Thomas R. Franz

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Decimonónica

Volume

3

Issue

2

Publisher

Decimonónica

Publication Date

2006

First Page

27

Last Page

44

Abstract

In chapter 17 of La Madre Naturaleza (1887), Gabriel Pardo de la Lage rummages through the library of Los Pazos [as the priest Julián Alvarez had done in Los Pazos de Ulloa (1886)] and discovers copies of Andrews’s Clarissa Harlow and Richardson’s Pamela (1856), exemplars of the English sentimental novel. Somewhat later on, the reader begins to note provocative similarities between La Madre and Emily Brontë’s proto-Gothic, Romantic masterpiece, Wuthering Heights (1847). There are headstrong sets of lovers, a strong hint of the demonic, the possibility of happiness through marriage to a more civilized man, a strong suggestion of the violation of the incest taboo, envy and revenge, the presence of multiple generations, and a narrative interrupted by massive flashbacks. Many of these characteristics also describe Unamuno’s most hair-raising novel, Abel Sánchez (1917), which has been related to the Gothic genre so popular in nineteenth-century Britain (Franz, “Abel Sánchez” passim). The present article is a study of the process by which Unamuno created large parts of Abel Sánchez out of Wuthering Heights and La Madre Naturaleza. Its purpose is to show how Abel Sánchez, while indebted to Pardo Bazán’s use in La Madre Natrualeza of material from Wuthering Heights, appropriates much more from the disconnected unconventionalities of Brontë’s novel and thus is able to approach the creation of a narrative that today we might term postmodern.

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