Jacinto Benavente’s De muy buena familia and Early Twentieth-Century Discourse on Crime and Homosexuality: Three Readings

Abstract

Jacinto Benavente’s De muy buena familia and Early Twentieth-Century Discourse on Crime and Homosexuality:Three Readings Jeffrey Zamostny During the Primo de Rivera regime in Spain, two high-profile crimes put male homosexuality in the limelight as a topic of social debate and anxiety. In 1924, five conspirators in the Crime on the Andalusian Express planned a robbery that led to the murder of two railway officials. Two of the criminals hailed from respectable middle-class families and were criticized by reporters for their effeminacy, degenerate friends, and equivocal sexual inclinations (Jiménez de Asúa Crónica 7-55; Pérez Abellán).1 Five years later, the decapitated and dismembered corpse of the Barcelona industrialist Pablo Casado showed up in a box in Madrid’s Atocha Station. Rumors circulated that Casado had been killed by his effeminate servant in a case of homosexual jealousy (Jiménez de Asúa Crónica 149-59).2 In both instances, the press played a crucial role shaping public opinion and disseminating divergent understandings of homosexuality. As Nerea Aresti has demonstrated with respect to the 1929 murder, newspapers across the political spectrum published reports with references to sexual deviancy, vice, sin, mental or physical illness, and evolutionary aberration (179-252). These terms tended to overlap as journalists vacillated between exposing and censoring the sexual dimension of the crimes. To quote Aresti, the press made manifest “una coexistencia en el tiempo de categorizaciones distintas y percepciones diversas del sexo, el género y la sexualidad” (249-50). It is within this context that I want to foreground the multilayered treatment of homosexuality and crime in Jacinto Benavente’s understudied drama De muy buena familia.3 Revolving around a murder linked to clandestine homosexual prostitution, the 1931 play fits into Benavente’s corpus of “comedias a noticia,” realist enactments [End Page 183] of contemporary manners and events in middle-class Spain.4 The label is particularly appropriate with respect to De muy buena familia because a newspaper advances the plot and underscores the play’s reporting function. Moreover, contemporary theater critics related the drama to the crimes discussed above, and its characters give voice to the discourses about sexuality that had inundated the press on the occasion of those offenses. Hence, the work capitalizes on the conventions of Benavente’s realist theater to broach the question of male homosexuality in a sophisticated way on the commercial stage. Offstage action, explicatory dialogue, and moralizing speeches open the door for the play to be interpreted at once as a staid defense of bourgeois heterosexism, a liberal plea for pity for homosexual men, and, more obliquely, a defense of sexual diversity. Due to the constraints of mainstream theater at the time, this third reading had to be articulated covertly through the enunciation of a queer discourse by unlikely characters. By highlighting this subversive undercurrent, I want to draw renewed attention to the drama and to question the dominant critical stance that by the 1920s Benavente was a complacent bourgeois playwright.5 The play’s three-pronged approach to homosexuality is shaped by Benavente’s complex public persona and the legal and social regulation of commercial theater in early twentieth-century Spain. According to his contemporaries, Benavente made no effort to either deny or confirm widespread rumors that he had male lovers (Fernández 57-58; Mira 69-71). As Ramón Gómez de la Serna reports, the playwright was unfazed when the public chanted an allusive epigram at the debut of his 1920 comedy Una señora: El ilustre Benaventeha estrenado Una señora,y a coro dice la gente:¡Ya era hora! (102) Considering the open secret surrounding Benavente’s private life, audiences would have been predisposed to recognize references to homosexuality in his works. Critics Javier Huerta Calvo and Emilio Peral Vega point out that such allusions are most abundant in Benavente’s early modernista plays such as Cuento de primavera (1892), which features a sexually ambiguous incarnation of the mythological cupbearer Ganymede (67). For them, such works demonstrate Benavente’s conviction that “la diferencia sexual es enriquecedora, si sabemos trascender convenciones sociales y prejuicios morales” (74). In his 1919...