(En)gendering Fenisa in María de Zayas’s La traición en la amistad

Gwyn E. Campbell

Washington and Lee University

Despite recent studies on La traición en la amistad—or perhaps in response to their treatment of intertextuality and metatheatricality (Larson; Rodríguez-Garrido), and the dramatist’s play with and within male-centered literary conventions (Soufas “María”)—María de Zayas’s rather open-ended comedia raises several troubling questions.^[1] Zayas herself avows and rebukes the endless, misogynous depiction of literary women: “que se verá un libro y se oirá una comedia y no hallarán en él ni en ella una mujer inocente, ni un hombre falso. Toda la carga de las culpas es al sexo feminil . . . ” (Desengaños 200). Certainly, the years between her early comedia and her final prose collection may have honed Zayas’s critical pen.^[2] Yet her dramatic inversion and/or subversion in La traición of the traditionally polarized relationship between the sexes implies her criticism of the socio-literary double standard (Wilkins 107; Hegstrom Oakey 68). Thus, Zayas’s sole comedia clearly echoes not just the playwright’s feminist stance,^[3] but presumably too, her keen cognizance of the patriarchal literary stereotype of women. Why, then, does Zayas elect as her female protagonist one who seemingly signifies all that the dramatist decries therein? Perhaps Zayas’s recognition of “the inaccessibility of transcendence” of the literary norms for female representation suffices in response (Soufas, “María” 148).

But what, then, necessitates the gracioso’s explicit, closing ridicule of this mujer varonil? Fenisa’s marginalization appears already complete, for notably varying reasons: her betrayal of sisterhood and female friendship in exchange for her personal sexual desires (Wilkins 115; Stroud, “Love” 543; Larson 133), the negation of the “excluded middle” (Hegstrom Oakey 68), her moral degradation and “torpeza” (Rodríguez-Garrido 363), and her symbolic representation of the “hypocrisy of comedia theory” (Soufas, “María” 158). Nonetheless, as we recall, at play’s end Zayas effects the ritualistic re-affirmation of the dominant ideology through shady marriages,^[4] and avoids in, or denies Fenisa the typical post-carnivalesque reversion,^[5] which brings me to the central topic of this study: the troublesome “nature” of the chameleon-like Fenisa. At once, Fenisa resembles an almost hermaphroditic monstrosity of masculine and feminine characteristics and, certainly at the conclusion, an almost androgynous character in whose symbolic exclusion s/he appears to be neither completely one sex-gender nor the other, but neither truly the Other nor the Same. In this sense Fenisa remains a gender(ed) enigma in her cryptic “performance,” for performance, more than just the public spectacle of the comedia, comprises an inherent attribute of gender itself. Indeed, Fenisa’s gender performance—“which symbolic representations [of gender] are invoked, how, and in what contexts?” (Scott 1067)—largely determines Zayas’s socio-literary focus and critical intent in La traición and its performance. After initial consideration of the two intersecting performative forums (gender and theatre), I would like to explore in greater detail the sex-gender issue and Zayas’s (en)gendering of Fenisa in the text and context of her comedia. Under the premise of Zayas’s feminism, I will suggest a subversive reading/viewing of La traición—or a reading/viewing of the playwright’s subversive comedia—in which Fenisa signifies not mujer varonil, but rather lo varonil, and I will negotiate the implications of Fenisa’s role as a performative masculine character.^[6]

Throughout history, dominant socio-political institutions have equated (biological) sex with gender. The rigid bipolarity of genders—“masculine” and “feminine”—has emerged from this perspective of synonymy, in mimetic mirroring of the anatomical distinctions of “male” and “female.”^[7] Culturally inscribed norms of heterosexual desire further reinforce this oppositional asymmetry of gender, and yield the notion of culturally intelligible, thus admissible gender “identities” (Butler, Gender 17). Together, the binary system and the codified regulation of desire literally engender such series of dichotomies as feminine/masculine, passive/active, body/mind, private sphere/public domain, self-interest/social good, object of desire/desiring subject, and the particularly Spanish conduit of masculine honor/honor-subject.^[8] To be sure, in the patriarchal hierarchy of metaphorical attributes, values and beliefs, “femininity [the feminine] is not an alternative to masculinity [the masculine] but its negative” (Parker 132).

In large part since “[p]ower,” be it socio-regulatory, discursive, or even the power of and in the politics of theatrical spectacle, “is the infrastructure of the sex-gender system” (Lipman-Blumen 5), feminist gender theorists contest the very basis of the binary system in which gender exclusively mirrors sex. Sex, they point out, is the relatively fixed category determined by biological functions and/or anatomical differences. Gender, thus, is independent of sex and constitutes a cultural construct of values and behaviors inscribed on a sexed, that is male or female, body. The distinction between gender and sex effectively displaces prevalent gender norms, and posits “a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders,” with the most extreme extension—let us ponder here the example of the literary mujer varonil—“ . . . that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one” (Butler, Gender 6). Once differentiated from sex, the fluidity of gender, indeed of desire and sexuality as well, becomes readily evident.

Likewise, the intersection of the performative nature of both gender and theatre crystallizes. For gender is the external representation of acts, behaviors, gestures and other discursive means, given cohesive and constructive “identity” through its very repetition. Gender is the outward illusion of an internal core (Butler, Gender 136). Gender is performance. As such, a gender role depends upon the perception by others of the totality of discursive signs and codes, much the same as the comedia depend us upon the negotiation of meaning between actor and spectator-participant. Both “actors” face risks in that “those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished” (Butler, “Performative” 273), just as the paid performer hazards the spectator’s at times violent disapproval. Too, gender operates through cultural “norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer,”^[9] much the same as the public comedia operates under an established set of conventions and expectations, which may or may not be met.

Lastly comes the protean nature of gender in the comedia. The actor portrays his/her gender role through a designated—by playwright? by autor?—series of encoded dramatic signals. The spectator then decodes these signals, perhaps in other than the “authorized” manner, since meaning results from the negotiations among the parties involved (Gledhill 68), but in particular from the negotiations in the spectator’s sub/conscious mind between the three levels of action on-stage: the “real,” the metaphoric, and that of the playwright’s fantasy (Esslin 114–5). The point here is that there are multiple levels of gender encoding and decoding in the theatrical performance. Furthermore, the performance—gender as impersonation, to which a cross-dressed or cross-gendered role may add another performative degree—of the performance (the comedia), suggests the inherent illusion of gender. The concomitant potential instability and subversive nature of gender in performance brings to mind the moralists vehement attacks on the comedia. At its most complex, gender impersonation is “a double inversion that says “appearance is illusion”” (Newton 103), a self-nullifying inversion in which, for Butler, the sex-gender contradictions serve to “displace . . . gender significations from the discourse of truth and falsity” (Gender137). Or, to recontextualize these arguments with respect to this reading/viewing of La traición, precisely because gender impersonation is illusive, precisely because the mujer varonil constitutes a conventionally acceptable gender impersonation with an inherent contradiction of sex-gender identity, a subversive gender parody can displace the “truth” of the functional performative identity that is represented. In other words, a female playing a cross-gendered “female” role does not necessarily represent a female.

In La traición, Zayas establishes the parodic confusion of the sex-gender system in both dynamic fashion, through her play with the feminine/masculine paradigm, but also in more subtle contexts that merit brief mention. Leon (1.367–9) and Belisa (2.919–20) for instance, each articulate an express desire to be momentarily of the opposite sex, the latter because of another woman’s beauty. Marcia’s certain attraction to Laura, the woman whom Liseo has dishonored through his betrayal, accompanies Belisa’s hypothetical fantasy. “Descubríos, que los ojos/me tienen enamorada,” Marcia requests (2.909–10), a plea which further imbues this meeting scene with homosexual overtones. Even the strikingly similar bawdy tales told by the servants León (1.555–89) and Lucia (2.1508–13) serve to equate the philandering nature of both sexes, at least among the lower class. In addition, the almost identical subjects of their respective tales—his abuelo and her agüela—suggest a certain interchangeable disposition within the sex-gender system.

This blurring of the mirroring axes of sex-gender (a)symmetry, the confusion of female/male with feminine/masculine is the essence of gender parody. Zayas accomplishes a more subversive parody, I suggest, with the additional bipolar level in La traición, the loyalty/betrayal opposition which is the principal thematic axis of La traición. The comedia concludes with the almost farcical “cat fight” between Belisa and Fenisa. “Igual está la pendencia, / una a una . . . ,” chortles León (3.2766–7), as Fenisa demands in pathetic mimesis that first Liseo (3. 2841–3) and then Juan (3.2861–3) marry her, before her final plea for justice (3.2895). The gracioso’s parting insult redirects the male spectators’ literal vision, thus their general focus, to the still available Fenisa. In this manner the playwright tempts us to conclude the play along the thematic axis which offers a “two-sided portrayal of womanhood . . . the two standing respectively for warning and example” (McKendrick 148). Fenisa is the “negative” image of Marcia, Belisa and Laura. She is the “bad” example, the disloyal female scorned by both sexes alike, and punished for her betrayal through her exclusion from marriage and friendship; for their loyalty, the “good” examples earn marriages of their choosing, a further sign of their exemplary behavior in accepting their traditional socio-literary roles. Fenisa is Other to the sisterhood of loyalty. This thematic axis is, in many respects, a largely sex-specific (female) axis, whose effect is to reposition the reflective mirror between the female characters alone.

In its dramatic primacy, the thematic axis proposes the harmonic resolution of the comedia through the traditional re-integration and stability for Marcia, Belisa and Laura and the punishment of the treacherous female, Fenisa. This “happy” ending allows for an indefinite delay in the return to the central “semic axis” of the play—the feminine/masculine dichotomy (Hegstrom Oakey 66). Yet, the clear reflection of opposites along the female thematic axis is difficult, in light of certain similarities among the polarized women: Marcia and Fenisa both use deception to achieve their ends (Wilkins 114–5; Stroud, “Demand”158–9), and Laura’s sexual freedom parallels that of Fenisa, albeit certainly not in extent. Moreover, Fenisa’s apparent indisposition to marriage throughout the comedia disturbs, instead of facilitates, this reflection among the females. While the thematic axis proposes the meaning of the dramatic closure, the “hollow ring” of the feminine triumvirate’s moral victory (Stroud, “Love” 544), and the problematic matrimonial pairings also permit a return to the gender axis, for further consideration of the dramatic resolution.

Along the gender axis, Fenisa’s “otherness” transposes to the masculine pole of the spectrum, as particularly evident in her desire. Like Liseo and Juan, Fenisa moves from lover to lover, a masculine change in affections ironically denoted by “mudo” (2.1134) or “mudanza” (2.1312). On varying occasions Liseo describes himself in such a manner that the “actor” could be Fenisa. The nature of his dalliance—“es con engaños, burlas y mentiras, / no más de por cumplir con mi deseo” (2.1299–1300)—replicates the motivation of Fenisa, for whom “muchos amantes en mi alma caben, / mi nuevo amartelar todos alaben” (2.1464–5). Amartelar, of suggestive note, connotes “[e]namorar, solicita y acariciar à alguna persóna, particularmente mugér” (Diccionario I: 263). Likewise, Liseo’s realization of his inability to juggle his various lovers—“y todo sale en mi daño / pues y mi fingir se acaba” (3.1951–2) anticipates almost identically Fenisa’s loss of her lovers, as the truth of his/her liaisons materializes. Fenisa all but becomes victim of the violence that accompanies masculine sexual prowess (Wilkins 109), but that the irate male suitor, Juan, stays his dagger (2.1736–9). Too, the physical space that Fenisa occupies, apart from her beckoning to Liseo from Marcia’s balcony (1.407), corresponds to the traditional masculine escenography of public spaces: notably, the nocturnal streets, and the secluded amorous sites of the Prado that s/he controls (2.1447–8).

As many studies detail, the most salient link between Fenisa’s desires and the masculine spectrum are his/her powers of seduction and deception that engender Fenisa as “a kind of Doña Juana” (Stroud, “Love” 543) and “[n]ot quite a burladora” (Hegstrom Oakey 63). Wilkins notes Fenisa’s twist of Don Juan’s familiar line (114)—“Mal haya la que sólo un hombre quiere,” Fenisa muses to herself (2.1474). While Larson also illustrates Zayas’s challenge of the Tirsian intertextuality, she signals the seducers’ awareness of their performative roles, and the social, as opposed to theological focus of La traición, which causes Fenisa’s punishment to be “social humiliation rather than eternal damnation” (134). In fact, Fenisa is the masculine desiring subject in the gender dichotomy. While s/he may term Liseo’s eyes “¡Ay, ojos de hechizos llenos!” (1.107), s/he is but looking at the miniature portrait of her next conquest. It is Liseo who falls victim to the power of Fenisa’s gaze. Fenisa is, in this sense, the “phallic I” that distinguishes her from the unified feminine voice (Wilkins 110). S/he is the Don Juan of Zayas’s critical socio-literary comedia.

A second intertextual context, the exemplum that Belisa recounts to León, offers further support of Fenisa’s masculine performativity. Reminiscent of a traditional Aesopian fable,^[10] Belisa recounts the deception of “el soberbio lobo / de malas entrañas, / éste con la zorra / trae guerra trabada” (3.2647–50). The betrayed vixen, however, overhears the wolf’s claim to the lion concerning the healing power of her hide. She plots her vengeance and thus convinces the king of beasts that his cure rests in a cloak made of the wolf’s very own skin. Too, the vixen’s final mocking of the now skinned wolf—“sabed que no medra / quien en corte habla” (3.2713–4)—parallels the early fable’s corrective warning to the slanderous courtiers. Transposed to La traición, the scheming, reactive Marcia is the crafty vixen; Fenisa, of course, has the performative function of the instigating, treacherous male wolf, out foxed in the end.

Together, the intertextuality of La traición, Fenisa’s gender construct as don Juanesque desiring subject, and his/her “otherness” to the women in the comedia permit a reading/viewing of his/her operative role as masculine character. In fact, I suggest that through the juxtaposition of the thematic female axis and the axis of the feminine/masculine dichotomy Zayas effects an Early Modern separation of sex and gender from either axis, a split which further facilitates this reading. In other words, on the thematic axis, Fenisa is Other to the females. Transposed to the feminine/masculine paradigm of characteristics, attributes and values, this “otherness,” therefore, equates the masculine. But, in her desire, Fenisa already occupies the masculine pole of the gender paradigm, in her crystal clear choice of self-interest and present sexual gratification above all else. It is precisely Fenisa’s amorous masculine motivation, and not his/her behavior per se, that distinguishes her from, and makes her Other to Marcia, Belisa and Laura.

Along the thematic axis, Marcia and her avengers appear morally superior to the female Fenisa, their deceptive maneuvering notwithstanding. But as performative masculine construct, Fenisa refocuses Zayas’s criticism and the meaning of La traición, in a manner which suggests more complete resolution. If as female, Fenisa remains at large to continue “in her free-flowing sexuality” (Wilkins 115), in her masculine role the Don Juanesque freedom comes, on the one hand, as little surprise given the patriarchal double standards. On the other hand, because of this inherent male freedom, the absence of his/her reintegration can signify the eternal damnation that is the chaotic socio-literary force of masculine desire. If as mujer varonil Fenisa is the extreme avenger— “Hombres, así vuestros engaños vengo,” she declares (2.1467)—in what constitutes the metatheatre of Marcia’s plot (Larson 132; Rodríguez-Garrido 364–5), s/he becomes the deceiving male upon whom Marcia, Belisa and Laura exact their revenge. Subversively, the metatheatre thus negates the relative masculine impunity with which Liseo and Juan act in La traición proper. If on the female axis, the titular comedia refers to her betrayal of friendship, as masculine character, the alternate meaning of “amistad”—amancebamiento, or “[e]l trato y comunicación ilícita de hombre con muger” (Diccionario 1:258)—again echoes the chaotic threat of masculine desire and the hypocrisy of conventional standards. If as female Fenisa “represents the negative side of a woman’s appropriation of the male norm instead of the male’s potential for more just behavior” (Soufas, Dramas 141), perhaps her performative masculine function is simply, to elide Soufas’s insight dramatically, the “negative side . . . of the male norm.” If as disloyal female, she is dishonored or shamed by exclusion, the contempt for Fenisa translates into admiration for the honorable motivation of Marcia, Belisa and Laura. This praise for the women brings into sharper relief the very fact that the “true” female characters are not just rewarded for their honor, but rather that these female-feminine characters are capable of a self-sacrificing community honor that, socio-ethically, far out values the masculine honor (sexual) code. By extension, as masculine character, Fenisa’s dishonor and vergüenza is subversively extreme.

The multiple interpretations of León’s parting insult to Fenisa further deny a single meaning of the comedia. In his aside with which the performance of the comedia concludes, the gracioso virtually offers Fenisa to the señores of the corral (3.2911–4). His words, we recall, constitute a self-reference which, like “a splash of cold water thrown into the face of a dreaming, imagining audience,” alerts the audience to the theatrical artificiality (Hornby 104), and the reader to Zayas’s own awareness of artifice and performance. In response to León’s slur certainly the male spectators—and perhaps the female audience too—would delight in Fenisa’s downfall as stereotypical mujer varonil. Given the masculine propensity for pleasure expressed throughout La traición, were it possible, some mosqueteros would inevitably accept León’s invitation. Ironically, they would then become the next “real” victims of Fenisa’s voracious sexual drive. In her function as lo varonil, the males who deride Fenisa’s behavior and demise, laugh at hegemonic patriarchal hierarchy and masculine desire itself. In point of fact, they laugh at themselves. Either way, it seems that the parting joke at Fenisa’s expense may be, in truth, on the men of the audience.

With this reading/viewing of La traición en la amistad, I do not deny Zayas’s criticism of both men and women at court alike, for the Golden Age had long since passed, when “. . . la gente entonces / sin malicia estaba” (3.2543–4). But in this reading perhaps rests an answer to the troubling questions posed at this study’s outset. Despite the constraints of patriarchal socio-literary conventions, Zayas manipulates the representation of gender in theatrical representation to imbue her comedia with an alternate or additional level of criticism and meaning. Clearly, any subversive message entails a receptive feminist public, the dynamics of which far exceed the scope of this study.^[11] Nonetheless, it would seem that in Zayas’s (en)gendering of Fenisa in La traición en la amistad lies a partial response to the dominant notion that “in the drama of watching the men reveal their ‘truths,’ the only role Woman can play is that of scapegoat” (Austin 35). Fenisa as female, may well be the obvious, explicit target of derision. But is s/he not also, quite literally, the Aristotelian “misbegotten man?”^[12]

Works Cited

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___. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

___. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1990. 270–82.

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Foa, Sandra M. Femenismo y forma narrativa: Estudio del tema y las técnicas de María de Zayas y Sotomayor. Valencia: Albatros Hispanófila, 1979.

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Hegstrom Oakey, Valerie. “The Fallacy of False Dichotomy in María de Zayas’s La traición en la amistad.” Bulletin of the Comediantes 46.1 (Summer 1994): 59–70.

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Larson, Catherine. “Gender, Reading, and Intertextuality: Don Juan’s Legacy in María de Zayas’s La traición en la amistad.” Inti 40–41 (Fall 1994/Spring 1995): 129–138.

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Perry, Mary Elizabeth. Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1990.

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___. “María de Zayas’s (Un)Conventional Play, La traición en la amistad.” The Golden Age Comedia: Text, Theory, and Performance. Eds. Charles Ganelin and Howard Mancing. West Lafayette: Purdue U P, 1994. 148–64.

Stroud, Matthew D. “The Demand for Love and the Mediation of Desire in La traición en la amistad.” María de Zayas: The Dynamics of Discourse. Eds. Amy R. Williamsen and Judith A. Whitenack. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson U P, 1995. 155–69.

___. “Love, Friendship, and Deceit in La traición en la amistad, by María de Zayas.” Neophilologus 69.4 (1985): 539–47.

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___. La traición en la amistad. Women’s Acts: Plays by Women Dramatists of Spain’s Golden Age. Ed. Teresa Scott Soufas. Lexington: U P of Kentucky, 1997. 277–308.

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^[1]While the majority of studies note the openness of Zayas’s desenlace (Stroud, “Love” 544–5; Wilkins 115; Larson 133; Soufas, “María” 159 and Dramas 145–6), Rodríguez-Garrido rejects the open ending (369n7), arguing instead that the “tópico . . . del ingenio feminino” (360) constitutes the central axis of La traición, Thus, he proposes the comedia’s firm resolution with Marcia as protagonist-agent.

^[2]The predominance of the romance in Zayas’s comedia, leads Susan Paun de Garcia to suggest 1630–35 as the probabley period of composition of La traición (378). General concurrence that La traición is the comedia to which Pérez de Montalbán refers in Para todos (1632), further limits the closing date (Rodríguez-Garrido 358–9). Zayas’s comedia, then, predates her catalogue of male cruelty (Desengaños) by almost two decades.

^[3]For Perry, Zayas’s failure to propose a counter ideology defines her feminism as an atypically sensitive “consciousness of gender oppression” (74). Soufas confirms this neo-ideological absence, but nonetheless articulates the paradox of Fenisa as an untenable “alternative within the fixed conventional characterizations of women in the comedia” (“María” 157). On Zayas’s feminism, see also Foa, and Ordoñez.

^[4]Wilkins notes the formation of “all the right couples,” but their problematic nature (115), which Stroud articulates as Marcia’s resignation to love the one who loves her, Liseo’s punishment in marrying the one he abandoned, thus Laura’s marriage to an avowed philanderer (“Love” 544). Soufas signals the “ possible repetition of the disruption of those unions,” since the final couples are those of the play’s prehistory (“María” 159).

^[5]See Amy Williamsen’s insightful study of the mujer varonil and the carnivalesque.

^[6]My use of the term “performative” corresponds largely to Butler’s early definition, “that it is real only to the extent that it is performed” (“Performative” 278; emphasis added). For details of Butler’s notable evolution of “performativity,” see McKenzie.

^[7]In his seminal study, Ian Maclean provides in-depth consideration of multiple authoritative Renaissance treatises on women.

^[8]Yarbro-Bejarano details the conceptualization of the male, the female and honor in Spanish literature (ch. 1).

^[9](Butler, “Critically” 24, qtd. in McKenzie 225).

^[10]Aesop’s fable of the “The Lion, the Wolf and the Fox” portrays all three animals as male. In La Fontaine’s rendition of similar moral, the third character is specifically a vixen (356–9). The publication of his collections, however, starts in the later 1660s. Certainly, among the many popular fables of the era, there likely exists a version with the triumphant vixen.

^[11]See, for example, the thoughtful studies on feminist reading/viewing by Austin, Fetterley, and Dolan.

^[12]Aquinian commentary attributes to Aristotle the notion that “the female is a misbegotten man” (274; qu. 92, art. 1). Elsewhere, translations of the Aristotelian description of the female (De generatione animalium 2.3) include “deformed man” and “mutilated man.”