Domestic Politics, National Agendas: Reforming Don Juan and the Liberal Subject in Ángeles López de Ayala's De tal siembra, tal cosecha

Ángeles López de Ayala's early feminist play, De tal siembra, tal cosecha, was first performed in Barcelona at the Circo theater on 14 May 1889, against the backdrop of Restoration Spain.¹ Nowadays, both work and writer have been all but forgotten by literary historians and critics. Yet López de Ayala, described by Pere Sánchez i Ferré as "la feminista més important d'entresegles a Catalunya" and "la peça clau en la lluita pels drets de la dona al nostre país" (169), was a highly significant figure in freethinking and feminist circles from the mid 1880s until her death in 1926, and a key player in the politics of republicanism. A prolific writer of essays, poems and novels, López de Ayala almost invariably deployed her literary skills at the service of her sociopolitical objectives. De tal siembra, tal cosecha is no exception.

The purpose of this article is to explore how, in this neglected drama, López de Ayala rewrites clearly identifiable aspects of José Zorrilla's late Romantic play, Don Juan Tenorio (1844), which represents the ethos of a conservative liberalism.² The paradigms of masculinity and femininity displayed in Zorrilla's text are reformulated by López de Ayala to contest, I will argue, a liberal political model based on a social contract that positioned women as unequal stakeholders in civic life and the public sphere. Crucial to the social contract are the concepts of honor, obligation and the promise, which are all foregrounded in De tal siembra. By proposing a revised model of gender politics for the liberal upper-middle and middle classes, López de Ayala, I posit, paves a tentative path toward a vision of democracy that differs from mainstream Restoration liberalism.

Evidently, the Don Juan theme has played a prominent role in representing and shaping Spanish cultural politics. It first appeared with Tirso de Molina's drama, El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (c. 1630), where Don Juan's assault on moral laws and social hierarchies is punished by God and King. There the plot upholds a sociopolitical order founded on divine authority, dynastic right and a patriarchal culture. In mid nineteenth-century Spain, however, the transgressions effected by Zorrilla's Don Juan embody the Romantic individualism and the desire for freedom from sociopolitical restraints that are important for affirming new forms of political governance removed from dynastic succession and inherited blood. Nevertheless, the disorder that he sows must be curbed to safeguard the nation's unity and its domestic economy, as implied by his repentance and spiritual marriage to Doña Inés. The import of Don Juan for sociopolitical matters continued evident throughout the first third of the twentieth century, when he frequently featured in discussions on Spain's vitality, such as José Ortega y Gasset's El tema de nuestro tiempo (1923), Gregorio Marañón's "Notas para la biología de Don Juan" (1924), and Ramiro de Maeztu's Nietzchean interpretation in "Don Juan o el poder" (1925) (see Mandrell 237–43).³

As James Mandrell elucidates, any rewriting of the Don Juan theme constitutes a refundición: a text that builds on previous versions to infuse it with the particular imprint of the author's originality and context, providing "a critical and aesthetic reevaluation" (90). In the case of Zorrilla, the rivalry between Don Juan and Don Luis in the interrelated arenas of love and war is transformed, Mandrell continues, into "a confrontation between two texts in which one version of the same story will be granted privilege over the other" (99). The thematic repetitions and doublings do not simply reproduce the story but reinscribe it differently in a process effected by both author and audience (111).

Not all rewritings of the Don Juan plot, however, have been penned by male authors. As Roberta Johnson has explored, a number of texts featuring a female Don Juan and created by female modernist writers such as Sofía Casanova, Blanca...