Challenge or Surrender?: Female Responses to Spain’s Gendered Power Imbalance in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Feminist Short Stories

The eminent Spanish writer Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921) penned more than six hundred short stories, and this work, Challenge or Surrender?, focusses on the female protagonists of twenty-five of these narratives, selected for their exposition, in one way or another, of Pardo Bazán’s feminist views. Each of these stories has provided one or more largely proactive female protagonists who confront personal and contemporaneous societal challenges in their lives. Some rise to overcome a gender-related challenge, while others fail to do so.

Every story embodies Pardo Bazán’s forcefully expressed disdain for fin de siècle Spain’s gendered injustices and challenges at least one of the patriarchal mores of her Spanish society, most notably the Spanish code of honor, the ángel del hogar construct, the sexual double standard and el qué dirán-ubiquitous ＂neighbourhood gossip＂.

Most of the stories are, as expected, Realist narratives, but there are also examples of naturalist, romantic, gothic, costumbrismo, fantastic, and folletín writing. Pardo Bazán’s ability to manipulate the literary styles in her fiction, and her use of narrative techniques, that undermine the portrayal of conventional female behaviour convey, as subtexts, her antipathy towards the gendered inequalities that she recognises in her society. In retrospect, her short stories can now arguably be seen to have been her most effective channel of dissemination for her feminist ideas.

Challenge or Surrender? encompasses both the literary and cultural traditions of Spain and, in addition, it references multiple intersections of Spanish literature, culture and arts. With its original analyses of twenty-five Pardo Bazán narratives this publication represents a major addition to the existing corpus of analyses of the author’s short stories to date.

Patricia Ramsay, Ph.D., Victoria University of Wellington. Dr. Ramsay has an ongoing interest in fin de siècle Spanish literature and, in particular, Emilia Pardo Bazán’s short stories.