Social norms and private ethics: women’s adultery in Cervantes

Abstract

Contrary to what has often been assumed, honor plays, more than an involuted literary subgenre, respond to a widely documented social reality of wife murders. Delving into a vital problem of his times, Cervantes differs from many other contemporary writers in that he explores the causes of women’s adultery in a very complex domain of affective dysfunctionalities that are usually ignored from the postulates of honor, which privileges above all the unquestionability of marriage as an institution. Quite remarkably, in El celoso extremeño blame is distributed among all the characters except the «adulteress» herself. Although something similar occurs in El curioso impertinente, critics have most often either blamed or belittled Camila, without taking seriously her subjectivity or her exceptional capacity for love and survival. It turns out that she is the only character in this story whose actions are coherent. In these and other Cervantine texts we see that marriage possesses no absolute value and that in certain circumstances a woman’s adultery is more than justifiable.