The Cultural Labyrinth of Maria de Zyas

Renaissance Quarterly, Winter, 2001 by Alison Weber

Marina Brownlee, The Cultural Labyrinth of Maria de Zyas.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. xvi 214 pp. $38.50. ISBN: 0-8122-3537-1.

In seventeenth-century Spain, Maria de Zayas rivaled Cervantes in popularity. Her two collections of novellas, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (1637) and Desenganos amorosos (1647), were translated, plagiarized, and reissued into the nineteenth century, when they fell into near oblivion. Beginning in the 1970s, with the advent of feminist criticism, Zayas found enthusiastic new readers. But despite a spate of articles and books, critical consensus on Zayas has yet to emerge. Was she a late Renaissance feminist or an apologist for conservative, aristocratic values? Was she a hack or a skilled writer who sought to upset psychological stereotypes and narrative expectations? In The Cultural Labyrinth of Maria de Zayas, Marina Brownlee argues that Zayas's art and ideology must be understood as products of a Baroque culture, one which resists totalizing interpretation.

The literary Baroque is, accordingly, Brownlee's touchstone for an appreciation of Zayas. The Baroque, like postmodernism, is the expression of "a crisis of legitimacy," the impulse to discredit the myths of the preceding age without offering an alternative utopian vision. For Zayas, this disenchantment is expressed preferentially through paradox: women are equal to men and essentially different; the honor code protects women and victimizes them; women are powerless in the face of male violence but also foolishly dig their own graves. Perhaps the greatest paradox is that although Zayas pointedly declares in her prologues that her aim is to defend women's reputations against men's slanderous accusations, she leads her readers into a narrative maze in which gender explains everything and nothing.

In Chapter 1, Brownlee attempts to displace the question of Zayas's didactic aim from feminist apology to a broader arena of power. She is surely correct in observing that Zayas's denunciation of male violence in the prologues is contradicted by the novellas themselves, in which women as well as men victimize women. But where does Zayas locate the source of violence? For Brownlee, violence originates in the state -- emblematized by the Inquisition -- and it is replicated by the family. Many of the novellas, however, suggest otherwise. In La inocencia castigada, to take one of the better known examples, the protagonist, who has been raped while under a demonic spell, is exonerated by the civil authorities but is secretly tortured by her brother, sister-in-law, and husband until she is ultimately liberated by the civil authorities. The violence derives from the family's insistence, in defiance of the law, that a "polluted" woman must be destroyed. In others stories as well, Zayas suggests that the family is nei ther a refuge from the state nor an extension of it, but rather a primitive stronghold that the state has been unable to breech. If Zayas reluctantly accepts patriarchy, as Brownlee asserts, her novellas also reveal a longing for powerful institutions that might control petty family tyrants.

The second chapter offers close readings of five novellas in order to demonstrate Zayas's concept of character as a "changing conglomeration of subject-positions" (33). Although the novellas in which women are victims of violence have received most critical attention, Brownlee constructively points out that Zayas's female characters encompass not only innocent victims, but resourceful avengers, lascivious adulteresses, and cruel sadists. Her intra- and extra-diegetic characters alike defy stereotypical formulations of gender, race, sexuality, and class. One of her male narrators, for example, proves to be the best apologist for women, while one of the women narrators is the most misogynistic.

Chapter three considers the impact of an expanded reading public on Zayas's narrative and proposes that the pornographic details of some novellas may be the result of new private reading practices, which afforded readers secret, transgressive pleasures. Brownlee acknowledges that Zayas was a shrewd marketing strategist who exploited her audience's appetite for broadside sex and violence, but she disagrees with historian Jose Antonio Maravall, who characterized her as an exploitative, reactionary, popularizer. The escapism of her fiction, Brownlee Implies, is of a different kind -- readers are invited to explore alternative subjectivities and to interrogate social norms.

In her final chapter Brownlee analyzes how Zayas complicates the Renaissance exemplum. In the frame story of Zayas's second collection, Los desenganos amorosos, the hostess, Lisis, obliges her female guests to tell a story illustrating the perfidy of men against women. But as Brownlee reveals, the "exemplary" narratives, rather than clarifying and concretizing the assertions made by the narrators at Lisis's behest, offer instead a Baroque excess of interpretive possibilities.