This chapter will explore another significant aspect of the gynocentric orientation of Zayas’s prose works: the intersection of gender with class in women’s interrelationships. I will demonstrate that she weaves the threads of these class-based interactions into two distinct tapestries. While critics often contend that Zayas espouses a conservative agenda that poses no challenge to her society’s class structure, I intend to uncover the richness of her classbased discussion: through the focus of her female gaze and the medium of her woman’s voice, she intricately explores the complexities of inter-class issues throughout the novellas. Thus, I wish to consider how class discourse cuts across women’s relationships in her literary output.

Firstly, I will examine patterns of affection and reliance between mistresses and maids in Zayas’s tales, revealing the obstacles to their interdependency. To this end, I will examine two novellas, Al fin se paga todo and La esclava de su amante, one from each of her prose collections. These stories illustrate concrete instances in which, to a limited degree and in relatively positive forms, cross-class collaboration takes place within relationships defined by secrecy and trust. However, these servant-class allies can be shown to possess little ability to affect the fates of their superiors in the social hierarchy. Then, I will analyse the negative effects of serving-women’s usurpation of power, of which there is considerable evidence in Zayas’s text, applying carnivalesque theory to their subversive activity. Her prose encompasses a diverse range of female protagonists who actively pursue personal advantage, simultaneously engineering the downfall of the women who represent their social and moral superiors. To illustrate this phenomenon, I discuss El castigo de la miseria, La fuerza del amor, and Tarde llega el desengaño, and I re-examine La inocencia castigada and Estragos que causa el vicio. The final three of these tales appear in the Desengaños amorosos, which regularly ascribe women’s suffering to crimes committed by the female underclass; servant-class women vitally contribute to the spiralling violence of this collection. Similar to that of Zayas’s perfidious sisters, the physical danger posed by female servants equals or even surpasses that embodied by male characters.