ABSTRACT
At the conclusion of Cervantes's El celoso extremeño, readers are left to grapple with a series of puzzles concerning both the behaviour of the central characters, Felipo de Carrizales and his young wife Leonora, and the narrator's valedictory remarks about the story's exemplarity. 1 With regard to the characters, the most important questions that arise are: why, and how freely, does Leonora, having got as far as sharing a bed with Loaysa, reject his advances at the last moment?; why, and how freely, after the death of her husband, does she choose to enter a strictly enclosed convent?; and to what extent, if any, is Carrizales's declared forgiveness of his wife indicative of a genuine and redemptive change of mind and heart? With regard to the narrator's remarks about exemplarity, one is bound to ask how the novela can be, simultaneously, an 'ejemplo y espejo de lo poco que hay que fiar de llaves, tornos y paredes cuando queda la voluntad libre' (pp. 368—69) and of the vulnerability of girls 'de verdes y pocos años' (p. 369), such as Leonora, to manipulation at the hands of 'dueñas de monjil negro y tendido' (p. 369), such as Marialonso, and, further, how these claims are compatible with the notion of Leonora remaining 'limpia y sin ofensa [...] en aquel suceso' (p. 369). The difficulty of judging the behaviour of Carrizales and Leonora at the end of the story arises from the fact that we are not made privy to what is going on in their minds. In the absence of such insight, or of authoritative guidance — the narrator is generally unreliable, inconsistent and, on the question of Leonora's failure to vindicate her innocence, self-professedly (and disingenuously?) ignorant — readers are given the responsibility and the freedom to interpret and evaluate for themselves the actions and motives of the characters, the degree to which they act freely, and the narrator's judgements on all of these matters. We can do so only on the basis of what we have learned or can surmise about the characters' circumstances, dispositions and behaviour (and, in the latter two cases, those of the narrator), of our reading of the symbolic patterns within the story (its allusions to classical mythology, for example), our knowledge of the social and ethical norms prevailing in early seventeenth-century Spain, our sense of the extent to which these are implicitly endorsed or questioned by Cervantes, and also, inevitably, our own experiences, predilections and prejudices. The wide range of judgements proffered by commentators on these questions is symptomatic 12of the open-endedness and calculated indeterminacy of the text. 2 In this essay, it will be argued that two early, strategically placed and interrelated passages in the novela may be seen to function together as an imaginative paradigm of the range and interaction of forces at play, as well as of the variable degrees of both freedom and compulsion involved, in the decision-making processes of individuals (and particularly of Carrizales), and so to provide us with an anticipatory framework within which to assess the behaviour of the main characters, one which intimates the uncertainty of such assessments, and stimulates a sense of the freedom of the will as a mystery rather than the kind of unproblematic 'given' which the narrator-would have us believe that it is. 3
