Content area
Full Text
Maria de Zayas's popular framed novels have been the object of significant attention in the last few decades. Critics have highlighted the crucial difference in 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 the metaphor of the house. According to Amy Williamsen, while "in Novelas Amorosas Zayas explores the comic possibilities of this architectural sign, at times demonstrating that the rigid imposition of patriarchal order also restricts men . . . Desenganos, on the other hand, portrays the house as an instrument of torture employed against women" (646). Rather than viewing the house as metafiction of the struggle for female authorship, I purport to formulate the house in terms of the mapping of social relations.1 I propose that the representation of the house, space of the emerging modern family and microcosm of the State, is equivalent to the individual's representation within the contemporary social reality.
I will read the house, the "architecture of patriarchy" (Williamsen 646), within the larger context of the cartographic efforts of the seventeenth century, to concentrate later on the Spanish house endorsed by the Christian treatises for women. Regarding the house, women's private life, as part of the public sphere-the larger social context-allows for the conceptualization of the space of the family and of woman's development. This is necessary, according to Capel and Ortega, if we are to analyze feminine experience in a pre-industrial society, and I would add, if we are to historicize the concept of patriarchy in the particular scenario of seventeenth-century Spain.
Moreover, I believe that Zayas's work makes it apparent that defining "woman-as-housed" (337), in Mark Wigley's words, is a cartographic exercise that maps the woman's body, and that defines propriety at the same time it maps the identity of the emerging nation-state.2 The constant emphasis on the house and the family in Zayas's stories is thus a necessary reference to women's social positioning and identity amidst changing times. Therefore it may be that the difference underlying the ten years distance between the two volumes underscores Zayas's views on the progressive artificiality of systems of social and generic control such as that of the house.
The renewed interest in space...