Sand, George 1804–1876

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Sand, George
1804–1876

Born on July 1 in Paris, Aurore Dupin, who later adopted the pen name George Sand, was educated mostly by her maternal grandmother in the family home of Nohant in central France. She is the best known nineteenth-century French woman writer, having published over seventy novels between 1829 and her death in 1876. She also wrote various autobiographical works, including the monumental Histoire de ma vie [Story of my life], which she claimed was written not for those in search of gold and glory but for dreamers, those who were concerned with the life of the soul. She wrote more than thirty plays, some of which were adapted from her novels. The quality of her writing for the theater is reflected in the fact that it was in her 1870 play L'Autre [The other] that the celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt made her first appearance. In addition, she was a feisty and energetic contributor of critical and political articles to newspapers; a tireless letter writer, engaging most notably in a lengthy correspondence with the novelist Gustave Flaubert; and a painter. As a painter she invented a process known as dendritage in which patches of color are pressed under cardboard or glass, producing branching patterns reminiscent of those which appear on the surface of certain rocks. She died on June 9 in Nohant, her family home.

INFLUENCES AND POLITICAL ACTIVITY

Her early literary works bear testimony to an urgent desire to change women's lot, especially in regard to the constraints of marriage as it was conceived under contemporary French law, the patriarchal Napoleonic code. Under the influence of various nineteenth-century social reformers, particularly Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc, Félicité de Lamennais, and Pierre Leroux, Sand longed for a harmonious utopian society. When the 1848 revolution not only failed to produce such a society but descended rapidly into violence, she retreated to the family home at Nohant, where, while awaiting the arrival of what she called "a republican republic," she turned to a series of works that convey ideal social systems.

Sand's idealist novels have much to offer readers with an interest in gender roles, male and female, actual and possible. Sand argued that the writer's mission was one of sentiment and love, that the modern novel ought to replace the parables of the naïve past, and that "writers had a broader and more poetic task than that of proposing a few prudent and conciliatory suggestions in order to attenuate the horror inspired by their representations." Novels, she added, are not a study of reality but a search for ideal truth.

Sand rejected the calls of militant feminists for her to become a member of the National Assembly founded by the revolution of 1848. She claimed to prefer reform to revolt. Although she was not a feminist in the contemporary understanding of the term, throughout her life she rejected the trammels of conventional society, especially constrictions based on assumptions about gender. Although she did not indulge, as is sometimes believed, in pornographic writing, she did abandon the unhappy marriage she had contracted at age eighteen and openly engaged in a variety of extramarital liaisons, most famously with the poet Alfred de Musset and the musician Frédéric Chopin. She wore men's clothing (an act punishable under the law) when she wanted to move in circles to which women were refused access. It is, however, in her fiction that she most powerfully revealed her thinking about the social constructs of gender.

THE NOVELS AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WORKS

The novel Indiana (1832), the first Sand published on her own, explores the physical and mental sufferings of a woman locked in an unhappy marriage, and although it remains somewhat conventional, even melodramatic, in its depiction of women as largely passive victims and men as actors it does foreshadow her later, more original writing. In Mauprat (1837) she began to examine the constraints placed on men by images of masculinity predicated on violence and brutality. In contrast to Indiana, Consuelo (1842) and its sequel, La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1843), depict a far more independent woman and something like an egalitarian marriage in their analysis of a gifted singer who, together with her husband, attempts to found an ideal society.

In the year after the 1848 revolution, Sand's short novel La Petite Fadette, often dismissed as a "pastoral" work, offers a witty and insightful exploration of a young girl's path from tomboy to woman, at the same time examining what it means for a twin to carve out a personal identity. Among her most sustained analyses of individuals seeking their own identity in the face of society's images of femininity and masculinity is the 1853 novel Les Maîtres-Sonneurs [The master pipers]. This work also offers an image of an ideal society formed from the combination of the people of the Berry region—whose placidity provides stability but militates against necessary reforms—and the energetic Bourbonnais, whose energy can turn quickly to destructive violence. In this novel of individual education Sand brings together ideas on music (largely informed by her relationships with Chopin and Liszt); her thinking on maternal love, which she sees as something that is not necessarily instinctive but can be learned; and images of sexual love based on equality.

Just as vitally as her novels, Sand's autobiography and voluminous correspondence chart the progress of her thinking and offer the image of an intelligent and independent mind constantly questioning contemporary constructions of gender.