“The Mark of Zorro” (originally published serialized under the title “The Curse of Capistrano”) was published in 1919 and written by Johnston McCulley. It’s set at a time when California was still Spanish and Los Angeles was a small town with a military outpost. And in this setting we have a character who refuses to play the machismo game - Don Diego Vega.
A word of warning here - while the novel is old and there are oodles of movie and TV versions of it, too, I will discuss plot points and plot twists in this post. If you haven’t consumed the story in any way before and don’t want to encounter spoilers, do not read on - read the book or watch one of the movies, then come back. Personally, I suggest the book - it’s fun to read, if a little purple in prose sometimes.
As a matter of fact, the men shown with most machismo in the book are Captain Ramon and Sergeant Gonzales - two less-than-stellar characters. Ramon’s inability to deal with being rejected by a woman leads to the big climax at the end and Gonzales, while more amendable, still is a brute who thinks nothing of bullying others.
Don Diego falls into the other extreme: phlegmatic and often described as ‘lifeless’, he spends his life complaining that people are always going on about bloodshed and violence instead of music and poetry. Here the first spoiler: Don Diego is Zorro. So the man who is so little ‘manly’ in his ways is, at the same time, the dashing highwayman who is very much a Southern Californian version of Robin Hood - robbing those who deserve it, punishing those who abuse the helpless. The man who complains about a ride of four miles in good weather is the same man who will ride for half the night at high speed to escape the soldiers. The man who, everyone is sure, can’t use the blade he might sometimes carry is a master swordsman who can defeat even the best fighters. And the man who never raises his voice can be a fearless leader who lays out a strategy and inspires others to follow his lead. Don Diego is a hidden badass of a special kind.
Overly Sarcastic Productions have done a very good trope talk about the regular ‘crouching moron, hidden badass’ trope. While Don Diego is not a moron as a such, he certainly is more of a comic relief in his overplayed suffering.
The story opens with Gonzales, characterizing him while also giving the reader the necessary basic information by having the sergeant rave about Senor Zorro (Mr. Fox) who has become a bane of the highway between the missionaries, always being where the good sergeant, who would easily defeat him, is not. It then brings in Don Diego, easily introducing him to the reader as the ‘weakling’ he seems to be. And finally, it introduces us to Senor Zorro, who heard about Gonzales’ wish to cross blades with him and makes it possible.
In the scene of their duel, Gonzales is never shown as inept. He’s a man who makes his money with his sword, being a soldier, and who has been established as a man who is very good at this. This is preserved, he’s shown as a good fighter - but Zorro is better. After the defeat at the hands of the ‘pretty highwayman’, Gonzales is well-motivated for the rest of the novel to find Zorro and bring him in - dead or alive. After all, Gonzales is a ‘real’ man and that means he has to have his revenge.
The story then focuses on Don Diego and the task set for him by his father: find a wife and found a family. In a society where the pretty senoritas are to be courted extensively, lifeless Don Diego is tired by the mere thought of serenading or such follies. He wishes to marry the daughter of an old acquaintance of his father who has fallen in disgrace and expects for it to be a simple matter, given his family is wealthy and influential. Needless to say, the woman in question, Senorita Lolita (no relations to another Lolita, I’m sure), outright refuses him.
A few hours later, the pretty senorita then meets Zorro, who is every inch the man to woo a woman, and falls for him instead. Again, remember: Don Diego and Zorro are one and the same.
While her parents, realizing it will restore their status, push for a marriage between Don Diego and Lolita (or a marriage between her and Captain Ramon, until he shows his true colours), Lolita insists she will only marry the man her heart beats for, even if he’s just a lowly outcast.
The story climaxes after Captain Ramon has claimed that Lolita’s parents are traitors (after trying to force himself on her and being thwarted by Zorro) and in league with the highwayman, which they are not. Only hours earlier, Zorro has roused several young noblemen of the area, taunting them and pointing out that they and nobody else can end many injustices the readers have witnessed or heard about during the story. Making them his band - though Gonzales claimed long before that Zorro had a band, which he didn’t then -, he utilizes them to free Lolita and her parents, incarcerated unjustly and in an unfitting manner for a hidalgo and his family.
Later on, he calls out Ramon, forcing him to admit to the governor that his ‘proof’ for the treachery was fake, and then duelling him - making the villainous captain the only victim Zorro kills.
However, fitting with the masculinity of Zorro on the whole, it is not Zorro alone who wins the day in the end. As a matter of fact, he and Lolita are seconds from being killed and he’s about to show her his face, as he promised, when his new friends, the young noblemen in the area, come in and form a shield between the house he’s hiding in and the soldiers - knowing their status will make it impossible for the governor to just send the soldiers against them.
Roused from their ordinary lives by Zorro, remembering that they and their families are the real power in the area, the young men demand of the governor to cease the actions against Lolita’s family, relinquish control of the southern area of California, and grant amnesty to Zorro. Knowing his career is over once the noble families gang up on him, the governor acquiesces. Now, the ending might have been a deus ex machina in other cases, but it’s built up well in the novel, so it feels deserved.
It is only afterwards that Don Diego unmasks himself and gives everyone the story of how and why he became Zorro - making his father, who had long given up on his son, the proudest man in all of Los Angeles, no doubt.
What a writer can learn from this is that even in a setting with a certain idea of what makes a man, it’s always possible to play with that and have your main character be someone different. While Zorro matches both Captain Ramon and Sergeant Gonzales as a fighter and, one might presume, as a man, he isn’t looking down on the helpless, but fights for them (and this is what he really teaches the other nobles). He’s not fighting for glory or makes it his way of earning an income, he takes up the sword because he is needed. He also makes it clear that Senor Zorro will disappear now, since his work is done and a married man shouldn’t risk his life like that.
It might be easier to write a straight hero whom everyone knows to be a hero, but sometimes, having a hero who doesn’t appear heroic is more interesting. Having a character, male or female or non-binary, who isn’t as you’d expect is always interesting and makes for more diverse and thus more interesting stories.
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