Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Story Not Told: Sex And Marriage In Pardo Bazán's "Los Cirineos" And "La Argolla", Linda Willem

Linda M. Willem

This article examines how narrative strategies of indirection employed in “Los cirineos” and “La argolla” engage the reader’s ethical participation in examining and questioning societal norms concerning sex and marriage. In “Los cirineos,” the opposition between the moral and the immoral is broken down by the presence of what Shlomith Rimmon Kenan has called “doubly-directed clues,” resulting in mutually exclusive readings of the text that exemplify C. Namwali Serpell’s concept of oscillating narration. In “La argolla,” the sexual content of a proposition is suggested rather than stated due to what Robyn Warhol has defined as its “antinarratable” nature, but it …