Protecting the Spanish Woman: Gender Identity and Empowerment in María de Zayas's Works

This monograph studies “the representation of gender roles in María de Zayas's Novelas amorosas y ejemplares and its continuation, Desengaños amorosos” (3) in light of sixteenth-century conduct manuals for courtiers and lawsuits brought by women against men for gendered violence in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Navarre and the Basque Country. Xabier Granja Ibarreche argues that in her two collections of ten novellas each—set within a continuous frametale and published in 1637 and 1647—Zayas aims to convince Spanish men “not to obstruct the empowerment of women” (6–7) and agree to “a potential reform of both gender identities: a more restrained masculinity and a refashioned femininity where independent, authoritative, women would no longer require men's protection” (115). To do so, Zayas's tales depict noblemen who abuse the ideal of courtly sprezzatura—the art of feigned nonchalance prescribed by conduct manuals—transforming it instead into a means of concealing of character flaws (33), which drive them to victimize women within domestic spaces in increasingly gruesome and lethal ways. Noblewomen, for their part, strive to survive the brutality of patriarchy by projecting Christian virtue, which equips them to reform wayward men (90).The book consists of a preface that presents the thesis and situates it within Zayas's scholarship; an introduction that further defines the book's scope and outlines its chapters; chapter 1, on the construction of masculinity in sixteenth-century conduct manuals and neo-Aristotelian naturalism; and three additional chapters plus a conclusion that analyze five of the Novelas amorosas and all ten Desengaños. Chapters 2 through 4 range the novellas according to the gravity of the violence they depict. The conclusion argues that, in the denouement of the frametale, Lisis and two of her friends—wealthy noblewomen without male guardians—embody the template of empowered Spanish women. By withdrawing to the convent, they seek not mere seclusion but a strategic retreat from which they may safeguard their integrity and, after biding their time, win the war for the soul of Spanish men and the safety and authority of Spanish women (201–203).The incorporation of judicial proceedings constitutes the most distinctive aspect of this monograph, one that stands out in the context of Zayas studies, yet it also introduces a host of scholarly problems. The cases certainly support Granja Ibarreche's working premise whereby the masculinist violence in Zayas's fiction very much tracked with reality. On the other hand, the author does not justify the exclusive focus on judicial archives from a single region of early modern Spain. Moreover, he mainly does not identify the social standing of the parties. Yet, as Elizabeth Rhodes wrote in her 2012 review of Scott K. Taylor's 2008 Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain, “none of his data reflects the focus and class interests of those who wrote the prescriptive treatises and fictional texts whose representation of the problem he challenges” (Sixteenth Century Journal vol. 43, no. 1, 313). Indeed, most of Granja Ibarreche's plaintiffs and defendants seem to hail from the peasant and merchant classes in rural Euskal Herria. In contrast, Zayas's protagonists dwell in major cities and are nobles.The neglect of class and city weakens other aspects of Granja Ibarreche's argument. He consistently omits whether characters have the honorific don/doña attached to their names. Zayas's narrators are deliberate in this regard because thus they inform readers not only about characters’ social standing, which explains the power relations between them, but more importantly about the ethics they should observe. Take, for example, women antagonists, the “female villains” who, for Granja Ibarreche, do not diminish the relevance of Zayas's “condemnation of masculine despotism” (67). These characters, however, represent the other—in terms of class, race, and even age—of the virtuous noblewomen. When they are not nameless, such as the slanderous Black slave in “Desengaño cuarto” or the wicked sister-in-law in “Desengaño quinto,” they bear Italianate names such as Lucrecia in “El desengaño amando y premio de la virtud” or Alejandra in “La esclava de su amante,” in stark contrast to the very Spanish and noble Doña Juana and Doña Isabel, respectively. Contrary to what Granja Ibarreche maintains (5), Zayas directs her message to aristocrats. Moreover, she consistently presents lower-class, racialized, older, or sexually active, unattached women as their foil, thus discerning between good and bad women because of their gender, which inevitably upholds the patriarchal structure.