Degeneration is a Feminine Word: Gender and Sickness in Fin de Siecle Culture

In this paper I will analyze the relationship between gender and sickness in two novels from the first decade of the twentieth century: the unknown Pityusa (1908), written by Jose Maria Llanas Aguilaniedo, and Dulce dueno (1911) by Emilia Pardo Bazan. In the first place, I will consider the fin de siecle crisis as a collapse of the scientific rhetoric around bodies. In the second place, I will examine how, from their position in the so called fin de siecle crisis, both novels destabilize medical discourses that linked femininity with illness.