Out of the Wings

Valor, agravio y mujer (?), Ana Caro

Titles

English title: Valor, Outrage and Woman
Notable variations on Spanish title: Courage, Betrayal and a Woman Scorned
Keywords: morality > honour, morality > justice-revenge, identity > gender, family > marriage, ideology > honour, identity, identity > gender cross dressing
Genre and type: comedy

Pitch

The heroine, Leonor, has been jilted by her lover, Juan. She disguises herself as a man in order to challenge him, hoping to restore her lost honour with his death. She chases him across the sea, gets caught in a love triangle (wooing her rival, Estela, as a man), and successfully manipulates everyone in her path. Finally she deceives the man who deceived her and Juan is overjoyed to marry her.

Synopsis

This play features a woman, dressed as a man, who travels across the sea to vindicate her honour. Her onetime lover, Juan, promised marriage and fled, betraying their love and damaging her honour. So she follows him from Seville to Brussels, and this play is her story. It opens in Brussels, with the Countess Estela and her cousin Lisarda dressed for the hunt, descending a mountainside in a thunderstorm. They encounter three men, who turn out to be bandits, tying the women up and demanding their jewellery. They are saved by the gallant Juan of Cordoba, who chases the evil-doers away. Fernando de Rivera appears as well, meets Juan, and agrees to take Juan back to the palace with him. Once the women are gone, Juan tells Fernando the story of how he wooed and left the lovely Leonor in Seville. Meanwhile, Leonor and her servant Ribete have been chasing Juan across the sea, with plans to kill him in revenge. They have now come to the home of Leonor’s brother, Fernando. Leonor plans to dress as a man and take the name of Leonardo. She contrives a story to convince Fernando of his kinship to ‘Leonardo’ (through a relationship with ‘Victoria’, Fernando’s cousin) and so ‘Leonardo’ is also taken to the palace, to meet and stay with Juan. Act 2 reveals a series of hopeless love-interests, with Juan, ‘Leonardo’, the Prince Ludovico and Fernando all in love with the Countess Estela. In some pyrotechnic versifying, cleverly sharing décimas (ten-line stanzas), true confusion emerges with a series of forged love letters and impersonated voices between the garden gate, as Leonor pretends to be Estela, and Ludovico pretends to be ‘Leonardo’, with whom Estela is in love. Leonor, pretending to be Estela, tells Juan that she knows all about the abandoned Leonor in Sevilla, and that he should go back to Spain to make things right. He refuses, head over heels in love with Estela, and both their passions are inflamed: Leonor’s for justice, Juan’s for the disdainful Estela. Act 3 shows the inconstant ‘Leonardo’ throwing off Estela for his true love back home in Spain, whom he confesses is Leonor, whose honour has been damaged by Juan; according to the code of honour, ‘Leonardo’ must therefore kill Juan. After Estela disdains him, Juan begins to feel penitent for his poor behaviour towards Leonor, and he wishes both for his own death and to kill ‘Leonardo’, now his rival for Leonor. As ‘Leonardo’ and Juan begin to fight, Fernando and Ludovico enter and demand to know the cause of this strife in their house. ‘Leonardo’ reveals all, securing a promise of marriage from Juan to Leonor should she appear. Lo and behold, ‘Leonardo’ changes clothes and re-emerges as Leonor, swiftly to be married to Juan. Estela says she has a new sister in Leonor and takes Fernando’s hand in marriage (at her proposal). The poor Prince Ludovico, having lost Estela, takes her cousin Lisarda as his wife and the lackey Ribete gets Flora along with a hefty dowry from the Countess. Only Juan’s lackey, Tomillo, loses everything; he loses Flora and all his money, Flora having robbed him after feeding him soporific hot chocolate. The play ends, coyly inviting the audience to forgive its faults, written as it was by a woman.

Sources

The historical event of a peace treaty between Spain and Holland, signed in 1621 and ending twelve years of fighting, figures in the plot of this play; Juan relaxes in Brussels, relieved of duty thanks to that treaty (Soufas 1997: 134).

Soufas, Teresa S. 1997. ‘Ana Caro Mallén de Soto’. In Women’s Acts: Plays by Women Dramatists of Spain’s Golden Age, ed. Teresa Scott Soufas, pp. 133-6. Lexington, University Press of Kentucky

Critical response

Most studies of Valor, agravio y mujer focus on the heroine, the cross-dressing Leonor who masquerades as a man in order to trick her ex-lover into marrying her. The play is well known and has been the subject of a significant amount of critical work, despite its scanty performance record. It is often viewed through the lens of feminism, with the critics frequently coming down on one of two sides: Leonor is either a self-assured, successfully subversive feminist heroine, who effectively navigates the conventions of gender in order to get what she wants; or she is a conventional, generic comedia heroine who is only able to challenge social norms until patriarchal ‘order’ is restored at the end of the play, in the traditional ‘happy ending’ of a marriage agreement. Recently, one critic, Rhodes, has used a different lens, that of moral justice, to ‘redress’ the play and move the discussion forward (2005).

Rhodes, Elizabeth. 2005. ‘Redressing Ana Caro's Valor, agravio y mujer’, Hispanic Review, 73, 3, 309-28

Further information

Delgado dates the play as written between 1609-1620 (1993: 28); but the historical event of the peace treaty with Holland in 1621, which figures in the play, casts doubt on these dates. Soufas dates the play from the height of Caro’s writing career, between the 1630s and 1640s (Soufas 1997: 135).

Delgado, María José. 1993. Valor, agravio y mujer y El conde Partinuplés: una edición crítica. Doctoral thesis, University of Arizona (in Spanish)
Soufas, Teresa S. 1997. ‘Ana Caro Mallén de Soto’. In Women’s Acts: Plays by Women Dramatists of Spain’s Golden Age, ed. Teresa Scott Soufas, pp. 133-6. Lexington, University Press of Kentucky

Editions

Caro Mallén de Soto, Ana. 1997. Valor, agravio y mujer. In Women’s Acts: Plays by Women Dramatists of Spain’s Golden Age, ed. Teresa Scott Soufas, pp. 163-94. Lexington, University Press of Kentucky
Caro, Ana. 1975. Valor, agravio y mujer. In Apuntes para una biblioteca de escritoras españolas vol. 268, ed. Manuel Serrano y Sanz, pp. 179-212. Madrid, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles
Caro, Ana. 1998. Valor, agravio y mujer. In Las comedias de Ana Caro, ed. María José Delgado. New York, Peter Lang
Caro, Ana. Valor, agravio y mujer. Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. Manuscript 16.620 (Date unknown, from the seventeenth century).
There is also an eighteenth-century manuscript at the Biblioteca Nacional, 17.377. There is no seventeenth-century published edition.

Information about the editions

The original seventeenth-century publication date is unknown.

Useful readings and websites

Armas, Frederick de. 1976. The Invisible Mistress: Aspects of Feminism and Fantasy in the Golden Age. Biblioteca Siglo de Oro. Charlottesville, Virginia
Delgado, María José. 1993. Valor, agravio y mujer y El conde Partinuplés: una edición crítica. Doctoral thesis, University of Arizona (in Spanish)
Foley, Luisa F. 1977. Valor, agravio y mujer, by Doña Ana Caro Mallén de Soto: Annotated Critical Edition with Introductory Critical Study. Master’s thesis, Temple University
Mujica, Bárbara. 2004. ‘Ana Caro: La mujer se desquita’ . In Women Writers of Early Modern Spain: Sophia's Daughters, pp. 175-92. Yale language series. New Haven, Yale University Press (in Spanish)
Includes short excerpts of Valor, agravio y mujer.
Rhodes, Elizabeth. 2005. ‘Redressing Ana Caro's Valor, agravio y mujer’, Hispanic Review, 73, 3, 309-28
Soufas, Teresa S. 1991. ‘Ana Caro’s Re-evaluation of the Mujer varonil and her theatrics in Valor, agravio y mujer’. In The Perception of Women in Spanish Theater of the Golden Age, eds. Anita K. Stoll and Dawn L. Smith, pp. 85-106. Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press
Stroud, Matthew D. 1986. ‘La literatura y la mujer in el Barroco: Valor, agravio y mujer de Ana Caro’. In Actas del VIII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, eds. A. David Kossoff, José Amor y Vázquez, Ruth H. Kossoff et al. pp. 605-12. Madrid, Istmo (in Spanish)
Williamsen, Amy. 1992. ‘Rewriting in the Margins: Caro’s Valor, agravio y mujer as Challenge to Dominant Discourse’, Bulletin of the Comediantes, 44, 21-30

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Entry written by Kathleen Jeffs. Last updated on 4 October 2010.

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Out of the Wings

Out of the Wings

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Valor, agravio y mujer (?), Ana Caro

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