While dona Blanca's method of securing the Prince's love before marriage is well intentioned and reasonable, having him court her in the typical fashion of serenading her and praising her beauty and other virtues is a false love. Dona Blanca claims that "she wanted a love based on relationship and on her knowledge of her husband's intelligence, nature, and charms. But by instructing him to court her the way she believes is "proper" she prevents herself from truly knowing him. His gestures are purely ornamental as we have seen been the case in other disenchantments, except he is not putting on a show of courting her with the intention of later harming her, but rather because this is what he is expected to do and he also had the desire to go see Spain. This tradition of courting is really detrimental to most of these relationships because it sets a false precedent. The whole point is to flatter the woman and make her believe that the man is in love with her and consequently she with him. In this case it is a particularly false front as we learn later that the prince is homosexual.
( In the final story I was surprised by the commentary on how parents who remarry should treat the children of their spouses previous marriages.
Florentina speaks of how her stepmother loved her as her own and her father loved dona Magdalena as his own, "...which is what good spouses who wish to live in tranquility ought to do. A thousand regrets and feuds are born from husbands who don't like their wives' children and wives who reject their husbands'"
How progressive and insightful, unfortunately not practiced very often even today.)
To return to the question of Maria de Zayas being a true feminist or not, I believe that the roles of Florentina and Gaspar show her ability to set aside stereotypes against both men and women. While the stories are meant to "disenchant" women against the evils of men, Maria de Zayas is clearly not so ignorant as to say that all men are one way and all women another. Her characters make these generalizations about the sexes perhaps as a way of indicating how foolish feminism can be when it defaces all men absolutely. To say that all men are evil is the same as to say all women are inferior.
Really, de Zayas is the most perfect feminist because she shows how women have been abused due to their sex in the past and how history and society has been and continues to be extremely sexist against them, yet she does not allow herself to fall into the same categories as those who have committed these crimes. Through her characters she shows the necessity of giving all humans the opportunity to be the best they can be, free of stereotypes due to their sex.
The reader must look below the surface of these tales and the absolutes proclaimed by the characters to see that de Zayas is teaching a valuable lesson about the dangers of generalizations.
"To generalize is to be an idiot."
William Blake
No comments:
Post a Comment