51
I exclude the allegorical figure of Rosemond Clifford, mistress of England's Henry II several centuries prior to the fictional time of the Persiles. Rosamunda's brief emblematic appearance in the novel is confined to the main plot, which relates her attempted seduction of a young Hippolytus figure, his angry rejection of her, and her subsequent conversion and death. She is «one of the few cases in which the Persiles approaches pure allegory» (Forcione, Christian Romance, p. 121). As she first appears literally enchained to an exiled court poet, she can scarcely be Cervantes' model of the autonomously desiring woman. (N. from the A.)
52
Cf. Efron's female piratemen in «Bearded Waiting Women», 156-57. (N. from the A.)
53
Elizabeth Janeway, «Who is Sylvia? On the Loss of Sexual Paradigms», in Women: Sex and Sexuality, eds. Catharine R. Stimpson and Ethel Spector Person (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 7. (N. from the A.)
54
Joaquín Casalduero, Sentido y forma de «Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda» (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1975), p. 17. (N. from the A.)
55
Secular Scripture, p. 77. (N. from the A.)
56
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 1-52. (N. from the A.)
57
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963). Specifically, Isabela is subverting a cross-cousin marriage, a union which would facilitate the passage of inheritable property in a patrilineal descent system. (N. from the A.)
58
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 170. (N. from the A.)
59
Cf. Nancy K. Miller's discussion of Madame de Lafayette's dream in La Princesse de Clèves («Emphasis Added», p. 42). Consider Isabela also in the light of Catherine Clement's assessment that «La femme doit circuler et non pas faire circuler» [Women must circulate and must not cause to circulate], «La Coupable», in La jeune née, coauthored with Hélène Cixous (Paris: Union Générale d'Éditions, 1975), p. 104. (N. from the A.)
60
John Speirs, Medieval English Poetry: The Non-Chaucerian Tradition (New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 219. (N. from the A.)