“Mi nombre es doña Isabel Fajardo; no Zelima, ni mora, como pensáis, sino cristiana, y hija de padres católicos, y de los más principales de la ciudad de Murcia; que estos yerros que veis en mi rostro no son sino sombras de los que ha puesto en mi calidad y fama la ingratitud de un hombre; y para que deis más crédito, veislos aquí quitados.”

– María de Zayas, La esclava de su amante (46).

[My name is doña Isabel Fajardo and not, as you have thought, Zelima, nor am I Moorish but Christian, the daughter of Catholic parents who belong to one of the most prominent families in the city of Murcia. This brand that you see on my face is only a shadow, a symbol, of the stain on my good name and on my character caused by a man’s falseness. You will truly believe me when you see how I remove it.]

In this first-person account, we are introduced to the fictional character Isabel/Zelima in María de Zayas’s “La esclava de su amante” (A slave to her own lover), the first tale of the Desengaños amorosos (1647), a collection of frame tale novellas, which explores gender relations and sexual politics in seventeenth century Spain. Zayas’s narratives are informed by the social and political tensions that shaped her world. This character, Isabel/Zelima manipulates social and political categories and “passes” as a mora, ironically allowing her social and geographical mobility by denigrating herself.

Doña Isabel Fajardo is born to an aristocratic family in Murcia. Her family moves to Zaragoza, as her father is called into service for the king. In Zaragoza, she is raped by a young nobleman, Manuel, for whom she later develops affectionate feelings. Despite promising that he would marry her, he comes up with countless excuses and abandons her soon thereafter for a military campaign in Sicily. Consequently, she disguises herself as Zelima, a Morisca slave, in order to secretly pursue Manuel, hoping he would marry her and restore her honour. She convinces a former servant to sell her as a slave on a ship heading to Sicily, and she brands herself with a mark on her face that identifies her as a slave.

The identity that she fashions helps her transgress boundaries of geography, as she travels to Sicily and back to Iberia. More importantly, however, despite the disturbing sexual politics, this identity that she fashions helps her assert her autonomy over her own body and her own narrative. By denigrating herself from a noblewoman to a slave, she escapes her upper social class with its strict honour codes.^[1] This very power to assume a multitude of identities lies at the heart of Isabel/Zelima’s autonomy. Like clothes, her identity is changeable, and that is quite literal with the mark on her face. Indeed, in the frame narrative, before she begins to tell her tale as Zelima, she emerges from another room, “in such a different costume from the one she had been wearing [...] Her beauty and grace, and the majesty of her light and stately step, bespoke a princess of Algiers, a queen of Fez or Morocco, a sultana of Constantinople” (Zayas 1997, 42).^[2] The very garb that she chooses to wear to tell her tale indicates a social rank that is befitting of Isabel, but she significantly chooses to dress in Moorish garb, which adds an exotic element to her character and story.

Importantly, this narrative signals the transformative power of the Mediterranean. Traversing the Mediterranean allows her to relinquish her previous identity and a new one to emerge. On her journey to restore her honour, she discovers her own autonomy and is able to assert it. The ending, in which she returns to Christianity and chooses to retire to a convent, brings the story back to a full circle; after traversing the Mediterranean and crossing one frontier, she traverses back again and this time with self-awareness. The Mediterranean serves as a vessel that allows her to transform; it serves as a space in which histories, including personal histories, converge but also disintegrate. Throughout the journey, Isabel needs to disparage herself in order to escape the confines of honour codes, and Zelima gives her the exact kind of freedom that she needed. The Mediterranean subject is therefore, almost by definition, a transgressor of barriers and boundaries.

Bibliography

Compte, Deborah. “The ‘mora’ as Agent of Power and Authority: María de Zayas’s ‘La esclava de su amante.’ Hispanic Journal, vol 24. no. 1/2 (2003): 53–64.

Ellis, Bradford. “Morisca Acts of Resistance and the Subversive Agency of Isabel/Zelima in María de Zayas’s La esclava de su amante.” Laberinto Journal. vol. 6 (2012): 26-56.  

Zayas y Sotomayor, María de. Desengaños amorosos (1647). Ed. de Enrique Suárez Figaredo. Barcelona: Lemir, 2014.

---. The Disenchantments of Love; A Translation of the Desengaños Amorosos. Translated by Harriet Boyer. New York: State University of New York Press, 1997.

References

^[1] Bradford Ellis characterizes Isabel/Zelima’s disguise as subversive agency: “the subversive ability of Morisco women and slaves to preserve their Muslim identity and resist state efforts to assimilate them into the Christian mainstream after the fall of Granada” (2012, 26).  Deborah Compte notes that Isabel/Zelima’s passing is unlike narratives of passing in which the passing subject moves up; Isabel/Zelima creates a new self, opening up for her “new avenues of agency and power” (2003, 56).

^[2] “La hermosura, el donaire, la majestad de sus airosos y concertados pasos, no mostraba sino una princesa de Argel, una reina de Fez o Marruecos, o una sultana de Constantinopla” (Zayas 2014, 44).

Title Image: Map of Mediterranean by R. de Hooghe, accessed here