Lina Soy Yo: Mysticism as Subversion and Identity for the Modern Woman Writer in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Dulce Dueño

“J’ai toujours été étonné qu’on laissât les femmes entrer dans les églises. Quelle conversation peuvent-elles tenir avec Dieu?”

Charles Baudelaire, Mon coeur mis à nu

Various scholars have written about the presence of mysticism in Lina Mascareñas, the protagonist in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s last novel, Dulce Dueño, published in 1911. Raquel Medina surmises that Lina ends up existing only as a rational being in the divine world and as nothing more than a hysteric in the human world. Susan Kirkpatrick discusses the relationship of modernist turn-of-the-century discourse and its blurring of fixed gender roles that Lina at first represents and then ends up negating in her devotion to God as her master. Maryellen Bieder points out the self-representation of Lina through mysticism and how God’s prevailing power over her undercuts this power and “entraps her in the discourse of madness” (2002 14). Kathy Bacon contends that Lina’s mysticism is a form of “invisible social death” as Lina writes herself out of representation and objectification through madness and mysticism (382). Pau Pitarch Fernández interprets Lina’s mysticism as a manifestation of her eccentricity and exploration of her identity but does not see it as a strong expression of feminism. This paper will add another dimension to the analysis by exploring the novel’s mysticism not as undefined or flawed, but as a challenge to the status quo that also reflects the stages of mysticism according to Catholic tradition as well as nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conceptions of mysticism. Pardo Bazán’s inclusion of a mystic as a main character in Dulce Dueño is not novel, as Clarín’s La Regenta, Benito Pérez Galdós’ Nazarín and other works of the nineteenth and early twentieth century reveal, but Pardo Bazán defines, empowers and individualizes her mystic female protagonist to a greater extent. This study seeks to demonstrate how Lina’s mysticism subverts male hegemony and to show how it forms a response to modernity’s ambivalence about the emergence of the New Woman, a hybrid figure of the nascent feminist movements of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Europe, who displayed both feminine and feminist attitudes.² The paper will illustrate how Dulce Dueño represents Pardo Bazán’s culminating literary identity as a Catholic feminist woman writer of modernity and how in the uncertain world of the fin de siècle, mysticism helps define Dulce Dueño’s protagonist and its author.

In the first chapter of Dulce Dueño, the priest Carranza tells Lina Mascareñas, the early twentieth-century protagonist of the rest of the novel, the story of the life and martyrdom of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, an early fourth century pagan who converted to Christianity in her teens and was the only saint associated with learning of those celebrated in medieval and Renaissance Europe (Parker 11). Saint Catherine refused to marry unless she found someone who was more beautiful, intelligent, wealthy, and socially prominent than she, and ended up a Christian martyr after she refused the Roman Emperor Maximinus. The rest of Dulce Dueño describes Lina Mascareñas’ transformation from an impoverished orphan to an heiress bombarded by unexpected opulence and marriage prospects after she finds out that who she thought was her aunt is actually her mother. After realizing that none of her suitors can meet her spiritual needs, Lina rejects both materialism and marriage and opts instead to find her “dulce dueño” in a spiritual union with God. At the end of the novel, Lina eschews the mundane world altogether, living out the life of a mystic in her own mind, even though her male advisors, the priest Carranza, the liberal scholar Antón de la Polilla, and her illegitimate father Genaro Farnesio, ostracize and ridicule her, and she is ultimately banished to an insane asylum.

Lina is Pardo Bazán’s only female narrator of all...