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

Abstract

TOMAS de Marte (1750-1791), most often celebrated for his imaginative and innovative treatment of fable in his Fabulas literarias (1782), was also a cosmopolitan playwright, satirist and translator who was a constituent member of Madrid's artistic and literary scene during second half of eighteenth century along with his contemporaries Jose Cadalso, Leandro Fernandez de Moratin, Ramon de la Cruz, and Francisco de Goya. (1) His original comedies--such as El senorito mimado o la mala educacion (1787) and La senorita 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 senorito mimado, which enjoyed a particularly thunderous reception (Cox 240) upon its first staging in 1788, Iriarte lampoons improper and insubstantial education of Madrid's idle youth exemplified by foppish Don Mariano. (3) In most recent analyses of 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 themes of letter writing (Fueger) and marriage (McCallahan). However, role of bodily comportment and dress in fashioning of Mariano's deviant masculine character has yet to be explored, despite 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 senorito mimado o la mala educacion. In comedy, Mariano's characteristic indeterminacy and transgressive attitudes vis-a-vis hegemonic figures of patriarchal authority--embodied by his virtuous uncle Don Cristobal--are sartorially coded, and problematize facile categorization and diagnosis of his deviant attributes and behavior. Throughout El senorito mimado, Mariano operates as an agent of class transvestism by donning modish signifiers of both petimetre--an upper-class fop--and 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 permeability of terms and types to which they refer, along with porous nature of social boundaries at turn of century. Indeed, concomitant visual markers associated with petimetre (morning suits, canes, watches) and majo (capes, broad hats), along with types themselves, were in constant flux throughout 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 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 masculine to be a natural, stable marker of superiority over feminine (Penrose, Masculinity 9). Sartorial signifiers in El senorito mimado--especially those indicated by stage directions--and contemporaneous literary texts and discourses will confirm and give contour to these underlying tensions concerning potential threat of subversive masculinities that disrupt models of gentlemanly, virtuous masculinity (hombria de bien) promoted by eighteenth-century moralists like Iriarte. In other words, deviant masculinity --one that distorts and evades ideal forms embodied by hombre de bien--manifests itself in Iriarte's play as a class transvestism in which protagonist oscillates and shifts between sartorial markers of sexually deviant petimetre and socially marginalized, working-class majo. The comedy's title refers to Mariano's--el senorito's--inchoate masculinity: he is neither a child nor an adult. …