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

Aware that Emilia Pardo Bazán’s role in “el proceso de construcción nacional” has never been duly acknowledged (2), Carmen Pereira-Muro sets out to explore the interconnections between Pardo Bazán’s nationalism (Spanish) and her approach to women, region (her native Galicia), and literature. Exhaustively researched, elegantly written, and cogently argued, Género, nación y literatura: Emilia Pardo Bazán en la literatura gallega y española is a valuable contribution to feminist perspectives on Pardo Bazán, to the study of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish novel, as well as to Galician studies.

If male writers of Pardo Bazán’s generation created a literature for and embodying the nation-state, conceived according to gendered roles and symbols, doña Emilia developed (in a process that evolved from the internalization of those traditional codes) a project for the nation that incorporated women and shifted emphasis as Pereira-Muro brilliantly concludes, from the creator as father, to creative and cultural motherhood “que no acota, secciona y mutila para dar vida, sino que se deja ser, se abre al exterior para ser uno mismo” (176).

Pereira-Muro lists Pardo Bazán’s “insalvables contradicciones” (3)—a woman who dared to “write like a man;” conservative Catholic, yet liberal feminist; a native of Galicia yet exiled from the Galician canon. It is precisely this “no encajar” that renders her such an interesting object of study “como problema crítico y teórico” (16). Pereira-Muro rises to the challenge of debunking timeworn perspectives on Pardo Bazán and largely succeeds in explaining apparent contradictions between her feminism and her texts.

The first two chapters present parallel studies of Pardo Bazán in the context of Spanish and Galician nationalism in which Pereira-Muro highlights the role that gender played in doña Emilia’s exclusion from both. In command of a wide array of source material, she cites in chapter one the role of economics in the rise of literary nationalism, pointing to the ways in which Spain’s economic and industrial inferiority vis-à-vis France spurred writers to repatriate an original Spanish genre. Tracing Galdós’s disillusionment with the weakness of the nation-state during the Restauración, Pereira-Muro shows that the realist novel substituted for and became the reality, what she calls “texto-nación” or “metonimia nacional.”

An in-depth overview of the prevailing pseudo-medical and anti-feminine masculine discourse demonstrates how nationalism was sexualized. Women represented not only physical weakness and illness, but also economic ruin in their penchant for foreign items. In one of the many inspired textual analyses that appear throughout the book, Pereira-Muro identifies a passage from La desheredada listing “cinco novelas” among Isadora’s indiscriminate purchases as an echo of the dominant view on women’s superficial reading habits. In analysis after analysis of texts by male critics, Pereira-Muro deconstructs gendered discourse on the negative effects of the “feminization” of literature in a manner worthy of Gilbert and Gubar’s magisterial reading of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English writers. She plucks real gems from her contemporaries’ remarks, such as Pereda’s avowal in a letter to Galdós that Pardo Bazán’s Apuntes autobiográficos were of a “‘cursilería semi-estúpida que tumba de espaldas’” (63).

Pereira-Muro’s vast knowledge of Galician literary and political history enriches chapter two, as she presents contemporary perspectives on the role of language, ranging from the view that only authors writing in Galician should be considered part of the Galician canon, to a more inclusive approach in which a body of work written in Castilian depicting characteristics “que se consideraban inherentes al ser gallego” is seen as a sub-system of Galician literature (89). Noting that the majority of Pardo Bazán’s narratives of the...