Chapter Five - Bodies in Pain: Tales of Disillusion

Summary

Zayas's second volume was published ten years after the first, in 1647, in a decade of disasters for Spain and its empire. We see reflections of two of those disasters – the 1640 rebellions of Catalonia and Portugal – in the first and last stories of Tales of Disillusion. The Catalonian revolt ended in 1652, but that of Portugal only concluded with Spain's recognition of Portuguese independence in 1668. The mounting national mood of desengaño (disillusion) of the era surely fed the darkness and violence of the Tales of Disillusion as a whole. Calling the stories “disillusions,” as they are labeled, is a decided understatement; not only are women disabused of hopes and illusions, but their bodies are tortured and broken by their husbands, brothers and fathers. Another difference is the absence of a “To the Reader” introduction in Zayas's explicitly authorial voice. Zayas does refer to “my entertaining soiree” in the first framing paragraph and announces that Lisis would not wed Diego on New Year's Day, as promised at the end of Exemplary Tales of Love. In the rest of this volume, however, she projects her intentions through Lisis, her alter ego.

The majority of the Disillusions seem to me a kind of authorial rewriting of the stories in her first volume, either in terms of narrative voice, tone and structure, or in significant motifs. Furthermore, they intertwine, as their heroines try different methods to defend their lives and reputations, to no avail, making evident the box with no escape other than – for some survivors – retreat to a convent, in the fundamentally misogynist society in which Zayas depicts them. I center my discussion here on D. 1, D. 5 and D. 10, the most clear rewritings of N. 1, N. 5 and N. 10, with brief comments on other stories in this volume.

Lisis, we are told, has suffered a relapse of the illness of the quartan fever (see chapter 3), a melancholy lovesickness she attributes to having agreed to the engagement with Diego to avenge herself on don Juan for preferring Lisarda. Recognizing that she does not desire Diego, she sinks into despair and renewed illness with serious relapses lasting over a year. She recovers when a beautiful, talented slave enters her household, the “Zelima” who entertains Lisis and will narrate D. 1, “Her Lover's Slave.”