SOURCE: Kaler, Anne K. “Literary Origins of the Picaro and the Picara.” In Picara: From Hera to Fantasy Heroine, pp. 21-41. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1991.

[In this excerpt, Kaler discusses the early picaras in Spanish literature, focusing on their autonomy.]

Imagine that, after all the primary colors that the picaro left us are blended into crude figures, the artist introduces a true blinding white which is laid on top of all the other shades to highlight prominent points.

Autonomy is such a white—a brighter, larger, obtrusive, awkward, unpredictable, crystalline, visible, shattering white. For it is around and about and in and through her autonomy that the picara takes her distinctive literary form, separate from the subdued shades of earlier literary forms. If her autonomy clarifies her picaresque traits, autonomy also magnifies the shapes and colors of the earlier picaresque forms. Asserting that her autonomy is her distinctive characteristic, this part of the chapter will seek to prove that her existence not only precedes the emergence of the literary picaro in time, but also that her picaresque traits diverge sharply enough from that of the picaro to force us to look beyond him for their cause. For, where Lazarillo, Simplicius, and Guzman are more affected by their society than affecting it, the picara adapts the brilliance of her autonomy to survive in her society. She controls her own destiny. The picaros might serve masters but the picara is never a mistress—that is, she is never a mistress unless it will profit her.

The assertion of her autonomy over her sexuality brings the picara to the notice of Western literature: the Greek hetaira, the desert harlot, and the Renaissance courtesan, all possessed autonomy over men by bestowing their sexual favors. While the Song of Songs might praise women's breasts as apples and the images of Eve's tempting apple and of Israel as the unfaithful bride of the covenant might pervade the Scriptures, Christianity found sexual autonomy, such as the Lilith myth demanded, too dangerous a tool for women. While Christ's teachings upgraded the status of women by giving them the protection of marriage, some church fathers rejected feminine sexuality in their misogynist list of evil women. While the Church lauded Mary of Nazareth for her obedient submission to the will of God, it ignored her autonomy over her own destiny in choosing to be the bearer of Christ; she could have said “no” but her Fiat became the hallmark of acceptance of her feminine role and the model for all women. In contrast, Eve's apple is a borrowing from the cult of Aphrodite and her sin of “disobedience” was thought to be a sexual one akin to that of Lilith—a sin of rampant feminine sexuality gone wild. In iconography, Mary's crushing the head of the serpent with the apple of Eve's temptation still in his mouth exemplified the defeat of the spiritual over the material powers.

If the white of the picara's autonomy highlights the vivid green of her prostitution, the yellow of her courtesanship, and the dark green of her bawdry, her entrance point into literature is marked by her emergence, not by her sexual role as a prostitute, but by her role as the bawd. What characterizes her first is her avaricious greed. When the sin of usury prohibited Christians from the charging of interest because money should not beget money—Mammon should not beget Mammon—the bawd's major sin was her avarice, not her prostitution. While her traffic in fornication was serious enough, her more serious sin was that she profited from prostitution. Ironically, she is an early entrepreneur investing her capital—her time, experience, and efforts—in her prostitutes and living from the rewards of their labors: as Lynne Lawner in her Lives of the Courtesans notes, “the courtesan is one of the first examples of modern woman achieving a relatively autonomous economic position” (4). The later mercantile society chastised her for encouraging men's wastefulness and the lack of good stewardship; like coins debased with inferior metals, the man who frequented prostitutes wasted his efforts since no children resulted. So repugnant was this unproductive form of sexuality that the bawd was assigned to be the gatekeeper to hell, further tying her with the devil of Mammon. It took the satirical humor of Spanish literature to characterize the bawd as a woman worthy of notice.

In Spanish literature, as early as the fourteenth century, the bawd is the “sempi-eternal figure of Spanish literature” (Cohen 15). Prefigured as the go-between and the duenna in the Roman de la Rose, the bawd figure first entered into the tapestry of the young lovers in the Archpriest of Hita Juan Ruiz's 1330-43 tale of El libro de buen amor or the Book of Good Love. Often compared with the realism of The Canterbury Tales of his contemporary Chaucer, Ruiz's tale resembles the Wyf of Bath's Tale with the wandering knight who must marry the old hag when she gives him the correct answer as to what women want most—sovereignty. The hero of the Book of Good Love calls on Venus and the bawd to aid his amatory conquests. Using a twelfth century dramatic remnant of Terence and Plautus' comedies as a basis, Ruiz popularized the bawd under the title of “Trotaconventos” whose name describes her function, a woman who “trots” between convents or religious events to secure assignations for her clients. While Trotaconventos obtains for the narrator the object of his desire, Dona Endrina, the young widow is disgraced while the picaro narrator lives to bed a series of ugly shepherdesses (or cowherds), Moorish girls, and chaste nuns before Trotaconventos dies and he ends the book. That a bawd would have religious implications is not unexpected in a country like Spain where religious events were also social events and where church services provided a natural trysting place for women secluded by family and custom.

Such a mixture of religious and secular themes places Ruiz's book among goliardic or juglaresque literatures for his love songs jostle elbows with his hymns to Mary, his comic touches abut his serious moralizations, his autobiographical style compliments his misery at his imprisonment. He categorizes and castigates love in all its forms, rendering the nature of the book closer to carpe diem verses of goliardic literature in its celebration of wine, women and song. The narrator is a wandering cleric who writes for the wandering artists, actors, journalists of his time, for “blind men, for begging scholars, for Jews and Moors and wise women and serenading lovers” (Brenan 83). While all of these characters types are found in picaresque literature in some form and all contribute to the picara, so many literary genres are used by the author that the work becomes a satire on literary forms and pretensions of his day. The theatre, for example, is a natural environment for the picara and the drama a natural way to express herself. The church's use of auto sacramentales or religious drama heightened the use of dialogue as a worthy medium of literary exchange, as appears in the debat form of psychomachia of later literatures and in the later La Celestina. Ruiz's book contains drama in the debat between Dona Quaresma (Lent) and Don Carnal (Feast or Carnival), with Don Amor welcomed as a conqueror over Dona Quaresma. Still, the author creates the character of the memorable bawd with a gentle and humorous understanding of her necessary position in his society.

A century later, the 1438 work of another churchman presented the darker green-black view of the bawd. Nicknamed the Corbacho the work of the Arciprete de Talavera Alfonso Martinez de Toledo solidified the medieval litany of evil women by embroidering on the bawd of Boccaccio's Carbaccio until the bawd became a fit ancestress to Celestina. Unlike Ruiz, Martinez de Toledo introduced a lower form of dialogue to characterize his bawd, a form which continues into La Celestina. So intent is Martinez de Toledo's work that Chandler and Schwartz claim that the author made “misogyny a studied art” (165) in his indictment of types of evil women.

In the 1528 picaresque work of another churchman Francisco Delicado, Retrato de la lozana andaluza, the Andaluzian girl Lozana travels to Rome where she becomes an eavesdropper on courtesan life in her occupation as beautician. Lozana's autonomy appears in her recording that the Renaissance courtesans were exalted as cortesanae honestae or honorable whores in their roles as the personification of earthly beauty of Eros in contrast with the spiritual beauty. As Lawner in her work details, Rome was the “city of celibates” and of Renaissance artists where the “theoretical Neoplatonism idealizing the female figure as ‘heaven on earth’—literally the stepping stone to, or shadowy copy of, divine beauty—converged with a practical epicureanism to allow a quite concrete image of the desirable woman to emerge” (4). Entrepreneurs to a woman, the courtesans used portraiture as an advertising medium to increase belief in their role as necessary deities in the Roman society much as their later descendents used pictures to lure clients. As women who lived in secluded houses and attracted only the highest quality of clients, the courtesans' solemnity in their portraits shows the seriousness of their vocation.

Many of the picaresque traits are imitated in stories of these courtesans—they adopt fanciful names, change lovers, seek money; in Lozana's case, she travels from her home to Rome and from lover to lover, combining two major traits of the picara. While not quite knowing what to call her—Chandler and Schwartz settle for the term of “anti-heroine” (181)—they admit that she is the first of the picaras. What is of interest is the fact that the term “Lazarillo” for a beggar is mentioned in connection with her, proving that the name was in existence as a type long before Lazarillo became the literary picaro.

The most famous Spanish bawd, however, appears in the 1499 closet drama of Fernando de Rojas' La Celestina which achieved such popularity that more than sixty editions and even more imitations were produced in the century following its publication. While Rojas probably wrote the piece in 1499, the first act differs from the rest of the play in so many particulars that critics feel that it preceded the play by as much as a quarter of a century. In a letter accompanying the 1501 edition, Rojas claims to have reworked an old “auto” or interlude he found while on vacation from its one-act concentration on Celestina the bawd into the romantic story of Calisto and Melibea.

The Spanish auto sacramentales (short skits used as moral teaching devices akin to the Corpus Christi miracle and mystery plays of the English stage) employed the one-act structure of the morality play, personified vices and virtues, and were usually performed within a procession. For example, the “ship of fools” which convention appeared in Gil Vincente's 1519 Barca de la gloria, an “auto” based on the medieval danse macabre, was a familiar theme to a society who held the bawd as the gatekeeper of hell and who had sin and death as the children of the devil. Akin to the story of Dame Siriz in the “Interludum de Clerico et Puella,” Celestina was adapted by confreres of St. Thomas More as an interlude between the courses of banquets where it served the same purpose as a morality lesson to warn society of the evils of procuresses. Because the drama and the tale both come from similar sources of oral tradition, to find the same story in two genres is not any more unusual than to find the story of Tevye in a short story or in a musical comedy or a movie.

Critics agree that Celestina is actually a novel; Chandler and Schwartz refuse to place it in drama and insert it under the novel because it “was obviously never intended to be acted” (72-3). Yet the dramatic structure increases the play's connection with the picaresque novel. “What is gained by the use of uninterrupted dialogue is a condensation [with] no description of places or situations, which arbitrarily change. Everything is conveyed by conversation, stifled asides, and soliloquy,” J. M. Cohen claims in his introduction to his 1964 Penguin translation entitled The Spanish Bawd (9). Such paucity of details, such concentration on episodic action, such interchange of dialogue rather than description is characteristic of the picaresque tale and becomes the mainstay of picaresque novels.

Celestina is a bawd who, like Lazarillo, lives near a Spanish river with her two prostitutes Elicia and Areusa and two servants Sempronio and Parmeno. As a peddler of notions and potions she has access to the women at church services and in their homes. When Parmeno suggests that his master Calisto used Celestina's services to obtain the secluded Melibea, Celestina's professional skills become a tour de force, justifying her existence as a bawd. When she is successful, her servants kill her in an argument about the reward she has received for arranging the assignation between Calisto and Melibea. These star-crossed lovers are unfortunate; during one of their meetings, Calisto is killed in a fall from the ladder and Melibea throws herself from a tower in mourning.

Cohen asserts that Celestina's origins can be traced back to the lighthearted madam and bawd of Plautus and Terence because the names are Latin rather than Spanish in their origins (9). Monteser claims that in Plautus' parasites are early picaros and that in Truculentus the courtesan Phronesium is “clearly a sister-at-heart of Celestina, and therein is to be found a direct connection between Rome and the Siglo de Oro” (35). So popular was Rojas' combination of the bawd figure with the sentimental and romantic story of Calisto and Melibea that it was first translated into English as early as 1526. James Mabbe's famous translation entitled The Spanish Bawd in 1631 brought Celestina into prominence, prefiguring Shakespeare's combining the love story of Romeo and Juliet with Juliet's nurse as the bawd. Chandler and Schwartz claim that Shakespeare used an Italian edition to form his Juliet's nurse (172); as a descendant of Celestina, the nurse's practical, i.e. non-romantic comments, on the interchangeability of lovers shows her basic survival trait. Count Paris is as attractive as Romeo and he is available, she reasons the nurse's husband exists for no other reason than to provide lewd remarks to Juliet. This bawdic callousness in the face of love flaunts the convention of romance and is typically picaresque; love does not pay the rent nor buy the bread. By defying the traditional concept that marriages were arranged for the society's good and not for the individual's pleasure, Romeo and Juliet plunge into modern romanticism. Similarly, Celestina exemplifies the old morals while Calisto and Melibea employ the new romanticism of the individual. The entire play/novel can be read as a moral lesson on how unbridled passions of the individuals can lead to their deaths and to the rupture of society's communal growth.

While Celestina's tale remains a truncated picaresque morality play, in the hands of Rojas, however, the major love story develops leisurely in dialogue before it expands into a social commentary on the hostility of Spanish culture to its Jewish “conversos.” Because recent critics believed Rojas may have been such a “converso,” Cohen argues that the union between the lovers cannot take place because they are of different castes, religions, and social status, citing “the lack of Christian language in the speeches of Melibea and her father” (13), the superior attitude of Calisto, and Rojas' initial hesitation in acknowledging authorship as the signs of a “certain nervousness” (13) about censorship. Indeed, the anonymity of much Spanish literature, even Lazarillo des Tormes, Cohen claims, may stem from the fear of censorship that forced Rojas to include his name in an acrostic in the 1502 edition. For example, the same is not true of Celestina's story which remains an undeveloped and functionally picaresque tale of the bawd who dies for greed whereas the time and leisure of play's dialogue allows the lover's characters and backgrounds to develop; of special note is the fact that the story of Celestina dominates the first edition with the love story being expanded in later editions.

The picara is often accused of being a witch because she practices herbal or folk medicine under her cover as a seamstress. Celestina's witchcraft is associated with the prostitute/picara's occupation of cloth and sewing when she pictures herself as a peddler who deals in needles and thread. Parmeno the servant claims that she “had six trades in all. She was a seamstress, a perfumer, a master hand at making up cosmetics and patching maidenheads, a procuress, and a bit of a witch. Her first trade was a cover for the rest” (37). For over a hundred lines, Rojas details Celestina's lists of medicinal compounds and love potions with which she would “paint letters on their palms in saffron or vermilion, or give them wax hearts stuck full of broken needles [or] draw figures on the ground and recite spells” (39). Furthermore at the end of the third act, Celestina's list of ingredients would put Macbeth's witches to shame as she conjures up the dark forces of classical hell of “melancholy Pluto [to] wind this thread around you, and do not let it go till the time comes for Melibea to buy it. Then remain so tangled in it that the longer she gazes at it … she will forget her modesty, reveal herself to me, and reward me for my labours” (68). Ironically, Parmeno delivers a diabolic litany of her titles, the proudest of which is “old bawd” (36). As a witch and a procuress, she is a social outcast, her house “on the edge of town … stands a bit back from the road, near the tanneries and beside the river. It is a tumbledown place, in poor repair and badly furnished.” (37).

While Celestina harkens back to the personified Vice of Avarice in playing the archetypically greedy old woman, she is uniquely autonomous even in Spanish picaresque literature where she is worth of recognition in a society that is obsessed with servants and servitude. Whereas the later European derivatives of the picaros are usually free men and women, the Spanish picaro is a servant while the picara is not. Whatever her status, Celestina is a manipulator of people and industrious in her own cause, an independent entrepreneur who must adopt a servile guise but one who has “lived an honourable life, as everybody knows. I'm a person of note” (63). Like her avaricious sister-picaras, she demands and gets one hundred crowns to secure Melibea for Calisto by seducing Parmeno from his innocence into greed, counteracting his “I don't want ill gotten gains” with her own statement, “I'm for gains by fair means or foul” (48).

While Celestina adds the green of procuress and seamstress to the picaresque colors, the character of La Picara Justina adds the moon-silver of the wandering rogue to the nature of the Spanish picara. Where Trotaconventos trotted between lovers and Celestina went between the houses of the lovers, Justina moves from city to city, not in pursuit of love or lovers but for adventure and fun. Justina, Parker claims, “adds nothing new to the exploration of delinquency, but it does add a new element to the literary material of delinquency by the creation of a female rogue” (50-1). She is the first of the picara rogue/tricksters without being a bawd or prostitute herself.

Controversy still exists about Justina's authorship with most critics accepting Francisco de Ubeda as the author, although Frank Chandler claims that a Dominican friar Andres Perez of Leon wrote the work during his student years and used Ubeda as a frontman. Written in 1603, the story was classified with other picaresque tales, quickly passed into other European languages, and finally was condensed under its English subtitle of The Country Jilt with tales of Celestina and other minor picaros and published in 1707 by John Stevens.

As a literary work, Justina is perhaps more conscious of its literary style, although most critics see it as a roman a clef of Ubeda's court scene; it has three prologues and four books, an introductory preface, and little literary merit for its interest lies in its relationship to the other picaras and picaros. The subtitles of the books indicate the author's use of cultural and social customs in the different types of picaros and picaras: Justina is a picara montanesa whose concern with a high place in society implies the denial of Jewish or Moorish blood, a picara romera or pilgrim rogue, a picara plietista or deceiving rogue, and a picara novia or engaged rogue (Sieber 27-8). She compares herself to Celestina, Lazarillo, and other lesser picaros in the description she sends to Guzman prior to their marriage. For example, in the fourth book, Justina marries a soldier named Lozana, the same name as the first Spanish picara; in the promised but never delivered sequel, Justina was to marry Aleman's Guzman de Alfarache. In fact, Frank Chandler notes that the frontispiece of the first publications of Justina shows Celestina and Guzman accompanying Justina toward the Port of Death with Lazarillo in a neighboring boat (428).

Well aware of her position in such august company of the picaros and picaras, Justina is closer to the trickster-picaro than to the bawd Celestina. Justina is an anti-heroine to the romantic heroines as much as Lazarillo is an anti-hero to the knights errant. Like Lazarillo, she is much more of a trickster who seeks her identity and her inheritance by her cunning ways. What the world will not give her, she takes through chicanery. She has made the step from the hunger theme to the avarice theme because she needs money or goods rather than food itself to survive; in a sense, she feeds off the thrill of the adventure itself. As Frank Chandler points out, “the picara thus secured inevitably greater freedom of movement than the picaro, and through her was to come the evolution of the rogue novel to a higher stage, where the theme was not so much the classes in society as individual adventures and aspects of life” (239).

After establishing her picaresque genealogy, “for a rogue should prove roguery a heritage” (Chandler 235), and the death of her innkeeper parents, Justina wanders to the Spanish cities, joining with occasional con men to pull off tricks, returning home to Mansilla at the end of each book, marrying finally, and leaving her readers at that point. Because she is not a courtesan, Justina does not follow the picaresque exchange of masters; because she is not a beggar, she is never a picaresque parasite; because she is seldom a servant, she is not subservient. “Justina herself had but one mistress, the Morisca, and thereafter, down to Moll Flanders, the women of the romances of roguery were treated rather according to their lovers and their personal exploits than according to their changes of service” (Chandler 239). The picara had begun to wrest autonomy from a reluctant society.

Spain contributed other picaras, all of whom are variations on the same themes—courtesan, trickster, romantic heroine, adventuress—all of whom push the picara into the criminal/trickster image. The titles alone give a hint to their contents. In 1631, Castillo Solorzano wrote Las harpias en Madrid y coche de las estafas, a collection of four novellas about four fatherless girls who use a coach from a deceased admirer to defraud hapless suitors and to acquire wealth. The four retire to Granada, promising new adventures. His romances include Teresa del Manzanares [Teresa, the Child of Frauds] in which Teresa follows the sharpster tricks of Justina in defrauding and satirizing society. She joins the theatrical troupe, marries four times, and settles down, promising to “a new volume to treat of the avarice of his [her husband's] and her family” (Chandler 314). Solorzano's other novels are about the picaro Trapaza (whose name means deceit) and his daughter Rufina whose story in La graduna de Sevilla in 1642 gave rise to many translations and imitations; Scarron used it in his 1651 Roman Comique; John Davies printed La Picara or the Triumph of Female Subtilty in 1665 which was later titled The Life of Donna Rosina; in 1717, The Spanish Pole-Cat: or the Adventure of Senora Rufina appeared.

Influenced by the lists of evil women prevalent in the writings of church fathers, the picara acquired the darker shades of the villainess so that every evil woman becomes a picara. For example, Salas Barbadillo's 1612 novel La hija de Celestina, known also as La Ingeniosa Elena, departs from the picaresque genre into that of the murder mystery in which the heroine is executed for her crimes. Confusing the sordid reputation of Helen of Troy with the contemporary picaras, critics agree that Elena has strayed into the realm of villainesses: to Chandler and Schwartz, she is “the typical evil, vice-ridden woman … the most depraved of all the picaras” (186) and the tale of such a picara has deteriorated so that it is “no longer communicating with the birth of the rogue, and dispensing entirely with the service of masters, its observation of low life was only such as would contribute to the working of the plot, the intrigue standing out as supremely important” (Chandler 291).

Written within seventy years of each other, the early picaras' stories contribute additional colors to the basic formula: Lozana is a wanderer; Celestina is a full-time bawd, Justina is a trickster. While French and Italian authors never developed the picara beyond her Spanish origins, the German Grimmelshausen constructed his picara Courage as a countervoice to his picaro Simplicius. Hans Speier claims that it is unlikely that Grimmelshausen consciously used Celestina or Justina as sources of his picara while Monteser claims that “Trutz Simplex was probably based” on the French version of Justina, La Narquoise Justine (31). Indeed, while she does imitate the other picaras, Courage is very much her own individual; her contribution to the tapestry is the sparkling blue of the adventuress and the purple of the warrior.

Her name is intimately tied with her vice. When she is the daughter of an unidentified Bohemian nobleman, she is called Libuschka; when she is the military serving boy, she is Janco; when she is revealed as a woman, her captain names her Courage because, in her fight to resist discovery of her true sex, she refers to her opponent's grabbing her “between the legs because he wanted to get hold of the tool [male genitals] that I did not have” (99). Just as the name Lazarillo delineates his character, the various translations of Courage's name and subtitles color the reader's view of her. For example, Speier's translation refers to her as the “adventuress,” a word used by G.B. Shaw for his female heroines. Yet an “adventuress” is somehow less than an “adventurer” who is defined by Webster's as “one who engages in new and perilous enterprises” and “a soldier of fortune” while an “adventuress,” on the other hand, is a lesser being, a “female adventurer; a woman who seeks position or livelihood by equivocal means.” The older translation of George Schulz-Behrend's calls her the “Runagate” Courage, a word which confuses the Latin word “to deny” or “renegade” with the Middle English words “to run” and “agate” or “on the way.” Monteser calls her by the first German words of the manuscript—“Trutz Simplex”—“to spite Simplex” because he feels that it best describes Grimmelshausen's intent to weave Courage into his ten-novel series as a female rogue and antithetical contrast to Simplicimus. Most critics call her a picara.

Courage's life story, interwoven as it is with that of the picaros Simplicimus and Skipinthefield, ultimately revolves around the Thirty Years War. Because of the constant war, she adds a dimension not used by the Spanish picaras like Celestina and Justina; where their survival efforts center on wresting food from their reluctant societies, Courage's survival is even more basic because she is constantly uprooted by the chaos of war; it is not surprising to find her as a warrior of sorts. However, Speier notes that, while Courage is “as much an amazon as a harlot,” she also “has many of the quantities of the heroines in the idealistic novels of the baroque era … a manlike, vigorous creature, a virago … the ideal of the Renaissance, fashioned after illustrious ancient models” (32-3). He cites the several contemporary German baroque novels which helped form Courage but maintains that she has several picaresque elements which set her apart.

One of those elements is the variable final status of the picaras: Celestina is murdered; Justina survives to marry happily; Courage survives but at a lesser status as she is reduced from being the daughter of a nobleman to the “Madam General” or queen of the wandering gypsies. Within her military career, she is increasingly less fortunate as she is reduced from an actual combatant and plunderer, to her trade as a sutler, to a lesser position as dealer in minor tobacco and brandy, finally to a psuedo-military leader of a raid for stolen food from peasants. Fortune is often flexibility for the picara and what autonomy Courage has is linked with her military career as it parallels the Germany's war-ravaged destiny. Her picaresque nature allows her to move as easily within military ranks as she can in civilian life. While she cannot control the actions of war, she can control her participation in it as a combatant, plunderer, sutler, camp follower, or soldier of fortune; her fortune may decrease but Fortune still protects her.

In her marriages, her career is equally downward as she starts with marriage to a cavalry captain, descends to a infantry captain, to a lieutenant, to a sutler, to a musketeer (Skipinthefield), and ends up with a gypsy husband. Despite her checkered career, she outwits Fortune by her survival in the face of the horrors of war. At the end of the novel, she claims that she and the gypsies are “of no use to God or man and do not want to serve either of them, but to the detriment of both the country folk and the great, whom we relieve of many a head of game, [we] live on nothing but lies, fraud, and theft.” (223). The operative word here is “live” because she does survive into her seventies. Even then, as the wife of the gypsy lieutenant, blackened by “goose drippings and various salves for lice on my skin and from the use of unguents to dye my hair,” Courage is “so struck by the change I had undergone that I had to laugh at myself out loud” (216-6). Change, growth, Fortune, chance, chaos—all color the tapestry with their hues but the grim black-red of war dominates Courage's story.

The streaked black and red of the chaos of war are the natural foil for an autonomous picara; war and social change establish the disordered universe of the early picaras which later novel picaras use merely as backgrounds while many fantasy picaras adopt it as integral to their character as warriors. Parker claims that war is the ultimate delinquency derived from pride or the inability to submit the individual will to the common good (135), a vestige of the primal capital sin of pride. Courage prides herself in gaining revenge on Simplicius by abandoning a child for him to raise and on various lovers for their ill-treatment of her. Her pride leads to her concern with vanity about her loss of beauty which in turn might lead to a loss of money and an attack of avarice, the second deadly sin. She accuses herself of other faults—anger, indolence, melancholy, wantonness, lust—to construct her own version of the seven deadly sins that are so much a part of the makeup of Celestina and other Spanish picaras.

Courage uses the military aspect of war as a secondary source of her two vices: avarice and sexuality. She is aware of these as faults as she mentions in her first chapter: speaking of herself, she claims that “her sauciness and wantonness have subsided, her stricken conscience is anxiously awake, and the listless old age she has reached makes her feel ashamed of keeping on with her excessive follies … What I am lacking is repentance, and what I ought to be lacking are avarice and envy” (89-91). Always her chief characteristic is her avarice which drives her to her revenge on Simplicius; her ultimate trick, she claims, is that she has left her maid's child to be brought up at Simplicius' charge. Thus, her avarice is both motivation of her need for survival and a demonstration of her skill of survival. Even when she tries to settle down as a farmer, she is able to gain financially on the soldiers billeted at her house, so that she found that her “prosperity and income exceeded the expenses incurred through the war” (202). Her rapaciousness in accumulating plunder leads first to her dabbling in trade and then to her acquiring goods through tricks and scams; again, there is a downward movement as she participates in legal theft on the battlefield to illegal thievery with gypsies.

Just as the military setting satisfies the restlessness of the picara, so also does it provide a natural environment for her lustfulness. The change of military husbands and lovers serves as the picara's version of the picaro's change of masters, a form of autonomous control. With the help of her nurse, Courage first tries to avoid losing her virginity by disguising herself as a boy; when that disguise is about to be uncovered, she gives herself to the cavalry captain who promises to protect her. Even then she is autonomous because she controls the situation: “I liked the touch of his lascivious hands much better than his fine promises, but I resisted gallantly, not in order to get away from his or to escape his desire, but in order to arouse and excite him to even more fervent efforts” (101). Her assessment of her sexual powers achieves autonomy for her; once she understands that she has a marketable body, she uses it to obtain her survival by marrying and prostituting herself to her financial advantage. Thus, war has satisfied her need for chaos of Fortune, for pride in her military accomplishments, for her avarice in accumulating money, for her lust in sexual endeavors, for her need to travel, and for her general restlessness. Onto the picaro's colored skeins of wandering, hunger, and trickery, the picara laid her colorful skills in bawdry, avarice, and war. The next color to be applied came with the transportation of the picara into English.

The primary colors of these Continental picaros and picaras were muted down into softer shades of the English female rogue, derived partly from life and partly from the prose fiction forms of autobiography (criminal, spiritual), jest biography, joke books, fabliaux, drama. Although the English fictional picara is slashed in the bold outline of the criminal biography, her introduction of humor, literary realism, and social criticism capture the more complex tones and values to define the English picara.

Just as the epylla cluster around a central hero to become an epic, so do the stories within a generation center on the most prominent person of that century. In such a mythopoeic process, the subjects of the jest biographies or Schwankbiographen could not have created all the tricks and riddles assigned to them any more than Abraham Lincoln could have experienced all the anecdotes attributed to him. In England, the citrus yellow of jest biography—the treasury of jokes, riddles, and anecdotes—tinged the popular mind in various literary forms. Because such books needed justification for their existence, many overlapped characters with Lazarillo and Celestina, Justina and Guzman, frequenting later editions of each other's works. This spin-off effect or “visiting star guest” format is most familiar in television but its purpose is the same as that of the jest book: to provide “a whetstone to mirth” as the prologue of the 1635 edition of Long Meg of Westminster does when it compares the heroine's escapades with those of Robin Hood and Bevis of Southampton (Mish 83).

Despite the fact that her biography was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1590 and her story has continued down as an example of the jest biography, debate as to whether Long Meg was an actual living person is still going on. The actual persons mentioned in her biography place her in the early sixteenth century in the time of Henry VIII through Queen Mary's reign in 1557. According to the epitaph by a later writer Gayton, Long Meg of Westminster was buried in the Abbey: “I, Long Meg, once the wonder of the spinsters / was laid, as was my right, i' the best of Minsters” (Burford 47).

Long Meg's name stems from her extreme height of more than seven feet and from the “length of her proportion [where] every limb was so fit to her tallness that she seemed the picture and shape of some tall man cast in a woman's mold” (Mish 84). When she leaves her Lancashire home to London to “serve and to learn city fashions,” she is accompanied by several young women. Encouraged to find work as a tavern-maid at the Eagle tavern in Westminster, she is tested by two historical jesters—Will Summers and Doctor Skelton; when she defeats a third man in combat, a Spaniard, Sir James of Castile, she is hired as a “bouncer” for the tavern. That Sir James is a Spanish knight heightens awareness of the picara's origins in the Spanish picaresque, jest books, and anti-romantic spoofs. When this latter miles gloriosus again engages her in combat in her male attire, the braggart knight pleads with the disguised Long Meg for his life, declaring that the duel was only “for a woman's matter; spill not my blood” (Mish 91). When Meg agrees to spare his life if he serves as a page at dinner, she reveals herself as a woman and enjoys being “master of the feast, Sir James playing the proper page, and Meg sitting in her majesty” (Mish 92).

While Long Meg's two occupations of soldiering and tavern-keeping seem to lift her above the tradeless picaro, the trades actually precipitate and emphasize the later picara's autonomous abilities. Her original military career is precipitated by her taking the place of her servant. Nowhere is she called a camp follower but rather a “laundress [who caused] her women soldiers to throw down stones and scalding water” (104) on the French soldiers. When Meg is challenged by a braggart Frenchman, she defeats him in single combat and sends his head to his commander. For her military efforts, she is granted lifetime pension by the King of eightpence a day, not an uncommon practice for many of the actual women who soldiered in various wars. (The seventeenth century Christian Davies fought with the British army and was awarded a shilling a day pension (Thompson 69).) In peacetime, Meg also resorts to physical means to defend her business from a persistent constable who tries to count “what guests she had”; she promised to “beswinge you as ever constable was beswinged since Islington stood” (107). She keeps order in her tavern by enforcing a list of rules of conduct yet within her own marriage she gives apparent autonomy to her husband by refusing to fight with him when she is challenged.

The taint of prostitution was so intimately linked with picaresque soldiering and tavern-keeping that Long Meg is accounted as a prostitute everywhere but in her telling of her own tale. The closest the original text comes to prostitution is a reference to her house at Islington where “oftentimes there resorted gentlewomen thither and divers brave courtiers and other men of meaner degree, [so that] her house was spoken of” (107). Even here her soldiering affects her tavern-keeping. While her biography itself does not detail any prostitution, the house she kept at Islington with “lodging and victuals for gentlemen and yeomen … surpassed all other victuallers in excess of company” was kept “quiet” (108) and peaceful through a series of posted rules which, while generous to the impoverished, were enforced by Meg's strong arm. The only reference to other women is in one of these house rules where, if a “ruffler [who caused] an alehouse brawl … would not manfully … fight a bout or two with Long Meg, the maids of the house should dry beat him and so thrust him out of doors” (Mish 108). Whether the maids were prostitutes is not clear, although the assumption in picaresque literature is that any tavern or inn provided maidservants as temporary prostitutes.

Contemporary reports attribute prostitution to her tavern. For example, a tract “The Golden Grove” by William Vaughan assumes that she is a bawd: “It is saide that Long Megg of Westminster kept alwaies twentie Courtezans in her howse, who by their pictures she solde to alle commers” (Burford 47). Mentioning the practice of advertising the prostitutes by their pictures ties Meg with the same practice used by the Renaissance courtesans, the Dutch and Flemish brothels, and by Holland Leaguer's, the most famous brothel of its time. Perhaps her military career may have gotten tangled up with Holland Leaguer's reputation for defending itself against attack by the law. Somewhere after 1562 and before 1578, Long Meg was the alleged owner of the Manor in that area around the Bankside, infamous from its mention in the twelfth century rules laid down for licensed brothels. According to the anonymous 1632 pamphlet, the estate called Holland's Leaguer was known for “the memorie of that famous Amazon, Longa Margarita who had there for manie yeeres kept a famous Infamous House of Open Hospitalitie” (Burford 46).

The autonomy of the English prostitute rests with the strange Elizabethan institution of Holland's Leaguer and again it involves actual people rather than literary ones. Holland's Leaguer was originally the estate known as the Liberty of Old Paris Gardens on the south bank of the river Thames, so called because it provided a natural defensive front with its moat and porticullis. Playwright Shackerley Marmion's tract describes it as “a Fort citadell or Mansion Howse so fortified and envyroned about with al maner [of] fortifications that ere any foe could approach it he must march more than a muskette shotte on a narow banke … betwixt two dangerous ditches … then a worlde of bulwarks rivers ditches trenches and outworkes” (Burford 53). Holland's Leaguer lay very near the three major theatres of the day—the Swan, the Globe, and the Hope-Bear-pit—outside the environs of London proper and subject to its own laws because it was an “ancient Liberty with rights of asylum … and with very ill-defined means of law enforcement even by the king's officers” (Burford 55). It was called “leaguer” because of the difficulty anyone would have in beleaguering or capturing it. Easily reached by city clients who could walk over London Bridge or ferry across the river, the brothel was equally approachable by the court.

Its uniqueness does not lie with its defensibility alone but in the famous procuress and prostitutes who were sheltered by its walls. E.J. Burford in his Queen of the Bawds claims that the majority of information comes from a 1632 tract, possibly by the playwright Shackerley Marmion whose later play uses the house of prostitution, Holland's Leaguer, as it title and the theme. The pamphlet creates an early history from sparse facts to concentrate on the life and adventures of a young London housewife in the 1590s. During the Elizabethan and Jacobean era, the most famous prostitute of her time was Elizabeth Holland or Dona or Madame Brittanica Holland. Lured to London by the glitter of court life, the girl entered into genteel “service” in the household of an city alderman where his pictures of famous classical “curitizans” or courtesans encouraged her that to “synne wysely was to synne safely” (16). Such influences affected her choice of occupations.

Like Aphra Behn's mysterious disappearing husband, Elizabeth Holland's husband apparently contributed only his name before retiring from the arena while his wife started a lucrative brothel in London near the playhouses. While Elizabeth's merchant-husband may actually have been a member of the Holland family who ruled the Elizabethan underworld, there is considerable doubt about which Holland, Elizabeth or otherwise, owned the brothel and, indeed, so many references to Hollands being fined for prostitution during those years may point to the existence of an entire family who governed the vice. While her husband's position as a merchant may have first served to introduce her into the international set in bustling London, her liaison with an Italian courtier Alberto Gentile encouraged Elizabeth to provide a brothel for multi-national foreigners, streaming into prosperous London.

What is of importance is that Elizabeth Holland changed her name to Madame Britannica Hollandia in keeping with the regulations, stemming back to Roman times, that registered prostitutes must adopt a professional name to avoid confusion with street walkers or casual prostitutes. Also, it would hardly be political wisdom for “London's most popular well-known high-class Brothel Queen” (40) to bear the name of the Queen. This change of name allowed Elizabeth to follow the old custom that brothel “madams were either Flemish (including Dutch) or French [and] that whores should bear fancy foreign names, in line with the tradition that continental harlots knew their business better than local British ones” (Burford 40). One contemporary critic complains of the Bankside stews that “English women disdayned to be Baudes; Froes (women) of Flaunders were women for that purpose” (40). One of Elizabeth's prostitutes was known as Longa Margarita whose name, beside being connected to Long Meg, may have been a variant of the Flemish saint Margaret who died defending her employers' or relatives' tavern from being robbed; many Flemish taverns are named after her.

The connection of the Netherlands, France, and Italy with prostitution is a frequent one in English literature. Burford cites an instance where the apprentices' annual Shrove Tuesday shutting down of the Shoreditch brothels forced a brewer-owner, a Mrs. Leake or Leeke of Flemish heritage, to protest to the courts. According to Burford, Holland's Leaguer in Paris Gardens was the “congregating place for all the Dutch Whores at the end of the 16th century, and was popularly known as Hollands Laager” (119), in imitation of the “famous ‘Schoen Majken’ (The lovely Little Maiden) in Brussels, renowned at this time for its excellence in every respect” (73); Holland Leaguer's popularity depended on the business-like atmosphere in which it was conducted, its good food, luxurious surroundings, modern plumbing, medical inspections, clean linens, and high class prostitutes. Thus, the Continental brothels made popular by the Elizabethan poets and sonneteers sported English whores imitating the Dutch or Flemish “froes” imitating Italian Renaissance cortesanos imitating Roman courtesans imitating Greeks hetairai.

The civil authorities always threatened brothels and Elizabeth, employing her girls in Duke Street, near the docks but within the town walls and jurisdiction, came under the London court's harsh punishments. In 1597 she was imprisoned in the infamous debtor's prison of Newgate charged with running a brothel. While Elizabeth's literary sisters—Moll, Amber—find themselves in the notorious prison as harlots or thieves awaiting the punitive sentence to Bridewell—the prison for rehabilitation or punishment for women—or transportation to the colonies, Elizabeth had enough money to buy a comfortable existence in the Newgate. She paid her fine for running a brothel but escaped the physical punishment and humiliation of a public whipping at a cart's tail by fleeing to sanctuary outside London's jurisdiction. Stung by the law's inroads into her affairs, she swore to fight off any forces which might seek to disrupt her again. Consequently, she leased the estate outside of London and entered history as the Dona Hollandia Britannica, madam of Holland's Leaguer.

Elizabeth's ability to be autonomous is her most outstanding quality in a business where she competed with skilled whoremasters like Henslowe and Edward Alleyn. Frank Chandler, sees her as the “English Celestina, who had taken up her abode on the south shore of the Thames in an establishment impregnable except to her well-wishers and furnishing for the moment the scandal of the town” (147). As the bawd of a thriving brothel, Elizabeth became the major subject of a pamphlet by Nicholas Breton and the minor subject of a play by Marmion, where she is rendered as a “fierce imperious creature full of defiant spirit” (Burford 89). She is able to defend her house against the law from within; ordered by Privy Council to surrender, she defied the law and abandoned the house without answering any summons with no trace of her being punished or fined. Thus, Holland's Leaguer lived up to its name by withstanding the law's beleaguering to give its mistress time to escape unharmed. Shortly afterwards a balladeer Lawrence Price who wrote in “News from Holland's Leaguer” that “Hollands Leaguer is lately broken up / This for Certain is spoken” suggests that disappointed young men keep a lookout for the new brothel “at Bewdley where they [prostitutes] keep their musters” (Burford 116).

Burford asserts that King James must have known and probably visited her establishment. This tradition of the courtesan's connection with the king pervades the literature of the picara as the ultimate goal to be achieved, even though the picara's fortunes invariably decline after her liaison with the king. Courage has affairs with the military “king” of her high-ranking captain; Roxana's liaison with the king is a highpoint of her life and her French prince is another. Amber's one-night stand with Charles II frustrates her when she is not called back and Becky's affair with Lord Steyne is the highest she goes in the nobility. Even Scarlett marries Rhett who sets out to be the “king” of Atlanta society so that his daughter can be the “princess.” (This concept carries over into the film version where the “King” of movieland, Clark Gable created the role of Rhett Butler.) Liaison with the king does not usually continue into the fantasy picaras, although the created worlds which they inhabit often boast a monarchy of sorts; the fantasy picaras do not sleep their way to fame; either they earn fame themselves or they have affairs with men whom they consider “kingly” by their picara standards.

If the vivid green of Elizabethan courtesans did not clash with the earthier greens of the bawdic imitations of Celestina, the green of English picara broadened to incorporate the subtle camouflage greens of the trickster / confidence women like Justina. For example, Mary Frith was better known as Moll Cutpurse, a term arising from her thieves' jargon as a gangster's woman, a “moll” or a “doll,” and from her specific occupation as a pickpocket. Best known through her alleged diary of 1662, Moll was probably a hermaphrodite, according to her biographer C.J.S. Thompson; she was brought up as a girl but soon adopted attire akin to that of the hobby horse—a doublet on the top and a skirt on the bottom. As an actual person, Mary appears in court records for wearing men's clothes for which she had to do public penance in St. Paul's. So disguised she joined a group of thieves or “land pyrates” (21) who preyed on tourists near Covent Garden and the theatrical neighborhoods. She fenced stolen items for a network of thieves and, using her reputation as a fortune-teller and finder of lost items, returned the stolen goods for a reward: “‘The world consists of the cheats and the cheated,’” Mary claimed and there was no doubt which side she favored.

Just as Elizabeth Holland was immortalized in drama, so also did actual English female rogues like Mary Frith appear in plays as subjects and possibly as actresses. According to William Macqueen-Pope, “there had been rumours of a woman appearing before at the Fortune Theatre in 1610, in a play by Middleton and Dekker called The Roaring Girle-or Moll Cutpurse. Presumably the character was drawn from life for the author in an epilogue promised that Moll herself should appear if the public wanted her to do so” (27). She was also mentioned in Field's 1618 play Amends for Ladies and, over a hundred years later, Defoe knew her so well that he referred to her in Applebee's Journal of March 23, 1723 and, very possibly, used some of her experiences as a base for Moll Flanders.

Criminal autobiography further formed the English picara. In the life of Mary Moders Carleton, who appears in James Kirkman's 1673 criminal biography, The Counterfeit Lady Unveil'd, was so popular that twenty-four books emerged on her between 1663 and 1673, according to Spiro Peterson's introduction to Kirkman. Mary Moders Carleton was a swindler and impersonator who for twenty years bilked unsuspecting dupes. Charged with bigamy, she fled to Germany where she so infatuated an old man that she was able to abscond with his money. Arriving in England again, she posed as an impoverished German princess, swindled several men and was charged with bigamy for her third marriage. In one escapade reminiscent of Defoe and Amber, she and her maid posed as young men to escape with their loot; in another, she pulled the “jealous husband” scam, blackmailing a young lawyer to preserve his reputation. When she was apprehended, she was sent to Newgate, transported to Jamaica, returned to London, arrested again and hanged in January 1673. Her life story reads like a summary of the picara's archetype; her use of male clothes as a disguise to escape prosecution is typical picaresque action; her willingness to deceive by altering her name is also. The German Princess, as she titled herself, possessed the picaresque elements of roguery, vanity, thievery, disguise and deception; so widespread was her influence that Defoe has Roxana title herself the German Princess (271). In fact, critic Ernest Bernbaum, the early editor of the Mary Carleton Narratives, sees a foreshadowing of Defoe when he states that “Kirkman maintains the manner commonly associated with Defoe … serious moral tone, minute depiction of occurrences, the coherence of plot, the tracing of the motives of the character and the elaborate creation of verisimilitude” (90).

Not all the picaras existed before 1700, however. Another set of more subtle shades influenced by increased realism, the sharper light of criticism, and the color-hungry readers created the picaras of Behn and Defoe, the immediate ancestresses of the novel picaras and the distant ancestresses of the fantasy picaras.

The beginnings of the novel show glimmers of the picara as a subject worth writing about. Nicholas Breton's The Miseries of Manuilla lacks the force of character associated with the picara because for, while Manuilla suffers the troubles of a defenseless young woman in a wicked world, she escapes the fate of the disillusioned picara by dying while she is still innocent. Aphra Behn's heroines, on the other hand, present a variety of types from innocent to villainess. Unusually strong in mind and in action, Behn's heroines are determined to pursue their survival. Philadelphia in A True History suffers a Clarissa-like brothel imprisonment by her brother, survives, and emerges as a rich and honored widow, capable of choosing her next husband. Arabella in The Wandering Beauty escapes from an unwanted marriage by a journey of flight and disguise, finally choosing the husband she wants. The villainesses exhibit the same ferocious feminism. Ardelia in The Nun: or The Perjured Beauty is lustful, malicious, and vengeful; Sylvia in Love Letters is little better than a nymphomaniac; the heroine of The Fair Vow-Breaker is so evil that she murders one man and accidentally kills her husband. The subjects which Behn selects range from an Oedipal incest motif in The Force of Imagination to vanity as a reason for murder in The Fair Jilt.

Defoe's female heroines are logical steps in the development of the picara from her mythical origins through her counterpart with the picaro. Using the older forms, Defoe is a pivotal writer whose works both reflect his traditions and forecast the future of the novel. Just as Richardson developed Pamela's epistolary style from his books of letters and Fielding developed his comic epic of Tom Jones from earlier satires, so did Defoe rework criminal autobiographies as major themes in his novels. With the wealth of picaresque literature at his disposal, Defoe was in the enviable position of creating the first picara who blends the awkward primary colors of the picaresque forms with the subtler shades of the novel heroines, while still remaining very much her own autonomous person.

An innovator seldom perfects the form and Defoe's attempts are not generally considered novels. While each of Defoe's novels is different and each one is sui generis, Defoe makes the prefaces of Robinson Crusoe, Colonel Jacque, Moll Flanders, and Roxana complement each other in their insistence on the autobiographical confessional intent as the sole motive for their writings. Crusoe uses a variant of the spiritual pseudo-autobiography: thus, “the story is told with modesty, with seriousness, and with a religious application of events to the uses to which wise men always apply them, viz. to the instruction of others by this example” (n.p.) In Moll, Defoe comments that “as the best use is to be made of even the worst story the moral 'tis hoped will keep the reader serious, even where the story might incline him to be otherwise” (3). With Roxana, however, Defoe departs from his cautious statement of purpose; although he maintains the facade that the novel is meant for instruction, its fullest impact centers on its entertainment value. Nor apparently did Defoe feel that Roxana needed much apology for its existence since, “the advantages of the present Work are so great, and the Virtuous Reader has room for such much Improvement, that we make no Question, the Story however meanly told, will find a Passage to his best Hours; and be read both with Profit and Delight” (2-3).

Although Moll Flanders has been accorded the title of Defoe's most picaresque work, his Roxana is the stronger example of our argument because she is a full-bodied, full-blooded picara. Critics stress only some of the picaresque traits within Moll: Alter calls her an “anti-heroine” (73): Monteser sees Moll as “in the direct tradition of the picara” while Roxana is only one of the “samples of the picaresque romance” (48). As Starr points out in his preface, Moll is closer to a criminal autobiography; he cites several actual persons whose lives may have been the sources for Moll but denies that she is wholly taken from any one person. By limiting her to criminal autobiography, Defoe is able to expand on this familiar theme of what Starr calls the “callousness of society towards the unprotected and the unproductive—orphans, debtors, criminals, single women without trades, and other marginal types” (xiv). Within the larger scope of the picaresque being discussed in this book, Moll comes up a poor second to Roxana as a picara who overrides her genre. This is not to deny that Moll is a picara. She is a fine one but one whose picaresqueness is limited to her ability as a thief, as a wanderer, as a prostitute because, after her picaresque birth and background, Moll's story swerves into conventional marriage and economic problems, with only the second half involving her picaresque journey. Roxana, on the other hand, is immersed in the picaresque from her first memory as an immigrant from France; while the stability of her early upbringing aligns her more with the Continental picara, she is early forced into prostitution and deception for her survival before her autonomy asserts itself. Roxana is a picara; Moll is picaresque.

In developing an updated picara, Defoe did not need to create a character beyond Roxana because he had reached the zenith; this only possibility lay in creating an imaginary heroine and that was too far from the historical and literary realities to suit him. In Roxana, Defoe flexes his novelistic muscles into the showmanship of an older genre rather than the creation of a new genre. Having once finished Roxana, he had exhausted the genre and Defoe was too practical a man to pursue a dying genre. No matter what critics decide ex post facto, Defoe's experience with Roxana did lead him back to expository prose and away from a fictional suitable for a novel. Ironically, as Defoe's last fiction, Roxana is his most critically neglected work because his other novels distract from it. Within the history of literature, Roxana has been seen from the wrong perspective. The novel is not an example of an early novel—an archetype of the eighteenth century fiction or a prototype of the sentimental heroine's tale of misfortune. Roxana is Defoe's version of picaresque novel about a picara and, as such, it exhibits his unique adaptation of all the picaresque traditions.

Yet, Roxana has long perplexed critics who felt comfortable with Moll's picaro origins but not with Roxana's picara origins. (One critic even commented that he suspected that Roxana enjoyed being a courtesan. Chandler considers Roxana to be “almost without emotion. She certainly wins no sympathy … with characters so perverse in motive, with personages who are simply puppets, it is only natural that the morality of ‘Roxana,’ should be external and distorted” (196-7). Maximillan Novak calls her “Defoe's least attractive character” (50); Harrison Steeves sees her as “vain, avaricious, hypocritical, and a ruinous influence” (33). Is it her flagrant sexuality that offends them; is it her feminine approach to the masculine world that disturbs them? Or is it that critics avoid Roxana because they cannot recognize the archetype of autonomy? For our argument, Roxana presents a sharp outline of what the picara has been, should be, and will be.

Departing from the creamy homespun wool and the primitive herbal or vegetable dyes of the early picaresque genres, the colors of the picara in these early novels began to imitate the industrial practices where yarn was spun on mechanical wheels, looms were owned by factory owners, and colors expanded in numbers to over two thousand shades for the tapestry. The subtlety of the picara's figure deepened as new shades of picaresque color were developed in a group of novels classified, for the sake of our argument, as the later “novel” picaras, to separate them from the picaras of Defoe.

Primary among them is Thackeray's Vanity Fair, that novel without a hero, which presents another version of the picara, one who has learned how to mingle in society while milking it. Here, the actual actions of the picaresque are masked in the satire of polite society, journeying through the Fair. Just as Becky's hunger theme has been transmuted into her greed for goods and security, Thackeray's Puppet Master device distances the author from his work and gives him a set of impartial archetypal patterns which the picaro, telling his own story, never achieves. Becky is not an autobiographer and the lack of this viewpoint must be assumed by Thackeray as he does when he defends his heroines for their actions. What he admires are Becky's survival techniques and, consequently, he stresses her autonomy. However, Amelia is equally a picara: as the emanation of the Widow of Windsor archetype, doting on her child and her memories, she fights mightily for her autonomy in a mass of sentiment and Thackeray is as critical of her as he is of Becky. But, while Amelia is an economic outsider, Becky is still the emotional outsider who cannot find a place in her society; nor does she care to as long as she has the means to survive. Just as the somber black of Amelia's widows' weeds is a fugitive dye, so also the sharper reds of Becky's villainy that tint her sandy hair pale into insignificant and unobtrusive pink when she achieves some measure of respectability.

In contrast, another redheaded modern picara Scarlett O'Hara in Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind marches onto our tapestry, trailing the red clay of Tara in her wake. Critics claim that it is a satire on Mitchell's own culture as well as a reordering of the antebellum South. As a historical romance, it might be expected to end happily as its subsequent bodice-ripping novels do. But, of course, it does not. What Scarlett does is to rise above her literary romance heritage to become an archetype of the strong southern woman who insists on her own way; she is the first picara to become accessible in novel and film, the first to capture the popular imagination, the prime figure in our modern tapestry.

Another novel picara is Amber in Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber, written some ten years after Gone with the Wind and in direct imitation of it and of early picaresque forms and novels. Closely derivative of Moll Flanders, Roxana, and Scarlett, Winsor's use of historical details and scandalous liaisons made the book an instant bestseller with its recreation of Restoration England. By alternating chapters of the fictional life of Charles II, the novel differs from later historical novels by featuring a picaresque heroine in opposition to the well-balanced fictional biographies of historical figures such as those written by Jean Plaidy and Antonia Fraser and Norah Lofts. Amber has few morally redeeming values and the book was roundly condemned for its immorality by contemporary critics. So potent was the novel that Winsor carried autobiography to the ultimate by writing another book Star Money about her experiences as an author of a best-seller whose character became confused with her author in the eyes of the public. It too was made into successful film.

The last category of the picara is that of the fantasy picara who apparently developed from science fiction heroine. I say apparently because a quick look at the heroines of science fiction disproves this: in science fiction, the heroine is a pale appendage of the hero, the object of desire, usually sexual, the reward for the quest. She has no identity of her own because she seldom acts on her own; she lacks autonomy as she waits to be rescued. Not so the fantasy picara who is an autonomous hero who is a woman rather than a heroine. While she appears to have “ridden the coattails” of science fiction until she gained strength and identity to launch her own sub-genre in fantasy, we have only to look at her origins in the picara to see that such is not the case.

The fantasy picara is both the newest and the oldest picara. Built on the warp threads of the Great Goddess archetype, the picara is never far from any genre; in fantasy, she uses the background colors of the science fiction genre as foils to show off her skills but she is a clearly woven figure of her own. She is more than the feminine version of the hero because her quest is so vitally different; as a woman, she was different goals and different obstacles to overcome; her monsters are society's disapprovals, her mountains are galactic spaces, her hunger is for self-knowledge. The picara simply highlights the existing warp threads underlying her modern design because her autonomy demands full participation in any action involving her life. Furthermore, where science fiction is more hospitable to the nature and needs of science, fantasy includes the overwhelming need of the picara to tell her story.

The increase in women authors of fantasy and in the genre itself has made necessary some investigation as to why the fantasy heroine is a popular species. This leads immediately to the conclusion that the fantasy heroine often partakes of the nature of the picara, intentionally or unintentionally, consciously or unconsciously. The fantasy picara is an imperfect one because she is tinged with a humanism not found in early picaras. While she is motivated by the same needs—survival, hunger, traveling, adventure—as her sister/picaras, she is always subject to compassion. This somewhat limits her, as a fully functioning picara. Because the fantasy picara inhabits a created world and not a real one, she is seldom in science fiction which limits technology to that which is in existence. The fantasy picara can extend into the realm of fantasy in her use of pseudo-scientific psychic powers or magical powers which enable her to cope in a created or unreal world. That she carries over the same worries as a woman in the real world and how she handles them make her a picara. To maintain interest, the authors of fantasy, usually women, must create a sympathetic woman who upholds general moral principles; who does not destroy unnecessarily; who is reluctant to kill but will when forced to; who is an outsider but who does not refuse human companionship when it is offered; who abjures sexual morals for whatever feels good but who is responsible for her actions; who uses but does not abuse people; who judges all according to her standards; who rejects the double standard for sex and for power; who resists slavery of any sort as death to human spirit; who retains her autonomy despite the struggles of her society to remove it from her.

Many of these women authors have created several picaras: Jo Clayton has created Alyetys of the Diadem series of nine novels, Skeen with three novels, Brann of the Drinker of Souls series with two, Serroi of Moonscatter with three. Sharon Green has created Diana Santee of the Spaceways series with two novels, Jalav the Amazon warrior with five novels, Terrilian with five novels; Inky in The Mists of Ages series of two novels. Marion Zimmer Bradley has numerous picaras in her many novels of the Darkover planet as well as her Lythande of the short stories and her Zygydiek of the warrior stories. Other authors have one or more: Elizabeth A. Lynn has many picaras in her three Tornor novels and several in other works. Ann Maxwell has Rheba in the three Firedancer novels. Suzy McKee Charnas has Alldera in her two utopian novels. Jan Morris has Estri in the three High Couch of Silistra novels. Joan D. Vinge has a mother/daughter set in her two novels of Tiamet; Pamela Sargent has one in The Shore of Women and several others in other novels. Judith Ann Karr has two novels about Thorn and Frostflower; Joanna Russ has Alyx in the Paradise novels and Jan in the Whileaway novels. Vonda McIntyre has one major picara in Dreamsnake and lesser ones in The Exile Waiting. And there are many other novelists in the mainstream of science fiction/fantasy genre with others whose heroines are peripherally picaras.

As our investigation of the picaresque elements are defined, identified and classified, different aspects of these novels will be identified as being picaresque. No one single archetypal pattern flashes through every story but the persistence of the pattern in all the stories appears most often in fantasy. We shall trace important traits through the four steps of the picara mentioned—the early, the Puritan, the Victorian, and the fantasy—to attempt to establish the fluctuating presence of the picara. Even before we turn to the literary characteristics, the picara has accumulated her major traits of thievery, deception, disguise, sexual excess and avarice. She has become an autonomous, irascible, financially avaricious bawd who does not beget children nor nourish them, who does not align herself with anything but her own survival.

Autonomy is still the highlighting white which catches and disperses the light in the tapestry. The mix of traits provides a varied palette of colors to use, colors which are more freely mixed to enrich the personal identity of the picara. Restricted by the cultural or religious mores of male authors, the picara stands in her glaring yellow shade of the veil that the Renaissance courtesans had to wear. After the passage of time, the individual colors of the tapestry become more muted and more complementary and therefore harder to discern. Trying to explicate one strand of color from an entire tapestry involves touching all other colors forcing many levels of the picara to be discussed in each chapter; trying to give precedence to one color over another is a useless occupation. The patterns and combinations of colors may change but the primary colors of the picaresque blend into the subtle and complex tones of the picara's tapestry.

Each chapter that follows will try to isolate one or more colorful strands of the picaresque traits, identify its picaresque origins, trace its development in all levels of the picara—early, Defoe, novel, and fantasy. Because many traits overlap in time and emphasis, the order of the chapters is somewhat arbitrary as all the colors are needed to see the figure of the picara clearly. Each chapter will present picaresque color-traits which are either complementary or contradictory to each other but which are necessary shades to the tapestry.

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