Propuestas para (re)construir una nación: el teatro de Emilia Pardo Bazán by Margot Versteeg (review)

In this pathbreaking study, Margot Versteeg analyzes nine of the twenty-odd plays written by Emilia Pardo Bazán mainly between 1898 and 1909. The period marks the writer's adherence to the techniques of theatrical realism championed in the 1890s by Benito Pérez Galdós and José Martínez Ruiz "Azorín" in opposition to José Echegaray's attempts to reform melodrama. At the same time, it also reflects her engagement with the intellectual debates surrounding national regeneration that ensued in the aftermath of the loss of Spain's Caribbean and Pacific colonies in 1898. Even though only a few of her works were ever staged, Pardo Bazán sought to rescue the theater from the influence of a largely uncultured public that she characterized as "ignorantes y de gustos vulgares" in an article in the Argentine newspaper La Nación. Versteeg demonstrates that Pardo Bazán understood what was popular (she was a frequent theatergoer) and kept abreast of the latest developments in European drama, particularly modernism, with her thinking geared towards moving spectators into action.

The volume written in Spanish offers scholars a chance to learn about Pardo Bazán's experiments with the affective potential of the theater. Versteeg's analyses of these plays as "propuestas para la reconstrucción práctica y cotidiana de la patria (19)," highlight the impact that a debilitating nostalgia for the Spanish empire had, in the playwright's view, on the construction of the liberal subject, and casts light on the role of emotions in fin-de-siècle Spanish theater. Each of the seven chapters is devoted to a single play except chapter 2, which covers both La suerte, from 1904, and La muerte de la quimera, written in 1905, as a prologue to her novel La quimera. The study concludes with an epilogue on La Malinche, a sketch of unknown date, "emblemática de las aspiraciones regeneracionistas de la autora y sus esfuerzos por combatir la leyenda dorada" (202). The overall structure facilitates an approach to reading Pardo Bazán's dramas that is not only rigorous but also attentive to lesser-known aspects of her thinking that theater helps to recover. In the introduction, where Versteeg lays out a multifaceted approach, theater is described by Pardo Bazán, in a crucial quote from a 1906 article in La Ilustración Artística, as affording spectators a surplus of experience: "Es vida en que el artificio y la realidad, combinándose, dan por resultado un poco más de experiencia." Throughout the book Pardo Bazán emerges as someone who wrote with technical finesse against the grain of (what she believed was) standard theatrical reception. However, it is the "why" and the "how" of the writer's response to the so-called crisis del teatro, which Versteeg sees through the playwright's eyes as a faulty relationship between "thinking" and "feeling," that ought to be of interest for scholars of late-nineteenth-century Spain, not just those with a focus on theater and cultural studies.

The principal merits of the study lie with its original framework, provided by a mix of classic and recent literature on postcolonial and affect theory, theater and performance studies, and nationalism. Pardo Bazán's views on theatrical experience, scattered across her journalistic writing, have been gathered from sources from between 1887 and 1920. One of the critical aspects of the introduction, in reference to her use of melodrama, is her goal of achieving a unity of feeling between the spectators and the stage. This vital idea questions the erroneous belief that anti-theatricality, an oversimplifying concept, but also one Pardo Bazán assumed insofar as she objected to the effects of spectacularized emotion in a passive audience, tried to get rid of theater's affective potential, instead of adding to it a factor of correction regarding ideals like the re-imagining or redefinition of the...