Estrategias tematicas y narrativas en la novela feminizada en Maria de Zayas

Modern Language Review, The, Jan, 2007 by Elizabeth Rhodes

Estrategias tematicas y narrativas en la novela feminizada en Maria de Zayas. By Pilar Alcalde. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta. 2005. 141 pp. $18.95. ISBN 978-1-58871-071-0.

Pilar Alcalde's objective is to define the prose works of Maria de Zayas as 'feminine', presumably in contradistinction to the masculinist tradition. She takes on both the Novelas amorosas (1637) and the Desenganos amorosos (1647), a formidable task in 141 pages, and is thus highly selective in the textual evidence she cites. Finding that Zayas is writing for a female public, she considers the author's claim to truth-telling as the basis of her feminized discourse.

The first chapter is a rapid review of Zayas criticism and theoretical approaches to prose fiction of Zayas's day, a brief description of a few structural features, and equally brief descriptions of six other male authors of novelas. Siding with the absolutist critics who read Zayas as pro-woman and anti-male, Alcalde affiliates Zayas's 'truth' with female experience, defining what men say and do as 'lies' in that context. In her second chapter Alcalde makes two points: that Zayas identifies her 'self' with the narrator and, in some places, Lisis, thus soldering a feminine identity to the text; and that the 'truth' of Zayas's writing derives from her appropriation of standard elements of seventeenth-century prose fiction, such as magical events, in the service of her own agenda (necessarily 'feminine' because Zayas was a woman writer). Alcalde goes on to read Jacinta's dream in the Novelas amorosas, in which a lover stabs her with a dagger, as symbolic of the male tradition that silences women writers, a silence overcome at the tale's end when Jacinta appropriates the word in the convent, writing her story. The same chronology is observable in the tale of Beatriz in the Desenganos. The act of writing, then, becomes a form of truth-telling, or testimony, that flies in the face of established tradition, or 'truth' as established by men. In the third chapter Alcalde suggests that Zayas uses hagiographic models (she does not specify which ones) to counter the power of honour that repressed women in Zayas's society. Zayas's antidote to the honour code, she says, is to represent its victims as Christ-like figures redeemed through torture and suffering, ultimately united with the divinity. She proposes that Zayas uses the female body as Caroline Bynum describes its use by women in the late Middle Ages, as a vehicle of access to the divinity. Alcalde finds that Zayas justifies her characters' violent, protracted deaths because they are 'offered to God' and those deaths 'unite the soul' (p. 88); the women dead at the hands of men are 'full of faith and courage' (p. 97). In Chapter 4 Alcalde uses medieval sources to consider the convent, to which several of Zayas's characters retreat, as a feminine, virtuous, and ascetic space affiliated with the divinity. Such an idealized vision of Zayas's fictional convent is standard in readings of these novelas, and borrows largely from studies of real convent life, particularly in the Middle Ages. This reading is difficult to reconcile with textual evidence in the novelas that describes female convent dwellers living lives of material abundance and splendour, and, in one case, sexual abundance as well; this evidence might suggest a need to reconsider whether this fictional space represents virtue or certainly a 'life of privation' (p. 130), particularly since baroque convents (pace reformed Carmelites) were notoriously worldly.

This book does a good job of illuminating questions for further consideration, most notably the relationship of Zayas's prose to that of her male colleagues, and the function of religious signifiers in the text.

Boston College Elizabeth Rhodes