Re-Framing Discourse: Women before Their Public in Maria de Zayas

Abstract

As the critical anthology edited by Amy Williamsen and Judith Whitenack, The Dynamics of Discourse, and other recent publications have clearly established for Zayas scholarship, one of the most crucial problems addressed in her novela collections is the function of discourse itself in the work of the author.1 Beginning with the paratextual materials with which she presents both volumes to her reading public, followed by her creation of the frame narrative's literary sarao, and in the repeated telling of their own and others' tales by sarao participants, we find that Zayas focuses our attention on the exercise of discursive agency by voices. Mirroring her authorial stance, the frame and novela characters work to present their stories to a demanding audience and, by so doing, attempt to establish themselves as active subjects in a competitive artistic milieu. In their studies of various novelas, critics have shown that the representation of discourse in Zayas's works involves the appropriation of discursive models from the masculine world of letters and the performative reworking of them. Her narratives question the logic of these models, often placing them in the service of alternative, unexpected ends, and in the process they ironize the disparity between the social principles and the such models support. The project of self-authorization undertaken by Zayas and her narrators confirms Susan Lanser's argument that female voice ... is a site of ideological tension made visible in textual practices (6-7), for we find in the novela collections a poetics whose narrative structures as well as ideas substantially alter models appropriated from the masculine realm of letters.2In this essay, I would like to revisit the relationship between Maria de Zayas's own successful, self-reflective discursive function in the first volume, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares, as a published writer who directs her words to a potentially censorial, male-dominated public of literati and the apparently frustrated discursive function of the frame tale protagonist, Lisis. While the late Ruth Anthony El Saffar and others have seen in Lisis's troubled love life a reflection of the personal experiences of or known to Zayas, less attention has been given to the common discursive function of the author and her frame protagonist, particularly in the first novelets volume, where the latter is generally viewed as suffering from an illness-induced passivity.3 Although the development of Lisis's voice is chronicled in the narrative as a troubled, often challenged process, this character mirrors specifically the authorial function of Zayas in her mimetic bid for discursive authority before an academy-like public whose male members are empowered to judge and to respond to her communications. This essay will focus on the ways that both Zayas's and her heroine's voice represent the author's concern that women learn to control their position, vis-a-vis their audience, by exercising deliberate choice in the place from which they speak or write.The represented context or place of discourse is deliberately foregrounded in Zayas's own paratextual framing of the Novelas amorosas y ejemplares, in which the author frustrates readers by leaving no biographical trail to suggest how experience might have shaped her art. I suggest that Zayas carefully censors personal information, in order to establish her identity through the act of writing itself. In contrast, for example, to Cervantes's autobiographical references to his military service and physical injury in his Novelas prologue, in Al que leyere Zayas articulates herself solely from an imaginary space delineated as the public sphere by her discursive present tense, omitting any allusion to family and her personal past.4 The author's decision to found her identity within this public domain of print culture, through a published literary work that had attributed economic value in its own right, stands in marked contrast to the places from which her characters are made to tell their stories in the frame narrative. …