Figuring Gender in the Picaresque Novel: From Lazarillo to Zayas.

The picaresque genre's narrations of the misadventures of rogues have tended to privilege the masculine gender of its protagonists, and the male-centered plot of these canonical novels is further evinced not only in the maternal abandonment suffered by the young boy and his contact with a series of amoral father figures, but through the mature picaro's failed amorous relations with women. While most critical studies have diminished the significance of women's roles in these novels, aptly calling her "la gran desconocida" [the great unknown], Julia Martinez-Gonzalez points out that the picaro's mother in particular has received little attention. Yet, while the female figures are often overlooked by critics and repressed by the male protagonists, they assume a key part in the novels and their function takes on overt significance in those whose protagonists are picaras. Indeed, a major issue addressed by both the female and male picaresque is the representation of gender difference, since the genre, due both to the "homosocial economy" of its canonical male exemplars (Davis, "Breaking" 138) and to the numerous novels with female protagonists, illustrates the many theories that circulated regarding the behavior and treatment of women in the literary and moral discourses of the early modern period. Thus, no matter how devalued, the feminine element refuses to disappear from this new genre. Lazarillo de Tormes sets up one of the genre's main characteristics by drawing attention to the child's degraded family origins: born to a thief and a prostitute, Lazarillo attempts to cover up his parents' behavior by ironically portraying them in the best possible light. The father's death is ambiguously ascribed either to his service in the war against the Turks at Djerba or to his desertion of his post as muleteer, a job traditionally assigned to moriscos, who often sided with the enemy. His widowed mother takes up with Zaide, a Moor who feeds the starving family by stealing from his employer. By handing over the young boy to the blind man, she launches Lazarillo on his picaresque career, "Hijo, ya se que no te vere mas. Procura de ser bueno y Dios te guie. Criado te he y con buen amo te he puesto; valete por ti" (25). Her illicit relations with the heretic Moor, a thief like her previous partner, further corroborate her debased nature, significantly prefiguring all women's dissoluteness. The mother's negative portrait, in fact, is mirrored in the novel's last tratado in the image of the Archpriest's servant and lover, whom Lazaro takes as his wife, as the picaro's desecrated marriage to the adulterous servant ensures the novel's circular structure by linking her with his own prostitute mother.