The Novel

by Steven Moore

  Zayas’s two-part novel is about disillusionment (desengaño), a recurring theme in Golden Age Spanish literature (1580–1680), and not unrelated to Spain’s spectacular decline during that period from world power to provincial backwater. Alonso Quixano is dis-illusioned on his deathbed, finally seeing the true nature of things, and a pack of pícaros exposed the shabby interiors behind the illusory façades of church, state, and Spanish society. Dorotea dramatizes desengaño. Like Lope, Zayas focuses on the illusions (enchantments) of love, and offers both a morning-after appraisal of the disillusions that often follow courtship as well as an exposé of the true nature of the relations between women and men.

  In the frame-tale, 10 aristocrats of Madrid come together on Christmas Eve to entertain Lisis, a beauty suffering from quartan fever. Her mother Laura organizes a five-day party during which two guests each night will tell a romantic tale—an “enchantment,” as she calls it. “In using this term she wanted to avoid the common term ‘novella,” so trite that it was now out of fashion.”41 (In using this term Zayas wants to emphasize the illusions those in love or lust are under.) From the first night there is erotic tension in the group: prudent Lisis is in love with the dashing Juan and is prepared to marry him, but he’s more interested in her daring cousin Lisarda. Diego is also interested in Lisia, which Juan resents. Miguel has eyes for Filis, but has a rival in Lope; Alvaro is in thrall to Matilde, but she is accompanied by Alonso; Juan’s beautiful cousin Nise is fancy-free. Adding to the tension, every tale the women tell is bitterly resentful of the illusions men scam women with in order to have their way with them. The Christmas spirit is the farthest thing from their minds.

  Boyfriend-stealing Lisarda spins the first enchantment, which introduces all of Zayas’s themes. A wanderer named Fabio spots a shepherd boy who looks like a girl. “But, because the place was so dangerous for a woman, Fabio really doubted what he was seeing,” and immediately chastises himself for that misogynistic assumption: “He told himself that that doubt only accused him of not being very brave himself” (16), brave enough to admit a woman can handle herself in a dangerous place. And a woman it is: the shepherd turns out to be a noblewoman from Madrid named Jacinta who has hidden herself in the country to nurse her unrequited love for a two-timer named Celio. (Just as Jacinta appropriates men’s clothing, Zayas—Spain’s first significant woman author—appropriates a hitherto male profession.) While Fabio politely listens to her tale, Jacinta ticks off one feminist complaint after another:

  We women are brought up so deficiently that very little strength is expected of us simply because we have beautiful eyes. (17)

  If it won’t bore you, I’ll recite a poem for you, for even though it’s written by a woman, it’s all the better—it isn’t right to excuse the errors men make in their poetry because they are taught in all their studies how to refine and adorn their verses with art; but a woman, who has only her own instinct, deserves praise for everything that’s good and pardon for any defects. (19)42

  It didn’t amaze [Celio] that I composed poetry. That’s no miracle in a woman whose soul is just the same as a man’s, and maybe it pleases Nature to perform this wonder, or maybe men shouldn’t feel so vain, believing they’re the only ones who enjoy great talent. (36–37)

  When I think about the tricks and strategies men use to conquer women and overcome their weakness, I consider them all traitors. (38)

  Though disillusioned, Jacinta remains stubbornly in love with Celio after he betrays her—she admits “I stopped being wise and fell in love with a man who despised women” (38)—because she is determined to portray “women’s constancy” over men’s infidelity. Jacinta returns to Madrid, but only to immure herself in a convent: “I made a commitment to love, and that’s how I shall die” (44). She may be disillusioned about Spanish men, but not yet about the patriarchal Spanish culture that equates “constancy” with throwing one’s life away.

  Juan praises the tale extravagantly to butter up Lisarda, but Lisis cuts short his shameless flattery by picking up a guitar and singing a song in which she identifies with Jacinta’s constancy. “Few in the room missed the fact that these verses sung by the beautiful Lysis were aimed at the disdain with which don Juan repaid her love” (45), and Juan’s friend Diego praises her song to express his infatuation with her, earning Juan’s ire. In this way Zayas interlocks the fame and the inset tales so that the latter pique our interest not for their own sake—they are entertaining enough, but derivative of Italian novellas and a few by Cervantes and Lope de Vega—but for what they tell us about how Lisis and her guests reconcile their culture’s gender assumptions and their own erotic longings.

  The betrayed woman of the second tale narrated that night (by Matilde) reacts differently than Jacinta. After being humped and dumped by a philanderer named Jacinto, Aminta cuts her hair short and disguises herself as a man, becomes his servant, then one night stabs him to death in his sleep, along with his floozy Flora—a name popular with Roman whores, we’re told—who had helped him deceive Aminta, correctly guessing he’d tire of her quickly and return to her lascivious arms. Though Zayas is hard on men, she’s harder on women like Flora; the narrator accuses her of being “Terribly evil because, as a woman who’s evil, you have the advantage over men. Love excuses don Jacinto, deception excuses the unfortunate Aminta, but for Flora there is no excuse. Don’t be amazed at men’s deceptions any longer, for Flora surpasses them all in the expression of her love, if indeed it’s really love” (59). As Jacinta said in the previous tale, anticipating Pat Benatar, “Love represents a battlefield and a combat zone where, with fire and sword, it struggles to vanquish honor, guardian of the soul’s fortress” (38).

  The war between the sexes wages on over the next four nights with similar tales of lust, betrayal, and revenge. Those the gentlemen tell, condemning “clever women who, trusting in their ingenuity, seek to deceive men” (129), are milder than the ladies’ sob stories, even comical at times. Nevertheless, Zayas has one of the men admit “there are a hundred good women for each bad one; not all women are bad, and it isn’t right to confuse the good with the bad and blame them all” (120). Zayas’ feminist message is reiterated throughout, most forcefully in Nise’s tale on the third night when a betrayed woman apostrophes:

  Why, vain legislators of the world, do you tie our hands so that we cannot take vengeance. Because of your mistaken ideas about us, you render us powerless and deny us access to pen and sword. Isn’t our soul the same as a man’s soul? If the soul is what gives courage to the body, why are we so cowardly? If you men knew that we were brave and strong, I’m sure you wouldn’t deceive us the way you do. By keeping us subject from the moment we’re born, you weaken our strength with fears about honor and our minds with exaggerated emphasis on modesty and shame. For a sword, you give us the distaff, instead of books, a sewing cushion. (175)

  After the final story on the fifth day—a corker about a treacherous woman, a fratricidal man, and the devil himself—the party breaks up with plans to reassemble on New Year’s Day for the wedding of Lisis and Diego, whose courtship has progressed in tandem with the tales. But at the beginning of volume 2, Lisis lapses into depression and fever—throughout the novel illness is a metaphor for unrequited love—and postpones the wedding for over a year. When she recovers, partly with the help of her new Moorish slave-girl Zelima, she arranges for another storytelling party for Holy Week, to conclude with her marriage to Diego on the day before Lent. This time, the rules are different: only women will be allowed to tell tales—the male guests are told to listen and learn—and they should be true stories, or “disenchantments,” to expose the hit-and-run tactics men use to seduce women, “and also to defend women’s good name in an age when it has fallen so low that no one ever hears or speaks a good word about them” (42). The sensible feminism of volume 1 becomes more strident in volume 2, though that’s perfectly understandable given the ingrained prejudices intelligent woman like Zayas faced then. Still, The Disenchan
tment of Love could be subtitled The Man-hater’s Bible.

  The beautiful and talented slave Zelima narrates the first tale, all dolled up and rocking the 17th-century equivalent of a miniskirt: “It was so short it scarcely reached the turn of her ankle” (41). Born a Christian, at age 14 she attracted an unwanted suitor who, frustrated by her demurrals, raped her—the first of many acts of rape, murder, and torture in this second, decidedly darker volume. Persuaded she can salvage her honor only by marrying him, she somehow falls in love with the rapist and pursues him around the Mediterranean, disguised as a Moorish slave with a brand on her face. (Her slave status is Zayas’s unsubtle judgment of the position of all women in patriarchal Spain, though the fact Zelima brands herself a slave complicates matters.) Spurned by the rapist for chasing after him, she sells herself into real slavery and winds up in Lisis’s household, and at the conclusion of her tale announces her plan to marry the only man she can trust: Jesus. Recalling the first story in Enchantments and foreshadowing the conclusion of Disenchantments, the tale makes the dubious point that a woman can feel safe and in control of her life only in a convent, as a slave in Jesus’ celestial seraglio. Now under a different form of enchantment, Zelima gushes, “I don’t want or need men nor do I care whether they’re false or true, because I’ve chosen a beloved who will never neglect me, a spouse who will never spurn me and I can see him with his arms open wide to receive me” (81). I wish I could report Zayas is being ironic, that Zelima’s decision to trade up from men’s slave to “God’s slave” (81) is delusional and self-defeating, but I’m afraid she’s serious. (We know little about Zayas’s life, but there’s no indication she herself joined a convent.43)

  The next story is even more religiose, which is why Zayas’s books later found favor with some clergymen even as others condemned their licentiousness. Following another seduction, rape, and flight to a convent, this one adds the first of many male “honor killings” as Zayas ratchets up her screed against men; in fact, she and her narrators encourage women to use the same kind of violence against men with instances of torture, murder, even decapitation. The third story, narrated by the still-single Nise, brings in more supernatural elements and horrors, and from this point on Zayas’s tales begin sounding like the Gothic literature that would follow in the 18th century. They also begin sounding more didactic as the narrators lecture at greater length about men’s mistreatment of women. Zayas anticipates the title of Germaine Greer’s famous 1970 polemic when she has one of her narrators complain “men deprive women of the exercise of both letters and arms, the same way that Moors do to Christians who serve among their women, turning them into eunuchs to be sure of them” (141). The lecturing quickly becomes tedious, repetitious, and aesthetically unnecessary, for Zayas’s tales dramatize her concerns effectively enough; one narrator interrupts herself, “Who but a man could be so deviously treacherous? But I shall say no more, for the events speak for themselves” (100). They do indeed, and Zayas’s lack of trust in her material leads to rhetorical overkill. Her insistence that the tales in the second volume are based on real life betrays a similar mistrust in the power of fiction.

  Much of this lecturing occurs in the interludes between tales, which further encourages treating the two volumes as a novel, for it becomes obvious Lisis arranged for this second soirée to explain why she has decided, like so many of the tales’ disenchanted protagonists, to reject patient Diego’s marriage proposal and enter a convent. She appears on the third and final night wearing not the dress and jewels Diego had sent, but one exactly like that of her BFF Zelima.44 “This sight causes no little apprehension in don Diego” (306). After she narrates the final tale that night—volume 1 features 10 tales spread over five nights, volume 2 10 over three—she delivers one final lecture against men and announces she plans to join Zelima in a convent, “from where, as from behind a safety barricade, I intend to observe what happens to everybody else” (403). Thus the 700-page work has been about Lisis’s unsentimental education and her decision to embrace feminist separatism.

  Zayas was influenced by Cervantes’ Exemplary Stories, but she also seems to have been encouraged by the metafictional shenanigans of DQ2 that made a mess of its chronology. Enchantments is set in the 1630s and was published in 1637; Disenchantments (1647) is set a little over a year later, but we’re told at the end that the year is 1646, meaning the first volume is set during the last week of 1644—seven years after it was published. Characters in Disenchantments refer to the publication of Enchantments (113), and in the frame-story to the second night, Zayas boasts of the reception of Enchantments: “If a few people criticized it, a hundred applauded it. Everyone rushed out to buy it and they’re still buying it. It’s already been through three printings, two legitimate and one pirated” (168), meaning Zayas’s characters are aware they are characters in a book, and preparing a sequel as they speak. In the introduction to her tale on the final night, Lisis states she’s the author of this work, but on the final page the narrator addresses Fabio, the sympathetic auditor of the first tale in Enchantments, as though the whole thing has been a continuation of Jacinta’s narrative. It’s a confusing parting shot in this 700-page “war against all men” (367), a sustained attack on patriarchy and misogyny, as well as a stirring defense of women and an early classic of feminism. And if Zayas failed to recognize her beloved Catholicism as one of the pillars of her despised patriarchy, she is to be praised for crashing the men’s club of Spanish fiction and opening the doors for future “Homers in skirts and petticoats or Virgils wearing a chignon” (168).

  María de Zayas’s style is plain, unpolished; one of her English translators noticed, “She writes like a woman in a hurry, impatient often of the niceties of structure and balance.”45 At the opposite end of the stylistic spectrum is the last 17th-century Spanish novel of consequence, Baltasar Gracián’s extravagant, imaginative allegory The Master Critic (El Criticón), published in three parts in 1651, 1653, and 1657. Gracián (1601–58) was a leading exponent and theorist of the elaborate, baroque style known as conceptismo, where concepts (or conceits) were the subject of ingenious, extended displays of wit and erudition. A worldly Jesuit constantly in trouble with his superiors, Gracián wrote several nonfiction works before dedicating the final years of his life to this three-part novel, a 600-page dramatization of his bitter view of life in moribund Spain. One critic has convincingly argued that it “is the ultimate and most intricately encyclopedic statement and critical examination of the individual’s situation in the troubled seventeenth century; it accomplishes this statement and examination with a virtuosity of wit and verbal expression that are the very pinnacle of the period’s style.”46

  Set during the irresponsible reign of Philip IV (1621–65), the novel opens like a cerebral adventure story: a shipwrecked man washes up on the shore of the island of Saint Helena, which for Gracián’s purposes is uninhabited except for his rescuer, “a sprightly youth, an angel in his appearance,” who has no language.47 The “grateful naufrague” introduces himself as Critilo and names his rescuer Andrenio (Greek for “natural man”), and after teaching this noble savage Spanish he learns that Andrenio was raised by animals in a den. As he grew older he gradually began to apprehend the nature of the universe, from whose perfect design he eventually inferred a divine creator.48 The intellectual Critilo validates Andrenio’s homemade theology and begins to tell his own story when the two spot some Spanish galleons returning from the New World. Andrenio has never seen a ship, so we’re given this exchange, typical of Gracián’s metaphoric style:

  “I see,” said he, “some wandering mountains, or winged sea-monsters, or else some clouds.”

  “No,” said Critilo, “they are ships, though you have said aptly in calling them clouds, for they rain gold into Spain.” (4, punning on nubes [clouds] and naves [ships])

  After boarding this ship en route for Spain, Critilo explains he was born of Spanish parents in Goa (India), where he led a reckless youth and fell in love
with a girl named Felisanda, of another Spanish expatriate family. Killing a rival suitor of hers, he was sent to prison, where he mended his ways and educated himself in literature and philosophy. Felisinda returned to Spain and arranged for his pardon, and it was during Critilo’s voyage home that he was thrown overboard near Saint Helena.

  When Critilo and Andrenio arrive in Spain, Gracián abandons novelistic realism for baroque allegory. Warning Andrenio of the “vast distance and difference you will find between the civil and the natural world” (5), Critilo and the rube first witness a group of pampered children attacked by wild animals, symbolizing the evil unleashed by lenient parents who allow a child to live in “folly than to displease his palate with the bitter pills and remedies of correction; . . . whereby the evil of depraved nature prevailing, allures the tender infant into the valley of beasts to be made a prey unto vice, and a slave to passions” (5). This is Gracián’s modus operandi throughout: he literalizes a concept (“a prey to vice”), pushes it to extremes via extended metaphors, and then explains the allegory and moral lesson to be learned. Critical Critilo provides some of the explanations, while others are provided by various symbolic guides—the centaur Chiron, treacherous Proteus, the wise woman Artemia—whom the wanderers meet as they travel throughout Spain, witnessing the country’s moral depravity. Predictably, Andrenio is a sucker for attractions like the Palace of Falsimundo (“false world”), the City of Deceit, the Cave of Lust, and other allegorical sites, though by the end of part 1 he is disabused of these illusions (another instance of desengaño) and learns he is actually Critilo’s son, the result of his father’s dalliance with Felisinda, who abandoned her baby on Saint Helena on the way back to Spain.