Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change: Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder ed. by Jennifer Smith (review)

Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change: Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder is a collection of eleven essays that present new approaches to assess Spanish writers’ and social activists’ literary and political contributions to feminism in nineteenth-century Spain. As Jennifer Smith points out in the Introduction, this collection is a tribute to the prolific academic Maryellen Bieder, one of the most relevant scholars of nineteenth-century Spanish literature, whose influential works on female Spanish writers, such as Emilia Pardo Bazán and women writers who lived through the Spanish Civil War, revolutionized literary criticism by exploring issues of female identity, feminist discourse, the interplay of gender and nationality, among others.

In chapter 1, Akiko Tsuchiya examines María Rosa Gálvez’s and Faustina Sáez de Melgar’s antislavery plays titled “Zinda” (1804) and “La cadena rota” (1879), respectively. As the author reveals, these plays gravitate around themes regarding gender, race and colonialism. Tsuchiya focuses, in particular, on the ways in which the female playwrights strategically deployed Romantic and neo-Romantic melodrama as a means to advocate for the rights of the colonized, the slave, and women. Christine Arkinstall relates in chapter 2 the impressive academic life of journalist, fiction writer and women’s rights activist Sofía Tartillán (1829–1888). In particular, she analyzes the ideological background that shaped Tartillán’s writings, which fiercely defended, among other rights, women’s education. Influenced by the values of Enlightenment, Realism, Krausism, Freemasonry and Republicanism, Tartillán fought for women’s inclusion in the Spanish political sphere as primary “educators of future citizens and makers of national well-being” (47). In chapter 3, Roberta Johnson explores the intertextuality among Carmen de Burgos, Georg Simmel and Gregorio Marañón with respect to defining the nature and social and individual effects of fashion. In her description of Burgos’s conception, Johnson is able to identify similarities but also radical differences with Simmel’s social interpretation and Marañón’s biological understanding of fashion. In her feminist essay La mujer moderna y sus derechos (1927), Burgos expounds fashion as closely tied to feminism, as a means through which women could emancipate themselves from patriarchal and heteronormative rules and create their own sexually empowering image. Fashion, moreover, undermines class distinctions.

Susana M. McKenna studies in chapter 4 Emilia Pardo Bazán’s literary theory as drafted in “Apuntes,” which is the prologue to Los pasos de Ulloa (1886), and the ways in which such a theory in fact reflects narrative techniques (such as the framing device), metaliterature, intertextuality, and reading modalities constructed in Pardo Bazán’s fiction, especially the story “El baile del Querubín” (1891). For McKenna, the unfounded defense of the traditional over the modern and the socially accepted enclosure of women in the domestic sphere, both of which are handled with irony in the story, in fact correspond to real situations that Pardo Bazán experienced and fought to change in her fiction. In chapter 5, Linda M. Willem deploys Armine Kotin Mortimer’s concept of the second story in her analysis of some of Pardo Bazán’s stories. In the two pairs of stories explored here, namely “Presentido” (1910)—“En coche-cama” (1914) and “Confidencia” (1892)—“Madre” (1893), Willem is able to postulate that the second story in each set (published at a later date) reveals a new approach to a theme already taken in its counterpart. Furthermore, they require an active reader who could fill in the gaps, question the reliability of the narrators, distinguish between framing and embedded narrations, and find the hidden and true resolutions of the conflicts in each story. Denis DuPont explores in chapter 6 the parallelisms between Pardo Bazán’s novel Dulce sueño (1911) and the French Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novels À rebours (1884), Là-bas (1891), En route (1895), La cathédrale (1898...