SOURCE: Gorfkle, Laura J. “Seduction and Hysteria in María de Zayas's Desengaños Amorosos.” Hispanofila 115 (September 1995): 11-28.

In the following essay, Gorfkle explores Zayas's attitude toward female sexuality and gender as it is expressed in her Desengaños amorosos.

The woman novelist must be an hysteric. Hysteria … is simultaneously what a woman can do both to be feminine and to refuse femininity, within patriarchal discourse.

Juliet Mitchell, Women: The Longest Revolution.

María de Zayas's collection of short fiction, Desengaños amorosos, first published in 1647, is a shocking testimony of violent acts that men perpetrate against women, including rape, torture, extortion and murder, apparently ubiquitous in the author's social milieu.¹ At first glance, the novellas seem to read as a critique of a society that has abandoned all serious pretensions to conform to the honor code, widely divulged by the literature of the period, according to which...