The Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) has celebrated this Thursday, May 13, a tribute to the writer Emilia Pardo Bazán on the occasion of the centenary of her death, in an act in which she has asked forgiveness for not incorporating into the institution an author who “He more than deserved it.”
“Pardo Bazán suffered a lot with the RAE and was a writer who more than deserved to be in this house. We look back with sorrow, but understanding that the historical situation was what it was. Still, We really regret that a situation like Emilia’s came to pass“, said at the beginning of the act the director of the RAE, Santiago Muñoz Machado.
Armchair 47, for the writer
In fact, the director of the Academy has symbolically pointed out that Pardo Bazán could occupy seat 47 of the RAE (The institution has 46). “They are those armchairs that are reserved for those better than those who were inside at the time and had no opportunity to enter,” he lamented.
Even Muñoz Machado has spoken of ‘the Doña Emilia question’ to address this matter, which “occupies a special place” for the institution. “As director of the institution, I must refer as normal to what happened 100 years ago in this house“, has warned.
The machismo of the historical moment
“The ladies were not received in this institution for reasons of sex and the academics demonstrated against Emilia Pardo Bazán, without underestimating her literary virtues, for her to join “, the academic pointed out, recalling that vetoes against women were previously established with Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda.
“That was the way things were everywhere and the treatment of women was then almost everywhere the same. Now the RAE can only look with nostalgia on that occasion that I would have allowed a great woman in this house and she would have been the first to enter“, he pointed out.
Pardo Bazán’s letters
The RAE keeps three documents regarding this case. One is a letter from the writer herself in March 1914 requesting in her own handwriting to enter the RAE, explaining his literary and institutional merits, with written works and positions held in relevant institutions. “It ends with an application for admission, doing it openly and in an unusual way of what are the customs and academic practices, which require to enter the RAE that three academics of number sign it”, indicated Muñoz Machado. An unsigned apocryphal answer is kept from this request, in which it is stated that the request will not be processed because “it does not meet objective conditions and it is not a male”, although the academy does not “accept” this document.
The other document is a letter signed by the Marchioness of San Luis in which she addresses this institution requesting that Pardo Bazán be appointed an honorary academic, repairing the evil that was done to her at the time she requested it. The Academy did not respond to this request, but its director at the time, Antonio Maura, did. with “a kind letter” in which he told the Countess that his request “had not been accepted for processing, not for reasons of a personal nature, but for reasons of an objective nature.”
Don and doña
The First Vice President and Minister of the Presidency, Relations with the Courts and Democratic Memory, Carmen Calvo, has defended the importance of Pardo Bazán both for the set of Spanish letters as “for the women of Spain, who can be recognized in their activism and their lives “.
“She is one of the few women in history who has the ‘doña’ in front of her, which gives a sparkling measure of the imprint of her intellectual strength and security. If she put ‘Don Emilio’ on her card, her life would have been different. , but with ‘doña Emilia’ he reached almost all the places he wanted and where almost none went, which gives a measure of his immensity, “he concluded.
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