Redressing Ana Caro's Valor, agravio y mujer

Ana Caro's comedy "Valor, agravio y mujer" presents readers with the dilemma of how to resolve the heroine's male attire with the play's energetic defense of women and its challenges to established categories of class. This study suggests that reading the play as a defense of justice releases it from this tension, allowing it to signify in closer proximity to Caro's objective than reading it according to standards of gender. Scripting justice allowed Caro to avenge her heroine's dishonor and normalize female wit and self-defense. In accordance with justiciary poetics, the ending qualifies as unconditionally sound and gratifying to the public, whose members would have celebrated Leonor's ability to provide don Juan with precisely what he had given her: dishonor, and outdo him by leading him to correction of his own errors. Leonor not only delivers tit for tat, but in the process betters don Juan's performance of masculinity by modeling the social attributes of virtue for him while dressed as a man, only to claim those virtues for women when she reveals herself as Leonor. Finally, her ability to attain reconciliation and marriages by outwitting the man who abandoned her contrasts with his practice of dishonesty and unfaithfulness and further exalts Caro's energetic and admirable protagonist. The play's marriage ending rewards the heroine with exactly what she wants: marriage, troped as social legitimacy.