger and authority of women who can hold the look. Never- theless, there is a drastic change in tone here, as any pretense to idealiz- ing the beloved is immediately abandoned. What he stages, instead, is a complex dialectic of looks: the woman who is looking at a version of508 Maria Cristina Quintero herself as she, in turn, is being observed by the male poetic speaker. Now, as time has wreaked havoc on the woman's beauty, the poet can avenge that humiliating domination by gleefully holding up the degrading spec- tacle of faded beauty for cruel scrutiny. The male reclaims the look but the spectacle before him and that of the readers is now that of an old and unattractive woman who did not hearken the call to “carpe diem.” ‘When she was young and beautiful, he tells us, she was disdainful of men not because she was virtuous but rather because she was presump- tuous and mad. As a punishment, she will die old, ugly, and a virgin: “Mueres doncella.” Indeed, for all intents and purposes, she is dead al- ready since the death of beauty is the end of a poetic identity. The mirror and the death of female subjectivity again appears in the sonnet, “Venganza en figura de consejo a la hermosura pasada.” In this poem the woman is advised to throw away the mirror because now that she is old, she can no longer be either the object of the gaze or the viewing subject : cuelga el espejo a Venus, donde miras yllloras la que fuiste en la que hoy eres; pues, suspirada entonces, hoy suspiras. Y ansi, lo que no quieren ni oi quieres ver, no verdn los ojos, ni tus iras, cuando vives vejez y nifiez mueres. (343) As in the first poem, the woman's identity is constituted through an illusory identification with an ideology of beauty and youth reflected in the mirror. Here, the speaking subject goes further, recommending that she give up the look, an act that is akin to asking her to give up her identity. In a typically antithetical sleight of words, Quevedo here both dramatizes the female look and at the same time advocates that she give it up in order to avoid the despair over the loss of her youthful beauty. The use of the mirror image is particularly significant because it is emblematic of the construction of the gaze and specifically of soci- etal attitudes toward feminine beauty. Furthermore, as psychoanalysis tells us, the formation of subjectivity is intrinsically associated with what has been called the mirror stage, for it is here that a specular image forms the basis for ego formation. Indeed, the ego is the product of the mir- ror image because the subject relies for his or her visual identity on an external representation of him or herself. In both poems Quevedo sug- gests that the mirror had provided a repertoire of the normative repre-Con ansia estrema de mirar 509 sentation of women in all their formulaic beauty (for example, the as- sociation of hair with gold), This, in Lacanian terms, would be an in- stance of méconnaissance or misrecognition, the illusory identification through which the ego is constructed (Lacan, “Mirror Stage” 6). In the first Venganza poem the mirror has betrayed the woman by persuading her that her golden hair would never turn to silver; and now the same mirror reflects the death of beauty: “Ves la que antes eras, sepultada / yaces en la que vives . . .” Within the misogynist equation of identity with beauty and youth, the mirror (the site where society's gaze and the man and the woman's looks converge and also the site where social iden- tity is inscribed) reflects the death of her identity as someone worthy of either attracting or possessing the look. But if the poet is rejecting the normative representation of women, he is also in essence rejecting his own imaginary identification with the female object. If subjecting women to poetic surveillance is always an exercise in self-display, then the loss of the idealized object is also a loss of self for the viewing sub- ject. There is, then, an implicit questioning of the normative repre- sentation provided by the Petrarchan repertoire and its role in creating a rhetorical male subjectivity. After all, it is the idealizing poetic conven- tions that informed the image that stared back at the woman in the mirror. By revealing the folly of this poetic masquerade, the poet im- plicates himself in this loss. We have said that idealization is central to desire and the construction of a poetic subjectivity. Without idealiza- tion desire is obliterated; and this leads to disintegration, not just for the woman but for the poet as the bearer of the look. Silverman, fol- lowing Lacan, tells us that a viewing subject is constituted in and through his fiction (Threshold 126). The desengafo or disillusionment here is not just with the fictive feminine body but with the poetic conventions which informed the poet's authorial self-display. The desengafio so preva- lent in Baroque poetry, particularly in that of Quevedo, was also in- formed by an understanding of optics whose most important and in- sistent lesson was the delusory role of the senses, particularly that of sight. The optimistic Renaissance association between knowledge and seeing was vitiated in the Baroque through the growing recognition that vi- sual appearance is often the site for error. If the masculine poetic sub- ject is constituted through a specular relation to a desired woman, then ultimately what is enacted through the questioning of spectatorship is a crisis of the self.510 Marfa Cristina Quintero The ideology and rhetoric of the gaze that are at the core of the amatory poetry of early modern Spain were, in part, inherited from an- tiquity, informed by Renaissance neo-platonism, and later problematized by the Baroque interest in optics and theatricality. The modern femi- nist theorization of the gaze contributes to our understanding of this poetry by reminding us that vision, associated from ancient times with cognition and desire, is always gendered. We began this article by allud- ing specifically to the male gaze; and indeed, initially, the scopophilic drive as dramatized in this poetry seems to be a one-directional power play in which the image of the woman is subsumed, metaphorically manipulated, and distorted through poetic fragmentation. Nevertheless, the dynamics of the gaze turn out to be far more complicated; for in the representation of an other who is both desired and feared, there is a simultaneous drive to establish a masculine poetic subjectivity that wishes to display itself before the eyes of his male readers. All of the poems that we have studied here are about the positioning of subjects and ob- jects in a specular relationship; but this positioning is necessarily unstable because the subject, even as he is looking at the object he is trying to possess, is also identifying with it. In these shifting positions the poetry dramatizes the scopophilic effort to master, to dominate, and to pos- sess the feminine other, but it also emphatically reenacts the ultimate failure to do so. Furthermore, in the mechanisms of self-display and rhetorical exhibitionism, poets like Quevedo and Géngora reveal an ambivalent relationship to tradition and poetic convention. The poetry of the Golden Age may be primarily about the constitution of male subjectivity and the coding of the female body as a sign of masculinity. This masculine identity, however, turns out to be a volatile structure made up of anxiety, frustrated looks, close encounters and a rhetorical play of presence and absence. The poetry we have studied here contains the roots of its own subversion and thus represents an implicit ques- tioning of the cultural economy of the gaze. Bryn Mawr COLLEGECon ansia estrema de mirar 511 NOTES The bibliography on the gaze is vast. In addition to Lacan, other critics whose work has been particularly helpful in the elaboration of this article are Kaja Silverman, Barbara Freedman, and Laura Mulvey. Silverman's The Threshold of the Visible World makes the clearest distinction between terms like the gaze, the look, the eye, and the screen, ” For Freud’s description of scopophilia, see Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Standard Edition (vol. 7, 191-92) and “Instincts and Their Viscissitudes,” Standard Edition (14, 129-30) * See my “The Rhetoric of Desire and Misogyny in Jardin de Venus.” “The original is quoted by Eugenio Donato (23), and the translation is mine. Here ‘Tesauro is anticipating by some three hundred years Freud’s assertion that scopophilia or Schaulust—the eroticized desire to see—is closely tied to Wisstrieb, or the desire for knowl- edge. According to Peter Brooks, Freud often emphasizes the importance of optics to psychoanalysis and links vision, desire, and the epistemophilic urge (Body Work 9). * Qrd, by Hillman (83), emphases in the original. For the importance of anatomy and dissection in Spain, see Redondo, “La métaphore du corps.” Redondo studies a treatise written in 1587 by the doctor Jerénimo Merola who also promotes the idea of opening the body as ifit were a window in order to discover its secrets (44). “ In herstudy of the female nude in arc, Lynda Nead studies this dynamic as applied to the artisc/model relationship. See 46-51 in particular. ” According to Silverman: “Identity and desire are so completely imbricated that neither can be explained without recourse to the other” (Male Subjectivity 6). * See Anne J. Cruz for the best discussion of Garcilaso's originality in inscribing himself within the Petrarchan tradition. ° See Silverman, Threshold 20. "° See the first chapter in Donaldson Evans who summarizes this theory: “the efflux theory of vision represents the eye not asa mere receiver or reflector of light rays, but as possessing its own internal illumination in the form of fire. The eye is described as being a transmitter oflight, sending out beams which, when they strike another object, either carry the image back to the eye or actually join the eye to the object being viewed” (12). " See Lobanob-Rostovsky for a discussion of the ambivalent gendering of the look. ” See Lacan’ “The Mirror Stage.”512 Marfa Cristina Quintero WORKS CITED Brooks, Peter. Body Work. Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Capellanus, Andreas, The Art of Courtly Love. Trans. John Jay Parry. New York: Columbia UP, 1941. Cruz, Anne J. Jmitacién y ransformacion: el petrarquismo en la poesta de Boscdn y Garcilaso de la Vega. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1988. Davis, Charles. “El tacitismo politico espafiol y la metéfora del cuerpo.” Le Corps comme meéraphore dans LEspagne des XVIe et XVIlesitcles. Ed. Augustin Redondo. Patis: Sorbonne, 1992. 31-39. Donaldson Evans, Lance K. Loves Fatal Glance: A Study of Eye Imagery in the Poets of the Ecole Lyonnaise. 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