Resumen de Gossip’s Politics: Reading Between the Lines of Emilia Pardo Bazán’s 1889 Short Story ‘Morrión y Boina’
‘Morrión y Boina’ was the first composition to appear in the first issue of La España Moderna. Emilia Pardo Bazán lent significant support to its founder, José Lázaro Galdiano, and, arguably, ‘Morrión y Boina’ was chosen as a ‘signature’ piece on Restoration politics to ‘lead’ that first issue. It is also gossip from beginning to end. Applying Ricardo Piglia’s theses on the short story, this article reveals the multiple narratives in this short story, and how its secret stories are key to its gossip form. The protagonists of ‘Morrión y Boina’ epitomize, and undercut, the ‘personalism’ and caciquismo that was to be the death of Carlist politics in the nineteenth century. The first-person female narrator, a choice that is unusual for Pardo Bazán in this genre, is one of them. She is not a proxy for the author, I argue, but chisme personified. A female Ariadne, she provides an additional, alternative, allegorical response to the criticism and political furore Pardo Bazán incited through her account of her meeting in Venice in January 1888 with the then (fourth) Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne, Carlos María de Borbón, Duke of Madrid (Carlos VII).
