Rediscovering the Racy Fiction of a 17th-Century Spanish Woman

By SCOTT HELLER

"No doubt, dear reader, it will amaze you that a woman should have the nerve, not just to write a book but actually to have it printed."

With those words, a sensational 17th-century author named Maria de Zayas

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began her first collection of novellas, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares, typically translated as The Enchantments of Love.

"There will be many who will attribute to madness my righteous audacity in bringing my scribbles to light, being a woman, which in the opinion of some fools, is the same as being incompetent," Zayas continued.

Yet scribble she did, writing 10 rich, racy stories in that collection, and following it up with an even more lurid volume, The Disenchantments of Love. A prologue and, 900 pages in two volumes later, a linked epilogue flank those fantastic tales, which boast titles like "Slave to Her Own Lover" and "The Ravages of Vice."

Audiences gobbled them up. More than 20 editions of one or both volumes were printed between 1637 and 1814, and the novellas were translated into French, German, English, and Dutch, and even adapted for the stage, although sometimes without credit to their originator. In 18th-century Western Europe, only Cervantes himself was a better-known writer of novellas.

Yet a hundred years later, Zayas's work had largely disappeared, suffering the same fate as that of other popular female writers of her time. Her obscurity continued into the 20th century. Sniffed one male critic, in 1929: "Can there be anything more gross and obscene, more unaesthetic and repulsive, than a woman who writes lascivious, dirty, sadistic, and morally corrupt stories?"

Now, just as scholars have rediscovered the outspoken Restoration playwright Aphra Behn, so, too, have they brought back Maria de Zayas -- with a vengeance. Three new scholarly studies will be out by midyear. According to their authors, Zayas did more than entertain or outrage. She wrote, frankly, as a woman in search of a readership. She captured the voices of those punished or displaced by the Spanish. She was conflicted about women's possibilities in a patriarchal society.

Stories full of sex, violence, and revenge express covert social and emotional tensions, the scholars contend. "Centuries before viewers flocked to such films as Blue Velvet, The Crying Game, or The Silence of the Lambs, Zayas was exploring the irrational origins of sexual desire, the social construction of gender roles, the multiple varieties of sexual obsession, and the violence it provokes," writes Margaret Rich Greer, an associate professor of Romance studies at Duke University.

Ms. Greer is the author of Maria de Zayas Tells Baroque Tales of Love and the Cruelty of Men (Penn State University Press, 2000). Also just out is The Cultural Labyrinth of Maria de Zayas (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000) by Marina S. Brownlee, a professor of romance languages at Penn. And this year the University of North Carolina Press will publish Reclaiming the Body: Maria de Zayas's Early Modern Feminism, by Lisa Vollendorf, an assistant professor of Spanish at Wayne State University.

As a graduate student, Ms. Greer read other writers from the so-called "golden age," but never encountered Zayas. "If they didn't have the clear literary polish of Cervantes or Calderon, other works were dismissed as just popular literature," she explains.

Zayas was excluded from the canon precisely because her often wild tales went against the grain of realism, considered the only serious literary form. Yet it's just that fantastic quality that makes the works such page-turners today, and so ripe for postmodern interpretation.

Take this passage, from Forewarned but Not Forearmed, in which Antonio, a slave, is speaking of his mistress, Beatriz: "What do you want of me, madam? Leave me alone, for the love of God! How can you pursue me even as I lay dying? Isn't it enough that your lasciviousness has brought me to this end? Even now you want me to satisfy your vicious appetites when I am breathing my last? Get yourself a husband, madam, and leave me in peace."

According to Ms. Brownlee, Zayas gave her own twist to the story cycle made famous by Boccaccio, in the Decameron, and his counterparts. "She redoes them by turning up the heat sexually and socially, in true baroque fashion," the professor says.

Ms. Greer uses Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to discuss cross-dressing, motherhood, and marriage in Zayas's fiction. Unusual for her time, Zayas presented women as capable of serial love, not bound to one undying true love. Even so, her stance seems to change from the first volume to the second, far grimmer book, in which "the literal body count just mounts," says Ms. Greer.

"In the second book the only ones who survive love relationships are the women who get away to a convent in time -- and the bad women."

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