Almost three weeks ago now was the Atlanta shooting, in which eight people (including six Asian women) were killed at massage parlors. The shooter, Robert Aaron Long, was later described by acquaintances as quiet and extremely religious. He called himself a sex addict and claimed that he wanted to eliminate temptation, and he might have been trying to shoot others in Florida in his violent crusade against sex and porn. As Asian women are fetishized, and as sex workers are commonly degraded, this was no doubt an act of misogyny and of racism. However, numerous articles have also pointed out the particular evangelical quality of Long’s reasoning, in his self-hatred perhaps for having any sexual impulses at all. And it is no secret that evangelicalism is generally associated with destructive political beliefs. In a Time magazine interview, Samuel Perry says that evangelicals are much more likely to claim a sex addiction or porn addiction, as well as to view lust as the supreme sin. But the obsession with lust and the blatant objectification of women goes far beyond evangelicalism. Lust was certainly considered a universal sin in the medieval Catholic church, thus the significant elevation of a person’s perceived mental fortitude upon taking their monastic vows. In fact, the idea of young women as temptresses, while still present (such as in school dress codes that send girls home for showing their shoulders), is much more subtle today than in medieval tales, in which women were literally impersonations of the devil.
This week, I looked at “La Española Inglesa” from Cervantes’s Novelas Ejemplares (1613). His “Celoso Extremeño” would be a more fitting story for a discussion of lust and the belief that men are uncontrollable sexual beings, but alas, I am trying to read things that I did not already read for class. Fortunately, almost every story from this time period that features a young woman character touches upon the idea of female purity and of male desire, so our English Spanish girl will do just as well as any other.
The story starts out with a respectable English captain named Clotaldo. He kidnaps a seven-year-old girl named Isabel from Cádiz and makes her essentially a slave in his household. Cervantes reminds us of the Church of England when he writes that Clotaldo and his wife Catalina are secret Catholics and, luckily for Isabel, raises her as a Catholic as well. Every mention of Isabel is accompanied with a thousand praises of her natural beauty and her radiant presence and her intense piety and the impeccable manners and convenient bilingualism with which she was “raised” (can Clotaldo and Catalina really be considered parental figures, as Cervantes implies, if Isabel has to call them “masters”?). It is already apparent by the first mention of their slightly older son Ricaredo that he will soon look upon Isabel as a sexual object. When he is twenty (and Isabel is fifteen), Ricaredo falls physically ill from his lust for Isabel and the belief that he’d be unable to marry her because he’d already been promised to someone of higher status from Scotland, and he does not recover until his parents accept his wish to marry Isabel. Then, the queen demands Isabel’s audience and is so enamored with her beauty that she temporarily takes her into her court. However, the queen contends that it is she, and not Clotaldo and Catalina, who has the right to give away Isabel’s hand, so she makes Ricaredo earn his right to marry Isabel by temporarily captaining one of her royal ships.
Ricaredo has quite the dramatic journey at sea, as a general he was to work with passes away, and he finds himself suddenly promoted to general of both ships. He then encounters two “Turkish” pirate ships and a larger ship from the “Portuguese indies” that they had captured. After a short fight, Ricaredo is in control of all five ships, and although his crew could care less about the people aboard these three foreign ships, given that none of them were protestant, Ricaredo is pious and chooses to bring those still alive all back to Spain unharmed, although he takes the pirated treasure for himself in his effort to impress the English queen. On this ship he also happens to run into the true parents of Isabel, who out of despair of losing their daughter had ruined themselves financially and had hopped aboard the pirate ship to take them to a new life in the colonies. Ricaredo successfully reunites them with Isabel and also gains the queen’s approval.
Tragedy strikes, however, as the queen’s main lady in waiting wanted Isabel to marry her own son, Arnesto, so she tries to convince the queen to delay the wedding, but ultimately the queen keeps her word that she should give Isabel away to Ricaredo. Bitter from this rejection, Arnesto tries to confront Ricaredo with his sword drawn, and the lady in waiting tries to poison Isabel, whose life is then rescued but emerges disfigured and having lost her physical beauty. Clotaldo and Catalina no longer want her as Ricaredo’s wife, so they get back in contact with the Scottish girl, and they ship Isabel and her parents back to Spain, but before they do so, Ricaredo promises Isabel that he will come for her within two years.
In order to avoid marrying the Scottish girl, Ricaredo goes on a pilgrimage to Rome. The queen sadly lets Isabel go and gives her a good sum of money for her family to restart their lives in Seville, where she had told Ricaredo to come find her. With the restoration of the family’s livelihood came also the restoration of Isabel’s physical beauty, but she begins feeling hopeless about Ricaredo’s return. A year and a half into this waiting, Catalina sends Isabel a message that Ricaredo has died by the hands of Arnesto, who found him in France. Still, Isabel’s parents convince her to wait out the two years before she joins a monastery. And lo and behold, on the exact day of two years after Ricaredo’s promise, as Isabel is processing down to the monastery to take her vows, Ricaredo appears in beggar’s clothing, ready to finally become her husband. His page had mistaken taken him to be dead when Arnesto attacked them both, but Ricaredo was in fact still alive, merely injured, and he was only able to make it to Seville safely because of the mercy of both Catholics and “Turks,” who let him pass because of the mercy he once showed them as captain of the queen’s ships. Cervantes ends with the lesson that outer beauty and inner virtue complement each other and that the Catholic god can be trusted to overcome all obstacles.
Although Isabel’s virtue is praised time and time again, she is no more than a one-dimensional character, something for Ricaredo to strive for (and target of violence by way of Arnesto and his mother). She always speaks in the most passive and diplomatic way and only shows enthusiasm for Ricaredo when he announces his intention to marry her. The only conviction she expresses in the entire story is to enter the monastery to forget the sadness of Ricaredo’s failure to return. Meanwhile, it is never questioned that Ricaredo should find sexually attractive someone who, according to Cervantes’s narration, was raised akin to his sister, although it really is more problematic that she was in fact his servant and five years his junior. His lovesickness and passion for Isabel is the catalyst for his adventures all over the world, while Isabel can only stay behind and wait. It really worked out perfectly that Isabel was loved and protected by the queen and then by her parents and that she was Catholic, and even so Ricaredo never once asks Isabel what she herself would prefer. But if she had been from a different religion and had not been taught all the ways of proper English society? If she had been a sex worker? If her physical beauty had not returned? Would Ricaredo have shown her the same chivalrous respect?
The cold noodles that I made this week require so little energy that perhaps Isabel could even have made them during her six-month-long depression. You can add whichever chopped vegetables you’d like, or you could just have the noodles and sauce by itself, with a soup on the side (this is how I ate this dish growing up, but this would require a little more than damsel-in-distress energy).
Forlorn Cucumber Cold Noodles
Ingredients:
- 300g noodles
- 1 cucumber
- 2 fake meat patties
- 1/2 cup peanut butter
- 1 cup water
- 1/4 cup soy sauce
- 2 tablespoons black vinegar
- sesame oil
Directions:
- Cook noodles in boiling water for 2 minutes. Drain and toss with sesame oil to prevent sticking.
- Mix peanut butter, water, soy sauce, and black vinegar in whatever ratios you’d like (my amounts are approximate) until you get a runny sauce.
- Chop cucumber finely.
- Chop fake meat patties and sauté them until slightly charred.
- Toss everything together and enjoy!
Makes 3 meals.
Racións 
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