Love, Power, and the Metaphysics of Control in the 13th c. Occitan Romance of Flamenca and Rosalía's El mal querer was a comparative study (with the album being a modern musical retelling structured chapter-by-chapter after the medieval text), reading both works as meditations on imprisonment and liberation. Developed for the 2025 Humanities Research Conference at Lycoming College, this project traced how both works translate experiences of romantic confinement into metaphysical, existential, and temporal structures. It examined how love, so often imagined as a space of freedom, becomes instead a sophisticated mechanism of control, one built through jealousy, surveillance, emotional dependency, the logic of institutionalization, and the gradual distortion of time.

The first section drew on Schopenhauer’s account of desire as suffering to illuminate why Archambaut’s jealous obsession becomes a self-perpetuating justification for confinement. His compulsive surveillance in Flamenca (“his heart was gnawed by sharp jealous pangs”) was paired with Rosalía’s “Que no salga la luna,” in which the plea for the moon not to rise dramatizes the impossibility of controlling love’s irrational metaphysical force. The project read both figures as subjects overtaken by impulses that exceed rational agency, revealing how emotional captivity begins with the illusion of justification.

The second section employed Sartre’s theory of “the gaze” to show how confinement reshapes identity from within. Archambaut’s obsessive watching forces Flamenca into a state of “being-for-others,” where she becomes an object in his eyes and eventually in her own. This internalization of surveillance was read alongside Rosalía’s “Pienso en tu mirá,” where repetition and pulsating production sonically enact the psychological pressure of being seen. The analysis framed these moments not as interpersonal conflicts but as metaphysical crises in which the self is redefined under the weight of another’s perception.

The third section explored Heidegger’s concept of temporal distortion, analyzing how both works render time as cyclical, stagnant, and oppressive. The text’s description “Long time she lived thus afflicted… Thus passed two years” was placed in conversation with the looping structures of “Reniego,” which never resolve, instead producing a audible claustrophobia that mirrors the lived experience of imprisonment. This pairing showed how confinement is experienced not only spatially but temporally: as a present that cannot open into a future.

The final section argued that the protagonists’ eventual acts of liberation do not function as romantic resolutions but as philosophical rejections of the structures that confined them. In Flamenca, autonomy emerges through clandestine acts of communication and self-assertion; in El mal querer, Rosalía’s closing track “A ningún hombre” strips away musical ornamentation to foreground a voice refusing domination: “A ningún hombre consiento que dicte mi sentencia.” Liberation becomes not escape but the reclamation of authorship over one’s own narrative.

By placing Flamenca and El mal querer in direct dialogue, the study demonstrated that the logics of power, confinement, and liberation transcend genre and era, emerging across literature, philosophy, and sound. It remains one of my most meaningful projects, integrating interdisciplinary research with close textual analysis to show how the emotional architectures of love persist across centuries. More information is available upon request.