ABSTRACT
María de Zayas’ 1647 collection of novellas Los desengaños amorosos features a voyeuristic entrance into the world of violence against women, one of the most graphic early modern accounts of rape, torture, and self-harm. Re-considering Zayas under the framework of the pornographic allows us to examine the intersections between a number of interrelated theoretical categories: judicial and political witnessing, performative spectatorship, and the marketing and moralizing of sexual pleasure. While numerous scholars have persuasively identified Zayas’ important contribution to our understanding of early modern women’s lives, reading the novellas under the frame of women-authored pornography allows us to examine the ways in which the author overtly displays women’s bodies (including their torture and rape) as a call to action. With particular focus on the two novellas La esclava de su amante and La inocencia castigada, this chapter will concentrate on the architecture of domestic enclosures (bedrooms, chimneys) and their impact on corporeal punishment and spectacular display. It will also examine the ties between transformative dress, religious practice, and change in status (Christian women dressing as Muslim, aristocratic women becoming slaves). Also important is how these novellas play with truth and fiction in ways that enhance their illicit eroticism: Zayas situates autobiography within the context of the fictional setting of a sarao; the desengaño is also a fraught genre with its dual mandate to entertain and educate.
