The balcony of the Chapín, or the vain architecture of shoes in early modern Spain

Abstract

This paper explores the role shoes played in the regulation of sex and gender in early modern Spain. A key component of a sartorial code identified with prostitution and civil status, the chapines became the object of self-fashioning for women, as well as the target of control of their sexuality and subjectivity. “The Balcony of the Chapín” analyzes the correspondences of representation of these kinds of shoes in Lope de Vega's play El perro del hortelano [The Dog in the Manger], the theatrical home of Tristán, Marcela, Diana, and Teodoro, and in a series of regulation texts (edicts, laws, and treatises by moralistas) that sought to contain the wearing of such shoes. Rather than separating the “free” expression of this footwear in the fantasy of theater from the “contained” prescription of the regulation texts, the goal of this article is to tease out how the wearing of these shoes by women responded to a more complex agency than mere banality (the “vain architecture” of the balcony of the chapines uttered by Tristán) or transgression. The articulation of desires, such as to be and to look taller or to keep the hem of the dress from getting soiled in the streets, help readers of this early modern period understand that the wearing of these shoes did not respond to a mere desire to transgress, or to fall into any of the abject categories of the wife, the whore or the servant, but to project an image of one's own, not necessarily aligned with one particular, prefabricated identity.