"A Man with No Name": A Contrarian Reading of One Version of Don Juan in the Twenty-first Century

Gender theory generally holds that white men are the triumphant beneficiaries of a patriarchal system that oppresses and exploits the Other in all of its manifestations, but principally in the form of the feminine. Readings of the function of gender in Golden Age drama tend to support this tenet. A close analysis of the intersection of gender, character, and society in Tirso de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla, however, draws a more nuanced and less categorical picture. It presents Don Juan not as the result of the rebellion of women against the patriarchal order, nor as the rebel himself against it, but rather as the phantom created by patriarchy itself in order to justify its own existence. His unsettling lack of personal and social identity, as well as his challenge to the homosocial bonds that ideally structured early modern aristocratic society, represent the fears of masculinity that haunt a patriarchal system. (TAS)