Imperial Tapestries by Farmer Julia L.;

Author:Farmer, Julia L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

In this way, Felismena fully adopts the courtly role toward which she has apparently been headed on her entire journey. Her acceptance of the new attire signals her complete transformation into a woman of the court—a woman who could just as easily have been honored in the canto de Orfeo. At the same time, however, Felismena’s acceptance of this attire tethers her to Felicia, and by implication, to service to the imperial court. As Jones and Stallybrass have shown, in early modern Europe, “Clothing was more binding than money, both symbolically, since it incorporated the body, and economically, since a further transaction had to take place if you wanted to transform it into cash via the fripper or broker.”[61] Indeed, the value of clothing given to servants at court often exceeded any wages that were paid. Felicia’s donning of this donated attire thus marks both her ascension to courtly life and her lingering debt to those who made the ascension possible.

This debt in fact prevents a complete escape from the pull of Felicia’s palace, as the paths that Felismena follows upon her exit from the temple make clear. After the receipt of her new attire, Felismena makes her way from the palace on a journey that eventually leads her to Portugal and specifically to Coimbra, in a clear homage to Montemayor’s hometown. The bridge on which she reaches the town, according to Carroll Johnson, represents a link between the pastoral world and the historical world in which it was created.[62] With this turn from the bucolic to the real, Felismena embodies in many ways the aspirations to leave the court and return home that Montemayor had expressed in so much of his other work. If Selvagia opened the novel with a journey from Portugal to Spain that mirrored Montemayor’s own life history, Felismena now appears to bring it to a close with a trajectory that can only represent a return home.

And yet, this triumph of an escape from the realm of the imperial court is illusory at best, as certain cycles once again begin to repeat themselves. Just as Sireno, Sylvano, and Selvagia appear at the end of the novel to fall into old unshakable habits, so too does Felismena repeat familiar patterns. First, she finally reencounters Felis when she rescues him from some attackers, in a scene that recalls her rescue of the nymphs just before recounting her initial tale of woe. Likewise, she follows this rescue with a return to Felicia’s palace, accompanied by Felis, just as her initial battle against the savages was followed by her tale of pursuing her beloved to the court of Augusta Cesarina. Upon arriving for a second time at Felicia’s palace, Felismena and Felis thus find themselves once again in a setting remarkably reminiscent of that original imperial palace, which was in no way conducive to their stability as a couple.

One must wonder, then, whether things will truly be different this time, especially given the repeated patterns that unfold as the novel draws to a close.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.