Gender Reveal: The Achilles/Amadís Paradigm in María de Zayas's Amar solo por vencer

Abstract:This article finds the sixth of María de Zayas y Sotomayor's Desengaños amorosos unique among all her novelasfor two elements: its dense intertextuality and its strikingly unreliable narrator. Achilles's transvestite initiation into heroic manhood is a trope replicated in sixteenth-century Spanish chivalric novels, seventeenth-century drama, and Amar solo porvencer. With both the plot and Matilde's shifty manner of telling it, Zayas acknowledges and revises the classical figure's cross-dressing performance. The result is a chilling assessment of her culture's eroding norms of manly behavior.