SOURCE: "Subversion of Victorian Values and Idea Types: Pardo Bazán and the Ángel del hogar," in Hispanofila, Vol. 113, 1995, pp. 31-44.

In the following essay, Pérez examines several of the stories collected in Pardo Bazán's Cuentos de Marineda, which she considers "ironic or otherwise subversive reactions to the Victorian ideal."

The mention of the word "Victorian" evokes a world unto itself, a closed world based largely on authority: God, the church, parents, elders, the upper classes. And Emilia Pardo Bazán was—among other things—a Victorian writer, born and raised during the long reign of Victoria Regina (1837-1901), who wrote her most celebrated works in the Victorian era. The canon has heretofore privileged those aspects of Pardo Bazán which might be deemed least Victorian, i.e., those classed as Naturalistic, yet she was something more—and something less—than a Naturalist, as recent studies...