Chapter Two - Exemplary Tales of Love: A Contradiction?

Summary

Exemplary” is not a word we use much in the twenty-first century, except perhaps to refer to the “exemplary behavior” – or the absence thereof – of a child or a public figure. But in the early seventeenth century, both Miguel de Cervantes and María de Zayas called their novella collections “exemplary.” Cervantes called his, published in 1613, simply Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novellas). “People are not always in churches” or “attending to their affairs,” Cervantes writes in the prologue to the collection, but need “times of recreation, when the afflicted spirit can rest” [no siempre se está en los templos; … no siempre se asiste a los negocios … Horas hay de recreación, donde el afligido espíritu descanse]. And he adds, “If it happened somehow that the reading of these Novels could encourage the person reading them to any evil desire or thought, I would rather cut off the hand that wrote them than make them public” [por si algún modo alcanzara que la lección estas Novelas pudiera inducir a quien las leyera a algún mal deseo o pensamiento, antes me cortara la mano con que las escribí, que sacarlos en público]. These were not empty words, since Cervantes had lost the use of his other hand fighting the Ottomans in the battle of Lepanto in 1571. In an age when exploration and conquests in the New World, Africa, the Near and Far East expanded knowledge of far-flung lands and cultures, amid religious division between Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Christians and Muslims, and political, social and economic change propelled by competition for power, writers used examples as devices to model reality in such a way as to achieve shared belief and to modify behavior. At the end of chapter 1, I listed a few of the ways those pressures are reflected in Zayas's stories, and I will point out others in subsequent chapters. Although she writes in the genre of the love story, few of her tales follow the pattern we expect in that genre, of lovers who overcome obstacles to be happily united at the end in marriage to their first beloved. That is why I analyze in this chapter the ways in which she adjusts the love story to make it exemplary of the hazards that men and women should avoid.