Staging the senex : Aging masculinities in the theater of Miguel de Cervantes and Federico García Lorca

Abstract

Staging the senex: Aging masculinities in the theater of Miguel de Cervantes and Federico García Lorca José I. Badenes To what degree is an old man identified as a man? Is he seen more in terms of his gender or his age? According to Edward H. Thompson, men who are old are relatively invisible in contemporary culture. As a result, discussions of old men and their masculinities in gender studies in general and in the field of men’s studies in particular are rare. Most of the available research is in gerontology, which emphasizes men’s aging processes and the medical problems they face as they get older, but eschews gender issues. Therefore, because of “[a]ging scholars’ inattention to old men combined with men’s studies lack of concern with old men” (Calasanti and King 4), contemporary discourse on how old age shapes masculinity is scarce. This is particularly so in literary studies, where the analysis of representations of men that are old is minimal. The old man married to a younger wife is a conventional figure of European, mainly comic, drama, traced all the way back to antiquity. The senex (as he is known in classical Roman literature) is usually associated with decrepitude and sexual impotence. He is portrayed as tyrannical and is therefore hated by those around him, particularly his wife who wants to be rid of him. Simultaneously, he is also constructed as an object of ridicule and laughter with whom his wife and others can have their mocking revenge in the long run. Anthony Ellis, in his book Old Age, Masculinity and Early Modern Drama, has studied the development of this figure during the early modern period, particularly in Italian and English drama. Early modern Spanish plays, influenced by the Italian commedia dell’arte, featured the old man – the vejete – as one of its stock characters as well. In two of his comic and satirical entremeses, El juez de los divorcios and El viejo celoso, Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) deploys the character of the old man to critique societal [End Page 335] values, such as marriage, honor, honra, and the role of men and women in society. Influenced by Cervantes, 20th century author Federico García Lorca’s (1898–1936) farsas, La zapatera prodigiosa and Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín, has recourse to the figure of the senex as well in order to address issues of his time dealing with personal integrity, public reputation, constructions of gender, and the relationships between men and women. However, his is a different treatment of the character of the old man than Cervantes’s viejos. Whereas Cervantes’s old men tend to be negatively portrayed, García Lorca’s characters are more sympathetically treated. García Lorca’s is a deconstruction of Cervantes’s old men. Though scholars have studied Cervantes’s and García Lorca’s old men in these comic plays separately and jointly in the past,1 none have examined them as men that are old.2 They tend to emphasize their age rather than their gender. Through Cervantes’s and García Lorca’s comic plays, this essay examines continuities and discontinuities in early modern and modern intersections between old age, masculinity, and sexuality and how they are mutually constructed. While the viejos in Cervantes’s entremeses adhere to a traditional model of masculinity that constructs them as “failed” men to critique early modern society’s preoccupations with genital virility, García Lorca’s old men reflect a creative understanding of aged masculinity that emphasizes intimacy over sexual performance. Both Miguel de Cervantes’s El juez de los divorcios and El viejo celoso and Federico García Lorca’s La zapatera prodigiosa and Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín deal with unhappy marital situations because of age differences. In El juez de los divorcios, the first couple to appear before the judge consists of an old man, the Vejete, from whom his younger wife Mariana seeks separation because “no pued[e] sufrir sus impertinencias, ni estar contino atenta a curar todas sus enfermedades, que son sin número” (45). In...