“Las normas son para romperlas”: Emilia Pardo Bazán, Carmen de Burgos, and the Unruly Women of Seis Hermanas

Abstract

Willem examines how the 2015–2017 Spanish television series, Seis hermanas, set in Madrid from 1913 through 1916, draws on the lives and writings of two of the era’s strongest proponents of women’s rights, Emilia Pardo Bazán and Carmen de Burgos, to explore the social and legal situation of women in Restoration society, and to raise such issues as gender and class barriers, spousal abuse, infidelity, divorce, and lesbianism. The writings of Pardo Bazán and Burgos justify the transgressive actions of the sisters as they defy social and legal norms in pursuit of personal freedom and self-actualization. Furthermore, these women writers serve as a bridge to today’s television viewer whose twenty-first-century perspective validates their ideas that were once considered radical but are now accepted.