The Nineteenth-Century Woman Reader of Intellectual Texts in Her Role as Social Agent

This paper deals with the effects of reading intellectual texts and how it affects the heroine in relation to the new way that conform her gender, also her relationship to the environment and the interactions with other agents, being as she is a social subject ˗in the realist and naturalist Spanish novels˗. Therefore, I analyze how society restricts and punishes any conduct that falls out the normative order. At the same time, however, I emphasize the contradictions within the authors, who, while denying the opportunities to their heroines, they make them visible.