Fashioning the Deviant Male Body in Tomás de Iriarte’s El señorito mimado o la mala educación

Tomás de Iriarte (1750–1791), most often celebrated for his imaginative and innovative treatment of the fable in his Fábulas literarias (1782), was also a cosmopolitan playwright, satirist and translator who was a constituent member of Madrid’s artistic and literary scene during the second half of the eighteenth century along with his contemporaries José Cadalso, Leandro Fernández de Moratín, Ramón de la Cruz, and Francisco de Goya.¹ His original comedies – such as El señorito mimado o la mala educación (1787) and La señorita malcriada (1788) – were immediately recognized and well received for their finely tuned and versified representations of Spanish society, as well as for their incorporation of neoclassical aesthetics and theatrical reforms.² In El señorito mimado, which enjoyed a particularly “thunderous reception” (Cox 240) upon its first staging in 1788, Iriarte lampoons the improper and insubstantial education of Madrid’s idle youth exemplified by the foppish Don Mariano.³ In the most recent analyses of the comedy, critics have focused on topics ranging from its aesthetic, historical, and political context (Andioc, Sebold), Iriarte’s literary influences (Cox), as well as its treatment of the themes of letter writing (Fueger) and marriage (McCallahan). However, the role of bodily comportment and dress in the fashioning of Mariano’s deviant masculine character has yet to be explored, despite the visibility Iriarte gives to these subjects in his comedy.⁴

In this article, I will highlight a new context in which to read Iriarte’s El señorito mimado o la mala educación. In the comedy, Mariano’s characteristic indeterminacy and transgressive attitudes vis-à-vis hegemonic figures of patriarchal authority – embodied by his virtuous uncle Don Cristóbal – are sartorially coded, and problematize the facile categorization and diagnosis of his deviant attributes and behavior. Throughout El señorito mimado, Mariano operates as an agent of class transvestism by donning the modish signifiers of both the petimetre – an upper-class fop – and the majo – a working-class representative of Spanish tradition or casticismo, blending and confusing both types and their respective paradigms of dress. This confusion of otherwise distinctive male garments highlights the permeability of the terms and types to which they refer, along with the porous nature of social boundaries at the turn of the century. Indeed, the concomitant visual markers associated with the petimetre (morning suits, canes, watches) and the majo (capes, broad hats), along with the types themselves, were in constant flux throughout the eighteenth century in Spain. In providing a new lens through which to analyze Iriarte’s comedy, I argue that frequent references to items of male fashion index eighteenth-century anxieties concerning appropriate masculine behavior and bodily comportment, along with the growing instability of recognizable social hierarchies and modes of representation and signification. It should be emphasized that such anxieties were rendered possible by “the unstable, precarious position of masculinity in societies that long held the masculine to be a natural, stable marker of superiority over the feminine” (Penrose, Masculinity 9). Sartorial signifiers in El señorito mimado – especially those indicated by stage directions – and contemporaneous literary texts and discourses will confirm and give contour to these underlying tensions concerning the potential threat of subversive masculinities that disrupt models of gentlemanly, virtuous masculinity (hombría de bien) promoted by eighteenth-century moralists like Iriarte. In other words, deviant masculinity – one that distorts and evades the ideal forms embodied by the hombre de bien – manifests itself in Iriarte’s play as a class transvestism in which the protagonist oscillates and shifts between the sartorial markers of the sexually deviant petimetre and the socially marginalized, working-class majo.

The comedy’s title refers to Mariano’s – el señorito’s – inchoate masculinity: he is neither a child nor an adult. In an early conversation with his mother Doña Dominga in the second act of the play, Mariano complains about the childish treatment he receives from his elders, specifically referencing Don Cristóbal’s desire to discipline...