Maria de Zayas and Ana Caro: The Space of Woman's Solidarity in the Spanish Golden Age

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Hispanic Review. S-"-world without friends was, for Francis Bacon, comparable to a "wilderness," for friendship, he Ssuggested, is the main quality that distinguishes humans from beasts: "whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections is unfit for friendship, he * ,taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity" (139). Bacon's comparison of a world lacking in solidarity to a wilderness is significant in the context of the early modem ideas of civility and barbarism and their relationship with the urban developments of baroque Spain. Friendship and wilderness are concepts that acquire special relevance when referring to the Spanish Golden Age, a period which has been described as arising partly out of the disenchantment and the nostalgia of past imperial glories and as a time when solitude and rivalry combined to produce an unfriendly atmosphere. Golden Age writers such as Quevedo, G6ngora, Ruiz de Alarc6n, and Lope de Vega contributed to their society's tensions with their active participation in an often brutal contest in which prejudices were normally backed by appeals to "clean" lineage or even to outward appearance and physical handicaps. The names of two women, Maria de Zayas and Ana Caro, stand out against this mercenary environment. The friendship between these two authors and the way they portrayed heterosexual relations and female friendship, as this essay will illustrate, present alternative models of behavior that question the contemporary panorama of bitter rivalry. 1 This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Mon, 22 Dec 2014 15:19:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Mercedes Maroto Camino HR 67(1999) Although we know very little about Zayas and Caro, we know that they shared an interest in women as subjects and objects of writing.1We also know that they attended social functions together. For example, in La gardufia de Sevilla y anzuelo de las bolsas, the writer Antonio de Castillo Sol6rzano praised both women and located them together in Madrid: en estos tiempos luce y campea con felices lauros el ingenio de dofia Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor, que con justo titulo ha merecido el nombre de Sibila de Madrid, adquirido por sus admirables versos, por su felice ingenio y gran prudencia, habiendo sacado de la estampa un libro de diez novelas, que son diez asombros para los que escriben deste genero, pues la meditada prosa, el artificio dellas y los versos que interpola, es todo tan admirable, que acobarda las mis valientes plumas de nuestra Espafia. Acompaifiala en Madrid dofia Ana Caro de Mallen, dama de nuestra Sevilla, a quien se deben no meno...