Struggling with the ‘Rosalian myth’

Abstract

The theme of emigration is present in the work of two of the most prominent nineteenth-century Galician authors, Emilia Pardo Bazán and Rosalía de Castro. They had very different approaches: the topic of displacement in several naturalist stories by Pardo Bazán is far removed from the discourse of affect that characterizes de Castro’s work. But in the novel Morriña [‘Homesickness’] (1889), Pardo Bazán displays an uneasy mixture of both discourses (sentimentalism and naturalist determinism) which is, I will argue, a result of the unresolved tension between her Spanish nationalism and her feminist agenda. This tension will lead her to both accept and challenge the ‘Rosalian myth’ created by Galician migrants and embodied in Esclavitud, the migrant protagonist of Morriña.