JUAN DE FLORES' TWO SENTIMENTAL NOVELS


Juan de Flores' Male-Centered Battle of the Sexes

Despite the frequent claim that Flores gave voice to fifteenth-century profeminist concerns, much of his work presents the reader with a highly metaliterary and metalinguistic recreation of the same male-centered society that dominates the works of Diego de San Pedro. In both Grimalte y Gradissa and Grisel y Mirabella, the two sentimental novels of Juan de Flores, women are associated with readership, passivity, fiction, and helpless subordination to will, while men are linked to authorship, action, reality, and initiative through reason. In both texts women are ultimately shown as powerless victims in a logocentric, male-dominated universe; they are unable to assume authorship, unable to assert their rights through debate, unable to exploit the power of the "word" and, therefore, are defenseless victims of the laws of men.
In Grisel y Mirabella, generally considered the earlier of Flores' works, the structuring dialogue between the sexes takes a very literal, tangible form, as the text is almost totally overtaken by a lengthy debate between a man (an historical Spanish poet known for his satirically misogynist verse) and a woman (a fictional opportunistic, unfaithful lover, recast by Flores as a victim of male faithlessness). This debate is precisely on the issue of "power" relations between the sexes, specifically empowerment through language. Although women are granted the final, violent, non-verbal act in Grisel y Mirabella, from the outset the odds are against their gaining a voice. The female characters' powerlessness stems from their perennial subordination to language and law; within the text, all of their thoughts, words, and actions are mediated and interpreted by male characters and narrative agents.
In Grimalte y Gradissa, an analogous power struggle between the sexes is presented in a startlingly "modern" metafictive frame. Men's power in society is seen as a phenomenon analogous to writing and authorship. As we shall see Grimalte y Gradissa is a story about reading and writing, specifically, about women's "appropriately" passive role as readers and men's "appropriately" active role as writers. The historical Juan de Flores may very well have been a pro-feminist, but the implied author of his two sentimental novels espouses pro-feminism within clearly visible quotation marks, very often at odds with the context in which it is framed.
The life of Juan de Flores remains today as great a mystery as it was when Menéndez Pelayo wrote: "ningún dato biográfico tenemos de Juan de Flores" (66). To make any hypotheses about the historical author, literary historians have been obliged to look to Flores' work in compensation for the paucity of reliable external documentation. Matulka conjectured that Flores was of a Castilian and noble family based on the author's explicit identification with his noble, Castilian protagonist, Grimalte (xv). While Matulka posits that Flores was affiliated with the court of the Catholic Monarchs, Waley has raised the possibility of Flores' connection to the Aragonese court of Juan II: "Aragonese traits are to be found in the text [Grisel y Mirabella], so that it seems at least probable that Flores also was connected at some time with that court" (xi). There is little more we know about Flores.

Linguistic Dialogue and Style of Language in Flores' Works
Although Flores' style is relatively unadorned when compared to that which we find in San Pedro's Arnalte, there is some latinizing influence, particularly verbal postponement and a "massive use of subjunctive," as noted by Waley (lvi). What distinguishes Flores' style in both Grisel y Mirabella and Grimalte y Gradissa from that of San Pedro's Arnalte, is the considerable reduction of rhetorical ornamentation, derivation, acoustic conceits and so forth, that also characterize cancionero verse. This may be due, in part, to the fact that Flores clearly establishes himself as primarily a prose writer; although Grimalte and Gradissa contains verse, the poetry is all the work of Flores' collaborator, Alfonso de Córdoba.
The lack of characteristic cancionero style in Flores' prose, does not lessen his tendency to latinize his prose, particularly when his prose serves a purely narrative function. His prose achieves a Latin-Castilian polyglossia similar to that which we identified in the Arnalte, although considerably less hyperbolic. Verbal postponement is more common in narrative passages, less common when the primary narrator is describing or citing direct discourse. When the "author" visits Pamphilo in Fiometa's behalf, postponement of the main verbs to clause-final and sentence-final position common to sentimental fiction from Siervo to Arnalte, surfaces in his narrative function and is suppressed in his direct discourse. For example, in Pamphilo's initial response and introduction the auctor 's discourse, both verbs have been forced to clause final position:
y de que algun tanto alexadas nuestras palabras de mi proposito, por razon de las nuevas offiertas, ell con un gracioso rizo, como quien presume de mi demanda, la causa de mi venida me pregunto; a quien yo en tal manera respondi: (italics mine; 25)

As the narrator continues to cite his own direct discourse, we note that several opportunities for verbal postponement have been passed up:
No se con quales palabras comience a recontar vuestras culpas, pues days lugar que muera la fama de vuestra graciosa disposicion con obras a ella mal conformadas. ¿Quien puede miraros que crea en vos tantos males quantos Fiometa de vos pregona? Ni se como podeys ser tanto enemigo vuestro que podays desechar una para de tan alto vencimiento como ella. (25-26)

Thus verbal postponement is a feature associated with narrative function that tends to be suppressed in direct discourse analogous to the Arnalte 's use of subjunctive in como clauses. While subjunctive following como in imitation of Latin cum clauses is not a salient feature of Flores' prose, there is a marked use of the participle that is analogous to Latin absolute constructions.
The absolute construction participles are, like verbal postponement, strongly associated with the narrative function and suppressed in direct discourse; this is a feature of Flores' prose both in Grisel y Mirabella and Grimalte y Gradissa. For example, as the narrator explains that after he had left Fiometa he went off to Pamphilo's father's house, he uses neither the past imperfect nor the infinitive of the auxiliary verb (avia, aver):
Despues que yo de Fiometa partido, fue me a los palacios de micer Poliando. (25)

We find the same imitation of Latin absolute construction, when the narrator in Grisel y Mirabella tells us of Torrellas' reaction after Brazaida's insincere love letter had come into his hands:
Venida a poder de Torrellas la respuesta de Brazaida, tan alegre y soberbioso se hizo, (91)

In addition to these grammatical and syntactical latinisms, there are a number of lexical and orthographic features, inconsistently scattered throughout both narrative and dialogue. The latinate spellings, of course, could be unauthorized corrrections made by printers. Nonetheless we find more than occasional use of the Latin "x" in places where Valdés would later recommend "s," particularly when a roman subject is mentioned: "Mira exemplo en los antiguos romanos" (34). There is also an identifiable tendency to use the ornamental "y" (as a vowel), again particularly in Latin words such as tyranno. The unnecessary "ç" (c cerilla, superfluous before e and i) is used inconsistently throughout the text; thus at times we find merecen, at other times mereçes. The "z" is also occasionally substituted for the appropriately used "ç" (before o, a, u): both coraçon and corazón can be found in the text.
Flores' reluctance to use the prothetic vowel, even when the word before does not end in a vowel, is a marked latinism, perhaps also ascribable to the influence of Italian or Catalan: gran spacio, tal stado, en special, sin sperança. Another possible Italian nuance, particularly characteristic of the Grimalte y Gradissa, is Flores' tendency in that work to occasionally use the article with the possessive, particularly when the Italian characters are speaking, as in Pamphilo's "tú vienes a publicar por el mundo las nuestras culpas" (Italics mine; 22).
The slight but unmistakable presence of Catalan throughout the text occasioned Matulka to wonder if Flores had not spent time at the Aragonese court. Occasionally lexical Catalanisms seem to be linked to Catalan thematic, a similar phenomenon, but not nearly as pronounced as the frequency with which Catalan language seemed to surface in the Triste deleytaçión 's mention of Fortune. For example, just before the auctor lectures Fiometa on the mutability of Fortune, he uses the Catalan esser for the Castilian ser:
Sin duda, senyora, sin hoyr vuestra palabra me voluntad pensava en obra poner vuestro mandado, y ninguna cosa me puede esser cara, obrada en vuestro servicio, en special esta, en cuyo vençer esta mi victoria.
Pues tomad buen esfuerço contra la mudable Fortuna. (italics mine; 24)

Debate and Dialogue: Grisel y Mirabella
From the standpoint of traditional stylistics, Juan de Flores' Grisel y Mirabella is very different from his Grimalte y Gradissa and quite unlike any other of the fifteenth-century sentimental novels. Everything we traditionally think of as essential to suspense, to reader interest -- the violent consequences of an impeded desire, the striving toward fulfillment -- is all dispatched within the first few pages of the text, leaving the reader with a seemingly disproportionate denouement, a lengthy debate, a power struggle that structures the rest of the text and ideologically divides all the characters according to gender with men on one side and women on the other.
The rapid pace of the compact traditional plot seems to enhance the potential of reading this text as a literary parody of the sentimental genre. The plot seems satirically exaggerated at the outset as we learn of the king's predicament: his knights are killing each other in duels over rivalry for his daughter's love. At the start of the text, all but two of the king's knights have died in duels over Mirabella. The king has prudently decided to lock his daughter in a tower out of sight, and recklessly assigned the two surviving knights as her guards. When the two knights meet approaching Mirabella's tower window, and each carrying a ladder, the inevitable violence of their rivalry errupts, first as a verbal battle and ultimately as open combat. Intitially, the debate motif is introduced by the two knights who debate whether Fortune (or God; the two are conspicuously confused) will favor in chance or in battle the "true" lover. The inevitable duel ensues, and Grisel who originally argued against the trail-of-true-love-by-Fortune proposal, killing his rival, becomes the last of Mirabella's suitors and the last of her father's knights left alive. With the supply of suitors reduced to one, Mirabella more or less instantly accepts Grisel as her lover; and there we feel should be the end of the story. But Mirabella is a royal princess, and a Scottish royal princess into the bargain, a blatant device to evoke the well known ley de Escocia. Her father discovers her indiscretion, a crime, of course, punishable by death.

Narrative Dialogue in Grisel y Mirabella
The primary narrator dominates the text during the very short opening segment that ultimately brings together Mirabella and her last living suitor:
Estos dos caballeros, después de haber mucho cuestionado quién más dignamente la merecía, vinieron en tan grades rompimientos de palabras que el que no consintió en las suertes mató al otro; y tan secreta fue la cuestión entre ellos que jamás el Rey pudo saber quién lo había muerto. Aquel caballero vencedor llamaban Grisel; el cual prosiguiendo sus amores, Mirabella . . . de su amor fue presa. (57)

In the two short paragraphs that follow, we are told by the primary narrator's voice that the king was informed of their clandestine affair, caught the two lovers in bed together, and had them imprisoned to await sentence which was to be death for one and lifelong exile for the other.
The primary narrator steps to the background as a debate ensues between the king and the queen; their verbal contest prefigures the longer debate that will consume most of the rest of the text. The issue is whether the king should yield to fatherly sentiment or kingly rigor. The queen argues for mercy, the king for justice. The king's position is sustained by the laws of the land while the queen appeals to the "natural" law that enjoins parents to love their children. The queen's position cannot prevail in the forum of debate which, like the law of the land, is carried out according to preestablished norms of logic and language. The crime will be punished by death. Surely, one feels that this should be the end of the story; but first, greater guilt has to be determined.
In a curiously innovative interpretation of the law of Scotland, we are told that the initiator of the affair deserves death; the other, exile for life. As the narrator explains, the law demands that one party be more guilty than the other.
Y como acaece cuando dos personas se aman, el uno tener más culpa que el otro en la recuesta: por esto las leyes no disponían que las penas fuessen iguales. (58)

Neither of the two lovers will assign blame to the other. The king has them both tortured to no avail as each, aware of the penalty, insists on assuming the greater responsibility: "y cuanto más los atormentaban tanto más cada uno hacía las culpas suyas" (61).
Grisel and Mirabella's self-recriminations prefigure the arguments that will later condemn women in general and Mirabella in particular. For example, Mirabella argues that it is less blameworthy for men to try to seduce women than for women even to listen to their seductive discourse. Because each debater's objective is to lose and thus spare the other, Mirabella and Grisel are both in a position of arguing against themselves. Mirabella's self-recriminations, however, are textually privileged with sententious introductions such as "dizen que . . ., "es conocido . . ..," unlike Grisel's, none of which is presented as a generalized truth. Grisel assumes personal blame:
Y pues que es mía [la muerte] y mis merecimientos lo han ganado, no me los quitéis: que si bien conosciesedes cuántos tormentos me dan los vuestros, diriades que la muerte non es pena, en comparación de lo que siento por la vuestra. Mayormente, conosciendo tener yo la culpa, y que vos padezcáis la pena: ¡ésta me es incomportable pasión! (62)

Although the reader may sympathize with both lovers, Mirabella's self-recriminations tend to present a general indictment of her sex; for example: "conocido es ser más deshonesto el oír a las mujeres, que el recuestar a los hombres (59); and, "[las mujeres] sin conceder en lo que es demandado, dan señales de consentir en ello" (60).
Unable to reach a decisive verdict by means of torture, the king asks his council for advice. The council responds: "que examinase si los hombres o las mujeres, o ellas o ellos, cuál destos era más ocasión del yerro al otro (63). The king agrees that the council should decide the question, but they respond that, as scholars, they are not sufficiently expert in matters of love. Who is to blame? The whole issue becomes generalized: who is usually to blame, or more to blame when lovers yield to passion: men or women? Two experienced lovers must be found: a woman to speak for women; and, a man to present the male point of view.
This is not to be a "court of love" in the medieval sense where an individual lover is reproached by the ladies of a court for not faithfully serving the laws of the Lord Love. This is to be a debate in order to ascertain a general "truth," illustrating --in fact ridiculing-- the typically humanist belief of late fifteenth-century Castile that truth can be worked out by means of the exercise of human reason through debate and study. This humanist article of faith is, in Grisel y Mirabella, mercilessly ridiculed by its overly rigorous application to the discourse of love and seduction, issues that prove highly resistant to the laws of logic.
The advocate for women is chosen -- Brazaida, a foreigner of uncertain national origin, known for both her profeminist position and her eloquence. Though her name evokes Creseida or Briseida, the faithless and opportunistic lover of Troilus in the Roman de Troie and Boccaccio's Filostrato, Flores' Brazaida is the wronged party. She is no longer the faithless lover of the romances of Troy; as Matulka observed, her character had been evolving in fifteenth-century Castilian cancionero verse. The new Brazaida is a beautiful, strong, cunning, militant defender of women, a worthy adversary (88-94).
Although the action takes place in Scotland, in order to find a worthy adversary for Brazaida, the council seeks a certain man named Torrellas "en los reinos de España," known to the council and to most Spanish contemporaneous readers as the cancionero poet famous for his Maldezir de mujeres. From the outset, one wonders if this can be an equally matched contest. The women's advocate is a character in fiction while the spokesman for men is an historical poet, an author, a writer. In this highly literary and metafictive world, can a created being compete on equal ground with a creator? Certainly the outcome of the debate affirms that the contest has been an unequal one from the outset.
The arrival of the two debaters has a decidedly polarizing effect on the court. The queen, unlike her husband, does not allow her maternal feelings for her daughter to be compromised by any higher sense of justice. She and her ladies lavishly receive Brazaida whom they at first perceive more as Mirabella's advocate than as a spokesperson for all women. The king and his knights likewise give Torrellas a warm welcome: "Y así andaban la Reina y sus damas con Brazaida y los caballeros, con Torrellas; favoreciendo cada uno su partido" (64). The polarizing of the court implicitly suggests that the king and all the men of the court favor Grisel and would prefer to see Mirabella put to death.
The debate sequence lacks verisimilitude; it seems less a reality than a satire on contemporaneous sensibilities. At this pivotal juncture, the omniscient narrator steps into the shadows, apparently handing over narrative control to the two debaters only to reappear in a curious instantiation of the topos of abbreviatio, when he claims that to transcribe every word of the debate would be beyond his abilities.
Brazaida opens the debate. She accuses men of inventing music, dance, and tournament "para nos atraer a veros, engañosamente" (65). It is the addressivity of Brazaida's remarks that calls the reader's attention even while she is indirectly raising the issue of the fictive nature of seductive discourse and attributing its authorship to men. While she seems to be taken seriously by her inscribed male addressees, one wonders if contemporaneous extratextual male readers could do the same. Her accusations in the second-person plural help the (male) reader to feel a part of the debate but the more seriously her inscribed audience seems to take her accusations, the more ridiculous they seem to the reader. As Matulka points out, her accusations are as well-known and literary as those of her adversary. Both Torrellas and Brazaida draw from two sides of the commonplace cancionero debates between the sexes, or verses in praise and blame of women. It is little wonder that both present a curiously male-centered point of view since, as the reader is well aware, both are drawing their material from male poets.
One notices throughout the debate that Brazaida's ostensibly profeminist accusations against men all have a self-destructive core. Brazaida argues that if women refrain from visiting jousts or attending dances, men send letters; if women punish their servants for acting as messengers and refuse to read the letters, men scale walls and climb to their windows. Brazaida concludes: "¿cuál puede ser tan grande defensora de sí mesma que contra tantas cosas refrenarse pueda?" (66). To follow Brazaida's rhetorical question with one of my own: does her final question really sound like a woman's point of view? Does it even seem consistent with the Brazaida we have been presented? Indeed not; what is being established is that the male's deception, his fiction, is irresistible to women. It is conspicuously the argument that Torrellas immediately uses to accuse women of deception, of hiding their true feelings.
Torrellas says that women love jousts; tournaments incite women to passion and men to victory, two different ends both of which serve a conspicuously male agenda. He says that women only feign outrage, "falsa honestad" (68). He does not really need to make this point since Brazaida has already declared that few women could resist the constant attentions of their suitors.
While Brazaida apparently turns the argument that "women are less intelligent than men" to her purposes, once again her claim has a self-destructive core that can hardly serve the interests of a profeminist cause. If women are less intelligent than men, according to Brazaida, then men know more about good and evil and are therefore more deserving to be punished when blame is shared. Once again the reader may question whether this is a woman's point of view. Again Brazaida is ultimately defeated by her own position. If Brazaida is as intelligent as the text suggests, she must recognize this argument as the foundation of a patriarchal belief system that had held women responsible for evil at the same time it maintained their innate inferiority.
Brazaida also points out that male animals are more beautiful than females. Females like to be begged, males like to show off; men and women, she concludes, are the same as beasts. Moreover, if men are inclined to brag among themselves, what can women do to protect their fragile honor?
Torrellas turns the peacock argument against Brazaida by saying that humans are not only the exception to the rule but that women actually add to their natural adornments with jewels, makeup, and finery. As to Brazaida's assertion that females "naturally" like being begged for their favors, Torrellas maintains that women are as "naturally" libidinous as men. Torrellas argument, of course, has the authority of already having been proven by Mirabella's example. He conjectures that if men, by mutual agreement, ceased chasing women at once, women would start going after men, begging them more than they are at present begged by them. This pure conjecture, unsupported by authority or experience, is not typical of Torrellas' role in the debate. It seems inserted for comic relief. In fact, the debate itself needs to be closely scrutinized. The contemporaneous reader's inevitable intertextual instantiation of Torrellas' maldezir can only help to serve reading Grisel y Mirabella as a humorous parody of a scholarly debate.
Torrellas does in fact win the debate because he always addresses and refutes Brazaida's most recent accusations. Of course, since Brazaida spoke first, he is always in the position of refuter. Nevertheless, he raises new issues that are not always directly addressed by his adversary. Brazaida loses the debate not because men are the judges but because men have made the rules to suit their own "nature," a nature, as perceived in this text, that places more value on reason than will. Brazaida, as she astutely points out, is in a no-win situation. Since the basis of her defence of women is her assertion that women are habitually out-reasoned and out-argued by men, if she is out-argued by Torrellas she will both prove her point and lose the debate (71). This is Brazaida's one observation that cannot be turned against her, and, in fact, it is not Torrellas but Brazaida who ultimately defeats herself. The only conclusion that the reader can draw from Flores' text is that women need male advocacy to "win."
One area of agreement between the debaters has been sustained throughout: women are no match for men in verbal contests. Torrellas first response to Braçaida was prefaced by his remark that women are easily seduced and therefore easily defeated in all other things: "Y como en los casos de amor sois ligeras de vencer, así creo lo seréis en las otras cosas" (70).

Intertextual and Narrative Dialogue in Grisel y Mirabella
It is remarkable that the issues of guilt and punishment that inform the text are so fully developed without benefit of an intradiegetic narrator-character. There is no auctor-character in this sentimental novel, and the prevailing opinion is that this text is prior to Grimalte y Gradissa and that the latter may have been influenced by the work of Diego de San Pedro (Waley xxii). However, the historical Pere Torrellas, male-centered focalization, the contest between the discourse of men and the discourse of women, and above all the position taken by the third-person omniscient narrator regarding the debate, are all aspects of this sentimental novel that argue in favor of Flores' two works presenting a cohesive and decidedly antifeminist world vision.
According to Waley, the extradiegetic, omniscient, narrator in the Grisel is really more a sign of aesthetic failure than of innovation in sentimental novels. But the Grisel 's omniscient narrator plays a startlingly modern game of hide-and-seek with his readers, at times dominating his text through excessive commentary, reporting of dialogue and foreshadowing, at times becoming virtually invisible.
Torrellas is not only an historical character in fiction but a poet, the author of an extant text who becomes a character in the fictional narrative of another writer. Torrellas and the primary narrator are both aware of, and make constant allusion to, the well-known works of Torrellas the poet. In mid-debate, Torrellas prefaces one of his remarks by saying "como ya otras veces dije en alguna obra mía," (77). Since readers are aware that Torrellas the poet's work is "real," they are disposed to attribute some of this "reality" to Torrellas the character without ever losing sight of the fact that they are reading a fictional text. Brazaida's fame, in contrast, is as a character whose vita has been read and rewritten by generations of male authors; the fictionalization of Brazaida is actually an ongoing intertextual phenomenon as well as an historical extratextual fact. The reader may momentarily forget that all Brazaida says during the debate is being mediated by a primary narrator who at times will explicitly remind his readers that he is consciously choosing what and how much Brazaida says.
If Torrellas's ties are to an historic --albeit literary-- reality, Brazaida is conspicuously tied to the world of fiction. Torrellas' home is named; Brazaida is from the unnamed realm of fiction. The essential distinction between the two debaters becomes significant toward the end of the debate where Torrellas will be declared the winner. As Torrellas and Brazaida's debate draws to a close, the primary narrator who has been forgotten makes an abrupt intrusion to halt the debate because if it were to continue, each contender would speak more than anyone could possibly write: "Grandes altercaciones pasaron entre Torrellas y Brazaida; más de las que ninguno podría escribir" (77). The readers can safely intuit that the debate proceeds in much the same manner, that they have already seen enough to imagine what they will not see and could only grow weary. But the reader has already seen far more than enough. The narrator waits so long to effect this halt, that the literary minutia of the debate has long since slipped beyond boring and entered the realm of the absurd. The abreviatio reestablishes the narrator as a strong presence and the reader is reminded that Brazaida and Torrellas are not the authors of the debate being written. Logically, the author would not have shared as much as he did of the debate with his readers if he did not feel that it would be a source of delight. Thus we identify a distance between the narrator's words of the abbreviatio and the author's meaning, a distance characteristic of the fifteenth-century sentimental novels.
As the debate draws to a close, it becomes evident that the narrator's reading of the debate's objective is not concordant with the objectives of the king's council that he reported before the debate began: "Y eran doce jueces, los cuales dieron sentencia que Mirabella muriese" (77). The original objective had been to determine only the general "truth" of whether men or women were more at fault. After this determination, the sentencing of Grisel and Mirabella was to follow from their conclusion. But no sooner have Grisel and Mirabella been so forcefully reintroduced than Brazaida begins her final harangue, which seems to have no relevance to the case of the two lovers except to the extent that they are the victims of disenfranchisement by language and law.
Brazaida, when she sees that she cannot have justice from men, calls on God, the "Justo Juez" (78). Women, she claims, are the inevitable victims of the imperfect justice of men, men "so cuyas leyes vivimos que quieren que muera la que es forzada y viva el forzador" (78). This is an emotional appeal that has very little bearing on the case at hand; Mirabella is certainly not presented in this text as a rape victim. As Brownlee observes "the issues debated by these two contestants have literally nothing to do with the attitudes projected by Grisel and Mirabella" (202).
Women, having lost the "reasoned" debate, must now appeal to the will of men, for a higher justice. As she did before the long debate, the queen directly confronts the king with arguments designed to convince him to spare his daughter. The queen asks the king what personal value he can ascribe to his kingdom and the public laws designed to defend it, if he has no children to succeed him to the throne. The king responds that honor is more important than his daughter. He is king: "la persona del Rey es espejo en que todos miran y sus obras conviene ser tales que resplandezcan entre todas las otras gentes" (79-80). What the will of the world sees as an ignoble action, the king sees as his only reasonable option.
As preparations for Mirabella's execution are made, the narrator comments that as strong as was the king's love for his daughter, his sense of justice was stronger still, so strong that other thoughts were not permitted to intrude. This sense of justice has overtaken the royal personage such that he is shown taking an obsessive delight in the elaborate plans for Mirabella's immolation: "el Rey no pensaba sino como a la vida de Mirabella diese fin, aunque en estremo la amaba; pero la justicia era más poderosa que el amor" (80). The king has effected a perverse inversion of the sentimental commonplace of the inner debates between Will and Reason in which the base appetites of the will contend with the most noble effects of reason. The most noble functions of the king's will, which are love and mercy, are defeated by the cruelest function of his reason which is the rigorous application of justice.
The narrator again resorts to abbreviatio regarding the detailed plans for Mirabella's execution. Despite the narrator's reluctance or inability to describe the event, much is revealed: "quince mil doncellas vestidas de luto" (81); "traían un carro en el cual iba Mirabella con cuatro obispos que el cargo de su ánima tomaban" (81). The law of the land again finds linguistic support in the narrator's words "quien por fuego de amor se vence, en fuego muera" (81).
With the flames already leaping high, the queen steps up her impassioned diatribe against the king's inhumanity: "Tú no padre, mas enemigo te pudes decir" (81), and personalizes it by lamenting her own death sentence as his consort: "El primero día que te conocí fue la mi muerte" (81). However, before Mirabella can be consigned to the fire, Grisel throws himself into the flames. It is curious how easily the king is convinced that since justice has claimed its one required sacrifice, he should spare the life of his daughter. The king's honor has claimed its blood sacrifice; justice has, in fact, been thwarted. This act of self-serving compassion overturns the internal logic of the text to this point; the law and its guarantor, the king, had not stated merely that one must die, but that the more guilty should be the one to pay the ultimate price. Mirabella must be restrained to keep her from following her lover into the flames, which would have been the only "just" atonement for having cast herself into the metaphorical flames of passion.
Mirabella, however, cannot be long restrained from her self-destructive will. Her suicide is presented as an act of love, just as her love was presented as an act of suicide. Again imprisoned in a tower, she lets herself fall to her father's lions "los cuales no usaron con ella de aquella obediencia que a la sangre real debían" (86). The reader cannot help but think that this is a somewhat unusual turn of phrase under the circumstances.
Flores' penchant for gruesome detail has been pointed out by several critics: graphic violence, graphic sex, and fifteenth-century sensibilities are often cited as constituent elements of the text. Brownlee points out that it is ultimately a text that is more about verbal than physical violence (209). I would add that Grisel y Mirabella seems to be about both verbal and physical violence, and about the relationship between the two.
The narrator would rather leave the gruesome details of Mirabella's dismemberment to the reader's imagination ( "Pero porque yo no podría tan dolorosas cosas como eran figurar, no quiero sino dejarlo a quien pensarlo pudiere" (86)), but there is at the same time an ironic plea for his readers to imaginatively recreate the violence that the author's supposed sensibilities and limitations cannot present unaided.
However, the story does not end with the death of the two lovers; the violent consequences of desire promise to continue. The women in the text, having been shown incapable of defeating Torrellas with their words, ultimately resort to deluding him into believing that Brazaida is "truly" in love with him. In a letter that Torrellas sends in response to Brazaida's deception, Torrellas shows himself to be so involved that he cannot see the danger that awaits him. The omniscient narrator's commentary reaches its apogee as he openly calls his readers' attention, commanding their attention: "mirad." He reminds us that Torrellas is guilty of not believing his own indictment of women, namely that they are capable of deception:
Pero el malaventurado no pudo conocer aquel engaño de la muerte que en la presta piedad de Brazaida se escondía. él, juzgándola por ligera de vencer, fue el más ligera, simple, y neciamente vencido. (italics mine; 91)
The danger to Torrellas is not merely that he will become another victim of impossible love. In Flores' text, this ultimate self-victimization is given a tangible expression, as Torrellas is tortured and killed by the conspicuously silent ladies of the court. Throughout the final episode, the omniscient narrator becomes a dominant force, as he continually warns the reader of Torella's danger. Torrellas ultimately suffers the same fate as San Pedro's lovers. He has allowed his imagination to be captivated by his own fiction, the price of one who comes to believe his own lies, what Ovid referred to as becoming a "true" lover.

Authorship and Boccaccio's Subtext: Grimalte and Gradissa
Often considered the "most highly evolved" of the sentimental novels, Grimalte and Gradissa, written by Flores in collaboration with poet Alonso de Córdoba, has been cited as the sentimental novel that exploits the most complex "narrative dialogue." Grimalte and Gradissa is the story of a reluctant lady and her persistent, faithful suitor, the two protagonists named in the work's title. Gradissa, having read Boccaccio's Elegia di madonna Fiammetta, sympathizes so strongly with its protagonist that she asks Grimalte to prove his love for her (Gradissa) by effecting a reconciliation between Fiammetta and Panfilo. Grimalte, having miraculously managed to meet up with the fictional Italian lovers, fails in his efforts to make the reluctant Panfilo return to Fiammetta. Fiammetta (referred to as Fiometa in the Spanish text) finally dies in despair, an apparent suicide, and Panfilo, suddenly reformed, goes off to live a life of penance. When Gradissa learns of Fiammetta's death and Panfilo's escape, she insists that Grimalte pursue Panfilo and punish him. After years of wandering, Grimalte catches up with Panfilo who is now converted into a wild man. Grimalte, moved by Panfilo's transformation, finally decides to join him in his life of penance.
Unlike San Pedro's narrators, who serve respectively as inscribed addressee (the auctor in the Arnalte) and secondary character-cum-witness (the auctor in Cárcel), Flores' Grimalte y Gradissa is narrated by its male protagonist. In addition to the structuring dialogue between the sexes that marks both of Flores' works, Grimalte y Gradissa is also characterized by an inseparable intertextual link: its transtextual deformation of Boccaccio's Elegia di madonna Fiammetta. Through an interesting reversal of the sexes of the principal roles in Boccaccio's text, where the female narrator-protagonist really is afforded the opportunity to present a woman's point of view, Flores' protagonist-narrator is male and closely linked to the author in an introduction more reminiscent of Boccaccio's Teseida than his Fiammetta. The narrator asserts that "Flores" will change his name to "Grimalte" in order to enter his own text:
Comiença un breve tractado compuesto por Johan de Flores, el qual por la siguiente obra mudo su nombre en Grimalte, la invención del qual es sobre la Fiometa. (3)

As in San Pedro's Arnalte y Lucenda, there is a strong structuring dialogue between men and women that begins with the problem of the potential distance between the inscribed reader and the implied reader. As Pamela Waley notes: "Fundamentally, the work is a kind of debate between the sexes, between man as a rational and woman as an emotional being" (xxxv).
Generations of readers and critics alike have wondered about the identity of Gradissa, an analogous dilemma to the identity of Boccaccio's mysterious Fiammetta, over which so much ink has been spilled. Boccaccio scholarship has recently taken strides in dismissing this traditional reader fascination with the deciphering of a potential roman à clef by deemphasizing the importance of historical, authorial referents. The role of Boccaccio's Fiammetta can be more productively studied as a mere narrative device, at best a composite of several women; even the most conservative Boccaccio scholars now admit that perhaps Fiammetta had no more historical corporeality than don Quijote's Dulcinea, or for that matter, Dante's Beatrice.
Who or what is Gradissa? Is she an historical character, the mysterious beloved of Juan de Flores or merely a narrative device? Gradissa, whatever or whoever else she may be, is above all an inscribed reader, eager but unable to turn the tables and share in the creative act of writing. Grimalte y Gradissa is the only sentimental novel in which the reader can actually see a female character reading and responding to sentimental fiction. Gradissa, the cooperative reader, is first presented