The second longest of the group (after the Casamiento/Coloquio [Marriage/Colloquy]) and the most deceptively complex of all the Novelas ejemplares is the text that Cervantes chose to open the entire collection. La gitanilla (The Little Gypsy Girl) is also one of the most studied and popular. Re-read in the imagination, recomposed in memory, La gitanilla easily devolves into the genre of the formulaic, fortunate tale of loss and recovery: the beautiful baby daughter of a noble family is kidnapped at birth by gypsies; she is raised in a marginal world, but later she meets a handsome young aristocrat who has fallen in love with her and who is willing to undergo a period of testing disguised as a gypsy and living in their world. Strife and violence erupt, and this leads to the recovery and recognition of the long-lost girl by her rightful parents. At the end, all conflicts and problems are resolved, and a happy marriage of the two young lovers restores social unity and familial harmony.

Thus abbreviated, this novela is the simple, affirmative story of the triumph of love and inner virtue, and the fortunate restoration of order. But a more full and attentive reading of the text reveals that this is a remarkably complex and suggestive work, strange in its structure and narrative order, full of seemingly gratuitous loose ends, and ultimately revealing of numerous troubling ironies that touch upon socio-cultural inequalities and tensions. In the commentary that follows, I would like to explore a few of what strike me as the most fascinating and telling complexities of the work. What I hope to suggest, finally, is that the apparent excess of ironies, unresolved issues, and digressive actions all serve to make the novela more, rather than less, powerful and engaging and that, beyond this positive consequence of Cervantine complexity, the subtle dissonances of La gitanilla prepare us to be more astute and appropriately sceptical readers of the tales that will follow.

The Gypsies and Their World

The implications of including the gypsies – a fascinating yet slightly threatening marginal ethnic group despised by the Spaniards of Cervantes's time – as a key part of the story's human dynamic have been much studied.