Göngora and Evolutionary Psychology.

When I started the All Göngora in English project and came to Poem 6, I saw that there was a stanza in that poem that remained unexplained till this day since 1581. The stanza is this one:

That a disdainful lady want
dead tongue and lively purse,
   it may well be;
but that she find, with no entrance,
lively purse and dead tongue,
   it cannot be.

The scholars who have dealt with its meaning before informed me:

Antonio Carreira (1986, 2009): “As the text is in most testimonies, it makes not much sense that the l. 107 repeats what says l. 104. The variant of the ms. Alba: lively tongue and dead purse, avoids the repetition, but it would require find not in l. 106.”

Antonio Pérez Lasheras and José María Micó (1991): “In the first part, the meaning is ‘that she find who is silent and pay’, but in the second the meaning (erotic?) is lost.”

I thought about it for a while but could not find an answer. The lady wants to find the money and then she finds no door open to get the money. No clues. There must be a textual error here and the meaning is lost, I thought. It was a year later, revising the project, that I focused again on this particular stanza. And as I was at that time with many others studies apart from poetry, like philosophy and biology and evolutionary psychology, I saw it at once. I am really glad that my own commentary to this particular stanza that has been considered a failure for 400 years has solved the dark stanza at last. It is not DINS theory or the pseudonyms of John Donne what this was all about; it was something less grand; just a stanza; but for me it was something as important as that. Because what a scholar is supposed to do is to illuminate the darkness of a text. My explanation (which I added to my published Opus III of 2017, together with my discoveries on Poem 186 and Poem 175) is this one that can be read now on All Göngora in English project online: 

The lady may want the sight of money with less words; that may well be. But she will only achieve that money and «dead tongue» if she allows the man to get into her, to access her (dar puerta). To believe otherwise, to believe that the shrew will find the money without selling her body (sin dar puerta), that cannot be. See Poem 105, ll. 49-50, Poem 125, l. 30, Poem 180 and Poem 402, ll. 9-10.

This is the solution, and it is based on pure, real, biological life, confirmed by other poems of the poet’s corpus. As evolutionary psychology tells us, women sell beauty and sex (fertility and reproduction), and men sell power and money (status) to get access to that. Without my studies on evolutionary psychology I would never have guessed that those doors were metaphorical, not literal. Göngora has written the stanza in such a way in Spanish that the reader thinks on literal doors (sin dar puerta), for this Spanish expression is a very natural one when going from door to door or going nowhere. There is a very apt anecdote about this issue. A woman tells her friend that she does not know how to break her relationship with her present boyfriend. Her friend then tells her: “Have you tried not to have sex with him for a while?” And she did as she was told. The boyfriend flew away from her without she saying anything else but a repeated (and exasperating for him): “I have a headache.” The signal was clear to him. Without sex there is no love, no commitment. Without sex with him, she might be reserving her body for another. Time to go away to find another door. 

Biology is Biotiful and Göngora et labora...