[In the following essay, Singer questions the conclusion drawn by Ruth Lundelius and others that El burlador de Sevilla clearly shows Tirso's misogyny, arguing instead that the play should be seen as an expression of men's desire to conquer women.]

Psychological analysis, Freudian or otherwise, is a mark of our introspective age.¹ Recent years have seen several attempts to probe into the character of Tirso's burlador (notably two articles by Gerald Wade²) and to penetrate the nature of the women he seduces, the best of which I consider Ruth Lundelius' account in the Comediantes' Bulletin itself.³ What I intend postulating here uses her arguments as a point of departure. The interested reader is referred to her article on the basic question of whether or not Tirso actually championed women as claimed by Blanca de los Ríos and others, or, as Lundelius claims (and I would say, almost irrefutably), was pretty much a misogynist—if misogynist is just the proper term, about which more later. She limns the characters of Don Juan's four conquests, guilty as she accuses them of greed, deception, ambition, moral impotence, and various other sins deadly or venial, and concludes that for Tirso and educated clerics of his age in general women are poorly equipped to long resist the likes of Don Juan Tenorio. All this, she argues, stems from Scholastic-Aristotelian-Pauline-Biblical tradition, as surely it must. Such a portrait of women, she then concludes, is profoundly cynical, pessimistic, misogynic. The female of the species is intrinsically weak, morally corrupt. The only basic reason the women escape Don Juan's fate is not Tirso's supposed compassion for them but simple dramatic necessity: punishment must be centered on the protagonist. His victims, humbled and wiser, will be married off and the essential rightness of social order and nature vindicated. It is difficult to argue against so essentially correct an assessment of the meaning of the Burlador, and I have no intention of trying. Still, there are some aspects of the problem worth further consideration.

Besides the Lundelius-los Ríos positions, there have been, of course, others concerning Tirso and women. Otis Green, for one, has argued that Tirso favored them as neo-Platonist, idealizing perfect love, perfect beauty (vide his Venganza de Tamar, though he also wrote in the same play, as Green admits, “mujer gozada es basura”).⁴ Green considers Tirso, like the Spanish Golden Age in general, to have had an ambivalent opinion of women, debased and chivalric in turn.⁵ The truth is, and we all know it, that fiction may or may not reflect its authors, authors whose convictions wax, wane, even execute about-faces from work to work. La venganza was probably written only some five years after the Burlador and may well reflect much the same views.⁶

In any event, the Burlador certainly shows Tirso scornful of women's worth, more so actually than even Lundelius seems to charge. If he has depicted other women in other plays that suggest a different point of view, what makes this particular drama a valid touchstone for his true beliefs? For one thing, the mistreatment of women in the Burlador reveals the ultimate in masculine machismo. If ever Tirso is to champion the distaff cause, it should be here. For another, as Lundelius herself notes (p. 13), Tirso could have shown Don Juan's four antagonists a bit more resistant to his blandishments. Or at least one or two of them.

But there is a more serious accusation, one that may be levelled against almost the entire Don Juan canon, Tirso's Burlador, other Spanish Don Juans, those of France, England, Germany, Russia, all of them: he possesses no outstanding charm of manner or language or character to implement his raw sexuality, animal magnetism, supernatural or diabolic attraction. Cunning, yes: bravery, of course; physical drive, necessarily. But where is the version that justifies the legend of his irresistibility? That he should find success here or there, even frequently, is quite credible. Casanova comes to mind, or, in recent years, the likes of a Frank Harris. But the true Don Juan of Tirso and his followers—Molière, Mozart, and especially Zorrilla—is by definition irresistibly charming as well as cursed by some mysterious sexual aura. Does this charm reveal itself in Tirso's four conquests? Hardly. Consider the greatest Don Juan of them all, Mozart's Giovanni with his “mille e tre” and Zorrilla's Tenorio, they of the astronomical lists:

Por dondquiera que fuí,
la razón atropellé,
la virtud escarnecí,
a la justicia burlé
y a las mujeres vendí.
Yo a las cabañas bajé,
yo a los palacios subí,
yo los claustros escalé,
y en todas partes dejé
memoria amarga de mí.

(Part I, 11. 500-09)

So boasts Zorrilla's lady killer, speaking of one year's seventy-two conquests. He has allowed five days per victim, plus an hour to forget each one (11. 654, 685-89). This works out at 72 × 5 or 360 days + 72 × 1 hour = 3 days more, for a grand total of 363 days, giving him only two days off, unless it was a leap year. This the play famous for its beautiful if a bit overrated poetry, the one version that really aspires to give Don Juan amorous language to match his lust. This the version that shows us poor Doña Inés seduced by reading Don Juan's letter (Part I, 1.1643 ff.), perhaps the unique example of epistolary seduction in all literature.

No, we are not witnessing examples of masculine invincibility. These lists, this poetry, these conquests are often close to farce, parodic at the least.⁷ And proof of their authors' indelible male chauvinism. This is the stuff of men's dormitory bull sessions, whether the Burlador's sophomoric line, Don Juan's harem adventures in Canto V ff. of Byron's poem, or Don Giovanni's pocket-calculator totals.

I suspect that critics take their secret ideal (should I say?) a mite too seriously. His conquests are credible because they are credulous. It is a matter of record that the Don Juan theme has rarely appealed to women. Until recently the legend was not told from their point of view and even now almost never by them. Small wonder. Men have been allowed, somehow, down through the centuries—remnants of the caveman syndrome, doubtless—to consider themselves among God's elect. If they want sexual satisfaction, they shall have it. It seems to touch the Spanish character more than most, but it lies ingrained in almost all the males of the species, and those few who would question the validity of the concept risk stoning by their confreres. If we are examining the phenomenon mainly in Tirso and in his prototypical male creation, it is simply because it reveals itself so clearly there. Elsewhere Don Juan has enjoyed an unbelievable success in some two thousand versions since Tirso's play, almost all over the world.

Gerald Brenan can write “[So many male Spaniards] seem to find their women, except in the capacity of mothers, so disappointing.”⁸ They did in Tirso's day. And seemingly, Tirso did; the women in his play merit little respect. Look again at the Burlador. It isn't just that the women fall for him so easily. They fall for any man. Doña Isabela thinks Juan is Don Octavio; Doña Ana thinks him to be the Marqués de la Mota; both willingly admit him to their rooms. Tisbea is a little flirt, taking up with our shipwrecked hero almost as soon as he awakens in her arms. And Aminta jilts her bridegroom in the course of their wedding feast after some five minutes of Tenorio's half-hearted rhetoric. Of course, whether in real life things went so swimmingly for males may be open to doubt. (Many years ago George Tyler Northup noted the posibility of a gap between the literary pundonor code with women as the fragile vessel of honor to be broken at their peril, and the facts of real life.⁹

But that is precisely what makes Don Juan the stuff out of which dreams are spun. The audience presumably approved of the lesson preached in this popular play by a churchman, no less. And what is it? Before you recall those famous lines, “no hay plazo que no llegue / ni deuda que no se pague,” please bear with me for a moment. The tradition of the errant male is an old one. After all, Don Juan-Zeus was the supreme god of Greece and Rome. Chasing women is like hunting animals, wrote Callimachus of Cyrene, over two thousand years ago. Once the kill is made, the thrill is gone.¹⁰ “Mujer vencida es basura.” Two millennia have effected little improvement. Let us not forget that Don Juan came within an ace of getting away with his sins. The Marqués and Don Octavio are actually rewarded for their scarcely Christian morality. Call it Aristotelian peripeteia or Tirso's double standard of conduct, necessitated by a conflict within himself between secular and Christian ethics, or what you will. The fact is that the King was willing to pardon Don Juan all his transgressions—as much a matter of insulting his father, his society, his King himself as anything else—almost until the very end of the drama, when Don Juan's procrastinative presumption finally caught up with him. The play furnishes the moralizing conclusion of good Victorian melodrama, but seventeenth-century conventions, at least as described in the fiction of the day, favored Tenorio over his female victims. Golden-Age comedia moralizes constantly; it is not constantly moral. It is difficult to see the Burlador as a deeply religious warning against donjuanismo. But then I cannot see it exactly as a misogynist tract either. Misogyny implies a hatred of women. To the contrary this play, pace a welter of present-day psychiatrists, shows a great love for women—in their subordinate, pleasure-giving place. Not trustworthy, nor very intelligent, but highly desirable.

And what nation of men then or before would have gainsaid Tirso's conclusions? The Spaniards have been somewhat more open than most in admitting their point of view. And their Don Juan, the ultimate, the over-achiever, I fear expresses all too well a common male desire for feminine conquest. Not necessarily attainable in reality; yet to be dreamed of. In Browning's immortal observation, “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp / Or what's a heaven for?”

Notes

1. Somewhat modified from a paper read at a special session on the Comedia held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the AATSP in Toronto, 16 August 1979.

2. Gerald E. Wade, “The Character of Don Juan of El burlador de Sevilla,” in Hispanic Studies in Honor of Nicholson B. Adams, ed. J.E. Keller and K.L. Selig (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1966), pp. 167-78; and “The Character of Tirso's Don Juan of El burlador de Sevilla,” BCom 31 (1979), 33-42.

3. Ruth Lundelius, “Tirso's View of Women in El burlador de Sevilla,” BCom 21 (1975), 5-13. See also Eunice Knight, “The Role of Women in Don Juan and Faust Literature,” DAI 35 (1974), 1106A, which includes Tirso.

4. Otis H. Green, Spain and the Western Tradition, I (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, (1963), 242-43; also see pp. ix and 211-12. The remark concerning the status of the fallen woman is made by Tamar (Act II, Sc. xiii), the heroine violated by her own half brother Amnón, and she should know: he immediately reviles her after his act of passion, as we are told in both Tirso (Act III, Sc. i) and the Old Testament (see 2 Sam. 13 for the whole account). Though Amnón is finally killed (like Don Juan, though under different circumstances) by his vengeful, politically motivated brother Absalom, Tirso has Amnón's own father King David pardon him (Act III, Sc. 5—again like Don Juan's king, though again for different reasons; Tirso's Bible source merely reads that he did not want to vex the boy's spirit, since, as his firstborn son, David loved him). And incest, neither in ancient Judaea nor in Renaissance Spain, was normally considered a venial sin.

5. Ibid., p. 249. Actually, at best, Tirso is a dubious champion of the weaker sex. Were I a woman, I should eschew having him represent me in court in a case alleging male chauvinism. I cannot imagine him (or anyone else in his day or age, for that matter) writing anywhere, “Hombre que goza es basura.”

6. André Nougué, “La venganza de Tamar, de Tirso de Molina (Notes pour l'établissement du texte: Problème de la datation),” Bulletin Hispanique 73 (1971), 122-24, opts for the date 1623. The Burlador is now usually set at around 1618.

7. It is surely no coincidence that Zorrilla's Don Juan has been the object of a spate of burlesques and parodies: See my various bibliographies; the works in question are cross-referenced under “Zorrilla,” No. 1935. William McKnight delivered a paper on Spanish parodies, especially those of the Zorrilla version, at a SAMLA meeting, 15 Nov. 1963; abstracted in South Atlantic Bulletin 29 (Jan. 1964), 13.

8. Gerald Brenan, The Literature of the Spanish People (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1951), p. 217.

9. G. T. Northup, Three Plays by Calderón (Boston, etc.: D. C. Heath, 1926), p. xvi.

10. Callimachus of Cyrene, ca. 310-ca. 240 B.C. See trans. in Frank L. Lucas' Greek Poetry for Everyman (N. Y.: Macmillan, 1951), p. 302.