The Rape-Revenge Plot as a Reading of María de Zayas and Ana Caro de Mallén in Herminia Luque’s Amar tanta belleza (2015)

Abstract: The novel Amar tanta belleza (2015) by Herminia Luque constitutes an interpretation of the oeuvre and legacy of Ana Caro de Mallén and María de Zayas. Luque imagines an etiology of the parody of the Don Juan figure in Caro de Mallén’s play Valor, agravio y mujer (ca. 1630–40) and especially of the rape of adult women in Zayas’s fiction, prevalent throughout Desengaños amorosos (1647). This article examines Luque’s choice in Amar tanta belleza of the rape-revenge plot as a device to make sense of Spain’s two most celebrated and studied women writers of seventeenth century, impressing upon her readers that the early modern Spanish field of cultural production was emphatically a man’s world and that the violation of Ana epitomizes the oppression visited upon women writers, both then and now, but also celebrating the solidarity between them and their capacity to craft distinctively feminine forms. Analysis focuses on four embodied experiences in the novel: the rape of Ana; the characterization of the chief antagonist as a lindo or effeminate man; sex and the embodiment of gender and desire as the object of disgust and horror; and the myth of Arachne as a poetics for women’s writing.