Don Juan's Women in El burlador de Sevilla

DON JUAN'S WOMEN IN EL BURLADOR DE SEVILLA* ARMAND E. SINGER West Virginia University Psychological analysis, Freudian or otherwise, is a mark of our introspective age. Recent years have seen several attempts to probe into the character of Tirso's burlador (notably two articles by Gerald Wade') and to penetrate the nature of the women he seduces, the best of which I consider Ruth Lundelius' account in the Comediantes' Bulletin itself.2 What I intend postulating here uses her arguments as a point of departure. The interested reader is referred to her article on the basic question of whether or not Tirso actually championed women as claimed by Blanca de los Ríos and others, or, as Lundelius claims (and I would say, almost irrefutably), was pretty much a misogynist—if misogynist is just the proper term, about which more later. She limns the characters of Don Juan's four conquests, guilty as she accuses them of greed, deception, ambition, moral impotence, and various other sins deadly or venial, and concludes that for Tirso and educated clerics of his age in general women are poorly equipped to long resist the likes of Don Juan Tenorio. All this, she argues, stems from Scholastic—Aristotelian—Pauline—Biblical tradition, as surely it must. Such a portrait of women, she then concludes, is profoundly cynical, pessimistic, misogynie. The female of the species is intrinsically weak, morally corrupt. The only basic reason the women escape Don Juan's fate is not Tirso's supposed compassion for them but simple dramatic necessity: punishment must be centered on the protagonist. His victims, humbled and wiser, will be married off and the essential Tightness of social order and nature vindicated. It is difficult to argue against so essentially correct an assessment of the meaning of the Burlador, and I have no intention of trying. Still, there are some aspects of the problem worth further consideration. Besides the Lundelius—los Ríos positions, there have been, of course, others concerning Tirso and women. Otis Green, for one, has argued that Tirso favored them as neo-Platonist, idealizing perfect love, perfect beauty (vide his Venganza de Tamar, though he also wrote in the same play, as Green ad67 68Bulletin of the Comediantes mits, «mujer gozada es basura»). ' Green considers Tirso, like the Spanish Golden Age in general, to have had an ambivalent opinion of women, debased and chivalric in turn. 4 The truth is, and we all know it, that fiction may or may not reflect its authors, authors whose convictions wax, wane, even execute about-faces from work to work. La venganza was probably written only some five years after the Burlador and may well reflect much the same views.5 In any event, the Burlador certainly shows Tirso scornful of women's worth, more so actually than even Lundelius seems to charge. If he has depicted other women in other plays that suggest a different point of view, what makes this particular drama a valid touchstone for his true beliefs? For one thing, the mistreatment of women in the Burlador reveals the ultimate in masculine machismo. If ever Tirso is to champion the distaff cause, it should be here. For another, as Lundelius herself notes (p. 13), Tirso could have shown Don Juan's four antagonists a bit more resistant to his blandishments. Or at least one or two of them. But there is a more serious accusation, one that may be levelled against almost the entire Don Juan canon, Tirso's Burlador, other Spanish Don Juans, those of France, England, Germany, Russia, all of them: he possesses no outstanding charm of manner or language or character to implement his raw sexuality, animal magnetism, supernatural or diabolic attraction. Cunning , yes: bravery, of course; physical drive, necessarily. But where is the version that justifies the legend of his irresistibility? That he should find success here or there, even frequently, is quite credible. Casanova comes to mind, or, in recent years, the likes of a Frank Harris. But the true Don Juan of Tirso and his followers—Molière, Mozart, and especially Zorrilla—is by definition irresistibly charming as well as cursed by some mysterious sexual aura. Does this...