Sedução e honra no Auto dos Enfatriões

Abstract

The masculine main characters of Auto dos Enfatriões' two narratives, Feliseu and Anfatrião, show, with their sayings and doings, the functioning of two important categories of masculinity: seduction and honour. This study aims to explore how Feliseu and Anfatrião's masculine subjectivity develops around the tension between their desires and wants and the inevitability of the sixteenth-century hegemonic ideals of "being a man". If Feliseu's case shows the intricacies of seduction, even endowed with a homosocial character, and unveils the possible masculine sufferings due to matrimony's patriarchal definition, Anfatrião's story reveals how a present suffering could be profitable in the future, specially when the reward is an affiliation to an ideal of masculinity impossible to achieve without divine aid.