Crafting the Female Subject: Narrative Innovation in the Short Fiction of Emilia Pardo Bazán

Conclusion

[161] Conclusion A story is like a horse race—it is the start and the finish that count most. Ellery Sedgwick Because of its inherently self-conscious style, the short story has proven invaluable as a means for examining the distinct modes of disruptive reappropriation in Pardo Bazán’s texts. Using a variety of theoretical tools, each chapter in this work engaged in a unique reading practice that examined the complex and varied strategies of resistance employed by Pardo Bazán to circumvent conventional narrative design, and by so doing, to afford her female heroes differing degrees of narrative subjectivity. In concentrating our efforts on the ways in which she manipulates language, at both the level of story and of discourse, we are better able to understand the simultaneous traces of complicity and resistance found within her texts. Charles May affirms this view of the story, maintaining that, as a genre, the short story has always been apt to “lay bare its own fictionality .” Moreover, “fictional self-consciousness” in the short story does not allow the reader to maintain “the comfortable cover-up [162] Conclusion assumption” that what is depicted is real. The reader, he concludes, “is made uncomfortably aware that the only reality is the process of depiction itself—the fiction-making process, the language act.”1 Attentive to the creative processes involved in the reading/writing of fiction, we approach Pardo Bazán’s stories prepared to take part in the practice of literature, that is, prepared to engage in the narrative strategies of resistance that give rise to her subversive/conciliatory texts. Each one a dialogic exchange of voices, texts, authors, and readers, these stories evince a new and unique dialogue every time that they are read. The uniqueness of each practical, textual experience is likewise the narrative foundation upon which each story is newly reconstructed. In short, Pardo Bazán’s self-critical narratives articulate a model for reading/writing women’s texts that centers on a paradigm of disruptive reappropriation. Wayne Booth distinguishes between the acts of reading with, reading against, and critical rereading as follows: reading with is to accept the apparent demands made upon us by the text; reading against is to seek that which is unintended or even banned by the text; and critical rereading means to search a text anew, either for a deeper meaning or for an understanding of structure that clarifies the experience.2 Critical readings, or rereadings, of Pardo Bazán’s simultaneous expropriation and redefinition of the male tradition, then, lead not only to the creation of innovative narrative strategies but also to the articulation of a desiring female subject: a sexual subject seeking fulfillment both within and without the gendered institutions in turn-of-the-century Spain. Because adherence to the conventional literary narratives afforded an insufficient medium for female subjectivity, Pardo Bazán circumvents the status quo by us1 . Charles May, “Chekhov and the Modern Story,” in The New Short Story Theories , ed. Charles May (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994), 199–217, quotation on 215–16. 2. Wayne Booth, “The Ethics of Forms: Taking Flight with The Wings of the Dove,” in Understanding Narrative, ed. James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz (Columbus : Ohio State University Press, 1994), 99–135, quotation on 102–5. [163] Conclusion ing various methods of disruptive reappropriation. The female subjects in the twenty stories studied in this work represent a diverse collection of female heroes whose temperaments range from deceptively conventional to outright rebellious. We read these heroes, as Robyn Warhol suggests, not as “real people” but rather as “functions of texts.”3 As functions of texts, then, Pardo Bazán’s female heroes both articulate their desire to become subjects themselves and attempt to fulfill that desire by breaking the codes of traditional narrative design. Sexual/textual transgression is both the means and the end in the above-analyzed stories. The chapters in this book suggest how versatile and varied narrative theory and practice can be—and how exciting. By examining four distinct versions of Pardo Bazán’s disruptive reappropriation —final recalcitrance, transgressing the formal conventions of closure, alternative endings within the texts themselves, and innovative narrative beginnings—we see the wide array of textual strategies utilized by the author in her short fiction. Similarly, as readers we employ diverse critical skills and theoretical methods each time we partake in the singular act of reading one of...