Mirrors of All Perfection?: Feminist Advocacy in Selected Stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán

AbstractThis thesis focusses on the female protagonists of twenty-five of Emilia Pardo Bazán’s (1851–1921) short stories. I argue that from 1890 onwards Pardo Bazán addressed the lack of an overt response to her early feminist crusade for female emancipation through Nuevo Teatro Crítico and the Biblioteca de la mujer, by employing a more subversive strategy of dissemination, that of embedding a feminist slant in her short fiction. The female protagonists of these narratives exercise their agency and often challenge the gendered patriarchal mores of fin de siècle Spanish society, most notably the ángel del hogar construct, the honour code, the sexual double standard and critical public opinion—the ubiquitous el qué dirán.

Many of the narratives portray realistic situations. As in real life, some women triumph over their challenges, while others are less fortunate, and, as is reflected in the Spanish women described in Pardo Bazán’s 1889 essay “The Women of Spain”, very few of the protagonists in the narratives analysed here mirror traditional “angel” behaviour. Pardo Bazán’s narrative techniques that undermined the portrayal of traditional female behaviour in these stories include: the manipulation of established narrative styles, framed narratives introducing subversive voices, and literary tropes, allusions, intertexts and ambiguous titling. All of these encourage unvoiced subversive impressions to arise in the reader’s mind. In this way, she entertained but also educated her readership. These feminist-slanted texts seemingly conform with the patriarchal mores of Pardo Bazán’s society, but detailed individual analyses reveal veiled sub-texts that highlight the multiplicity of gendered injustices that existed in Spanish society, and bring them to the attention of the men who held the power to remedy them.