Gender Coding in the Narratives of Maria de Zayas
[In the following essay, Gamboa focuses on Zayas's works, recounting the strains and restrictions placed on women in the patriarchal system of early modern Spain.]
BACKGROUND
In this paper, I look at the constraints on women in the patriarchy of early modern Spain, as reflected in the novels of the popular woman writer of the time, Maria de Zayas. I propose that these constraints take effect thanks to the operation of certain social codes (which I call ‘discursive practices’), namely the discourse of Honour, the discourse of the Normative Woman, and the discourse of Enclosure into private spaces. I suggest that such gendercodes were (and still are today) expressed, maintained and transmitted by the church, the state and the family. However, I reveal that despite censorship, strategies for change are formulated, often by voices which are veiled by irony, voices like that of de Zayas, which lay bare the purposes of social codes used to confine and disempower women.
The parallels between the operation of these gender codes in seventeenth Spain and in contemporary South Africa are striking. The discourse of Honour is matched by the code of masculine strength and mastery so prevalent in traditional society, and both depend in large measure for their definition on the complementary code of feminine subservience and dependence, which is a part of the discourse of the Normative Woman. Evident in the institutions of both seventeenth Spain and contemporary South Africa (and indeed any patriarchy) is a set of prescriptions as to what is becoming for a woman, what her proper character and sanctioned behaviour are, and what the appropriate place for womanly activities is, viz., the home. The last discourse, that of Enclosure, has been extensively discussed in feminist theory in the form of the damaging and disempowering (to women) public/private dichotomy, gendered as public—masculine, private—feminine. Social codes regarding women are still maintained through church and state, and the family has gained new significance in this role via television and the media. There are thus lessons to be learned from early modern Spain, and applied in our present society.
The early modern world and particularly early modern Spain was a period of social transformation where the discursive practices of the Church and State competed for hegemony against dissenting voices. On the one hand, the Catholic Church, at this time involved in the process of Counter-Reformation, was reviving dogma and helping to spread it by means of educational religious literature. On the other hand, the early modern state, in its process of transformation, was modifying the concept of secular authority from that of absolute monarchy to one of monarchic-seigniorial alliance, enabling it to become stronger while gaining acceptance by a wider sector of the population.
Based on modern arguments regarding the architecture of gender, like those of Mark Wigley, and studies on the social discourses of the Renaissance, like the work of Peter Stallybrass, one could say that the means of achieving the social transformation required on both fronts was the encouragement of the ‘discourse of honour’ which relied heavily on the ‘Law of the Father’, on a ‘normative concept of Woman’, on the ‘generic division of space’, and also on ‘architecture’. Peter Stallybrass, commenting on the social practices of the Renaissance and aware that, in the Renaissance, the family was thought to be a microcosm of the State, and the house, the means of controlling what was regarded as ‘uncontrollable’ women's nature, has observed: ‘the normative Woman could become the emblem of the perfect and impermeable container, and hence a map of the integrity of the State’ (Stallybrass, 1986:129).
This apparently harmonic, hegemonic discourse had a number of fissures which were revealed, on occasion, by a few dissenting voices. At a time when censorship was strict, though, such voices are to be found often veiled by irony or by the language of the marginalized of the time.
One of these dissenting voices is that of Spanish seventeenth century woman writer Maria de Zayas who was a popular and prolific writer. Her two volumes each comprising 10 short novels (or ‘novellas’) within a frame narrative in the tradition of the Italian Decameron, namely, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (Amorous and Exemplary Novels) and Desengaños amorosos (Amorous Deceits), were published in 1637 and 1647 respectively. And in general there is a significant difference between the two volumes: the short novels contained in the second volume, published ten years after the first, are richer, more complex, more modern, and more relevant for the situation of women in today's world. That is the volume 1 will more often address.
ENCLOSURE INTO PRIVATE SPACES
In a number of her short novels Zayas portrays heroines imprisoned in space. However, as Amy Williamsen (1991) has mentioned, there is a marked difference between the first volume, where ‘Zayas explores the comic possibilities of this architectural sign (being, the house)’ and the second volume, where she ‘portrays the house as an instrument of torture employed against women’ (ibid.:646). Examples of a space that contributes to women's torture abound. Among them are: the enclosure of women in a small room before raping or killing them; the creation of an artificial, unlivable entrapment to punish women; and last but not least, the creation of a fortress-like house which is yet unable to deny access to tragedy.
Both Marcia Welles (1978) and Elizabeth Ordóñez (1985) have suggested in their different ways that Zayas' preoccupation with enclosures anticipates Gilbert and Gubar's assertions regarding the 18th century Gothic Fiction: for Gilbert and Gubar ‘the house becomes a sign for the ‘architecture of patriarchy’ which represents the entrapment of women by male-dominated social institutions’ (Williamsen, 1991:646). Welles has concentrated on the grotesque aspects of Zayas' fiction whereas Ordóñez has alluded to the symbolic entrapment in male-dominated institutions. On the one hand, commenting on the grotesque aspects of Zayas' narrative, Welles notes a similarity between Zayas' techniques and those sought in the Gothic novel which she expresses in the following terms: ‘If at the aesthetic level the intent was the elevation of the spirit through amazement and terror, at the psychological level such chilling details, which prefigure the effects sought in the Gothic novel of the late eighteenth century, provided for the description of intense bodily sensations’ (1978:304). On the other hand, Ordóñez's concern that the lives of the characters in a female-authored text usually offer a commentary about the writer's own relationship with the text, has led her to affirm that ‘anxieties about spatial confinement may encode, then, anxieties about authorship in textual traditions similarly restrictive to women’ (1985:5).
However, in her stories, Zayas does more than note that the house is a sign of patriarchy. She goes on to reveal the fissures of the house, and consequently of the discourses that have constantly ‘housed’ women, and thus she questions the discursive practices of both Church and State. But before we get to her stories we shall have to observe how they relate to the discourses of her time, namely, to the honour code, the normative concept of ‘Woman’, the generic division of space and architecture.
THE CODE OF HONOUR
The ‘honour code’ was a strict social code which regulated not only societal relationships but also the intimate relationships between men and women. According to Gustavo Correa (1958) honour was a twofold concept which included both a vertical and a horizontal dimension. The ‘vertical’ concept of honour implied a stratification of society and was inherent in the position of an individual on the social scale. The highest social classes were therefore the ones with the most honour even from birth. The ‘horizontal’ concept of honour, on the contrary, was based on the complex social relationships among the members of a given community and therefore used to rest on the opinion people had of a person. The horizontal concept of honour ended up representing fundamental values of Spanish culture. A man's value was directly related to his ‘manliness’ (‘hombŕia’) (ibid.:103). Signs of his manliness were his ability to get women, as well as the perpetuation of himself as husband and head of the household, which assured the integrity of the family.
What Correa is referring to here is none other than the ‘Law of the Father’ to which Wigley refers in the following terms: according to him the primary role of the house, and of architecture, is the control of woman's sexuality. Its role therefore ‘is to protect the father's genealogical claims by isolating women from other men. Reproduction is understood as reproduction of the father. The law of the house is undoubtedly no more than the law of the father. The physical house is the possibility of the patriarchal order that appears to be applied to it’ (Wigley, 1992:336).
However, necessary for the man's ‘manliness’ was the woman's ‘virtue’, ‘which refers to the purity and morality of her conduct’ (Correa, 1958:103; note that due to the unavailability of translations, all quotes in English from Correa, De León and Zayas are my own). Female virtue also assumes the ‘normative Woman’. The lack of virtue in a woman would threaten the integrity of the family in revealing the lack of manliness on the man's part. The same way a wife's conduct would attest the husband's lack of manliness, a daughter or a sister's conduct threatened to disintegrate the purity of the caste and the moral integrity of the family. Consequently, during the Renaissance, ‘the virtue of chastity was assured by the woman's being closed off, immured in her house, while the open door and the open mouth were taken to signify sexual incontinence’ (Scolnicov, 1994:7).
Given the prevalence of the ‘honour code’ in the community, a literary genre emerged, that of the ‘Wife-Murder Comedia’, a theme also found in narrative, although less often. The most popular exponent of this genre is sixteenth century dramatist Calderon de la Barca. His El médico de su honra (‘The doctor of his own honour’) portrays the husband, who suspects his wife of adultery, killing her by letting her bleed to death (sangría), a procedure often found in the literary works of the period. An example of a wife-murder story which presents a number of parallels with Calderon's play is also present among the short novels contained in Zayas' second volume, Desengaños. It is the third novel of the volume and is entitled El verdugo de su esposa (‘His wife's executioner’).
Another example of an honour story is Zayas' chilling eighth story, ‘El traidor contra su sangre’ (‘Traitor against his own blood’) where the heroine's brother, in their father's absence, takes more than the usual responsibility for his sister's honour. A brief summary is in order. The sister has a suitor of whom her father does not approve because, despite his money, his family is descended from the peasantry (this, by the way, illustrates ‘vertical’ honour, and alludes also to ‘horizontal honour’ or the possibility of transcending social class by merit in a mobile society). She continues seeing him, especially at night through the window, and hopes eventually to marry him. Her father and brother plan to send her to a convent in order to pay less dowry for her. The brother, especially, fears that if she were to marry, his inheritance would diminish. Consequently, when their father is away and having found that his sister keeps on seeing the gentleman, he takes her to a ‘retrete’, an isolated room within the house, stabs her to death, locks the room and escapes.
The action is excessive not only because wishing to marry does not involve offence on the sister's side, but because the brother acts in the father's absence and without his consent. The presence of the ‘retrete’, the room where the action is executed, which would later be known as a ‘closet’, associates with it the man's space since that room, initially no more than a writing desk where the man kept all family and crucial documents, according to Wigley (1992), was created as the first masculine private space: ‘The first truly private space was the man's study, a small locked room off his bedroom which no one else ever enters, an intellectual space beyond that of sexuality’ (1992:347). From a different perspective, though, it could be read as a statement of the brother's anger because the sister, in trying to arrange her own marriage, had transgressed her brother's power and therefore his space, in venturing into the public sphere. Moreover, locking her up in that room, when the lock and the key are symbolic in themselves (‘male control is expressed by the physical oppression of lock and key’—Scolnicov, 1994:69) means to ‘literally closet away the abject domain from the spatial representation of pure order’ (Wigley, 1992:344).
THE CONCEPT OF ‘NORMATIVE WOMAN’
However, for the honour code to work discursively it had to rely on a normative concept of woman. The idea of the ‘Normative Woman’ was provided for sixteenth century Spain by its educational religious literature. I mentioned in my introduction the Church's reformative efforts at that time, but I will now be more specific.
Following the meeting of the Council of Trent, where the Catholic Church defined its dogma, the publication of religious books proliferated in Spain. This took place mainly during the sixteenth century, giving way to a proliferation of profane literature (Zayas among them) at the end of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. According to R.O. Jones, the Counter Reformation corresponded to the intent of reviving the traditional culture by a Church intent on moulding and directing such culture in all its aspects. The teachings of humanism were incorporated and education was considered vital for the task the Church had set itself (Jones, 1983:123). Representative authors of this tendency were: Pedro Malón de Chaide, whose Conversion of Mary Magdalene (1588) presented a moral alternative to the profane books written in his time; St. Theresa (1515-1582) whose religious books of a didactic nature explain the way of virtue and prayer by means of her own mystic visionary experiences; St. John of the Cross (1542-1591) who expresses personal mystical experiences in his poetry, and Fray Luis de León (1527-1591), whose book La perfecta casada, an educational manual for the married woman, deserves especial attention.
La perfecta casada (‘The perfect married woman’ and by extension ‘The perfect woman’) is, I believe, the best source of the concept of Normative Woman of the time. First published in 1583, it was intended as a biblical comment on the poem of Solomon and, on another level, inscribed within the tradition of Renaissance conduct books and specifically marriage books. It attempted to regulate all spheres of a (married) woman's life, indicating what the ‘perfect’ (understood as normative) woman at all times should be. The justifications for all the conclusions regarding women proposed in this book are undebatable; they are either examples taken from literature or the Bible as if they reflected reality, or they are premises sanctioned by reference to God, nature or ‘what is natural’. One of these ‘natural’ arguments is the explanation of the ‘Law of the Father’: ‘It is true that nature ordered men to marry not only so that their names and lineage be perpetuated in their descendants but also so that they themselves were preserved through them’ (de León, 1992:93).
ENCLOSED BODY, CLOSED MOUTH, LOCKED HOUSE
The ‘Normative Woman’, says Stallybrass, is like Bakhtin's classical body: ‘her signs are the enclosed body, the closed mouth, the locked house’ (Stallybrass, 1986:127). Therefore it is not surprising that the discourse on this theme devotes attention to the three elements: body, mouth and house. I propose a comparison between La perfecta casada and Stallybrass' article regarding ‘the woman as body enclosed’. A contraposition of a few quotes relative to those three focal points of attention will reveal that De León's discourse follows the traditional arguments regarding women.
Linked to the idea of the ‘enclosed body’ is that of measure, a way of controlling the uncontrollable. It is derived, says Stallybrass, from ‘the assumption that woman's body, unlike the prince's, is naturally grotesque. It must be subjected to constant surveillance precisely because, as Bahktin says of the grotesque body, it is ‘unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits’ (Stallybrass, 1986:126). De León constantly alludes to the fact that women are more frail and more prone to go astray. For instance, in the following passage, he believes work is the solution for them: ‘since woman is more inclined to pleasure and more easily softens and falls prey to idleness, then work is more convenient to her’ (ibid.: 125). On other occasions Fray Luis de León notes the inferiority of the woman and her need to behave accordingly: ‘woman's class, in comparison to her husband's, is humble, and measure and modesty are woman's natural talents’ (De León, 1992:176). Similarly, and quoting a Renaissance book of good conduct by William Whately, Stallybrass notes that woman's obedience is necessary, her duties being: ‘first to acknowledge her inferiority: the next to carry her selfe as inferior’ (Stallybrass, 1986:126).
Wigley also relates the origins of these arguments by mentioning the long-held ideas that the woman ‘on the outside’ is considered implicitly sexually mobile and more dangerously feminine; and that women lack internal self-control, internal boundaries and therefore ‘must be controlled by being bounded. Marriage, understood as the domestication of a wild animal, is instituted to effect this control. As the mechanism of, rather than simply the scene for, this control, the house is involved in the production of the gender division it appears to secure’ (Wigley, 1992:335-336).
The idea of the ‘closed mouth’ is represented in the constant insistence on the need for women to be silent. Again, De León justifies this on the basis of nature: ‘nature did not make the good and honest woman either for the study of the sciences or for difficult businesses but for one and only one simple and domestic business, thus it limited her understanding and, consequently her words and reasoning’ (De León, 1992:176). Stallybrass provides the reasons behind this statement: ‘Silence, the closed mouth, is made a sign of chastity. And silence and chastity are, in turn, homologous to women's enclosure within the house’ (Stallybrass, 1986:127).
‘The locked house’ is justified by De León as a divine mandate, saying that ‘the end for which God ordered the woman and gave her as company to the husband was so that she kept his house’ (De León, 1992:180). He also justifies woman's need to stay enclosed based on her nature, saying that God provided women with little strength so that they stayed in their corner (ibid.:181). He is very specific regarding the space allowed to women, which is tremendously limited, as will be clear from the following quote: ‘When telling the woman to go around her house he wants to show her the space where she should move her feet and, also the length of her steps, (which is to say, figuratively, the scope of her life) which should be restricted to her own house and neither the streets, nor the squares, nor the orchards, nor other people's homes’ (ibid.:180). The requirement that a woman be present at her house at all times, in all its corners, implies that the only task allocated to her is that of surveillance of the house, meaning not only the building but all the servants and inhabitants within it. Moreover, although De León wants the surveillance task to appear as her duty, the reality is, as Wigley notes, that ‘the house is literally understood as a mechanism for the domestication of (delicately minded and pathologically embodied) women’ (Wigley, 1992:332). In enclosure, the woman is the one exposed to surveillance mechanisms rather than the one effecting them.
Both the honour code and the normative concept of woman relied on a generic division of space where its monument, the house, as mentioned previously, would ensure ‘The Law of the Father’ and thus ‘the father's genealogical claims’(Wigley, 1992:336). ‘The generic division of space’ which separates by means of opposing terms, the house from the non-house and thus the private from the public, is at once ancestral and an ongoing phenomenon in Western culture, and its origins can be found in Hellenic culture. Hellenic culture associated the inside of the house with the quiet goddess Hestia (and therefore venerated it) and the outside entrance with the mobile God Hermes. According to Scolnicov (1994:6): ‘the structural division of space into the interior and the exterior of the house carries with it social and cultural implications. Gender roles are spatially defined in relation to the inside and the outside of this house’. However, according to Wigley ‘opposing male mobility in the exterior to female stasis in the interior […] at once naturalizes and spatializes gender’ (1992:334). Moreover, he claims that ‘the spaces literally produce the effect of gender, transforming the mental and physical character of those who occupy the wrong place’. Wigley's original thought consists in reversing the usual parallel between gender and architecture, proposing on the other hand that a different division of space could have produced a different gender, that is to say, that space is a product of gender as much as gender is a product of space.
THE NARRATIVES OF MARIA DE ZAYAS
Zayas who, like Wigley, also questioned the establishment, reveals, to put it metaphorically, the ‘fissures’ of the house and the discourses housed within it. On a number of occasions Zayas' stories illustrate the lack of security of the house, given the invasions effected on women by both outsiders and insiders. The security of the house walls is particularly questioned in the fifth and sixth stories of her second volume. In the fifth story, ‘La inocencia castigada’ (‘Innocence punished’) the protagonist, Inés, enchanted by a diabolic magician, leaves her house at night, unlocking it herself, in order to keep tryst with a man who is in love with her. In the sixth story, ‘Amar sólo por vencer’ (‘To love in order to win’), a man, dressed as a woman and pretending to be a maid, manages to enter the house and eventually win the favours of the youngest daughter, who decides to escape with him, only to be later abandoned.
These two occasions are testimony to the fact that, as Wigley suggests, space itself is insufficient since ‘boundaries are only established by the intersection between a walled space and a system of surveillance which monitors all the openings in the walls’ (1992:338). Moreover, aware that their surveillance mechanisms have failed, the male protagonists of both stories take drastic measures: in the fifth story, the protagonist's husband and sister-in-law devise a small chimney-type structure where the protagonist, by way of punishment, is made to live standing up for ten years until she is eventually rescued. In the sixth story the father, angry at his daughter's usurpation of his honour and ‘genealogical claims’ (Wigley, 1992:336) constructs a wall that falls on her head and instantly kills her. Having the wall, a symbol of the house's boundaries, fall on the head of the protagonist, which is the most important element of the body, constitutes a manifestation of anger which, ironically, takes the form of the failed surveillance mechanism. The father, thus, admits his failure and ‘the text seems to suggest that such extreme implementations of the honour code may lead to the erosion of the social structure itself’ (Williamsen, 1991:646).
The security offered by the house walls is even more questionable when invasions of women's space are caused by some of the insiders themselves and sometimes even by very close friends or relatives. The first and last stories, placed not surprisingly in the most significant positions of a volume, are a case in point. In the first story, ‘La esclava de su amante’ (‘Her lover's slave’), the respected son of a family who lives in the same house as that of the protagonist, makes her enter his room in order to rape her. The event is described in the following terms: the protagonist, Isabel, is walking towards the room of the gentleman's sister who is a very good friend of hers, in order to get dressed for a Carnival party. She never manages to reach that room though, because as she enters the corridor, the man, waiting at the door of his own bedroom, greets her and shortly after pushes her inside. The rest is left for the imagination of the reader, although its symbolic description, I believe, makes it clear: ‘He pushed me inside and locked the door with the key. I know not what happened to me since the shock deprived me of my senses in a deadly swoon’ (Zayas, 1983:137). The presence of the Carnival alludes to the masking of the public space, the space in which the private and subjective have no room (Wigley, 1992:377). The lock is itself symbolic of male oppression but also of the sexual act. Moreover, the fact that the event renders her speechless, given what we now know of rape cases, is very telling in itself.
The last story, ‘Estragos que causa el vicio’ (‘The ravages of vice’), is an exaggerated version of the ‘invasion by the insider’ theme. In this story, a man has built a fortress-type house where he keeps all his household members locked up (and they include his wife, his wife's sister and a number of both black and white servants). When the circumstances of his love life get out of control (he is emotionally involved with both sisters) his rage makes him kill all of the household members except the protagonist, who manages to escape to tell the story. Whereas such situations are crude in other stories, in this ‘house of horrors’, given its magnitude, the situation is ironic. It manifests that a woman is never safe from her lovers, brothers or other relatives, not even inside the supposedly secure structure of the house. It notes, as Wigley does, that ‘architecture is precisely not about the transparency it advertises’ (Wigley, 1992:379) and it certainly leaves the reader with the question of whom does the house protect.
I believe economic motives dictated the enclosure of women in seventeenth century Spain. An empire that had been decaying for two centuries, it required the presence of men in a variety of wars started against neighbouring European countries. A country progressively losing its male force required women permanently enclosed in the home for the procreation and raising of the men to be employed in the needed political enterprises. However, as Zayas's stories reveal, the discursive practices of the Church and State, given the insecurity of the house (and therefore of the discourses which housed it) proved insufficient. The family was unable to reproduce the mechanisms set in place for the modern state. One wonders if the surveillance methods did not function or if they were questionable from the start.
Bibliography
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