“DEATH BECOMES HER”: FATAL BEAUTY IN MARÍA DE ZAYAS’S “MAL PRESAGIO CASAR LEJOS”

Nancy Saporta Sternbach, in her thought-provoking essay on modernism’s penchant for detailing the agonizing death of its beautiful heroines, concludes that “the premature, violent, pornographic death of the female protagonist is not likely to be a seductive literary model for a woman writer” (54). Although at first one might be tempted to accept this generalization, a consideration of María de Zayas’s Desengaños amorosos (1647) challenges such a stance.^[1] Repeatedly throughout her second volume of novellas, the female protagonists suffer violent, untimely deaths. One text in particular graphically underscores the link between woman’s beauty and her tragic fate.

The female narrator of “Mal presagio casar lejos” details the misfortunes of four beautiful sisters, left in their brother’s care after the death of both their parents. She prefaces the events by specifying, “ni les sirvió la hermosura, la virtud, el entendimiento, la real sangre, ni la inocencia para que no fuesen víctimas sacrificadas en las aras de la desgracia” (338). As in many other Desengaños, the novella relates beauty (hermosura) with misfortune (desgracia) and victimization. Yet, in “Mal presagio” the repeated acts of violence against women reach a frenzied scale matched only by that found in the final narrative “Estragos que causa el vicio.”

Within the space of two paragraphs, three of the four sisters have met with disaster. The eldest, appropriately named Doña Mayor, marries a man from Portugal who quickly rids himself of her. He sets a devious trap in which a letter he himself wrote is used as proof of her infidelity with a non-existent Spanish lover. Catching her in the act of reading the incriminating document, the scheming husband kills the servant who attempts to reveal his treachery, and then kills his innocent wife. Her youngest sister, Doña María, fearing for her own safety, leaps out of the window, breaking both her legs so badly that she becomes confined to bed for the rest of her life: “se rompió todas las piernas, de modo que algunos años que vivió estuvo siempre en la cama” (338).

The second sister, Doña Leonor, marries an Italian who strangles her, in a fit of jealous rage because his wife praises a gallant Spanish knight. Significantly, the text emphasizes that the irate husband avails himself of her “propios cabellos, que los tenía muy hermosos” (339) to carry out his murderous task. In this action, beauty and death become inextricably linked. To further accentuate the barbarity of the husband’s actions, the narrative reveals how he poisons his own four year old son “diciendo que no había de heredar su estado hijo dudoso” (339).

Doña Blanca, the third sister, is the last to wed. The narrator specifies that “por conveniencias a la real corona y gusto de su hermano, se concertó su matrimonio con un príncipe de Flandes . . .” (339). These lines anticipate Gayle Rubin’s analysis of “The Traffic in Women” in which she states that woman serves as a “conduit of a relationship rather than as a partner to it . . .” (174). Paul Julian Smith insightfully indicates that the very name, Blanca, denotes a unit of money. In essence, doña Blanca serves as political currency, an object of exchange to foster closer relationships among men in power. That she is not an equal participant in this transaction is underscored by the use of the verb “casar.” In the title and in key locations throughout the narrative, the non-reciprocal form of the verb is employed. For example, in the descriptions of the fate of her sisters, the text states: “doña Mayor casó en Portugal,” “la segunda hermana . . . casó en Italia” (338). The narrative contrasts this type of marriage contract with the enviable marriages embarked upon by women “que se casaban precediendo primero las finezas de enamorados, pues, cuando sobre voluntad no acertase, no se podía quejar de nadie, sino de sí misma” (339).

Although Doña Blanca realizes that her social circumstances preclude the possibility of her establishing a love match, she attempts to insert her own will into the process. She establishes as a condition for her marriage that the Prince must court her for one year as if they were not already promised to each other. Despite the ridicule her conditions elicit in the court, she defends her stance, arguing that “todas cuantas cosas se compran se procuran ver . . . ¿Y un marido, que no se puede deshacer de él como de la joya y del vestido, ha de ser por el gusto ajeno?” (340). In Luce Irigaray’s musings about woman and Marx, she speculates, “ ‘If commodities could speak,’ they might possibly give an opinion about their price, about whether they consider their status just, or about the dealings of their owners” (Speculum 118). It seems that this is precisely what Doña Blanca attempts to do: she tries to find a way to make her voice heard within the patriarchal system that depends on woman’s silent participation as commodities in the exchange between men. Nonetheless, as her maidservant notes, she lacks agency in that she does not have the power to change her destiny: “Mas tú, señora, no puedes; aunque conozcas diferentes condiciones en el príncipe de las que en tu idea te prometes, ¿puedes ya dejar de ser suya?” (341).

In answer to this query, Doña Blanca states that if she finds that the Prince does not fulfill the promises made to her, then she will not be obliged to comply with the agreement: “Y para eso hay conventos, pues no me tengo yo de cautivar con otro diferente del que me dijeron . . .” (341). Yet, despite strong forebodings that lead her to spend days in bed crying, she agrees to marry the Prince, desperately trying to believe in the gestures of love he has effected throughout the year. Unfortunately for the heroine, the news of her sisters’ plights does not arrive until just after the Prince and she have exchanged their vows. One by one, messengers arrive bearing the ill tidings. In a horrific passage of almost gothic proportions,^[2] her younger sister arrives:

la más pequeña, imposibilitada de poder andar, porque de las rodillas abajo no tenía piernas ni pies, habiendo de ser la cama el teatro donde mientras vivió representaba a todas horas la adversa estrella con que había nacido. (348)

Smith describes this culmination of events as “so overstated and under explained as to be almost farcical” (236); however, the powerful image of the bedridden sister, now half-woman, half-furniture, might be understood as a concrete expression of the objectification of woman in the operant system of exchange. She graphically represents the (dis)embodiment of woman in the patriarchal economy. Moreover, the description of the bed as “teatro” suggests that her mutilation serves as spectacle. It also anticipates the phrasing used in a later scene where Doña Blanca discovers her husband and his lover in “el teatro donde se comete su ofensa [de Dios] y la mía” (361), words that denote the specularization of the sex act.

The narrative voice insists that if only Doña Blanca had learned of her sisters’ fates earlier

se tiene por seguro que si no se hubiera desposado, por ningún temor, interés ni conveniencia, se casara. Y así lo decía a sus damas con muchos sentimientos: antes se hubiera entrado religiosa. (348)

Yet, despite the repeated references to the alternative offered by religious life, at no time in the tale does the protagonist actively seek refuge in a convent even when her life is threatened. The work describes her husband’s ill-treatment of her in vivid detail:

el príncipe se descompuso con doña Blanca, no sólo de palabras, mas de obras, maltratándola tanto, que fue milagro salir de sus manos con la vida. (355)

Yet, the text would have us believe that she still loves him even though his mere presence suffices to bring out her bruises: “aunque amaba ternísimamente a su esposo, todas las veces que le veía le salían las colores que le habían puesto en él sus atrevidas manos” (356). These lines reflect the dynamic operant in what we now call the “battered woman” syndrome. Despite the awareness of other alternatives, many women do not escape the cycle of marital violence.

Smith, who criticizes the narrative for being “wildly overdetermined” states that

neither the character nor the reader requires all of Blanca’s sisters and female companions to be murdered or mutilated in order to get the point that foreign men are not to be trusted. (236)

Few would disagree with this assertion; however, perhaps the need to distrust foreign men is not the point at all. In fact, a close examination of the fate of three key female characters suggests that the danger lies closer to home, conditioned not only by gender but by class as well.

After Doña Blanca moves to Flanders, she encounters great hostility in her husband’s household.^[3] Her main ally proves to be her sister-in-law, Doña Marieta, who consistently defends her against the attacks of the Prince and his father. Although the title, “Mal presagio casar lejos,” might imply that the fact that Blanca is far from home leads to her misfortunes, it cannot explain Marieta’s fate. In her own home, under her own father’s malevolent gaze, her husband executes her because of some ill-founded suspicions regarding her honor. The text specifies that “esta cruel sentencia contra la hermosa y desgraciada señora salió de acuerdo de los dos, suegro y yerno . . .” (356–57). Clearly, then, women cannot avoid disaster by marrying close to home. Rather than supporting the simplistic, xenophobic view that foreign men are dangerous, it seems that the narrative suggests that women are always already “foreign” to men.

The text repeatedly underscores Blanca’s otherness, usually in terms of her national origin, as in the lines “Cansadísimas sois las mujeres españolas; gran castigo merece el extranjero que mezcla su sangre con la vuestra” (355); however, Marieta is also consistently objectified as other despite being in her own homeland. Thus, one might read Blanca’s “Spanishness” as a metaphor for her “otherness” in a system that violently oppresses the feminine. The text itself provides further evidence of the conflation of nationality and “femininity.” When the Prince protests his sister’s cruel murder and his father’s ill-treatment of Blanca, his father responds, disgusted by his son’s “female” weakheartedness, “Calla, cobarde, que más pareces hijo de algún español que no mío, que luego te dejas vencer de hazañerías españolas” (358).

Blanca’s own suffering, which forms the nucleus of the story, is presented as being influenced by her class. First, because of her social rank, she cannot seek a marriage of the heart. Then, when the marriage begins to sour, the text underscores that the quarrels fester because of the spouses’ nobility:

porque entre la vulgaridad, estas rencillas de entre casados, en llegando a acabarse los enojos, no se acuerdan más de ellas; mas en la grandeza de los señores es diferente, que aunque sean casados, tienen duelo. (356)

In this context, the narrator’s digression criticizing the abuse of the honorific “don” and “doña” in Spain becomes significant.^[4] It hints that the strained social relations among/between classes form an integral part of the societal framework that leads to the women’s misfortunes.

Significantly, though many critics have stated that all the women characters in the Desengaños either die or enter a convent, one woman in “Mal presagio casar lejos” marries and lives happily ever after. Blanca’s beloved maidservant, María, had originally planned to stay in Spain to marry the man she loved; however, her mistress convinced her to come with her to Flanders, promising to marry them there. When Blanca realizes that she is about to be killed, she calls her servants together to provide for their futures. She gives María her most valuable jewels and entreats her to marry Don Gabriel, “dichosa tú que tendrás marido de tu natural, y no como yo, que me entregué a un enemigo” (359). Apparently, her social standing allows María to marry the man she loves. Yet, even this embedded happy ending seems suspect. When the narrator first mentions María’s lover, she calls him Don Jorge; however, in all subsequent references, the man María marries is called Don Gabriel. Most editions simply dismiss this as an “olvido probable de la escritora o, con menos probablidad, errata de impresión” (349n6). Nonetheless, it might possibly represent an actual change in partners, thereby suggesting that even those free to choose their own mates often do not wed the ones they love. No matter how one chooses to interpret the vacillation in name, the story does allow for happiness in marriage not determined by social rank.

To say that Blanca, marked as other and constrained by class, does not find happiness in marriage would be an understatement. Convinced that her spouse’s coolness stems from his involvement with another woman, she enters her husband’s private chambers only to find him in a passionate embrace with his manservant. The narrator prefaces her account of the scene with remarks condemning the acts witnessed, then proceeds to describe Blanca’s reaction:

Quisiera, hermosas damas y discretos caballeros, ser tan entendida que, sin darme a entender, me entendiérades, por ser cosa tan enorme y fea lo que halló. Vio acostados en la cama a su esposo y a Arnesto, en deleites tan torpes y abominables, que es bajeza, no sólo decirlo, mas pensarlo. Que dó doña Blanca, a la vista de tan horrendo y sucio espectáculo, más difunta que cuando vio el cadaver de la señora Marieta, mas con más valor, pues apenas lo vio, cuando mas apriesa que había ido, se volvió a salir, quedando ellos, no vergonzosos ni pesarosos de que los hubiese visto, sino más descompuestos de alegría, pues con gran risa dijeron:

—Mosca lleva la española. (360)

As Smith indicates, this passage does seem to anticipate Irigaray’s belief that “ ‘hom(m)osexualité’ (sexual commerce between men) is the logical result of a system which persists in excluding women” (238). Yet, it seems that his analysis falters when he asserts that Blanca is “defined (if at all) by her absence of sexuality” reading her act of defiance, burning the lovers’ bed, as “a symbolic rejection of desire in all its forms” (237).

The significance of the scene she witnesses and her reaction merit further consideration. When María asks what she found that could have upset her so greatly, Blanca replies “Mi muerte hallé” (360). She further declares that although nothing can save her from her fate, at least “será con alguna causa, o dejaré de ser quien soy” (237). Thus, far from a rejection of all sexual desire, the burning of the bed represents her protest against the system of oppression that will demand her “sacrifice.”

One must ask, why does she assume that what she has witnessed will mean her death? In the other cases, honor was invoked as the reason for murdering the hapless wives. But, in Blanca’s case, the men offer no pretext to justify her execution. The narrative highlights Arnesto’s role in the unfolding events. After threatening the “española” for having dared to burn the bed, he retaliates by recounting her actions in an inflammatory way:

apenas vinieron los príncipes padre e hijo, cuando les contó cuanto había pasado, poderándolo con tales razones, que hinchó de venenosa furia los pechos dañados de sus señores. . . . (362)

After hearing his prevarications, the father swears to make Blanca pay for her “excesses.” So, the question gradually emerges, would Blanca have died if she had not acted?^[5] Would merely witnessing the events have led to her death?

Sternbach’s observation on the modernista novels may lend some insight. After careful consideration, she observes that “the death of a beautiful woman coincides with her experimentation with or initiation into sexuality” (49). In many ways, Blanca’s witnessing of her husband’s tryst represents her initiation into sexuality. Moreover, for the first time she as subject “sees” him as object. She has violated the foundations of the specular economy in which she, as Other, served solely to mirror the male self. Perhaps this is the unpardonable offense, a violation so grave that it requires her sacrifice.

The text invokes terms of martyrdom to describe her death: “quisieron ejecutar la sentencia contra la inocente corderilla” (363), “aquella inocente víctima, sacrificada en el rigor de tan crueles enemigos” (363). Patricia Grieve, in her study of how Zayas appropriates hagiographic discourse for her own purposes, concludes that

according to Zayas, women should reject the secular martyrdom sanctioned by society’s view of civilized behavior—marriage—and seek refuge in the communities of women afforded by the convents. (104)

“Mal presagio” certainly seems consistent with this appraisal.

Though the discourse of martyrdom in the text is noteworthy, it is not the most remarkable facet of Blanca’s death; more disturbing and more provocative is the insistence on how death enhances her beauty. Describing her appearance during her final hours, the narrator states that she appeared “más linda que jamás la habían visto, porque el luto que traía por la señora Marieta la hacía más hermosa” (363). Mourning becomes her. Then, as she lies bleeding to death, “quedó tan linda” that the Prince, “o enternecido de ver la deshojada azucena, o enamorado de tan bella muerte” (363), protests, begging his father to spare her. He swears that she is more beautiful than ever; evidently, death becomes her even more.

Only when Blanca lies completely inert, drained of her vital fluids, does the Prince find her attractive. In Sternbach’s words

what could be more seductive . . . than a stunningly seductive woman who, because she was no longer alive, could pose no threat, sexual or otherwise? (43)^[6]

Rather than experience the repulsion of the abject that Kristeva associates with corpses (Grosz 75), the Prince experiences a deep attraction. Once Blanca becomes completely “objectified” she can serve as the perfect “Other,” a passive canvas on which he can inscribe himself.

Interestingly, the Prince’s father, who never censured the Prince’s homosexual affair, rages against his son’s change of heart:

Calla, cobarde, medio mujer, que te vences de la hermosura. . . . Salte fuera y no lo veas, que mal se defenderá ni ofenderá a los hombres quien desmaya de ver morir una mujer. Así tuviera a todas las de su nación como tengo a ésta. (363)

If one accepts that Blanca’s foreignness can be read as a metaphor for her femaleness, then it would follow that, in fact, the old patriarch wishes to do away with all women who pose a threat to the established order. Yet, even in death, beauty can hold disruptive and destabilizing power. Four years later, when her brother’s forces rescue the remaining servants and recover Blanca’s body, the “hermoso cadáver” “estaba tan lindo como si entonces acabara de morir (señal de la gloria que goza el alma)” (365).

One would expect, as does Sternbach, that woman writers would “eschew” this distasteful subject matter (54). Yet, while in many ways this novella echoes other male-authored tales of wife murders,^[7] it adds another dimension. Rather than glossing over the reactions of the male characters, it emphasizes the gruesome pleasure they take in their handiwork. As Margarita Levisi observes,

Esta particular insistencia en el aspecto sádico de la situación distingue a María de Zayas y la coloca en un lugar aparte entre los escritores de su época. (449)

Zayas’s text underscores that Blanca’s death arouses the Prince’s desire, thereby making explicit the “porno-graphic” implications of the violent objectification of woman.

By laying bare the inherent misogyny in the sexual economy,^[8] “Mal presagio casar lejos” challenges the dominant system just as Pardo Bazán’s “No lo invento” does centuries later. This nineteenth-century tale also links beauty and death, describing how “Puri la Casta se iba al sepulcro hecha un milagro de belleza, más que en la vida si cabe” (131). Despite Pardo Bazán’s decision to omit some of Zayas’ novellas, including “Mal presagio,” from her edition because of their “mucha crudeza” (13), her own narrative, an acerbic indictment of the excessive preoccupation with the appearance of honor,^[9] goes beyond the mere suggestion of a necrophilic attraction. The “sepultero” actually confesses to having violated the bodies of all the women who died in the village during his tenure, exclaiming:

Si la honra y el pudor no dependen de la voluntad de la persona misma, y se pueden coger así . . . como yo los he cogido, entonces confieso que bien he deshonrado al vecindario de Arfe. (137)

Thus, both Zayas and Pardo Bazán explore the peculiar relationship between beauty and death.

Yet, Zayas’s “Mal presagio” remains a decidely unique text. Several factors distinguish it from other works of the period: the frank depiction of a homosexual affair, the graphic presentation of uxoricide dissociated from honor, and the insistence on the “sadistic” nature of violence against women. Together these elements combine to create a disturbing narrative that anticipates many insights from contemporary theories regarding female/male relationships. Unquestionably, when inscribed by Zayas, the death of a beautiful woman has a very different “poetical” force than the one Poe envisioned.

Works Cited

Charnon-Deutsch, Lou. “The Sexual Economy in the Narratives of María de Zayas.” Letras femeninas 15 (1991): 15–28.

Grieve, Patricia E. “Embroidering with Saintly Threads: María de Zayas Challenges Cervantes and the Church.” Renaissance Quarterly 44.1 (1991): 86–106.

Grosz, Elizabeth. “Julia Kristeva, Abjection, Motherhood and Love.” Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989. 70–99.

Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.

Levisi, Margarita. “La crueldad en los Desengaños amorosos.” Estudios literarios de hispanistas norteamericanos dedicados a Helmut Hatzfeld con motivo de su 80 aniversario. Eds. Josep M. Sola-Solé, Alessandro Crisafulli, and Bruno Damiani. Barcelona: Hispam, 1974. 447–56.

Montesa Peydro, Salvador. Texto y contexto en la narración de María de Zayas. Madrid: Juventud y Promoción Sociocultural, 1981.

Mortimer, Armine. Plotting to Kill. New York: Peter Lang, 1991.

Ordóñez, Elizabeth J. “Woman and Her Text in the Works of María de Zayas and Ana Caro.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 19.1 (1985): 3–15.

Pardo Bazán, Emilia. “Breve noticia sobre Doña María de Zayas y Sotomayor.” Novelas de María de Zayas. Biblioteca de la mujer 3. Madrid: Avrial, 1892. 5–16.

___. “No lo invento.” Cuentos (Selección). Ed. Juan Paredes Núñez. Madrid: Taurus, 1985. 129–38.

Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review, 1975. 157–210.

Sedgwick, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

Smith, Paul Julian. “Writing Women in Golden Age Spain: Saint Teresa and María de Zayas.” MLN 102 (1987): 202–40.

Sternbach, Nancy Saporta. “The Death of a Beautiful Woman: Modernismo, the Woman Writer and the Pornographic Imagination.” Ideologies and Literature. 3.1 (1988): 35–60.

Tolliver, Joyce. “Social Portest and Subversion: The Essays and Short Stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán.” Paper presented at the Conference on Feminism, Writing and Politics in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Culture and Literature. Minneapolis. October, 1990.

Welles, Marcia L. “María de Zayas y Sotomayor and Her ‘novela cortesana’: A Re-evaluation.” Bulletin of His-panic Studies 55 (1978): 301–10.

Zayas, María de. Desengaños amorosos. Ed. Alicia Yllera. Madrid: Cátedra, 1983.

^[1]Armine Mortimer’s analysis of the death in the works of French authors, including Simone de Beauvoir, offers further evidence that women employ this model.

^[2]Marcia Welles has noted that in Zayas’s prose “chilling details prefigure the effects sought in the gothic novel of the late eighteenth century” (304).

^[3]The text employs the “Spanish hatred” for the Flemish, a well-documented rivalry during Zayas’s period, as a pretext for Blancas’s story. The Flemish men in the tale are portrayed as evil and immoral. They murder innocent women, even their own daughters.

^[4]Paul Julian Smith cites this same passage as an example of how Zayas’s narrators “intervene at inappropriate moments,” claiming that the “digression on the Spanish love of formal address . . . is not only irrevelant to the main theme, but also tends to detract from it” (238).

^[5]In her answer to this question, Margarita Levisi asserts that “es su reacción ante la homosexualidad lo que causa su muerte, y su posición es así doblemente la de la víctima inocente” (448).

^[6]Though Sternbach’s article deals with the attraction that the death of a beautiful women held for modernista authors, her observations seems quite relevant to “Mal presagio.”

^[7]For example, as I have noted elsewhere, Zayas’s tales of wife murders establish a dialogical relationship with those by Calderón. One only need think of “El médico de su honra” where the husband sacrifices the innocent wife, bleeding her to death under the pretext of maintaining his honor, to appreciate the intertextuality.

^[8]For an intriguing analysis of related themes, see Lou Charnon-Deutsch’s essay, “The Sexual Economy in María de Zayas.”

^[9]Joyce Tolliver explores this aspect of “No lo invento” in her thoughtful article on “Social Protest and Subversion.” See especially pages 4–8.