"Ficcion, aficion y seducion": Ana Caro's Valor, Agravio y Mujer

Ignored in most comparative studies of Don Juan, Caro's play offers a treatment of the story from the perspective of a professional seventeenth-century female writer. The development of Caro's Don Juan can be said to follow closely that of the mujer esquiva plays in which a woman who eschews marriage is ultimately "tamed" often (but not always) through the force of an irresistible love. In this play, however, we witness the domestication not of an independent woman but of a man—and of one who belongs to a long-lived lineage of seducers still commanding cinematic appeal in our days.

Caro's play rewrites the Don Juan story as that of a seducer who is ultimately seduced by the only woman he had tricked and from whom he had tried to escape. This Don Juan thus departs significantly from the masculine prototype embodied by his namesake to join his destiny as loving husband and perpetuator of the species. His characterization can be seen to conform to a sort of seventeenth-century romantic, feminine fantasy which, I will argue in this essay, runs counter to the notion that there was a monolithic idea of "man" and "woman" during the Spanish "Golden Age."

This paper suggests that the masculinism embedded in the tradition of the libertine seducer whose conquests inscribe women as signs is foregrounded and questioned throughout Caro's play. By altering the traditional pattern of relationships and roles Caro manages to propose an alternative paradigm for women which is, nevertheless, well-bounded by the conservatism of the comedia's happy marriage denouement. Caro's gestures of rapprochement and distancing from the Donjuanian tradition, I will propose in this paper, are framed by a pattern of mimesis and indistinctness that not only surrounds the histrionic geography of her characters, but is also part of their own make-up.