The Geopolitics of Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La Quimera: Femme Fatale as Split Feminist Subject

Abstract

This paper analyzes the representation of the femme fatale in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La Quimera (1905). Femme fatale is described by many critics as an expression of masculine anxieties and fears, caused by political crisis and growth of feminine independence in the nineteenth century. Male authors employed this figure to preserve patriarchal structure and the existent power balance between prescribed gender roles. I argue that Pardo Bazán, through imitation of male writers and manipulation of hidden meanings in La Quimera, employs this masculinist projection to express latent feminist ideas and a critique of the contemporary social position of women. In her novel, Pardo Bazán creates a feminist femme fatale and, through her geopolitically split formation (France/Latin America/Spain), criticizes Spanish patriarchy, domesticity and non-modernity. She achieves this without overtly violating masculine narrative structure or demeaning patriarchal order, as she appropriates the originally masculinist imagery of fatal woman. Nevertheless, the eventual fate of Pardo Bazán’s femme fatale—especially the elaboration of internal dialogs and her presentation not as antagonist and invasive Other but as protagonist and subject—demonstrates fundamental differences of a feminist perspective within her elaboration of this masculine fantasy. In this way, in a time and space where feminism as a movement did not yet exist or was in its formative years, Pardo Bazán immensely contributed to the development of European/Spanish feminist thought.