Género, nación y literatura: Emilia Pardo Bazán en la literatura gallega y española by Carmen Pereira-Muro (review)

Pereira-Muro’s study, Género, nación y literatura, analyzes Emilia Pardo-Bazán as a public intellectual and writer, who functioned as a catalyzing force for the formation of the emerging Spanish and Galician national cultures during Restoration Spain. Pardo-Bazán, for much of her career, adopted the patriarchal discourses of her time that associated women with nature and men with culture. However, Pereira-Muro argues that she was able to subvert these gender binaries by advocating for an inclusion of women in a public and participatory role in the nation. With her last novel, Dulce dueño, Pardo-Bazán was able to carve out a space for female writing, and a female voice in national culture. Her complex ideological views make her difficult to classify for some feminist scholars, as well as critics engaged in the Spanish and Galician literary canons. Pereira-Muro indicates that the anomalies or dissidences produced by Pardo-Bazán’s work are an opportunity to re-think the “naturalness” and historical validity of literary canons, and come to terms with the underlying issues of gender and power that inform them.

The first chapters of the book are devoted to contextualizing the literary and cultural milieu of Restoration Spain and the Galician Rexurdimento. Pereira-Muro draws a parallel between the reluctant inclusion of Pardo-Bazán in the Spanish canon, and her exclusion from the Galician one, highlighting the underlying issue of gender. The realist novel was, for intellectuals during the Restoration, the way to produce a nation that was not yet cohesive. Studying the critiques leveled against Pardo-Bazán by her contemporaries reveals the efforts to naturalize Spanish literature (and by extension, the nation) as virile, masculine, and therefore modern. Pardo-Bazán’s critics, such as Clarín, decried her works as “cursi” and wished to disqualify her from the national canon due to the fact that she was a woman, and therefore only capable of superficial imitation. Yet, Pardo-Bazán’s realist works were included in the national canon, in order to maintain the prestige and stability of the realist novel as the legitimate national narrative.

Ironically, what qualified Pardo-Bazán’s works for the Spanish literary canon was what disqualified them from the Galician one. Pardo-Bazán’s transgression of gender roles, and her “masculine” literary pursuits (the realist novel), were what Manuel de Murguía, the “father” of Galician literature, attacked. For Murguía, Pardo-Bazán, as a novelist and a person, lacked appropriate “womanly” feelings; her prose was too “masculine.” Pardo-Bazán is contrasted with Murguía’s wife, Rosalía de Castro, whom he enshrined as the paradigm of Galician national literary production. Pereira-Muro underscores the gender discourses that framed the Galician national canon, which had to be emotive, lyrical, and “maternal,” so that it could be appropriated by the “fathers” of Galician nationalism, such as Murguía.

Pereira-Muro dedicates the final chapter to Pardo-Bazán’s last novel, Dulce dueño (1911). The author argues that, in Dulce dueño, Pardo-Bazán was able to transcend an “impasse” in her intellectual and literary production: insisting on women’s public participation in the nation, but continuing to maintain a patriarchal view of literary and national culture. Pereira-Muro demonstrates that modernism, primarily due to its destabilization of gender categories, is the movement that helped Pardo create a narrative space that was “feminine” and at the same time modern. Dulce dueño’s female protagonist and narrator, through an intertextual dialogue with the Spanish literary canon, hagiography, and mysticism, harmonizes feminine literature with high culture in a manner that had not been available before.

Pereira-Muro has conducted an extensive analysis of Pardo-Bazán’s letters, essays, speeches, and novels. This study...