Celestina's house or the perpetual reshaping of intimacy (1502–1542)

Abstract

 It is the house of Celestina, as it emerges in the original work and its first three continuations (Feliciano de Silva, Gaspar Gómez and Sancho de Muñón), that is at the heart of this article. As a perennial diegetic site and guarantor of the cyclical continuity necessary for a proper understanding of works that invest and enrich a pre-existing fictional universe, the house of the matchmaker – and this is one of its paradoxes and the reason why it escapes us in part – gives the impression of constituting a space with shifting boundaries, constantly being pushed back. A space that the continuators modulate as they wish, according to the vicissitudes of the plot and, in particular, the needs of each individual for intimacy. It is the theatre of a perpetual spatial and symbolic recomposition of intimacy, of a successive veiling/unveiling, which does not fail to refer to an extra-literary reality of time. Shouldn’t the conception of this domestic space as both inside and outside be linked to a more general movement specific to early modern Spain, a movement of increasing specialisation and delimitation of domestic spaces and, more broadly, of the gradual conquest of intimacy echoed by historians?