From the Outside Looking In: Narrative Frames and Narrative Spaces in the Short Stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán (review)

Susan Walter's monograph is one of three recent volumes by U.S. Hispanists dedicated to the study of the short fiction of Emilia Pardo Bazán, appearing a year after Susan McKenna's Crafting the Female Subject: Narrative Innovation in the Short Fiction of Emilia Pardo Bazán (Catholic University of America Press, 2009), and in the same year as Linda M. Willem's edition, "Náufragas" y otros cuentos (European Masterpieces, 2010)—volumes that themselves were published in the wake of this past decade's marked increase in close readings of Pardo Bazán's short fiction with a focus on the intersection of gender and narrative voice. Walter's study thus forms a notable contribution to this critical "boom"—a very welcome turn in Hispanic studies that recognizes not only the importance of the 600-some texts that comprise Pardo Bazán's short story production, but also the significance and value of the genre itself.

In From the Outside Looking In..., Walter examines a group of thirteen stories featuring framed narratives, categorizing them according to the genders of the protagonist and of the narrators. Her interest in examining these texts is double. Within an explicitly structuralist paradigm, she wants to answer Todorov's question, posed in The Poetics of Prose (Cornell, 1977), about what it is that narrative frames add to a narrative—or, more specifically, what the function of narrative frames is in these thirteen texts. Like McKenna, she explains how the framing structure of these stories often requires that the reader participate more actively in interpreting the events told. In terms of the representation of women's experience, Walter's claim is that the stories she studies tend to present "objectified images" (88) of women and their experiences when the narrative frame features a male narrator speaking in the first person about the experiences of a female character (as occurs in "Afra," "Madre," "Los ramilletes," "Sor Aparición," and "Los buenos tiempos"); and that the handful of Pardo Bazan's stories that feature female narrators telling their own stories "give the reader insight into the feelings and motivations of the female protagonists (57)." She specifies that, in the four stories studied in this category ("Champagne," "Paria," "El encaje roto," and "El revolver"), "this is achieved by giving a voice to these female protagonists so that they can narrate their own stories, from their very personal perspectives" (57). Finally, Walter examines four stories in which a male narrator represents the experiences of a male character, and concludes that each of these stories ("Banquete de boda," "Remordimiento," "Delincuente honrado, and "Feminista") "all succeed in questioning the traditional patriarchal social norms" even though there is no overt criticism of the characters' gender ideology (127).

In keeping with previous critical studies of Pardo Bazán's stories, Walter draws on the work not only of the early structuralist narratologists such as Gérard Genette and Gerald Prince, but also on theories of feminist narratologists Susan Lanser and Robyn Warhol, referring regularly to Lanser's distinction between "public" and "private" narration. She also comments on the representation, in the stories, of public and private physical spaces, although she does not explore the potential relationship between the representation of public and private physical spaces and the "public" or "private" nature of the narrative voices in these same texts.

In each of the three chapters, Walter studies some stories that have already received critical attention in the U.S., and others that have escaped our attention. The studies presented here of "Afra," "El encaje roto," "Champagne," "Sor Aparición" and "Feminista" may seem familiar to those who have read analyses of these stories by other scholars. Many readers who have read the stories examined in this volume may take issue, on the other hand, with some of Walters' interpretative postulations—for example her claim that the...