Who's Telling This Story Anyhow?

Framing Tales East and West:

Panchatantra to Boccaccio to Zayas¹

Margaret Greer

Duke University

My central interest in this essay is the use of the frame tale by the Spanish Baroque writer María de Zayas y Sotomayor in her two-volume collection of stories, the Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (Amorous and Exemplary Stories) and the [Desengaños amorosos] Parte segunda del Sarao y entretenimiento honesto ([Amorous Disillusions] Second Part of the Soire and Honest Entertainment) published in 1637 and 1647, respectively. To understand Zayas' particular use of the frame tale, however, I will approach it through a brief consideration of the function of artistic frames in a larger sense, and of the nature and function of the frame tale as it was employed, or omitted, by Zayas' predecessors in the novella tradition.

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First let us imagine a fond father or mother who in a burst of parental enthusiasm puts a child's first tempra painting in a real frame and hangs it on the wall. What is the significance of that frame? In the mind of parent and child, at least, it says, this is not just a four-year old's play with color, this is important; this is ART (Illustration 1).

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Now, working in reverse, if we call to mind a favorite painting, whether it be Velázquez, Monet, or Picasso and, in our mind's eye, remove its frame, does it diminish it in some way? Does it make more tenuous the stature of that image as a work of art? I would be tempted to say that it does, until I think of a small print I have of one of my favorite paintings, La Tour's Education of the Virgin (Illustration 2).² It has no frame, just two tacks holding it to the wall above my desk in my office, yet looking at it transports me to another realm of aesthetic as well as educational purity. I would deduce from this mental exercise that the declaration of aesthetic value can be either internally or externally coded.

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If we turn to theater, we find the same to be the case. Theaters with a proscenium arch and a stage curtain need no mediating dramatic frame or prologue to define the dramatic world. But dramatic prologues are an important constituent of Spanish Renaissance drama from Juan del Encina forward, when plays were performed in improvised theaters and playwrights were defining the conventions of drama for their audiences. Although they gradually disappeared from corral (public theater) performances once permanent theaters were established, they continued in vigor as a vital part of the street performances of the autos sacramentales (allegorical religious dramas) for the annual Corpus Christi celebration.³ Informal street theater today, too, requires some kind of frame definition. This may be effected by a barker, or a lone performer who attracts a group of spectators. On the other hand, the separate, aesthetic realm may in this case need to be marked internally, by opening the dramatic action with a heightened theatrical rhetoric --"overacting"--which marks this interaction as distinct from the everyday world of the street itself. Once a semicircle of spectators forms, they themselves mark out the limits of the aesthetic "object", within which space, time and being have the peculiar doubleness of drama. While most mature human beings respect the integrity of the object thus demarcated, the frame is not impermeable. Naive spectators do sometimes behave like Don Quixote before Maese Pedro's puppet show; Henry Sullivan (386) cites two cases of twentieth-century spectators of a German version of Caldern's La dama duende (The Phantom Lady) who intervened across the frame at least verbally. The Argentine dramatist Osvaldo Dragún told me that when in the last days of the military regime that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, his troop, using theater as a political weapon, performed his works wherever they could gather a crowd in the streets of Buenos Aires (figures 1 , 2, 3, 4, 5). One play in particular caused "framing"problems. In his brief play, Historia de un hombre convertido en perro (Story of a man transformed into a dog), as the title indicates, the main character is transformed from a speaking human being into a barking dog. As he was reduced to barking, the spectators might understand the political point being made, but all the neighborhood dogs saw was a new interloper in their territory, and the only way the troop could keep them from attacking was by, shall we say, turning up the theatrical rhetoric, and, in solidarity with the "caninized" actor, all barking ferociously until the real dogs retreated.

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Presumably, most of us are not mongrel readers. While we acknowledge the thorny problem of the ontology of fictional discourse, in practice we are generally able to recognize the presence of a fictional text by its own combination of external and internal markers: externally the book as a physical object in itself, and the liminary elements that Genette (1987, 7-8) calls the "paratexte" of the work-- title, preface, epigraph, etc., and internally by stylistic clues. The latter may be as close to the time-honored "Erase una vez..." (Once upon a time . . .) as is the opening sentence of Cervantes' novella, La ilustre fregona (The Illustrious Kitchen-Maid): "En Burgos, ciudad ilustre y famosa, no ha muchos años que en ella vivían dos caballeros principales y ricos" [In the illustrious and famous city of Burgos, not many years ago there lived two principal and rich gentlemen] (Cervantes 297). Or the clues may appear more subtly and slowly, as in La fuerza de la sangre (The Power of Blood): "Una noche de las calurosas del verano volvían de recrearse del río, en Toledo, un anciano hidalgo, con su mujer, un niño pequeño, una hija de diez y seis años y una criada. La noche era clara; la hora, las once; el camino, solo, y el paso, tardo...." [One of those hot summer nights, in Toledo, an elderly gentleman, with his wife, a small boy, a sixteen-year-old daughter and a serving girl, were returning from an outing to the river. The night was clear, the hour, eleven o-clock, the road, deserted, and their pace, slow] (Cervantes 239). Even in this second case, the special rhythm of the second sentence would alert most readers that they are not perusing a seventeenth-century equivalent of a police report.

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If these subtle forms of framing are, in practice, generally sufficient to delimit a fictional text, what, then, are the purpose and function of the much more assertive framing devices used by Boccaccio in the Decameron (c.1350), Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales (1386-1400) (and their Eastern predecessors) and the many novella writers who followed in that tradition? Why did Cervantes in his Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Stories) (1613) dispense with the frame and why did Lope personalize it in the Novelas a Marcia Leonarda (Stories for Marcia Leonarda) (1621-1624)?⁴ Why did the many Spanish novella writers of the 1620s and 1630s follow the example of Cervantes rather than Boccaccio or Lope? Finally, the question of most interest to me, why did Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor opt to use a frame tale again? She appears to have written at least eight of the stories of the first volume and to have been preparing them for publication about 1625, when the preferred style was Cervantes's frame-less model. Yet she encloses her collection within a single frame that unites the two volumes, despite the ten-year separation in their publication and the much darker tone of the second volume.

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In tackling these questions, I would like to make one more preliminary detour through a recent use of the frame tale, the Rob Reiner film The Princess Bride, which I would describe as a romance packaged for postmodern cynics. And very effectively packaged indeed. Any of you who have sons and daughters the approximate age of mine have probably seen at least bits of this film more times than you can count, and my daughter says that at the mere mention of it, her college friends launch into gleeful recitals of their favorite lines. The film opens with the sound of a child's cough, followed by strains of "Take me out to the ball game" and a view of a Nintendo-style baseball game on a television screen (video clip 1). The young boy playing it is ill and confined to his room, but is less than delighted when his grandfather arrives to visit bearing a present - "a book??" -- and proposing to read to him the story that his father read to him when he was sick, that he read to the boy's father and will now read to him. The boy is unenthusiastic but when his grandfather assures him that it has lots of sports in it, he says he'll try to stay awake. What the grandfather reads is a classic tale of a poor, gallant hero Wesley who defeats an evil prince Humperdink and wins his beautiful ladylove Buttercup, all seasoned generously with humor, magic and valiantry. At key points in the narrative, the camera cuts back to the boy, now fully engrossed in the tale, but interrupting the reading when the story seems to depart from his ideal paradigm, or when Wesley and Buttercup spend too much time kissing.

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This cinematographic frame tale contains most of the major elements of classic literary frames. The first is the motif of illness. In Boccaccio's frame, this illness is without - the plague raging through Florence, from which the seven ladies and three gentlemen retreat both physically and psychologically, recounting stories in the safe haven of beautiful gardens in country estates. More often, the sickness is within; in Petrus Alfonsi's 12th-century Disciplina clericalis, a dying Arab transmits his wisdom to his son by telling him a series of stories and proverbs containing moral lessons (Gittes 59).⁵ The pretext for story-telling in María de Zayas' novellas is the illness of the heroine of the frame tale, Lisis, whose friends gather to entertain her and speed her convalescence by telling stories. In Zayas' tale, as in numerous stories in novella collections, the true illness is doubly within, for the physical symptoms are the result of mal de amor (malady of love)--in the case of Zayas' Lisis, suffering caused by jealousy and disappointment in love, as her beloved don Juan neglects her for her cousin Lisarda. Boccaccio (1982, 2-3) too, in his "Proemio" (Proem) cites his former suffering of frustrated passion and offers his stories as pleasure, counsel and cure for the "charming ladies" who suffer love's melancholy (2-3). Zayas' frame narrative seems, until the very end, to posit two possible remedies for the suffering of unrequited love; on the one hand, Lisis is promising to marry another man, the adoring don Diego; on the other, the enclosed narrators hammer in the point that their tales are to warn women against the pitfalls of desire and male treachery. Their counsel prevails at the end as the heroine of the frame follows many of the fictional protagonists into the closed, woman's world of the convent. No kissing there.

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Another element that Reiner's cinematic frame shares with literary frame tales is that of a physical separation from the everyday world, a separation that permits story-telling. Often the frame underlines the horror and threat of the outside world. Boccaccio describes the physical and social ravages of the plague with gruesome detail, and Marguerite de Navarre's narrators in the Heptameron (1559) narrowly escape war, violent bandits and a roaring flood.⁶ Zayas, and later Mariana de Carvajals Navidades de Madrid (Christmas in Madrid) (1663) mark the separation in terms of temperature, contrasting the inner warmth with the icy December temperatures without. In so doing, they link their settings with the folklore tradition of storytelling "alrededor de la lumbre" (around the fire), a tradition also evoked by the very titles of two earlier Spanish novella collections, Timoneda's El Patrañuelo (Tall Tales) (1567) and Eslava's Noches de Invierno (Winter Nights) (1609).⁷ I would hardly be original in suggesting that the comfort proffered in the frame settings in companionship and a crackling fire is a physical translation of the psychic or metaphysical "warmth," comfort, or "cure" provided by narrative itself, as it models a meaningful design for human life, for a cold, chaotic existence in which order and purpose are rarely self-evident.

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Reiner's grandfather, like the narrators of many frame tales, represents the wise man (or woman) who instructs an inexperienced listener through an entertaining tale. In the eighth century frame narrative Panchatantra , the three doltish young sons of a mighty king learn worldly and political wisdom from the tales of a wise man (Gittes 9-10); in don Juan Manuel's El Conde Lucanor (Count Lucanor) (1335), the wise old servant Petronio provides the guidance requested by the Count in the form of exemplary tales. While the grandfather reads to a boy, Boccaccio, Lope de Vega and many other writers of novella collections posit a primarily female readership. Zayas' narrators, however, address a mixed audience, both within the frame and as presumed readers of the collection, exhorting women to attend the warnings in the tales, and entreating men to hear or read them with a chivalrous spirit and open mind.

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This dialogue with a fictive audience is, of course, one of the primary functions of the frame tale, as Amy Williamsen demonstrates in the case of Zayas. Anne Cayuela points out in her study of the liminary apparatus of seventeenth-century Spanish fiction that reading is a communicative act in which one of the parties is absent, and publication in printing made works available to a large and heterogeneous audience. One result is an emphasis in the liminary apparatus on the nature of the destinatario (receiver) and on the concrete aspects of the communicative act (Cayuela 1994, 81, 123-124). The prologue, in a kind of act of seduction, creates an image both of the author and of the implied or ideal reader in order to obtain not only a reading, but a particular kind of reading (Cayuela 1994, 321-322). Two of our novella authors perform this image-creating function quite literally: Cervantes in the self-portrait he paints in the prologue to his Novelas Ejemplares (Exemplary Stories), and Lope de Vega, who depicts his fictive listener Marcia Leonarda in glowing color. The fully personified communicative act in frame narratives make this image-operated seduction of the reader yet more dramatic, particularly in frames such as those of Marguerite de Navarre and María de Zayas, which involve extensive exchange between fictional narrators and their listeners. This function of the frame is of the utmost importance in Zayas' collection, as we will see.

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First, however, I would like to consider two other perspectives on the nature and function of frames, theories which focus more on the other end of the author to "real" world relation, that of the sociohistorical and ideological context and the author's use or omission of a frame tale. Katherine Gittes provides a fascinating perspective on the relation between cultural structures and frame narratives in her study of an early time period, the development of the tradition from early Eastern tales to Chaucer and Cité des Dames (The Book of the City of Ladies) by Christine de Pizan (1405). With reiterated apologies for the imprecision of the terms "Eastern" and "Western,"⁸ Gittes draws a fundamental contrast between East and West in the metaphysical conception of the world. The East, rooted in nomadic tribal life, saw the world as open, and appreciated the infinite variety and limitless renewability of life. Early Arabic literary forms, such as the pre-Islamic qasida or ode and the tenth and eleventh-century Arabic picaresque, or maqamat, have a loose, open-ended and linear structure, organized not by a unifying theme or idea but by the perspective of the speaker or central character (Gittes 334-345). Hence, a collection such as the Thousand Nights and a Night, the product of a culture which avoids rounding off numbers, but prefers 1001 as meaning a large, indefinite number (Gittes 33, 46). Gittes traces the Western view of a more closed universe back to Greek mathematical principles, to the preference of Pythagoras for geometry over algebra, and for what Gittes describes as

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[a] concept of organization, a notion of unity, in which the whole has greater importance than the parts. Pythagoras, voicing what had been implied in Greek thought before his time, stated that the universe is harmonious because all its parts are related to one another mathematically. He thought that mathematical order lay behind the apparently mysterious, arbitrary, and chaotic workings of nature (Gittes 1991, 24).

This insistence on harmony, unity, and the orderly subordination of the part to the whole underlies the literature, art and architecture, and world view passed on from Greece and Rome to medieval European philosophers (Gittes 1991, 29).

Medieval Spain served as the bridge over which the frame-tale collection, along with so many other elements of Eastern culture, reached the West. The collection of tales known as the Panchatantra, much of which seems to have originated in India and the Near East, acquired in its eighth-century Arabic translation an open-ended frame in which a wise man tells stories to educate a king's sons who had previously refused instruction (Gittes 8-20). Augmented and renamed with an Arabic touch Kalilah and Dimnah , the collection came to Europe through the Arab conquest. When Alfonso X had it translated in the thirteenth century, it became, according to a recent editor Thomas Irving, the first extensive piece of prose literature in the popular language of Spain and a point of confluence in the streams of Arabic and Spanish civilization (Kalilah and Dimnah, 1980, xi). It also furnished the model for the widely-read Disciplina Clericalis that the converted Spanish Jew, Petrus Alfonsi wrote first in Arabic, then translated into Latin. That work, according to Gittes, "ranks above all other works in bridging 'Eastern' and 'Western' narrative traditions and in funneling Arabic content and structure to European medieval vernacular writers (1991, 57).⁹ The frame narrative tradition that developed thereafter, according to Gittes, bore the continuing tension between open and closed structures, between the attraction of symmetry and the suspense of the indefinite (113). Whereas, she says,

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the earliest Arabic frame narratives suggests that medieval Arabs perceived the natural world as a world where boundaries and structure, if they exist, are not especially desirable. The later European frame narratives, notably the Decameron, the Confessio and the Canterbury Tales suggest the reverse; that even though the natural world appears disorderly, the medieval Christian longed to see a spark...which would give the sensation that underneath the disorder lies a comforting divine harmony, perhaps ordered along Pythagorean lines. The harmony hinted at in these fourteenth-century frame narratives is a harmony which the reader will see and fully comprehend in the afterlife. What looks like disorder on earth is God's order misperceived (1991, 148).

H. H. Wetzel, beginning approximately where Gittes leaves off in time, traces the development of the novella from the late Middle Ages to Cervantes, in a more closely deterministic fashion. He relates the presence or absence of a developed narrative frame-as well as the predominance of different types of novellas-to the relative stability or flux in the political and ideological structures of the age. Within the stable order of feudalism and medieval Christianity, collections of exempla did not require an elaborated narrative frame, for order was perceived to be supplied by Divine Providence, whose operation the exempla helped to explain allegorically. Says Wetzel,

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It was not by chance that the first European collections of novellas appeared at the end of the thirteenth century in southern and central Italy; in that "anarchic" land, the autonomy of the towns and of their citizens was most advanced, the social order profoundly overturned by the nascent preponderance of the merchant bourgeoisie and orthodox faith heavily buffeted by the revaluation of man, a new consciousness of his own value and the effect of major heretical movements (46).

Within this turbulent world, Boccaccio supplied a harmonious fictional order to contain the chaos of reality, the social breakdown brought on by the plague, "a symbolic index of the danger which threatened to dissolve the civic, religious and moral norms of the society" (47). That Boccaccio felt empowered to supply such an order, and felt the need to do so, Wetzel relates to the sociopolitical order of Florence in his day, in which a commoner such as Boccaccio could participate actively both in the financial and political life of the city, and in which social norms were in flux and civic equilibrium precarious, as the bourgeois "virtues" of a modern economy intermingled with traditional aristocratic codes of conduct. With the refeudalization of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, frame narratives were either weakened or omitted by authors who enjoyed no true political power, but were limited to a subordinate role in princely courts (Wetzel 1981, 50). For his mid-sixteenth-century collection, Bandello constructed no organizing frame but dedicated each of his 214 stories to one of a variety of notable figures in the courtly society he knew. Wetzel relates this practice to his dependent position within an Italy whose cities no longer enjoyed the relative autonomy of Boccaccio's Florence, but were buffeted by European power contests on Italian soil, and in which the discovery of the New World and the Reformation were transforming the mental as well as the physical world (53). That Marguerite de Navarre, on the other hand, constructed a highly elaborated narrative frame within a rigidly hierarchical political structure, Wetzel attributes to her privileged position, one of true authority as queen of France, albeit a France torn by religious dissension. Hence the importance of the lengthy discussions by quite fully developed frame personalities, who express profound differences of viewpoint (50-51).¹⁰ And finally, in the declining empire of seventeenth-century Spain Cervantes, says Wetzel, "made a virtue of the necessity of renouncing the frame" (54). He exchanged the powerlessness of an hidalgo (the lowest level of nobility) without even the comfort of a subordinate position at court "for the empowerment of a gifted artist who constructed fictive reality to his own image and dissolved the contradictions of reality through well-known literary devices such as recognitions, found children, etc." (54-55). One might contest his evaluation of the Cervantine renunciation of the frame in the light of that author's announcement of a future work that has the sound of a framed novella collection, Semanas del Jardín (Weeks in the garden). On the other hand, Wetzel might claim vindication in the fact that such a collection never saw publication.

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If we bring the theories of Gittes and Wetzel to bear on Zayas' choice of a fully developed frame narrative, the results are contradictory. From the scarce documentation of her life, we can say that she probably enjoyed a somewhat more secure socio-economic position than Cervantes, as the daughter of Fernando de Zayas, who was at one time the Majordomo of the Count of Lemos and who was named administrator of an estate of the Order of Santiago in 1638. (Barbeito Carneiro 165-172). In no way could we argue that she enjoyed true political authority, as did Marguerite de Navarre. At best we could claim for her, as she does for herself, a position of moral authority as self-appointed spokeswoman for women within an absolutist, resolutely patriarchal Counter-Reformation society that denied them any legitimate independent agency. By Gittes' categories, this was an ideologically closed society, one that would foster the containment of difference, of the chaotic multiplicity of reality, within a strictly controlling frame, but by those of Wetzel, it would make the erection of such a frame impossible for a powerless female. Zayas does not use the frame as a format for true discussion of philosophical difference, as does Marguerite de Navarre, but rather as an arm of philosophical combat in the defense of women. She makes of it, we might say, a "thesis" frame narrative.¹¹ And it is the effective propagation of this thesis, I would argue, that motivates her use of such a frame.

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The frame narrative of Reiner's film modeled for postmodern viewers how a boy moves from playing electronic games to avid attention to a traditional romance. At first, he objects to the "kissing parts" and tells his grandfather to skip them, although his grandpa assures him "Some day you may not mind so much." That "someday" arrives by the end of the story, when he tells his grandfather not to skip the description of the sublime final kiss of Wesley and Buttercup.

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What has changed his mind? The story, of course. Peter Brooks suggests that narrative accomplishes what is logically unthinkable. Jerome Bruner (1991) seconds this idea and adds several important observations: 1) that human beings, from their earliest years, perceive and organize existence through narrative; 2) that narrative constitutes reality as much as it reflects it; and 3) that changes in narrative paradigms may reshape not just plots, but modes of thought.

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The Reiner frame shows narrative moving an Oedipal boy to acceptance of what for him was previously unthinkable: that the objective of a hero is not just excelling at sports or defeating the evil antagonist, but should include blissful, lasting union with an ideal member of the opposite sex--the traditional plot that however unrealistic, assures the continuation of the species.

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Zayas, however, faced a much more formidable logical obstacle. Within the genre of the "novela amorosa" (love story), she seeks to implant the conviction that heterosexual union is not the desired goal but a fatal trap for women, and that true happy endings can only be found by sublimating desire for any corporeal male and rejoining the mother in the feminine world of the convent. To accomplish that, she not only tells story after story of the fatal effects of desire, but models in her frame narrative the re-educative effect of those stories, as Lisis breaks her engagement to don Diego and retreats with her mother to the safety of convent walls. Zayas' decision to employ a frame tale, I would propose, is not aesthetically motivated in the need to delimit and organize fictional worlds, but polemically designed to enhance the power of the narrative to transcend the limits of fiction and reorganize her readers' modes of thought.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anonymous. 1980. Kalilah and Dimnah. Ed. Thomas Ballantine Irving. Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta.

Bandello, Matteo. [1966]. Le Novelle. 2 vols. Ed. Francesco Flora. [Verona]: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore.

Barbeito Carneiro, Isabel. 1986. Escritoras madrileñas del siglo XVII. Estudio bibliográfico-crítico. 2 vols. Ph.D. Diss., Universidad Complutense.

Boccaccio, Giovanni. 1982. The Decameron. Trans. Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella. New York: Mentor Books.

Brooks, Peter. 1985. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage Books.

Bruner, Jerome. 1991. "The Narrative Construction of Reality." Critical Inquiry 18: 1-21.

Carvajal, Mariana de. Navidades de Madrid y noches entretenidas, en ocho novelas. Ed. Catherine Soriano. Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid.

Cayuela, Anne. 1994. L'Appareil liminaire des libres de fiction en prose, Université contribution à l'histoire de la lecture en Espagne au XVIIème siècle. Ph.D. Diss., Stendhal Grenoble III.

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. 1990. Novelas ejemplares. Ed. Fernando Gutiérrez. 6th ed. Barcelona: Editorial Juventud.

Conisbee, Philip. 1996. Georges de La Tour and his world. Catalogue of the exhibition at the National Gallery of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, 1996-1997. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Erdocia, Carolina. 1997. Hacia una poética de la representación sacramental del Siglo de Oro español: Los sacramentales de Calderón de la Barca y la celebración del Corpus Christi. Ph.D. Diss., Princeton University.

Eslava, Antonio. 1986. Noches de invierno . Ed. Julia Varella Vigal. Pamplona: Institución Príncipe de Viana del Departamento de Educacin y Cultura del Gobierno de Navarra.

Flecniakoska, Jean-Louis. 1975. La loa. Madrid: Sociedad General Española de Librería, S. A.

Gittes, Katharine S. 1991. Framing the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer and the Medieval Frame Narrative Tradition. New York: Greenwood Press.

Losse, Deborah N. 1994. Sampling the Book. Renaissance Prologues and the French Conteurs. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press.

Lyons, John D. 1989. Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Modern France and Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Menocal, Mara Rosa. 1987. The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Montesa Peydró, Salvador. 1981. Texto y contexto en la narrativa de María de Zayas. Madrid: Dirección General de la Juventud y Promoción Sociocultural.

Navarre, Marguerite de. 1984. The Heptameron. Trans. Paul A. Chilton. London: Penguin Books.

Pabst, Walter. 1972. La novela corta en la teoría y en la creación literaria. Notas para la historia de su antinomia en las literaturas románicas. Trans. Rafael de la Vega. Madrid: Editorial Gredos, S. A.

Piña, Juan de. 1987. Novelas exemplares y prodigiosas historias. Ed. Encarnacin Garca de Dini. Verona: Facolt di Lingue e Letterature Straniere, Universit degli Studi di Pisa.

Sullivan, Henry. 1983. Calderón in the German Lands and the Low Countries: His Reception and Influence, 1654-1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Timoneda, Joan. 1986. El Patrañuelo. Ed. Jos Romera Castillo. Madrid: C tedra.

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Williamsen, Amy. 1991. "Engendering Interpretation: The Manipulation of Reader Response in María de Zayas." Romance Languages Annual 3: 642-48.

Zayas y Sotomayor, María de. 1983. [Desengaños amorosos]. Parte segunda del Sarao y entretenimiento honesto. Ed. Alicia Yllera. Madrid: Cátedra.

-----. 1948. Novelas ejemplares y amorosas. Ed. Agustín C. de Ameza y Mayo. Madrid: Aldus.

ENDNOTES

[1] This essay is a slightly-expanded version of an address first presented at the Mid-America Conference on Hispanic Literature, Lawrence, Kansas, in September, 1994. A longer consideration of Zayas' technique constitutes the final chapter of my forthcoming book on her stories, Desiring Readers: María de Zayas tells Baroque Tales of Love and the Cruelty of Men.


[2] My print attributes this to Georges de La Tour, but according to the catalog of the exhibit of La Tourís work in the National Gallery of Art in 1996-97, while the original conception was due to George, some art historians believe the execution of the work may be due in large part to his son Etienne. See Conisbee, p. 124.


[3] See Flecniakoska and Erdocia.


[4] Juan de Piña goes Cervantes one further, in a witty near-abolition of the prologue too in his collection, published in 1624. He reduces it to two sentences: "El Prólogo se introduze a suma de lo impresso: dilatado, nunca visto de la ociosidad. Las Novelas exemplares y prodigiosas historias deste libro dizen la brevedad que afectan, como el Prólogo" (The Prologue presents itself as a summation of what is printed, postponed, never seen by idle readers. The Exemplary novels and prodigious stories of this book, like its Prologue, bespeak the brevity to which they aspire) (1987, 33). Piña transfers the explanatory and apologetic function of the standard prologue to a complex Epilogue.


[5] Illness is also a motif in numerous French collections: Philippe de Vigneulles, Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles; Le Seigneur de Cholires, Les Après-disnees du Seigneur de Cholires and others (Losse 63). In Mariana de Carvajal's Navidades de Madrid, the lady of the house has been confined to the house caring for her ailing, elderly husband and, curiously, it is his death near the Christmas season that makes the story telling possible.


[6] As Lyons (1989, 76-78) points out, however, the refuge they take, in a Franciscan monastery, is in a moral sense at least, the heart of the danger, as Franciscan monks, both in the frame and enclosed tales, represent the threat of religious hypocrisy. The same could be said of Zayasís frame refuge, for the courtly gathering of men and women revolves around the same lure and threat of amorous desire central to her stories.


[7] Eslava shows as well the economic effect of love sickness; first tale tells how one of the participants of his frame gathering lost a ship due to the immoderate passion of its young captain.


[8] Gittes cites María Rosa Menocal's study of the insistent repression of the substantial impact in medieval Europe exercised by Arabic culture, both as the source of learning, of literary traditions, and of material well-being, and as a negative pole against which theologians and writers like Dante reacted.


[9] Menocal (1987, 139-142) argues that Boccaccio scholars have paid too little attention to the importance of the Arabic and Hebrew inspiration and Arabic or Andalusian sources in the Decameron, as, for example, the model of scatalogical tales within a didactic frame provided him by Petrus Alfonsis Disciplina clericalis.


[10] Wetzel is thus closer to Marcel Tetel's reading (1981) of a fundamental ambiguity, indeed a manichean duality, in the Heptameron than to Paula Sommer's assertion of an ascendance (1984) of Protestant faith therein.


[11] Montesa Peydró (1981, 351), in his excellent discussion of her use of the frame, also describes her collection as a whole as an obra de tesis (thesis work) (emphasis in the original).