Feelings and Conflicts in El Perro del Hortelano’s Love Sonnets PDF

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In this literary analysis paper, I study the function of sonnets in a play by Lope de Vega....

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Mendoza Sosa 1 Alan Mendoza Sosa HISP1240O Prof. Laura Bass and Prof. Coppélia Kahn October 17, 2017 Feelings and Conflicts in El Perro del Hortelano’s Love Sonnets A central theme in El Perro del Hortelano, the conflict between social rank and desire, is dramatized in the love plot of Diana and Teodoro. Diana, whose love for Teodoro could harm her honor, communicates her feelings through an elaborate ploy: she asks Teodoro to improve a love sonnet that a lady friend, “uncertain of her [own] skill” (Dixon 50), asked her to compose; of course, the friend is not real. In this sonnet, Diana not only reveals her attraction, but also imprints her anxiety of loving someone from a lower rank. Similarly, Teodoro expresses his conflicted feelings in his rewrite of the sonnet, suggesting that he understood Diana’s scheme, but sounding confused about the countess’s real feelings. Both characters mask their attraction in deceits that alter the norms of honor and love, without completely destabilizing it. Through elaborate rhetoric and subterfuges, these sonnets externalize Diana’s and Teodoro’s feelings, reflecting their inner conflicts about social rank and love. The first quatrain in Diana’s sonnet introduces her conflicted feelings through her use of rhetorical figures and different modes of language. In this stanza she first outlines her distress as a philosophical problem and then provides a rationale for it: in contrast to the predominating conception that love engenders jealousy, Diana’s jealousy is the cause of her love. Look at the opening verse: “Amar por ver amar envidia ha sido,” (56, 551); the use of the past perfect form “ha sido” makes it sound impersonal; it conjures up social perceptions of love: A jealousy that is prior to love has been considered impossible: “por imposible se ha tenido” (56, 554). Yet, for

Mendoza Sosa 2 Diana, “estar celosa / es invención de amor maravillosa” (56, 552 – 553). Notice the repetition of “amar.” This rhetorical trope – polyptoton – equalizes the love that Diana has for Teodoro with the love that Teodoro has for Marcela. Defying the contemporary philosophy of love, Diana implies that not only does her love originate from jealousy, but also that it is neither merely envy, nor less significant than the love between Teodoro and Marcela. Diana develops this defense of her feelings in the second quatrain, where she also rationalizes the nature of her jealousy. Despite being “más hermosa [que Marcela]” (56, 556), Diana and Teodoro cannot love each other because they are from different social ranks. She points out the paradox that her higher rank – something that grants her more privileges over others – is precisely what disallows her to love Teodoro. Another paradox comes in the last tercet: “darme quiero a entender sin decir nada: / entiéndame quien pueda; yo me entiendo” (56 – 57, 563 – 564). Diana refers to the irony of revealing her feelings without saying anything; she wants to be precise but at the same time not too revealing. Teodoro, indeed, has a sense of Diana’s hints; he suspects that she flirts with him, but he is not completely sure. In his rewrite, he mirrors the form of Diana’s sonnet: he starts with a general reflection about love, follows with an instance that rethinks that theory, and ends with a personal remark about his own situation. He does not think that jealousy is prior to love, implying that Diana has loved him since the beginning – before seeing him with Marcela. According to Teodoro, Diana’s feelings were simply triggered by seeing another love: “But when love sees what it admires among another’s trophies, it’s provoked to speak” (Dixon 55). Notice that he verb to see emulates Diana’s anthropomorphizing of love, “…love springs from jealousy” (Dixon 51). Portraying love as a being with agency, both Diana and Teodoro present it as something they cannot control. However, Teodoro cannot risk being too explicit. He presents this

Mendoza Sosa 3 dilemma in the 10th and 11th lines of his response: “No digo nada más, porque lo más ofendo / desde lo menos…” (64, 765 – 764), and then in the 15th: “… lo que no merezco no lo entiendo / por no dar a entender que lo merezco” (64, 769 – 770). Although his style is prudent, Teodoro suggests his amorous feelings with another parallelism – his polyptoton with the verb “merecer,” which in Diana’s sonnet refers to the love that she desires, but cannot have. Both Diana and Teodoro can only voice their conflict between what they desire and what is afforded to them in these convoluted ploys. Both the subterfuges and the theatrical devices play a role in this. While the conceit of a letter for a friend masks Diana’s love, her body reactions when Teodoro reads her poem aloud suggest her true feelings. The sonnet-letter disguise enables Diana to smuggle out her own voice without damaging her honor: “Darme quiero a entender sin decir nada: / entiéndame quien pueda; yo me entiendo” (56, 563-564); however, when she makes Teodoro read her sonnet aloud, she blushes – Teodoro mentions this in his sonnet: “que como el color sale a la cara, / sale a la cara lo que el alma altera” (64, 764 – 75). Indeed, professional actresses who performed this scene, would have had to pay close attention to Diana’s demeanor while Teodoro reads, for Diana’s bodily reactions dissipate Teodoro’s doubts about her flirtation: “Pero en vano se recela / mi temor, porque jamás / burlando salen colores [a la cara]” (67, 865 – 867). Even though her honor is still safeguarded by the ruse of the letter-sonnet, Diana’s body reactions also communicate her feelings. Thus, Diana and Teodoro utilize schemes, rhetoric, and strategies to reveal their feelings, both explicitly and tacitly, to each other. Diana’s sonnet not only suggests her attraction to his secretary Teodoro, but also shows her internal conflict between this attraction and her honor. Similarly, Teodoro utilizes obscure tropes and direct parallelisms to, at once, conceal and convey his feelings, revealing his doubts about the veracity of Diana’s love. Although the disguise of the

Mendoza Sosa 4 “letter for a friend,” masks Diana’s intentions, Teodoro can read her real feelings in the countess’s physical reactions. The sonnets’ language and the characters’ disguise expose Diana’s and Teodoro’s conflicts, anxieties, and feelings about honor and love.

Mendoza Sosa 5 Works Cited De Vega Carpio, Félix Lope. El Perro del Hortelano. Edited by Adrienne Laskier Martín and Esther Fernández Rodríguez, Cervantes & Co., 2001. De Vega Carpio, Félix Lope. The Dog in the Manger. Edited by Victor Dixon. Ottawa, Dovehouse, 1990....