The Disenchantments of Love II

Filis’ introduction to the forth disenchantment is her attempt to explain women’s fatal flaw—why they are often the victim of deceit. “I wonder, however, if women are really deceived: it’s one thing to let oneself be deceived and it’s another to be deceived (139)”. I think that this is an important distinction to make. In the first three stories the women let their hopes take over their common sense. Filis also accounts for the expectations of women, not that there are many. Men want docile and beautiful women because they know if women were given the same education and training that as men that “they may well fear women will take some of their power away (140)”. The introduction serves as foreshadowing for the remainder of the story. Don Jaime let himself be deceived by the actions of a servant. He managed to convince himself that his relationship with Elena was too good to be true, so he sabotaged it himself.

I think that doña Inés didn’t know how to handle the situations that arose, and therefore didn’t do much more than hope that they would pass quickly. I find it interesting that she never acted to prevent any possible incident, but she had clever ways of handling them once they had occurred. When she discovered that her neighbor had tricked don Diego, and were tarnishing her name, she acted quickly. I don’t think that many women would have had the forethought to have the mayor witness their meeting so no rumors could be started. She was also clever when she had the widow bring both the mayor and the archbishop to rescue her. This provided no means of salvation for her tormentors since both the church and the government had seen her deplorable punishment.

While Esteban is Estefanía he may be dressed as a woman but he is still trying to court Laurela through his songs. It doesn’t seem as though he adopts another gender role. I think that people see what they expect to see as far as gender roles are concerned. “…among themselves they pondered every word and every act of the deceitful Estefanía, noticing now what they should have noticed before (234)”.  I think that this topic is so widely used because there seems to be a gap between the genders. Situations like these remind people that the genders aren’t as different as we think they are, after all the people acting like the other gender are able to succeed without people finding out the truth before it is revealed.