Post-partum illness in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s <i>Los pazos de Ulloa</i> (1886)

This article takes a medical-humanities approach to the novel Los pazos de Ulloa (1886) by Spain’s first modern feminist writer, Emilia Pardo Bazán. It examines the post-partum illness suffered by its protagonist, Nucha Pardo de la Lage, against a background of cultural, social, and scientific discourse that tended to pathologize the bourgeois female body as weak and unreliable. By examining the representation of Nucha within the novel alongside Pardo Bazán’s public contestation of received medical opinion in speeches and published articles, the paper builds an argument which complicates and nuances the causes of post-partum illness. The article further argues that Los pazos de Ulloa exposes the squeamishness of Spain’s national novel at the sight of sexual activity, pregnancy, childbirth, and their realities for a legitimately married woman.