The Spanish Daughter

The Spanish Daughter focuses on female characters but carves out space to consider and critique masculinity. The novel stresses the link between gender and performance, as Puri dons her husband’s clothes and tries to pass as a man. Gesturing to the proverb “Clothing makes the man,” Puri’s disguise creates a male identity that allows her to view the interactions between men and to feel the freedom that comes with masculine identity. As she acts as a man, however, she begins to feel both the unwritten expectations and restrictions for men and the depths of their differences as individuals. Her view of men originates with her mother, who, abandoned by Don Armand, “always said that men were only useful when they were gone” (30). These judgments become part of a script that Puri performs toward men, thinking that all men share a communal identity.

Martin embodies this traditional masculine ideal most easily. He is a strong working man, and Puri notices her poor performance most clearly in his presence. For example, walking around the plantation together, Puri has a hard time dealing with the muddy terrain. She soon realizes her mistake: “Men didn’t care if their shoes got a little soiled or wet” (84-85). Martin later acknowledges that he found Puri as Cristóbal strange and tested her, to gauge her manhood. Puri notices the differences between Martin in Cristóbal, noting her husband’s hand was smooth in comparison to Martin’s. This shows a difference in how masculinity manifests between classes, with Cristóbal sharing more with Laurent than Martin. Laurent, for his part, provides an additional view of masculinity as a gay man. Each of these men behaves differently and has different values, and accessing male-only spaces allows Puri to interrogate her flat perspectives about men.

Performing as her husband, Puri also discovers how difficult being a man is and how men constantly negotiate masculinity. Even with her costume and prosthetic beard, her behavior makes her the target of suspicion considering the unwritten rules she often breaks. She offers to prepare her siblings chocolate but realizes that “Men [do] not prepare anything for others (unless it involve[s] alcohol)” (66). Likewise, masculinity does not protect Puri, though it does offer her an elevated social standing. Forced to perform masculinity, she rides the wildest horse and takes a punch from Don Fernando toward the end of the novel. Men are frequently forced to assert their masculinity through violence, a new experience for Puri. Ultimately, her performance as Cristóbal is more than skin deep, and she reflects “the more I impersonated Cristóbal, the more it affected my psyche” (184). Puri’s time living as her husband changes her—rather than see masculinity as a costume, she sees the full range of experiences that might make one a man.