Zaide: Histoire Espagnole by Madame de La Fayette

Zaide: Histoire Espagnole Reviews

• 
  Amanda Weissman

  Okay so she actually went so hard
• 
  Padawan

  Une histoire d’amour longue et useless.
• 
  Saint Litchi

  C'était marrant mais quand même drôlement chiant
• 
  Ava Scarlett Sutter

  The emotional labyrinth of the characters in Zayde overflows with an obsessive fixation on love, jealousy, and suffering – all of which are inextricably bound together in a continuous loop. Characters fall in love without genuinely knowing one another, eventually developing irrational feelings of jealousy and inexorable discontent over the lack of authentic intimacy in their amorous relations. Lafayette’s characters are tormented by the impossibility of apprehending or being apprehended by the object of their love.
  
  Time and time again, each character’s pain in Zayde echoes the pain suffered by their double. The anguish Consalve suffers is augmented by his inability to communicate his love to Zayde, while the misery of the lonely Alphonse and Alamir is exacerbated by the recognition of their own self-destructive amorous temperaments. The alienation that afflicts Zayde intensifies as she is continuously misunderstood, silenced, and othered, while the heartbreak that tragically scourges Félime prevails as long as Alamir blindly looks past her, oblivious to her love. For a novel filled with multiple interconnected love stories, none of the characters seem actually to love each other. Alamir’s love for women like Naria and Elsibery is a fleeting feeling that fades as quickly as it is lit. Consalve’s love for Zayde, whom he barely knows, is founded upon superficiality and aestheticism, while Zayde’s love for Consalve appears just as fickle and unfounded. Lafayette unveils that Zayde loves an unfounded, fabricated portrait, a mere representation of Consalve, rather than an actual person as the plot unfolds. Zayde wishes Consalve were the idealized, illusory image she has in her mind: “J’ai souvent souhaité que vous puissiez être celui à qui vous ressemblez” (170).
  
  The lovers in Zayde see one another through an obscured gaze, communicate through scribbled words, and claim to love one another despite barely knowing each other. Lafayette weaves together a complex narrative quilt of emotion and desire that lays bare the insufficiencies of representation and the difficulties of ever genuinely knowing and loving another human being. Love, which begins with the hope of escaping the pain of subjective isolation and being understood, ends with the lover feeling an even greater sense of isolation or succumbing to an idealized illusion of love. Erotic love, which repeatedly seeks to transcend separation by bridging the emotional divide between discontinuous beings, is conditioned upon the lover’s ability to grasp one another – not just in the body but in the soul. However, this vision of love is never captured in Zayde, a fictional realm filled with impenetrable beings.
  
  The insuperable conflict that permeates Zayde is the inability of humankind to comprehend one another, a clash between desire and capability that portrays each character, in some shape or form, l’autre inconnu – the unknown other for whom love is but a mere illusion.