Disrupting Nineteenth-Century Dichotomies of Gender: Reading and Imagination in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La madre Naturaleza

This essay contends that Emilia Pardo Bazán’s novel La madre Naturaleza (1887) reflects the author’s fundamental preoccupation with the state of women’s education in Spain. I argue that the narrative portrayal of the novel’s central character, Gabriel Pardo de la Lage, unravels nineteenth-century gendered assumptions of what—or who—constitutes an ideal reader. Despite his extensive rational education, Gabriel Pardo possesses an overactive imagination that, when read in conjunction with contemporary social commentaries of women’s education, emasculates the artilleryman. The novel demonstrates that neither reason nor imagination is indelibly linked to gender, thus problematizing nineteenth-century discourses precluding women from male-coded rational education, or instrucción.