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Reviewed by:
  • Insolación by Emilia Pardo Bazán
  • Lisa Nalbone
Emilia Pardo Bazán. Insolación. Ed. Jennifer Smith. Newark, Delaware: Cervantes & Co. Spanish Classics N0 54, 2011. 226 pp.

Emilia Pardo Bazán’s novel Insolación (1889) has gained critical attention in recent years as an important text that renders a reading beyond its realist or naturalist traits. This scholarship addresses a variety of nuances related to gender constructs and narrative mode. Jennifer Smith’s edition of the novel is a welcome contribution to the field and an effective pedagogical tool that, in the introduction, combines a balanced discussion of influences on the novel’s creation and of the approaches from which critics have studied this novel. The edition consists of an “Introduction to Students” (7-21), the text of the novel (23-163) and a Spanish-English glossary (165-226).

The “Introduction to Students,” consisting of seven sections, provides a summary of the salient foundational points surrounding the first publication of Insolación. In “Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Life and Works,” Smith gives a succinct account of the author’s biography and highlights her life’s unfolding in tandem with her literary output. This outline effectively provides readers who are new to Pardo Bazán’s writing the framework that identifies how this author engaged political, social and literary topics of her time. For example, as Smith explains, the 1883 publication of La cuestión palpitante “drastically changed the direction of doña Emilia’s life and career” (8). The author’s partial defense of Naturalism in this collection of articles and subsequent blend of Realist and Naturalist writing, beginning with the trilogy Los pazos de Ulloa (1886), La madre naturaleza (1887) and Insolación (1889)—undergirds her steadfast defense of women’s rights as theme of much of her writing. A portion of her extensive journalistic and short story production is also dedicated to this topic. Although the final stage of her career includes the publication of her last three novels and several national accolades: the concession of the title Condesa, and her appointment as the Ateneo’s Presidenta de la Sección de Literatura as well as Professor of Romance literatures at the Universidad Central in Madrid, she experienced an enduring disillusionment with the state of women’s place in Spanish society. As testimony to her accomplishments in life and writing, she has achieved canonical status within Spanish literature.

The section titled “Nineteenth Century Spain” culls the details of a rather complex sequence of events, historically speaking, beginning with the explanation of how the clash between liberal and conservative ideologies coiled through this century, from the dawn of liberalism at the beginning in the early 1800s that opposed monarchical rule, through the events of 1898. Discussion on the economy, religion, women’s rights and culture throughout the nineteenth century also elucidates the context in which Pardo Bazán lived and wrote.

In “Realism and Naturalism,” Smith provides a clear description of these literary movements, identifying French Realist writers Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert as the most influential on their Spanish Realist counterparts, Juan Valera, Benito Pérez Galdós, Leopoldo Alas, Pardo Bazán and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. Further, Naturalism’s foray into Spanish letters through Émile Zola’s Le roman expérimental was not fully embraced in [End Page 137] Spain because, primarily, of its rejection of free will, a sentiment doña Emilia shared, as she “condemns scientific determinism as fatalistic and opposed to her Catholic belief in free will” (17).

In the next section, “Insolación,” Smith prompts the reader to look for textual clues in the novel that render an informed reading on the ways in which the Naturalist components interplay with the costumbrista element as well as the notion of free will. Her comments on the two narrators also help to guide the reader. Smith concludes the bulk of her introduction with remarks that demonstrate her familiarity with the recent scholarship on Insolación regarding notions of gender. While the bibliography (following the Acknowledgements) contains the most appropriate sources for this introduction, I would encourage the users of this text to supplement their reading with...

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