Zayas Intro - Notes on The Disenchantments of Love PDF

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Notes on The Disenchantments of Love...

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SPLT57 Summer 2009 Intro to The Disenchantments of Love, by María de Zayas (1647) SLIDE 1 I think it is convenient to briefly introduce the work of Maria de Zayas. She lived and worked in the 17th century, a few decades after the age of Shakspeare and Cervantes. We are going to read 3 novellas from one of her main works. A novella is a piece of fictional prose that is shorter than what we call a novel. I want to introduce these works because, since we are not contemporary of de Zayas, we might need to know a bit about the literary and social context in which her works were produced. As you listen to this presentation, and as you read her novellas later, I want you to have in mind what we have discussed already about the formation of the literary cannon, and the questions we might have to ask to the history of literature: who reads? Who writes? Who writes what kind of genres and for whom? SLIDE 2 María de Zayas is mostly known for 2 collections of novellas, the first one was entitled The Enchantments of Love and the second one, ten years later, The Disenchantments of Love. The 3 stories we are going to read come from the second collection, but I want to say a bit about the whole project. When they came out, they became instant best sellers not only in Spain but in the whole of Europe. They saw 20 editions in the next 200 years and they were translated into English, French, German and Dutch. In the 1800s she was the most translated Spanish author after Cervantes. However, since reading and writing are social practices subject to control and regulation, it is not surprising that her place in the history of literary history would change some centuries later, when critics from the Spanish Academy would trash her work as being “un-lady like” and obscene, and she is removed from the “canon” to the point that someone like me, schooled in Spain, having been to college and majored in Spanish and English, I had not heard about María de Zayas until my graduate studies, when her work was being “rediscovered”. At this point I would like to invite you to read later the short piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education that I have posted in the module. It is short, but very informative.

SLIDE 3 I want to talk now about the structure of both collections. They both use the narrative device of the “Frame Story”. A frame story is a narrative technique whereby an introductory main story is composed, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage for a fictive narrative or organizing a set of shorter stories. Thus, if you open your text,

you will see the words “First Night” on one page, and on the next page the words “Frame Story” right above the text. Both the Enchantments and the Disenchantments are constructed around a frame story with its own plot and set of characters. The main protagonist in the Frame Story is a young woman, Lisis. In the first collection Lisis is ill, apparently from fever, but in reality from her unrequited love for Don Juan. To cheer her up her friends organize a series of parties with storytelling. The frame story develops the rivalry between Lisis and her cousin Lisarda, and don Juan’s efforts to conquest both women. Another guest, Don Diego, falls in love with Lisis and start courting her, since Don Juan seems to be more into Lisarda, Lisis decides to settle for Don Diego. By the end of the final night Lisis and D. Diego become engaged and plan to celebrate their marriage. The stories of these first series were narrated by five men and five women (all guests at the parties), and the stories themselves had different themes and played with the generic conventions of the time. SLIDE 4 This one time, the guests are the same, they include Lisis, her cousin Lisard, Don Juan, Don Diego. Lisis’s slave, Zelima; Lisis’s Mother Laura, and many of their friends. This time around, however, Lisis and her friends have decided to set some rules for the story telling: --They must be narrated by women, men are not allowed as speakers, only as listeners, --and the stories must be true cases --intended to disenchant or undeceive women about the deceptions of men. So this is then the structure of the stories: --There will be 10 women telling a story, a disenchantment, to the party of guests gathered at Lisis’s place for 3 consecutive evenings. These women become the NARRATORS, the listeners are both men and women, we are going to call them NARRATEES. But to these layers we have to add several more: we must be aware of de Zayas “implied reader,” who was she telling the story to in her time, and we have to consider ourselves, as readers of the final product. I think this will be clear once you have read the first 2 stories. We are only going to read 3 of the novellas. They are narrated by --Zelima/Isable, Lisis’s slave and dear companion will tell “Slave to Her Own Lover” --Laura, Lisis’s mother, “Innocence Punished” --Filis, a dear friend of Lisis, “Too Late Undeceived” SLIDE 5 The stated purpose of the collection: to change the world by changing the ways women and men think, talk about, and treat women. This will be done by “disenchanting” or

undeceiving readers through the telling of women’s stories that depict women’s views and experiences. We can say that, in 1647 De Zayas was already undertaking what will be later called “feminst criticism”That is, she was pointing out that most reading and most writing was done from a masculinist perspective). All works of fiction operate within a set of conventions (think for instance of the movie Pulp Fiction, which is playing with the conventions precisely of the literature that is known as ‘pulp fiction”). In the same way, María de Zayas was very aware of the literary conventions of her time, she uses them, and at the same time she subverts them, undermines them. One of the conventions in Spanish Golden Age literature was that the plots derive their power from the suppression of the feminine, either through physical violence or through the exclusion of the woman’s point of view. Women were mostly the object of men’s desire rather than being subjects in their own right. The Disenchantments stress the need for women’s side of the story. De Zayas disenchantments question the implications for the culture of masculine honor--A culture that makes the woman responsible for the honor of her father, her brother, her husband… when she has very little agency and very little voice. You will see a lot of violence, what we call in our society, domestic violence, since the stories present vivid recreations of women’s hidden reality: we see what happens behind closed doors. SLIDE 6 You will see that at the end of most disenchantments, the listeners, guest at the party, comment on what has been narrated. Sometimes they seem to have completely missed the point. I want you to pay attention at how the stories present 2 different ways of looking at things: --One would be the normative, public, masculine perspective --The other would be the private, domestic, feminist perspective There would be elements in the different stories that would encourage the reader, the contemporary reader, but also US, reading now, to choose between these two perspectives. The reader cannot just sit and be entertained, he or she has to have an opinion, and cannot take things at face value. SLIDE 7 We are almost ready to start reading the first disenchantment, “Slave to Her Own Lover” As I have said already, it is the only autobiographical story, that is, Zelima Isabel is a character in the frame story and narrator AND also the protagonist of the disenchantment. The story follows the conventions of a popular genre from the 16th century: The Byzantine. This was normally a most fantastic, unrealistic story in which a couple of lovers would be forced to separate and would then have really exotic, fantastic adventures in many parts of the world. At the end they would be reunited and be happy forever. The

reader was an accomplice in that he/she would never expect the story to comply with realistic norms: that is, one day the protagonist would be in Greece and the next they could be in Italy and no one wondered how that was possible. We, reading the story more than 300 years later, must then suspend our disbelief aswell. I hope you enjoy the story, “Slave to Her Own Lover” and I look forward to discuss it together in blackboard. Thank you....