Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity Elizabeth Rhodes Fuchs, Barbara . Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2003. 142 pages. Barbara Fuchs's book is based on the understanding that nation building generally, and that of Imperial Spain specifically, is a homogenizing process that squeezes the others of history into an ellipsis, from which Cervantes recovers them and flashes them in a series of tropes involving disguise, to which she refers as "passing" (on inspiration from Hillary Leone and Jennifer MacDonald's 1996 [End Page 517] video of that title). The book's thesis is that Cervantes points to the falsity of the essentialism consequent to political and ideological consolidation by providing the reader with characters who successfully perform a religious, political, and/or gendered other: "his texts constantly de-emphasize and problematize essence" (9). In Fuchs's opinion, trans-behavior, meaning the suspension of what the reader expects as a character's "true" identity, frustrates and challenges "an exclusionist version of Spain" (5) and Cervantes's texts are indices of a crisis of identity in the Mediterranean world. Her decision to read Cervantes in this fashion requires her to find "devastating irony" (17; 102) in characters' articulations of dominant ideology such as the Morisco Ricote's famous and troubling defense of the expulsion of his own people from Spain. To her credit, she recognizes that the "passings" on which she focuses enact both transgression and preservation, in that they define a baseline by virtue of contrast as they simultaneously violate that baseline. Her focus, however, is on cases she considers transgressive. Chapter 2, "Border Crossings: Transvestism and Passing in Don Quijote," appeared in an earlier version in Cervantes (1996), here expanded somewhat. Fuchs considers the transformations in the text that introduce similitude where there should be difference, instances of cross-dressing, most of which transpire in removed geographies such as the Sierra Morena: the Dorotea episode; the dueñas barbudas (of which she nicely observes, "the dueñas' beardedness . . . is the problem rather than the solution, and the moment of revelation comes when their maleness is exposed" [30]); Diego de la Llana's children; Claudia Jerónima; and Ana Félix. The latter is intensely unstable, crossing nations, religions, and gender, as well as affiliated with an effeminized aristocratic male, don Gaspar. Fuchs finds that Claudia's failed transvestism marks a limit for Cervantes beyond which passing will not work: "tragedy is what happens when women adopt male violence in their own defense" (37). Of course, this interpretation buys directly into the idea that violence is necessarily male; how Cervantes saw this question is a good one. The disguise of the barber as male in the Dorotea episode (he is already male), and Sancho's identification of Dorotea as a white African slave owner, are examples of how Cervantes collapses categories of otherness onto one figure, and pushes the passings typical of romance into something else: an interrogation of hegemonic categories of identity. Particularly effective is Fuchs's observation that the unstable characters, most notably Ana Félix, remain in Spain where, presumably, they do not "belong," and certainly do not perform categories of hegemony, as far as the reader knows. The idea that Cervantes uses the beard, such as one manufactured from a tail by the curate and barber (the one that refuses to stay put), as a fetishized sign that "suggests a masculinity that comes off easily" (27) draws her argument to an extreme where some readers might not care to follow. (I will betray my age by asking [End Page 518] whether anything can just be funny anymore). Fuchs admittedly focuses on operations of passing that occur in spheres only tangentially related to don Quijote. Using her fine arguments, it remains for someone else to read the would-be knight himself as the fundamental instance of transvestism that serves as the stage for all the others: an aging, poor country gentlemen in disguise as a prototype of youth, valor, and heroism across a countryside ill-disposed to accept his antics, yet desperately needy of them at the same time. Chapter 3 considers "Las dos...