1
Hemingway notes that many of Pardo Bazán’s most important novels are narrated wholly or partially in the first person, including Pascual López, Insolación, La quimera, La sirena negra, and Dulce dueño (71). On the feminine aspects of the narrator of Los Pazos de Ulloa, see Bieder («Between Gender and Genre»). Pardo Bazán also assumes a male narrative voice in several short stories. A pertinent example is Cuento primitivo (1893), where «the author’s point of view is disguised beneath a deprecating attitude towards her male narrator, seen as a primitive and befuddled storyteller» (Charnon-Deutsch 69).
2
See Ordóñez, whose article is a response to Bieder’s essay on Pardo Bazán’s use of the marriage ending in Memorias. Ordóñez shows that, though Pardo Bazán does make use of a conventional ending, her text includes significant revisions of a number of stereotypical realist plots. She also cites Pardo Bazán’s familiarity with the model of contemporary marriage suggested by John Stuart Mill.
3
Speaking of the eighteenth-century, Terry Castle writes, «Then, as now, dress spoke symbolically of the human being beneath its folds. It reinscribed a person’s sex, rank, age, occupation-all the distinctive features of the self. Modern semiotics has confirmed the force of the analogy: like language, clothing is after all a system of signs, and a means of symbolic communication. Like speech acts, different costumes carry conventional meanings; clothing opens itself everywhere to interpretation by others, in accordance with prevailing systems of sartorial inscriptions. Clothing inescapably serves a signifying function within culture; it is in fact an institution inseparable from culture» (55).
4
Noël Valis has studied the representation of decadence in the novels of Alas. On decadence and gender inversion, see also Nimetz (252-53).
5
On nineteenth-century Spanish domestic ideology and the roles deemed appropriate for women see Aldaraca. Andreu also examines the image of the mujer virtuosa as represented in popular literature (39-69).
6
Bravo-Villasante and McKendrick discuss women and cross-dressing in Spanish Golden Age theater.
7
Feldman has taken issue with Gilbert and Gubar’s tendency to attribute radically different motives to male and female modernists who deal with cross-dressing (15-17). Her view of the dandy as a figure who inevitably «challenges patriarchal thought» generally complements Marjorie Garber’s study of transvestism.
8
Dendle finds signs of hasty composition in this entire episodio (106-09), while Rubén Benítez finds Jenara far more convincing.
9
For a critique of the phallocentric bias of psychoanalytic definitions of transvestism, see Garber (41-51; 93-101).
10
There is a parallel between the characterization of Mauro and that of Feíta, who is contrasted to her sisters, each of whom represents a common literary stereotype: Argos is the mística falsa, Rosa is a vain Rosalía de Bringas type who loves clothes, Costanza is the sincerely religious sister who enters the convent.