UC Irvine

This dissertation explores the construction and negotiation of marital identities in several novellas written by the Spanish author María de Zayas. I explore fictional representations of space through the analytical framework of Michel Foucault's heterotopias. Zayas’s novellas can be defined as narratives of desengaño, representing marriage as a highly problematic social institution. Identities are continuously contested and redefined within traditional spaces meant to protect and promote familial unity, honor, and nobility. The dissertation explored Zayas's representations of space and their implications for married life through the lens of heterotopias as “other” spaces that mirror and disrupt prevailing societal norms. I closely analyze gardens, forests, chimneys, bedrooms, churches, homes, humilladeros, large territories, and castles in select novellas that become distorted by the creation of heterotopias that expose the inherent pressures placed on women due to the contradictions prevalent in married life. I apply Foucault's diverse conception of heterotopias of juxtaposition, functionality, temporality, exclusivity, crisis, and deviation to explore non-traditional spaces that oppose conventional expectations of place. Focusing on the archetype of the Goodwife, I analyze the female experience within spaces that end up restricting their capacity to adhere to expected behavioral norms. Women must resort to alternative measures such as sorcery, abjection, and extreme solutions to protect themselves from abusive husbands or lovers who dishonor them. My dissertation identifies the problems of an honor-driven society and how transgressive behaviors create complex and sometimes impossible pressures that transform marriage into an unsustainable institution. As a transformative concept, heterotopias allow characters to challenge entrenched gender roles and reveal male vulnerabilities, excessive pleasures, and extreme abuse. Understanding such spaces as alternatives that provide a necessary agency for characters to reconfigure the meanings of places leads to a deeper reflection of the depictions of marriage and marital homes in seventeenth-century Spanish literature. My analysis contributes to broader theoretical discussions concerning the intersection of space with power, gender, and identity. I propose that Zayas negotiates female narration to provide alternative visions for more equitable relationships in the future. Thus, for Zayas, women can appropriate their own fate by choosing the convent as a stable and protective space where they can pursue an education free from the bounds of marriage and enter a spiritual realm with God as their protector.