Maria de Zayas' Broken Frame: A Brief Study of the History and Evolution of Frame Narratives

The focus of this paper is to investigate the evolution and the genre of frame narratives in order to address some of the numerous narratological challenges with which Maria de Zayas presents her readers. These challenges include the questioning of the narrative frame's capacity to control embedded narratives and the effects of the embedded narrative on the frame narrative. Maria de Zayas, I will argue, not only challenges the concept of the frame narrative but also attempts to explore, and perhaps surpass, its limits. In order to investigate the narrative frames, I will use Jacques Derrida's definitions of the ergon (the essence of a work) and the parergon (the nonessential components of a work) and apply his theory concerning the two to frame narratives. I hope to demonstrate how Zayas, like many of her predecessors, repeatedly manipulates the frame narrative of her text. However, as she attempts to direct her narrative attention to more and more issues, she eventually looses control of her frame narrative. This is not meant to be overly critical of Zayas, however, for as Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg tell us "The greatest narratives are inevitably those in which the most is attempted" (16).