Crafting the Female Subject. Narrative Innovation in the Short Fiction of Emilia Pardo Bazán (review)

Even though the author of novels such as Los pazos de Ulloa, Insolación and La madre naturaleza is also the most prolific writer of short stories in the history of Spanish literature, the cuentos of Emilia Pardo Bazán remain the less studied genre of her career as a writer. In Crafting the Female Subject, Susan McKenna highlights the literary sophistication – the "craft" – behind Pardo Bazán's short narratives by analyzing how the Galician countess breaks with the literary conventions of the short story of her time. Her specific focus is on the way the beginnings and the endings of Pardo Bazán's short stories subtly disrupt the reader's expectations and call for his or her active engagement. McKenna's thesis is that Pardo Bazán's subtle deviations from traditional literary design – her "disruptive reappropriations" – are carriers of a hidden feminist message. In these spaces of rupture an "authentic female subject" emerges (7). From McKenna's analysis we are convinced of the subtle power of rupture that Pardo Bazán made possible by her literary skills, insight into the minds of her readers and instinct for literary survival. McKenna puts this nicely when she says that "To communicate her nontraditional ideas and effect a unique construction of the female subject, Pardo Bazán worked within the very system she hoped to change" (10).

The five chapters that form Crafting the Female Subject are organized diachronically, and each one of them engages its object of study from different theoretical frames. Chapter 1 contains a brief outline of the history of the cuento genre in Spain. McKenna's study links Pardo Bazán's techniques to the literary and social context of her times, demonstrating how her innovations are sometimes conditioned by literary and extra-literary factors. For example, McKenna calls attention to the fact that many short stories during the second half of the 19^th century in Spain tend to present just one decisive moment in one character's life, and that "a sensation of instantaneity predominates" (20). She also highlights the importance of Romanticism in the development of the genre and the influence in Spain of authors such as Poe or Hoffmann. Also conditioning Pardo Bazán's choice of style in her short narrations is the fact that they were designed to appear in the many periodicals that were avidly consumed – mostly by male readers – at that time. McKenna reminds us that the impact of these stories was considerable, and that short narrations such as "La sed de Cristo" were the source of bitter social controversy. This chapter is a brief and informative introduction to the history of the short story in Spain and it places the innovations that McKenna emphasizes in the work of Pardo Bazán in their literary context.

In subsequent chapters of the book, McKenna traces the "textual resistance" to traditional short story design in a total of twenty tales composed between 1882 and 1914. Chapters 2 to 4 deal with the disruption of narrative endings while chapter 5 deals with the ways Pardo Bazán dislocates traditional beginnings. The different analyses of Pardo Bazán's cuentos are always clear and interesting, and the way McKenna retells the stories and interprets them demonstrates the literary value of these works as well as McKenna's nimbleness and tact as a reader. McKenna's superb feminist analysis of the gothic short story "El comadrón" in Chapter 2 is a perfect example of the book's thesis. What at first glance may seem a merely lurid tale of the birth of a deformed creature out of the dead body of a beautiful pregnant woman is interpreted by McKenna as a parable of the difficulties of female authorship.

At times the ambiguities that McKenna uncovers in some of Pardo Bazán's short stories speak more about...