Maria de Zayas's popular framed novels have been object of significant attention last few decades. Critics have highlighted crucial difference tone between her two collections, namely, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares [Amorous and Exemplary Novels] (1637), and Desenganos amorosos [The Disenchantmenls of Love] (1647), especially regarding metaphor of house. According to Amy Williamsen, while in Novelas Amorosas Zayas explores comic possibilities of this architectural sign, at times demonstrating that rigid imposition of patriarchal order also restricts men . . . Desenganos, on other hand, portrays house as an instrument of torture employed against women (646). Rather than viewing house as metafiction of struggle for female authorship, I purport to formulate house terms of mapping of social relations.1 I propose that representation of house, space of emerging modern family and microcosm of State, is equivalent to individual's representation within contemporary social reality.I will read house, architecture of (Williamsen 646), within larger context of cartographic efforts of seventeenth century, to concentrate later on Spanish house endorsed by Christian treatises for women. Regarding house, women's private life, as part of public sphere-the larger social context-allows for conceptualization of space of family and of woman's development. This is necessary, according to Capel and Ortega, if we are to analyze feminine experience a pre-industrial society, and I would add, if we are to historicize concept of patriarchy particular scenario of seventeenth-century Spain.Moreover, I believe that Zayas's work makes it apparent that defining woman-as-housed (337), Mark Wigley's words, is a cartographic exercise that maps woman's body, and that defines propriety at same time it maps identity of emerging nation-state.2 The constant emphasis on house and family Zayas's stories is thus a necessary reference to women's social positioning and identity amidst changing times. Therefore it may be that difference underlying ten years distance between two volumes underscores Zayas's views on progressive artificiality of systems of social and generic control such as that of house.The renewed interest space by postmodern social and architectural theorists, as well as by contemporary feminists and geographers, is due to fact that it reveals more about relations than time or history, concepts that were focus of sociological studies until seventies (Soja 4-6). It has become apparent that interrelation between space and social or generic identity, what Edward Soja names the spatiality of social life (44), is never innocent since class, gender, and race are inscribed everywhere as spatial metaphors. Contemporary feminists propose, moreover, that knowledge itself is embodied, so to speak, it is engendered and embedded material context of place (Duncan 1). However, space also affects way gender is constructed and understood to point that spatiality and identity can he regarded as interrelated (Massey 179). Consequently, if we think that, contrary to time, idea of space is encoded as feminine, then we will agree with Doreen Massey that exercise of rescuing it from passivity, stasis, and depoliticization, connects with philosophical debate regarding construction of dichotomies of gender relations (6-7). In other words, questioning way space is conceptualized implies challenging definitions and borders characteristic of a masculinist episternology. Particularly, architecture's interrogation of house and its implications may contribute to understanding of what Massey refers to as power geometry (265), that is, inscription of intricate map of social relations. …