Female Friendship Extolled: Exploring the Enduring Appeal of María de Zayas's Novellas

Abstract

This article explores a major contributory factor to the perennial, literary import of María de Zayas's novellas: her innovative portrayal of friendship amongst women. Throughout Zayas's second prose work, the Desengaños amorosos (1647), nascent female solidarity emerges in tandem with the disenchantment that pervades her depiction of relations between the sexes. Considerable critical attention has been directed towards the question of Zayas's Spanish proto-feminism; studies that examine this issue have an impoverishing tendency to under-explore her texts' same-sex relationships and to confine their field of study to hetero-relations. To address this analytical dearth, I will examine the emergent friendship trajectory of the autobiographical novella narrated by Isabel, a determinative protagonist who is introduced in the Desengaños amorosos, and the interweaving of narrative levels that results from her crucial solidarity with the principal frame protagonist, Lisis. Thus, I detect in Zayas's prose an early example of what Janice Raymond has since termed 'Gyn/affection'. By contrasting the burgeoning Gyn/affection among Zayas's female protagonists with representations of friendship in other seventeenth-century Spanish works, including female-authored comedias, the original appeal of her novelistic endeavour becomes manifest.