Zayas y Sotomayor, María de - Laura J. Gorfkle (essay date September 1995)
Laura J. Gorfkle (essay date September 1995)
SOURCE: Gorfkle, Laura J. “Seduction and Hysteria in María de Zayas's Desengaños Amorosos.” Hispanofila 115 (September 1995): 11-28.
[In the following essay, Gorfkle explores Zayas's attitude toward female sexuality and gender as it is expressed in her Desengaños amorosos.]
The woman novelist must be an hysteric. Hysteria … is simultaneously what a woman can do both to be feminine and to refuse femininity, within patriarchal discourse.
Juliet Mitchell, Women: The Longest Revolution.
María de Zayas's collection of short fiction, Desengaños amorosos, first published in 1647, is a shocking testimony of violent acts that men perpetrate against women, including rape, torture, extortion and murder, apparently ubiquitous in the author's social milieu.1 At first glance, the novellas seem to read as a critique of a...
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