ABSTRACT
María de Zayas, one of the few early modern Spanish female writers, brought society’s attention to the hardships women endured in patriarchy with literary works that constitute a social critique of excessive behavior among royal courtiers of seventeenth-century Spain. In her collections of short stories Novelas Amorosas y Ejemplares (Enchantments of Love, 1637) and Desengaños Amorosos (Disenchantments of Love, 1649) Zayas demonstrates how socialization perpetuates aggressive masculine models that fall short of the ideal of self-control that seventeenth-century humanist nobility was expected to adopt in all aspects of life and not merely use it as a façade of social gentility. Overwhelmed by the pressure of extreme social standards and the demand for unrelenting and daily self-control, men often took their anger out on women secretly in private encounters. Zayas’ stories show that a restructuring of gender roles may be the answer to this social crisis. This essay explores women’s exclusion from sociopolitical authority as represented in Zayas’ work, which localizes the causes of social decay in the ideological inferiority of women in early modern Spanish patriarchy and proposes that allowing women to harness said authority could repair gender relations, rectify masculine excess, and propel Spain towards an egalitarian future.
