María de Zayas y Sotomayor

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Ana/Lysis/Zayas: Reflections on Courtship and Literary Women in Maria de Zayas's Enchantments of Love

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SOURCE: El Saffar, Ruth. “Ana/Lysis/Zayas: Reflections on Courtship and Literary Women in Maria de Zayas's Enchantments of Love.Indiana Journal of Hispanic Literatures 2, no. 1 (fall 1993): 7-28.

[In the following essay, El Saffar offers a detailed explanation of Zayas's Enchantments, reflecting on how the narrative's multiple levels represent the problems faced by a female author living and working in a patriarchal society.]

Maria de Zayas's 1637 collection of Novelas amorosas y ejemplares, The Enchantments of Love,1 is, at the most obvious level, a multi-layered artifact in the tradition of Boccaccio. A group of well-born young men and women engaged in dancing, banqueting, singing, and storytelling assemble for five nights during the Christmas season as part of an effort to dispel the fever suffered by their hostess Lysis. In a fashion perhaps closer to the Thousand and One Nights than to the Decameron, however, the stories the gentlemen and ladies tell play an important role in the drama of the frame tale. At stake is the disposition of Lysis's will as she considers the question of marriage. At the beginning of the frame tale Lysis hopes to marry the dashing Don Juan. Don Juan, however, proves an unworthy object of her affections, having turned his eyes toward Lysis's cousin Lisarda.2

Over the course of the five nights of storytelling, Lysis, through a succession of poetic compositions, and Don Juan, with a series of poems of his own, spar with one another. Through verses traded over the first two nights they accuse one another of falseness, insincerity and jealousy in a wrangle lost on none of the observers. The tension between the two rises when Don Diego appears to step into the spot in Lysis's affection left vacant by Don Juan, leading to a point at the end of the second night when the two male rivals agree to a duel, albeit one postponed until after the festivities are over, so as “not to spoil the ladies' pleasure in these celebrations” (154).

The frame tale functions as a courtly love romance featuring the rivalry between Lysis and Lisarda on the one hand, and Don Juan and Don Diego on the other. Within that romance, and serving simultaneously as distractions, deferrals, and amplifications, the ten novellas are embedded. In the study that follows I will examine the various fictional levels of the Enchantments and how those levels interpenetrate and refract off one another as they repeat the problematics of the “writing woman” in a social order that obstructs female autonomy and authority. Through a consideration of the various narrative levels and voices I will seek to show how Zayas's voice breaks through narrative as well as social constraints to challenge the dominant assumptions regarding woman's place and role.

I.

From the very beginning of the soirées organized for her entertainment it becomes clear that Lysis is a poet few can rival. She performs the poetic and musical entertainment from the first night, voicing through her compositions her feelings of injury and moral superiority vis-à-vis her unfaithful love, Don Juan. At the beginning of the third evening Lysis, by this time having consented to marry Don Diego and wanting “to avoid the theme of love and jealousy and so discourage the rivalry between [Don Juan and Don Diego]” (158), sings an apparently passion-free sonnet in honor of King Philip IV.

Given Philip's reputation as a womanizer, and Zayas's tendency to turn literary and patriarchal conventions against themselves, Lysis's opening poem of the third night can hardly be read as neutral. The Philip whom Lysis lauds in the quartets as “Sun” and “Phoenix” is transformed in the tercets into first Jupiter with his nymphs, and then the youthful Cupid (157-58). If a monarch well known for his mistresses sets the moral tone for the whole court,3 what, we may well be encouraged by Zayas to ask, are we to expect from the lesser nobility from whom the likes of such fickle suitors as Don Juan are drawn?

Paired with the convention of the laudatory poem to the King as part of Lysis's interlude entertainment on the third night is another poem, also conventional, that further ironizes the courtly love game. Drawing on the familiar conceit of the fly or mosquito who has such easy access to the beloved's flesh, Lysis sings to “sister flea” a madrigal commenting on the power of that nearly invisible creature who is as voracious as she is indiscriminate.

Lysis's apparently neutral poems at mid-point in the series of soirées serve in fact to contextualize the love politics being enacted among her fellow noble men and women. The poems suggest that the network of deceptions within which the young men and women are operating extends well past the apartment building in which they live. Between the King, who epitomizes the noble pretenses and wealth of the assembled, and the flea, who exposes the commonality and fleshly hunger that promotes romance,4 can be recognized the whole work that Zayas has produced.

The frame tale interludes highlight sumptuous banquets, perfumes, elegant costumes, exquisite music. The stories, on the other hand, dredge up from the depths passion's otherwise artfully disguised affiliations with betrayal, murder, suicide, and madness. It is over this world of ceremony and secret passion that King Philip IV and the humble flea preside. Between the pretenses of the former and the stark truths of the latter, Zayas, through Lysis, seeks to find her place.

The poems to Philip IV and the flea, however incisive in their allusions to power and its relation to desire, work within the frame primarily to ease the growing tensions among the guests. The tension is pointed out by the frame narrator, who notes that “everyone felt good because Lisarda and Lysis prudently had asked Don Juan and Don Diego to promise to be friends” (212). The fact that Lysis's poetic commentary on love is lost on the guests of the soirée suggests the presence in the work of an intended reader distinct from the ones dramatized in the text. Indeed, as Patsy Boyer has noted, the frame characters frequently misunderstand, or show only partial understanding, of the stories they hear. In a later section of this paper I will consider this point in greater detail.

The collective relief occasioned by the apparent resolution of the two frame-tale triangles continues into the fourth night, when it is announced that Don Juan and Don Diego will take turns hosting the dinners of the two remaining nights. The apparent resolution of conflict is further underscored by the accent on dancing, with its association of the harmonious pairing of men and women: “The remainder of the afternoon was spent in dancing. With much grace and skill, the participants competed with one another in dress, bearing, elegance, and courtliness for, at this soirée, everyone knew who was courting whom” (213).

The betrothal at mid-festivities has a premature, unsettled air, however, as Lysis reveals in her opening song on the fourth evening. Somewhat surprisingly, considering that she is now supposedly happily promised to Don Diego, she sings: “To love a faithless man, / can there be greater misfortune? / Curses upon the woman who tries / to attract the constant man” (214). In the ever-shifting alliances on which the triangle's inherent instability is based, Lysis's curse upon fickle men throws Don Juan and Don Diego into temporary alliance against Lysis. The narrator comments: “Lysis cut Don Juan deeply with these three stanzas, and even Don Diego was saddened by them” (214).

Lysis makes a quick disclaimer about the verses, saying they were written by someone else because she hadn't had time to write something of her own. The multi-layered structure of the work as a whole, however, invites us to consider to whom, if not to Don Juan and Don Diego, were Lysis's words addressed. As will be developed in Section II of this paper, where Lysis's role vis-à-vis the frame narrator is explored, the question of the destinary in Zayas's hermetic courtly text is not easily resolved. The point here is only that, undermining the principal frame characters' drive toward reconciliation is another voice, present among them but not intended for them, which is less patient with the flaws of men. Where Lysis might be represented as “aggravated” or pained by Don Juan's inconstancy, the other voice, commenting to the reader, is more savage, and more inclined to say of Don Juan, “Such fickle men belong in solitary confinement” (181).

Lysis also opens the fifth night with a song. Although her new work is reported to please Don Diego, who imagines that “these were occasional verses intended to erase the memory of the ill-intentioned verses that had been sung before” (272), her poem should hardly have been the occasion for a lover's joy were he attuned to the beloved's feelings rather than to the skirmishes in which passion plays itself out. In her poem Lysis contrasts the abundance of nature overflowing with gladness with “Marfisa's” sorrow:

What is this, beautiful nature, / she asks tearfully; / it seems as if your glory / is born from my sorrow. / If you laugh because I weep, / cease, nature, your laughter, / for you should pity / and lament my sad love.

(272)

Once again, the inaccuracy of the frame characters' interpretation leaves a gap between the dramatized sender and the dramatized recipient that allows us to conjecture that there is in Zayas's text an unnamed other for whom the verses are in reality intended.

Lysis continues the theme of unhappiness in love into the interlude between the first and second stories of the fifth night, singing:

The misfortunes I suffer are so great / that I am misfortune personified; / life for me is living death. / But if Favio is both life and heaven, / why do you, Marfisa, fear / that heaven will hear your sorrows, / that life will grant you death? / While nature overflows with gladness, / only Marfisa weeps.

(295)

The use of riddles, emblems, and imprese is common in Renaissance literary compositions. In at least one of her novellas (“Aminta Deceived and Honor's Revenge”), Zayas, following Masuccio, employs the device of the impresa.5 The riddle in Lysis's just-cited poem, poses the simple question of identification: “Who is Marfisa?; Who is Favio?” The fact that nothing in what Lysis appears to be experiencing suggests that “Marfisa” and “Fabio” are figures for her and Don Diego leaves the door wide open, once again, for the possibility that Zayas's work has a riddle quality designed to be understood by a specific, historical reader. Hovering unseen over the entire collection may be another pair of lovers, between whom our text moves as a message only they can decode.

Despite the clear poetic indications of Lysis's uncertainty, the frame narrator ends the book promising a second part where “we shall see Don Juan's ingratitude punished, Lisarda's change of heart, and Lysis's wedding” (312). In a collection of stories full of “true” examples of the deceptions occasioned by love,6 Lysis's apprehensions about love itself, and her still-smoldering resentment of Don Juan, belie the narrator's promise for a successful resolution to the love conflicts represented in the frame tale. Like Cervantes's unfinished pastoral novel La Galatea, the tensions among the principal characters in the frame tale cry out for a resolution that nothing in the structure of the work admits. The true story that “romance” seeks to disguise is that the “other” can never in fact be possessed.7 In both Zayas and the Cervantes of the Galatea, males and females remain fundamentally separated from one another, making courtship a matter not of harmonious interaction but of dominance and resistance.

By the end of the first collection of stories we know that Lysis is betrothed to Don Diego. She wears his diamond necklace, her fever has lifted, and she has accepted his proposal for marriage. Her mother has approved the match. All that remains for the frame tale of the promised second collection, according to the narrator, is the punishment of Don Juan and Lisarda, and the marriage of Lysis and Don Diego.

The announced, yet deferred “happy ending” is suspicious on a number of counts. The perspicacious reader would not need to wait for the 1647 collection of Disenchantments, Desengaños amorosos, to suspect that Lysis's planned marriage to Don Diego was destined to miscarry. In a book rigorously structured to reflect the separation of men and women, and full of commentary on the perils that await those who seek to form a permanent alliance with an “other” from the opposing camp, no foundation is laid for enduring heterosexual love.

The drama of the frame tale is clearly unfinished at the end of María de Zayas's first collection of stories, in part because all the options available to Lysis have not been considered. The male-female bi-partite structure of Book 1, as will be explored in detail in the next section of this paper, supposes that the choice confronting Lysis is between Don Juan and Don Diego. The exercise of her will is oriented, in other words, toward the selection of a mate in a context that assumes matrimony as the outcome. Latent in the structure of the frame, however, and explicit in many of the “exemplary” frame tales, is the option of rejecting heterosexual love entirely that will in fact prevail in the second collection. Before considering that other option, and how it is represented in latent form in the 1637 text, we need to look closely at the male/female binarisms built not only into the narrative structure of the frame in the 1637 collection, but into the fabric of the society out of which Zayas writes.

II.

In the frame tale of the Novelas ejemplares y amorosas male and female forces are carefully balanced against one another. Women as well as men have access to the spoken word, as in equal numbers on alternating nights they recite tales of love that lay bare the mechanisms of conflict their dances, masques, and courtly behavior work to disguise. At the level of the frame the sexual parity is believable. Various depictions of life in Spain in the seventeenth century show the development, especially under Philip IV, of a courtly society made up of highly refined women as well as men who were schooled in the arts of poetry and theater, and equally enamored of wit and literary skill. Cervantes's depiction of such characters as the Duke and Duchess, Altisidora, and the ladies of the “False Arcadia” show early signs of a courtly and literate aristocratic sub-culture that becomes responsible, by the 1620s, for most of what we now consider the artistic and literary output of the Spanish Baroque.8

Though we know next to nothing about the life of María de Zayas, we do have it on record that Lope de Vega as early as 1621 had acknowledged her literary talents. Since she published her two collections of stories after his death, we can surmise that Lope's praise of Zayas's “rare and unique genius” (qtd. in Boyer, Introduction xi) was based on his appreciation of what wit and poetic talent María de Zayas may have shown in the literary salons of which both must have formed a part. In her introduction “To the Reader,” Zayas traces what may well have been her own literary trajectory when she says:

The moment I see a book, new or old, I drop my sewing and can't rest until I've read it. From this inclination came information, and from the information, good taste, and from this the writing of poetry and then the writing of these novellas. …

(2)

The implication is that Zayas, clearly a member of the Madrid nobility and most probably an active participant in the literary salons that had become popular in the early seventeenth century, had attracted Lope's attention with her skill at writing verse.

A glimpse of what the literary gatherings she attended may have been like is provided by Zayas herself as she recreates in the frame the idle and refined life to which young men and women of the aristocratic classes devoted themselves. Women like Lysis, like, indeed, the Doña Ana to be discussed in Section III when we take up the novella “Forewarned but not Forearmed,” may well have been as active as men in composing occasional poems. The examples of Lysis and Doña Ana, in fact, suggest that the literary women may have been better than most of their male counterparts.9 Where they differed, and this is important in considering Zayas's work as a whole, was in the making of the decisive step from the spoken to the written word. So conscious is Zayas of the momentous quality of the breach in convention that she is making in coming out in print that her very first words anticipate the reader's amazement. In “To the Reader” she writes:

Oh my reader, no doubt it will amaze you that a woman has the nerve, not only to write a book but actually to publish it, for publication is the crucible in which the purity of genius is tested. … Who can doubt … that there will be many who will attribute to folly my audacity in publishing my scribbles because I'm a woman, and women, in the opinion of some fools, are unfit beings.

(1)

As Ann Rosalind Jones in her study of Luise Labe and Veronica Franco points out, and as Zayas herself makes clear, women's erudition was considered an adornment in the Renaissance, a domestic enrichment that was in no way considered something which she should display outside the confines of her intimate circle, much less something she should sell for profit.10 Openly challenging that limitation on women's artistic productivity, Zayas not only questions in the first prologue the tacit injunction against women publishing, but in the second prologue (“Prologue by an Objective Reader”) spends considerable time on the question of profit, urging, like the author of the Buscón, that the reader not rifle through her book at the bookstall, but actually buy it.11 After giving a number of examples of how “parasitic” readers escape paying for a book they want to read, Zayas's “Objective Reader” exhorts: “Oh, dearest readers, let this book be exempt from this kind of treatment because of its great merit. Don't let the swindler get away with reading it for free.” (4)

The frank merchandising of her work makes a clear statement about a system designed to make women vassals in an economy entirely male-controlled.12 Given the impossibility of women earning an honest living outside marriage or the convent, Zayas's plea, however possibly ironic, for profit for her writing, highlights an aspect of her distance from her frame heroine Lysis, who is staged as a woman still hopeful of marriage, and apparently content to let her poetry serve occasional, decorative purposes. Lysis is a long way from the independence and assertiveness which her author, by the very act of publishing the work, is demonstrating.

In the background of Zayas's frame-tale presentation of men and women of intelligence and literary skill is the sense on the part of the author herself that the equality of souls on which she is so insistent has no relation to the realities of economic and political power. Nor does the equality have relevance to the conjugal unit, as story after story within the frame reveals. The frame, then, is a kind of artifice, a suspension between the outer world of seventeenth-century Spanish politics and the inner realities of matrimony—a beguiling moment of courtship in which Lysis is being seduced by illusions of equality that she cannot in fact experience.

It is in the context of the artificiality of the courtly festivities that the reader is invited to consider the situation of Lysis, whose unrequited love for Don Juan appears to motivate the entire work. Underneath the costumes and finery a fever burns that Lysis hopes to tame. The work of soothing her rage is given over to her mother, Laura, who sets the rules for this courtly exploration of the ways of romance and the possibility that its rituals can promote or prepare for lasting union. The rules can be seen as an effort at order that is constantly challenged by the sentiments of the participants.

Don Juan appears at the festivities accompanied by a number of friends equal to that of the women who attend Lysis. Both principals in the love contest thus have four cohorts, making a total, counting Lysis and Don Juan, of ten named young men and women. The pairing of the group into couples at the beginning of the party gives an appearance of heterosexual bonding that the narrator is careful to reveal as drastically unstable.

Lysis, who is nominated “president of the delightful entertainments” (8), is dressed in blue, “the color of jealousy” (9), while her supposed counterpart, Don Juan, the man to whom “she was hoping to surrender in legal matrimony all the delightful charms with which heaven had endowed her” (7), appears, as master of ceremonies, dressed in brown. Their separation is reinforced spatially as Lysis, due to her fever, is seated on her couch. Don Juan, without a partner, is compelled to start the dance alone. The others who follow him onto the dance floor, though they enter the hall in pairs, are in no case enamored of the one with whom they enter. Lisarda, “wearing brown to match Don Juan's colors,” comes in on the arm of Don Álvaro, who is wearing Matilda's colors. Matilda, however, appears with Don Alonso, who has eyes for Nise, and so on.

The rigidity of the barrier separating the sexes is emphasized in the structuring of the storytelling. Laura decrees that two women tell stories the first night, two men the second night, and so on until the fifth night when Don Juan would tell the first story and Laura, replacing her daughter, the second. It is Laura, then, who is pared structurally with Don Juan, not Lysis.

As if further to underscore the rigor by which men and women are depicted as separate from one another, the author gratuitously and improbably endows each young man and woman at the party with a same-sex parent who is invited to the final banquet. The narrator says that the participants made plans to “invite the ladies' mothers and the gentlemen's fathers, for it just so happened that none of the ladies had a father and none of the gentlemen had a mother.” As if sensing the need for an explanation, the narrator adds somewhat lamely that “death does not accommodate the desires of mortals” (8-9).

The redoubling of the separation of the sexes to the second generation, while it seems to have no import in the construction of the story, gives a quality of overdetermination, of obsessive reiteration, to the question of gender distinction. In the courtly world that Zayas recreates in her imagination, no models for the effort honorably to cross the gender barrier seem to be available. Dishonorable boundary crossings, of course, are the rule in a courtly society that R. Trevor Davies has depicted as “overwhelmingly depraved” (87).13

On the other hand, aspirations to some form of reconciliation, through marriage, between the sexes remain alive in this first collection of Zayas's stories: Some couples in the frame tales manage to overcome the innumerable impediments to fulfilling union; and the heroine of the frame story remains at least nominally committed to marriage. The frame narrator, furthermore, makes room for men as well as women in her equal distribution of male and female narrators, as already noted. Finally, the very use of such social activities as eating and dancing bespeak a form of potential harmony among parties otherwise prone to separation and mutual hostility.

However, a closer look at the relationship between the frame narrator and the principal frame character reveals that the apparent “even-handed” distribution of men and women at the party and in the collection is undermined by a clearly partisan favoring of women over men. Examination reveals that the voice of the frame narrator, though more emphatic than that of Lysis, is closely allied with the emotional position of her character, amounting at times to a blurring of the narrator/character boundaries and a corollary investiture of “authority” in the character of Lysis.

Lysis, indeed, stands out from all the other young people in the work. She occupies a place midway between the characters, on the one hand, and the author/reader on the other. While she is one of the characters in that she participates in the action, interacts with the other characters, and experiences on their level the desires, hopes, and frustrations, she also stands apart as the most accomplished of them from a literary standpoint. She is the only one of the women to compose and sing poetry, some of it so close to her own passion that she sings with tears, her soul weeping (44), some so disengaged as to be represented as work written for a contest. Her only rival in that art of poetry is Don Juan (“Consummate in composition as in everything else he did” [77]), who sings two compositions.

Clearly Zayas intends to make a point here with regard to Lysis's superiority. The other frame characters, with the exception of Don Juan, limit themselves to prose, considered an inferior genre from a literary point of view. All, again except for Don Juan, emphasize that their work is not literary, and that it comes instead from stories others have told them, or have written, based on true, contemporary events. Closer to Lysis's literary skill than the others, Don Juan emphasizes the writerly quality of his own story when he says of it, “I took my pen in hand and wrote out several drafts, product of my feeble wit” (273).

If Don Juan exhibits poetic aspirations, Zayas is careful to stage his work as inferior to Lysis's, not only in quantity, but in quality. Against the two poems written by Don Juan are seven composed and sung by Lysis. And while Don Juan restricts his work to the rustic and poetically simple ballad, Lysis displays a variety of cultured verse forms, including the sonnet, in her repertoire. Lysis also stands out as the only one among the assembled men and women who does not tell a story. Instead she sits to the side of the dais on a luxurious couch that served as “seat, sanctuary, and throne” (9). From that place slightly above and slightly removed from the others Lysis considers her amorous situation, listening each night as alternating pairs of men and women tell the troubled stories of love.

That Lysis in her position at once in and out of the setting in which she is placed figures forth the position of the author, herself acclaimed as a poet, is supported by a considerable array of evidence. First, as already suggested, the narrator's commentary tends to favor Lysis over against her adversaries. A totally disinterested narrator would limit herself to describing the rivalries on which the love struggles are based. This narrator, however, makes adverse judgments on Don Juan and Lisarda, but never on Lysis. She refers to Lisarda as “unprincipled in getting her way” (8), and shows at the end a desire, like her main character, to see Lisarda and Don Juan punished (312).

Even at the end, now out of the context of Lysis and the guests, and addressing herself as writer to the reader, the author can still be found expressing what appears to be her wish that Don Juan be punished. Since we have no evidence that would help us understand the nature of Don Juan's commitment to Lysis, we can only say that the characterization of Don Juan as a cad alludes to the presence of an unnamed but clearly intended destinary, who may stand for men outside the text whom Zayas wishes to reprove.

The story-within-a-story structure of the work, its mise en abîme quality that encloses narratives within narratives in an ever-receding replication of the failed love of the frame, in itself invites the conjecture of a faithless lover and rival male writer to whom the author addresses herself. Just as Lysis voices her complaints of Don Juan using the names of such poetic figures as “Fabio” and “Marfisa,” so “Lysis” and “Don Juan” may well be names given to fictional courtiers designed to represent Zayas's own struggle with the men who have wounded her.

Clark Hulse argues persuasively for the search for historical destinaries in Renaissance texts in his article on Philip Sidney's sonnets. Questioning the twentieth-century New Critical assumption of a self-referential text, Hulse points to the public quality of courtship in Renaissance courts that required the poet frequently to construct poems able simultaneously to convey a general meaning to the audience at large and a special meaning to those few who understand. The Golden Age drama, where lovers are rarely free openly to discuss their desire for one another, is full of such poems of double-entendre. Mencía's conversation with Enrique in front of her husband in Act I of Calderón's El médico de su honra is an example, as is Doña Leonor's address to her former lover, Don Luis, in A secreto agravio secreta venganza. Hulse points out, bearing in mind the situation at the Renaissance court, that:

readers, like writers, exist as real people. … Just as the image of the writer within the text acts as a double for the real writer, partially disclosing, partially hiding his life and thoughts, so the image of the reader in the text interacts ironically with real readers. … When we measure our sense of the fictive audience of a poem against a real Renaissance audience, this interplay can help us see how the creation of the poem was itself an act with consequences—personal, sexual, and political—within its literary culture.

(272)

As has been noted already in Section I of this paper, Zayas leaves a large gap between sender and fictional recipient in many of Lysis's poems. The presence, in Golden Age drama, of the misperceiving recipient (usually the deceived husband), always implies another destinary for whom the hidden message is intended.

The picture that emerges out of the partisanship betrayed by the frame narrator—her clear identification with Lysis as both woman betrayed and as consumate courtly poet—is that of a gifted and talented woman author, mirrored in Lysis, in search of a place in a male-dominated social and literary order. That that order has mocked, when not able to prevent, women's publications has already been noted as the dominant point of the author's opening address to the reader. That that order also severely restricts women's social activities before, but even more after marriage, is clear in the stories that Lysis listens to. At either side of the frame tale whose heroine bridges the disparate fictional realms of frame narrator on the one side and characters within the novella on the other, the reader is presented with the spectacle of a society which leaves little room for female freedom.

In La vida cotidiana en el Siglo de Oro español, Néstor Luján corroborates the position Zayas illustrates in her fiction, pointing out that:

La mujer en el Madrid de los Austrias, por lo general, había recibido una educación deficiente y estaba sometida a unas circunstancias jurídicas bastante duras; por un lado, la potestad paterna, o sea el derecho para casar a las hijas sin consentimiento, y por otro la desigualdad de la mujer en el matrimonio, donde la autoridad del marido estaba apoyada por grandes facilidades jurídicas, incluso el asesinato por infidelidad de la mujer. Esto es un hecho incontrovertible y viene apoyado no tan sólo por las leyes y costumbres, sino por los hechos.

(101)

The anomaly of the brilliant and free woman is one that Zayas seeks to reconcile within a social structure designed to limit and silence her. It is not until 1647, with the publication of the Desengaños amorosos, that Zayas abandons all hope for integration for her young heroine Lysis. In that later publication the sexual division is complete. Although men form part of the audience in the frame tale of the later collection, only women are permitted to tell stories, and those stories focus exclusively not on courtship, but rather on the fate of women in matrimony. Of the “true” tales of the second collection, six married women die at the hands of their husbands and/or brothers and fathers, while the other four, after brutal treatment, escape to the convent. Lysis, her mother Laura, and many of her friends end the soirées of the second collection deciding to take the tales as cautionary and themselves enter the convent, leaving Don Diego's hopes for marriage to Lysis dashed.

Like Virginia Woolf three centuries later, Zayas appears to have resolved the struggle represented in the character of Lysis in favor of celibacy and female bonding. As Jane Marcus says of Woolf,

it is clear that the survival of the fittest is in conflict with the survival of the creative woman. She can only refuse to reproduce, refuse wifehood and motherhood. Chastity is power. Chastity is liberty. Marriage … is a trade. And since women have no control over the means of production in their trade or the means of reproduction, their only access to dignity is the sexual strike.

(63-64)

Also like Woolf, the “daughter of an educated man,” Zayas has found through her appropriation of the means of self-expression that she has rendered herself incapable of engaging in the gendered game of dominance and submission that depended on her ignorance of its rules. Her stories are the more shocking for their effort to disrupt the very codes on which they are based. Though they are not notably innovative at the structural and lexical level, they are nonetheless radically subversive of the honor code which determined social and literary relations in seventeenth-century Spain.14 Because much of what transpires at the level of the frame in the second collection is anticipated in the novellas of the first collection, I want now to move from questions of frame and the relation of the frame heroine and author, to a close examination of one of the most interesting stories in the first collection.

III.

The clear ambiguity of Zayas's position in 1637 when the first collection was published does not allow her yet to reach the radical position to which she will have arrived a decade later. In the final section of this paper I want to focus on a tale from the 1637 collection in which I find the uncertainty of Zayas's own image best reflected. The story, “Forewarned but not Forearmed,” is not entirely flattering to women, since it presents a series of female figures best characterized by their willfulness, their sexual appetite, their wiliness and their hypocrisy.

Like the other stories in the collection that present women as either Amazonian or adulterously inclined, this one is narrated by a man. As Patsy Boyer has astutely pointed out, the stories are in fact sex-coded, and some recognition of the narrative bias is important in assessing each story (xxviii). Typically, the stories narrated by the women present female characters as devoted, and as victims of male treachery. Though they may act in a “manly” way to avenge themselves when dishonored, they are never themselves depicted as wrongdoers. In the stories told by men, on the other hand, women generally show at least some inclination toward depravity as defined by the honor code. Interestingly, however, the male narrators tend to favor resolutions that end in marriage, while the three instances in which women disappointed in love enter convents all occur in tales told by women.

I have chosen to highlight “Forewarned but not Forearmed,” the story Don Alonso narrates as the second tale of the second night, because it offers, embedded within its episodic structure, the image of a female character who, like the figure we have extracted from the Lysis/Zayas composite, is a gifted and attractive woman of the court. The figure of the adulterous and lascivious woman that Don Alonso paints, as he takes his hero, Don Fadrique, on a sexual odyssey through Spain and Italy in search of the faithful wife, is not unknown in the courtly environment of seventeenth-century Spain. Quoting once again from Luján, we see that:

si el siglo XVII en Madrid es el siglo del honor, también lo es del libertinaje. Los hombres tienen mancebas, bastardos, son clientes de burdeles, enferman de males secretos. Muchas de las mujeres por merecer, las solteras, llevan una vida hipócrita y disimulada de disolución, de tal modo que la palabra “soltera” llega a tener un sentido equívoco y a las que mantienen su virginidad se las llama doncellas.

(101)

The hero of “Forewarned” is clearly intended to be shown as a foolish man. Don Fadrique, in his efforts to find a noble and honest wife, styles himself a kind of Diogenes figure, traveling from town to town in search of the woman who will display the qualities of chastity and fidelity he so desires to possess. The story appears to be designed to respond to the question, much debated in the seventeenth century, of which was preferable, a submissive wife or a cultivated woman. Vigil notes that the abundance of household help gave women of the upper and middle classes considerable leisure time, which worried the moralists of the day. Husbands, she adds, were concerned about the freedom of their wives, but also tended to complain that house-bound wives were irritable and unattractive.15

Don Fadrique, after his many disappointments with clever women, is certain that only an ignorant woman can be faithful. At the end of his sixteen years of affairs, mostly with married women, he concludes that the only available woman who will meet his criterion of absolute trustworthiness is a girl called Gracia who has spent her entire life in a convent. The ironic twist that Zayas puts on the contest between worldly and naïve women, however, is to show that even the product of the convent, a mere child and utterly ignorant, cannot be counted on. In the end Zayas has Don Fadrique learn that clever women are better after all because if they do not in fact practice marital fidelity, they at least know how to appear to do so.

Fadrique's search for the faithful woman begins in his own home town of Granada, where the beautiful Serafina attracts his devotion. In what will come to be a pattern throughout his travels, Fadrique finds that Serafina is already being courted by someone else. Confident that he will win his suit for her hand since his rival is less rich and well-connected than he, he presses for marriage through Serafina's parents, who agree to the match. The difficulty comes when Fadrique, keeping obsessive vigil over Serafina's house, discovers that she escapes one night secretly to give birth in a fallen-down shed. She abandons the child, who, because Fadrique rescues her, winds up in the convent and eventually becomes his wife. That comes at the end of the story. At this point, having discovered Serafina's betrayal, Fadrique goes to Seville.

In Seville he again falls in love, this time with a beautiful widow named Doña Beatrice. Keeping watch once more through the night, the over-curious Fadrique discovers that this idealized woman also has a secret. He manages to follow her into the stables when she thinks the house is quiet, and finds that Beatrice has had the custom of sleeping with a black stable hand whom she has apparently so exhausted with her unquenchable desire that he has come to despise her and attribute his impending death to her.

Making yet another hasty retreat Fadrique finds himself now in Madrid, where, through his cousin Don Juan, he meets Doña Ana and Violante, two wealthy and clever women of the court to whom the two young gallants quickly become enamored. By now Don Fadrique has developed a fear of clever women. Doña Ana and Violante are so vivacious and attractive, however, that Fadrique finds himself caught. The story-within-a-story of Doña Ana, Violante, Don Juan, and Don Fadrique, shows women demonstrating, through their cleverness, their absolute control over their and their lovers' sexuality.

If Zayas turns the tables on the male debate over whether a dull and virtuous wife is preferable to one who is charming and untrustworthy by showing that the question hangs on a false dichotomy, her work is duplicated within the novella in the machinations of Doña Ana and Violante. In both cases what we see overturned is the assumption, basic to the honor code, that the usual tools of male control work to limit female sexuality. Neither by denying her access to education nor by subjecting her to threats of punishment and death can a woman be denied her freedom. By making a fool of Don Fadrique in the story as a whole and in the episode, to be described below, with Doña Ana and Violante, Zayas argues once again for the right of clever and attractive women to be recognized and appreciated.

It must be noted that in the much darker tales of the Disenchantments Zayas does not present female characters on a romp, joyfully turning their would-be lovers' illusions of control into shams. By 1647 she seems convinced that women can in fact be broken by the honor system, and, furthermore, that men can be counted on to press their legal rights to power over their wives to the limit. In “Forewarned,” as in many of the novellas of the Enchantments, however, we are still in the world of courtship, where women enjoy more power.16

The two women who “play” with Fadrique, in the third of the five episodes that track his erotic odyssey, bear certain characteristics in common with Zayas and Lysis, as already noted. Doña Ana and Violante, like their sisters in the frame and beyond, are renowned in Madrid as poets and musicians. Don Juan says of them, “[they] are the sibyls of Spain: both are beautiful, witty, both are musicians and poets. In conclusion, these two women possess the sum of all beauty and intelligence scattered among all other women in the world” (130).

Doña Ana, whom Don Juan loves, is promised to a man still in the Indies. Doña Violante is unmarried. They refuse any erotic entanglement with the two young men until after Doña Ana's future husband arrives, presumably so as to preserve Doña Ana's virginity. Once he has come and the marriage has been settled, Doña Ana and Doña Violante send messages to Don Juan and Don Fadrique promising them an invitation once her husband leaves town on a business trip. The men become impatient, and finally Doña Ana hits on a plan. She gets Don Juan to persuade Don Fadrique to spend the night in her husband's bed so that, her place apparently occupied, she can then sleep with Don Juan.

Fadrique is of course horrified with the plan and makes every effort to refuse. At stake for him, however is a relationship with Violante, and Don Juan is so desperate for a night with Ana that he threatens suicide if Fadrique doesn't help him. With extreme reluctance, followed by utter terror, Fadrique allows Ana to lead him, dressed only in a nightshirt, into her husband's bed. The narrator takes apparent great relish in describing Fadrique's night of torment—the husband's turning and sighing, his cozying up to his “wife,” Fadrique's belief that he would never survive the night. It is not until day finally breaks and Doña Ana returns that Fadrique learns the “man” he spent the night with was not Doña Ana's husband at all, but Violante.

The trick Doña Ana works on Don Fadrique is one that has the effect of putting him in the place of the adulterous woman, exposing him to the terror of spending the night in bed with a jealous man. Doña Ana and Violante have forced him by trickery into a reversal of sex roles that demonstrates the humiliation that attends powerlessness, and the phallic control that women of intelligence can exercise over men who presume to be their masters. The alliance Zayas makes in this episode, and the next one of the Duchess, of intelligence and sexual freedom is not used in this story so much to corroborate male fears as to make light of Don Fadrique's prejudices. The real point, made clear in the last episode where even the innocent Gracia is led to betray her husband, is that women, like men, have sexual desires. When the social structure mitigates against the expression of those desires, they are either expressed in secretive and abnormal fashion, as with Serafina, who is forced out of fear to abandon her infant daughter, and Doña Beatrice, a slave to the love of a black slave, or disguised in a more flamboyant manner as with Doña Ana and the Duchess. Gracia, however unknowing of the ways of the world, also soon discovers that there is more to married life than dressing up in a breastplate and pacing in front of her husband's bed with a sword. What her ultimate succumbing to the charms of a young suitor reveals is that it is desire itself, not intelligence, that determines behavior.

Doña Ana's and Violante's game of sexual table turning with Don Fadrique is a basically didactic and entertaining work of art, a gratuitous performance designed, like the tale that contains it, to ridicule the laws of honor that justify the suppression of women's education. The story shows that whether they have access to the pen, like Doña Ana, or the sword, like Gracia, it is the will that wields them, and not the instruments themselves, that determines the use to which they will be put.

Although the story clearly addresses one of Zayas's major complaints about the society in which she lives—that women are deprived of the means to defend themselves and to become independent, and that that deprivation is justified by the false assumption that women with power will be less faithful than women easily forced into submission—“Forewarned” also contains another, scarcely developed story worth considering. The tale ends not with Fadrique, who seemed to be the “hero,” but with Serafina, the first of his fiancées, and the hapless mother of Gracia. We learn that Serafina, tormented by the guilt of having had to abandon her daughter, threw herself after the incident into a life of repentance, and came to be considered a saint. Only after several anxiety-filled years of living with his infantile yet still untrustworthy wife, and knowing he is about to die, does Fadrique finally tell Serafina that Gracia is her daughter. In his will he stipulates that the two be reunited in the convent, in exchange for which he would leave them all his wealth.

The true end to the story is the reunion, in the convent, of a mother and daughter separated because of the fear that sexual disobedience inspired in the young Serafina. Undergirding the whole series of comic adventures of Don Fadrique is the tragic and yet scarcely recorded story of mother-daughter separation and forced abandonment. It is only at the end that we realize that Don Fadrique, who seems to be on a noble quest, is in fact part of a system that controls not only the sexuality and educational opportunities of women, but also the access of a mother to her child. This darker, still submerged tale of female suffering at the hands of patriarchy, with its resultant discovery of a female utopia outside the bounds of male-female intercourse, will become, in the Disenchantments, the central focus.

In the Enchantments, at every level, we find signs that Zayas was still very much a part of the world of courtiers and courtship. She presents high-spirited single women at every level of the work who are known for their wit and relative social freedom, and often offers stories that end in marriage. On the other hand, she also shows an awareness of the myriad ways in which marriage can work to the detriment of women. Her depiction of Lysis as favoring marriage is, I suspect, an accurate indicator of Zayas's own still-mixed feelings about courtship and marriage. In the Enchantments she is still holding out for the possibility of female freedom and enduring heterosexual love. The story of Don Fadrique that I have focused on here, gives, perhaps, the best snapshot of the possibilities Zayas still envisaged for young women of talent. Its further value is that it also foreshadows, in the scarcely-written story of Serafina and Gracia, the retreat to a world made up exclusively of women—of mothers and daughters—toward which Zayas's work was leading her.

Notes

  1. The references to the Novelas amorosas y ejemplares used here and throughout this article are taken from H. Patsy Boyer's recently published English translation. The new edition finally makes Zayas's work accessible to a wider range of critics. This article is dedicated to Patsy, to whom I am indebted for having introduced Zayas to me many years ago, and for having produced such a beautiful rendition of and introduction to the work of that too little read seventeenth-century writer.

  2. As Patsy Boyer has noted in her introduction to the Enchantments, the name of Don Juan is not without wry significance, since much of the frame tale will be devoted to a not so poorly disguised deflation of this particular Don Juan's flamboyant and narcissistic character (Introduction xviii).

  3. R. Trevor Davies says of Philip, “En general, no se esforzó demasiado por conformar su conducta a los patrones de la moral cristiana. Al morir dejó por lo menos siete u ocho hijos ilegítimos; algunos autores elevan este número a treinta y dos” (85).

  4. My use of the word romance here exploits intentionally the dual signification—erotic and literary—of the term. I have further chosen to use the word in its double sense because Zayas so clearly conflates the literary and the erotic. In her work the erotic skirmishes carried out among her lovers are literature: they are patently false, dependent on artistry, highly self-conscious, and closely allied to literary forms and conventions. At the level of the frame as well as at the level of the novellas, her characters are figures trapped in the fiction of romance. Echoing the early work of René Girard, one could say of the whole collection that it constitutes, through the characters of Lysis and her mother, Laura, a search for a haven beyond the mensonge romantique, a place of self-dominion where the devil himself is defeated.

  5. I am indebted to Maude Bregoli-Russo for calling attention to the appearance of imprese in Zayas's work, and for her reference to the Masuccio novella.

  6. The narrators of the novellas all affirm, with the exception of Don Juan, that the stories they tell actually happened, after adding that the characters represented in them are still living in the city named in the tale. This reiterated affirmation of a reality that reaches outside the closed house of fiction in which the noble men and women live serves only to reinforce the sense that, on the one hand, the whole work is intended to reach a real audience, possibly consisting of a single destinary—and on the other, that that reality rooted in mimetic desire (see Girard), is in fact indistinguishable from fiction.

  7. The failure to possess the “other” as female, the radical impenetrability of the woman who is the object of desire, is what Mary Gossey refers to as the “untold story.” No one perhaps as subtly as Zayas (whom Gossey does not study in her work) writes that tale of the failure of the dream of romance. As in Gossey's study, the failure of romance in Zayas leads to the discovery of new and more lasting bonds of affiliation among women.

  8. John Elliott writes of the over-production of educated aristocrats in the seventeenth century, and their lavish support of the arts:

    On the whole, the wealth of the aristocracy seems to have been spent more on the patronage of literature and painting than on architecture. … The Count of Olivares, after leaving Salamanca University, spent several years at Seville in the company of poets and authors. … When he became the Favourite of Philip IV—himself a great connoisseur, and a patron of arts and letters—he made the Court a brilliant literary and artistic centre, famous for the theatrical presentations and literary fiestas, in which such names as Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca figured prominently.

    (315)

  9. In “Everything Ventured” the narrator Jacinta comments on her skill as a poet and her sense of competition with her lover Celio:

    Since I too compose poetry, he would challenge me and we would enjoy the competition. It didn't amaze him that I composed poetry. That's no miracle in a woman whose soul is just the same as a man's, and maybe it pleases Nature to perform this wonder, or maybe men shouldn't feel so vain, believing they're the only ones who enjoy great talent. What did amaze Celio was that I composed so well.

    (36-37)

    In Jacinta's combination of pride, competitiveness and defensiveness can be found an echo of the Zayas of the Prologue, who both knows her talent and the hostility with which it is likely to be received.

  10. Ann Rosalind Jones writes:

    If they [women] went on to write, gender expectations … shaped their choice of genre and their sense of an audience. … Unlike the humanist and courtly texts that male writers directed toward readers and fellow citizens, women's literary production was typically described as intended only for the use of their families. Their themes and their audiences were private.

    (emphasis hers; 299)

  11. In her first prologue she argues further that souls are without sex, and that men overpower women in the world only because women have been denied training:

    How … can men presume to be wise and presume that women are not? … [T]he only answer to this question is men's cruelty and tyranny in keeping us cloistered and not giving us teachers. The real reason why women are not learned is not a defect in intelligence but a lack of opportunity. When our parents bring us up if, instead of putting cambric on our sewing cushions and patterns in our embroidery frames, they gave us books and teachers, we would be as fit as men for any job or university professorship.

    (1)

  12. For more on the economic aspects of the patriarchal family so firmly entrenched in Spain (and most other European countries by late in the sixteenth century), see Vigil 105-26.

  13. Trevor Davies says: “La tremenda depravación en que estaban sumidas las gentes y la casi increíble relajación de las Órdenes Religiosas en España se pusieron de manifiesto con los escándalos del convento de San Plácido” (87). The scandals he goes on to describe, dating from 1623 to 1628, and therefore not long before Zayas's novellas were published, include the kind of easy male access to the convent present in Zayas's first novella of the 1637 collection, “Everything Ventured.”

  14. Although I value and have been greatly inspired by Paul Julian Smith's effort to find in Julia Kristeva's “semiotic” a means of distinguishing Zayas's prose from that of her male contemporaries, I am not persuaded that the meandering and episodic plots to which Smith alludes are decisive of what most basically differentiates her work from that of male writers. I am more inclined to attribute such features in Zayas as the blurring of the distinction between author and character, the projection of a female utopia in the form of the convent, and the exaggeration of the social depravity that oppresses women, to Zayas's need to establish a self and a social identity in a political environment hostile to those aspirations. Following the work of Rita Felski, I am looking much more directly at content in Zayas's work than, using a French feminist model, Paul Julian Smith would do.

  15. Vigil says, quoting Guevara on the problems of married men, “si tu mujer es muy aliñada y casera, es por otra parte tan brava que no hay moza—criada—que la sufra.” Virgil also cites Ferrer de Valcedebro who observed that if one is married “con entendida, no es casera; si con casera, es insufrible” (117-18).

  16. For a still excellent study of the power women can exercise during the courtship process, see Fred de Armas's The Invisible Mistress.

Works Cited

Boyer, H. Patsy. “Introduction.” Zayas, Enchantments xi-xxxi.

De Armas, Frederick. The Invisible Mistress. Charlottesville, VA: Biblioteca Siglo de Oro, 1976.

Elliott, J. H. Imperial Spain, 1469-1716. New York: Mentor Books, 1966.

Felski, Rita. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989.

Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1970. Trans. of Mensonge romantique et verité romanesque.

Gossey, Mary. The Untold Story: Women and Theory in Golden Age Texts. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1989.

Hulse, Clark. “‘Stella's Wit’: Penelope Rich as Reader of Sidney's Sonnets.” Rewriting the Renaissance. Ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 272-86.

Jones, Ann Rosalind. “City Women and Their Audiences: Louise Labe and Veronica Franco.” Rewriting the Renaissance. Ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 299-316.

Luján, Néstor. La vida cotidiana en el Siglo de Oro español. Barcelona: Planeta, 1988.

Marcus, Jane. “Liberty, Sorority, Misogyny.” The Representation of Women in Fiction: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1981. Ed. Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983. 60-97.

Smith, Paul Julian. The Body Hispanic: Gender and Sexuality in Spanish and Spanish American Literature. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1989.

Trevor Davies, R. La decadencia española, 1621-1700. Barcelona: Editorial Labor, 1969.

Vigil, Marilo. La vida de las mujeres en los siglos XVI y XVII. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno, 1986.

Zayas y Sotomayor, María de. Desengaños amorosos. 1647. Ed. Alicia Yllera. Madrid: Cátedra, 1983.

———. The Enchantments of Love: Amorous and Exemplary Novels. Trans. and Intro. H. Patsy Boyer. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Trans. of Novelas amorosas y ejemplares. 1637.

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