[In the excerpt which follows, Friedman focuses on La lozana andaluza and La pícara Justina as examples of the distinct type of picaresque narrative that features female heroes.]

Men, in determining the “acceptable” values and assumptions (which include the inferior status of women), subject women to experiences that men are not subjected to; but men's language structure does not include the ready means for women to express the thoughts and behavior that result from their subjugation.

Cheris Kramarae, Women and Men Speaking

A salient feature of narrative is its paradoxical resistance to historicist principles. As narrative forms proceed historically through time, they both expand the recourses of earlier texts and validate the presence of the new—the novel—in their predecessors. Don Quijote stands as a monument to the synchronic backdrop of intertextuality and to the defiant chronology of narrative development. The absurd and counterhistoric temporal scope of Cervantes's novel underscores, perhaps precognitively, the interplay between history and fiction and the powers and limitations of the verbal sign. Don Quijote erects barriers between the real and the imaginary; it establishes categories of experience and writing before theories of history and literature legitimize such distinctions. Don Quijote reacts to nineteenth-century narrative realism over two centuries before European literary realism takes hold, and it challenges narrative presuppositions from the perspective of author, narrator, character, and reader. Practice encompasses theory, and theory raises rather than answers questions. The problem of truth and the amplification of perspective foreground the self-conscious literary object as a microcosm turned macrocosm, a system of devices that uses artifice to seek essence. By placing himself in the work—by fictionalizing himself—Cervantes acknowledges the comprehensive nature and the inverted hierarchy of his narrative performance. The irony of his vision points forward to twentieth-century skepticism and backward to the discursive strategies of picaresque narrative, in which an implied authorial presence directs language and event. The feminine variations of the picaresque offer new patterns of discourse while forming the basis for further transformations of the model. Quite fittingly, they also anticipate the dialectical discourse and rhetorical effects of the picaresque archetypes.

Borrowing from the tension between stated intention and uncompliant text (and between the author and his alter ego) in the Libro de Buen Amor, the early writers of picaresque fiction project ambiguity on various levels of narration. The doubling of the author and narrator in the prologue of Lazarillo de Tormes initiates the relationship between implied author and narrator/protagonist that regulates the irony of the text proper. The prologue speaks, without transition, of a book to be judged by a reading public and an explanatory manuscript with a readership of one. Lázaro himself is both man and boy, writer and character, participant and observer. From the standpoint of discourse, he is unreliable and reliable, because the authorial figure encodes the text with fixed patterns of irony and revelations of truth that betray Lázaro's defensive rhetoric. Guzmán de Alfarache heightens rhetoric and defense by moving the explanation to a spiritual plane. Guzmán's text is a confession in the double sense, the story of a professed conversion presented through the discourse of a repressed individual. The separation of episode and moral digression establishes the opposing sides of a narrative competition in which the reader may accept or reject the penitential stance. To read Guzmán de Alfarache is to determine priorities, to validate the narrator's redemption or to expose the unredeemed self. Authorial control becomes more prominent in El Buscón. The intensification of language, the identifying sign of a baroque stylist rather than of a narrative novice, finds an analogue in the incriminating discourse and fatalistic events of the text. Quevedo announces his presence verbally, in technical and rhetorical terms; neither the words nor their message belong entirely to Pablos. The idiolect, the negative determinism, and the implicit denial of upward mobility mark the intrusion of the creator in his creation, to oppose and ultimately to silence the narrator.

Just as Don Quijote makes the process of composition a part of the narrative product, the archetypal picaresque novels allow particular strategies of storytelling to guide message production. The markers of discursive play set opposing systems into motion. The dual direction of the prologue in Lazarillo de Tormes, the division between narrative and commentary in Guzmán de Alfarache, and linguistic self-consciousness in El Buscón suggest a dialectical chain of connections that unite discourse, story, and signification. The premise of each work—Lázaro's explanation of the case, Guzmán's indictment of sin following his conversion, and Pablos's record of his entry into the world of crime—leads to a possible counterargument that would redefine the focus of the work. Lázaro's ascent in society may, in fact, be a descent into complacent depravity, Guzmán may be a hypocrite instead of a convert, and Pablos may adopt a bold tone to camouflage his shame. The narrators as pawns of the authors, real and implied, function as analogues of the individual at the mercy of a regimented society, but the literary space grants the narrator a forum that society does not provide and that an author cannot completely dominate. The discursive structure ironically features variations on the theme of silence, specifically attempts on the part of the narrator to conceal the truth and on the part of the (implied) author to discredit or render problematic the words of the speaker. The ironic consequence is a duplication of narrative voice, which adds a richness of ambiguity and a subtext for speech and social acts.

The earliest of the male picaresque forms secularize the spiritual confession to delineate a character who confronts society and the blank page. Lázaro breaks a protective silence to publicize his disgrace, as the speaker in the first part of the prologue alludes to honor attained in the pursuit of the arts. While boasting of his newly acquired prosperity, Lázaro stresses the importance of silence (and figurative blindness) in the honor-obsessed Spain of his time. Rather than remove him from the preoccupations of his countrymen, his words seem to concede his faith in the power of illusion. The narrative continually reiterates the contradictory force of its existence. Unity comes not so much from the execution of the narrative premises as from the ironic correspondences and “unconscious” revelations of the text. Guzmán links the sacred and the profane in an attempt to negate a sinful past through contrast with a calculatedly exemplary present. To give credence to the earnestness of Guzmán's conversion, the reader must take him at his word and ignore to some extent the comprehensive impact of his words. The discourse of Guzmán de Alfarache subtly belies the stated intention and the avowed repentance. Between the adventures of the pícaro and the moral lessons of the reformed sinner lie the thoughts (made public) of one made bitter by his rejection by God and his fellow man. This psychic middle ground disrupts the balance created by the textual division to favor the sinner over the would-be saint and a rhetoric of discord and resentment over a language of inner peace. In El Buscón, the extended verbal conceits announce the presence of an extranarrative mediator who makes his way into the story by controlling causality as well as discourse. Pablos publicizes his dishonor through words not fully his own, and a fate guided by the implied author conspires to deny him escape from the past. The connecting threads of the narrative relate to the superstructure of linguistic and situational determinism.

The doubling effect, characterized by irony of discourse and circumstance, brings into question the concept of an objective reality or of absolute values. The narrative mirrors the dilemma of man before nature, society, and fate, only partially in control of the events that beset him. While the literary vehicle privileges him, the authorial figure compromises his autonomy at every turn. Message systems interact and at times contradict each other, finding an order of sorts in the evasive syntheses and ironic patterns of narration. When a female protagonist replaces the male, the distance between empathy and contrivance increases. Women do not necessarily sound like women, nor do authors always give them a voice in the narrative. The precariousness and inequality of their social roles are reflected in literary works that often reduce feminism to the status of motif. Male authors bring women into the domain of the picaresque without giving them freedom of speech and without liberating them from the constraints of their social inferiority. The female rogues achieve a degree of success by plotting against men, but society at large, if not the individual, avenges their deviation from behavioral norms. The pícaras face despair, unhappy marriages, and even death for their tricks and for their rebellion. The texts that portray their lives marginate them from discourse. Their stories are immoral yet entertaining interludes in the male-oriented scheme of things, and their creators undermine their words as society undermines their actions. Like their male counterparts, the female protagonists achieve an identity in spite of the factors that work against them, and some manage to escape the silence that threatens their discursive authority.

A beauty and an enigma of the picaresque trajectory is the generic consciousness of writers, narrators, readers, and critics, ranging from mythic to socio-historical, from moral and conceptual to purely formal considerations. The feminine picaresque, with its inherent need for modification of the model, lends itself to the study of the “readings” (and anticipation) of the picaresque archetypes by those authors who choose to present antiheroines. The pícara is an orphan, an outsider, a trickster, whose story relies on an episodic structure and a system of poetic justice based on the social status quo. The incipient psychological realism of the Lazarillo, the Guzmán, and the Buscón counts less in these readings than the re-creation of antisocial events to conform to the female characters. Discursive mediation becomes more evident in the presentation of women's lives. The external self—the male view of the opposite sex—dominates the narratives, which nonetheless bespeak woman's place in society and in the text. The discourse contains a number of voices, one of which belongs to the protagonist. Her confrontation with competing voices offers a key to the production of meaning, as well as a social statment.

The dialogic format of Francisco Delicado's La lozana andaluza links the work to the tradition of Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina (1499, 1502), with its emphasis on verbal portraiture and social panorama. Significantly, however, La lozana andaluza points forward to the picaresque mode through an ambiguous prologue, rich in moral intention and challenged by the text proper, and through a doubling of the author, who becomes a character and commentator in Lozana's story. As the object of story and discourse, the protagonist acts and interacts with those around her. As a participant in the dialogue, she develops a voice to complement (and perhaps to rectify) the descriptive and narrative components of the text. In La pícara Justina, Francisco López de Ubeda foreshadows the linguistic intricacies of Quevedo's Buscón with a voice-over that puts morality at the service of the written word. The baroque idiolect subordinates self-revelation to diversion, accentuating the role of the implied author over the delineation of Justina's inner being. The intertextual motive for the artistic display—and the target of López de Ubeda's moral indolence—is Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache. In Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo's La hija de Celestina, the authorial figure once again becomes the agent of morality. The narrative commentary, the chronology, and the intervention of fate adhere to a moral order that occupies more narrative space than weight of conviction. Death looms in the background (and in the foreground of narration) for Elena the sinner, the victim of an ignoble heredity, a corrupt environment, and a third-person narrator who gives her little opportunity to speak for herself.

The movement from La lozana andaluza to La hija de Celestina gives priority to entertainment, instruction, and feminism, generally in that order. The carnivalesque world of inversion and wish-fulfillment informs the feminine picaresque, despite its antifeminist subtext of social hierarchies and male superiority. Alonso de Castillo Solórzano draws on the picaresque models for plot and form, while avoiding a certain ambivalence of discourse. The archetypes are models rather than myths, and discourse is no longer an end in itself. The evidence is a first-person perspective in Teresa de Manzanares that changes only slightly in the shift to the third person in La garduña de Sevilla. As a unit, the antiheroines' narratives cover the discursive range of their brother works. They become counterfictions when the differentiated voices of the texts convey a sense of variation and sexual consciousness, when the female presence begins to affect the production of meaning. The semiotic (and economic) system associated with these women is the body, a visual and sexual commodity. Their tricks and their words depend on desirability, and the transition from object to subject illustrates the tenuous interiority of the female character. To a degree the texts define identity in negative terms or in terms of what is left unsaid. Discourse becomes a literary response to a social question.

LA LOZANA ANDALUZA

Lozana: Mirá, dolorido, que de aquí adelante que “sé cómo se baten las calderas,” no quiero de noche que ninguno duerma comigo sino vos, y de día, comer de todo, y d'esta manera engordaré, y vos procurá de arcarme la lana si queréis que teja cintas de cuero. Andá, entrá, y empleá vuestra garrocha. Entrá en coso, que yo's veo que venís “como estudiante que durmió en duro, que contaba las estrellas.”

Look here, heartsick boy, as of now “I know how to stir the cauldron,” and I don't want anybody to sleep with me at night but you, and in the daytime, I want to eat some of everything, and in this way I'll fatten myself up, and you'd better check out the territory if you want me to get some hides under my belt. Come on, enter, and employ your spear. Enter the ring, for I can see that you're approaching “like the student who slept on a hard bed, the one who was reaching for the stars.”

The Spanish feminine picaresque both addresses itself to the male archetypes and prefigures the dialectical narrative of the models. La lozana andaluza, published twenty-six years before Lazarillo de Tormes, strives to reproduce reality through the devices of fiction, in a portrait that brings the artist into his work. Expanding the role of the auctor from sentimental romances such as Juan Rodríguez del Padrón's Siervo libre de amor (Free Slave of Love, mid-fifteenth century) and Diego de San Pedro's Cárcel de Amor (Prison of Love, 1492),¹ Delicado populates his literary creation with characters from an identifiable real world and places them in authentic settings, notably in the holy and corrupt city of Rome. He escapes the fantasy realm of idealistic fiction by concentrating on the lower elements of society and the baser instincts of humanity. The author fictionalizes himself to add credence to the portrait and in doing so gains control of the text from both sides of the figurative canvas. He is a writer, an observer, and an actor who influences events and calls attention to the task of composition. He is not only author as character but also character as author. The literary product becomes the macrocosm, subjecting the elements of reality to the conventions of art. The author manipulates the material from within and beyond the text, while Lozana derives her power as the focal point of the discourse and as a speaker. The progression of the text is panoramic rather than emotional, but Delicado does include a final moment of disillusionment for his protagonist and with it the possibility of redemption. The individual and morality lie within the portrait, which places extension over depth. As in every portrait, the center carries a privileged status, and at the center of La lozana andaluza stands a woman with a well-defined past and an ingenious talent for reaping rewards in the present. She is an unabashedly sensual product of her time and milieu, artistically enriched by the complementary facets of the portrait, one of which is a voice of her own.

In his dedication to an illustrious personage, Delicado stresses the pleasure derived from things related to love, “que deleitan a todo hombre” (which delight every man),² especially in the case of so expert a practitioner as the subject of the portrait. Alluding to Juvenal's skill at observation, he purports to reveal only what he has heard and seen. A faithful rendering of events in a less than exemplary moral climate necessitates a degree of poetic license for the sake of reader satisfaction: “Mi intención fue mezclar natura con bemol” (p. 34; My purpose was to mix nature with sweetness), to soften the truth in order to heighten the enjoyment. Delicado modifies the Horatian dichotomy of the sweet and useful, aiming for authenticity over instruction, or perhaps for instruction through an accurate portrayal of life. Morality and didacticism are at the service of art, an art that establishes an order for quotidian reality.³ For those who would question his motives, Delicado comments, “Si, por tiempo, alguno se maravillare que me puse a escribir semejante materia, respondo por entonces que epistola enim non erubescit, y asimismo que es pasado el tiempo que estimaban los que trabajaban en cosas meritorias” (pp. 33-34; If, in time, someone were to wonder that I would bring myself to write such things, I would reply then that a letter does not blush, and likewise that the time is past when they respected those who busied themselves in worthy matters). The ambiguity of this passage, with its debt to Cicero, sets the tone of the work. In unpraiseworthy times, literary scruples cede to verisimilitude, as art reflects life in a double sense. If the Libro de Buen Amor rationalizes its carnal obsession under the rubric of negative exemplarity, La lozana andaluza relates its scurrilous episodes and vulgarities of language to fidelity in the artistic representation of nature.

Following the dedication, the author offers a brief description of the materials contained in the text. He once again emphasizes the completeness of the portrait and its faithfulness to nature, while using classical sources to justify the need for an artistic arrangement of events and a “dressing up” of the material for the cause of creativity.⁴ Thus, in the story Lozana will come to be much wiser than her real-life model (“verná en fábula muncho más sabia la Lozana que no mostraba,” p. 36), remade to enter the literary tableau. The analogy to painting expresses the tension between natural phenomena and their transference to another medium, between absolute truth and truth in art. Artistic creation involves re-creation according to the principles of the chosen mode. Delicado acknowledges this distinction, despite repeated references to his accurate rendering of the life around him, by foregrounding his own role in the creative process and later by entering the fictional world. In the preliminary sections of this precursor of Lazarillo de Tormes and Don Quijote, the author notes, whether consciously or unconsciously, the ongoing dialectic of fiction. Unmediated reality provides multiple options. The writer designs a model, selects some elements at the expense of others, and asks the real to comply with the norms of the imaginary. The contradictions inherent in a verbal approach to reality—standard features of the picaresque and a motivating force of Don Quijote—direct the self-consciousness of La lozana andaluza. The more the author and his alter ego ponder the act of writing, the more obvious their imposition on reality becomes. By transforming himself, Delicado punctuates the transformation of reality. By defending the veracity of his portrait, he illustrates the pervasive influence of literary artifice.

La lozana andaluza reflects the trope of synecdoche, which centers on the representative part to symbolize the whole. The sinful existence of a courtesan corresponds to the decaying morality of the Roman populace, avenged by Spanish and German soldiers in the 1527 sack of Rome. The portrait is not art for art's sake but art with a foreboding of doom. The historical moment is as significant a part of the structure as setting, character, and speech. The sack of Rome is determined by political, social, and (for Delicado) ethical factors and predetermined by history. As exposition and warning, the text exists in an ironic present and in a parabolic atemporality. Lozana's story evokes a precognitive or precocious determinism, a combination of her converso background, her sex, and her exposure to poverty, crime, and sin. Delicado presents the stages of her decline in a systematic fashion. He begins with her birth and ignoble lineage, follows her along the path of destruction, and ends with a spiritual solution to discontentment. The vision of the lower depths, so to speak, offers an early form of naturalism that takes into account the desires, instincts, and motives of the characters. The realistic view of society seen from below builds on the exploration of multiple social levels in La Celestina and precedes the anti-idealistic tenor and focus on the individual in Lazarillo de Tormes. La lozana andaluza works from the isolated subject to a segment of society to society and humanity at large. Lozana's destiny relates to circumstances beyond her control, as well as to her conscious choices. The author supplies a family portrait to complement the panorama of Rome, allowing descriptive voices to take the place of the introspection that will mark subsequent narrative discourse. As the mediating presence within the unmediated form of dialogue, the author in his dual role sets the terms and the boundaries of Lozana's story.⁵

La lozana andaluza is divided into three parts containing sixty-six mamotretos, or memoranda, and several closing pieces. The first mamotreto gives a brief biographical introduction, while the second initiates the dialogue form sustained throughout the text, interrupted only by infrequent commentary by the author (outside his role as actor). Perhaps unwittingly, given his zeal for realistic depiction, Delicado questions the narrative devices he employs. The author who in the dedication attests to having seen and heard the events portrayed in the text cannot have seen and heard everything, nor could his recounting of the dialogue be exact. Like Cide Hamete Benengeli in the Quijote, he claims to be a witness to events he could not possibly have observed. Note, for example, the author's remark in mamotreto 14 concerning Lozana and her servant/procurer Rampín, with whom she has just spent the night: “Quisiera saber escribir un par de ronquidos, a los cuales despertó él y, queriéndola besar, despertó ella” (p. 76; I wish I knew how to write down a couple of snores, which woke him up, and when he tried to kiss her, she woke up). The statements supporting the validity of the text underscore their implausibility. The author at work within his fiction—a fiction that applauds its historicity—embraces and opposes a reality perceived by the senses and modified by words. Realism's loss is literature's gain. Delicado exposes what Cervantes exploits: the writing process itself, the creative distance between signifier and signified, the inversion of microcosm and macrocosm. The figure of the author in La lozana andaluza makes problematic the elements that he attempts to clarify. Objective reality becomes subjective, absolute truth yields to poetic license, and the poet reveals the tools (and the tricks) of his creative trade.⁶

The author provides a moralizing voice in the text, to the point of confronting Lozana herself on the issue of God's omnipresence and omnipotence (mamotreto 42), a passage that places the creator in a superior position to his creation. The moral stance of the author as character approximates narrative perspective, setting up a type of analogy between the historical veracity and moral validity of the text and the credibility of Lozana's penitent attitude at the end of her story. The discrepancy between a moral position and a profane text and between a historical position and an artistic text may predispose a somewhat skeptical reaction to the change of heart, overshadowed by a volume of sinful acts. The quantitative imbalance resembles that of the Libro de Buen Amor, in which the rhetoric of bad love proves a formidable combatant to the doctrine of good love. An important difference, however, is the presentation in La lozana andaluza of family origins and the origins of antisocial behavior, leading to sin and eventually to despair. Just as Don Quijote and the authorial figure(s) share the spotlight in Cervantes's novel, Lozana and her author(s) command attention in Delicado's work. The author establishes the terms of the socio-biographical account, placing himself within the narrative to report, comment, and interact. Lozana performs mimetically to substantiate his case and to offer her own.

Born in Córdoba to New Christians, Aldonza (later renamed Lozana for her feminine ripeness) travels throughout southern Spain with her widowed mother. The author hints of early sexual encounters and a free-spiritedness that increases on her mother's death. In Sevilla, Lozana's aunt introduces her to a successful merchant, Diomedes, whose mistress she becomes. She journeys toward Italy with Diomedes and barely escapes death at the hands of his irate father, who imprisons Diomedes and arranges to kill Lozana. The protagonist makes her way to Rome, where she settles in the section known as Pozo Blanco, largely populated by Spanish conversos. She finds a kindred spirit in the women of Pozo Blanco, many of whom specialize in the cosmetic arts. Through them she meets a Neapolitan woman whose son Rampín becomes a guide, companion, and sexual partner. Trigo, a wealthy member of the Jewish community, sets Lozana up in a house, where she uses her sexual and economic expertise to profit from her clients. She also practices her skills in the treatment of venereal diseases. At the end of part 1, she comes to the aid of a canon and his pregnant mistress, and at the beginning of part 2, the author discovers that Lozana herself will bear a child by the canon.

The events of what may be termed Lozana's pre-history greatly affect her story, as do the circumstances of her early years. Her impurity of blood, her unstable family life, her status as an orphan, her emerging sexuality, and her mistreatment at the hands of men rob her of youth, innocence, and dignity. Fate brings her to Rome and to Pozo Blanco, where she finds the comfort of group identity and a continuity of ostracism. She becomes the queen of whores in a society that denies her respectability, and the text does not reveal that she would wish it otherwise. The dialogue form gives Lozana an active role in the literary structure, and she has reached a discursive maturity before she begins to speak in the text. She is hardened, cynical, and adept at linguistic as well as sexual expression. The Renaissance predilection for physical beauty customarily manifests itself in paeans to the female form, in works such as Juan del Encina's Egloga de Plácida y Vitoriano (Eclogue of Plácida and Vitoriano). When Lozana sees Diomedes for the first time, she reacts excitedly to his physical charms, shattering the model (and decorum) to acknowledge feminine sexual urges. In Rome, she recalls her successes: “Fui festejada de cuantos hijos de caballeros hubo en Córdoba, que de aquello me holgaba yo. Y esto puedo jurar, que desde chiquita me comía lo mío, y en ver hombre se me desperezaba, y me quisiera ir con alguno, sin que no me lo daba la edad” (p. 49; I was courted by as many gentlemen's sons as there were in Córdoba, which gave me great satisfaction. And I swear that from the time I was a young girl I could feel the cravings of my sex, and just seeing a man stirred me up, and I would have liked to go off with one of them, but age got in my way). Whether to satisfy her desires or to repay men for their abuse, Lozana—whose name suggests her maturity—thrives as a prostitute, swindling her patrons as she gratifies their desires.

Lozana is the antithesis of the ethereal, virginal, elusive beauty, and she is far removed from the aesthetically erotic love objects of idealistic fiction. She shows little concern for the children she has borne Diomedes, she sleeps with Rampin on their first night together, and she combines prostitution with theft. Like Pablos of El Buscón, she is a retrogressive over-achiever, the most flagrant of courtesans, as he is the most flagrant of delinquents. While she deals in cosmetology and legerdemain—arts of illusion—her language reflects the directness of her approach to lovemaking. Her tastes are natural, her needs immediate, her actions shameless, and her discourse is graphic, colloquial, and to the point. When a headwaiter who requires her services approaches her, Lozana says, “‘Señor, dijo el ciego que deseaba ver’” (p. 96; “Sir, the blind man said that he wanted to see,” that is, “Put your money on the table”). She refers openly to sins past and present, to syphilis and other consequences of these sins, and to sexual topics in general, lying only when the deception of the moment demands it. The following passage, in which Lozana addresses a group of Spanish women living in Rome, illustrates her lack of discursive restraint: “¡Ay, señoras! Contaros he maravillas. Dejáme ir a verter aguas que, como eché aquellas putas viejas alcoholadas por las escaleras abajo, no me paré a mis necesidades, y estaba allí una beata de Lara, el coño puto y el ojo ladrón, que creo hizo pasto a cuantos brunetes van por el mar Océano” (p. 50; Oh, ladies, do I have things to tell you! Just let me make water, since because I had to push through all those old painted whores downstairs, I couldn't stop to answer my needs, and among them was a pious hypocrite from Lara, with her smelly cunt and thieving eyes, who I think has rolled in the hay with every sailor who sails the high seas). Lozana's goal of independence extends to her lexicon. Her language, like her lifestyle, is consciously rebellious, unladylike, and worthy of the basest profligate, male or female.⁷

Delicado's depiction of Lozana is an analogue within an analogue. The antiheroine becomes a symbol of the depravity that is Rome, as Rome itself is a symbol of the triumph of evil. Language, event, and attitude mark a type of semiotic consistency, as all signs lead to sin. Vulgarity is intrinsic to the portrait and to its message, even though the seriousness of the message remains a subtext in a text that seems to take its scandalousness quite seriously. The author forges (or forces) his way into this world, sharing its language and partaking of its temptations yet aware of retributive justice. In mamotreto 4, he describes Lozana as “muy contenta, viendo en su caro amador Diomedes todos los géneros y partes de gentilhombre, y de hermosura en todos sus miembros” (p. 43; very happy, discovering in her dear lover Diomedes all the goods and parts of a gentleman, and with beauty in all his members). Later, in mamotreto 17, he discusses the wayward life with Rampín as one who knows from where he speaks but who knows, as well, the wages of sin. Lozana, for her part, concentrates on the here and now of a commercial venture that unites sexual passion with financial security.

The author as character takes a more active role in part 2, separating himself to a certain degree from both the extratextual author and the intratextual biographer and commentator. A companion provides the exposition of Lozana's affairs, of her victories over men and their pocketbooks, after which the author speaks directly to the protagonist. He is now a lovesick gentleman, she a consultant in matters of the heart. Lozana advises the author to eat sage with his mistress, but prescribes another remedy—monetary in nature—for the companion, who is in love with her. The first mamotreto (24) of part 2 presents Lozana in action among three men, including the author, who praise her beauty and ingenuity, avail themselves of her multiple talents, and finally judge her licentiousness as symptomatic of the ills that beset Rome. In the sections that follow, Lozana pursues all manner of meretricious business, giving counsel and giving of herself. In mamotreto 31, she tells of a dream in which Rampín falls into the river, and she fears for his safety. Immediately afterward, the chief constable apprehends the servant for robbing a grocer. On his release, Rampín ironically validates the dream by falling into a latrine. The dream vision and its actualization relate to the impending disaster and to the importance of Lozana's dream in mamotreto 66, the last memorandum, a dream that may lead to her salvation. In part 2, however, the emphasis is on destruction, personal and communal. Lozana advances as a deceiver of men, and Rome moves toward defeat. In mamotreto 34, a squire echoes Silvio's earlier warning of the danger facing Rome, while Lozana disregards the warning and the future to seize the day.

Part 3, which promises to be more entertaining than the preceding parts,⁸ gives greater space to the individual and brings the author into the dramatic events and Lozana into the commentary. The protagonist has periodically evaluated her course of action, and she continues to do so, finally realizing that slight modifications cannot benefit her, that the change must be radical. The text devotes little attention to the crisis of conscience and none to the penitence itself. The diversion comes from further variations of Lozana's craft and craftiness. In a lengthy soliloquy at the beginning of part 3, Lozana expresses a desire to separate herself from the prostitute population in order to have greater control over her destiny: “Ya no quiero andar tras el rabo de putas. Hasta agora no he perdido nada; de aquí adelante quiero que ellas me busquen. No quiero que de mí se diga ‘puta de todo trance, alcatara a la fin.’ Yo quiero de aquí adelante mirar por mi honra, que, como dicen: ‘a los audaces la fortuna les ayuda’” (p. 172; I don't want to follow behind whores' tails any more. Up to now I haven't lost anything; from here on I want them to come after me. I don't want it said of me, “a whore all along, a beggar in the end.” From here on I want to watch out for my honor, for, as they say, “fortune comes to the aid of the bold”). Even allowing for honor among thieves, there is a certain boldness in Lozana's words. More than honor, what she apparently wants is status within the demimonde. She is the ultimate pragmatist, willing to do anything to stay one step ahead of her neighbor. The road to redemption is thus far the road not taken.

Mamotreto 42 features a debate between Lozana and the author on the legitimacy of her strategies for survival. Lozana elaborates the various branches of her practice, which include paramedical and pseudoreligious rites and the interpretation of dreams. The author chides her for profiteering from the fears and the superstitions of her customers, cautioning her against playing God. Lozana counters that she performs a service by satisfying the needs of the people and that her prognostication is based on fact and common sense. Having observed those around her, she predicts great carnage in Rome. The author recants, ending the polemic by restating his adversary's case: “Y digo que es verdad un dicho que munchas veces leí, que, quidquid agunt homines, intentio salvat omnes. Donde se ve claro que vuestra intención es buscar la vida en diversas maneras, de tal modo que otro cría las gallinas y vos coméis los pollos sin perjudicio ni sin fatiga. Felice Lozana, que no habría putas si no hubiese rufianas que las injiriesen a las buenas con las malas” (p. 178; And I maintain as true a saying I read many times, that “whatever men do, their intention saves them.” Whence it seems clear that your intention is searching for life in diverse ways, such that another raises hens and you eat chickens, without prejudice and without causing trouble. Fortunate Lozana, there would be no whores if there were no bawds to mix the good with the bad). The dialogue puts the protagonist's activities into moral and practical contexts. Along with the author, the reader discovers the range of Lozana's enterprises and a logical—as well as rhetorical—force that rivals that of Celestina. In spite of his argument to the contrary, the author accepts the instinctive, self-serving rationale of his forensic opponent. Both recognize, nonetheless, that men and women must answer to a higher authority for their conduct. The author looks to the hereafter and Lozana to an imminent hell on earth.

The debate between the fictionalized creator and his creation attests to the persuasive and multiperspectivist capabilities of the literary work and to an emerging self-consciousness on the part of the artist. Just as the character Miguel de Unamuno allows Augusto Pérez to present a superior argument centuries later in the climactic confrontation of Niebla,⁹ Delicado gives his protagonist the final word in the debate, using his foreknowledge of the sack of Rome to justify her prophetic claims. Rhetoric triumphs over absolute values, self-preservation over virtue. La lozana andaluza offers no psychological progression, but the author's position in the debate conveys an understanding of the protagonist's social predicament. Lozana builds from weakness, using her marginated identity to survive in a hostile world. She becomes mistress of the illegitimate, specialist in the unholy, advisor/confessor in cases of love. Alienated from social acceptability, she inverts the hierarchies of society to control fragmented (and errant) souls. The author places himself in the role of the reader, and his reaction to Lozana's speech guides the reader of the text to a more sympathetic response to her antisocial behavior. Because of his involvement in Lozana's story—he is, in fact, one of the errant souls—the author achieves a dual credibility, as director and participant. By allowing Lozana to “outvoice” him, he gives a victory of sorts to the female outsider and to the evolution of narrative discourse.

The foregrounding of Lozana in the debate serves the transition to her withdrawal from the world, an escape that the text presents as her own decision. Mamotreto 44 sustains the ambivalent portrait of Lozana and of the prostitute in general by addressing the issue of security. As an active member of the community within a community, Lozana lives “better than the Pope,” yet her unceremonious language suggests a concern for and kinship with the older prostitutes whose days of glory have come to an end. She dares to recommend that society provide for the former ladies of pleasure in order to ensure continuity among the ranks. She defends this stance with a traditional argument in favor of prostitution: “Cuando a las perdidas o lisiadas y pobres y en senetud constitutas, no les dan el premio o mérito que merecen, serán causa que no vengan munchas que vinieran a relevar a las naturales las fatigas y cansancios y combates, … y de aquí redundará que los galanes requieran a las casadas y a las vírgenes d'esta tierra” (p. 184; When the lost and crippled and poor and elderly don't receive the recompense or recognition they deserve, it will turn out that many who would have come to relieve the regulars from their weariness and toil and conflicts won't come, … and from this it will follow that gentlemen will court the married women and virgins of this land). Human interest competes with sin, and scruples with logic, in a speech that has greater impact because it follows Lozana's case (with the author's endorsement) for resourcefulness and survival at any cost. The presentation of the problem by Lozana herself stresses the importance of perspective on message production. The prostitutes are agents of sin and guardians of purity; by corrupting themselves, they save others from corruption.

In the debate, the author offers a compassionate and socially advanced affirmation of Lozana's views. Here and in the following memoranda, he gives the antiheroine a voice to identify and elicit sympathy for her sisters in sin. As a character, he yields the floor to Lozana's rhetoric of self-defense. As manipulator of the text, he fosters the cause of the underdog while vacillating slightly in the area of feminine discourse. It is implicit in the statements concerning sexual roles that women fall into one of two categories. They are either good (chaste or married) or bad (prostitutes). Men, in contrast, can have it both ways. Their sexual activities do not affect their honor or their social status. When Delicado has a prostitute rationalize the benefits of her profession for society as a whole, he bestows a somewhat suspicious magnanimity on the figure of the scapegoat. Although he may be accused of putting words into the speaker's mouth, one must note that the double standard has endured far beyond the early sixteenth century and that Lozana's voice, however contrived, has a significant function in the text.

In the concluding sections, Lozana labors as a sexual and medical counselor and cosmetics specialist, mixing with all types from pimps to jurists. She is aggressive, cynical, ready to compete for business. More mature and more pensive than in the preceding parts of the text, she continues to seek notoriety in the margins of society. Mamotreto 51 represents a turning point in the protagonist's life, as the deceiver of men becomes the trickster tricked, duped into giving her affection for nothing. She takes this as a personal affront, and her speech to that effect contains numerous linguistic signs of her rage. The episode forms part of a progression toward her total disenchantment with the things of this world and toward the decision to isolate herself from the past. While Delicado's structure has a beginning, a middle, and an end, the order of events does not reflect a calculated building of momentum. After the deception, it is business as usual for Lozana until she registers dissatisfaction with her earthly existence in the final memorandum. La lozana andaluza is an outline rather than a manifestation of psychological realism. The text provides a compendium of scenes, a portrait of Lozana's enterprises and of her environment, and a re-creation of her speech. The transformation, be it spiritual or self-serving, is a fitting culmination to the material presented in the text. The rigors of her profession, which have a cumulative force in the work, take their toll on Lozana, and she determines to pursue the road to eternity.

Delicado returns to the motif of the dream to inspire Lozana's reformed outlook. Lozana's dream in mamotreto 66 draws images from mythology, legend, and astrology to conclude that “‘el hombre apercibido medio combatido’” (p. 244; “forewarned is forearmed”). From the tree of human destiny, she will reach for the fruit that will lead her to paradise. The vision allows her to put her present existence into perspective: “Ya estoy harta de meter barboquejos a putas y poner jáquimas de mi casa, y pues he visto mi ventura y desgracia, y he tenido modo y manera y conversación para saber vivir, y veo que mi trato y plática ya me dejan, que [no] corren como solían, haré como hace la Paz, que huye a las islas, y como no la buscan, duerme quieta y sin fastidio” (p. 245; I'm tired of putting chin straps on whores and applying home-made depilatories, and since I've seen my fortune and misfortune, and I've had the ways and means and conversation to know how to live, and I see that style and repartee now leave me, for those things don't flow forth the way they used to, I will do as Peace does, which is to flee to the islands, and since they don't seek it out, it sleeps tranquilly and with no burdens). Lozana will retire to the island of Lipari, leaving behind the vanities of her life in Rome, in the hope that a new setting may calm her troubled soul. The author closes with the wish that his portrait may lead its readers to peace, as he has led the protagonist to righteousness. If the resolution is abrupt, the motive is worthy. Lozana laments her age and fading beauty, neither of which has an earthly remedy, and the dream gives her an extramundane alternative that begins with atonement. The reader may applaud the intention and hope for the best or consider Pablos's closing words in El Buscón, published a century later, to the effect that a change of locale does not bring a change of habits.

La lozana andaluza ends with several short compositions, including an apology, an explanation, an epilogue, two letters (one an epistle written by Lozana), and a digression. In the apology, the author answers possible objections to his work. He refers to the moral intention evoked in the dedication to remind the reader what the text proposes. He cites modesty and verisimilitude to justify its imperfections, its crudeness of episode and language. The apology advances the story by stating that Lozana did, in fact, go to live on the island, where she changed her name to signify her change in attitude. The author mentions that he composed the work—which he calls “estas vanidades,” this nonsense—to pass the time while recuperating from a grave and lengthy illness. He closes with an admonition to the reader to place the spirit above the body, as those of the portrait do not, to win God's approval and salvation. The explanation defines mamotreto as a book that contains diverse arguments, in this case secular, thus emphasizing the idea of multiple items of interest and multiple perspectives. Delicado gives the background of Lipari, traditionally a home of condemned criminals, and notes that Lozana's three names (Aldonza, Lozana, and Vellida) all derive from words meaning exuberance and beauty. He adds, “Por tanto, digo que para gozar d'este retrato y para murmurar del autor, que primero lo deben bien leer y entender, sed non legatur in escolis” (pp. 250-51; Therefore, I say that in order to enjoy this portrait and to criticize the author, they first ought to read and comprehend it well, but “it should not be read in school”). The apology and the explanation, along with the introductory materials, offer a literary frame (and moral framework) for the portrait of Lozana.

In the “Letter of Excommunication against a Cruel Maiden in Good Health,” the author presents the suffering of love from the viewpoint of a gentleman overcome by the fire of passion, a lover who laments his lost freedom and blames the ungrateful woman (described in courtly detail) responsible for his metaphorical demise. Significantly, the speaker here is Cupid, a figure whose effect on humanity informs La lozana andaluza. Sixteenth-century Rome rejects Christian doctrine to worship the pagan deity of love, and moral chaos and destruction follow. Lozana's epistle deals directly with the sack of Rome. Addressing her sisters in love, she points out that sin, the cause of the devastation, must now yield to reconstruction, for the prostitutes have only past glories to celebrate. Delicado's digression, written in Venice, places the sack of Rome in the context of divine retribution for mortal errors. On a more personal level, the author recounts the situation that brings him to have his manuscript (which he does not count among his “legitimate” writings) printed in Venice. In addition to the dual culmination—the sack of Rome and the publication of the text—the digression asserts the authority of Delicado's voice in the dialogue, bringing the “real” author into his work to validate his fictional counterpart. The result may be an inversion of this principle; the touted diversity of the memoranda may include the fragmentation of the author.

La lozana andaluza creates verbal portraits of an antiheroine and her milieu with a consciousness of history, causality, and the act of composition. The protagonist is an outcast among outcasts, poor, foreign, a New Christian, and a woman who works as a prostitute in a Jewish quarter of Rome. The precocious naturalism of the text relates to Delicado's conception of portraiture as a detailed rendering of reality and to his analogical vision of corruption as a prelude to disaster. The portrait “freezes” a moment to present its richness and its historical irony. Lozana is an agent of sin and a product of the society that ostracizes her. Her position in the portrait is genetically and socially determined, a testimony to the importance of bloodlines for social respectability and responsibility. Up to the final memorandum, Lozana is a character without a conscience and without a sense of the hereafter.¹⁰ Disillusioned at last, she retires to Lipari as a form of penitence, thereby abetting the author in his claim of a moral intention. The same author seems to relish the freedom that Lozana's licentiousness gives him to convert her negative energy into a justifiably scatological text. The tension between the expressed purpose and the direction of the text typifies the interplay of author and narrator in the later picaresque models. The dialogue format of La lozana andaluza effects a unique strategy of authority that nonetheless points the way to succeeding fictions.

By projecting himself into the text, the author brings the real world into the realm of fiction while pretending to do precisely the opposite. He is artist and character. He interacts with Lozana and her associates and develops a portrait according to the conventions of literature. He respects truth but subjects his work to the criteria of poetic truth and artistic unity. He makes the writing process a part of the product. One can distinguish between the several faces (or voices) of the author as creator, participant, witness, and mediator. His presence heightens the verisimilitude of the events and at the same time puts narrative reliability into question. The direct discourse calls for exact reproduction, and the privacy of a number of scenes precludes the intrusion of a witness. The author must approximate, must create new realities from old, and must reinvent the world to conform to the demands and the limitations of fiction. The arguments for literary realism and the divided self indicate the distance between the world and the work of art. Literary reality is faithful to its source in an analogical, symbolic way, a fact lost neither on the picaresque authors nor on Cervantes. Self-consciousness turns restrictions into assets by expanding the horizons of literature, by incorporating the problematic relation between life and art into the text. Delicado seems to intuit both the delicate balance and the means of using it to his advantage through the author's multiple functions in La lozana andaluza. As in the later forms, realistic and counterrealistic tendencies coexist.

The fragmentation of the authorial figure and the use of dialogue make possible a variety of perspectives. Several characters describe the protagonist, and she completes the portrait by acting and speaking in the text. Through her, Delicado seeks a discursive correlative for immoral behavior in a richly indecent speech. La lozana andaluza is a display of colloquial and dialectal speech, proverbs, classical sententiae, lists, literary allusions, maledictions, and the sexual lexicon of its period. The antiheroine is the principal informant, a storehouse of linguistic data. Because she offers counsel on beauty and carnal matters, her discourse provides not only a vocabulary but also a state of the art, and perhaps an experiential statement about the author. Discourse reflects character, as the wayward Lozana freely expresses her emotions, with little or no concern for polite society. Language becomes a form of release, a means of decrying social inequity, a verbal analogue of promiscuity. The author's discourse mirrors the ambiguity of intention by uniting moral insertions with vulgar speech. His language alternately places him above the characters he depicts and makes him one of them. He pleads for piety in an age of sin but shows compassion for the sinner, fights for spiritual ideals but defends the tactics of survival in this life, shows the protagonist on the road to hell but leads her toward peace. Using a non-narrative form, he fashions a multiperspectivist object in which the author interacts with the antiheroine and discourse parallels story. Lozana's language, like her lifestyle, is unrestrained, yet she is free only in a relative sense. A higher authority regulates her conduct and her discourse.

Considered historically, La lozana andaluza points to the subtle interplay between author and narrator/protagonist in the picaresque. As is often the case in the archetypal novels, the more the speaker (here, the author as character) says, the wider the distance between the expressed intention and the messages produced by the text itself. Discourse works ironically to shatter the foundations of a positive or moral purpose. Speech intervenes when only silence will protect secrets or serve didacticism. Lozana's discourse hardly progresses toward the change of attitude reflected in the final memorandum. The linguistic consistency conveys a pattern of thought and behavior. Lozana is as much a product of heredity and environment at the end of the work as she is at the beginning. The text does not prepare the reader for a conversion, so that the shift from sin to repentance may carry a note of skepticism. The intervention of the author in the work, as both moralizer and womanizer, intensifies the system of mixed messages. The anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes announces his presence in the prologue and within the text as the manipulator of irony. Alemán extends the interpretive possibilities in Guzmán de Alfarache by allowing the allegedly reformed sinner to describe his errors and provide moral commentary. When the inner thoughts conflict with the outward stance, Guzmán may reveal more than he intends. Like his author, he may accept morality as a necessary premise while responding more fully to the world of feeling and spontaneity. Quevedo's Buscón unites stylized discourse with a coercive story to acknowledge the intrusion of the author into his fiction. Published between Guzmán de Alfarache and El Buscón, La pícara Justina has a different historical (and intertextual) role than La lozana andaluza. Borrowing a gloss of morality from Alemán and offering a prelude to the linguistic achievement of Quevedo, López de Ubeda forges a new direction for the picaresque.¹¹

LA PíCARA JUSTINA

No quiero, pluma mía, que vuestras manchas cubran las de mi vida, que (si es que mi historia ha de ser retrato verdadero, sin tener que retratar de lo mentido), siendo pícara, es forzoso pintarme con manchas y mechas.

I don't wish, my pen, to have your stains cover those of my life, for—if my story is to be a valid drawing, without having to withdraw from deceptive events—being a pícara, it's essential to paint myself with stains and threads showing.

La pícara Justina opens with a dedication, two prologues, and a general introduction. In the dedication to his patron Don Rodrigo Calderón, López de Ubeda puts forth certain facts “out of character.” He emphasizes the diversity of the material and its great entertainment value, which will give respite from the grave issues of state that concern Don Rodrigo. In the prologue to the reader, written in a comically sycophantic tone, he recognizes that a totally playful book should not be published and that a totally solemn one would not be read, and so he opts for leisure reading with a message. To the frivolous adventures of a free woman he has appended moral messages in the style of the fabulists. The author claims to avoid the love plot of La Celestina by focusing on the greater evil of deception for financial purposes. He replaces a carnal structure with a commercial structure that incorporates all manner of sin. For every crime there is an implied punishment and for every punishment a lesson: “En este libro hallará la doncella el conocimiento de su perdición, los peligros en que se pone una libre mujer que no se rinde al consejo de otros; aprenderán las casadas los inconvinientes de los malos ejemplos y mala crianza de sus hijas; … y finalmente, todos los hombres, de cualquier calidad y estado, aprenderán los enredos de que se han de librar, los peligros que han de huir, los pecados que les pueden saltear las almas … pues no hay en él número ni capítulo que no se aplique a la reformación espiritual” (In this book, the maiden will find knowledge of her perdition, the danger into which a woman who will not heed the counsel of others places herself; married women will learn the consequences of bad examples and inadequate rearing of their daughters; and finally, all men, of every rank and status, will learn the snares from which they must free themselves, the dangers that they must flee, the sins that may rob them of their souls, since there is in it no item nor chapter that does not apply to spiritual reformation).¹² The second prologue uses the words of the protagonist, directed to her fiancé Guzmán de Alfarache, to summarize the major episodes of the text through epithets that collectively affirm her protean nature.

In the three parts of the general introduction, Justina Díez addresses herself to the act of writing. The point of departure is a reaction to a hair on her pen. In an apostrophe to the writing instrument, she wonders if the hair has appeared to cover her blemishes or rather to show that hair will never cover her blemishes, an allusion to the loss of hair from venereal disease. Submitting that artful treatment may make an ugly object valuable, she will present a truthful picture of herself and hope that, as in other creatures of nature, the spots will enhance her worth. She plays on the verb confesar, to confess, and her status as confesa, converted Jew, to synthesize the writing process with its social implications. In the second part of the introduction, Justina again works with variations of the word mancha (spot, blemish) as she complains of the ink stains she has received in removing the hair from her pen. Attempting to remove the stains, she gets ink on her skirt, a situation treated as emblematic. In the third part, the narrator reacts to the small snake that serves as watermark on her paper, at first fearing the symbol and then indicating its positive qualities. Similarly, negative incidents may have illuminating results, and her book will allow readers to see the light as it entertains them. Thus, with pen and paper in order, the composition may begin.

The writing process has, of course, already begun. The introduction defines the goals and the parameters of Justina's text and establishes the direction of the discourse. The author enters the text to frame the narrator's story with a verse resumé at the beginning of each section and moral commentary (aprovechamiento, application) at the end. The commentaries represent a concession to didacticism, with a special nod to the digressions of Guzmán de Alfarache. Despite their prominent position in the text, the concluding passages register as truthful but uninventive adages competing against the resourceful and sophisticated discourse of the antiheroine. La pícara Justina is a static work from the perspective of psychological or ethical development. The protagonist liberates herself from the dictates of society to pursue monetary rewards. She knows that she is wrong to place wealth and pleasure above all else, but she chooses to obey the mandates of pocketbook and heart over the admonitions of Christian dogma and conscience. The text alternately celebrates this freedom and condemns it, placing entertainment in the context of final judgment and reminding the reader that freedom abused is license. As an object unto itself, La pícara Justina prioritizes a lack of restraint in deed and discourse, while the aprovechamientos link the text to the world and make the present moment part of an eternal scheme. The narrator justifies her work as entertainment without fully convincing the reader of its enlightened vision. As a self-consciously conventional gesture, the author coats the wanton account with studied virtue.

The introduction presents a framework for the text and a format for the relation between author and narrator, and it foregrounds Justina's linguistic skills. Here, as throughout the narrative, one discovers a mistress of the word whose art becomes a type of structure of consciousness. If Guzmán de Alfarache alternates story with moral digression, Justina does little but digress at every phase of storytelling. The hair of the first section, for example, leads to word plays, symbolic interpretations, historical and mythological allusions, fables, rhetorical analogies, refrains, and hieroglyphic or emblematic representation.¹³ Blowing on the hair, she stains herself and her clothing and thereby progresses into a new set of verbal tricks. From there, she finds additional digressive possibilities in the watermark. The obsession with hair illustrates the inevitable suffering for sins of the past, as her crowning glory falls prey to syphilis. The constant shifts aid the cause of multiperspectivism, for Justina devotedly complements the bad with the good, the bitter with the sweet, and the sweet with the useful. Within this miscellany of free association, Justina speaks of the exemplary nature of her manuscript, of her current social and physical status, and of the picaresque life. There is method in her tangents. The salient features of her discourse are its directness, its commitment to honesty at the expense of modesty, and its virtuosity. Her willingness to push self-examination to the limit may denote the presence of a male author who takes every opportunity to criticize and to satirize her actions or to make her the mouthpiece of such criticism. Justina is quick, perhaps too quick, to make her impure blood, her infirmities, and her calamitous existence the object of verbal abuse. There are signs to indicate that the author does not withdraw from the text between the opening verses and the closing admonition, and that he controls the irony of Justina's discourse.

Whatever subtextual strategies may be discerned from the discourse of La pícara Justina, it is important to note that López de Ubeda creates a protagonist who recounts her life from birth to her first marriage (with the promise of a sequel) in a consistent style and with a literary sensibility. While the author has the last word in each section, Justina has the major voice, even if it is not entirely her own. López de Ubeda makes the antiheroine a specialist in proverbs, tales, historical and geographical data, and symbolic meanings. Justina ventures into the realm of the senses—debatably from the male perspective—to discuss general feminine psychology. The judgment of her own actions comes primarily from the author's commentaries as opposed to narrative introspection. More dedicated to details than to motives, Justina moves chronologically (and tangentially) from one episode to the next. In her role as narrator, she periodically considers the ramifications of her deceptions. As a character, she has little regard for the future and little regret for her errant ways. The four books of La pícara Justina share a common ground in Justina's greed and tricks to ensure economic security, in a figurative and literal return to her roots, and in the discursive plan. To comply with his moral aim, the author employs the narrator as speaker in the introduction to undermine the success and the self-determination of the young protagonist. In the text proper, he assumes the task of guardian of morality, while, at least quantitatively, Justina dominates the discourse. The interdependence of author and narrator marks an impressive collaboration that nonetheless precludes discursive freedom for Justina.

Book 1, “La pícara montañesa” (from the mountains, where most people have pure blood), begins with the narrator's comments on writing and with a defense of her endeavor. She has barely started to write when her first critic appears. Perlícaro ridicules the presumptuousness of her act. Is her story holy or significant? Is she a legitimate artist? Does posterity require the thoughts and deeds of a lowly, untrained, and undesirable woman? This case of devil's advocacy on the part of the author confronts the question of justification. Justina devotes far more space to answering Perlícaro's charge that she is old than to answering his condemnation of her literary enterprise, but the implied argument, based on fables and verbal emblems, is to let the book speak for itself and to judge it after the fact. The author comes into the text to censure Justina's vanity and humanity's inclination to use words for evil rather than for good. The antiheroine's discourse has detractors before her story commences.

The narrator maintains that the picaresque nature is hereditary, a premise supported by her family tree. The none-too-impressive ancestry leads to her parents, shrewd and unscrupulous innkeepers who give Justina a practical, if not pious, education. Justina's grief at the loss of her parents is shortlived. Of her lack of tears upon her mother's death, she notes, “Hay veces que, aunque un hombre se sangre de la vena cebollera, no quiere salir gota de agua por los ojos, que las lágrimas andan con los tiempos, y aquél debía de ser estío de lágrimas, y aun podré decir que unas lagrimitas que se me rezumaron salían a tragantones. ¿Qué mucho? Vía que ya yo me podía criar sin madre, y también que ella me dejó enseñada desde el mortuorio de mi padre a hacer entierros enjutos y de poca costa” (pp. 144-45; There are times when, although a man may even resort to peeling onions, not a drop of water will come from his eyes, for tears are at the mercy of the occasion, and this must have been the summer of tears, and I can even say that some little tears that did leak out came out in gulps. Indeed, I saw that I could get along without a mother, and she herself taught me on my father's death how to bring off a dry and cheap funeral). The passage shows an inherited insensitivity and an acquired self-sufficiency, as well as a comic and colloquial form of expression. The pícara is now an orphan who must fend for herself. She leaves her village to see the world and conquer.

Book 2, “La pícara romera,” takes its title from the practice of making pilgrimages in memory of loved ones. Justina's adventures in the town of Arenillas are more secular than spiritual, as is logical of one whose goals are to dance and to travel. Justina has an extremely brief career as a religious devotee, then finds herself pursued by a zealous suitor, a bacon and pork dealer. Escaping him through deception, she participates in a celebration with acquaintances whose envy and ill treatment force her to move on. She meets up with a group of student-rogues dressed in religious habits and involved in mock-religious celebrations. The captain or “bishop” of the company, called Pero Grullo after a character in folklore, takes a liking to Justina and wants to add her to his flock. The rogues kidnap her and prepare for her seduction by their leader. Using reason, her feminine wiles, and a great deal of wine, Justina manages to outwit them and to hold them up to ridicule. To complete her revenge, she leads them to Mansilla, accuses them of robbery, and watches in delight as they flee. Home again, she enjoys the notoriety of her triumph. Having set out to complete a holy mission, she falls in with an unholy alliance. She prays only when Pero Grullo threatens to violate her, yet her salvation hardly makes her more devout. Her escape is not a moral victory but a demonstration of her ability to trick the trickster. The townspeople praise her as chaste, astute, and brave. The author denounces her as loose-living, lazy, and hypocritical.

Justina confesses that she has never felt any particular affection for the men of her village. Now that she has risen above the rustic life, she departs for León. Her journey marks the beginning of the second part of book 2. The author remarks, “Pondera, el lector, que los males crecen a palmos, pues esta mujer, la cual, la primera vez que salió de su casa, tomó achaque de que iba a romería, ahora, la segunda vez, sale sin otro fin ni ocasión más que gozar su libertad, ver y ser vista, sin reparar en el qué dirán” (p. 224; Ponder, if you will, reader, that evil grows by leaps and bounds, for if this woman, when she left home the first time, used the pretext that she was going on a pilgrimage, now, the second time, she goes without any other end or reason than to enjoy her freedom, to see and to be seen, without any regard for what people will say). In the midst of the holy activities of the cathedral city of León, Justina may observe the religious sites, but her mind is on money and men. An episode with a student-cardsharper shows Justina blinding her admirer with love only to defraud him of a gold crucifix, a symbol of the sacred ideals that she is rejecting. The (implied) author cleverly juxtaposes this episode with Justina's commentary on why hypocrites are abhorrent, based on an encounter with a thief dressed in hermit's garb. The protagonist is, of course, not beyond duping the hypocrite of his money.

Never quite devoted to her role as pilgrim, Justina covers herself with a cloak and places herself at a church door to beg for alms. Shortly after the account of her experience as a mendicant, she delivers a “sermon” on the glories of virtue, which ends, “No predico ni tal uso, como sabes, sólo repaso mi vida y digo que tengo esperanza de ser buena algún día y aun alguna noche, ca, pues me acerco a la sombra del árbol de la virtud, algún día comeré fruta, y si Dios me da salud, verás lo que pasa en el último tomo, en que diré mi conversión. Basta de seso, pues. Quédese aquí. Voy a mi cuento” (p. 303; It's not my custom to preach, as you know, for I'm only reviewing my life, and I tell you that I have hopes of being good someday and even some night, for I'm approaching the shade of the tree of virtue and someday I'll partake of its fruit, and if God gives me strength, you will see what happens in the last volume, where I'll tell of my conversion. Enough food for thought, now. Let's leave it here, and I'll get on with my story). She is still some distance away from the tree of virtue. She tricks a student, a widow, a barber who has helped her rob the widow, and others before a second triumphal return to Mansilla.

Book 2 of La pícara Justina sustains the format of book 1, differing only in the intensification of story and discourse. The tricks become more complex, with several cases of repeated crimes against the same victim. There is greater emphasis on role-playing and disguise and on the sacrilegious nature of Justina's behavior. She is an insincere pilgrim who uses León as her base of operations and nominal religious practice as a means to financial ends. Her contact with clerical figures is economically rather than divinely inspired, and she prays for the success of her sinful ventures. Just as Justina exploits those around her, the author forces his narrator to sermonize against the very transgressions that typify her behavior. Neither her promised conversion nor his promised sequel materializes, a fact that consciously or unconsciously adds to the irony. The successful homecoming is a return to the sins of the past and a prelude to those of the future. The motif of inheritance appropriately dominates the third book of the narrative. Throughout the text, Justina Díez acts according to a parental and ethnic legacy, a public notoriety, and an ironic code of self-betrayal inherited from her picaresque predecessors.

In book 3, “La pícara pleitista” (litigant), Justina quarrels with her siblings over the estate of their parents and is disinherited: “Para mí fue la justicia justicia, para mis hermanas misericordia” (p. 391; For me the court of justice was just, while for my sisters it was compassionate). To avenge the decision of the magistrate, she convinces a roguish admirer to rob the family coffers, and, with the newly acquired wealth, she departs for the town of Ríoseco. There she uses the stolen money to renew her claims. A “perverse” solicitor enters a suit but consumes her resources in the process. With finances depleted but spirit intact, she endears herself to three spinners—having changed her costume to fit the enterprise—whom she relieves of wool and profits. Justina meets her match in an elderly Moorish woman, a sorceress whom she calls “great-grandmother of Celestina.” During the time that Justina resides with the old crone, she finds her ingenuity (formerly termed “grandiose,” she informs the reader) of little avail. Fate intervenes, however. The old woman dies, and Justina claims to be her granddaughter and only heir. Her acting achieves what her legitimate defense does not; a constable grants her the rights of inheritance. After resisting the “importunate” sacristan who handles the burial, Justina once more returns to Mansilla. Motivated by pride and encouraged by prosperity, she appeals the earlier judgment and obtains a favorable sentence. Now that she has resolved the problems of the past, she turns to domestic possibilities for the future.

Book 4, “La pícara novia” (bride), traces Justina's steps to the altar and, in the process, allows the narrator (and the implied author) to satirize some members of male society. The first of the suitors is Maximino de Umenos, a turner with illusions of grandeur. Ironically, or hypocritically, Justina rejects him for pretending to be more than he is. The next candidate is an equally presumptuous washerwoman's son who appears as a flagellant to woo Justina. In the third chapter of book 4, the narrator catalogs the aspirants to marriage, emphasizing vices that range from insincerity, egotism, ostentation, and rustic impropriety to excessive gravity. For Justina, the bottom line in courtship is the economic status of the suitor: “Gustamos las damas que haya pasajeros por nuestra puerta, que no es buen bodegón donde no cursan muchos. Pero no es ese el finis terrae, que ya la gallardía, gravedad, señorío—y aun el gusto y el amor—, por pragmática usual se ha reducido a sólo el dar. … El amor se declina por sólo dos casos, conviene a saber: dativo y genitivo. El primero por antes de casarse y el segundo por postre. ¡El diablo soy, que hasta los nominativos se me encajaron!” (p. 448; We women like to have travelers pass by our door, for a tavern can't be any good if few frequent it. But this isn't the be all and end all, since gallantry, seriousness, distinction—and even pleasure and love—as a general rule have been reduced to only giving. Love is declined in only two cases, to wit, the dative and the genitive. Devil that I am, even nominatives cramped my style!). Justina sacrifices some of her illusions to marry Lozano, a soldier given to gambling and defender of her estate in the suit against her brothers and sisters. She concludes the text with a description of the wedding ceremony and wedding night, then alludes briefly to her second marriage to a wealthy old man named Santolaja and a third and blissful marriage to none other than Guzmán de Alfarache.

In La pícara Justina, López de Ubeda creates a loquacious, irreverent, and intelligent narrator full of misdirected energy. Justina's verbosity is a family trait, her delinquency a product of heredity and environment, and her knowledge a synthesis of reading (a collection of works left in her parents' inn) and experience. The misdirected energy is the synthesis of a synthesis; the craving for financial security is the logical final stage of her upbringing and marginated position in society. Lineage and circumstances work against her, so she must fight on her own behalf. Unlike the defensive tenor of Lazarillo de Tormes or the confessional air of Guzmán de Alfarache, Justina's account carries no apologetic overtones. The narrator/protagonist follows the way of the world by differentiating theory from practice, by making action and diction functions of situation rather than of doctrine. She states boldly, “Ya ves que hago alarde de mis males, no a lo devoto, por no espantar la caza, sino a lo gracioso, por ver si puedo hacer buena pecadora” (p. 401; So you see I make a show of my wrongdoing, not in a devout manner, so as not to spoil my prospects, but in an amusing manner, to see if I can make a good sinner). Fully conscious of her picaresque tendencies—and given to dropping forms of the word pícaro—Justina relishes her noncomformist performance on the stage of life and on the pages of her manuscript as one who has nothing to lose. It is the author, not she, who professes to make a moral point.

The author superimposes himself on the structure of the narrative, poetically at the beginning of each section and morally at the end. In the poems, he strives for variety and a touch of humor. In the aprovechamientos, he appends instructive but commonplace adages to a blatantly antisocial text to remove La pícara Justina from the threat of inquisitorial stricture. The benefits are reciprocal in that the author enjoys moral superiority over his creation and the narrator enjoys a certain freedom of speech. From the opposing perspective, equally reciprocal, the author's presence in the text proper seems evident and Justina's liberated discourse may be an illusion. The depth of information, literary and otherwise, contained in the work suggests a background far more diverse than Justina's. The autobiographical thread belongs to the narrator, while the great quantity of non-narrative material—descriptions, judgments, anecdotes, customs, emblems—bears witness to the educational and experiential range of the author. The treatment of hypocrisy reflects an ironic strategy in which the narrator betrays herself by condemning others for a sin that she continually commits; this is the author's discursive version of tricking the trickster. In terms of plot, López de Ubeda builds unity around the themes of freedom, deception, and inheritance, with special emphasis on the latter. Justina is a product, perhaps victim, of biological and socio-historical factors that dominate her existence. She responds to and pursues the family legacy, fighting her closest blood relations and fighting the discrimination caused by her blood. Her means of survival in an inimical world is deception, just as the only power she can achieve is wealth. Criminality is freedom only in the most relative sense, and Justina is subject to control from without, both in society and in the text.

Following the lead of Delicado's Lozana, Justina flouts the rules of proper (feminine) speech, as well as the social proprieties. López de Ubeda makes a concerted effort to include what may be termed women's topics in La pícara Justina, but the series of observations bespeaks a male viewpoint. The manipulation of the female voice to evoke antifeminist (or pre-feminist) responses signals the inversion of perspective characteristic of the picaresque variations. In book 1, chapter 1, number 2, Justina discusses the basic generic roles: “El hombre fue hecho para enseñar y gobernar, en lo cual las mujeres ni damos ni tomamos. La mujer fue hecha principalmente para ayudarle (no a este oficio, sino a otros de a ratos, conviene a saber:) a la propagación del linaje humano y a cuidar de la familia” (p. 98; Man was made to instruct and govern, in which we women have no give or take. Woman was made primarily to help him [not in this duty but in others from time to time, namely:] the propagation of the human race and looking after the family). In book 2, she provides male-oriented theories as to why women are restless, why women respond to rejection, why women favor possessions over the welfare of men (an inheritance from Eve) and why they are vain about their beauty.¹⁴ Justina also credits her sex with the invention of false stories and stratagems: “La primera que oyó fictiones en el mundo fue la mujer. … La primera que buscó aparentes remedios para persuadirse que en un daño claro había remedio infalible, fue mujer. La primera que con dulces palabras hizo a un hombre, de padre amoroso, padrastro tirano, y de madre de vivos, abuela de todos los muertos, fue una mujer. En fin, la primera que falseó el bien y la naturaleza, fue mujer” (p. 345; The first in the world to hear falsehoods was woman. The first to seek outward cures to persuade herself that a clear injury had an infallible cure was woman. The first to use sweet words to turn a man from loving father to tyrannical stepfather and a mother of the living to grandmother of all the dead was a woman. In sum, the first to falsify goodness and nature was woman). Few readers, it seems, would deem this unqualified freedom of expression for the pícara.

In the throes of courtship and imminent marriage, the narrator further examines the nature of male-female relations in book 4. In chapter 4 (“On the Obligations of Love”), she declares that there are three reasons why a woman loves. The first is wealth, which she places above honor. The second is to preserve, albeit temporarily, the natural order and have man submissive to her as a slave of love. Justina notes that women react against dominion and subjection “although it is natural and for our own good” (“aunque sea natural y para nuestro bien,” p. 455). The third reason stems from woman's nature to please (“dar gusto”). Wishing to make the best match possible and yet not disappoint anyone, women respond most strongly to the men who are most persistent. True to her sex, Justina yields to interest, presumption, and persistence in agreeing to marry Lozano. Idealized love and honor have no place in this pragmatic approach to holy matrimony. López de Ubeda transforms the sexual reprobate of La lozana andaluza into a virgin sinner. Justina's body is a selling point, but not for sale; she takes men's money and escapes before they can abuse her. On her wedding night, she laments her lack of education in the wifely duties and faces the nuptial couch with a certain degree of modesty. At the end of the narrative, Justina alludes to future volumes that will include accounts of her widowhood and a second and unfortunate marriage to Santolaja, which nonetheless leaves her with property she may share with Guzmán de Alfarache. She refers somewhat ambiguously to her current happiness (“el felice estado que ahora poseo,” p. 465) while saying that she will be called the poor one (“la pobre,” p. 466) in the fourth volume of her account. In any event, the interest from her second marriage presumably allows her to modify the criteria for selection of a third partner, a love match with the infamous Guzmán.

Early in the narrative, Justina mentions that she wrote the manuscript quite a while before (“Mil años ha que hice esta obrecilla,” p. 79), so one must assume that the narrating voice is a composite of past and present. The text barely reflects the dual temporal scheme, however. There is no interplay between an unreflective past and a reflective present nor a dialectic of experience and contemplation, and there is only negligible difference between the Justina of the introduction and the Justina of book 4. For all her loquacity, insights, and data, the narrator resists self-examination, stressing detail and cross-reference over the implications of events. A dubious prosperity, reminiscent of Lazarillo de Tormes, marks an ending that shifts from the first wedding ceremony to the third marriage. A conversion that would link the work to Guzmán de Alfarache is conspicuous by its absence, with the exception of a fleeting remark. López de Ubeda responds parodically to Alemán's novel, retaining the moral lessons but separating them from the narrator/protagonist and greatly reducing their quantitative impact.¹⁵ The aprovechamientos vindicate the author from negative reaction to story and discourse, while the associative thinking of the narrator justifies unlimited interpolations. Justina provides the reprehensible examples, the author provides a rhetoric of righteousness. Alemán and later Quevedo create protagonists who fight to deny their heritage, whereas Lopéz de Ubeda shows Justina's struggles to attain her birthright. With no facade of piety and no defensive maneuvers, she moves doggedly forward to reach her objective, as the author recasts her temerity in the framework of eternity, or of eternal damnation. The intricate use of language, exhaustive range of materials, and ironic exposure of hypocrisy proclaim an authorial presence who combines invention with subversion. La pícara Justina heralds the linguistic flourishes and discursive intrusions of El Buscón and the narrative syntheses of Salas Barbadillo and Castillo Solórzano.

Notes

1. See Barbara F. Weissberger, “‘Habla el auctor’: L'Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta as a Source for the Siervo libre de amor,” Journal of Hispanic Philology 4 (1980): 203-36. The intertext for the feminine variations of the picaresque would include the autobiography of Leonor López de Córdoba, written early in the fifteenth century. See Reinaldo Ayerbe-Chaux, “Las memorias de doña Leonor López de Córdoba,” Journal of Hispanic Philology 2 (1977): 11-33; Randolph D. Pope, La autobiografía española hasta Torres Villarroel (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1974), pp. 14-24; and Alan Deyermond, “Spain's First Women Writers,” in Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols, ed. Beth Miller (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 27-52.

2. Francisco Delicado, La lozana andaluza, ed. Bruno Damiani (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1969), p. 33. All subsequent quotations from La lozana andaluza will refer to this edition, and page numbers will be indicated in parentheses. See Francisco Delicado, Retrato de la loçana andaluza, ed. Bruno M. Damiani and Giovanni Allegra (Madrid: Ediciones José Porrúa Turanzas, 1975). M. Louise Salstad treats the narratives discussed in this chapter in The Presentation of Women in Spanish Golden Age Literature: An Annotated Bibliography (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980). For background material in the European context, see Ian MacLean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

3. José María Díez Borque, in “Francisco Delicado, autor y personaje de La lozana andaluza,” Prohemio 3 (1972): 455-66; Bruno M. Damiani, in Francisco Delicado (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974); and José A. Hernández Ortiz, in La génesis artística de La lozana andaluza (Madrid: Editorial Aguilera, 1974) argue for a moral intention in La lozana andaluza. See also Juan Goytisolo, “Notas sobre La lozana andaluza,” Triunfo, no. 689 (10 April 1976): 50-55; and Augusta E. Foley, Delicado: La Lozana andaluza (London: Grant and Cutler, 1977).

4. See Bruce W. Wardropper, “La novela como retrato: El arte de Francisco Delicado,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 7 (1953): 475-88; and Valeria Scorpioni, “Un ritratto a due facce: La loçana andaluza di F. Delicado,” Annali Istituto Universitario Orientale, Napoli: Sezione Romanza 22 (1980): 441-76. For studies of the portrait with Rome as backdrop, see Segundo Serrano Poncela, “Aldonza la andaluza lozana en Roma,” Cuadernos Americanos 122 (1962): 117-32, and Lilia Ferrara de Orduna, “Algunas observaciones sobre La Lozana andaluza,” Archivum 23 (1973): 105-15; and for a relation of the portrait to literary theory, see José M. Domínguez, “La teoría literaria en la época de Francisco Delgado [Delicado], c. 1474-c. 1536,” Explicación de Textos Literarios 6, 1 (1977): 93-96.

5. On the use of the dialogue form, see Claude Allaigre, “A propos des dialogues de la Lozana andaluza: La Pelegrina du mamotreto LXIII,” in Essais sur le dialogue, intro. Jean Lavédrine (Grenoble: Publications de l'Université des Langues et Lettres, 1980), pp. 103-14; and Augusta Espantoso Foley, “Técnica audio-visual del diálogo y retrato de La lozana andaluza,” in Actas del Sexto Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas, ed. Alan M. Gordon and Evelyn Rugg (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1980), pp. 258-60.

6. For views on the role of the author, see Díez Borque, in “Francisco Delicado”; Hernández Ortiz, in La génesis artística, esp. pp. 119-27; and Peter N. Dunn, “A Postscript to La lozana andaluza: Life and Poetry,” Romanische Forschungen 88 (1976): 355-60. Addressing himself to a great extent to Delicado himself, as opposed to his textual alter ego, Dunn writes, “The sack of Rome is read in light of a code which is also a theodicy: wicked peoples and nations are punished by God in exemplary fashion. Lozana, learning to read the signs of Providence, rewrites her life on the pattern of St. Mary of Egypt: she retires to an island and becomes a pious recluse. For his part, the author protests his serious purpose; afflicted now with disease and the onset of age, he reads his own life and its involvement with Lozana as a sign. All that careless fornication and insouciant indulgence, and the seemingly gratuitous note-taking for the unmotivated ‘portrait’ of Lozana, appear as if directed by the same finger of Providence which points to the catastrophic punishment that is to come. He writes his book at the convergence of life (his own and Lozana's) and myth” (p. 356).

7. For linguistic considerations of La lozana andaluza, see Manuel Criado de Val, “Antífrasis y contaminaciones de sentido erótico en La lozana andaluza,” in Studia Philologica: Homenaje ofrecido a Dámaso Alonso, vol. 1 (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1960), pp. 431-57, and Damiani, in the introduction to Retrato de la loçana andaluza, esp. pp. 33-51.

8. The title of mamotreto 41 begins, “Aquí comienza la tercera parte del retrato, y serán más graciosas cosas que lo pasado” (p. 171).

9. In chapter 31 of Unamuno's novel Niebla (Mist, 1914), the fictionalized author debates the question of authenticity with the protagonist, Augusto Pérez. In the climactic confrontation, Augusto uses Unamuno's own words against him.

10. Bruno Damiani speaks of a “spirit of the Renaissance” in La lozana andaluza. The protagonist “takes pride in asserting her dignity and merit and her right to use the physical and intellectual attributes in full to enjoy what the world has to offer. The concomitant effect of this attribute is the formation of a strong individualism and a notable social amorality. Although this amorality existed without any sense of guilt, in the ethical sense of the word, it created, nevertheless, a milieu for the inevitable disenchantment man felt with worldly things” (Francisco Delicado, pp. 90-91).

11. For general studies of La pícara Justina, see Marcel Bataillon, Pícaros y picaresca (Madrid: Taurus Ediciones, 1969); Bruno M. Damiani, Francisco López de Ubeda (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1977), “Aspectos barrocos de La pícara Justina,” in Actas del Sexto Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas, ed. Alan M. Gordon and Evelyn Rugg, pp. 198-202, and “Notas sobre lo grotesco en La pícara Justina,” Romance Notes 22 (1982): 341-47; Luz Rodríguez, “Aspectos de la primera variante femenina de la picaresca española,” Explicación de Textos Literario 8 (1979-1980): 175-81; Antonio Rey Hazas, “La compleja faz de una pícara: Hacia una interpretación de La pícara Justina,” Revista de Literatura 45 (1983): 87-109. Peter N. Dunn treats “The Pícara: The Rogue Female” from La pícara Justina to the narratives of Castillo Solórzano in The Spanish Picaresque Novel (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979), pp. 113-33. See also Thomas Hanrahan, S. J., La mujer en la novela picaresca española, vol. 2 (Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas, 1967), pp. 195-261; Richard Bjornson, The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), pp. 87-96; Pablo J. Ronquillo, Retrato de la pícara: La protagonista de la picaresca española del XVII (Madrid: Playor, 1980); and José María Alegre, “Las mujeres en el Lazarillo de Tormes,” Arbor 117, 460 (1984): 23-35.

12. [Francisco López de Ubeda,] La pícara Justina, ed. Bruno Mario Damiani (Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas, 1982), pp. 44-45. All subsequent quotations from La pícara Justina will refer to this edition.

13. Joseph Jones studies “‘Hieroglyphics’ in La pícara Justina,” in Estudios literarios de hispanistas norteamericanos dedicados a Helmut Hatzfeld con motivo de su 80 aniversario, ed. Josep Sola-Solé, Alessandro S. Crisafulli, and Bruno M. Damiani (Barcelona: Hispam, 1974), pp. 415-29. For a study of semantic layering, see Claude Allaigre and René Cotrait, “‘La escribana fisgada’: Estratos de significación en un pasaje de La pícara Justina,” in Hommage des hispanistes français a Noël Salomon, intro. Henry Bonneville (Barcelona: LAIA, 1979), pp. 27-47.

14. See, respectively, book 2 (first part), chapter 1, number 1, pp. 154-55; book 2 (second part), chapter 1, number 2, pp. 225-26; and book 2 (second part), chapter 4, number 3, pp. 294-96.

15. Bataillon (Pícaros y picaresca, esp. pp. 175-99) and Damiani (Francisco López de Ubeda, esp. pp. 49-60) discuss the influence of Guzmán de Alfarache on La pícara Justina. Alexander A. Parker, in Literature and the Delinquent: The Picaresque Novel in Spain and Europe, 1599-1753 (Edinburgh: The University Press, 1967), states, “It seems to me that Ubeda … honestly thought that Guzmán was not the way to write a work of entertainment combining pleasure and profit, that a low-life theme should not be treated seriously, and that the tone of realistic fiction should therefore be lowered. Ubeda's extraordinary language can be considered an intentional travesty of the ‘low style’ in order to counter the solemnity of Alemán. His aim was to make the new genre laughable, which is why the title page does not offer the ‘Life’ of the heroine, but a ‘Book of Entertainment’ concerning her” (p. 50).