Refiguring the Hero. From Peasant to Noble in Lope de Vega and Calderón (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS Fox, Dian. Refiguring the Hero. From Peasant to Noble in Lope de Vega and Calderón. University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1991. 242 pp. In Refiguring the Hero Dian Fox challenges what has been one of the most basic concepts of comedia criticism among recent generations of Hispanists. With a grounding in seventeenth-century notions of the ideal hero, she provides close re-readings of canonical plays and questions the critical tendency to see peasant protagonists as heroic. Fox demonstrates how Noël Salomon and several post-Civil War Spanish and AngloAmerican critics in the last fifty years have tended to judge peasant characters by "modern" standards and have over-emphasized those aspects with which they can identify—namely those elements they see as evidence of democratic values. Fox argues that the seventeenth-century Spanish public, immersed in the traditions of classical and Renaissance erudition, of medieval epic poetry and in Counter-Reformation and antiMachiavellian ideology, had different expectations for its heroes. Desirable hero figures of the time, she suggests, would demonstrate spiritual strength and personal growth in moments of crisis and they would have, preferably, noble blood. Fox holds that the peasant as a heroic figure fell outside this set of values, as did violent revenge for a perceived personal affront. She establishes this point after providing a thorough discussion of concepts of the hero and an excellent survey of Spanish literary figures up to the seventeenth century in the introductory chapters of her book. Based on what Fox considers to be the period's ideals of heroism, she then analizes Lope's and Calderón's best known "peasant plays" and vulgo-types and produces several interesting commentaries and conclusions . She sees, for example, that Lope's Peribáñez does not qualify as a hero since his actions are emotional and opportunistic rather than the result of ethical conflict resolutions. Similarly, his wife Casilda is found to 310 Reviews311 exhibit a lack of conscience with regard to her cousin Inés's needs or to the death of Don Fadrique. In her examination ofEl villano en su rincón, Fox shows that Juan Labrador hails from a countryside as "blighted and pretentious as the court" and is possessed by a "hermetic cowardice" (76, 170). Ironically, among Lope's supposed peasant heroes, the only characters Fox finds worthy of hero status are Ñuño and Sancho in El mayor alcalde, el rey—both of whom are actually of noble blood. The two seem to be evidence of Lope's arbitrista-like vision in which the best inhabitants of the countryside would be "productive hidalgos" (88). Among those who are true peasants, the people of Fuenteovejuna come closest to ranking as heroes without quite reaching that status in Fox's judgement. Despite their "modest dignity," they are "ruled by passion" and "mak(e) the wrong choice" (138, 136). If Fox sees in Lope an ability to identify with the common people without creating heroic underclass characters, her investigation of Calderón produces even fewer possible candidates for hero status. The rebel soldier, like the rest of the vulgo in La vida es sueño, is considered powerful but unprincipled. The title character in Luis Pérez is also made ineligible because his reformation is merely that of a picaresque character . Even Calderón's Pedro Crespo falls short of true hero status because he is a "shrewd calculator" exercising a "hidden agenda" of revenge (165, 161). In short, the plays and characters most signaled by critics as upholding peasant dignity or demonstrating the democratic spirit of seventeenth -century Spanish public and similar tendencies in two major playwrights have been inaccurately or insufficiently studied according to Fox. The main theoretical points on which her study is based are that "each successive period seems to see in [a text] a mirror of its own values " and that in the case of comedia heroes we must first look at their seventeenth-century context (181). In this regard we can see that Fox's book is situated at a crossroads between a post-structuralist emphasis on readers and a more traditional, formalistic approach to literary history that concentrates on structures and ideal...