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

4. Defiant Endings and the Disruption of Content

[99] 4 Defiant Endings and the Disruption of Content What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. T. S. Eliot Learning to read and write as a woman presupposes a disruption of conventional content and form. As I have argued throughout this book, the disruption and manipulation of the accepted mode of traditional discourse to exert the presence of a female subject constitutes the narrative framework of Pardo Bazán’s radical revisioning of the short story. Employing strategies of resistance that defy the status quo, Pardo Bazán’s stories embody what Nancy Miller has termed a “dissent from the dominant tradition” in their numerous recurrent “narrative gestures,” especially in the “modalities of closure.”1 This chapter examines the dissent of these closing “narrative gestures” and their defiance of the culturally constructed no1 . Nancy Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 8. [100] tions of gender in five stories written towards the end of Pardo Baz án’s literary career, between the years 1906 and 1914.2 Previous chapters explored the many ways in which Pardo Baz án constructed seemingly conventional narratives that promoted alternative readings because of gaps, multiplicities, contradictions, and ambiguities found within the formal constituents of narrative closure. Endings implied beginnings and answers suggested questions , all of which, of course, required the reader to reenter the text in search of further clarification or resolution. What separates the stories to be examined here from those discussed above is the defiant positioning of alternative endings within the narrative content of the stories themselves. Refusing to unequivocally validate the sociocultural norms of her contemporaries, Pardo Bazán experimented with increasingly more radical strategies of resistance over time. She repeatedly stretched and tested the limits of traditional social and literary boundaries while simultaneously maintaining a semblance of coexistence with the dominant ideology. Pardo Bazán’s defiant endings rely on the dialogic exchange inherent in all discourse. Entirely relational, this textual meaning is determined by where, when, how, why, and what it is we read/write. Pardo Bazán, as we have seen throughout this study, exploits to her great advantage this Bakhtinian notion of the “simultaneity of difference .” These endings, like all differential relations, depend upon the dynamic interplay between author, text, and reader—each story , then, a plurality of languages, discourses, stories, and voices. At once combative and conciliatory, the stories in this chapter evince a third variation of Pardo Bazán’s disruptive reappropriation: an alternative ending positioned within the story/plot itself. 2. Paredes Núñez documents the publication in La Ilustración Española y Americana of “La aventura” in 1909, “Los novios de pastaflora” in 1910, and “La punta del cigarro” in 1914. “Las ‘cutres’” was published in Blanco y Negro in 1910 and “El sabio” in 1906. All five stories were later included in the collection Cuentos amorosos. Pardo Bazán, Cuentos completos. Crafting the Female Subject [101] Defiant Endings and Disruption of Content For Annis Pratt, the characteristic ambivalence of women’s texts arises from their simultaneous accommodation and contradiction of gender norms. Ambivalence of tone, irony in characterization, and “a strange disjunction in plotting,” she contends, reflect women ’s social experiences outside the literary text.3 Moreover, “feminine aspirations existing in dialectical relationship to societal prescriptions against women’s development create textual mixtures of rebellion and repression.”4 For Pratt, then, there exists an established pattern in women’s fiction whereby the female characters are simultaneously subversive and conventional. Similarly, Elizabeth Abel points up the conspicuous contrast between the aspirations of male and female protagonists, stating that “while male protagonists struggle to find a hospitable context in which to realize their aspirations , female protagonists must frequently struggle to voice any aspirations whatsoever.”5 Female-authored texts, then, as Elizabeth Meese has so eloquently argued, present characters that exemplify the problematic tensions that accompany womanhood.6 This chapter examines the ways in which Pardo Bazán constructs a variety of oppositional strategies within the content of the stories themselves to challenge the conventional depictions of gendered norms and institutions within the traditional short-story narrative. Ambivalence in tone, ambiguity in attitude, and contradiction in character are some of the salient characteristics of the five stories examined here. In these stories, Pardo Bazán presents her readers...