“Fleshing out Feminism: María de Zayas' Corporeal Politics.”

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Fleshing out Feminism in Early Modern Spain: María de Zayas's Corporeal Politics Author(s): LISA VOLLENDORF Source: Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Otoño 1997), pp. 87-108Published by: Revista Canadiense de Estudios HispánicosStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27763431Accessed: 01-03-2015 19:55 UTC

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LISA VOLLENDORF

Fleshing out Feminism in Early Modern

Spain: Mar?a de Zayas s Corporeal Politics*

Este art?culo estudia la intersecci?n de la violencia y el cuerpo en las Novelas amorosas y ejemplares y los Desenga?os amorosos de Mar?a de Zayas y Sotomayor para poner de relieve la importancia del discurso corporal en su est?tica

y pol?tica. A lo largo de los dos vol?menes, Zayas comunica un feminismo mediante un enfoque en el cuerpo femenino y, en los Desenga?os en particular, a trav?s de la movilizaci?n de la subjetividad femenina. Estudiamos el pr?logo de las Novelas amorosas y la primera novela de los Desenga?os para mostrar que la clave de la

expresi?n del feminismo de Zayas se encuentra precisamente en la violencia contra la mujer y en un discurso enfocado en el cuerpo femenino. Dada la importancia de lo corporal y la protesta contra la falta de control de la mujer sobre su propio cuerpo, el feminismo de Zayas tiene muchos puntos en com?n con la teor?a

feminista contempor?nea, los cuales examinamos a partir de un estudio de Elizabeth Groszpara definir con m?s precisi?n no s?lo el feminismo de Zayas sino tambi?n la relaci?n problem?tica entre el feminismo y los estudios sobre el cuerpo

femenino.

It is possible to construct a biography, a history of the body, for each individual and social body.

Elizabeth Grosz Volatile Bodies

Like many early modern authors, Maria de Zayas holds the violated body up for

scrutiny, demanding that we read its multiple historical and cultural meanings. In her Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (1637), women are raped, beaten, and killed

by men. In the Desenga?os amorosos (1647), morbidly creative means of

punishing and containing women are narrated as characters attempt to

* I would like to thank H. Patsy Boyer and Denise K. Buell for reading earlier versions

of this article. Their comments were invaluable in the preparation of the final copy.

REVISTA CANADIENSE DE ESTUDIOS HISP?NICOS Vol XXII, 1 Oto?o 1997



88

eliminate the threat posed to the social order by the female body. In this second volume, every type of violence imaginable is carried out as characters imprison, rape, poison, torture, strangle, stab, and behead the women closest to them. The reader of these novelas would likely have been familiar with such confrontations with the corporeal: in addition to the violence seen in the public chastisement of penitents and in autos de fe, many Baroque texts rely on similarly vivid

representations of violated bodies.1

Signalled by the disruption of the physical and/or psychical integrity of the

self, violation occurs in seemingly infinite variations in the literature of the

period. The most salient examples can be found in the spectacle of the wife murder plays, that sub-genre of comedia in which the female body is posited as the principle site of contestation for issues of sexual and political anxiety.2 Here

we find Calder?n's Mencia sacrificially bled to death in El m?dico de su honra and Lopes Casandra killed by her lover in El castigo sin venganza. In addition to violation, bodies are also the site for subversion and challenge during the

period, as the popularity of cross-dressing and other questioning of gender roles confirm. Some of the best known female characters of the period, including Rosaura in La vida es sue?o and Laurencia in Fuenteovejuna, break down gender roles by dressing and/or acting like men.3 In spite of the differences among these

many theatrical characters engaged in transgressive gender behaviour, the one

thing they have in common is that they were all penned by men. And, as Sheila Fisher and Janet Halley summarily state in The Lady Vanishes, "for a male author to write women in these periods was to refer not to women, but to men"

(4). The use of the body by these and other early modern authors tells us many things, but the one conclusion we can easily make about the comedia and other

literary genres and cultural phenomena is that bodies acted as signifiers for a

variety of dominant (i.e. patriarchal) ideologies in the seventeenth century. Bodies had meaning, and, in the literary as well as the social realms, men controlled the production and presentation of that meaning.

In early modern Spain, an age in which male authors and the Inquisitorial state used bodies for varying aesthetic, didactic, political, yet ultimately patriarchal, purposes, Zayas issued her own response to male dominance over

technologies of sex and gender. Relying on myriad manifestations of violence to

convey a feminist message, Zayas's novela collection incorporates the spectacle of violence usually reserved for comedia and the aestheticization of violence seen, as Patricia Grieve has suggested, in the hagiographie tradition.4 Given that

Zayas's texts continually defend women's right to education and to fair treatment in society, much ink has been spilled over the nature of her feminist beliefs. Some critics claim that to read Zayas as a feminist is to read

anachronistically (Perry), to be duped by her rhetoric (Griswold), or to underestimate the sophistication with which she uses language (Brownlee, "Postmodernism").5 Others (such as Boyer, Foa, and Maroto Camino) point to



89

the privileging of the feminine in her fiction as testimony to her feminist

ideologies. This debate persists not only because Zayas s texts are, as Brownlee has highlighted, quintessentially Baroque in their refutation of univalence, but

also, I would argue, because the tenets of Zayas's politics have yet to be articulated within a theoretical model that addresses her feminism. It is with this task at hand that this article locates the cornerstone of what I read as Zayas's carefully conceived feminist politics: the connection between violence and bodies in her texts. In the Novelas amorosas and in the more daring Desenga?os amorosos, Zayas turns to the stories of the body to which Elizabeth Grosz refers in my epigraph. Through fictional women characters, Zayas offers up women's stories with the effect of constructing what Grosz calls "a biography, a history of the body, for each individual and social body" (142). Using women's voices,

Zayas tells the story of the collective feminine body and of society; she thus lays out the tenets of an early modern corporeal feminism that engages and

politicizes the female body in order to mobilize male and female readers and

society at large to enact reform that would improve the treatment of women.

Zayas's self-conscious appropriation and deployment of the female body will be examined here in an analysis of the prefatory note "Al que leyere" in the Novelas amorosas and its ideological counterpoint, the first novela of the

Desenga?os amorosos. After a brief analysis of "Al que leyere" and an overview of the key narrative techniques that situate the feminine body at the centre of the texts, I will analyse "Esclava de su amante" to elucidate the ways in which

body, voice, and text merge in Zayas's poetics to create a formidable political agenda which mobilizes the female body in a campaign to validate women's

physical and psychical integrity.6 This politicization of the feminine constitutes a corporeal feminism that speaks of and through the woman's body, thereby issuing a challenge to the ideologies and cultural practices which utilize and dehumanize women, practices that position women on the body side of the

mind/body split and that treat the female body as a male domain. Zayas's theorization of the body forges a close relationship among women's bodies, voices, and texts and therefore can be interpreted not only as a corrective to the

prevailing devaluation of the feminine in the seventeenth century, but also as an

anticipation of twentieth-century body-based feminisms.

Philosophy and feminist theory of the past two decades are helpful in

bridging the gap between the role of the body in late twentieth-century Western culture and the corporeality of Zayasian discourse. As a reminder of the

changing role of the body throughout history, we need only recall Michel Foucault 's influential explanation, as stated in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, about sexuality in pre-eighteenth-century Europe:

At the beginning of the seventeenth century a certain frankness was still common, it

would seem. Sexual practices had little need of secrecy ... Codes regulating the coarse,



90

the obscene, and the indecent were quite lax compared to those of the nineteenth

century. (3)

Although much Foucauldian analysis has been challenged and criticized by feminists, this particular observation seems to hold true in the Spanish context, where the frankness of Zayas's texts was condemned in the nineteenth century. It is no coincidence that Zayas's fiction, with its focus on sexuality and violence,

went out of print in the middle of the nineteenth century after enjoying publishing success for two hundred years.7 Emilia Pardo Baz?n's cautionary explanation in her Introduction to her 1892 edition of Zayas's novelas speaks to

this shift in ideology:

Nuestro recato exterior ha progresado tanto desde el siglo XVII ac?, que temo, al presentar

nuevamente ? do?a Mar?a de Zayas, que se la juzgue mal por culpa de algunas frases vivas

y algunas escenas poco veladas. (15)

As Pardo Baz?n's remarks imply, Zayas's focus on sexuality and on the tensions between the sexes has not gone unnoticed. Pardo Baz?n's comments also draw

attention to the gap between Zayas's conception of these issues and changing views toward the same issues over time. I would argue that, even well into the twentieth century, our impulse to regulate the body and its functions is so

distinct from the attitudes toward the body in the pre-Victorian age that even at the end of the twentieth century we continue to overlook the important role of the corporeal in pre- and early modern texts.

The difficulties of reading bodies and interpreting sexuality are compounded by the fact that women's relationship to their bodies and to the body social has

long been problematic for feminist thinkers. As philosopher Elizabeth Grosz summarizes in Volatile Bodies, the absolute differentiation between mind and

body, with its attendant exaltation of the mind and denigration of the body, effected a "binarization of the sexes" at the very "threshold of Western reason"

(5). Since ancient times, in sources claimed as foundational to Western thought, women have been said to belong to the disparaged sphere of matter, of the body, while men's territory has been defined as that of reason and the mind. The

persistence of such conceptions of women both in intellectual and popular realms has quite justifiably made feminists wary of approaching the corporeal. Yet many feminists have taken on the project with grace and force.8 In this

regard, contemporary feminist theory, which influenced and in turn was

influenced by Foucault, has helped tremendously to refine our thinking about the relationships between mind and body and between body and culture.

In one of the latest publications on corporeality and philosophy, Grosz addresses the complex history of women's relationship to the body. In the Introduction to Volatile Bodies, Grosz admits, for example, that feminists are



91

sceptical of putting too much stock in the body, since, traditionally, women's bodies have been acted upon, culturally constructed and represented for us

rather than by us (x). In her book she sets out to issue a feminist corrective to

this corporeal colonization by examining mainstream philosophical discourse and teasing out the useful aspects of this tradition that might be used for the

theorization of what she announces in her sub-title to be "corporeal feminism."

Like Grosz's own philosophical explorations, Zayas's discourse is fundamentally

corporeal, for she focuses on the signifying powers of the body as a means to

convey a feminist message to the politically-tense society of seventeenth-century

Spain. And, just as Elizabeth Grosz responds to a masculinist philosophical tradition in an attempt to theorize a body-based feminism in Volatile Bodies,

Mar?a de Zayas responds to the devaluation of the feminine in the intellectual and cultural spheres with a feminism based on women's corporeality.

From the beginning of the Novelas amorosas to the end of the Desenga?os,

Zayas politicizes her fiction both directly and indirectly, using the body as the

central point of reference for her feminist messages. Unlike the countless

anonymous texts attributed to Virginia Woolf 's much discussed female author

"Anon," Zayas gives her readers no room to doubt her gender or her politics. At

the beginning of the prefatory "Al que leyere" of the Novelas amorosas, Zayas confronts the reader with her gender and then inserts herself firmly into the

public sphere as a woman writer whose work has been legitimized by virtue of

having gone to press:

Qui?n duda, lector m?o, que te causar? admiraci?n que una mujer tenga despejo, no s?lo

para escribir un libro, sino para darle a la estampa, que es el crisol donde se averigua la

pureza de los ingenios; porque hasta que los escritos se rozan en las letras de plomo, no

tienen valor cierto ... (21)

Aware of the potential criticism her work might receive because of her gender,

Zayas does not stop with simply claiming the public space of publication. In

keeping with Renaissance discourse on the querelle des femmes, Zayas also

diminishes the supposed differences between the sexes as she asserts biological and spiritual equality between men and women. In this self-authorizing move,

Zayas draws on prevailing philosophical and theological paradigms to validate

her own intellectual exercise. Constance Jordan tells us in Renaissance Feminism

that such merging of Scriptural and philosophical models was popular among

early modern feminists who questioned the discourses meant to perpetuate

"existing social and political practices" (65). By directly addressing the dominant

ideologies (so-called "natural laws") regarding sex and gender, Zayas indicts men for mistakenly viewing women as weak, inferior beings who should remain, as Fray Luis insists in La perfecta casada, silent, chaste, and humble so as to

please both their husbands and God. Zayas argues, for example:



92

... si esta materia de que nos componemos los hombres y las mujeres, ya sea una

trabaz?n de fuego y barro, o ya una masa de esp?ritus y terrones, no tiene m?s nobleza

en ellos que en nosotras, si es una misma la sangre, los sentidos, las potencias y los

?rganos por donde se obran sus efetos son unos mismos, la misma alma que ellos,

porque las almas ni son hombres ni mujeres... (Novelas amorosas 21)

Here, in an allusion to the popular Aristotelian and Galenic models that saw woman as a biologically defective man, Zayas highlights the sameness of male and female corporeality. In emphasizing this corporeal equality, Zayas does not

confirm a natural hierarchy as Aristotle does, but, rather, she pinpoints a natural lack of sexual difference (or sexual indifference as Luce Irigaray would have it) that can then be interpreted as a sameness between the sexes.9 The subsequent declaration of spiritual equality that de-sexes the soul expresses the late medieval and Renaissance essentialist belief, as discussed by Fisher and Halley, in an

androgynous self (2).10

Throughout this preface, then, Zayas capitalizes on prevailing topoi of the day in order to validate her position as a woman writer. Countering claims to mens

superiority, for example, Zayas elaborates on her arguments for equality and then actually uses her own biological explanations to posit that perhaps women are intellectually more capable than men:

la verdadera causa de no ser las mujeres doctas no es defecto del caudal, sino falta de la

aplicaci?n ... [fu?ramos] quiz? m?s agudas por ser de natural m?s fr?o, por consistir en

humedad el entendimiento ... (Novelas amorosas 22)

Here, Zayas speaks to the reader in terms of the discourse that described human nature in terms of humours, adopting this logic to fit her own feminist

purposes. While Paul Julian Smith in The Body Hispanic reads this rhetoric as an indication of Zayass failure to "transcend the phallocentric logic of her own time" (31), we might also consider that rather than merely inverting the anti feminist biological arguments, Zayas perceptively demonstrates the flexibility, and therefore the fallibility, of logic that claims to explain human nature. With these and previous comments, she issues a challenge to the reader of the preface, pressing him or her to see the flaws in dominant masculine discourse and

simultaneously urging him or her to continue to read her texts.

Zayas does not stop at inverting popular assumptions about sexual

difference, for she also elaborates the challenge to the reader by using her feminine status to lure men in by appealing to chivalrous obligation:

Te ofrezco este libro muy segura de tu bizarr?a y en confianza de que si te desagradare,

pod?as disculparme con que nac? mujer, no con obligaciones de hacer buenas novelas,

sino con muchos deseos de acertar a servirte. (Novelas amorosas 23)



93

Faced with what she obviously anticipates to be a resistant reader, Zayas relies on various rhetorical strategies, including a focus on androgynous corporeality and spirituality and an appeal to chivalry, as a way to lure readers into her texts.11 Throughout the preface, she appropriates and uses to her benefit the very

logic used against women in her culture. This appropriation allows her to derive a conclusion that legitimates her intellectual and political endeavours: she inverts the dominant models of bodily rhetoric and thereby demonstrates the

slippery nature of "scientific" discourses that make truth claims about the "natural" order of things. In the course of this sophisticated argumentation, which is rhetorically comparable to many querelle des femmes debates, she points to the body as the site of exploration for the issues of social, juridical, and individual reform that will dominate in her novelas. With such references to bodies, writing, and resistance, the preface

immediately refers us to the culturally constructed boundaries placed on

feminine behaviour. Zayas's concern for legitimizing herself as an author communicates her awareness of the daring enterprise she undertakes as a woman offering up her intellectual efforts for public scrutiny. The insistence on

drawing in the male audience suggests that something larger is at stake here, however, for both in "Al que leyere" and in the frame tale itself, men are figured as integral to the texts. In the Novelas amorosas, for example, the task of

narrating the ten novelas is equally divided between the sexes. During the

soir?es, held as a diversion for the recuperating protagonist Lisis, the ten frame characters tell various tales dealing with love and relationships. Spurned by the suitor Juan, Lisis plays the roles of hostess, poet, and vengeful mistress as she deals with rejection by entertaining the advances of another man, Diego. While

Zayas goes out of her way to reel in the resistant (probably male) reader in "Al

que leyere," in the frame tale there is a sexual equilibrium between male and female characters. This equilibrium makes itself manifest in the sartorial

matching of each man with a woman and in the equal division of responsibility for narration.12 While Ruth El Saffar argues that the equity of narrative distribution can be attributed to the dynamics of courtship present in the frame tale of the Novelas amorosas, it becomes clear in the preface and in the more

politically charged Desenga?os that to weave men into the texts at so many different levels and in such a self-conscious way is to recognize men's potential to influence social change and to improve cultural attitudes toward women.

Zayas's dependence on inclusionary discursive practices, then, functions as a

mirror to her larger political project of engaging both men and women in a plan for social reform.

First captured in the rhetorically manipulative "Al que leyere," the potentially resistant reader's attention must be held throughout the novelas themselves.13 To accomplish this, inclusionary strategies are used throughout the first volume: in addition to the gender equity and the structure of shared narration in the



94

frame tale, both men's and women's bodies are portrayed as endangered in this first volume. Through various acts of violence and verbal protestations on the

part of characters and narrators, the human body is shown to be in danger within a cultural system that places exaggerated importance on honor. Periodic

protests against women's oppression and against the honor code surface in the Novelas amorosas and thus prefigure the Desenga?os' indictment of the

patriarchal practices that victimize women. In spite of these resistant comments, the comparatively idyllic Novelas amorosas y ejemplares do not forge the close

relationship among women's body, voice, and text that is abundantly evident in the Desenga?os.

From Zayas's comments in "Al que leyere" to Lisis's illness and the violence in the novelas proper, the Novelas amorosas do, however, set the stage for

corporeal discourse. The more critical and woman-centred Desenga?os then

focus almost exclusively on the female body, exposing the crisis facing women

by narrating act after act of violation. Highlighting the importance of the body, the entire collection is framed by Lisis's illnesses. While, at the start of the

Novelas, she is recovering from quartan fever, in the Desenga??se discover her on her deathbed, driven to sickness by tumultuous love relationships. The institutions of courtship and marriage lead to women's physical danger, in other

words, and Lisis is a living example of this correlation. But it is the character Zelima who best represents the merging of body, voice, and text in this volume, and we turn to her in order to explain the critical shift toward corporeality which takes place in the Desenga?os.

Articulated by Lisis in the Introduction to the Desenga?os, the rules of narration of this second publication exchange the general didacticism seen in the Novelas amorosas for a gynocentric exemplarity meant to "volver por la fama de las mujeres (tan postrada y abatida por su mal juicio, que apenas hay quien hable bien de ellas)" (Desenga?os 118). These texts pointedly respond to the masculine literary tradition that portrays women negatively. In effect, the texts are meant to free women's voices and to tell their side of the story. As seen in the remarks made in "Al que leyere" and in this Introduction to the second volume,

Zayas's indictment of the dominant literary tradition coincides with H?l?ne Cixous's own comments in "Laugh of the Medusa":

I maintain unequivocally that there is such a thing as marked writing; that, until now, far

more extensively and repressively than is ever suspected or admitted, writing has been

run by a libidinal and cultural - hence political, typically masculine - economy. (249)

Zayas writes against this "typically masculine" discursive tradition which she criticizes in "Al que leyere" and again in the Desenga?os. Specifically, she creates a fictional world that redresses the exclusion of women by issuing a new set of rules for literary production. As is well known, only women can narrate in the



95

Desenga?os and they must tell "true" tales of masculine deception. That Zelima is granted by Lisis the privileged position of being the first narrator communi cates the close friendship Lisis has with this woman, her new-found companion and Moorish slave who will later reveal herself to be the Christian aristocrat, Isabel. Similar to Mar?a de Zayas's position as a voice breaking masculine

barriers, Zelima's is the first voice to speak of women's experiences, to answer to the manipulation, objectification, and commodification of women in discursive and cultural traditions. Due to Zelima's uneasy position (that of a woman speaking to men, speaking out against them), Zayas once again strategizes to draw in the male reader and to maintain his attention.

As the first narrator of the Desenga?os, the slave Zelima is an exotic presence in the otherwise homogeneous group of white Catholic aristocrats who populate the frame tale and whose counterparts are the protagonists of the novelas

proper. Presented as a gift to Lisis, Zelima has physical markings of slavery on her face. An iron brand in the shape of an "s" with a bar through it has a

metaphoric capacity not lost on the reader: "la S y clavo" clearly serve as a

fragmented representation of the word "esclavo" (Desenga?os 117). With slavery thus written upon her body, the outward declaration of her identity seems fixed. The first to express interest in Zelima's life, her owner and friend Lisis shows

curiosity that is deflected when Zelima promises, "A su tiempo, se?ora m?a, la

sabr?s, y te admirar?s de ella" (Desenga?os 117). The mystery surrounding this

unusually beautiful and intriguing slave intensifies when she enters the soir?e on the first night, prepared to be the first woman to narrate a tale of disenchant

ment.

Figured as the outsider par excellence, Zelima is presented as a body that serves to secure the hegemonic gaze. Zelima's Otherness functions as a means

to hook the reader, for she represents the "off-centre, non-hegemonic identity" described by Sidonie Smith in "Identity's Body" as inviting the gaze (269). Zelima's difference functions to grab the male (and female) gaze, but a process of undifferentiation is quickly put into place that converts the Other into a

member of the dominant group, thereby encouraging an identification between Zelima and the reader. Importantly, this identification serves to diminish the

triple threat posed by a non-Christian female slave. The first motion toward the

homogenization of Zelima occurs when she communicates her desire to become Christian to her mistress. This initial indication of Zelima's possible assimilation into the aristocratic, Christian environment of the frame tale minimizes the threat her religious difference might pose.

Zelima's physical appearance suggests this mixture of identities put forth in the religious context. As Amy Katz Kaminsky has discussed in "Dress and Redress: Clothing in the Desenga?os," Zelima's breathtaking blue and white costume of European and Moorish markings "proclaims her rank but only hints at her nationality and religion" (382). Focusing our attention on the body, the



96

narration carefully describes the details of Zehmas clothing, allowing us to read her for clues of her true identity. The guests read her as well, variously interpreting her as "una princesa de Argel, una reina de Fez o Marruecos, o una

sultana de Constantinople and "una ninfa o diosa de las antiguas f?bulas"

(Desenga?os 124). These attempts at defining a woman through her outward

appearance express a desire to decode the exemplarity of the body. This

willingness to seek meaning in the body is related to the conditioning provided by long-standing literary, artistic, and philosophical traditions that define women as body and hold women up to be read. As in "Al que leyere," Zayas exploits this conditioning in order to gain and maintain our attention.

Once the audience is at Zelima's mercy, with the women envious of her

beauty and the men "rendidos a ella" (Desenga?os 124), she launches into a

vituperation about misogyny that echoes Zayas's own invective in "Al que

leyere." Here Zelima remarks on the need for women's voices and stories to be heard "pues ni comedia se representa, ni libro se imprime que no sea todo en ofensa de las mujeres" (Desenga?os 124). Having thus defined the macrocosmic

scope of the storytelling project, Zelima secures the connection between body and text by announcing that, although she could tell many tales of disenchant

ment, she has chosen to tell her own. Zelima thus adopts the personal voice, which is defined by narratologist Susan Lanser as "indistinguishable from

autobiography" in that it consists of "a personal narrator [who] claims only the

validity of one person's right to interpret her experience" (19). Lanser suggests that the authority of the personal voice is limited in comparison to other narrative voices because it must establish its own credibility with the reader. It

is, therefore, "less formidable for women than authorial voice, since an authorial narrator claims broad powers of knowledge and judgment" (19-20). Yet Zayas's use of this narrative voice poses a challenge to Lanser's assertions; Zelima's

autobiographical voice is, arguably, the most powerful voice in the Desenga?os, as it sets the important precedent of the telling of women's stories of victimiz ation.

Of course, for a woman to speak up or speak out in early modern Spain required her to address the lack of opportunity for women to speak and the lack of credibility given to them when they did speak. Zayas confronts these issues in her own voice in the preface and has Zelima confront them as well. In spite of literary, philosophical, and cultural traditions that disparage women's

intellect, Zelima resorts to autobiography, to the creation and narration of her own experience, as a way to free her own body as well as to free women's stories,

voices, and bodies. Zelima's telling of an autobiographical story should also be

read, as Mireya P?rez-Erdelyi points out, as an example that all women have their own disenchantment to tell (69). Through the emphasis on the body in her

autobiography, Zelima's story solidifies the relationship between female



97

subjectivity and corporeality that provides the cornerstone for the political agenda of the texts.

Underscoring the multiplicity of her identity, Zelima immediately decon structs the initial image she has presented of herself.14 In doing so, she reveals herself to be a living example of the Baroque conceit of deceptive appearances.

With her multiple subjectivities, Isabel is also a perfect example of the "elusive

subjectivity" that Marina Brownlee identifies in "Elusive Subjectivity in Maria de Zayas," for here the supposed Moorish slave Zelima undermines all of the

previous assumptions made about her in one fell swoop:

Mi nombre es do?a Isabel Fajardo, no Zelima, ni mora, como pens?is, sino cristiana, y

hija de padres cat?licos, y de los m?s principales de la ciudad de Murcia. (Desenga?os 127)

In search of self-authorization, Isabel then reinforces her assertion that she is indeed like the other guests by removing the self-fashioned brand from her face so that the audience will be more inclined to believe her ("para que deis m?s cr?dito" [Desenga?os 127]). This performative transformation turns Zelima, the

Moorish female slave triply representative of the Other, into Isabel, a Christian aristocrat whose only marker of difference is that she is a speaking woman,

willing to perform and give voice to her many identities in a public forum.

Previously Other, Zelima/Isabel thus integrates herself into the mainstream,

stripping away the layers separating her from the audience as she makes her

body a text and encourages the reader to equate textuality with corporeality.15 In line with this interchangeability of terms, Isabel describes her condition of

slavery as a willfully chosen position meant to represent on the surface of her

body the spiritual and psychical enslavement she feels as a result of having been

raped and subsequently rejected by the rapist, who had professed his love to her.

Thus, as Kaminsky states of Zelima/Isabel,

She makes material the metaphor of the lover's abiding presence within her and

determines to advertise his base and unchristian behaviour by wearing outwardly the

marks of estrangement from Christian society (Muslim dress) and enslavement (the

brand on her face) which his actions have occasioned. (383)

While Isabel does originally fashion herself as a slave in order to publicize her

rapist s dishonourable behaviour and the effects of the rape and abandonment on her psyche, the performative act also has other implications that range from the practical to the political. Ironically, slavery affords Isabel unusual flexibility in that, once sold, she secures a freedom of movement that otherwise would not have been possible for her. And, in keeping with the didactic and political purposes of the Desenga?os, she posits the violated female body as the focus of



98

the texts and the woman as the logical and valid spokesperson for the treatment

of women in society.

Through Zelima/Isabel, Zayas takes care to authorize women's creativity just as she did when speaking "al que leyere." Announcing that she herself is a

talented poet, Isabel pauses her narration, for example, to defend women's right to create, their right to write, demanding that men give credit where it is due

rather than feel threatened by women's creative talents. As Sidonie Smith states

of women's autobiography, the speaking subject (the I of autobiography) seeks

"to pursue her own desires, to shatter the portrait of herself she sees hanging in

the textual frames of patriarchy" (A Poetics 59). Isabel's claims about her poetic abilities indicate that she is aware of her ability to create, to pursue her own

desires, for she states, "Yo fui en todo extremada, y m?s en hacer versos, que era

el espanto de aquel reino" (Desenga?os 128). Isabel's personal voice is a poet's voice. It is with creative, corporeal, Christian, aristocratic authority that she is

shown as presenting herself and her story as a text meant to shatter not only textual portraits of women but also the treatment of women in her culture.

The positioning of this particular novela, the only tale to sustain the

autobiographical mode, as the first in the volume requires an analysis not only of the narrative techniques employed to reel in the reader, but also of the

characterization of the narrator. Isabel's tale of deception, danger, and desire

lays out the principle elements of the ten desenga?os. Structured around female

victimization, all of the tales in this volume portray masculine violence and the victims' frustrated interaction with men. Repeatedly betrayed and violated, the female protagonists either wind up dead (in six stories) or, for four of the fortunate ones, in a convent. That Isabel gives voice to her own suffering and survival sets a precedent that the other female narrators (and women outside the

texts) can follow. At the outset of her story, Isabel describes herself as occupying the typical

position of a female: objectified by men, she only reacted to other's wishes for her rather than defining her own desires. When she was younger, she tells us, she had many suitors and resisted them all, insisting that she would never go against her father's plans for her future (Desenga?os 131). The lack of articulation of her own desire at the start becomes increasingly ironic, however, for as the tale

proceeds she shows herself to be increasingly autonomous - a woman in control of her identity and in search of justice for the wrongs done to her.

The traumatic incident that propels Isabel toward independence and agency is a rape. That is, once she falls victim to this sexual crime, Isabel is forced to come to terms with women's precarious position in a society that emphasizes, even fetishizes, women's sexual purity and physical integrity to such a degree that a victimized woman is perceived as impure and corrupt. Thus, Isabel is

forced out of passivity and into a repeated, eloquent articulation of her desire both in words and action as she seeks to repair the loss of self that she describes



99

as the result of being raped. The description of Isabel's painful realization of the crime tellingly points to the profound repercussions of the event while also

drawing attention to her enraged reaction to the rape. After Manuel locks her in a room and rapes her, Isabel recovers consciousness and realizes what has been done to her. Using what Lynn Higgins and Brenda Silver call in Rape and

Representation the "rhetoric of elision," Isabel gives voice to the rape through silence.16 The silencing of the violent act is apparent in her narration:

Pues pasada poco m?s de media hora, volv? en m?, y me hall?, mal digo, no me hall?,

pues me hall? perdida, y tan perdida, que no me supe ni pude volver ni podr? ganarme

jam?s y infundiendo en m? mi agravio una mort?fera rabia, lo que en otra mujer pudiera causar l?grimas y desesperaciones, en m? fue un furor diab?lico, con el cu?l, desasi?ndo

me de sus infames lazos, arremet? a la espada que ten?a a la cabecera de la cama ... [y] se

la fui a envainar en el cuerpo ... (Desenga?os 137)

Isabel equates the integrity of the body (i.e. virginity) with the integrity of the

psyche and consequently interprets this multiple violation as an erasure of herself ("no me hall?"). This abrupt change, the erasure of her core identity, calls into question Isabel's very existence and leaves the reader asking, "Where is the subject of this autobiography?" The reader already has a partial answer to

this question; in the process of unveiling her identity, Zelima/Isabel already has

begun to reveal the multiplicity of self, her multifarious agency, that will be the

key to her survival. The rest of the story, including Isabel's immediate violent reaction of trying unsuccessfully to kill Manuel and then herself, revolves around the search for the self lost in the moment of violation. Through this

process, Isabel overcomes the position of object in which she found herself in her younger years and the position of victim in which she finds herself during the rape scene. Eventually, she becomes an autonomous subject, an agent in her

own self-invention and representation. This subject-object binary is problematized throughout Isabel's story. When

she leaves her house and takes on the identity of a slave and, with the help of an

ex-servant, is sold for one hundred ducats, she enacts a commodification of self that would appear to undermine her newly found independence. In effect, she has chosen to objectify herself. However, as Lou Charnon-Deutsch suggests, Isabel uses slavery to control her destiny, thereby gaining an independence that is usually unavailable to women (18-19). Isabel's decision to leave her house in search of justice results in her father's immediate death, and with this, and with her mother's rancour toward her because of the death, Isabel feels utterly alone in the world, searching for retribution for the rape in a six-year quest to oblige

Manuel to marry her.

Fearing the performativity that affords Zelima/Isabel independence of movement and access to him, Manuel interprets her masquerade as an indicator



100

of unstable, dangerous identity. Upon recognizing her, Manuel criticizes Isabels

mutability: "?Qu? disfraz es ?ste, do?a Isabel? ?O c?mo las mujeres de tus

obligaciones, y que han tenido deseos y pensamientos de ser m?a, se ponen en

semejantes bajezas?" {Desenga?os 157). Later, he will use her costume as a

psychological weapon to discredit her. Manuel admits that perhaps he might have been obligated to marry Isabel at one point, but he now definitively disavows her "porque es imposible que yo me fiase de mujer que sabe hacer y buscar tantos disfraces" (Desenga?os 163). From the male perspective, Isabel's multifarious agency spills over the boundaries of model female decorum and thus legitimizes his attack on her as a mutable woman of many identities. Excessive in its breaking down of boundaries of class, ethnicity, religion, power, and space, Isabel's slave identity disrupts every basic element of the cultural codes that seek to establish sexual, political, economic, and social order.

Manuel's criticism of Isabel's many masks bespeaks a culturally coded fear of the

feminine, of the Other, as that which symbolizes a threatening destabilization and complete de-centering of patriarchal order.17 In this sense, Isabel is an

anomaly with regard to her feminine agency and autonomy; she is a threat to the social order and, in terms of difference, she remains the Other.

The resolution of Isabel's autobiographical tale provides the thematic and didactic framework for the rest of the Desenga?os. In spite of her impressive capacity for action, Isabel does not act in response to Manuel's final rejection of her as a "base" woman. Rather, a man steps in to resolve the situation: Isabel's

suitor Felipe, whose help she resists throughout the tale as he follows her in his own extended masquerade, exacts revenge by killing Manuel. While the death of her offender should mark a moment of release, Isabel is in fact newly obligated to yet another man, feeling that she must marry Felipe to repay him for avenging her loss of honor. In hiding from the authorities, she contemplates her options and wavers between fulfilling her obligation to Felipe through marriage and returning to Murcia to be with her mother. Significantly, Isabel sets an example for all women when she liberates herself from the obligation she feels toward Felipe: she decides not to take on the prescribed role of wife which is dictated by the economies of marriage and honor and made available to her

(an impure woman) only through the generosity of a man. Instead, she forges a new possibility for herself by taking on the identity of a slave again, preferring this self-commodification to the culturally-imposed identification of woman as

commodity in the sexual economy.18 Later, in the midst of Lisis's soir?e, Isabel announces her intention to enter a convent to become a slave to God, the lover

who will never mistreat her (Desenga?os 167). In keeping with her creative

capacity for writing poetry, telling a tale, and inventing the self, Isabel once

again seeks out a cultural space in which she may determine, to the greatest extent possible within patriarchy, control over herself.19 While Isabel finally settles on the only option available to most sexually "impure" woman, the



101

exploration of and persistent search for female agency in the autobiographical tale challenges traditional notions of female sexuality and subjectivity.

Having fashioned herself as a devoted slave to God, Isabel ends her

autobiographical tale, leaving all who have heard her "tiernos y lastimados"

(Desenga?os 167). This reaction seems to result from the highly personal nature of the discourse as much as from the content of the narration. In a gesture that communicates the power of Isabel's tale, Lisis immediately offers all of her

jewels to help Isabel with the dowry that will allow her to enter the convent.20 The reactions of the frame characters on both a general and a gendered level thus mirror the desired reading of the entire novela collection.

This embedding of the desired effect of the texts within the frame tale is

repeated at the end of the frame tale in the Desenga?os. Recalling the fate of the various female protagonists (all of whom are victimized by men), Lisis refuses to marry Diego. Lisis decidedly links herself with Isabel when she mentions that her own doubts about survival in the sexual economy began with Isabel's story:

... no es justo que yo me f?e de mi dicha, porque no me siento m?s firme que la hermosa

do?a Isabel, a quien no le aprovecharon tantos trabajos como en el discurso de su

desenga?o nos refiri?, de que mis temores han tenido principio ...

(Desenga?os 508)

Isabel's story thus becomes the quintessential tale of peril and survival. With the female body figured as text, a female voice speaking from the position of "I," and a story of rape and rejection, Isabel's identification as "slave to her own

lover" pointedly responds to the cultural positioning of women as objects, as

commodities, in a phallocentric sexual economy. Thinking about the powerful effects and structural implications of Isabel's

first tale, we can turn to Sylvia Molloy's At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America, where she states, "All fiction is, of course, a recollection"

(139). Like Isabel's own story, Zayas's novelas purport to collect, present, and recollect women's disadvantaged and imperiled position. Isabel initiates this

project in her autobiographical tale, in which the female voice is exposed in a

dramatic, effective fashion: the autobiographical, personal voice narrates the inextricable connection between the female voice and body, between objectivity and subjectivity. The self-conscious fashioning of narrative authority on the part of the first narrator in the Desenga?os amorosos belies a need, created by the

gender exclusivity of narration in this volume, to validate the collective female narrative voice and the collective feminine experience. By negating distance between self and text, this first tale invites us to read women's bodies as texts of violation and injustice throughout all of the novelas. Declaring her self lost after

being raped, Isabel asserts control over her body and self by seeking justice for the crime of a man. In the end, she chooses to become a nun, to be a slave to

God in order to protect her emotional and bodily integrity. Given the emphasis



102

on women's community and on women's friendship, Isabel's final fashioning of the self into a nun can be read as this character's taking control of her body and her story, her re-invention of self in the gynocentric image of religious

women.

Isabel's personal voice contributes to the collective voice of women's protest,

encouraging other women to speak their victimization just as the remaining nine narrators of the Desenga?os will on behalf of their violated, victimized sisters. The important placement of Isabel's tale as first paves the way for the other women narrators to speak, yet none will speak from the "I" in the same

way that she does. Only in the last tale, "Estragos que causa el vicio," will a

female character speak from her body and for herself in a way that recalls Isabel's bodily discourse. In the intervening stories, other women's violated bodies are described with great, gory detail. Yet, as narrator of the final tale, Lisis

gives over the narration to her protagonist, and thus the collection ends as it

began, with woman speaking of her body and of herself. Unlike the Novelas amorosas, in which the human body in general is shown

to be at risk, the Desenga?os feminize and materialize corporeal discourse. Effected by a shift in narration that excludes the male voice, this second volume is framed by an autobiographical discursive mode that speaks the body and rewrites the cultural script that reifies the violation of the feminine. The

corporeality of Zayas's texts has theoretical implications both for feminist and

bodily politics in the seventeenth century. Zayas properly perceives the

profundity of the task she has set for herself: seeking to valorize and authorize women's experiences and voices, she chooses the body as the vehicle through which to make her readers invest in the feminine. The Novelas amorosas begin this process by putting the human body on display, and thus causing us to reflect on its meaning and forging an affinity between readers and text. The

Desenga?os amorosos, and, in particular, "Esclava de su amante," then

specifically claim the female body as a truly contested site, as a flesh and blood text whose violation is produced by institutionalized misogyny. In case the reader still misses the point and does not appreciate the need for women to

speak their experiences and for men to learn to listen and to value the feminine, Lisis and Isabel, who best understand the need to give women the opportunity to speak, make of themselves a bodily example as they exit the soir?e with their nun-friend Estefan?a. Bound for the convent, they will not be bound to men and to the cultural practices exposed and criticized throughout the Desenga?os.

Elizabeth Grosz describes her book Volatile Bodies as a wager: betting on the

importance of corporeality, she announces the bet: the body, like the mind

(either the conscious or the unconscious), can be used to explain all of the effects of subjectivity; bodies, in other words, "have all the explanatory power of minds" (vii). Writing in the seventeenth century, in a time when women's minds were purposefully denied cultivation and women's bodies were used as



103

expendable commodities in men's sexual, political, and ideological markets, Mar?a de Zayas appears to have relied on reasoning similar to Grosz's when she chose to speak through the female body in her fictional texts. Setting out a

feminist politics that indicts the entire culture for its devaluation of the

feminine, Zayas corporealizes women's experiences and mobilizes the body as a source of self-authorization and political validation. From Isabel's assertion of agency through metamorphosis to Lisis's final decision to remove her body from the marriage market, the Desenga?os speak of and through the body. Through this corporealization of her feminist agenda, Zayas begs us all to read the female body for its capacity to convey meaning about the culture at large.

Like many late twentieth-century feminist theorists who urge women to write

through the body of the body for the collective female body, Zayas mobilizes

corporeality as the intersection between the sexes, as the common language between men and women. Urging women to take control discursively, intellectually, and physically of their own bodies, Zayas speaks through the collective female body in her novela collection and pushes women to recognize their undervalued position in society. Zayas thus exploits the different bodily discourses available to her and uses them in her campaign to educate society on the gender question. Hundreds of years before H?l?ne Cixous or Luce Irigaray or Elizabeth Grosz wrote of the body, Maria de Zayas claimed the corporeal as feminist territory.

Wayne State University

NOTES

1 Although autos de fe were increasingly rare in the seventeenth century, corporal

punishment did continue to occur in the public sphere. As Henry Kamen

discusses in Inquisition and Society in Spain, after the first twenty years of the

Inquisition, relatively few prisoners (perhaps less than two percent of the

accused) were publicly executed. More frequently, in addition to being sent to

the galleys, penitents were also publicly whipped "in which case he [or she] had to appear stripped to the waist - often mounted on an ass - and was duly

flogged through the streets with the specified number of strokes by the public executioner" (187).

2 With regard to the large numbers of Spanish uxoricide plays, in Fatal Union,

Matthew Stroud focuses on thirty-one of these comedias dating from 1575-1675. He points out, however, that "it is very likely that there are others still not

considered" in his study (19).

3 The anomalous life of the woman warrior Catalina de Erauso also represents an

intriguing story in terms of the body. Given the recent publication of her

biography, Lieutenant Nun, the escapades of this cross-dressed woman seem to



104

have captured the imagination of modern Americans as well. For more on the

body in early modern drama, see Mitchell Greenberg's Canonical States,

Canonical Stages or Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano's Feminism and the Honor Plays of

Lope de Vega.

4 Grieve's article, "Embroidering with Saintly Threads," draws attention to the

importance of hagiography in Zayas's novelas and concludes that Zayas

encourages women to reject "secular martyrdom" and seek refuge in the

feminine community of the convent.

5 While Mary Elizabeth Perry says that Zayas "cannot really be considered a

'feminist' in the modern sense" (74), Susan Griswold rejects Zayas's "feminist

posturing" as "purely rhetorical" (100). Taking in the complexities of Zayas's

discourse, in "Postmodernism and the Baroque," Marina Brownlee lucidly

points to this author's interest in perspectivism: "Instead of an exclusive focus

on the gender of the speaker or character, she undertakes an analysis of the

many discourses (sexuality and gender as well as socio-economic status and

racial identity) whose conflicting imperatives collectively define the unstable

boundaries of the individual subject of baroque culture" (119-20). While I agree with Brownlee's excellent analysis, I will argue in this article that Zayas's feminist ideology is the driving force behind her aesthetics and politics.

6 For a more detailed explanation of Zayas's use of the body and how this relates

to the deployment of the body by the state, see Vollendorf's, "Reading the Body

Imperiled: Violence against Women in Maria de Zayas."

7 For a detailed publishing history of Zayas's novelas, see Alicia Yllera's

Introduction to her edition of the Desenga?os amorosos (64-93). 8 Feminists have long focused on the body as a rallying point for politics and as a

focus for theorization. Some writers who have made great contributions to the

field include, but certainly are not limited to: Luce Irigaray (e.g. This Sex which

Is not One), H?l?ne Cixous ("Laugh of the Medusa"), Monique Wittig (eg. "The

Straight Mind" and "One Is not Born Woman"), Judith Butler (Gender Trouble

and Bodies that Matter), Diana Fuss (Essentially Speaking), Susan Bordo

(Unbearable Weight), Elizabeth Grosz (VolatileBodies), and, most recently, Moira Gatens (Imaginary Bodies).

9 See Irigaray's An Ethics of Sexual Difference. For more on the one-sex model

that dominated European thinking until 1800, see Chapter One of Thomas

Laqueur's Making Sex.

10 This use of the topos of androgynous souls is repeated several times throughout the novelas. In the Novelas amorosas, for example, the protagonist of "La fuerza

del amor" asks in a frustrated tone, "?El alma no es la misma que la de los

hombres?" (241). 11 Not all early modern women writing on the Woman question accommodated

male characters or readers in the direct manner seen in Zayas. Marie de

Gournay specifically excludes men as possible readers from UOmbre de la

demoiselle de Gournay: uvre compos?e de m?slanges (1626), saying in the "Advis

au lecteur": "I realize that we will get along best if we separate. Is it not an act of

charity to put distance between two irritable characters [deux esprits scabreux]



105

before they actually quarrel?" (quoted in Constance Jordans Renaissance

Feminism, 285). 12 With regard to the textual equilibrium between men and women in the frame

tale, Ruth El Saffar points out that "male and female forces are carefully balanced against one another" (97). This balance carries over to the family structure as well, for all of the female frame characters only have mothers while

the men only have fathers. Pointing to the influence of courtship on the frame

tale, El Saffar explains the "redoubling of the separation of the sexes to the

second generation" as emphasizing "the rigidity of the barrier separating the

sexes" (201).

13 It is impossible to know who exactly was reading Zayas's bestselling books.

W^hile literacy statistics are sparse for this period, a likely figure is 20% literacy

(see Beverley, Cruikshank), with the highest figure for women's literacy posited at 25% in Madrid (Nalle 69). In the "Pr?logo de un desapasionado" in the

Novelas amorosas, the appeal made actually to buy the book suggests that

booksellers worried that few books would be bought, possibly since most

people would have heard Zayas's texts read aloud. See Ife's Reading and Fiction

in Golden Age Spain for more on the transition from public to private reading in the seventeenth century.

14 Zelima/Isabel's self-representation coincides with the multiplicity of the

autobiographical subject and her or his capacity for transformation. See, for

example, the Introduction to Leigh Gilmore's Autobiographies and Chapter One

of Sidonie Smith's A Poetics of Women s Autobiography. 15 The detailed revelation of Zehmas true identity is one that homogenizes the

Other in a way that points to the general tendency in Zayas to over-categorize in order to maintain the integrity of her aristocratic feminist agenda. Butler

would call this a "colonizing gesture" or a "totalizing discourse" (Gender Trouble 13) that functions to neglect the diversity of the (feminine) body (Gender Trouble 22). This is an issue of Zayas's poetics and politics that I am

exploring in my larger project on Zayas. 16 Part Two of Rape and Representation is entitled "Rhetoric of Elision." This

section of the book explores the rhetorical technique of figuring violation as a

textual gap in literary representations of sexual crimes.

17 This novela, as much of Zayas's discourse, can be read in terms of the analysis done on classical and un-classical bodies in Peter Stallybrass and Allon White's

The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. The tale serves as a clear example of

woman as antithetical to the classical body: she is an open body that poses a

threat to the stability of the phallocentric, classical, unchanging body of the

man.

18 For a concise, provoking essay on the deleterious effects of the

commodification of women, see Irigaray's "Commodities among Themselves"

in This Sex which Is not One.

19 As recent scholarship on convents has shown, nuns enjoyed a large degree of

autonomy within communities that were, ultimately, controlled by the male

church authorities (see Arenal and Schlau's Untold Sisters).



106

20 By offering her own jewels and all that she is worth to help Isabel enter the convent, Lisis implicitly imitates Isabel's subversion of the role of commodity

assigned to women by the dominant culture. For a materialist analysis of

Isabel's use of money, see Charnon-Deutsch (16-19).

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“Fleshing out Feminism: María de Zayas' Corporeal Politics.”

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