Erotic Paranoia and Wife Murder in Calderonian Drama

Abstract

Calderon's three famous wife-murder plays El medico de su honra, A secreto agravio, secreta venganza and El pintor de su deshonra dramatize the predicament of the husbands who believe they have been dishonored through adulterous acts committed by their wives, who are consequently killed. In each case the marriage is an arranged one, contracted after the death or departure of the wife's former suitor, who then returns to pursue her. Although all three wives remain faithful, they often act precipitously and unwisely, inducing their husbands to believe that their suspicions are justified. In two cases the suitor is killed alongside the wife; the third lover is a royal personage and therefore immune (McKendrick, Theatre, 147). In El medico de su honra only the object of desire, Mencia, is murdered, whereas Enrique, her suitor, escapes punishment because he is the king's brother. In A secreto agravio, secreta venganza and El pintor de su deshonra both the subjects and objects of the illicit, adulterous desire, the lovers and the wives, are punished by the jealous husbands. fact that wife-murders were actually no more frequent in seventeenth-century Spain than elsewhere in Europe, and that their depiction should consequently not be taken as evidence that they were, has led McKendrick to conclude that the idea that the mere suspicion of a wife's or daughter's guilt should lead to bloodshed is a theatrical device; so too is the risk-laden avenging of a secret dishonor (Honour/Vengeance, 317). There were very few recorded cases of wife-murder in the sixteenth as well as the seventeenth century, and, in fact, violence was far more frequently directed outside the family than within it (Stone 77). honor/vengeance code needs to be viewed as a dramatic convention which signifies on a symbolic plane; it expresses anxieties linked to a loss of self-control and rationality: The honour code by its rationalizations protected man from those passions of love and jealousy alien to the self-respecting, self-controlled individual (McKendrick, Honour/Vengeance, 333). sacrifice of an innocent wife can thus be understood as a desperate attempt to redraw boundaries which have been blurred through the dangerous supplement, the desire which exceeds the heterosexual contract of marriage, and to re-gain the control which has been lost. By charting a radically different ideology of sexuality and desire for the Early Modern period, it will be possible to analyze the deeper motivations and anxieties that induce the husbands to murder their wives beside the more obvious ones. Adultery was a far from private issue in Early Modern Europe, and preoccupied social and political institutions alike. church officially viewed adultery as a mortal sin, regardless of whether it was committed by the husband or the wife. In practice, however, a double standard existed owing to the fact that an adulterous woman threatened the principles on which the perpetuation of property was based, whereas an adulterous man left his home unscathed. In countries such as Spain, where criminal codes were based on Roman law, an adulterous woman could be killed by her husband on the spot without his incurring the charge of murder, providing there were witnesses and the wife was caught in flagrante delicto. A woman, however, had no recourse to the law if her husband had a concubine; she was expected to tolerate her husband's extra-marital sexual activities (Hufton 56-7). In England, a wife's murder of her husband was classed as petty treason. husband fulfilled the role of king within the household and his murder was equated with the destruction of sovereign power and the subversion of a God-ordained order. In Early Modern Europe, monogamous marriage was regarded as the institution at the heart of the social system, and this English characterization of the murder of a husband as petty treason suggests that the correspondence between husband and king was more than pure analogy. …