Die leidende Frau. Mitleid bei María de Zayas

By means of a narratological analysis, this article explores the dynamics between the depiction of suffering women and the evocation of compassion in the novellas of Spanish Baroque author María de Zayas y Sotomayor (1590-1661?). Zayas uses emotional and physical suffering to evoke compassion on the different layers of these narrative texts, i.e. in the fictitious world of the intradiegetic novellas and the framework story as well as in the extratextual world of the reader. As will be shown, evoking compassion follows different guidelines on these different layers, although Zayas pursues an all-encompassing educative agenda in the sense that the affective rhetoric that Zayas employs is stylized as a highly effective means of transmitting knowledge about vices and virtues. Therefore, compassion as an affective reaction to narratives of suffering women illustrates that fiction itself and the reception of fiction – both as a reader and as a listener – is considered as a privileged medium of discussing the situation of women in Early Modern Europe.