Who She Is
Marcela is the shepherdess the goatherds talk about in chapter XII of Part One: the daughter of the farmer Guillermo, orphaned of both parents, wealthy, raised with great modesty by a priest uncle who would not marry her off without her consent. One day she woke up dressed as a shepherdess, despite her uncle and the whole village, and began roaming the wilds with a flock, followed by rich young men, gentlemen, and farmers who dressed as shepherds to court her. One of them, Grisóstomo, a student from Salamanca, dies, and people say it was for love of her. Marcela appears in person only in chapter XIV of Part One, on the rock where the grave is being dug, and what she does there is defend herself aloud before everyone, without waiting for an answer. She wants to live in solitude; she fears being forced to love because she is beautiful; she knows that her beauty was given to her freely by heaven and that she cannot be blamed for it; and she is perhaps mistaken in supposing that the reason she claims will be enough against the village, which has already chosen for Grisóstomo's headstone the epitaph that blames her. She passes through the book in three chapters and stays in it as the figure in whom the novel places the freedom that Don Quixote only knew how to praise in the past.
Trajectory
In chapter XII of Part One she does not yet appear, and the narration belongs to the one who tells her story. Pedro, a goatherd, tells Don Quixote who Grisóstomo was and who the shepherdess is. He takes care to defend her, and the one who defends her is the same goatherd who will condemn her:
Y no se piense que porque Marcela se puso en aquella libertad y vida tan suelta y de tan poco o de ningún recogimiento, que por eso ha dado indicio, ni por semejas, que venga en menoscabo de su honestidad y recato, and let no one think that because Marcela has taken up that freedom and that loose life, with so little or no reserve, she has given any sign, not even a hint, that it harms her honesty and modesty.
Marcela went out into the fields and gave no one the slightest hope. As for her honor, not even the village, which gossips about everything, has anything to say. What remains is the effect she produces, and the blame laid on her is not one of vice but of haughtiness and cruelty. She neither flees nor avoids the shepherds, and she treats them with courtesy and friendship, but when one of them reveals his intention, even a just and holy one, that of marriage, she casts him off as if with a blunderbuss. It is to this manner that Pedro attributes the calamity:
hace más daño en esta tierra que si por ella entrara la pestilencia; porque su afabilidad y hermosura atrae los corazones de los que la tratan a servirla y a amarla, pero su desdén y desengaño los conduce a términos de desesperarse, does more harm in this land than if the plague had come through it, because her affability and beauty draw the hearts of those who deal with her to serve and love her, but her disdain and disillusionment drive them to the point of despair.
Pedro sets affability and disillusionment side by side: she is pleasant to everyone and clear with each one, and it is that clarity he calls harm. The reckoning is the village's, which suffers the effect without asking for the cause: the beeches with names carved into them, the garlands on the trunks, the sighs in every holm oak. Once again the question that Marcela will ask in chapter XIV of Part One is left out: what debt does beauty owe to those who love it?
In chapter XIII of Part One, at the burial, Ambrosio praises the dead man, and the list of courtesies serves as the preamble to an accusation:
fue único en el ingenio, solo en la cortesía, estremo en la gentileza, fénix en la amistad, magnífico sin tasa, grave sin presunción, alegre sin bajeza, he was unique in wit, alone in courtesy, extreme in gentility, a phoenix in friendship, magnificent without measure, grave without presumption, cheerful without baseness.
Whoever loved her was wearied, adored and then scorned, begged a wild beast, importuned a marble. And it is out of obedience to his friend, and not by his own judgment, that he is going to burn the papers. Vivaldo, who wants to save the writings, asks for the papers in the name of curiosity and pity, so that Marcela's cruelty may serve as a lesson.
In chapter XIV of Part One, when Vivaldo reads Grisóstomo's Desperate Song, those who hear it notice that it does not fit what has been said of Marcela's modesty, because in it the poet complains of jealousy, suspicion, and absence, to the detriment of her good name. Ambrosio explains that he wrote it on purpose while absent, and that the jealousy was imagined. Then Marcela appears on the rock, so beautiful that her beauty surpassed her reputation. Ambrosio, indignant, calls her a basilisk and an ungrateful daughter who tramples her dead father, and asks what she wants. Marcela replies that she has come to defend herself, and she separates three things that the shepherds lump together: being lovable, being loved, and being obliged to love:
mas no alcanzo que, por razón de ser amado, esté obligado lo que es amado por hermoso a amar a quien le ama, but I do not see how, because one is loved, the one who is loved for being beautiful is obliged to love the one who loves them.
She admits that the beautiful may be lovable and denies that beauty obliges: if it did, desires would be as endless as the beautiful, and true love, as she has heard it said, is not divided and must be voluntary, not forced. She argues from the natural reason she claims to have, and not from the caprice of which she is accused. She adds that she did not choose the beauty she has, given freely by heaven, and that the viper does not deserve blame for the venom that kills; the beauty of an honest woman is like fire kept at a distance or a sharp sword, which burn or cut no one who does not come near. Then she speaks of herself:
Yo nací libre, y para poder vivir libre escogí la soledad de los campos. Los árboles destas montañas son mi compañía, las claras aguas destos arroyos mis espejos, I was born free, and in order to live free I chose the solitude of the fields. The trees of these mountains are my company, the clear waters of these streams my mirrors.
The freedom she claims here echoes the Golden Age praised by Don Quixote three chapters earlier:
Marcela chooses solitude as one chooses a trade: trees for company, waters for a mirror. The freedom she claims is the one that Don Quixote, three chapters earlier, placed in the age when there was no "yours" or "mine," and she asks for it for herself, here and now; the reaction of Ambrosio and the shepherds shows that her village does not accept her without cost, either because that age has passed or because it never existed.
Marcela completes her defense with the facts: those she enamored with her looks, she disillusioned with her words; she never gave Grisóstomo or anyone else any hope, and when he declared to her the goodness of his intention, in that same place, she told him that her will was to live in perpetual solitude. If he wanted to sail against the wind, he drowned in the gulf of his own folly: his obstinacy killed him, not her cruelty. Whoever wants to call her a beast and a basilisk may do so, and whoever calls her ungrateful may stop serving her. She has her own wealth, covets no one else's, has a free condition, and does not like to submit: she neither wants nor dislikes anyone, and her desires are limited by the mountains. Without waiting for a reply, she turns her back and plunges into the thickest scrub.
Some of those wounded by the arrow of her eyes make as if to follow her, paying no heed to the disillusionment they have just heard. It is then that Don Quixote, thinking that this is the occasion to practice his chivalry, puts his hand on the hilt of his sword and forbids, in loud and clear voices, anyone to follow the beautiful Marcela, under pain of falling into his furious indignation: she has shown, with clear and sufficient reasons, how little or no fault she bears. The gentleman acts because the case fits his trade: there is a maiden whom men pursue, and he has a sword. What he lacks is what chivalry presupposes, a lady who asks for help, since Marcela asked only to be left alone, and his aid merely repeats, with his hand on the hilt, the conclusion she had already reached. The shepherds do not move, either because of his threats or because Ambrosio reminds them of what they owe their friend: they finish digging the grave and burn the papers. Before placing the body in the pit, Ambrosio announces the headstone he will have made:
Yace aquí de un amador el mísero cuerpo helado, que fue pastor de ganado, perdido por desamor, here lies, of a lover, the wretched frozen body, who was a herder of cattle, lost through lack of love.
Ambrosio has just heard Marcela say that obstinacy killed Grisóstomo, and he chooses the lines that blame her: the rest of the epitaph says that he died at the hands of the rigor of a beautiful, aloof, and ungrateful woman. There are two readings: it is the grief of a friend, who writes what the dead man would have written, or it is a headstone that says what the village wants to read, and then Marcela's speech has no place on the stone. The gentleman decides to go and find her to offer her everything he can in his service, but, the narrator warns, it did not turn out as he expected, and the book does not show her to us again.
Themes Embodied
Marcela is Freedom and Oppression given the voice of a woman: the freedom she claims is not that of an ideal state, but that of someone who chooses solitude as a trade and sustains that choice before a village that does not accept it without cost. The reason she gives is that true love must be voluntary. The gentleman, three chapters earlier, praised the freedom of the Golden Age, when there was no "yours" or "mine," and it is she who claims it for herself in the present (chapter XI of Part One, chapter XIV of Part One).
In Love, she separates love from duty. Beauty does not oblige anyone to love, and whoever loves her for being beautiful has no right to demand love from one to whom it was not owed. The thesis goes against the code of the pastoral romance that the village and the gentleman know, in which the disdainful lady is to blame, and that is why Ambrosio's headstone rewrites her as aloof and ungrateful. The book returns to the subject with Leandra (chapter LI of Part One), in which the whole valley talks about a girl in its own way, and her father locks her in a convent.
Marcela's Honor and Reputation lies in being, in everyone's mouth, the girl with no sign of fault and the cause of a death. Pedro defends her and condemns her in the same speech (chapter XII of Part One); Ambrosio calls her a basilisk and then writes that she killed (chapter XIII of Part One, chapter XIV of Part One). What she says of herself, that she neither wants nor dislikes anyone, is the reputation she claims.
Divergent Readings
The book presents two opposing readings of what Marcela did, and neither is refuted. For Ambrosio and the village, she is the cause of the death: the beast, the basilisk, the aloof and ungrateful one of the epitaph. For her, obstinacy killed him, not cruelty, and the proof is that she never gave anyone hope (chapter XIV of Part One). The text supports the second through the accuracy of the facts that the goatherd himself confirms (chapter XII of Part One), and the first through the weight of those who remain to mourn.
Readings also differ on what the shepherdess is. Whoever reads her as a woman who chooses sees in Marcela a voice that the novel lets say what the village would not say. Whoever reads her as a figure of the pastoral genre sees a cruel lady whom Cervantes at once defends and lets leave the scene without an answer. Against the first reading, it is worth remembering that the speech is delivered at a funeral, and that she plunges into the scrub without waiting for a reply; against the second, that Cervantes gives her the longest and most articulated speech of the chapter, and a gentleman in arms who guarantees her withdrawal (chapter XIV of Part One).
Relationships
- Don Quixote: the knight who hears Pedro's story (chapter XII of Part One), who defends chivalry before Vivaldo (chapter XIII of Part One), and who forbids anyone to follow her, though she never asked him to (chapter XIV of Part One).
- Sancho Panza: the squire who, on the night of the tale, sleeps between Rocinante and the donkey, battered by kicks (chapter XII of Part One).
- Cardenio: the other case in the book in which lost love leads to the sierra, but through betrayal and not disdain (chapter XXIV of Part One).