The Scenic/Sensorial alacena: A Feminine Interplay between Visuality and Tactility in La dama duende

Abstract:This essay reconstructs the "alacena de vidrios" in both the dramatic and the scenic space of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's play La dama duende. It begins by visualizing the material alacena in the seventeenth-century Spanish household, which evokes an interplay between visuality and tactility with the openwork doors and engraved façade. This visual and tactile language of the alacena is further echoed by the Doña Ángela tapada and by the invisible mistress's affective maneuver of the objects in her surroundings to ignite sensorial experiences in her lover. The alacena on stage, meanwhile, functions as a practical entrance into Don Manuel's room, yet its scenography occludes the female characters' careful pilgrimage across the household garden and their repetitive, ritualistic dislocation of the alacena, all of which is accomplished in dimness and in silence on the reverse side of the scenic alacena with the help of their agile sense of touch. The alacena is thereby the threshold bridging the scenic space and the expansive dramatic space backstage. Building upon existing scholarship on the symbolic significance and the scenography of the alacena, this essay excavates a long-overlooked form of embodied language shared by the theatrical objects and the female characters of the play through reorientating the reading of the baroque theatrical text around the ornamental and the feminine.