In light of the problematic relationship between women and nation in nineteenth-century Spain and Latin America, this study considers the especially complex position of women writers. As writers they contributed to the production of culture, an integral part of national discourses, but as women they were circumscribed by traditional gender roles that attempted to obstruct them from doing so. My dissertation studies this contradictory relationship through two canonical women writers, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (Cuba, Spain) and Emilia Pardo Bazán (Spain), and how it informs the representations of nation in their novels. I specifically analyze the division of national spaces into hegemonic binaries, such as public/private, rural/urban, and colony/empire in seven of their novels, ranging from Sab (1841) to Memorias de un solterón (1896).

The characters that use and inhabit the socially constructed spaces in these novels also find themselves in a conflicting relationship with their nations by reason of gender, race, ethnicity, and/or class. Marginal to the nation, but central to the novels in more ways than one, the characters function to disrupt both imposed and accepted binaries, challenge national master narratives, and give new meaning to the concept of nation. The redefinition of spaces in their novels reveals these authors' dialogue with contemporary national discourses in times of political and social transitions, with a special focus on women's stagnant gender roles in marriage and the family.

This dissertation incorporates spatial theory (the study of the cultural construction of space) to explore the way that the nation is defined both through concrete uses of space and via cultural discourses. Using gender, colonial and post-colonial theories allowed me to highlight the multiple and varying meanings given to national space and the nuanced levels of power relations that exist within these writings on the nation. Even with Avellaneda and Pardo Bazán's generational differences, the elements of gender and nation establish continuity between their intellectual productions and reveal similar ideological connections that speak to a shared female experience across the century and beyond. Drawing connections between these two authors also emphasizes a transatlantic exchange that shows their challenge of the traditional direction in the transport of cultural knowledge, and adds a richer dimension to their work and to the very concept of nation, since Cuba still held colonial ties to Spain until the end of the nineteenth century.