"La fuerza del amor" or "The Power of Self-Love": Zayas' Response to Cervantes' "La fuerza de la sangre"

Abstract

THE debt of Maria de Zayas' Ejemplos and Desenganos amorosos to Cervantes' Novelas Ejemplares has been studied frequently. Given the popularity that the Novelas ejemplares enjoyed, their influence upon other authors of short stories was inevitable, even obligatory. And Zayas' work is often read as an elaboration of the style, themes, and content of Cervantes' ejemplos. Nonetheless, as Cervantes himself well demonstrated, imitation does not imply blind reverence to the model; for Cervantes, as for most writers of the Renaissance and Baroque, the practice of imitatio was a conscious effort to transform, and in the process hopefully surpass, the model. In fact, Zayas' texts readily lend themselves to multiple and paradoxical readings, making any imitation of or response to the content and themes of Cervantes' works unexpected and highly original. As Patricia E. Grieve has stated in her study of Zayas' practice of imitation and manipulation of hagiographic codes, her works not only (and thus transform) form and content, but radically undermine the ideological premises which commonly frame text and reading context: By foregrounding hagiography and transforming seventeenth-century male-approved reading matter for women into material for women's writing, while refusing merely to imitate it, Zayas creates a revisionist text that subverts hagiography's patriarchal discourse. She appropriates the content but revises the context of the stories, thereby circumventing the pitfalls of being a female voice in a male discourse. (89) I would add that this practice of irreverent imitation, of taking a male oriented discourse, subverting its premises, and recontextualizing it into a woman's text is the same practice Zayas employs in her transformation of Cervantes' works. In this essay I will discuss the ways in which Zayas' La fuerza del amor is a direct retort to the irony (whether intentional or not) of Leocadia's marriage in Cervantes' La fuerza de la sangre. I will argue that in fact Zayas' tale of marriage and deception is a conscious continuation of Cervantes' contradictory tale of rape, sin, and farfetched reconciliation. If La fuerza de la sangre ends with an uneasy declaration of marital bliss between Rodolfo, an aristocrat and a rapist, and his victim, Leocadia, La fuerza del amor openly exposes the cruel reality that this blessed state can and will bring. Cervantes' tale ends with Leocadia's surrender to her rapist's gaze and her tenuous reintegration into society as his honorable wife and mother of his children. In contrast, Zayas focuses on the pitfalls of marriage for women such as Leocadia and La fuerza del amor's Laura, beautiful objects of desire always lacking power and readily abused by husband and society. Nonetheless, Zayas enables her disgraced heroine to find in herself the power of self-love (this tale should really be titled La fuerza del amor propio) and establish her subjectivity apart from all male influence. First let us examine Cervantes' Sangre. In this ejemplo Leocadia, a virginal and extremely beautiful sixteen-year-old is abducted from her family's carriage by Rodolfo, a caballero whose inclinacion torcida, libertad demasiada and companias libres prevent him from honoring his or her honorable standing in society (77). She is taken to Rodolfo's room where, unconscious, she is raped. As the night evolves Leocadia first pleads for her death, then for her release, and manages to leave taking a crucifix that, as Marcia Welles establishes, will be both symbol and proof of her innocent sacrifice (247). Luisico, the product of this unworthy union, has an accident that miraculously brings him to his noble grandparents' house where he lies in the bed that seven years earlier had been the stage of his mother's disgrace. Leocadia, finally aware of her aggressor's identity, acts accordingly and, through Rodolfo's parents' grace and kindness, is able to regain her honor through marriage. …