The Case of Rosaura’s Honor,
and the Problem of Modernity
(La vida es sueño)
❦
Joachim Küpper
Calderón’s La vida es sueño (c. 1635) begins with a female character, Rosaura,
stepping onstage. She is the daughter of Violante, a lady at the imperial court
of Moscow. When Violante was young, she entertained pre-marital relations
with a courtier named Clotaldo, who left her, although he knew she was pregnant. We are not informed of Clotaldo’s motives, but he is likely to have acted
out of career opportunism. He was offered and accepted a position at the
court of the Polish King Basilio. When Rosaura comes to Poland some twenty
years later, Clotaldo is what one might call the “privado,” the first courtier of
the Polish King. As an illegitimate child, Rosaura is without honor (“honor”)
in the sense of reputation and social acceptability. But she has yet another
problem: at court in Moscow, she met a young nobleman named Astolfo, who
succeeded in winning her favor. Afterwards, he did to her what her father had
already done to her mother, Violante: he left her for selfish reasons. He went
to Poland as a suitor to princess Estrella, because he hoped by marrying her
to inherit the Polish throne from their common uncle, Basilio.
Born without honor and forsaken by her lover: this is Rosaura’s situation at
the beginning of the play, a situation largely brought about by contingency,
by adversa fortuna, as it was called in the seventeenth century. She is not
responsible for her illegitimate birth, and her surrender to Astolfo’s carnal
desires, although considered sinful from the standpoint of moral theology,
was not a serious mistake measured by the standards of courtly society. Thus,
one may regard Rosaura’s being without a husband as the consequence of
another interference of adversa fortuna: namely the fact that, by contingency,
in a neighboring kingdom the dynastic situation is such that it offers Astolfo
the prospects to achieve the rank of king.
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What Rosaura does in this situation is perfectly understandable by modern
standards. She does not accept what contingency has inflicted upon her; she
decides instead to claim agency by searching for her father and her lover to
make them restore her reputation. She cross-dresses as a man and travels on
horseback to Poland. My reading may well seem an over-interpretation, but I
will try to substantiate it in the following argument: the function of Rosaura
in this play is to represent an attitude towards life that we may call the basis
of modernity, a radically different position from earlier periods. According to
this attitude one should not simply accept the world and reality as they are;
nor should one assign meaning to facts by interpreting contingency as a form
of higher necessity (e.g. mythical necessity) or as a consequence of the will of
God or Providence. Rather, one should try to set things right or to mend, as
it were, the defects of the factual world. To cite a formula that was to become
prominent roughly 150 years later, one should pursue one’s happiness. One
may call this basically modern attitude the project of self-assertion.
Of course, a Christian understanding of life’s misfortunes also differs from
the way these problems were treated in mythical ages—Christianity does not
require that humans passively accept their fate. The crucial difference between
traditional Christian and modern attitudes towards contingency, however, is
that Catholic belief allows for agency only within certain limits, namely the
limits of moral theology, that is, tradition and dogma. This excludes the freedom to transgress the boundaries of the “role,” to put it in Golden Age terms,
which God as the creator of all human beings has allocated to each individual
at birth. In the case of Calderón’s drama, this would refer to Rosaura taking
on a masculine identity and thus denying being born female.1
This assessment of Rosaura’s choice may well prompt a contemporary
reader to ask what else she could have done to restore her honor: should
she have submissively accepted her misfortune? The answer is: no, she did
not have to. The era sub gratia, that is the period after Christ’s self-sacrifice,
differs not only from the age of paganism but also from the age of the Old
Testament, the era sub lege. Rosaura is not expected to act as Job did. In Act
III her father, Clotaldo, tells her that she should have retired to a monastery,
which was an appropriate solution for restoring one’s lost honor, and, at the
same time, a way to transcendental happiness. Rosaura’s response to this sug-
1
It would require a separate discussion on the function of comedy (comedia de capa y
espada) in order to explain how the remarks above relate to the countless occurrences
of cross-dressing found in Golden Age comedies. Suffice it to say that comedy is not
“mimetic” in the sense that applies to the “serious” sub-genres of drama. In a way
that shows certain affinities with the discourse of the carnivalesque as described by
Michail M. Bakhtin, comedy seems to be intended to provide temporary relief from
the multiple constraints of the “official” discourse. From this perspective, one could
even interpret the predominance of the cross-dressing motif in early modern Spanish
(and also English) literature as a sign of the rigidity of the gender-system in the extratheatrical, real world of the period.
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gestion is characterized by violent anger,2 which shows that what is at stake
for her, unconsciously, of course, is not primarily restoring her honor, but
rather winning back her lover, Astolfo.
There is another point, which should be taken into consideration. I have
already emphasized that part of Rosaura’s misfortune is inherited. She is a sinner, but she may owe her inclination to illicit carnal pleasure to her mother (or
to the example set by her mother). From a Calderonian standpoint this does
not mean that she is not responsible for what she does, but it does mean that
she deserves what she thinks no one is willing to bestow upon her, “piedad.”3
With her inherited tendency to sin she represents humankind in the state of
original sin, but without even being conscious of it, she lives in the age sub
gratia. The consequence of her self-assertion is not instantaneous death, as
for the pagan Phaeton—to whom she refers in her introductory words upon
which I will comment below—but an accident that should teach her a lesson
providing she properly understands it, which is not the case. Nevertheless,
Rosaura is indeed conceded a second “piedad.” Immediately after falling from
her horse in this opening scene she meets Segismundo, who will restore her
honor at the end of the play. Acting within the God-given order of nature and
society, he will do what she has not achieved in her attempt to transgress this
order. One of his first actions after ascending the throne is to order Astolfo
to marry Rosaura.4
This text would be a medieval text if it merely signified that claiming
agency is sinful. Yet, the text says in addition, that self-assertion is doomed
to fail. We may take this as indication of the attraction, in those times, to
the concept Rosaura represents, an indication of what I should like to call
the imminence of modernity in Golden Age Spain. Finally, the text contains
a promise: that those who are ready to give up on the project of claiming
agency for themselves will be rewarded by God on earth. From the point of
view of dogma, this is a somewhat problematic promise, which shows once
more how appealing the concepts of rising modernity must have been in
seventeenth century Spain.
Now that I have stated my hypothesis, I will analyze the first lines of the
play to explain how the vision of Rosaura as a character who allegorizes the
2
She calls her father’s proposal an “injuria” (v. 2629; citations from La vida es sueño,
ed. Ciriaco Morón; translations from Life is a dream).
3
V. 22. See my citation of Rosaura’s long introductory monologue, p. 4, to which I
refer here and in anticipation of my argument on p. 4 below.
4
He does this even though he loves her. For reasons of dynastic stability, Segismundo
marries Estrella who has certain claims to the throne, and he celebrates his actions, on
the day of his great victory, as a “vencerme a mí” and as “la más alta [de mis grandes
vitorias]” (v. 3256–3258). If we take into consideration that Rosaura is the first woman
Segismundo ever saw (his biological mother died while giving birth), it becomes evident that La vida es sueño is a paradigm of the ideal solution to the Oedipal conflict,
according to classical Freudianism.
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dangers and the fundamental misconceptions in the modern response to
life’s contingencies, at least for Calderón, is already encoded in these first
lines, a passage, which, according to Menéndez Pelayo, is simply mannerist,
overcomplicated, even meaningless rhetoric.5
Hipogrifo violento,
que corriste parejas con el viento,
¿dónde, rayo sin llama,
pájaro sin matíz, pez sin escama,
y bruto sin instinto
natural, al confuso laberinto
desas desnudas peñas
te desbocas, te arrastras y despeñas?
Quédate en este monte,
donde tengan los brutos su Faetonte;
que yo, sin más camino
que el que me dan las leyes del destino,
ciega y desesperada
bajaré la cabeza enmarañada
deste monte eminente
que abrasa al sol el ceño de la frente.
Mal, Polonia, recibes
a un extranjero, pues con sangre escribes
su entrada en tus arenas,
y a penas llega, cuando llega apenas.
Bien mi suerte lo dice;
mas ¿dónde halló piedad un infelice?6
(ll. 1–22)
At first, we gain from these lines some basic information. Rosaura has
reached her destination in Poland, and the first thing she encounters there
is another misfortune.7 Her horse has thrown her off and she is injured,
bleeding. She is extremely angry and curses her horse, wishing death upon
5
“. . . aquellos altisonantes versos . . . han quedado como tipo de mal gusto” (Menén­
dez Pelayo 230).
6
“Wild hippogriff, that matched the wind in flight / Dark lightning, dull-plumed bird,
unscaled fish / Brute beast that makes a mock of nature’s laws, / Now wherefore art
thou come in headlong plunge/ Through twisting trails to reach this barren brink? /
Remain upon this crag so beasts may have / Their Phaëthon; for I, with no more
course / Than destiny decrees, in blind despair / Descend the tangled slope of this
harsh hill / That wrinkles to the sun its scowling brow. / A poor reception, Poland,
dost thou give / A stranger, since with blood her welcome’s writ / Upon thy sands,
and hardly here, she fares / So hardly. Yet my fate ordains it so. / But where was pity
e’er found for one in woe?” (1 f.).
7
At this stage, the spectator does not know yet about Rosaura’s past misfortunes; I am
considering, however, the whole scene from the character’s perspective. Her “desperation” is plausible only if we take into consideration that the above-mentioned accident
is one of a long series of unhappy events.
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it as implied by the Phaeton simile. She has lost her way, and, confronted
with this renewed misfortune, she regards herself as a person doomed to
failure, a person whose fate (destino) is constant suffering (pena), and constant
unhappiness (infelice), without any prospect of compassion or succor (piedad)
from anyone. Therefore, she is not only literally disoriented—she cannot find
her way—but also in the figurative sense of mental disorientation, so much
so that she considers herself blind (ciega) and hopeless (desesperada). What
seems strange here is that this courageous, self-assertive young woman is so
extremely desperate when confronted with an incident that is, after all, not
uncommon when traveling on horse-back.
There are many other odd points in this passage, if we take a closer look at
details I haven’t mentioned so far. Why, for example, does she call her horse
a “hippogryph,” if, as it seems, she merely wants to say that it runs as fast as
a bird?8 And why does she insist so emphatically on her steed’s exceptional
celerity in a long sequence of strikingly unusual similes: “rayo sin llama,”
“pájaro sin matíz,” “pez sin escama”? What does she mean when she calls
her horse an animal without instinct (“bruto sin instinto natural”), when one
could argue that throwing the rider and running away (i.e. freeing oneself
from discipline) is nothing but an affirmation of a beast’s natural instinct?
And what about this mountain, which, she says, is so high that its peak touches
the sun? Seventeenth-century Spaniards were certainly not familiar with the
exact topography of Poland, but it is quite probable that they had a rough
idea of this country,9 in which case they would have known it was not at all a
region with particularly high mountains, or at least, that in order to get from
Russia to Poland it was not necessary to cross an alpine range.
How, then, should we as readers or spectators account for all these inconsistencies and unanswerable questions that arise from the very first lines of the
comedia? Certainly not, I would suggest, by considering them as an indication
of Calderón’s incapability to present a coherent introductory scene. We should
rather consider the confusion I have indicated as hinting at the character’s
state of mind in pronouncing the quoted lines. Let me begin with the assumption that, rather than necessity, it was Rosaura’s own will that made her climb
this extremely high mountain. As an experienced horsewoman she should
have been extremely cautious when riding downhill. Therefore, she should
8
In Greek, “hippo” means “horse,” a “gryph” is a bird of prey. The literary tradition
of the phantasmatic animal goes back to Ovid (Metamorphoses I: 748–II: 400), who does
not, however, introduce the term, but rather speaks of “equi pennisque levati” (II: 159).
At the time, the hippogryph owed its literary prominence to Ariosto (Orlando furioso IV:
18 and passim); in Ariosto’s text, though, which refers to the genre of the burlesque,
the anti-natural hybridity of the animal does not have any further-going moral implications, as I would like to propose with regard to Calderón.
9
Poland, though far from Spain, was not totally unknown to Spaniards in the seventeenth century. It was one of the first countries whose population accepted the
Reformation, and it was the only Protestant country to be almost entirely reconverted
later to Catholicism. In Calderón’s day, Poland was a center of Jesuit activity.
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not blame her horse, but rather herself. If we follow up with the idea that,
in her mental disorientation, Rosaura accuses the horse of actions for which
she herself is responsible (a process that Freud would later call projection),
we could find consistency in her words by reading her description of the
horse as a description of herself. To accept this hypothesis would imply that
she, Rosaura, is a monster (“siendo / monstruo de una especie y otra”10 [v.
2724 f.], she says at the end of the drama), a hybrid being who transgresses
her place in the great chain of being, a horse-bird, a flame without light, a
bird without feathers, a fish without scales, a beast without natural instinct,
and thus, not just a hybrid, but a creature lacking the distinctive feature of
the being it is meant to be. Since she is human, this would mean that what
she lacks is reason.
We should relate this idea, which is so far only a hypothesis, to what the
spectator knows about her physical appearance at this point, namely, that she
is cross-dressed (“Rosaura en hábito de hombre,” we read as a stage direction
at the beginning of the text); she is thus a woman-man, a sort of hybrid much
like a hippogryph. Yet another point should be considered: through her use
of the Phaeton simile, by mixing up horse and rider, responsible agent and
passive object, she inadvertently foregrounds what I have labeled a quasiFreudian structure of projection. Phaeton was a son of Apollo, the god whose
task was to transport the sun from east to west each day with a chariot drawn
by mighty horses. Phaeton, refusing to accept the limits imposed upon him as
the mortal son of a god, longed to be as powerful as his father and ignored
Apollo’s warning that he lacked the skill necessary to drive the chariot. On
his trip, he failed to bridle the horses; the chariot tumbled from the sky and
Phaeton was killed. If we read the simile according to my hypothesis, this suggests that in choosing action, that is, attempting to repair the negative effects
of her fate, Rosaura transgresses the boundaries imposed upon her as a child
of God. She tries to be as mighty as God himself and consequently fails. She
does not succeed in bridling her horse and is thrown down.11
So far, my reading of these lines has been a kind of close reading referring
mainly to common, non-specialist knowledge, namely, the inexistence of a
mountain range between Poland and Russia, a rider’s responsibility when
thrown from a well-trained horse, as well as some basic knowledge of pagan
mythology and of the functioning of the human psyche. It would of course be
misleading to think that the interpretative hypothesis I linked to all these points
can be detected without taking into account some extra-textual information,
which was contemporary general knowledge, but is no longer so today. “Et ipsa
superbia, et diabolus, et impetus irrationalis est mons . . . Et mons excelsus
“. . . I must seem a freak of both / The sexes . . . .” (85).
Most of Calderón’s Christian allegorical reinterpretations of pagan mythology and
its figures are already to be found in the Ovide moralisé. Regarding Phaeton as an allegory of Lucifer and of man in the state of superbia and vanagloria, see Ovide moralisé,
Premier livre v. 4151–4300 and Seconde livre, v. 1–1364.
10
11
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est superbia pharisaica. Et montes defluentes a facie Dei sunt daemones et
superbi.” This passage is from a book compiled by one Hieronymus Lauretus
called Silva allegoriarum, “A Collection of Allegorical Meanings.” Hieronymus
was a monk in the famous monastery of Montserrat, one of the spiritual and
intellectual centers of medieval and early modern Europe. His book was first
printed in 1570 and then reprinted again and again during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries throughout Europe, and is an indispensable tool for
understanding Spanish texts of the age.12
Allegory is a rhetorical construction that transfers a secondary meaning,
which is, in principle, completely arbitrary, upon a given signified. What
distinguishes friar Hieronymus’s compilation from allegory tout court is that
for every allegorical meaning, he provides a corresponding citation from the
Bible. That is why I have suggested the term “orthodox allegory” for these
structures, which implies that there are true as well as misconceived allegorical
meanings, as seen from the standpoint of the discourse we are considering.13
It may seem strange to us to maintain that allegory, a rhetorical figure, which,
by its very structure, seems to be the apogee of rhetoric, can convey true,
essential meanings. This notion is based upon the concept of Scripture as
revelation, that is, as a text in which God communicates transcendental truth
to human beings. “Scripture” is the “first book,” the liber primus. But, since the
whole world is nothing but creation, created from nothing by this selfsame
God, reading the world as a book provides humankind with a second way to
access transcendental truth: “Invisibilia enim ipsius, a creatura mundi, per
ea quae facta sunt, intellecta, conspiciuntur.”14 This concept of the world as a
liber naturae was later combined with Aristotelian, Epicurean, and, primarily,
Stoic physics, that is, with the principles of sympathy and antipathy, of correspondence and analogy between the different levels of the material and
the living cosmos. The result was a conception of a world full of meaning,
a concept that Foucault discusses in the chapter entitled “The Prose of the
World” of his book The Order of Things.
At first glance, this quite fascinating concept poses a serious problem, both
epistemologically and dogmatically. If the cosmos is a thoroughly structured
entity, where every element is, by means of analogy, linked to every other element, how can we distinguish the relevant analogies from the less relevant or
misleading ones? Or, to put it more clearly, if the cosmos is such a structured
12
See the entry “mons” in the 10th edition of Hieronymus’s collection (Cologne
1681; there is a facsimile of this latter edition, Munich 1971; despite its wide distribution, the Silva is widely unknown to comedia criticism, whether peninsular, continental
or American).
13
I have tried to give a detailed reading of several Golden Age dramas (though not
of Calderón’s dream play) and an overview of the discourse (in the Foucauldian sense)
that informs these dramas in my book Diskurs-Renovatio bei Lope de Vega und Calderón.
14
Saint Paul, Letter to the Romans 1:19 ff.
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entity, are there any misleading analogies at all? The answer to this must certainly be negative, and this is why late-Renaissance discourse tended toward
a sort of semiotic entropy, toward the thesis that any proposition concerning
the factual world was, in the final analysis, to be considered true. A reaction
to this epistemological situation, which was dangerous to Christian belief as a
dogmatic system, one of many reactions, was what we read in the allegorical
encyclopedia of this monk called Hieronymus: to restrict the reading of the
liber naturae by making this reading dependent on the liber primus, i.e. Scripture. In addition to Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Quevedo and dozens of
minor contemporary authors, who all engaged in the project of ideological
restoration, which is typical of the Spanish seventeenth century, Calderón
knew this book and used it. He propagated the orthodox allegories found in
this encyclopedia in his comedias and in his autos sacramentales where he made
the corresponding secondary meanings explicit.
This short excursus leads us back to La vida es sueño, in that it allows us to
explain what Rosaura’s climb to the mountain’s heights might signify. If we
read the passage allegorically, that is, as a sort of unconscious self-commentary
on her own actions, then her self-assertive project would have to be categorized as Pride (superbia), i.e. the always-illusionary urge of humankind to be
as mighty as God. Accordingly, in Hieronymous under the entry “sun” /
“sol” we find the allegorical meaning “God” (which we would have to link
to Calderón’s “deste monte eminente que abrasa al sol. . .”; an additional
reference to “sol” is, of course, implied in the myth of Phaeton, namely in
his attempt to control the sun); under the entry “wind”/“ventus” as referred
to in the second verse of this passage, “que corriste parejas con el viento,”
we find the allegorical meaning of “Devil”; and, essential for my concluding
remarks on this passage, under the entry “horse”/“equus” we find: “Equi . . .
dici possunt sensus corporis et concupiscentiae . . . Et equus mas dici potest
. . . foemina vero concupiscentia, seu vis concupisciblis.”15 It would be possible
to provide additional references, which would further substantiate my reading, but I will only add one more here. The treatises that, according to the
Council of Trent, codified Christian dogma more than any other text were
the writings of Thomas Aquinas. In the Summa theologiae we find, that carnal
sin, luxuria (referring not only to committed sin but also to carnal desire) is
connected to a number of mental disturbances. According to Aquinas, the
filiae luxuriae, the daughters of carnal desire, are caecitas mentis, inconsideratio,
praecipitatio, amor sui, and finally desperatio.16 I do not think that I need to
15
As a side remark, I would like to mention that Rosaura calls her horse a “caballo,”
which is the equivalent of “equus mas” (“yegua” being the term for mare). The running
horse as a metaphor for luxuria (carnal desire) has been classic since Plato, and in
particular since Thomas Aquinas (“sicut . . . equus concitatus praecipitanter uadit rupto
freno quo retinebatur. Sic ergo concupiscentia . . .” [De malo, qu. 4, art. 2]).
16
Summa theologiae IIa IIae, qu. 153, art. 5. In the most important Golden Age compendium of moral theology, Thomas Aquinas’ Liber theologiae moralis, we find the same
features (401646 (11644), p. 279).
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elaborate further on Rosaura’s monologue in order to argue that Calderón
constructs her character according to this model.
So what does this argument mean as a whole, and what does it mean for the
problem with which the plot engages? It would mean that Rosaura’s project,
although it might win her spontaneous sympathy from a modern standpoint,
confers upon her the status of a character steeped in sin from the standpoint
of the dominant Golden Age discourse. She transgresses the boundaries of
the natural order. Worse yet, she entertains the illusion that she is as mighty
as God. Furthermore, the true motive for her to do what she does is not the
restoration of her honor, but pure carnal desire.
As already implied, however, the total failure of Rosaura’s project of “selffashioning,” or rather self-assertion, is not the comedia’s “last word” on this
character, or on the attitudes she allegorizes. Like Basilio, Rosaura fails in
every respect, and, as with Basilio, when she is saved at the end and given
what she longs for (i.e. Astolfo as husband and the consequent restitution
of her honor), it is not a result of her autonomous actions, but because of
Segismundo’s renunciation of all autonomy and his submission to the moral
duties taught by traditional Christian belief. If all humans would finally behave
according to these principles, there might be peace and a sort of private
satisfaction for all: this is the promise made to the spectator in exchange for
resisting the luring temptations of a rising Modernity. The play, however, shows
an inherent inconsistency: this promise is based upon the narrative of God’s
self-sacrifice, which is indispensable precisely because of humanity’s systematic
tendency to not behave the way the characters of this comedia do in the end.
This basic inconsistency may account once more for the impasse Spain, whose
quasi-official poet was the author of the play, reached during that age.
Freie Universität Berlin
Bibliography
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. Life is a dream. Trans. William E. Colford. Woodbury, NY:
Baron’s Educational Series, 1956.
———. La vida es sueño. Ed. Ciriaco Morón. Madrid: Cátedra, 1987.
Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino. “Calderón y su teatro, Conferencia quinta: Dramas filosóficos.” Edición nacional de las obras completas de Menéndez Pelayo. Vol. 8. Santander:
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1941. 209–32.
Hieronymus Lauretis. Silva allegoriarum. Cologne: Hermann Demen, 1681. Munich:
W. Fink, 1971.
Küpper, Joachim. Diskurs-Renovatio bei Lope de Vega und Calderón. Tübingen: G. Naar,
1990.
Ovide moralisé: Poème du XIVe siècle. Ed. C. de Boer. Amsterdam: J. Müller, 1915.
Thomas Aquinas. Liber theologiae moralis, Viginti quatuor societatis Iesu doctoribus reseratus, quem R. P. Antonius de Escobar y Mendoza, Vallisoletanus, eiusdem societatis
theologus in examen confessariorum digessit, Monachii, 1646.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.