Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Zayas’s Prose, a Feminine World
- 1 Women’s Alliances and the Frame ‘Sisterhood’
- 2 Women’s Perfidy and the Subversion of Sisterhood
- 3 The Intersection of Gender and Class in Zayas’s Feminine World
- 4 Absences/Presences: Mother-Daughter Relationships
- 5 Other ‘Mothers’: Surrogates and the Mother of God
- Conclusion: A Gynocentric Ending: ‘No es trágico fin’
- Appendix 1 Women’s Interrelationships in Zayas’s Novelas amorosas y ejemplares
- Appendix 2 Women’s Interrelationships in Zayas’s Desengaños amorosos
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Women’s Alliances and the Frame ‘Sisterhood’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Zayas’s Prose, a Feminine World
- 1 Women’s Alliances and the Frame ‘Sisterhood’
- 2 Women’s Perfidy and the Subversion of Sisterhood
- 3 The Intersection of Gender and Class in Zayas’s Feminine World
- 4 Absences/Presences: Mother-Daughter Relationships
- 5 Other ‘Mothers’: Surrogates and the Mother of God
- Conclusion: A Gynocentric Ending: ‘No es trágico fin’
- Appendix 1 Women’s Interrelationships in Zayas’s Novelas amorosas y ejemplares
- Appendix 2 Women’s Interrelationships in Zayas’s Desengaños amorosos
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Cobrándose las dos tanto amor, que si no era para dormir, no se dividía la una de la otra. (DA 350)
Tomo por amparo el retiro de un convento […] y así, con mi querida doña Isabel, a quien pienso acompañar mientras viviere, me voy a salvar de los engaños de los hombres. (DA 509)
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.
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- Women in the Prose of María de Zayas , pp. 9 - 55Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2010