Maria de Zayas Tells Baroque Tales of Love and the Cruelty of Men

Modern Language Review, The, April, 2003 by Judith Drinkwater

Novelas amorosas y ejemplares. By MARIA DE ZAYAS Y SOTOMAYOR. Ed. by JULIAN OLIVARES. Madrid: Catedra. 2000. 562 pp. ISBN 84-376-1825-8.

Maria de Zayas Tells Baroque Tales of Love and the Cruelty of Men. By MARGARET RICH GREER. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2000. 468 pp. ISBN 0-271-01987-5.

The modern critical re-evaluation of the work of Maria de Zayas continues and is reinforced by the publication of the two volumes under review. Julian Olivares's edition of the Novelas amorosas y ejemplares offers a clearly presented and readable text; the footnotes are kept to a minimum and so do not distract the reader's attention from the flow of the tales, while a helpful glossary of archaic terms and a detailed explanation of proper names both fictional and non-fictional is provided in an appendix. An account of the editorial trajectory of the text is offered: it is surprising to note that the only previous complete modern (i.e. post-1847) editions of the Novelas appeared in 1947 and 1973, and that these do not follow a coherent rationale for the establishing of a definitive text. Olivares bases the text of his edition on the second 1637 edition corrected and amended by the author, and so brings us back to the original text as it was before successive generations of publishers and editors abridged and altered it for their own purposes. The lengthy introduction, as well as addressing the biographical, contextual, generic, and feminist issues usual in Zayas studies (and also amply developed by Margaret Rich Greer), gives a brief commentary on each of the Novelas. The commentaries draw judiciously on existing scholarship, to which Olivares adds his own perspective on the tales, seeing in them the turning of the masculine economy against itself either through the actions of the female protagonists or thanks to the ironic handling of situation and narrative convention by the author.

Greer's study of Zayas's Novelas amorosas y ejemplares and the Desenganos amorosos underlines the ambivalence inherent in the tales, and the constant tension in Zayas's writing between the conventionality of the narrative and the undermining of social and narrative conventions from within. Refreshingly, Greer does not feel the need to offer a comfortable resolution of this tension but gives a thought-provoking analysis of the tales from the standpoint of Lacanian psychonalytic theory (she also draws heavily on Freud and Kristeva), which she uses as a tool to duplicate Zayas's conflictive position as a writer within a patriarchal economy who espouses its discourse while simultaneously reworking and challenging that discourse. A review of this length cannot do justice to this dense and detailed study of the series of apparently familiar motifs, the absence/presence of the mother, dreams and fantasies, cross-dressing, which Greer defamiliarizes in order to reveal the complexity of Zayas's approach to both female and male desire. She demonstrates how the heroines of the tales narrated by women, whose motherlessness provides the conditions for the quest for an emotional bond, become victims of their own desire at the hands of men, and ultimately return to the 'house of the mother' (the convent, or the company of women). In other tales, dreams and fantasies become the mechanism for the working through of female desire, which otherwise cannot be realized within the strictures of the social world. The cross-dressing of the male and female protagonists of certain of the tales makes manifest masculine anxiety fantasies as seen from a female perspective. The final third of the volume concludes Greer's impressive contribution to Zayas studies with an examination of gender division in the use of the motifs of magic and the supernatural in Zayas's tales, and of the historical and political context of the textual victimization of women.

JUDITH DRINKWATER GIRTON COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE