Seduction and Hysteria in María de Zayas's Desengaños Amorosos
[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 society that has abandoned all serious pretensions to conform to the honor code, widely divulged by the literature of the period, according to which men must guarantee their honor by protecting female virtue.2 In response to her male contemporaries who denigrate women's virtue in word and deed and create fiction or “lies” (“novelar” or “engañar”) that represent women as the “fallen angel,” Zayas promises to use fiction to reveal the truth (“desengañar”). She will protect women, and hence, strengthen the honor code, by providing a series of “scenarios” of seduction that will bring to women's consciousness the tragic consequences of the arousal of female desire. At the same time she will expose the slander to which the men of her time subjected women.3
Yet as more than one bewildered critic has pointed out, Zayas contradicts her stated intent to uphold traditional values as she obsessively interrogates the nature of female desire. Indeed, the detailed analyses of woman's sexual awakening, either in the form of sexual activity or its impassioned disavowal, confer vitality to the narration, as Juan Goytisolo asserts: “Las escenas y alusiones sexuales infunden un soplo de vida al material inerte de los recursos y esquemas de la novela” (98). The assorted descriptions of erotic sentiment clearly constitute the most captivating or “seductive” scenes in these tales, engendering an uncanny narrative excess that the author is unable to contain.4 In this paper, I would like to explore Zayas's conflictive attitudes toward female sexuality and gender, and the disorder they produce in the narrative. The psychic or symptomatic effects of what in psychoanalytic theory is referred to as “hysteria,” a female disease emerging from woman's ambivalence with regard to her sexual identity, inform, as I will argue, the underlying contradictions in Zayas's text.
Although hysteria was first identified as a widespread female malady with the clinical studies of Charcot and Freud, its origins can be traced to Antiquity. Having emerged with impetus in the sexually repressive culture of the Victorian period, hysteria can provide insights on the representation of gender and sexuality in earlier social and literary texts, particularly those of the Golden Age. Cultural historians of the early Modern period affirm that during the decline of the Spanish empire, definitions of apppriateness in gender and sexual roles became increasingly rigid. Referring to Counter Reformation attitudes on the vigilance and control of female sexuality, Elizabeth Perry speaks of a “theology of purity.” According to this belief system, the order of a crumbling society could only be maintained by the physical enclosure of the “wandering woman” within the institutions of the confessional, the convent, marriage or brothel. The emergence of sexual disorder or “deviance” to which all women were prone could thus be prevented. Within the divine or providential order, woman's inferior position was biologically determined and divinely ordained. She required man's mandates and protection, that in turn limited her autonomy and self-direction:
The partnership of secular and ecclesiastical authorities that was so apparent in early modern Seville had a lasting impact on gender. Its answer to the question of what is Woman transformed all women into daughters of perfidious Susana. Defining women as ideally pure, it also emphasized their dangerous sexuality, their weakness and propensity for disorder that require special protection.
(Perry 179)
The medical concept of hysteria in seventeenth century Europe, moreover, was defined in analogous terms. The “hyster” or womb was believed to rise up and “wander” about the body, causing pressure to the internal organs, creating mental “disorders” and anxiety. The doctor's job was to “cure” the malady by causing the womb to be pressed back to its assigned position. Thus, historically, hysteria functioned as a trope for the female condition, a disorderly infringement of the bodily (sexual and reproductive) functions on the rational ones, a sliding across boundaries that law, science, and religion would try to contain (Heath 27-32). Two more centuries would pass, however, before a theory of hysteria and its relation to female sexuality would be fully developed, providing a sexual ideology of which Freud was mere repository, rooted in Counter Reformation Europe.5
In what follows, I will briefly review the family plot of Freud's most celebrated case history of hysteria, “Dora, Fragment of an Analysis” and then trace some of the ways in which Zayas's female narrators and protagonists engender hysterical narratives. Following French feminist Catherine Clément's re-reading of Freud, I will analyze the narrative plots as “scenes” of seduction, in order to expose the manner in which rigid definitions of the “feminine” are trapped within the limits of an “ideological theater” (83) which the author hysterically reenacts or mimes, only to reveal their rhetorical underpinnings. Clément's perspective of ideology as “spectacle” will further allow me to question how a feminist reading of Zayas's “symptomizing” fiction asks us to transcend those ideological limits,—to find ways out.6
FREUD AND DORA
Freud defined hysteria as a psychosomatic illness suffered mainly by women, characterized by a variety of symptoms, including disjointed discourse, aphonia, paralysis, difficulty of breathing, fainting spells, and false pregnancies, each of which reenacts some aspect of the sexual act. Freud initially believed the symptoms were triggered by a memory or reminiscence of a seduction by a father or father figure. However, after developing his theory on the sexual fantasies of children, which were later to lead to the formulation of the oedipal complex, he revised his findings. The aetiology of hysteria is not derived from real seductions, but from fictitious ones, that is, from fantasies of seduction that disguise the truth of forbidden infantile desires. In literary texts, as well as in the text of the hysterical patient, symptoms are manifested physically by the female subject, but are also embedded discursively, in the gaps and displacements of the female-authored narrative. As Bernstein demonstrates in her analysis of Gallop's re-reading of Freud, the task of the psychoanalytic literary critic is to elicit what the narrative represses by “seiz[ing] on points of textual ambiguity as symptomatic moments which [he or] she investigates for ‘rootstocks’ of significance” (197-198).
Dora's narrative begins with the sexual interchange of two women. Dora accuses her father of wishing to deliver her as a sexual consort to Herr K., so that he may enjoy the sexual services of Frau K., Herr K.'s wife. Freud considered Dora's harsh rejection of her “suitor” pathogenic, since a heterosexual desire for the virile male, and, if possible, marriage, would be the normal repetition of her infantile desire for her father. As he outlines in his theory of Oedipus, the little girl assumes her femininity when she recognizes her condition of lack (castration), repudiates her originary love for her mother, and desires the phallus and a series of phallic substitutes. Freud intends to bring to Dora's consciousness her repressed incestual desire for her father which has been “converted” into an assortment of bodily or somatic (hysterical) symptoms. But Dora's symptoms do not disappear. Freud finally confesses, albeit parenthetically, that this is because Dora's story “deviates.” It contains a double plot. She maintains a desire for her father, which leads her to a rivalry with his lover Frau K., but also identifies with him, harboring an active masculine desire for Frau K.7 She desires simultaneously the mother and the father. With her oscillating hysterical sexual aims and symptoms, she defies Freud's oedipal plot, by which gender and sexuality were to be regularized and hierarchically ordered. In the end, she cuts off treatment, and refuses his (Freud's) seduction, the seduction of the Father's Law of sexuality, the Father's knowledge.8
SCENE I: THE GUILT OF THE FATHER
Clément's first scene corresponds to Freud's first theory of seduction, the Father's seduction of the daughter. The hysteric suffers in her kinship relations because her father, uncle, or brother-in-law acts as a sexual aggressor. He is the guilty one, arousing prohibited feelings in the female victim that will convert into hysterical bodily suffering (Clément 41-45). Although at the time that Freud wrote up Dora's narrative he had discarded his first theory of sexual trauma for a theory of infantile sexual fantasy, Dora's story, as feminist scholars have pointed out, can clearly be read both ways, as reality as well as a fantasy. In the “realist” plot, we could expect to find a repetition of the daughter's original submission to the Father's perverse law, which commands: ‘You shall love none other than me.’ Clément affirms that in these plots, the hysterical daughter, while always looking for an ideal man as a substitute to eradicate her earlier relation, is condemned to fail at constituting an exogamous interchange. Precisely this interdiction informs the plot action of many of the tales in Zayas's fiction.
Zayas's sixth tale, “Amar sólo por vencer” resembles Dora's story. The story begins when the pubescent Laurela, the youngest of three sisters, becomes subject to an ambiguous attraction. Don Esteban, disguised as a woman (Doña Estefanía), has entered Laurela's household as her lady-in-waiting in order to seduce her. While “she” spends all day singing love songs to Laurela, affirming that it is possible for women to love other women, Don Bernardo falls in love with “her.” I would suggest that he sees in the young “woman” a double of his disarming, seductive daughter, who, with her beauty and charm, has captivated all those around her. His desire for his biological daughter, an unacceptable object choice, leads him to seek a surrogate object, Doña Estefanía. While attempting to seduce her with increasing despair, he delivers his daughter to Don Enrique, just as Dora's bedridden father exchanges Dora as his “nurse” for Frau K., delivering her to Herr K.
Don Bernardo, however, is unsuccessful in persuading his daughter to accept the suitor of his choice because of Laurela's same-sex attraction to Doña Estefanía, one which she is able to act on when she discovers his masculine identity. Similarly, Dora's father, with whom Freud identified, is unsuccessful in persuading Dora to accept Herr K. because of her same-sex attraction to Frau K. In the end, the perverse father can only try to reinstate his Law by force, not by seduction. Freud, the psychoanalytic father, egged on by Dora's father, will try to coerce Dora into accepting Herr K. by instilling in her the fear of being cast out as mad, disordered, hysterical. And Don Bernardo? If he cannot have (control of) the daughter, as object of desire or as object of exchange, none other will. Unable to locate the substitute daughter, he casts out the real one, murdering her for her transgressions. What he kills when he murders Laurela is the daughter's embodiment of the recalcitrant love object (she refuses to submit to his rule), of the rival (they both love the same woman/man), and of the rebel, (she forms part of a sexual circuit with her father in which sexual aims have become deviant—ambivalent, unstable, and free floating, a fact that undermines his own masculine identity or “hombría”). Doña Estefanía, the “hermaphrodite,” acts as a pivotal figure in the dynamic between father and daughter, provoking a series of equivocal desires in which one can more than intue an undercurrent of frustrated incestual desire.
Another family triangle is reproduced in “Estragos que causan el vicio.” Florentina and Magdalena have lived like sisters, their father and mother having married when they were very young. The amorous conflict centers on the affair between Florentina and her brother-in-law, Don Dionís. Although the narrator of the story blames Florentina for seducing or being seduced by Don Dionís and for the tragedy that results in Magdalena's death, in fact, Florentina is victim of an incestual triangle. Florentina is obliged to accompany Magdalena during her courtship, and comes to identify with her sister's role of love object. She is later brought to live with the couple after they are married. The couple are to take on the responsibility of finding her a husband, which, given the primary circuit of desire, is not fulfilled. The incestual and adulterous relationship that ensues results in Don Dionís's murder of his servants, wife and, finally, his own suicide.
The failure of exogamous relations occurs in other tales in the collection as well. Women are not exchanged, but become subject to the seductions of father figures, primarily brother-in-laws. In “El verdugo de su esposa,” Rosaleta is persecuted by a brother-in-law figure, Juan. Juan and Pedro are like brothers and have always been inseparable. Juan was brought up in Don Pedro's house and continues to live with him after Pedro marries Rosaleta. His seductive enticements, although not responded to in kind by Rosaleta, lead to her death. When Rosaleta accuses the perpetrator, Don Pedro stabs his wife to death. Beatriz is the object of seduction by her brother-in-law in “La perseguida triunfante.” Persecuted unmercifully by Federico, she falls subject to untold bodily, mental, and spiritual sufferings as a result of her rejection of him.9
The stories analyzed above are “symptomatic” inasmuch as the victimization of the female protagonists are a reminiscence, a repetition of the relations of the original child to the unforgettable, perverse, seductive Father (Clément 44). By means of the tragic repercussions that the early scenario later produces, Zayas points an accusatory finger at the social structure (the Father's law and the Father's identity) in its family roots. The ideological underpinnings of that structure are further challenged when the events occurring in the tales produce an affect on the narrators of the tales.
In a relationship of cause and effect, the daughter's inability to attain exogamous relations in the inner plots results in the recurrence or repetition of failure in the frame, but one which transforms the victim into rebel. Having invited her female companions to tell stories of seductions on the eve of her wedding in order to instruct herself on matters of the heart, Doña Lisis now refuses matrimony to Don Diego. She decides instead to enter the convent with her beloved servant Zelima (Isabel) and her mother Laura. The failures of the heroines in the stories to find the “ideal man” have brought to her consciousness the indomitable power of the paternal figure, which can only be avoided by the abandonment of marriage and the family, the institutions upon which the social structures of her society and its concomitant values were founded. She decides, in a rebellious gesture, to quit the circus, shut down the show. She will take the cloth: “me voy a salvar de los engaños de los hombres” (509).10
THE SECOND SCENE: THE GUILT OF THE DAUGHTER
Clément's second scene corresponds to Freud's revision of his theory of hysteria. Freud's discovery of infantile sexuality and the fantasies arising from it exonerates the father. Now the blame falls on the daughter. She is a liar and a fraud, who accuses others of “things” which she herself has done or thought. In the hysterical plots that unfold in this scenic category, we can expect to find the motif of performance. In their later relationships, women pass themselves off as chaste, but they are really guilty of shameful desires and deeds. As analysts or critics, we must uncover the deception or spectacle, discover the hysteric's beastliness, and rehabilitate her through various repressive strategies (45-49).
In Zayas's fiction, three groups of plots can be charted, each one containing a repetition of the originary scene described by Freud, but at the same time, a retextualization of it that questions, if not absolves, women's guilt. On the one hand Zayas denounces in her plots the laws of representation by which women are defined under patriarchy: the sexual women, the hysteric, who “lives with her body in the past” and “transforms it into a theater for forgotten scenes” (Clément 5). On the other hand, she subverts this representation when the narrators reveal motives which will exonerate the victimized women, or when the female heroines are made to return after death, as saints or martyrs, to confirm their innocence. In a first group of plots, there is a persecution of women who are presumed guilty but are ultimately found to be innocent; in a second group, the sexual woman is found to be guilty in the eyes of the law, but her guilt is mitigated or eliminated by the uncovering of circumstances relevant to her actions; and in a third group, the categories of innocence and guilt are no longer clearly opposed or even distinguishable.
The collection abounds with plots of the first type. We have a cast of women who abide by the cultural norms defining the sexual conduct of women. They are virtuous, honest, angelic women, who shun any display of themselves as sexual beings. Doña Ana in “El traidor en contra de su sangre,” Doña Blanca in “Mal presagio casar lejos,” Doña Inés in “La inocencia castigada,” Beatriz in “La perseguida triunfante,”—all of these are women who defend their virtue and their husband's honor at all cost. Their virtue, however, is met with the rage of fathers, husbands, and brothers, who, eager to maintain their identity-in-the-world, obstinately persist in the persecution of a guilty victim. For them, women can only mime innocence.
In “El traidor contra su sangre,” Doña Ana falls prey to Don Alonso's persecution. An innocent and virtuous wife, she is persecuted, we are clearly told, not because she has hidden a sexual transgression, but because she has not inherited enough wealth to satisfy Alonso's father. He eradicates the female sexual body, the perennial threat to his identity, by chopping up and throwing the body down a well and later hiding the head in a cave. The head is eventually found, its original beauty still intact, illuminating the virtue of the young woman.
In “La inocencia castigada,” Doña Inés is accused by her husband and sister-in-law of succumbing to Don Dionís's seduction. Not only is her innocence eventually proven, but a temperament far removed from the one attributed to her is revealed. Unlike other female victims in these tales, Inés shows a desire to actively seek out means to protect her reputation. She discovers Don Dionís's aborted attempt to seduce her, and hiding the mayor in the next room so that he might hear the conversation, manages to make the young man confess his plan of seduction. She exonerates herself this time and is able to ward off the seduction in secrecy. The second time he pursues her, however, his onslaught is successful. Using effigy magic, he rapes her on successive occasions.
Although her innocence is again proved logically and legally, the event has been publicized and Inés's husband is predisposed to assert his honor by imputing guilt. Her punishment will represent the bodily abasement he attributes to her as well as the eradication of the threat her bodily desire represents to him. She is thrown into a small cubicle in the walls of their new lodgings, only large enough for her to stand up in. When she is removed six years later, she is miraculously found alive, buried under own excrements, her cell a stinking, fetid space. Her hair is wild, dishevelled and filled with worms. She is a reflection of bodily filth and beastliness. Her body is all open wounds, and at the same time consumed, reduced to bones. Yet something has changed in the representation her husband would bestow on her. In her abasement, she has become exalted. Blinded to the material world, she can see only Him for whom she has undergone so much suffering. We are told that her body is quickly restored to its original beauty and health, and soon thereafter she retires to a convent where she lives her life healing others.
Two other martyrs, Doña Blanca, in “Mal presagio casar lejos,” and Beatriz in “La perseguida triunfante” deserve mention. Doña Blanca's only crime is to have been an unfortunate witness to her husband's homosexual affair with his young page. He has projected on to her what he perceives as the insidiousness of his own sexual misconduct, accusing her of adultery in order to maintain his male identity. Doña Blanca's veins are cut and she is left to bleed to death, but four years later her dead body is found intact. Her glowing skin is evidence of her chastity. Beatriz is also proven innocent of the crimes alleged against her. She has not seduced her brother-in-law Federico; it is he, as the narrator has already informed us, who has seduced her. Yet in spite of her virtuous conduct, her eyes are gouged out, she is left to die of hunger, and she is publicly accused of conspiracy to murder. After the occurrence of each misfortune, the Virgin Mary appears to her, performing various miracles on her behalf, and eventually conferring on her the extraordinary power to cure others.
In these stories of saints and miracles, the message is clear: if virtuous women must endure unjust accusations and punishments, there is no ordinary mortal woman free of the slander and persecution of men. By means of the motif of the miracle, the revelation of the guilty penitence as mimicry, and the exposure of the illogical contradictions inherent in the ideology of representation, the critique of the representation of women as the guilty hysteric is effected in this group of plots. The persecution of women is not, as it seems, divinely ordained. Simultaneously, the mechanisms by which the ideology is enforced are exposed. The “wayward” woman (the “hyster”) is physically contained by the most vile contrivances: Like Laurela, Doña Inés is imprisoned in the inner walls of a dwelling, while Doña Blanca's dead body is contained in a well. As Elizabeth Ordóñez suggests, the physical imprisonment of many of Zayas's female protagonists reflects the entrapment of women in a system of representation that reduces them to bodily functions, “in which the erotic plot closes in on women, regardless of their innocence” (6).
In the second group of plots, the heroine is discovered to be guilty of her crimes. The female protagonist's sexuality is represented as catastrophic, undermining not only her husband's or father's social identity, but the honor and reputation of all woman, causing the crumbling of the morality of an entire society. In “Esclava de su amante,” Zelima's love for Don Manuel causes her parent's early demise and the death of her rival, Zaida. In “Tarde llega el desengaño,” Doña Lucrecia's illicit desire for Don Martín and her attempt to murder him cause him to distrust all women. Without awaiting further proof of guilt, he believes the slanderous testimony of his black slave, who, driven by jealousy, has falsely accused Elena of adultery. He immediately seeks revenge on Elena, double of Doña Lucrecia, enforcing a harsh and humiliating penance: physical isolation and starvation. In “La más infame venganza,” Camila, Carlos's wife, pays for Octavia's illicit sexual involvement with Carlos. Due to Octavia's misconduct, Camila is first raped by Octavia's brother, and then poisoned by her own husband. In “Estragos que causan el vicio,” Florentina's burning desire for her sister's husband causes the bloody death of an entire household. In “El traidor contra su sangre,” Doña Mencia's secret marriage to Don Enrique brings dishonor to her brother and father.
Yet in all of these tales the guilt of the female protagonist is neutralized by the multiple and varying responses of the audience, as well as by the perspective from which the tale is narrated. In “Esclava de su amante,” Isabel (Zelima) is the narrator of her own story. She presents herself in a manner that exonerates her guilt. Her involvement with Don Manuel was not of her own doing. She was raped and then urged by his sister, her beloved friend, to do whatever necessary to persuade Manuel to marry her. The narration of her dangerous pilgrimage in which, disguised as a moorish slave she pursues her lover in order to restore her honor, moves her listeners to esteem her loyalty, constancy and self-worth, heroically displayed under harrowing circumstances. In “La más infame venganza,” Octavia, a vital and dynamic young woman, falls victim to a man who refuses to marry her only because she is not sufficiently wealthy. Elena is raped and poisoned, not because Octavia's desire is reprehensible, but because women are prohibited from defending their own honor. They must place their reputation in the hands of men who feel no compunction to defend it. Men are the cause of women's misfortunes. In “Tarde llega el desengaño,” Doña Lucrecia's only crime was to have defended her own honor. The young widow sought revenge on her lover, Don Martín, for having broken his vow to keep their affair secret. He later tortures Elena, Lucrecia's double, driven by the impulse to counter the revenge. Finally, in “El traidor contra su sangre,” Doña Mencia is obliged to keep her relationship hidden. Her father wished her to become a nun, so that he would be free to pass his entire inheritance on to her brother Alonso. In this group of plots, the guilt of the hysteric is contingent, attenuated, even annulled. In some instances the opposite view is presented, whereby women's desire is perceived as a right and prerogative. Doña Mencia is indeed entitled to pursue a civil status, to act on a desire which her father and brother have prohibited.
In a third group of plots, we find the blurring of boundaries between the categories of guilty and innocent, by means of the juxtaposition of plots within one tale. In “Tarde llega el desengaño” and “La más infame venganza,” the heroines of the subplots, although never appearing contiguously, are inextricably linked. Elena's conflict begins when the black slave, who has fallen in love with Elena's cousin, seeks revenge for his rejection of her by falsely accusing Elena of having an adulterous relationship with him. Believing her testimony, Don Jaime imposes a punishment that reveals and eradicates Elena's sexual body. While raising the black slave to the position of “wife,” he converts his wife into “beast,” making her crawl in order to enter and exit the house through a small door, and feeding her leftover bones and crumbs under the table. After living in a state of semi-starvation for two years, her body withers. Yet her repressed desire lives and is represented in the body of the other woman, the black slave, whose protruding belly and obese, swollen facial features exude a sexuality that is prohibitive of (white) women. If Zayas consciously condemns sexuality in the tale by means of an overtly racist representation of the black body and its violent and apparently deserved expulsion (her sexual urge has jeopardized the lives of innocent women), she subconsciously reveals the impossibility of divesting any woman of physical embodiment. For, significantly, at the very moment that Don Jaime kills the female body, imputed to the figure of the black slave, Elena dies too. The one cannot live without the other.
In “La más infame venganza,” Octavia and Elena's existence are linked in a similar fashion. Octavia's pre-marital affair with Carlos lead to Elena's unjust punishment, but one which allows the young girl to manifest her repressed bodily desire. When Carlos administers poison to his wife after discovering she has been raped by Octavia's brother, surprisingly, she does not die. Instead, her body swells and grows big. Or, to put it another way, it “symptomizes.” The “innocent” woman and the sexual, “hysterical” woman, both of whom are victims of a metaphysical system and a social structure that deny women a position from which to speak the body, are no longer placed in opposition, but are mutually identifiable in the narrative. Under oppressive conditions that a state of purity engenders, “innocent” women turn themselves into a symptom, becoming their own messages of despair and alienation. The return of the repressed is an attempt against annihilation (Evans, 1991: 214-215).
THIRD SCENE: THE GUILT OF THE MOTHER
Freud tells us that in the psychic history of the hysterical patient, the guilt further disseminates. The girl has been seduced not only by the father, but by the mother as well. Dora is seduced by Frau K.'s “adorable white body,” but also by the not-too-talked-about real mother, who cleans houses but bodies as well,—sexual organs, which she rubs and arouses. In hysterical sagas corresponding to the third family scene, we find a reminiscence of the maternal plot of seduction, in which maternal figures, such as governesses and maids, seduce the daughter. The mother figure is often portrayed ambiguously, as seductive, but also as terrifying and devouring. As Clément affirms, the guilt for seduction, whether it be initiated by the mother or the child, pushes the child toward the father and the oedipal resolution, as a means of escape from the anxiety-ridden desire for the mother (50-52).
The most salient figure of the seductive, sexual mother in Zayas's work is Doña Estefanía in “Amar sólo para vencer.” She is the older and more knowledgeable maid, through whose songs and dialogue Laurela learns of her own sexuality. In the narrator's elliptic narration of the year, Laurela's sexual awakening, the overriding interest in this tale, is revealed in the course of several telling “scenes,” centered around a song of despairing love improvised by Estefanía, followed by a conversation about desire which the song generates. Doña Estefanía's musical talent, her many pleasantries and her physical attributes seduce Laurela. However, after reflecting back to Laurela the heterogeneous nature of her desires by means of her own spectacle of gender, she reveals her true identity. Then, promising to marry her, “she” seduces and abandons her to the ire of her father. The role of the devouring, castrating (m)other is displaced onto Laurela's aunt, Don Bernardo's sister, who schemes the girl's murder.
Although there are several “devouring mother” types in the these tales, persuading or sexually enticing the “daughter” to conform to the Father's Law, often in the figure of a maid, another aggressive feminine figure intervenes with some frequency in Zayas's tales to undermine the fulfillment of the oedipal resolution: the rival. For the hysteric, whose feelings regarding the ambivalence of her sex differ only in quantity with that of her “healthy” female counterpart, other women are viewed ambivalently, inasmuch as they recall the primary figure of the mother: the originary love object, but also the rival, competing for the Father's love. The triangular relationship of rivalry is repeated endlessly in the literature of the period. In Zayas's narrative, however, the rival intervenes, not as a means to foster heterosexual desire or to propel the subject towards the desired object, but to keep the oedipal resolution and unendurable loss (castration) of the female protagonist at bay.
In “Esclava de su amante,” first Alejandra and then Zaida thwart Zelima's efforts to become the object of Manuel's desire. In “Estragos que causan el vicio,” Magdalena prevents Florentina from marrying Don Dionís. Lisis, the hostess of the group of feminine narrators, is unable to marry Juan, her first love, because of the success of her rival, Lisarda, in capturing his heart. Octavia is caught in a relationship of rivalry with Camila in “La más infame venganza,” as is Rosaleta with Angeliana in “El verdugo de su esposa.” In “El traidor contra su sangre,” Clavela schemes with Alonso to kill Doña Mencia. In the first three examples cited, feelings of intense affection between the rivals are evoked. Zelima and Zaida love each other dearly as do Magdalena and Florentina and Lisis and Lisarda. While in limited cases the intervention of the rival figure causes the death of the female protagonist, more frequently it allows the female heroine to escape male subjugation. There is, as it were, a positive function ascribed to the role of rival. Thanks to the rival, Florentina, Octavia, Isabel (Zelima), and Lisis abandon heterosexual love and are able to flee to the convent.
EPILOGUE: THE MATERNAL PLOT
In the Epilogue of the family “drama,” Clément elaborates further on Freud's description of the role of the mother. Everywhere in the hysterical plot, there is the feminine character to whom Freud assigns the role of homosexual object. Dora, identifying with her father's active sexuality, takes her mother as object choice. Having not yet fully identified with her role as object, she fluctuates between the subject and the object position. The hysteric is split between her desire for her father and her desire for her mother (Clément 52-57). We may expect to find an enactment of a maternal scene from the Epilogue in “the bisexual plot,” clearly the most frequent plot type in Zayas's tales, in which the female protagonist expresses an oscillation in her sexual identity and aims. These plots can be broken down into two story types: the development of triangles of desire, involving a young girl's love for both a man and a woman, and the interlacing of double plots in a tale, in which an idealized or more knowledgeable feminine figure is presented to the female protagonist as a means by which she may attain knowledge of her identity as a woman.
In the first plot, the female protagonist's desire circulates between a man and a woman, often a sister of her lover. There is not a rivalry, but a double attraction. In conjunction with this triangular movement, desire further disseminates to a group of women from whom the feminist heroine is inseparable, often sisters, or a circle of servants. In “Mal presagio casar lejos,” Doña Blanca is grief-stricken when faced with the prospect of leaving her country because of her tremendous love for her sisters. The circle of Spanish maids with whom she surrounds herself in Holland replace this first intimate group. In addition, she becomes particularly attached to her sister-in-law, and fellow victim, Marieta: “Con esta señora trabó doña Blanca grande amistad, cobrándose las dos tanto amor, que si no era para dormir, no se dividía la una de la otra …” (350).11
In “Esclava de su amante,” Zelima is inseparable from Doña Eufrasia, Don Manuel's sister, whom she loves deeply:
Esta y yo nos tomamos tanto amor, como su madre y la mía, que de día ni de noche nos dividíamos, que, si no era para ir a dar el común reposo a los ojos, jamás nos apartábamos, o yo en su cuarto, o ella en el mío. No hay más que encarecerlo, sino que ya la ciudad nos celebraba con el nombre de “las dos amigas.”
(131)
In the external narrative frame, Zelima in turn becomes the object of affection of Lisis, who, so enthralled with her new found friendship, is able to forget her afflictions of the heart. The two become inseparable, “cobrándose tanto amor, que no era como de señora y esclava, sino de dos queridas hermanas: sabía muy bien Zelima granjear y atraer a sí la voluntad de Lisis, y Lisis pagárselo en quererla tanto, que apenas se hallaba sin ella” (117).
The second plot type involves the juxtaposition of double plots of erotic intrigue in a single tale, one which leads the reader to reflect on the nature of women's identity. In re-working Freud's analysis of the Dora case, Lacan posits the original thesis that the hysteric's desire for the other woman is not a sexual one but the search for a peculiarly female knowledge about her own identity as a woman. The hysteric loves the person she presumes to know the secret of her sex, the mother as being a living example of sexed reproduction (Evans, 1991: 182). In Zayas's tales, the reader is invited to compare the conduct of each woman in the tale as the protagonists' opposing attitudes about their sexual roles and identities are juxtaposed. Octavia, the sexual woman, is opposed to the innocent Camila; Lucrecia and the black slave are opposed to Elena. Florentina is thrown against Marieta, Zelima against the innocent Zaida, and Estefanía against Laurela. The more sophisticated and knowledgeable women are dynamic and passionate, fascinating not only to their respective female counterparts in the story (when they have knowledge of their existence), but to the reader as well. By means of the juxtaposition of these female characters, the one incarnating a knowledge of the sexed body, the other an ignorance of it, Zayas poses the question of female identity (What is a woman?) in its bodily and sexed dimension.
The knowledge the other woman symbolizes, however, is not exclusively of a sexual nature. What the hysteric might alternately seek in the other woman is an idealized mother, the Madonna, who would be able to tell her the secret of sexless reproduction. The wise, virginal mother figure represents to her a refusal of castration and the resultant desexualization of women as mothers (Evans, 1991: 183). In Zayas's tales, we find important examples of the “ideal” mother, competing against the oedipal one. In “La inocencia castigada,” Inés's sister-in-law, a terrifying mother figure and classic oedipal rival, buries Inés alive in the inner wall of their dwelling in punishment of the young woman's alleged adultery. However, a kind and saintly neighbor woman hears Inés's entreaties to God, saves her, and nurtures her back to health. In “La perseguida triunfante,” the Virgin Mary appears to save Beatriz from her undeserving torments. Beatriz contemplates her in ecstasy: “Que, puestos los ojos en ella, así como estaba de hinojos, se quedó inmóvil y elevada, gran rato absorta en tan gloriosa vista” (459).12 Finally, in the external narrative frame, the women who gather together to share their or other women's misfortunes engage in a discourse and a relationship based on love and nurturance, prohibited in the phallic economy. The act of “telling” enacts a reappropriation of discourse, by means of which the narrator may offer knowledge to other women from the woman's point of view. In re-writing the text of seduction with the woman appearing as speaking and desiring subject, Zayas inscribes the daughter's desire for the (m)other in its multiple and varied registers. She thereby unscreens the phallocentric scheme, which, as Jacobus affirms, relegates relations between women exclusively to the sphere of the “gynaecophilic” (143).
CONCLUSION
A comparative study of the seductive plot and its relationship to the psycho-sexual dynamics of the family uncovers an underlying ambivalence in the unconscious expression of female desire in the female-authored text within a concrete historic context. In her Desengaños amorosos, Zayas constructs a traditional oedipal narrative, in which the female must become a “woman,” accept her passive femininity or be cast out, asserting thus the aristocratic code of honor and the ecclesiastical and secular values which prevailed in her time. Yet due to continued shifts in points of view, the insertion and juxtaposition of double and multiple plots and the chameleonic nature of the heroines themselves, the tales deviate, and the hysterical, female subtext emerges. Within this subtext, circumstances are revealed which undermine the representation of the “wayward” daughter. The guilty finger is pointed back to the Father's Law, and its denial, not only of the expression of female subjectivity, but of any discourse or action that might betray the specificity of women's sexual identity. The symptomatic disjointedness of Zayas's text unveils the artificial nature of the primacy of the phallic law, revealing it as a self-serving construct used to preserve a hierarchy of male privilege, from within the family unit to the broader and more universal macro-social structures.
The analysis of the maternal and bisexual plots in Zayas's fiction further reveals a transcendence of the phallic representation of women. The representation of the feminine is broken up, disordered, both sexually and textually by means of the bisexual and maternal plot. Inés, Laurela, Zelima, Octavia, Beatriz, Florentina, and Lucrecia fluctuate between the active and the passive, the masculine and the feminine, the mother and the father, the oedipal and the preoedipal. Their “hysteria” inscribes the otherness or strangeness which inhabits psychoanalytic theory and literature by underscoring the larger epistemological implications of sexual difference veiled by these fields of knowledge. For women, knowing and being in the world are not experienced in a fixed and polarized state, but in a complex, fluid and forever changing one. Thus, hysteria must not be viewed exclusively as a pathology, but as the only affirmation possible of woman's status as a desiring subject. In Zayas's fiction, ultimately, the hysteria that is femininity represents a condemnation of a gender ideology that is only able to maintain a semblance of its “truth” by resorting to mechanisms such as the enclosure, rape, torture, and murder of women, mechanisms which, unfortunately, are still observable in postmodern societies of the Western world.
Notes
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I wish to express my appreciation to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a Summer Stipend and to the Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Spain's Ministry of Culture and U. S. Universities for a research grant, both of which provided support during the investigative stage of this study.
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There has been much critical debate about the veracity of Zayas's descriptions of female victimization. Griswold posits that Zayas's attack against men corresponds to literary debates of the period that hinge on feminist and anti-feminist attitudes. However Foa affirms that although a literary tradition did exist that could have influenced Zayas, her portrayal of women's victimization had a basis in reality. The historical and philosophical background of that reality is discussed by McKendrick 140-146; Perry 6-13; and Dolzburn 82.
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Critics diverge on their opinion of Zayas's feminism. Departing from the earlier opinion of Vasileski on Zyas's intent to portray the crude reality of her time (117-118), Boyer affirms that Zayas's fiction was written against social attitudes, cultural institutions and literary works which conspired to oppress women (xxiv). Foa confirms this opinion (55 and 84-86) as does Dolz-Blackburn (73-82) and Spieker (154-160). According to Yllera, however, Zayas sacrifices her feminist ideals and accepts the social conservatism of her time (49). Montesa, for his part, affirms that Zayas's preoccupation with sexuality is in overt opposition to the Christian indoctrination she espouses (206).
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According to Foa (133-135) and Senabre (163-172), Zayas's vision of sex and gender attitudes is sustained on two axes, which are at times in contradiction, namely, her feminism and her masculinist didacticism. Boyer affirms that the novellas focus on the interplay between a masculinist perspective and a feminist subtext (xxiv). Ordóñez speaks of an “anxiety of authorship,” according to which the author, struggling against the tradition of the male-authored text, re-creates it, but with submerged meanings (3). Griswold affirms that Zayas argues from both the feminist and anti-feminist sides, reflecting misogynist attitudes toward women in one moment and feminist ones in another. In regard to Zayas's focus on love and desire, Welles affirms the theme of love “contributes a dynamic effect of linear propulsion” (306) and Vasileski calls it an “uncontrolled obsession” (51). Goytisolo sees erotic passion as “la fuerza animadora” in her work (87).
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In his Histoire de la sexualité, I, Foucault posits a “hypothesis of repression,” which originated in the Western world under the influence of the Counter Reformation and culminated in the Victorian Age. For Sánchez Ortega, sexuality was an omnipresent theme in the seventeenth century, although not quite as repressive as in the age of Freud (7-9).
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Clément's revision of Freud's definition of hysteria is instructive, moreover, as a model for feminist criticism of Golden Age literature because at the same time that she critiques Freud's theories, she applies them to literary and social texts that existed prior to Freud's time. Indeed, she shows that Freud's refinement of his theories on hysteria, based on his case studies, were connected to his readings, during 1897, of the inquisitorial persecution of women as sorceresses and witches (sexual deviants) in early modern Europe. For an overview of the various feminist approaches to female-authored texts of the Golden Age and their validity, see Cruz, 212ff.
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Only at the end of his study, however, and in a footnote, does Freud acknowledge the fact that he did not pay sufficient attention to Dora's desire for Frau K (142).
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A plethora of studies on hysteria and its applicability as a theoretical approach to the analysis of gender and sexual difference in literary texts has appeared in the last decade. Beyond Clément's revision of Freud's theories, the studies that I have found most helpful in explaining the complex interrelationship between psychoanalysis and hysteria, and between psychoanalysis, feminism, and literature are Evan's Fits & Starts, Heath's The Sexual Fix, Irigaray's Speculum, and Jacobus's Reading Women Reading, as well as several edited collections: Bernheimer and Kahane's In Dora's Case, Garner, Kahane and Sprengnether's The (M)other Tongue and Hunter's Seduction and Theory. Although I do not cite all of these works directly within the text, their influence informs the theoretical basis of this study.
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Hipólita, in “Al fin se paga todo,” included in Zayas's first volume of novellas, is also seduced by a brother-in-law.
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Passages from the text have been taken from the edition by Alicia Yllera. The rejection of conjugal life was understood as a rebellious attitude toward the “natural” ordering of gender relations in the seventeenth century. For a review of the moral treatises that prescribed such ordering mechanisms, see McKendrick, 144ff and Perry 60-68. Recent investigation on life in the cloister further confirms that a woman's decision to take the cloth was a form of liberation from traditional roles (Arenal and Schlau).
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Smith analyzes “Mal presagio casarse lejos” in terms of women's discourse, or “parler femme,” following Kristeva and Irigaray.
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For an analysis of female archetypes and the symbolism associated with it, see Welles 306-308.
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