ABSTRACT
Emilia Pardo Bazán’s short story “La sonrisa blanca,” (“The White Smile”) published in Blanco y Negro on September 18, 1909, presents a blow-by-blow account of a boxing match between reigning white champion Dick Saunders and a black competitor. An extra-and heterodiegetic narrator recounts this battle between the races and the crushing defeat of the white champion. Through the use of internal focalization and free indirect discourse the narrative voice shifts throughout the story revealing the perspectives of different characters. But the primary focus remains on those of the enraged white crowd and Dick Saunders himself. Although Pardo Bazán changes the name of the white fighter,1 the use of the last name Johnson for the black adversary and other details-such as naming the white heavyweight champion’s previous opponents-reveal that the story portrays the title match between Tommy Burns and black prizefighter Jack Johnson. The historic bout took place on December 26, 1908, before a crowd of nearly 20,000 in Sydney, Australia.2 The focus on a boxing match was uncommon both in the pages of Blanco y Negro as well as in the work of Pardo Bazán. This story stands out as a textual and visual3 exploration of issues of race and masculinity viewed through a colonialist lens. Pardo Bazán makes the editorial decision to position the fight as a battle between white and black Americans (even though Tommy Burns was Canadian), and before a predominantly British and American audience. Although the fight took place in Australia, a former British colony with its own history of racial issues,4 the text concentrates on the “muchos honorables gentlemen [que] habían venido desde América y desde Inglaterra, expresamente para no perder el emocionante espectáculo” (3, emphasis added; the many honorable gentlemen [who] had come from America and from England, expressly not to miss the exciting event). By employing racial stereotypes frequently found in the white press to depict Jack Johnson, the story highlights the racial bias of these fans and the white boxer himself. The narrator’s emphasis on American racial bias fits in with Pardo Bazán’s general disdain for the United States after the war in Cuba and the Philippines. But is this a simple example of Pardo Bazán’s “clumsy anti-Americanism” as Henn has argued concerning other stories by the author (418) or can we place this
piece somewhere else along the continuum of more creative and nuanced ways that Pardo Bazán leads her readers to question and subvert dominant narratives concerning gender and race as critics have suggested?5 Is Pardo Bazán’s treatment of this fight evidence of the author’s own racial biases, as some critics have argued concerning her work (Dendle and Bauer), or does she structure the narrative in such a way as to invite the implied reader to reject the racist views of the white fans and the fighter?
