Tales of Seduction: The Figure of Don Juan in Spanish Culture (review)

Abstract

Wright, sarah. Tales of Seduction: The Figure of Don Juan in Culture. London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007. xvii + 285 pp.The bibliography of scholarship about Don Juan legend resembles catalogue in Don Giovanni in both its length and its geographical scope. And as in Leporello's aria - Ma in Ispagna son gia mille tre - roll particularly long in Hispanic context. The latest addition to scholarly list, number 1,004 if you will, Sarah Wright's Tales of Seduction: The Figure of Don Juan in Culture, which examines twentieth- century incarnations of figure in Spain. Its analyses draw attention to some little-known but fascinating iterations of story. The study, however, not so much a monograph as a collection of essays that revolve loosely around a common theme.To extent that book has a goal or unifying thesis, it would be to show the different uses to which Don Juan has been put throughout twentieth century in Spain (20). Each of its chapters, except for one, illustrates a different way in which myth has been employed. The first explores how writers have used Don Juan legend to define national identity and to respond to loss of empire after War of 1898. The second examines myth as a site for exploring changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality in 1920s. The third describes appropriation of seducer in Francoist ideology. The fourth chapter - exception - does not describe a use so much as a challenge that revisions of myth must confront: problem of recovering newness of a play that has been repeated so often that many Spaniards know large sections by heart. The fifth and final chapter examines how Don Juan legend has been appropriated as a critique of capitalist consumption.Wright begins her study with a little-known woman writer, Blanca de los Rios, who she situates within context of 1898 debates about decline of Spanish race. In her 1907 novel Las hijas de Don Juan, de los Rios represents seducer as a symbol of decadence of Spain. An inveterate drunk and womanizer, her Don Juan has, through his recklessness and pernicious influence, doomed his daughters to prostitution and tuberculosis. In first part of chapter 1, Wright helpfully relates novel and its characters to nineteenth- century medical theories about degeneracy and eugenics. The second part of chapter, however, flounders when she attempts to project a commentary on colonialism onto a passage of novel. The scene in question evokes a church filled with working-class congregants and describes how religious aura of setting transforms their faces: aquellos rostros de chulas que en la vida tendrian gestos zainos y picantes, alli descoloridas, convalecientes, fervorosos, alumbrados por luz de cirios y fulgores matinales, se espiritualizaban, conmovian hasta el llanto. Wright reads into these lines subtle racial overtones and interprets passage as a blending of New and Old Worlds. A new child, she writes, is implicitly produced from union between Don Juan colonizer and ('dark-skinned and common') women. But these women and children are simultaneously made paler, symbolically colonized (41). This forced interpretation undermines Wright's subsequent argument, which situates de los Rios's work within an intellectual current that sought a solution to Spain's decadence in regenerating and redeeming influence of its colonies.The second chapter of study turns to doctor and essayist Gregorio Maranon, who famously associated donjuanismo with homosexuality. The first part of chapter chronicles evolution of Maranon's ideas and situates them within their intellectual context. The second half deals with reception of these theories in popular culture and in works of contemporaries such as Ortega y Gasset. …