Tales of Seduction: The Figure of Don Juan in Spanish Culture (review)

The bibliography of scholarship about the Don Juan legend resembles the catalogue in Don Giovanni in both its length and its geographical scope. And as in Leporello’s aria—“Ma in Ispagna son già mille tre”—the roll is particularly long in the Hispanic context. The latest addition to the scholarly list, number 1,004 if you will, is Sarah Wright’s Tales of Seduction: The Figure of Don Juan in Spanish Culture, which examines twentieth-century incarnations of the figure in Spain. Its analyses draw attention to some little-known but fascinating iterations of the story. The study, however, is not so much a monograph as a collection of essays that revolve loosely around a common theme.

To the extent that the book has a goal or unifying thesis, it would be to show “the different uses to which Don Juan has been put throughout the twentieth century in Spain” (20). Each of its chapters, except for one, illustrates a different way in which the myth has been employed. The first explores how writers have used the Don Juan legend to define national identity and to respond to the loss of empire after the War of 1898. The second examines the myth as a site for exploring the changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality in the 1920s. The third describes the appropriation of the seducer in Francoist ideology. The fourth chapter— the exception—does not describe a use so much as a challenge that revisions of the myth must confront: the problem of recovering the newness of a play that has been repeated so often that many Spaniards know large sections by heart. The fifth and final chapter examines how the Don Juan legend has been appropriated as a critique of capitalist consumption.

Wright begins her study with a little-known woman writer, Blanca de los Ríos, who she situates within the context of 1898 debates about the decline of the “Spanish race.” In her 1907 novel Las hijas de Don Juan, de los Ríos represents the seducer as a symbol of the decadence of Spain. An inveterate drunk and womanizer, her Don Juan has, through his recklessness and pernicious influence, doomed his daughters to prostitution and tuberculosis. In the first part of chapter 1, Wright helpfully relates the novel and its characters to nineteenth-century medical theories about degeneracy and eugenics. The second part of the chapter, however, flounders when she attempts to project a commentary on colonialism onto a passage of the novel. The scene in question evokes a church filled with working-class congregants and describes how the religious aura of the setting transforms their faces: “aquellos rostros de chulas que en la vida tendrían gestos zainos y picantes, allí descoloridas, convalecientes, fervorosos, alumbrados por luz de cirios y fulgores matinales, se espiritualizaban, conmovían hasta el llanto.” Wright reads into these lines subtle “racial overtones” and interprets the passage as a “blending of New and Old Worlds.” “A new child,” she writes, “is implicitly produced from the union between Don Juan the colonizer and the (‘dark-skinned and common’) women. But these women and children are simultaneously made paler, symbolically colonized” (41). This forced interpretation undermines Wright’s subsequent argument, which situates de los Ríos’s work within an intellectual current that sought a solution to Spain’s decadence in the regenerating and redeeming influence of its colonies.

The second chapter of the study turns to the doctor and essayist Gregorio Marañón, who famously associated donjuanismo with homosexuality. The first part of the chapter chronicles the evolution of Marañón’s ideas and situates them within their intellectual context. The second half deals with the reception of these theories in popular culture and in the works of contemporaries such as Ortega y Gasset. In this chapter...