In the male-dominated literature of Zayas’s time, it is striking that she regularly portrays the mother, and the mother–daughter relationship, as an important balancing measure in terms of gender relations. As the previous chapter demonstrated, the limited influence that mothers wield in the Novelas amorosas y ejemplares further diminishes in Zayas’s second collection of novellas. Nonetheless, these relationships need to be supplemented and strengthened. When parents or husbands are frequently absent, powerless, or disinclined to protect, endangered women must obtain succour elsewhere. Under the oppressive circumstances present in the Desengaños amorosos and, at times, in the Novelas amorosas y ejemplares, the vulnerable party requires solace, protection, and consolation: one woman takes care of another. This is unlike sisterhood, which implies some level of equality among women. Maternal acts of benevolent Gyn/affection emerge from unexpected sources, both secular and divine, particularly in the novellas of the Desengaños amorosos. Thus, Zayas juxtaposes weak, secular motherhood with stronger manifestations, which have pronounced monastic and religious undercurrents. In the tales under discussion, the maternal, protective role is occupied by a surrogate mother or by her supernatural variant: the Virgin Mary, as Mother of God. These mother-surrogates are at a remove from the patriarchal family, investing them with more power than the natural mothers of my previous chapter.

In Eve’s Orphans: Mothers and Daughters in Medieval English Literature, Nikki Stiller initially deduces that, in the period of literature being discussed, ‘mothers are conspicuously absent’; she later amends this claim by concluding that, ‘if we look hard enough and close enough, through all the barriers of class, male authorship, and paternal domination, we begin to glimpse our mothers at last in an occasional reference, a fleeting portrait, or in a whole series of substitutes and surrogates: a hidden gallery in a closedoff wing’.