The Celestina

The Celestina- Fernando de Rojas

How I found this book: When you take classes such as “Culture and Crises in Late Medieval Spain”, you get to read some interesting books. This was one of them, and I thank Teofilo Ruiz for making me read it for class. It’s think enough, I actually did get a chance to read it! It is one of the oldest books in Spanish literature, and I believe it is considered one of the oldest ‘novels’ in Western literature.

Setting: Late 15th century Spain, in a small town.

Main Characters:

Celestina: A caricature of the ‘old woman’ of the town, she specializes both in herbal and traditional medicines as well as ‘fixing’ women who have perhaps not been quite as chaste as they would have liked to be thought of. She is wily and irascible, and quite astute to the faults of all the classes, and plays those faults well. Full of life and not ashamed of who she is or what she does, Celestina is perhaps the most honest and fun character in the entire novel.

Calisto: A minor noble, he is madly in love with Melibea, and is willing to use his wealth to hire Celestina to have her. He seems to care little about the virtue of wooing a well-bred young lady and seducing her, but cares instead that he is infatuated with her and desires her. His self-centered actions have dire effects on all of those involved.

Melibea: A young daughter of another minor noble, she sticks to her class’s concepts of morality. While she worries about her honor, she also wishes to strike out against those moirés which bind her to her father’s house and do not allow her to enjoy the attentions of someone like Calisto. While it is Celestina’s ‘spell’ that allows her to rebel against those convictions, the shock and shame that she has in the end when all is discovered force her to commit the unthinkable.

Sempronio: One of Calisto’s man-servants, he is self-serving and conniving, and able to play his master well. Like many characters in picaresque novels from the period, Sempronio is looking out for himself first and foremost, knowing that the nobility can turn on him at any moment and he will be left out. He is the one who convinces Celestina to work with Calisto in the hopes that the two can swindle his master out of some of his fortune.

Parmeno: The second of Calisto’s man-servants, he is at first loyal to Calisto and tries to urge his master against trusting Sempronio so implicitly. When Calisto turns on him in one of his egotistical moods, Permeno decides that perhaps Sempronio has the right of it, and aids his fellow and Celestina in their plot. There is some sort of connection between Celestina and Paremeno, as his mother was a partner to Celestina. Parmeno seems to appear to be the person who tried to advance himself above the state he was, only to be pushed down again by nobility.
Elicia and Areusa: Two prostitutes who live with and work for Celestina. They are both interested in Sempronio and Parmeno


Plot: Calisto, a member of the lower nobility, falls in love with Melibea and seeks to have her, though she will have nothing to do with him. To do so, he enlists the aid of his somewhat dubious servants and an old crone named Celestina to beguile Melibea into his…mmmm…arms, yes that’s it. The plan goes horribly awry at the end, with Celestina being killed for keeping all of Calisto’s money to herself and giving none to his servants who helped in the conspiracy. The servants are killed for killing Celestina when her murder was witnessed by one of her prostitutes. Calisto dies when he falls from a ladder in an attempt to see Melibea. Melibea dies after her love, confessing to her father her affair and throwing herself off a tower.

Themes:

Greed: Greed seems to be the motivating factor of many of the characters, and perhaps speaks to part of the culture of late Medieval Spain at the time. The noble Calisto is greedy for Melibea, and is eager to part with his money to the equally greedy Celestina and Sempronio in exchange for his lady’s affections. He doesn’t who is hurt in this, but that he gets what he wants.

Equally Celestina, Sempronio, and Parmeno are affected by this as well. Celestina is a wily character, willing to do and act however she needs to get a few coins to get buy. Her life is a desperate one, where she sometimes has famine, sometimes fortune, and she knows a good opportunity when it presents itself. She represents the poor class of people in Spanish society at the time. Just above her are the two man-servants, both of whom have fairly decent positions working the home of their noble lord, but who are dependent on him and his whims for their own livelihood. Any extra they can get to be OK despite what he does is a chance they will take. It’s a cruel world that is run by the whims of those who have power, and they will take what they can to make sure they at least remain on top.

The clash between middle class morals and accesses: We think that this is a modern phenomenon, but in reality the clash between the morals of the middle class and the access has been going on since such a class existed. Melibea has been raised to follow the morals of her class unquestioningly, and fears more the damage to her personal honor than any religious repercussions. Yet she yearns for the forbidden fruit of Calisto and what he offers. In a time when chivalric romances flourished with all sorts of tantalizing tales, Melibea struggles to remain chaste, but desires to acquiesce to her ardent suitor because it is different, unique, and dangerous compared to the quiet, sequestered life as a noble daughter that she has always known. However, when she does finally go along with Calisto’s advances, when the truth is discovered she can not live with the shame to her honor and she kills herself, rather than face the shame she has brought on her family. This extreme action speaks to the high emphasis placed on such things in late-medieval Spanish culture, and to the struggle between the two sides of the argument.

The disparity between rich and poor: There had always been a divide between serf and noble in Spain, but in the towns, the gulf between rich and poor was becoming more and more evident as Spain began to enter into the Renaissance. The nobility, who had long been used to their own vice and decadence in the Middle Ages, cared little for the peasantry and their lives which were so intertwined with those of the class above them. We see in Calisto’s relationship to his own servants, and to that with Celestina, that he cares little about what effect this endeavor has on them. They are there to do his bidding. In the meantime, they are wise enough to understand their master and to make out of the situation what they can. While they never think to rebel against the system, that isn’t to say that they don’t know how to play it. Just because they are peasants doesn’t make them stupid. While the nobles are consumed with their own worries, such as their honor or their passions, the peasantry is concerned with what they must do to keep themselves afloat and to make themselves happy, no matter what their ‘masters’ do. This complex interaction will grow and develop as the centuries go on in Europe, and as the nobles become fewer but their ‘peasants’ become more.

Every book sucks somewhere: Perhaps the only ‘sucky’ thing about the book really is that it isn’t written in what we’ve come to think of as ‘traditional’ novel form. Being that the story is 500-years-old, it can perhaps be forgiven, but to those who have trouble reading Shakespeare you will have a hard time with this. I didn’t mind the play-script format because it made the book quicker to read. But it didn’t add a lot of definition to the story or the characters or the setting. However, it did draw the reader in quite a bit as you felt as if the people were really talking around you or to you.


What did I like: I loved the complex relationships between all the characters. This isn’t a simple, farcical story about nobles and servants in Medieval Spain, but a story about the relationships of people in that culture and society at the time period it was written. To a historian this is an invaluable tool, giving us a window into how contemporaries of that society saw the world in which they lived. To the casual reader it is still highly relatable, and gives someone who perhaps isn’t looking for social insights the ability to understand that yes, people in the past weren’t so very different from us now. It gives the reader the ability to see and understand how it is that people in the past dealt with situations that many in today’s world only have book-knowledge of.

How would I rate this wormy book: I would rate this as a FAT worm, I’d love to make it MONSTER, but I think the style perhaps will be difficult for just the casual reader unless your idea of casual reading is Shakespeare. Should I mention I usually read Shakespeare casually? Anyway, not everyone is me, so if you aren’t prepared for that type of style, than you will get easily confused and bored by the story. But it is still a good read, full of lively, interesting characters and a story that is easily relatable to, even in our modern times. In some ways I think kids in high school would love Celestina better than some Shakespeare, but then I suppose that Shakespeare, being English, is read much more for the English classes in school rather than history classes. *sigh*