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

Renaissance Quarterly, Summer, 2002 by Ariadna Garcia-Bryce

Margaret Rich Greer. Maria de Zayas Tells Baroque Tales of Love and the Cruelty of Men

(Penn State Studies in Romance Literatures.) Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. xii 355 pp. $49.95. ISBN: 0-271-01987-5.

How is Marla de Zayas' defense of women to be reconciled with her promotion of the aristocratic value system that perpetuates violence against her sex? In her study of the two novella collections, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares and Desenganos amorosos, Margaret Greer states that Zayas is an "aristocratic, protofeminist writer, torn between gender and class identity" (61). Rather than attempting to iron out the works' ideological inconsistencies, this book brings new light to their contradictions, through an elaborate critical apparatus that captures the intricacies of gender discourse in Zayas' narrative. Approaching the texts as reflections of a "desiring" female subject, Greer deciphers their linguistic and thematic constructs from the perspective of twentieth-century psychoanalytic theory (principally Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva), while also considering the sense in which this subject is conditioned by Counter Reformation values. The works, it is further sustained, do not adhere to an explicit philosophical agenda, nor do they undertake a uniform attack on the establishment. Comparing the relationship between text and reader to that between analysand and analyst, the critic argues, rather, that the novellas constitute a protean process of female self-definition vis-a-vis a patriarchal society. Conceiving of the subject as a dynamic compound of thought patterns involving the conscious and the unconscious, the political and the social, the study complicates our understanding of the confrontation between male and female in Zayas' world.

We are not before a monolithically determined set of sexual differences, but instead before the multivalent fantasies of a series of inwardly divided subjects. The "fundamental noncomplementarity" (288) of male and female desire is internalized in different ways in different stories. The dream in which Jacinta, in "Aventurarse perdiendo," stabs Narcissus is read as a symbolic annihilation of desire for the threatening male. Meanwhile, in "Juez de su causa," the female protagonist assumes a symbolically menacing role. The cross-dressed Estela usurps phallic power, sadistically submitting her admirer to questioning as she delays the revelation of her identity. Not coincidentally, this tale of transgression is told by a male narrator: "inconceivable as a logical possibility from a conservative feminine position, such empowerment could be imagined through a male narrator, for whom it would exist in unconscious fantasies" (206). Contrastingly, in other stories women are banished or subjected to physical abuse, to save their husbands from other men's castrating gazes: "the only refuge for women is a masochistic famtasu of love and honor for their beautiful, martyred flesh after death" (285).

Zayas, argues Greer, creatively confronts traditional power structures from within through assuming a varied spectrum of resistant voices. She "whirls from stance to stance, addressing now men, now women, attacking and curtseying, flattering and reviling, nagging and commanding, with a rhetoric that works its effect not with cool reason and linear logic but with the piling-on of passion" (338).

Contextualizing Zayas' polemical posture in relation to doctrinal and scientific discourses of her time, Greer recognizes her subversion of essentialist definitions of woman. Her oblique protest is, furthermore, manifest in her transformation of the novella tradition. In her representation of the honor code, courtly love, and supernatural agency, she departs significantly from figures like Cervantes and Lope de Vega. Her fictions do not radically undo the Oedipal master plot (involving maternal absence), insofar as women are limited within the paternal order either to marriage or convent. However, in their choice for the convent, they are motivated, not by a longing for God, but by a "psychic attachment to the mother" (354).

Where the application of psychoanalytic categories to seventeenth-century texts might, to some, seem methodologically questionable, Maria de Zayas Tells Baroque Tales of Love and the Cruelty of Men stands as an extraordinarily productive instance of this practice. Our understanding of the cultural dimensions of the texts and of their paradoxical nature is immensely enriched. Impressive in its lucid weaving together of twentieth-century and early modern definitions of the psyche, Baroque aesthetics, as well as Counter Reformation ideology, the study is a most valuable addition to the growing bibliography on Zayas. To all those interested in this author, and, more generally, in questions of subject and gender in Tridentine Spain, it will prove an inspiring source of reflection.