The Heterotextual Body of the "Mora Morilla"

Abstract

REVIEWS Heterotextual Body of Morilla. By Louise 0. Vasvari. London: Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, 1999. 116 pages. Heterotextual Body of by Louise 0. Vasvari is an engaging new study of ballad which begins Yo m'era mora moraima, morilla d'un bel catar. ballad has been analyzed with equal vigor as an example of ability of Christians to see Muslim point of view, even at height of frontier warfare, and as pro-Christian work with an ideological function. It receives here an interpretation that places it in context of analogous European folk tradition. Seen as dramatic ballad, it is a performative expression whose narrative structure is designed more as framework to suggest emotional experience than to develop details of coherent story line (8). ballad in question describes how when young Muslim woman is in bed at night, Christian claiming to be her uncle tricks her into opening door for him by telling her in algarabia that he is being pursued by Christian police because he has killed Christian. text ends abruptly, after young woman opens her door wide. Because earlier in text woman has referred to herself as mezquina and cuitada, it is largely assumed that morilla and Christian engage in sexual relations. What has been debated is whether morilla is truly victim of Christian violation, or whether she is somehow complicit in her own seduction. After brilliant and detailed discussion of how monUa has from start been portrayed as complicit in her own violation, Vasvari concludes that sexual selfaffirmation by morilla, combined with her protestations of victimization is the dramatized crisis of her self-consciousness as confession (22). Vasvari's evidence in support of her conclusion comes from recreation of universal poetics and semiotic system of text, recreation which relies on tracing cross-cultural and intertextual relationships of text and re-inserting it into context of traditional European folk genres. She looks at large number of analagous texts, including French, German, and Italian lyric, discussing with each comparison how manipulation of language functions to overdetermine sexual availability of young woman. book comprises eight chapters. Chapter i, The Heterotext and its Contexts, rehearses large body of scholarly interpretations of Mora morilla, and provides general picture of how connotative semiotic systems of folk poetry and other related oral genres may illuminate semiotic core of text. …