Jealousy and male anxiety: articulations of gender in “the curious impertinent” and the amorous prince

Authors

  • Raquel Serrano González Universidad de Oviedo

Abstract

The subplot of Aphra Behn’s play The Amorous Prince is a rewriting of “The Impertinent Curious,” an interpolated tale in Don Quixote that depicts a pathologically jealous husband. All-pervasive in both Golden Age Spain and Restoration England, the discourse of jealousy was deployed to explore cultural issues involving identity and power. While contributing to validate the established relations of power, the hegemonic notions of manhood prevailing in each context were contradictory, and hence were subject to subversion and resistance. Sexual jealousy is analysed as a consequence of the paradoxes underlying the culturally specific dominant constructions of gender, which was at the same time an enabling condition of hegemony and a source of male anxiety. My analysis is aimed at determining how this ideological contradiction is managed in each text. 

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Behn, Aphra. Plays Written by the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn, Entire in Two Volumes. London: Printed for J. Tonson, D. Brown, J. Knapton, R. Wellington, B. Tooke, and E. Rumball, 1702.

Bray, Alan. “Homosexuality and the signs of male friendship in Elizabethan England.” History Workshop Journal 29 (1990).

https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/29.1.1

Breitenberg, Mark. “Anxious Masculinity: Sexual Jealousy in Early Modern England.” Feminist Studies 19.2 (1993): 377-398.

https://doi.org/10.2307/3178375

---. Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy: What it is, with All the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostics, and Several Cures of It. In Three Partitions; With Their Several Sections, Members, and Subsections, Philosophically, Medically, Historically Opened and Cut Up, vol. III. Ex-classics project, 2009. Web. 22 Jan. 2014.

<http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10800>.

Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quijote de La Mancha. Ed. Francisco Rico. Madrid: Punto de Lectura, 2009.

Chance, Jane. “Gender Subversion and Linguistic Castration in Fifteenth-Century English Translations of Christine de Pizan.” Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts. Ed. Anna Roberts. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. 161-194.

De Armas Wilson, Diana. “‘Passing the Love of Women’: The Intertextuality of El curioso impertinente.” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 7.2 (1987): 9-28.

Foyster, Elizabeth A. Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage. New York: Longman, 1999.

González-Ruiz, Julio. Amistades peligrosas: el discurso homoerótico en el teatro de Lope de Vega. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. PMid:19795907

Hughes, Derek and Janet Todd. The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521820197

Jehenson, Yvonne. “Masochisma versus Machismo or: Camila’s Re-writing of Gender Assignations in Cervantes’s Tale of Foolish Curiosity.” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 18.2 (1998): 26-52.

Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990. PMid:2145819

Lee, Christina H. The anxiety of sameness in early modern Spain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.

Lehfeldt, Elizabeth A. “Ideal Men: Masculinity and Decline in Seventeenth-Century Spain.” Renaissance Quarterly 61.2 (2008): 463-494.

https://doi.org/10.1353/ren.0.0024. PMid:19227584

Montaigne, Michel. On Friendship. London: Penguin, 2004. PMid:15615242

Pearson, Jacqueline. The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists 1642-1737. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.

Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys M.A. F.R.S. London: George Bell & Sons, 1893.

Pérez, Ashley H. “Into the Dark Triangle of Desire: Rivalry, Resistance, and Repression in ‘El curioso impertinente.’” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 31.1 (2011): 83-107.

Snider, Alvin. “The Curious Impertinent on the Restoration Stage.” The Seventeenth Century 21.2 (2006): 315-334.

Stallybrass, Peter. “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed.”Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1986): 123-44.

Taylor, Scott K. Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300126853.001.0001

Villalobos, Francisco. Curiosidades bibliográficas. Biblioteca de Autores Españoles 36. Madrid: Atlas, 1950. PMid:17739700

Downloads

Published

2016-12-23

How to Cite

Serrano González, R. (2016). Jealousy and male anxiety: articulations of gender in “the curious impertinent” and the amorous prince. The Grove - Working Papers on English Studies, 23. Retrieved from https://revistaselectronicas.ujaen.es/index.php/grove/article/view/2889