This chapter will identify and explore a tendency within Zayas’s gallery of women’s interrelations or feminine world: the progressive emergence and consolidation of friendships among female protagonists in the novellas and frame narrative (i.e. the diegetic and metadiegetic narrative levels). Most importantly, I detect in Zayas’s prose an early example of what Janice Raymond has since termed ‘Gyn/affection’. In the latter part of this chapter, I contrast the burgeoning Gyn/affection among Zayas’s female protagonists with representations of friendship in other seventeenth-century Spanish works, including female-authored comedias. Several instances of woman’s perfidy towards her fellow sex in Zayas’s Novelas amorosas y ejemplares will be investigated in the second chapter; this represents the disintegration in social structure, as women betray their own kind. In parallel with this treachery, women’s friendships remain ineffectual and are largely underdeveloped in Zayas’s first volume; relations of courtship are patently the focus of female protagonists’ attentions and priorities. In contrast, the Desengaños amorosos emphasise Gyn/affection to a greater degree, against a backdrop of increasing violence. This suggests a limited social reintegration since women’s friendships act as a counterbalance to the corrosive disintegration of female solidarity; however, these friendships provide little protection for women in the secular world. Patriarchal and honour-coded values are omnipresent in these diverse female relationships, hampering women’s loyalties to each other and their cooperative agency. In this overall context, the developing frame tale will be discussed; its convent ‘solution’ optimistically offers an ideal ‘sisterhood’, although of a type which remains largely untested and unexplored within Zayas’s work.

Female Alliances in Zayas’s Novellas

Firstly, women’s alliances in two of Zayas’s novellas from her Novelas amorosas y ejemplares will be examined: Aventurarse perdiendo and El prevenido engañado. These are ‘weak’, opportunistically motivated friendships of only very limited duration. Then, I will turn to novellas within Desengaños amorosos, namely La esclava de su amante and Mal presagio casar lejos.