The Disenchantments of Love
The Disenchantments of Love
by María de Zayas y Sotomayor
THE LITERARY WORK
A collection of novellas set in different cities of the world, mainly in the European Spanish Empire, during the first half of the seventeenth century; published in Spanish (as Parte Segunda del soiree, y entretenimiento honesto) in 1647; English in 1997.
SYNOPSIS
Narrated by women, the ten stories deal with the suffering of females at the hands of the men in their lives, the intention being to warn them against the danger of love and marriage.
Events in History at the Time of the Novellas
María de Zayas y Sotomayor is thought to have been born in Madrid on September 12, 1590, at the end of the reign of Phillip II (1555-98) when Spain, once the most powerful country in the world, began its decline. Her parents, Doña María de Barasa and Don Fernando de Zayas y Sotomayor belonged to the middle nobility. Don Fernando received the honor of “Caballero del Hábito de Santiago” (Order of Knights of Santiago—patron saint of Spain) in 1628. He served under the famous Count Lemos, viceroy to Naples from 1610 to 1616 and protector of writers such as Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, and Miguel de Cervantes. It is believed that Zayas’s family traveled around Spain and Italy with the viceroy and his entourage. There is little information about Zayas; it is not known if she ever married or entered a convent, nor is there certainty about the year of her death. However, it is known that Zayas took active part in the literary circles of Madrid between 1621 and 1637. Important writers such as Lope de Vega in his Laurel de Apolo (1630), a book praising living poets of his time; Pérez de Montalban in his Para todos (1633), a chronicle of literary life in Spain; and Alonso Castillo Solózarno, author of the novellas Tardes entertenidas (1629, Entertaining Afternoons), praised her abilities as a prose writer and a poet. Because of her ingenio (ingenuity) and daring, Zayas was called the Tenth Muse and a Sybil, a woman ahead of her times. She began her writing career by composing poems but then switched to prose for which she became better known. In her first volume of novellas, Aventuras amorosas y ejemplares (1637; The Enchantments of Love: Amorous and Exemplary Novels, 1990), men and women recount tales of courtly love, that is, love among the nobles of Madrid. Her second volume, Parte Segunda del soiree, y entretenimiento honesto (Desengaños amorosos) (1647; The Disenchantments of Love, 1997) features women alone telling such tales. More pessimistic and sensationalist than the first volume, it highlights the danger of romance to women in seventeenth-century Spain.
Events in History at the Time of the Novellas
Imperial decline, cultural soul-searching
The historical period during which her stories take place and in which María de Zayas lived and wrote is the same: the first half of the seventeenth century, during the kingships of Phillip III (1598-1621) and Phillip IV (1621-65). The era was one of decadence and tumult in the Spanish kingdom, on which the “sun never set” since its empire spread from Roussillon (France), to Naples, Sicily, Milan, and Sardinia (Italy), to Holland, Belgium, the Cape Verde Islands, the Philippines, and the Spanish colonies in America from California to Tierra del Fuego.
Spain under the two king Phillips faced innumerable problems because these two monarchs, who were father and son, and of Austrian heritage, had little interest in the politics of governing such a complex empire. Weak rulers, they left the everyday business of government to their favorites, the Duke of Lerma and the Duke of Olivares. Spain itself suffered a host of problems: tax increases, a reduction in the price of gold and silver, emigration to America that depopulated the countryside, an increase in urban population that exacerbated crime and led to housing shortages, four plagues that destroyed one quarter of the population, and the 1609 expulsion of the Moriscos, the remaining Arab population in Spain, ostensibly converts to Christianity. The Moriscos had no choice but to comply with the expulsion, which led to a shortage of farmers and artisans. All these events exacerbated hunger and misery within Spain.
Aside from its internal problems, Spain had to cope with the uprising of Cataluña in 1640, the war in Flanders and its independence from Spain (1648), the Thirty Years War and concluding treaty of Westphalia (1648) by which Spain lost its supremacy in Europe, and the independence of Portugal (acknowledged in 1668). All the political and economic decadence not only caused uncertainty and agitation in the population but also stimulated an intensely critical atmosphere in which the nation’s problems were analyzed and studied with a profound desire to overcome them, or at least to make everyone conscious of the issues that needed to be resolved.
Fertile intellectual era
The intellectuals of Spain worked in what was later defined as the Spanish Baroque, a period of artistic endeavor characterized by duality, the struggle between antagonist forces, disenchantment, pessimism, and the idea that the world is a deceptive place. Unlike the Renaissance ideal, which strove to closely represent reality, Baroque works were full of intellectual mystery; in a sense, Baroque art was the art of the unfinished. In Spanish literature, a distinguishing trait of the Baroque was desengaño (disillusionment), the sudden realization that what one sees or believes is not necessarily
UPRISING OF CATALONIA
In 1640 the region of Catalonia, in northwest Spain, began a revolt in reaction to the presence and unruly behavior of Spanish troops in the region. Since 1626, the Catalonians had refused to cooperate with the central government, not furnishing money or soldiers to help Spain’s kings in their never-ending European wars. Now, in May 1640, peasants attacked Spanish troops in the north Catalan countryside; by June they had moved into the city of Barcelona. There they mobilized farm laborers into a revolutionary mob that seized the city and murdered royal officials, including the Spanish viceroy. Havoc followed. Poor peasants rose against their overlords, workers took over town streets, and gangs of bandits riddled the countryside. Uniting their forces with those of France, Spain’s enemy at that time, the Catalan rebels drove out the Spanish troops. Subsequently Catalonia became a French protectorate, with some rebels growing more resentful of France than they had been of Spain. In 1651–52 the Spanish army retook Barcelona. The Spanish crown afterward promised to preserve Catalonian laws. In the end, the revolt accomplished little beyond years of suffering for the Catalonians and a weakening of the power of the Spanish Crown.
real or true. From this came the view that the world is irrational, a place in which the unjust govern the just and evil triumphs over good.
Baroque artists played with intertwined but conflicting ideas, or, more exactly they played with reality and fantasy in their creations and with individual control and the forces of destiny. In a society without many religious or political options, artistic expression provided the only real outlet for new ideas. Artistic experiment was generally permissible in Spain, as long as the experiment had nothing to do with the Church or the government. This was the age of the Counter Reformation. In 1478, Spain had introduced the Inquisition, a tribunal to seek out and suppress deviation from the teachings of the Catholic Church. The power of this tribunal intensified during the mid-sixteenth century in what is now known as the Counter Reformation (or Catholic Reformation), in which the Catholic nations banded together to combat the influence of Martin Luther’s Protestant teachings.
María de Zayas was aware of the complexity of her century. Part of the nobility herself, she took care not to criticize the Church or the government. She did attack her society for its treatment of women, but she had no interest in attacking the privileges of her social class. In fact, her works do not concern themselves with economic or political issues. Her stories are set in a certain place and time, but only as part of a literary device popular in her day. Authors often used such details to convince readers that their narratives were based on real events. This helped them to combat the common charges leveled by moralists, who claimed that fiction was detrimental because it merely entertained and did not educate. The primary tenet of the Baroque—that art needed to both delight and educate—grew out of these claims and out of the Counter-Reformation concern for the orthodox practice of the Catholic faith. This minimum of historical detail also allowed Zayas to praise the monarchy through her stories, as did other Baroque intellectuals. Zayas glorified the past, especially the reign of the Catholic monarchs Isabel and Fernando more than a hundred years earlier; for Zayas, theirs was a time to emulate because men were patriotic and chivalrous to women, while her contemporaries were not. In The Disenchantments of Love only two historical dates are given: 1619 (the trip of Phillip III to Portugal) in “The Ravages of Vice,” and 1640 (the uprising of Cataluña) in “Slave to her Own Lover.”
The Novellas in Focus
Plot overview
The ten novellas of The Disenchantments of Love can be best understood after reading Zayas’s first set of novellas The Enchantments of Love. Published ten years apart, the two sets of stories share the same frame tale and are best understood as part of one collection. The use of the frame gave the author the opportunity
PHILLIP III VISITS PORTUGAL
In 1619 King Phillip III decided to travel to Portugal, then part of Spain. Portugal had become part of Spain in 1581, when Phillip II inherited the Portuguese crown because King Sebastian of Portugal died in an exploration to the North African Coast in 1578. Phillip II acquired the rights to the throne because, along with the unfortunate Sebastian, he was one of the grandchildren of the Portuguese King Don Manuel. In Phillip III’s time, Portugal was a troubled part of the empire because of its aspirations for independence. He wanted to visit in order to keep the nobles happy, to reinforce his rights to the crown, and finally to celebrate the crowning of the future king, his son Phillip, as heir to the vast Spanish Empire. When Phillip III and his entourage reached Portugal, the people welcomed the king and prince, and treated them with pomp and hospitality. Unfortunately the Spanish king had to hurry home due to political problems in Madrid. On his way back, the 43year-old king fell ill and died, whereupon his son inherited his declining empire. After the death of the king in 1620, it would take four decades for Spain to recognize Portugal’s independence. Recognition finally came in 1668, after nearly 100 years of dominance over Portugal by its Spanish neighbor.
to air her ideas about women’s role in society, about love and marriage, about the concept of honor, and about the violence perpetrated against females. The violence portrayed in Zayas’s stories (poison, legs broken, murder, stabbing, bleeding to death, starvation, blindness) can also be found in the comedia (drama), prose, fiction, and even in the tabloids of the day. Over 30 women are beaten, strangled, tortured, stabbed, raped, or poisoned in Zayas’s work, but all this violence should not be read as a realistic representation of the situation of women in the period. An exhaustive history of domestic violence has yet to be written, but we do know that the historical record shows few cases of wifemurder for the time. While this does not mean that women were not abused in their homes, it does make us question those who have read Zayas as a realist or costumbrista (a chronicler of her times). It is clear, though, that Zayas uses an aesthetic of violence to articulate an early modern feminist agenda that includes, among other things, a call for women’s access to education and arms, and a plea for greater access to legal and social justice (see Vollendorf). Through graphic violence, her stories call attention to the unfair treatment women are suffering at the hands of men and to their need to prepare their bodies and minds to survive in a patriarchal society.
In The Disenchantments of Love, as in its precursor, the Enchantments of Love, the main character in the frame story is Lisis, an aristocrat from Madrid. She has reunited a group of friends for a soiree (a private party that took several days and in which guests recited poetry or told tales). In the Enchantments of Love, Lisis is suffering because her love interest, Don Juan, is no longer showering attention on her; he has shifted his amorous interest to her cousin Lizarda. In this first collection, men and women are telling tales, with the men speaking about how women trick them, and the women declaring themselves more faithful and caring than the males. Six of the stories end with a happy marriage, and three with the main character entering a convent. One focuses on the vice of avarice. At the close of this first collection, Lisis announces that she will marry Don Diego. However, she is still in love with Don Juan, and her doubts about her decision upset her so intensely that she grows ill.
Published ten years later, The Disenchantments of Love concerns itself with “men’s cruelty and tyranny” and with those who insist on keeping women “cloistered and not giving us teachers” (Zayas, The Disenchantments of Love, p. 1). In the second collection’s frame story, Lisis, her mother, her cousin, her gentlemen callers and other friends reappear. This time the soiree, or private party, is held to celebrate Lisis’s recovery from her year-long illness and her upcoming wedding. At this soiree, only women can tell tales, the stories have to be true, and they must transmit a lesson for women to disenchant them from the dangers of falling in love and guiding their lives according to their naive ideas of romance.
The stories are told on three consecutive nights—four stories on the first night, four on the second, and two on the third. They take place in different countries (Spain, Italy, Portugal, Holland, Germany, Hungary, and Algiers), presenting variations on a common theme: violence against women by the males in their lives (father, brother, husband, father-in-law, and lover). The titles of the stories give a hint of the storylines and calamities that might befall women: His Wife’s Executioner, Innocence Punished, Love for the Sake of Conquest, Marriage Abroad: Portent of Doom, Traitor to His Own Blood, and Triumph Over Persecution. It should be noted that when Zayas published The Disenchantments of Love, she titled only the first novella “Slave to her Own Lover”; the rest were just numbered; it was not until the Barcelona edition of 1734 that the rest were given titles which pertained to the storylines and resembled the titles in her first collection.
Plot summary
Of the ten stories of The Disenchantments of Love, the first and last are intertwined: “Slave to Her Own Lover” and “The Ravages of Vice.” Lisis and her slave Zelima narrate these stories, demonstrating the depth of “sisterly” love, even in the case of a master and her slave. Zelima is in reality Doña Isabel, a Christian aristocrat from Murcia, who became a slave to follow the man who had first raped her. She agrees to the arrangement in hopes that he will marry her, which is the only action that will restore her honor. But after many incidents—disguising herself and serving as a Moorish slave, traveling to Italy, being a prisoner in Algiers, and finally returning home after six years—Zelima/Isabel learns that her unfaithful lover has no intention of marrying her. He is in love with the Algerian woman who helped them escape homeward. Luis, Zelima’s one-time servant and aspiring lover, kills Manuel. Zelima has learned her lesson; her rapist only pretended to care for her while buying time to find a way out of his verbal promise to marry her. (At the time, a verbal promise was so serious that on the strength of one, a man could be forced to marry.) Meanwhile, Zelima/Isabel has been the cause of her father’s death and her mother’s eternal sorrow. Having violated all the morals her family taught her, she realizes the only decent and safe course for her to follow is to enter a convent. Luckily Zelima has hidden some jewelry that will provide her with enough money for the dowry needed to enter the convent. Lisis, feeling sorry for Zelima’s misfortunes, frees her and offers to add money to her dowry.
RICH WOMAN’S REFUGE
Upper-class women had two options in the 1600s; marriage or the convent. Unfortunately there were not enough beds in the convents due to the high demand for monastic life (20 percent of the population belonged to the clergy). Convents found it especially difficult to support themselves at this point because of the limitations imposed on them; municipalities preferred male religious orders since they provided schooling and religious services, while the convents did not Only later would their nuns provide services as nurses or teachers, so the convents had to depend for sustenance on rent from properties, gifts from the community and Crown, and the dowries brought in by the novices. To enter the religious life, a woman generally had to bring in a dowry, and its amount often determined her status in the convent, if the dowry was high, the woman became a mother and if it was small or nonexistent, a sister. Sometimes, to improve its income, a convent allowed a rich woman, regardless of her marital status, to live there indefinitely as long as she paid a fee. The trend resulted in dramatic changes in convent life because these rich women demanded comfortable apartments with enough space to keep servants or slaves and receive visitors. In larger society, the trend met with disapproval. The women, thought many, had a harmful effect, weakening not only convent rules but also faith.
Lisis’s story, “The Ravages of Vice,” concerns the evils of passion. A young Portuguese woman falls in love with her brother-in-law and becomes his mistress for four years, but wants to elevate herself to wife. With the aid of a servant, a plot is set in motion by which the husband will be led to believe that his wife is having an affair with a young servant. The husband, crazed with jealousy, kills not only his wife and the innocent young servant, but also all the pages, servants, and slaves in the house. He even tries to kill his lover, but she survives because one of the slaves places herself between the killer and his lover. After recovering, the protagonist decides to enter a convent as retribution for her sins. Back in the frame story, Lisis announces that she too has decided to enter a religious order as a laywoman, not because she has suffered or been mistreated like many of the women in the tales told in her soiree, but because she is smart enough to avoid being a victim. The convent is the only place where women are safe in these tales. Also, the convent provides a female community in which women can exchange sisterly love without being plagued by an outside world where they compete and struggle for the love of men. Lisis has learned that men are women’s worst enemies. So touching is her decision that everyone cries, but the main narrative voice—perhaps the authorial voice—assures us that Lisis’s end “is not tragic but rather the happiest one you can imagine for, although courted and desired by many, she didn’t subject herself to anyone” (Disenchantments, p. 405). The tales end with a plea from the main narrator: “I beg the ladies to mend their forward ways if they wish to be respected by men, and I beg the gentlemen to act like gentlemen by honoring women as is proper for them” (Disenchantments, p. 404). The narrator nurtures hopes of returning to an alleged golden age when men treated women with kindness and humans were not each other’s worst enemy.
Slavery
Slavery in Spain existed from the times of the ancient Romans through the Middle Ages, but its nature was different at first. In ancient times, people became slaves because they were prisoners of war, or part of an inheritance or business exchange. The use of human beings as an important element of the overall economic spectrum did not begin until the close of the fifteenth century, when Europeans explored West Africa’s coasts and also ventured to the Americas.
Before the sixteenth century, the Spanish slave population consisted mainly of Moriscos and Muslims (many of them casualties of the Recon-quest). A minority were of Spanish origin. Numerous Christian lords owned Muslim slaves, using them as household servants or field laborers. The Reconquest took place in stages from the middle of the eighth to the end of the fifteenth centuries, producing so many slaves that even ordinary people came to own them. In the medievalera, it was thought prudent to treat one’s slaves well and even to free them after loyal service. Owners could liberate their slaves orally before witnesses or through a written will or charter of liberty (carta ingenuitatis). Often the ex-slaves continued to labor for and remain under the protection of their former owners. When the Spaniards began establishing sugar plantations in Africa and in America in the fifteenth century, African slaves became highly profitable and attention in Spain shifted away from the Moorish and to the African bondsman. By 1565, 7.4 percent of the population in Seville consisted of slaves, most of them Africans. To Spaniards, as to other Europeans, Africans appeared to be an ideal solution to the demand for labor. They seemed stronger and less likely to escape, and were easier to acquire than Moors or guanches (slaves from the Canary Islands). The appearance of the Africans in bondage reinvigorated slavery in Spain itself, remarked one observer in 1655, around the time Zayas’s stories take place: “The American trade has given new life to the institution of slavery in this country” (Kamen, p. 110). Zelima, the female slave in Zayas’s story, is of European heritage but pretends to be a Morisca.
Sources and literary context
After Cervantes (1547-1616), María de Zayas is considered the most popular author of short novels of the Baroque. When Cervantes published his Exemplary Novels (1613), he was opening the door to a new genre already popular in Italy: novellas with a moral teaching, modeled after The Decameron (1496) by Boccaccio. Cervantes, father of the modern novel for his creation of Don Quixote (1605 and 1615; also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times) published his collection of novellas in 1613. Literature had not yet become the prosperous business that it would two decades later, around 1630, when the novella with moral teachings reached its peak. Cervantes’s stories demanded a sophisticated reader, one who was familiar with the literary heritage of the Renaissance and the classics. But by the time Zayas started writing her short novels, the genre had become less serious and more popular; now it was being geared to readers interested in complicated stories full of action and exciting love plots. Many intellectuals of the seventeenth century did not consider such books serious literature, but this did not discourage writers from publishing amorous novellas that met with an enthusiastic reception among the general populous. Works such as Lope de Vega’s Novels to Marcia Leonarda (1624), Juan Perez de Montalban’s Sucesos y prodigios de amor en ocho novelas (1629, Wonders and Events of Love in Eight Novels) and Alonso Castillo Solorzano’s Tardes entretenidas (1625, Entertaining Afternoons) were sources of inspiration for María de Zayas. In later centuries, such novellas would be defined as novelas cortesanas (courtly tales) because the main characters are rich urban dwellers with a great deal of free time to pursue love and play amorous games. The intention of these novellas was to entertain, and occasionally, to moralize. They immersed readers in a world ruled by passion and emotion. Between 1625 and 1634, Spain suffered a ban on the publication of novels and volumes of plays because the Church believed they did not teach sound morals. Perhaps for this reason, Zayas decided to call her novellas something different. She named the stories in her first collection maravillas (wonders), and in her second collection desenganos. In the end, Zayas did not face any problems publishing her short novels, because the censors saw in them a moral lesson to be learned by those who did not control their instincts or feelings.
Despite what may have been an effort to distance her stories from previous ones, Zayas’s novellas presented many of the innovations of the novellas of her time: a great deal of action, sometimes started in medias res; many trips; direct discourse; a minimum of geographic descriptions, and interesting dialogue, all in a style dominated by conceptismo (use of complicated expressions, ideas, and conceptual games) and culteranismo (use of sophisticated language and references to the Greco-Roman classics). In regard to style, Zayas’s novellas have an oral quality about them, suggesting that perhaps they were meant to be read aloud. She also has a rhetorically polished baroque style that, in combination with her fascinating portrayal of violence, makes her one of the most complex and engaging authors to emerge from this Golden Age of Spanish literature.
In regard to content, Zayas’s stories tackled daring subjects: rapes, murders, male homosexuality, cross-dressing, lesbianism, the issues of race, cultural differences, and psychological and physical torture, and even the use of magic and the supernatural. Her innovation lay as well in the deep psychological insight into gender relations. Finally, Zayas’s stories end differently from other novellas of the day in that hers do not finish happily, especially those in her second collection. The endings are in tune with her overall aim—to raise questions about the mistreatment of women. Why are they pursued, attacked, even killed? Why are women so desired one moment and despised the next? As a good daughter of the Baroque, Zayas was fighting a corrupt world in which women faced many obstacles. Her writings strove to make people aware of the problems, in the interest of seeing if women’s lives could be improved.
The aristocratic setting of Zayas’s tales mirrors the custom of literary salons and gatherings of the time. In the tradition of the novela cortesana, her characters tell tales aimed at entertaining and educating each other and, by implication, the external readers. Writing in the tradition not only of the Spanish authors named above but also of the Italian story writer Boccaccio (1313-75) and the French story writer Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549), Zayas adapted the genre of the novella to fit her pro-woman didactic agenda.
While Zayas was innovative, then, she at the same time continued to develop existing traditions in world literature. Her novellas, for all their inventiveness, fall into line with and further develop already established traditions:
Zaya’s collection of tales is at the same time unique and highly conventional, both in its overall structure and narrative content. She draws on a tradition of familiar tales and narrative motifs, recombining, reworking, and augmenting them with stories partly or wholly of her own invention. Elements of her stories can be traced at least as far back as [the Arabic tale] Kalilah et Dimnah and the [Latin] Disciplina clericalis of Petrus Alfonsi
(Greer, p. 37)
Publication and impact
By the first half of the seventeenth century, there were more than 50 printing shops in Spain, at least 25 of them in Madrid. Spain was the most powerful country
TO THE READER
It took a great deal of determination for a woman to become a writer in Zayas’s time. Educated at home, women would have to wait two more centuries before they could attend university in Spain, Zayas had free time to educate herself because she belonged to the nobility. Like many other noble women of her time, she took an interest in the arts. Mostly these women showed interest in poetry and the theater. In saraos, soirees, women as well as men would exhibit their skills in poetry, singing, and dancing. It was acceptable for a female to demonstrate her intellectual abilities and wit in private. But she ought never, thought aristocratic society, behave this way in public or for profit This is not to say that women did not achieve intellectual prowess. There were many learned nuns at the time, such as Sor Marcela de San Félix, daughter to the playwright Lope de Vega (see Fuente Ovejum , also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times). A few un-cloistered women, such as Ana Caro de Mallen and Maríana de Carvajal, managed to publish their works in the public book market. In general, however, women were not integrated into the intellectual life in Spain as they were in some other European countries, such as France and Italy. Aware of the difficulties anyone of her gender faced in pursuing literary success, Zayas addressed this very obstacle in her preface to this first volume.
Oh my reader, no doubt it will amaze you that a woman has the nerve, not only to write a book but actually to publish it, for publication is the crucible in which the purity of genius is tested; until writing is set in letters of lead, it has no real value. Our senses are so easily deceived that fragile sight often sees as pure gold what, by the light of the fire, is simply a piece of polished brass. Who can doubt, I repeat, that there will be many who will attribute to folly my audacity in publishing my scribbles because I’m a woman, and women, in the opinion of some fools, are unfit beings. If only out of common courtesy, however, people shouldn’t take my book as an oddity or condemn it as foolish.
(Zayas, The Enchantments of Love, p. 1)
in the world at the time, with colonies in various reaches of the globe. Consequently its literature was read, translated, and imitated. Works by male writers, such as Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Francisco de Quevedo were influenced by and often influenced the rest of Europe. Female writers, on the other hand, were mostly relegated to the religious sphere. Few ventured, as María de Zayas did, into an industry in which men were the writers and owners of the printing presses. Literature had by then become a big business, one in which women had not yet succeeded, although they were avid consumers, especially of novels and novellas. At the same time, when Zayas wrote and published her volumes of novellas, competition was fierce. There were many writers of courtly tales, which by 1630 had become a good source of income for authors. In view of her gender and the competition, Zayas seems to have realized that she had to be different and daring, and that she could attract readers by writing shocking, dramatic tales. Meanwhile, Zayas had to keep in mind the censors of the Inquisition (established in 1478), the famous writers of her day, and her reputation as a lady. Since her society frowned on female authors unless they wrote religious books, she protected herself by having her stories teach a moral lesson while other aspects of them sustained interest. Her strategy—bizarre stories with twisted plots, featuring violence against women and torrid love affairs—succeeded. Zayas’s novellas became bestsellers in her own day. Between 1637 and 1814, more than 20 editions appeared, with the two collections published together after 1659. Zayas’s popularity peaked in the eighteenth century, after which her novellas were almost forgotten in the nineteenth. In the twentieth century, they would begin to again attract attention, but now as objects of intense study rather than popular bestsellers.
—Margarita M. Lezcano
For More Information
Alcalde, Pilar. “Estrategias temáticas y narrativas en María de Zayas.” Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1998.
Brownlee, Marina S. The Cultural Labyrinth of María de Zayas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
Cuadros, Evangelina Rodriguez, ed. Novelas amorosoas de diversos ingenios del sigh XVII. Madrid: Castalia, 1986.
Greer, Margaret Rich. María de Zayas Tells Baroque Tales of Love and the Cruelty of Men. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.
Kamen, Henry. Spain 1469-1714. 2d ed. London: Longman, 1991.
Vollendorf, Lisa. Reclaiming the Body: María de Zayas’ s Laxly Modern Feminism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Williamsen, Amy R., and Judith A. Whitenack, eds. María de Zayas: The Dynamics of Discourse. Cran-bury, N.J.: Associate University Press, 1995.
Zayas y Sotomayor, María. Desenganos amorosos. Ed. Alicia Yllera. Madrid: Cátedra, 1983.
_____ .The Disenchantments of Love. Trans. Patsy Boyer. Albany: State University Press, 1997.
_____. The Enchantments of Love: Amorous and Exemplary Novels. Trans. Patsy Boyer. Berkley: University of California Press, 1990.