Gender and the Monstrous in El burlador de Sevilla

In his 1611 Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Sebastián de Covarrubias defines "monstruo" as "cualquier parto contra la regla y orden natural" (761). Covarrubias's definition reveals his culture's understanding of the presumably feminine source of the monstrous for any biology in which females give birth. The relative disorder associated with Woman indirectly manifest in this dictionary entry is directly apparent in documents such as seventeenth-century prescriptive literature and pragmáticas against male effeminate behavior. ¹ Such references provide ample evidence of how gender constituted one of the most rigid categories of "la regla y orden natural" through which baroque Spanish society proposed to sustain and reproduce itself. The young, virile, and vicious protagonist of El burlador de Sevilla challenges dominant precepts of natural order by executing a dualistic performance comprised of both Female and Male attributes. Losing the challenge costs him his life, at the same time it guarantees his character a prominent place in western cultural history. Specifically, Don Juan performs negative cultural assignations of Woman while executing the positive features of Man, with the result that the feminine traits of his character assure his damnation and his masculine properties render him heroic for posterity.

In stark imitation of biological categories, gender in seventeenth-century Spain was defined as either masculine or feminine. Covarrubias defines género saying, "Comunmente en castellano se toma, [...] por el sexo, como género masculino o femenino" (586). ² This clean dualism acknowledged, nonetheless, a nuanced understanding of gender performance in early modern texts suggests two further considerations. First, characters defined as Varonil, meaning those who perform the attributes pertinent to the cultural construct of Male, were understood to be superior in kind and degree not only to what is Female, but any questionable admixture of the two in which behavior prescribed for one gender was embraced by the other. The associations between Varonil, power, and control, founded upon the essential equation of Male is Order, are obvious in Covarrubias's definition of the word varón: "Vale hombre de juicio, razón y discurso, y de buena conciencia" (952).

The contrast to this judgement, reason, and moral rectitude is mujer, whose inferior attributes serve as a foil to the dominant construct. Covarrubias cites St. Maximus as saying of women, among other things, "en la fábrica de un engaño, grandes artífices" (767). He goes on to remind his reader of Woman's essential instability and superficiality, recurring to an emblematic reference: "Jeroglífico de la mujer lo es la nao combatida del levante o norte, entre soberbias olas acosada" (767). Similarly, Hernando de Soto's 1599 Emblemas moralizadas offers the oleander as a metaphor for "El engaño en la mujer," in an emblem whose text elaborates on the image of a plant whose sight is as compelling as its consumption is deadly (see figure 1). De Soto's only other emblem about women likewise addresses their deceptive nature, admonishing, "Abra cada uno los ojos del entendimiento, y advierta, que se ha de perder, si las diere crédito" (60-62).

Woman is thus semantically opposed to Man as a figure of instability, deceit, and irrationality, and is mimetically inferior when [Begin Page 270] construed in negative terms, as is most often the case. As Mirsky puts it: "[A]ll masculinities share two central components: the negatively defining characteristic of being not feminine, or like women; and the positively defining characteristic of having more power (social, physical, cosmic, and so forth) than that which is feminine, or women" (31). Two cultural icons paint the mimetically superior nature of Male over Female in stark colors, both tropes of oxymoron: the mujer varonil, the woman who gains something—according to patriarchal measures—by performing the Masculine, and the mujer esquiva, the one who attempts to reject the dominant sexual economy and is usually raped or married for her efforts. The very presence of the...