Sand: Double Identity
[In the following extract, Lukacher uses psychoanalytical theory to examine the function of doubled female figures in Indiana. Lukacher relates Sand's use of such doubling to the writer's complex relationship with the two mother figures in her life.]
Which paternal eye was then opened on mankind the day it decided to divide itself by placing one sex under the domination of the other sex?
GEORGE SAND, Lélia
What is a name in our revolutionized and revolutionary society? A cipher for those who do nothing, a sign or an emblem for those who work of fight. The one I was given, I earned myself, after the event, by my own toil.
GEORGE SAND, Story of My Life
Inventing a Name and a Self
Like Stendhal's Vie de Henry Brulard, Sand's Histoire de ma vie (1855) was profoundly influenced by Rousseau's Confessions (1781). Though she admired Rousseau's autobiography, Sand nevertheless criticized his lack of integrity:
Forgive me, Jean-Jacques, for blaming you when I finished your admirable Confessions! In blaming you, I pay you greater tribute, because this blame does not obviate my respect and enthusiasm for the whole of your oeuvre.
Pardonne-moi, Jean-Jacques, de te blâmer en fermant ton admirable livre des Confessions! Je te blâme, et c'est te rendre hommage encore, puisque ce blâme ne détruit pas mon respect et mon enthousiasme pour l'ensemble de ton oeuvre.1
Sand's point is to tell "the story of her life," not, like Rousseau, by giving herself the freedom to invent and to lie, but by chronicling the most important events as precisely as possible. She begins by establishing her genealogy:
I was born the year Napoléon was crowned, Year Twelve of the French Republic (1804). My name is not Marie-Aurore de Saxe, Marquise de Dudevant, as several of my biographers have "discovered," but Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, and my husband, M. François Dudevant, claims no title.
Je suis née l'année du couronnement de Napoléon, l'an XII de la République française (1804). Mon nom n'est pas Marie-Aurore de Saxe, marquise de Dudevant, comme plusieurs de mes biographes l'ont découvert, mais Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, et mon mari, M. François Dudevant, ne s'attribue aucun titre.
(Story of My Life, 76/OA, 1:13)
Sand's dual origin makes her Maréchal de Saxe's great-grand-daughter on her father's side and a plebeian woman on her mother's side. This dual origin will have endless repercussions in her life and will provide the dramatic structure for her early novels. The family discrepancy between aristocrat and commoner will be replayed at her father's death by, respectively, her grandmother Madame Dupin (born Marie-Aurore de Saxe) and her mother Sophie Dupin (born Delaborde). Sand herself thinks that the confusion surrounding her name might be attributable to the confusion, on the part of her biographers, between two generations: "Marie-Aurore de Saxe was my grandmother; my husband's father was a colonel in the cavalry during the Empire" (Marie-Aurore de Saxe était ma grand-mère, le père de mon mari était colonel de cavalerie sous l'Empire) (Story of My Life, 76/OA, 1:14). In fact, this confusion is not accidental or a mere error on the part of her biographers; it is instead fundamental to understanding her identity. Aurore was always caught between two generations, her mother's and her grandmother's. Her life and her writing are constituted by that division, and, no less than for Rousseau, a certain fictionality is thus essential to Sand's self-understanding as well, since it was never a question of an authentic or irreducible self versus some fictive counterpart. For Sand the "story of her life" was always already a fiction.
My intention in this chapter is to show how Sand's dual maternal identification will be replayed in her first novels. I will examine how the choice between mother and grandmother is acted out in the recurrent feminine double who appears throughout Sand's early writing.
The question I will pose throughout my reading of Sand concerns the difficulties that confront any attempt to limit or restrict the nature of the conflict emerging around Sand's name, which, rather than being simply organized along a male-female axis, disrupts gender difference even as it constitutes it. Furthermore, Sand's conflicted identity spills beyond the question of gender and comes to determine her understanding of the relation between the isolated communities she depicts in her novels and civil society at large. Divided between two proper names, it was ultimately, of course, a third, masculine name, George Sand, that Aurore bequeathed to the world. Let us begin to reconstruct the paleography of this complex field of Sandean names and identities.
In Story of My Life, Sand explains that, first, her mother-in-law forbade her to use the family name Dudevant on "printed covers." Second, her literary collaboration with Jules Sandeau did not last. Abandoning her claim to authorial credit for their first effort, Rose et Blanche (1831), Aurore appears to have allowed Sandeau to take the credit and to sign under his pseudonym, Jules Sand, which, interestingly enough, he never used again. In a sense, then, she signs precisely by not signing, or rather, she signs within the very aberration of Sandeau's signature. She describes the emergence of her pseudonym in the following passage from Story of My Life:
I sketched out a first work that Jules Sandeau then entirely revised, and Delatouche put the name "Jules Sand" on it. This work attracted another publisher, who asked for another novel under the same pseudonym. I had written Indiana while at Nohant. I wanted to give it to the publisher under the pseudonym requested, but Jules Sandeau, out of modesty, did not wish to take credit for fathering a book which he knew nothing about. A name is a selling point, and as the little pseudonym had created a good demand, he really wanted to keep it. Delatouche was consulted and settled the question by a compromise: Sand would remain intact, and I would find another first name which would be uniquely mine. Without looking further, I quickly chose George, which seemed to me appropriate for someone from rural Berry.
Un premier ouvrage fut ébauché par moi, refait en entier ensuite par Jules Sandeau, à qui Delatouche fit le nom de Jules Sand. Cet ouvrage amena un autre éditeur qui demanda un autre roman sous le même pseudonyme. J'avais écrit Indiana à Nohant, je voulus le donner sous le pseudonyme demandé; mais Jules Sandeau, par modestie, ne voulut pas accepter la paternité d'un livre auquel il était complètement étranger. Le nom est tout pour la vente, et le petit pseudonyme s'étant bien écoulé, on tenait essentiellement à le conserver. Delatouche, consulté, trancha la question par un compromis: Sand resterait intact et je prendrai un autre prénom qui ne servirait qu'à moi. Je pris vite et sans chercher celui de George qui me paraissait synonyme de Berrichon.
(Story of My Life, 907/OA, 2:139)
Sand was evidently aware of acquiring, as she said, "half of the name of another writer," but she accepted it with good humor: "It was a whim of Delatouche which gave it to me" (Story of My Life, 908). Is this not Sand in a Rousseaustic moment of fictive reinvention, as she implies that the pseudonym is mere serendipity and not the leitmotif of her entire experience as a woman and as an artist?
The irreducible conflict within Aurore's experience of her name and identity was first forced upon her when her mother dressed her in a military uniform like that of her father and even introduced her as "my son" to the great Napoleonic general, Murat. While this disguise was meant to please Murat, Sand recalls it with horror: "But I felt hot under the fur, I felt smothered under the gold braiding, and I was very happy when we arrived at home and my mother again put on my Spanish costume of the time—the black silk dress, edged in white-mesh silk net starting at the knees and falling in fringes to the ankle" (Mais j'avais chaud sous cette fourrure, j'étais écrasée sous ces galons, et je me trouvai bien heureuse lorqu'en rentrant chez nous, ma mère me remettait le costume espagnol du temps, la robe de soie noire, bordée d'un grand réseau de soie, qui prenait au genou et tombait en franges sur la cheville (Story of My Life, 444/OA, 1:569). Though the instability of her gender identification was apparently difficult for the young Aurore (at least according to Sand's autobiography), we must also recall that Aurore (as George) would, as a young woman, come to adopt exactly such masculine attire:
I had already observed and experienced these things before I dreamed of settling in Paris, and had brought up the problem with my mother; how to make do with the cheapest mode of dress in this frightful climate, short of living confined to one's room seven days a week. She had replied to me, "At my age and with my habits, it's not hard; but when I was young and your father was short of money, he got the idea to dress me like a boy." At first mis idea seemed amusing to me, and then very ingenious. Having been dressed like a boy during my childhood, then having hunted in smock and gaiters with Descartes, I did not find it at all shocking again to put on a costume which was not new to me.
J'avais fait déjà ces remarques et ces expériences avant de songer à m'établir à Paris, et j'avais posé ce probléme à ma mère: comment suffire à la plus modeste toilette dans cet affreux climat, à moins de vivre enfermée dans sa chambre sept jours sur huit? Elle m'avait répondu: "C'est très possible à mon âge et avec mes habitudes; mais quand j'étais jeune et que ton père manquait d'argent, il avait imaginé de m'habiller en garçon." Cette idée me parut d'abord divertissante et puis très ingénieuse. Ayant été habillée en garçon durant mon enfance, ayant ensuite chassée en blouse et en guêtres avec Deschartres, je ne me trouvai pas étonnée du tout de reprendre un costume qui n'était pas nouveau pour moi.
(Story of My Life, 892-93/OA, 2:117)
Sand's masculine identification was further encouraged by financial difficulties, since masculine attire cost considerably less than the more complicated feminine wardrobe. "Idée divertissante," "ingénieuse"—such words indicate that for Sand the reinvention of gender, and more specifically cross-dressing, was from the beginning her privileged access to the experience of self-creation, not really of adopting or replicating an available identity but of fashioning a new one.
Sand's "Two Mothers"
In a letter dated 15 January, 1867, to Gustave Flaubert, George Sand makes the rather novel proposal that we should abolish the very notion whereby sexual difference is conventionally regarded in terms of anatomical difference. Sand is suggesting that, when considered more closely, apparent anatomical differences begin to dissolve and what appears is not two distinct sexes but one, though this one sex is still, we must remember, based on anatomical knowledge:
And still further, there is this for those strong in anatomy: there is only one sex. A man and a woman are so entirely the same thing, that one hardly understands the mass of distinctions and subtle reasons with which society is nourished concerning mis subject.
Et puis encore, il y a ceci pour les gens forts en anatomie: il n'y a qu'un sexe. Un homme et une femme c'est si bien la même chose que l'on ne comprend guère les tas de distinctions et de raisonnements subtils dont se sont nourries les sociétés sur ce chapitre-là.2
What is the relation between what are in effect Sand's "two mothers" and her notion here of "one sex"? Might it be that Sand's creative and highly idiosyncratic experience of self-fashioning revealed to her at a relatively early age that within and between the apparent anatomical distinctions between the sexes there was another element, another component that traversed these differences even as it marked them out? And is not this late notion of "one sex" finally a metaphor for the act of self-creation that Sand has always been heir to? In what follows, we shall try to find some indications, some preliminary outlines, of an answer.
Sand's father's premature death (Aurore was then four years old) confused her greatly, and like Stendhal, she was too young to understand death. She recalled asking her grandmother this cruel question: "But when my daddy is through being dead, he'll come back to see you, won't he?" (Mais quand mon papa aura fini d'être mort, il reviendra bien te voir?) (Story of My Life, 464/OA, 1:598). The death of the father also marked the end of normal family life, hence the impossible choice between her grandmother, who lived at Nohant, and her mother, who went to Paris. Sand's fiction is organized around family scenarios which try to find a remedy for the family impasse. Young Aurore's "novels" were fundamentally linked to the mother and were composed in order to please her: "I was composing aloud interminable stories which my mother referred to as my novels. I have no recollection whatever of those droll compositions which my mother spoke of to me a thousand times, long before I had any thought of writing" (Je composais à haute voix d'interminables contes que ma mère appleait mes romans. Je n'ai aucun souvenir de ces plaisantes compositions, ma mère m'en a parlé mille fois, et longtemps avant que j'eusse la pensée d'écrire) (Story of My Life, 426/OA, 1:542). The relation between Sand's mother and her writing warrants extensive development.
In this early literary context, let us now consider the divine and androgynous Corambé, Sand's desperate attempt at reconciling the masculine with the feminine. Even retrospectively, Sand is incapable of giving a meaning to Corambé: "I shall limit myself to recalling that I had started—at so early an age, I could not say exactly when—an unwritten novel made up of thousands of stories linked together through a main fantastic character called Corambé (a name without any significance, whose syllables put themselves together by chance in a dream)" (Je me bornerai à rappeler que j'avais commencè , dans un âge si enfantin que je ne pourrai le préciser, un roman composé de milliers de romans qui s'enchaînaient les uns aux autres par l'intervention d'un principal personnage fantastique appelé Corambé [nom sans signification aucune, dont les syllabes s'étaient rassemblées dans le hasard de quelque rêve]) (Story of My Life, 925/OA, 2:165). The function of the imaginary Corambé is to resituate the family drama. Since, according to Freud, dreams have childhood material at their command and since we know that material is for the most part blotted out in our consciousness, it is not surprising that Sand does not remember the meaning of the dream in which Corambé first appears. Nor is it surprising that many critics have sought to impose a meaning upon this mysterious name. My intention is to demonstrate why Sand's writings actually made it impossible for Corambé to survive.
Sand herself insists on the absence of sexual specificity of Corambé, and Corambé's presexual anticipation of the idea of "one sex" appears to undermine in advance any notion of sexual difference organized around normative anatomical notions:
And then, I also had to complement it at times with a woman's garb, because what I had loved best and understood best until then was a woman—my mother. Hence it often appeared to me with female features. In sum, it had no sex and put on many different guises.
Et puis, il me fallait le compléter en le vêtant en femme à l'occasion, car ce que j'avais le mieux aimé, le mieux compris jusqu'alors, c'était une femme, c'était ma mère. En somme, il n'avait pas de sexe et revêtait toutes sortes d'aspects différents.
(Story of My Life, 605/OA, 1:813)
Helene Deutsch's Freudian analysis of Corambé is relevant here, for even though it is clearly mistaken, Deutsch's remarks will help us to clarify the relation between Sand's notion of sexual difference and her experience of the dilemma of the proper name.
For Deutsch, Sand's "split personality" is "a clear example of a conflict between femininity and masculinity." She links Sand's experience of "bisexuality"3 to what she calls the "masculinity complex," and she argues that Sand takes this essentially defensive measure because of her father's early death and her abandonment by her mother to the care of her grandmother. By way of background here, we should recall that Sand's grandmother, in order to ensure that all links between Aurore and her mother were severed once and for all, told Aurore that her mother had been a prostitute, which was in fact the truth. Among the highly disruptive effects this had on Aurore was the shock it presented to her notion of her own legitimacy. Whose daughter might she actually be? This is an issue that, as we will see later, looms large in Sand's narrative imagination. But to return to the question of Corambé, which, as Deutsch interestingly remarks, disappeared during an interval following the revelations of Aurore's grandmother, Corambé is precisely a figure of the relation between writing and the maternal, a relation which, for Sand, is always unstable, threatened, vulnerable: "If my mother was detestable and hateful, then I, the fruit of her womb, was, too. Terrible harm had been done to me that could have been irreparable" (Si ma mère était méprisable et haïssable, moi, le fruit de ses entrailles, je l'étais aussi. On m'avait fait un mal affreux qui pouvait être irréparable) (Story of My Life, 634/OA, 1:858). For Sand, the major difficulty is to differentiate between two opposed maternal models which have been sublimated in Corambé's dreamlike parental union. Thinking back on her childhood following the revelations, Sand says that she herself became machinelike and that Corambé fell silent. The temporary death of Corambé might indicate that s/he was linked with the mother's fault and could not endure the damage done to the maternal representation, but also that, for the mature Sand, writing itself became in effect the sublation of Corambé, the dialectical negation, uplifting, and preservation of Corambé at a higher level of complexity. Deutsch, somewhat more narrowly, sees Corambé as marking the dominance of the masculine disposition which pursues Sand throughout her life and proves, in Deutsch's estimation, to be a limiting factor and ultimately the cause of Sand's repeated sexual failures: "This attachment to Corambé seems to have been a great obstacle to her feminine love life."4
Deutsch divides the name Corambé into coram, the Latin word for "in the presence of," and bé, "b," the second letter of the alphabet. When Aurore was still very young and her father was away, her mother tried to teach her the alphabet. Sand showed talent and application but had one curious difficulty: the letter "b" did not exist for her, and she obstinately omitted it from her list. Deutsch's argument is to demonstrate that the "b" repressed in her childhood is identical with the bé that later turned up as the suffix to coram: "The whole word could then mean, 'in the presence of b.' If the b repressed in childhood referred to the absent father whom she hardly knew at the time, then its turning up in Corambé would be quite understandable."5 If the massive repression resulted from her father's death, then the complete meaning of Corambé becomes "in the father's presence." When Sand transformed her father's demise into the comforting presence of an androgynous Corambé, she was also exposed to the gravest obstacle to her feminine nature. This explanation is, however, inadequate, since Corambé neither followed Sand, nor did Sand ever really abandon the name. It was, rather, as we have suggested, transformed, sublated, into something else, and as such remained the silent link conjoining Sand's life of writing to the constitutive division of the two mothers; Corambé names the very principle that traverses anatomical difference and makes "one sex" possible—a Utopian possibility, to be sure, and one that is crucial to understanding her future notion of the Utopian community, as we shall see later in this chapter. By Sand's own account, the disappearance of Corambé coincided with her sexual maturation.
The transformative disappearance of Corambé led Sand to, among other things, the writing of Indiana (1832). Writing will itself at once replace the androgynous Corambé and make his/her return (im)possible:
Meanwhile, my poor Corambé vanished as soon as I started to feel in a mood to persevere with a certain subject. He was of too tenuous an essence to bend to the demands of form. I had hardly finished my book when I wanted to regenerate my usual flow of reveries. Impossible! The characters of my manuscript, shut in a drawer, were happy to remain quiet. I hoped in vain to see Corambé reappear, and with him those thousands of beings who lulled me every day as pleasant day dreams.
Mais mon pauvre Corambé s'envola pour toujours, dès que j'eus commencé à me sentir dans cette veine de persévérance sur un sujet donné. II était d'une essence trop subtile pour se plier aux exigences de la forme. A peine eus-je fini mon livre, que je voulus retrouver le vague ordinaire de mes rêveries. Impossible! Les personnages de mon manuscrit, enfermés dans un tiroir, voulurent bien y rester tranquilles; mais j'espérai en vain voir reparaître Corambé et avec lui ces millers d'êtres qui me berçaient tous les jours de leurs agréables divagations.
(Story of My Life, 925/OA, 2:165)
The sublation of Corambé is an essential stage in Sand's reinvention of her identity and her art. Philippe Berthier has spoken of the frustration and the difficulties of this transition. He divides Corambé into cor (the heart) and ambo ("two," "the two of us"): "The name of Corambé would emblematize its function in the child's inner life: it would inscribe in her the sensibility perturbed by the family disequilibrium, the promise and already the presence of a pacified reunion in a euphoric shared love."6 In the idealized figure of Corambé, Aurore could project her need to love and be loved in the legitimacy of a true couple. Corambé is at the same time the fantasm of conjugal unity (her father is already dead) and the reconciliation dreamed of between her forbidding grandmother and her too-permissive mother.
The Coming to Writing: Indiana
Indiana describes the tragic effects of Colonel Delmare's tyranny upon his wife, Indiana, and Raymon's seduction of Noun. The novel reveals Sand's family tensions even while it transforms them. The female double Indiana/Noun, in conjunction with Noun's suicide, amounts to another symbolic killing of Corambé. As Berthier remarks: "This is a kind of hierogamy which is here celebrated: Aurore stages the imaginary wedding of her parents, including herself in it in a retro-projective way shaping both past and future according to her desire."7 While repeating this oscillation between her conflicted childhood and her sexual difficulties in adult life, Indiana also registers, in the guise of the Delmare couple, her bitter criticism of her failed marriage and of marriage in general.
As George Sand remarks in her 1842 preface to the novel, Indiana describes the catastrophic consequences of a bad marriage:
When I wrote Indiana, I was young; I acted in obedience to feelings of great strength and sincerity which overflowed thereafter in a series of novels, almost all of which were based on the same idea: the ill-defined relations between the sexes, attributable to the constitution of our society. These novels were all more or less inveighed against by the critics, as making unwise assaults upon the institution of marriage.
Lorsque j'écrivis le roman d'Indiana j'étais jeune, j'obéissais à des sentiments pleins de force et de sincérité, qui débordèrent de là dans une série de romans basés à peu près tous sur la même donnée: le rapport mal établi entre les sexes, par le fait de la société. Ces romans furent tous plus ou moins incriminés par la critique, comme portant d'imprudentes atteints à l'institution du mariage.8
It will be helpful here to summarize the plot of Indiana. It revolves around Indiana Delmare; she is married to old Colonel Delmare, who mistreats her. She falls in love with Raymon de Ramière, who tries in vain to seduce her. Leaving her husband in Bernica at the Ile Bourbon, Indiana returns to France and finds that de Ramière has married the rich Laure de Nangy. Destitute and dying, Indiana is saved by her cousin, Ralph Brown, who has spent his life with the Delmares. Ralph and Indiana decide to return to Bernica since M. Delmare is dead. Both Ralph and Indiana are unknown in the island:
In the year that had passed since the Nahandove brought Sir Ralph and his companion back to the colony, he had not been seen in the town three times; and, as for Madame Delmare, her seclusion had been so absolute that her existence was still a problematical matter to many of the people.
Depuis près d'un an que le navire la Nahandove avait ramené M. Brown et sa compagne à la colonie, on n'avait pas vu trois fois sir Ralph à la ville; et, quant à madame Delmare, sa retraite avait été si absolue, que son existence était encore une chose problématique pour beaucoup d'habitants.
(Indiana 4:317/343)
Sand never identified herself with Indiana. It was Deutsch, among other critics, who forced Sand's identification with her heroines. In Indiana, autobiography and fiction are two separeate but inextricable elements. Sand's identification with her own text produces in Indiana a new development in her social criticism which revolves around the strangely haunting figure of the female double. Sand gives a strong indication of this in her astonishing confession in Story of My Life:
I have created many female characters and I think that when people have read the present account of the impressions and reflections of my life, they will clearly see that I never portrayed myself in feminine guise. If I had wanted to show myself in serious depth, I would have told a life story which, up to that point, bore more resemblance to that of the monk Alexis (in the not very entertaining novel Spiridion [1839]) than to the passionate young Creole, Indiana.
J'ai présenté beaucoup de types de femmes, et je crois que quand on aura lu cet exposé des impressions et des réflexions de ma vie, on verra bien que je ne me suis jamais mise en scène sous des traits féminins. Si j'avais voulu montrer le fond sérieux, j'aurais raconté une vie qui jusqu'alors aurait plus ressemblé à celle du moine Alexis (dans le roman peu récréatif de Spiridion) qu'à celle d'Indiana la créole passionnée.
(Story of My Life, 921-22/OA, 2:160)
The difficulty that Sand experiences in portraying herself "in feminine guise" reveals her dread of being identified with other women insofar as this also entails her exclusion from society. Sand's strong identification with male writers echoes Nancy Miller's remark that "through literature, and more specifically through the use of the male pseudonym and male personae, women writers have been able to liberate themselves and attain a whole human experience."9 Writing "as a man" reveals at once Sand's response to the exclusion of women from literature while at the same time marking her ambivalence toward identifying with women, and thus a certain ambiguity toward feminism.
The subtleties of role playing are, as a result, very complex in Sand's writing. In discussing three novels written between 1832 and 1845—Indiana, Mauprat (1837), and Le Péché de Monsieur Antoine (1845)— I want to examine these issues in the context of Sand's artistic and intellectual shift of focus from the representation of "maternal fictions" to the future of Utopian communities.
In spite of Sand's mask of masculinity and Deutsch's diagnosis of a "masculinity complex," we will repeatedly rediscover the more powerful mediating figure of the recurrent female double and the phenomenon of female cross-dressing in Sand's major fiction; this includes not simply women dressing as men but women dressing as other women. Whereas for Deutsch "bisexuality" is uniquely linked to Sand's "masculinity complex," Naomi Schor's notion of "bisextuality" (at once bisexual and bitextual, an irreducible doubling that cuts across writing and gender) enables us to mark the oscillation between masculine and feminine on either side of the symbolic axis of castration. In other words, as Schor demonstrates, these undecidable identifications and permutations are characteristic of Sand: "In Sand's texts, this perverse oscillation takes the form of a breakdown of characterization which is quite possibly Sand's most radical gesture as a writer."10 Ultimately, the occasional adoption of male costume does not constitute an act of subversion but rather belongs to a long tradition of cross-dressing in fiction, drama, and opera. What Schor finds most interesting is the phenomenon of women dressing as other women, which I, in turn, will link to Sand's experience of the feminine double: "Female travesty in the sense of women dressing up as or impersonating other women constitutes by far the most disruptive form of bisextuality."11
Sand's feminine doubles, for instance, Indiana/Noun, Lélia/Pulchérie, and Valentine/Louise (each of which results from Sand's interminable impasse between her grandmother and her mother), are exemplary "bisextual" phenomena. Noun's suicide provides a fictional solution to the crisis that Sand herself experienced as insoluble. The feminine double is the figure at the intersection of two opposing maternal powers, and to choose either one is to end in tragedy. Perhaps Sand's writing enabled her to avert the tragedy for which she herself seemed destined.
Addressing issues raised in Story of My Life, which offers unparalleled insights into the deep-seated conflicts in Sand's nature, Thelma Jurgrau characterizes Sand's sexual "double bind": "The experiences of womanhood to which Sand herself directs us in Story of My Life are a primary source of evidence of gender anxiety, for they give readers a sense of the unusual origins and development that explain her inability to adapt to the typically constrained life of a woman of her time."12
The fluctuation between masculine and feminine identifications took a disturbing turn in a dream that Sand recounts in Story of My Life. In this passage, Aurore is fascinated by the green wallpaper of her bedroom and particularly by two figures shown in medallions over each doorway:
The one I saw on waking in the morning was a nymph, or a dancing Flora. This one gave enormous pleasure. The one facing her . . . had a totally different expression. She was a serious bacchante. I held the bacchante in awe, having read the story of Orpheus torn apart by similarly cruel ones; in the evening, when the shimmering light illuminated her extended arm and the thyrsus, I thought I saw the head of the divine poet on the end of a javelin.
Celle que je voyais le matin en m'éveillant était une nymphe ou une Flore dansante. Celle-là me plaisait énormément. Celle qui lui faisait vis à vis . . . était d'une expression toute différente. C'était une bacchante grave. Je regardais la bacchante avec étonnement, j'avais lu l'histoire d'Orphée déchiré par ces cruelles et le soir, quand la lumière vacillante éclairait le bras tendu et le thyrse, je croyais voir la tête du divin chantre au bout d'un javelot.
(Story of My Life, 477-78/OA, 1:619)
Aurore's dream fulfills her foreboding sense that something terrible was about to happen. Emerging from her medallion, the bacchante becomes a furious maenad who chases both Sand and the nymph and pierces both of their bodies with her sharp lance. The feminine double, bacchante/nymph, which again recalls Sand's hatred/love for the mother/grandmother figure, becomes another figure for Sand's tormented experience of gender identification.
This early scenario in Sand's life is replayed in Indiana. Instead of having two distinct and opposed figures (the bacchante and the nymph), Indiana and Noun represent the blurring of identities between the two Creoles. For Sand, the dream evokes Orpheus' death and the horror of his dismemberment. The dread she feels while looking at the wallpaper figures is expressed by the doubling of the female bacchante/nymph. In Indiana, Raymon de Ramière feels a similar dread when he is unable to differentiate between Indiana and Noun. The terror he experiences is closely related to Sand's horror at imagining the bacchante emerge from the wallpaper, with "the head of the divine poet on the end of a javelin." Raymon imagines that his mistress, Noun, is really the disguised Indiana, and thus that in making love to his mistress he is in fact making love to the chaste Indiana:
If she [Noun] had not been as drunk as he, she would have understood that in his wildest flights Raymon was thinking of another woman. But Noun appropriated all these transports to herself, when Raymon saw naught of her but Indiana's dress. If he kissed her black hair, he fancied that he was kissing Indiana's black hair. It was Indiana whom he saw in the fumes of the punch which Noun's hand had lighted; it was she who smiled upon him and beckoned him from behind those white muslin curtains.
Si elle n'eût pas été ivre comme lui, elle eût compris qu'au plus fort de son délire Raymon songeait à une autre. Mais Noun prenait tous ces transports pour elle-même, lorsque Raymon ne voyait d'elle que la robe d'Indiana. S'il baisait ses cheveux noirs, il croyait baiser les cheveux noirs d'Indiana. C'était Indiana qu'il voyait dans le nuage du punch que la main de Noun venait d'allumer; c'était elle qui l'appelait et qui lui souriait derrière ces blancs rideaux de mousseline.
(Indiana, 4:63/86)
The ghostlike shape of Indiana behind the "white muslin curtains" stresses the instability of Raymon's desire. In loving a "ghost," Raymon replays the Sandean scenario in which the absent woman is always the one most cherished.
In "The Uncanny" (1919), Freud describes the psychological phenomenon that arouses horror and dread. The uncanny registers the fact that something familiar has become "uncanny" (unheimlich), unfamiliar, through repression.13Indiana offers an exemplary incident of such a transformation in its account of Raymon's disorientation when, after Noun's suicide, he experiences an uncanny return of the repressed when he discovers that he has mistaken the hair of the dead Noun for that of Indiana: after Noun's suicide, Indiana offers Raymon a mass of cut hair, which he assumes to be that of Indiana, only to be overwhelmed when he realizes that it is that of his dead mistress. Raymon becomes a figure for Sand herself before the impasse of the double feminine identification. The familiar hair of the mysterious Indiana becomes unfamiliar once Raymon realizes it belongs to his late intimate companion. The familiarity/unfamiliarity of the hair and the women to whom it belongs crosses and recrosses. The central issue here is the instability that characterizes all these identifications.
Freud in effect describes the structure of Sandean "bisextuality" when he remarks that "among its different shades of meaning, the word heimlich [familiar] exhibits one which is identical with its opposite unheimlich. What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich."14 In other words, heimlich contains the meanings of both "canny" and "uncanny," "familiar" and "unfamiliar." So too does feminine identity in Sand. It contains within itself both the selfsame and the other. The experience of this doubleness causes Raymon to faint:
He looked more closely and saw a mass of black hair, of varying lengths, which seemed to have been cut in haste, and which Indiana was smoothing with her hands.
"Do you recognize it?" she asked.
Raymon hesitated, looked again at the handkerchief about her head and thought that he understood.
"This is not yours," he said, untying the kerchief which concealed Madame Delmare's hair.
"Don't you recognize this?"
Raymon sank upon a chair; Noun's locks fell from his trembling hand. He shivered from head to foot and fell in a swoon on the floor.
Il se pencha, et vit une masse de cheveux noirs irrégulièrement longs qui semblaient avoir été coupés à la hâte et qu'Indiana rassemblait et lissait dans ses mains.
"Les reconnaissez-vous?" lui dit-elle.
Raymon hésita, reporta son regard sur le foulard dont elle était coiffée, et crut comprendre.
"Ce ne sont pas les vôtres!" dit-il en détachant le mouchoir des Indes qui lui cachait ceux de madame Delmare.
"Ne reconnaissez-vous donc pas ceux-là?"
Raymon se laissa tomber sur une chaise; les cheveux de Noun échappèrent à sa main tremblante. Il frissonna de la tête aux pieds, et roula évanoui sur le parquet.
(Indiana, 4:163-64/183-84)
As he recognizes that he is holding the hair of the dead Noun, Raymon experiences the return of the repressed. Raymon's uncanny confusion between the dead and the living causes his desire to misfire and puts an end to his love for Indiana:
When he came to himself, Madame Delmare was on her knees beside him, weeping copiously; but Raymon no longer loved her.
"You have inflicted a horrible wound on me," he said; "a wound which it is not in your power to cure."
Quand il revint à lui, madame Delmare, à genoux près de lui, l'arrosait de larmes et lui demandait grâce; mais Raymon ne l'aimait plus.
"Vous m'avez fait un mal horrible," lui dit-il; "un mal qu'il n'est pas en votre pouvoir de réparer."
(Indiana, 4:164/184)
The uncanniness of the feminine double creates yet another form of psychological disturbance. The sexual instability of Raymon's love for Indiana is transformed into hatred: "He swore that he would be her master, were it but for a single day, and that then he would abandon her, to have the satisfaction of seeing her at his feet" (Il jura qu'il serait son maître, ne fût-ce qu'un jour, et qu'ensuite il l'abandonnerait pour avoir le plaisir de la voir à ses pieds) (Indiana, 4:172/191). Raymon's loss of consciousness emerges at the very moment the characteristic Sandean dilemma arises. That the crisis of the impossible but necessary need to choose between the two maternal models of identification emerges here within a male character and is envisioned from a male perspective simply reduplicates the process of doubling and division that has been at work from the outset. By virtue of the fetishistic remainder/reminder of the hair, the dead woman is the living one. Raymon's paralyzing inability to differentiate between them replays Sand's guilt. The unsettling effect that the scene has upon Raymon poses the question of the division within the Sandean ego.
We have, then, two pairs of doubles here: Indiana/Noun and Sand/Raymon. An important piece of evidence regarding this latter identification is surely the fact that the last words spoken by Raymon's dying mother exactly repeat the dying words of Sand's grandmother. Madame de Ramière says to her son, "'You are about to lose your best friend'" ("Vous perdez, lui dit-elle, votre meilleure amie" (Indiana, 4:244/264); while Sand's grandmother, on her deathbed, tells Aurore, "'You are losing your best friend.' Those were her last words" (Tu perds ta meilleure amie. Ce furent ces dernières paroles) (Story of My Life, 799/OA, 1:1106). The male who faints in Indiana is yet another figuration for the invariable Sandean experience of what lies at the limits of consciousness. The anguished choice between two modes of feminine identification, one the severe superego, the other the libidinally free ego ideal, is thus linked to the crisis of gender identification itself: am I a man or a woman? These are asymmetrical but inextricably linked dilemmas, and they lie at the heart of the structure and language of Indiana. They are asymmetrical because the other who calls on the ego to inhibit its desires, who prohibits the realization of desire, may or may not be female; and, conversely, the other who induces the ego to more pleasure, to more libidinal freedom, may or may not be male. The superego identification of the "thou shalt" variety and the ego-ideal identification with a positive rather than a negative model of desire form the constitutive parts of the unconscious dilemma of the Sandean ego, both in life and in art. The ego who responds to the call for more pleasure has no feminine models at its disposal, and hence it responds to the inducement to enjoy by taking on a masculine persona, cross-dressing, and all the other familiar Sandean motifs. On the other hand, the prohibition of desire by that other unconscious component in the Sandean ego forces it into its dialectically necessary conventionality; thus Sand must always be at once the archetypal Victorian matron and the archetypal Victorian artist-rebel. The crossings of these inescapable modes of identification lead us to a definitive typology of both Sand's life and her writing.
I would like to return to this process of doubling and division in one of Sand's dreams, which stages her gender anxiety at an early age. In this dream, she describes in detail a Pulcinella dressed in red and gold which she received as a gift when she was very young. The clown could not be kept in the same box with her favorite doll because she felt that the Pulcinella was a danger to it. Aurore had a foreboding that something terrible would happen to the feminine doll if she remained too near the Pulcinella. Having hung him from the stove, opposite her bed, Aurore fell asleep: "At night I had a terrible dream: Pulcinella, now dressed in a red spangled vest, his hump in front, had gotten up, caught fire on the stove, and was running all around, after me, after my doll who fled in a panic, while he reached us with long jets of flame" (La nuit, je fis un rêve épouvantable: polichinelle s'était levé, sa bosse de devant, revêtue d'un gilet de paillon rouge, avait pris feu sur le poêle, et il courait partout, poursuivant tantôt moi, tantôt ma poupée qui fuyait éperdue, tandis qu'il nous atteignait par de longs jets de flamme) (Story of My Life, 424/OA, 1:539). For Sand, the Pulcinella's violence, like Raymon's loss of consciousness, constitutes a moment of intense anxiety. While Pulcinella gave Sand a great souffrance morale, Raymon complains that a horrible wound (un mal horrible) has been inflicted on him. Aurore's passion for the fire is henceforth transformed into dread: "And instead of playing with the fire, as had been my passion until then, just one look at the fire left me in great terror" (Et, au lieu de jouer avec le feu comme jusque-là j'en avais eu la passion, la seule vue du feu me laissa une grande terreur) (Story of My Life, 424/OA, 1:539). As for Raymon, he swears that "he would triumph over her [Indiana]. It was no longer a matter of snatching a new pleasure, but of punishing an insult; not of possessing a woman, but of subduing her" (qu'il triompherait d'elle. Il ne s'agissait plus pour lui de conquérir un bonheur, mais de punir un affront; de posséder une femme, mais de la réduire) (Indiana, 4:172/191). The difference between and within the sexes is always an enigma for Sand. The Pulcinella dream, like Raymon's loss of consciousness, reveals her anxiety about both gender difference and the nature of feminine identity itself. Sand's writing is a defense against having to choose her gender, having to choose between the alternative maternal fictions she is presented with. Noun's suicide and Indiana's failures are figures of Sand's effort to evade the demands of reality.
Sand's writing is thus also an evasion, a foreclosure, a disavowal of the reality of death. Her refusal to choose between the fictions of her mothers is also a refusal to choose between life and death.
For Freud, death cannot be represented in our unconscious: "The psycho-analytic school could venture on the assertion that at bottom no one believes in his own death, or, to put the same thing in another way, that in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality" (SE, 14:289). It is part of Freud's clinical experience to discover that although the unconscious is ruled by the pleasure principle, it can be threatened by the death drive, thanatos. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1919), Freud argues that the life instincts have more contact with our internal perceptions, while the death instincts seem to do their work unobtrusively: "The pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts." Life is finally in the service of death. In Sand's scenarios, the doll, Noun, and Indiana are symbolic figures of the death drive. The different registers of thanatos are probed in Sand's dreams and writing.
Sand's work unveils that the death drive is secretly at work in most of our life practices. Following Freud's theses in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Julia Kristeva poses the question of how the death drive functions within a divided ego: "Thus, if the death instinct is not represented in the unconscious, must one invent another level in the psychic apparatus where—simultaneously with jouissance—the being of its nonbeing would be recorded? It is indeed a production of the split ego, made up of fantasy and fiction—in short, the level of the imagination, the level of writing which bears witness to the hiatus, blank or spacing that constitutes death for the unconscious."15 The abandoned Indiana is, for Sand, like the dismembered Orpheus, a figure of the destructive forces at work in the act of artistic creation. In Indiana, Noun's suicide and Indiana's failed suicide explicitly raise these questions.
Abandoned a first time by Raymon de Ramière, Indiana tries to drown herself in the Seine. She is saved by her cousin Ralph, who asks her to promise to join him in committing suicide together sometime in the future. This strange bond suggests that the union between man and woman is possible only in death:
"Well then," rejoined Ralph, "swear to me that you will not resort to suicide without notifying me. I swear to you on my honor that I will not oppose your design in any way. I simply insist on being notified: as for life, I care about it as little as you do, and you know that I have often had the same idea."
"Eh bien, jurez-moi," reprit Ralph, "de ne plus avoir recours au suicide sans m'en prévenir. Je vous jure sur l'honneur de ne m'y opposer en aucune manière.
Je ne tiens qu'à être averti; quant au reste, je m'en soucie aussi peu que vous, et vous savez que j'ai souvent eu la même idée."
(Indiana, 4:203/222)
The joint suicide occupies a privileged place in the narrative since it stands as a substitute for the marriage between Indiana and Ralph. It is thus also a kind of regressive reverie, a symbolic return to the womb: the Ile Bourbon, which is the place of origin, also becomes the site chosen for the suicide pact. Kristeva describes the death drive in similar terms when she speaks of "a total oceanic death."
Sand describes a fantasm of absolute plenitude in Story of My Life when she recalls the aesthetic sensations that overwhelmed her in the midst of a drowning experience: "But right in the middle of the ford, a dizziness seized me, my heart leaped, my vision blurred, I heard the fatal Yes roaring in my ears. I reined my horse abruptly to the right and found myself in deep water, wracked by hysterical laughter and joy" (Mais au beau milieu du gué, le vertige de la mort s'empare de moi, mon coeur bondit, ma vue se trouble, j'entends le oui fatal gronder dans mes oreilles, je pousse brusquement mon cheval à droite, et me voilà dans l'eau profonde, saisie d'un rire nerveux et d'une joie délirante) (Story of My Life, 793/OA, 1:1096). Suicide is indeed for Sand "oceanic" and jubilant, and it coincides with this other voice, this voice of the other that cries oui as it reaches beyond the pleasure principle.
In Indiana, Sand again runs the risk of complete dissolution. Though the suicide pact of Indiana and Ralph never transpires, it succeeds in inscribing Sand's narrative within a familiar male narrative paradigm. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie (1788) "legitimates" Indiana insofar as Ralph and Indiana reiterate the terms of this earlier text. As Ralph says to Indiana: "When I read you the story of Paul and Virginie, you only half understood it. You wept, however, you saw only the story of a brother and sister where I had quivered with sympathy, realizing the torments of two lovers. The book made me miserable, whereas it was your joy" (Quand je vous lisais l'histoire de Paul et Virginie, vous ne la compreniez qu'à demi. Vous pleuriez, cependant; vous aviez vu l'histoire d'une frère et d'une soeur là où j'avais frissonné de sympathie en apercevant les angoisses de deux amants) (Indiana, 4:301/324). The resemblance between Paul et Virginie and Indiana stops at the last chapter, as if Sand deliberately wanted to mark the difference by "adding" another ending, an ending that averts suicide. Nancy Miller says of the different endings: "At stake here is what I think amounts to a mise en abyme, as it were (the pun is not only terrible and irresistible but important), of a female signature, the internal delineation of a writer's territory."16 Sand's distancing from the legitimacy of the precursor text also asserts the triumph of life over death. In their evasion of suicide, Indiana and Ralph transform Paul et Virginie's tragic end into a Sandean utopia, which nevertheless lies beyond the pleasure principle. In brief, the utopia is another kind of death.
For Isabelle Naginski, the novel's double ending finds its true significance in the creation of an authentic language system: "There is a legitimate reason for the false suicide to be transmuted into a happy ending, a logic behind the two heroes' flight to a paradise lost, as they engulf themselves in a circular mythological time."17 As Naginski argues, Ralph and Indiana achieve a new system of communication. Moreover, the novel's double ending prepares the birth of the future socialist commune which will liberate Sand from the anguish-ridden family scenarios.
Sand's early ambivalent feeling for her mother and grandmother is resolved in this way. At first, hatred was the grandmother's portion and love the mother's. Later a reversal took place: the grandmother was loved and the mother was hated, because she disappointed her daughter. In returning with Ralph to Bernica, Indiana recalls all she owes to both her cousin and the island: "Do you know that his mother was my mother's sister? that we were born in the same valley; that in our early years he was my protector; that he was my mainstay, my only teacher, my only companion at Ile Bourbon; that he has followed me everywhere" (Vous ne savez donc pas que sa mère était la soeur de la mienne; que nous sommes nés dans la même vallée; que son adolescence a protégé mes premiers pas; qu'il a été mon seul appui, mon seul instituteur, mon seul compagnon à l'île Bourbon; qu'il m'a suivie partout) (Indiana, 4:121/144). The maternal link is underlined here, and this is what justifies the Utopian departure of the lovers to the island, which in turn marks its supplementary difference from Paul et Virginie.
In founding their "Indian cottage" outside wedlock, Ralph and Indiana subvert the traditional endings of the nineteenth-century French novel. Union libre offers here an alternative that remained unacceptable in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it defines the concept of a "happy" ending that she will elaborate in her later fiction. Georges Bataille has spoken of "the community of those who do not have a community," which is an apt description for the Utopian exclusion Ralph and Indiana experience at Ile Bourbon. The return to the place of origin again points to the question of the maternal and indicates as well Sand's need to legitimate her origin and identity. However, this maternal link must be broken in order for Ralph to tell the story of his life to Indiana: "I was hardly born when I was cast out of the heart which I most needed. My mother put me away from her breast with disgust" (A peine né, je fus repoussé du coeur dont j'avais le plus besoin. Ma mère m'éloigna de son sein avec dégoût) (Indiana, 4:298/321). Sand's ambiguity toward her mother is reiterated by Ralph's words. And there is something more; the desire to differentiate herself from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre is only part of the story. As Nancy Miller observes, although Indiana also marks the end of the collaboration between Sand and Jules Sandeau, "the traces of a certain doubling seem to remain."18 There is no end to the doublings at work in Indiana, for Sand is always invariably expressing both her attachment to and her separation from the past.
After her grandmother's death, Aurore was forced to go and live with her mother in Paris. The long-dreamt-of maternal proximity was quickly transformed into a painful "absence of community." In her memories Sand indicates the difficulties of their relation: "[Aurore's mother] said that she had thus been informed by one of the closest friends of the family. I did not say anything in response; I could not say anything. I felt sick and disgusted. She went to bed, victorious over having crushed me" (Elle se disait renseignée ainsi par un des plus intimes amis de notre maison. Je ne répondis rien, je ne pouvais rien répondre. Le coeur me levait de dégoût. Elle se mit au lit, triomphante de m'avoir écrasée) (Story of My Life, 815/OA, 1:1129). Sand's disgust transforms the once-desired maternal relation into what Kristeva calls an "impregnable and thus malevolent, detestable exteriority."19 Separation from the mother, which was once dreaded, now becomes desirable; it is symbolically acted out by the double's suicide. One after the other, mother and grandmother are symbolically eliminated in Sand's fiction. Instead of reading Sand's ambiguous gender identification within the traditional opposition of masculine/feminine, we might understand it as an effort to regulate the dreaded maternal double and the gender trouble it produces by eliminating it.
In Indiana, for example, Ralph's mother is expressive of the bad mother, while Raymon's mother offers a positive vision: "That evening Madame de Ramière died in her son's arms. Raymon's grief was deep and bitter. His mother was really necessary to him; with her he lost all the moral comfort of his life" (Le soir, madame de Ramière mourut dans les bras de son fils. La douleur de Raymon fut amère et profonde. Sa mère lui était réellement nécessaire; avec elle il perdait tout le bien-être moral de sa vie) (Indiana, 4:244-45/265). There is no end to the doubling of the maternal figure in Sand's fiction.
Toward the New Community
If "Sand," as we discussed earlier, was the name that Delatouche gave her, "Piffoël" was the name that she gave herself. In Entretiens journaliers avec le très docte et très habile docteur Piffoël (1837-1841), Piffoël is at once Sand and the voice of the other within. In the entry of 3, 4, 5 July 1837, Sand notes her mother's illness (she would die the following month): "Misery, despair, bitter tears, I did not know I loved her so much this poor woman!" (Misère, désespoir, larmes amères, je ne savais pas que je l'aimais ainsi cette pauvre femme!), which is followed by a deep depression: "Your heart is troubled. Piffoël, which worry is eating you up? Which fear of living makes you wish illness and death?" (Ton coeur est troublé. Piffoël quel ennui te ronge? Quelle peur de vivre te fait donc souhaiter la maladie et la mort?).20 Sand's melancholia is transferred to Piffoël, whom she calls" melancholy and abominable beast" (bête mélancolique et abominable), and who represents her psychic split. Sand's immediate specular identification with the mother is here inverted into a death-bearing maternal image. Piffoël takes the place of the analyst who allows the transference to occur. Thus the feminine as an image of death is constantly transformed into a masculine representation that keeps at bay the threat of confusional love. Piffoël becomes the pseudonym which plays a role similar to that of Brulard. Both Vie de Henry Brulard and Entretiens journaliers enable their authors to distance themselves by creating another voice. Both Brulard and Piffoël are pseudonymous identities which symbolically allow Stendhal and Sand to cope with their traumatic memories. In both cases, autobiography is a return to the maternal archive with a view toward reinventing it.
The suicide pact of Ralph and Indiana is a version of the threatened fatality of maternal fusion: "'Be my husband in heaven and on earth,' she said, 'and let this kiss bind me to you for all eternity!'" ("Sois mon époux dans le ciel et sur la terre," lui ditelle, "et que ce baiser me fiance á toi pour l'éternité!") (Indiana, 4:314/338). The suicide pact expresses at once the impossibility of community and the basis for a new type of community. In this connection there is a particular pertinence to Jean-Luc Nancy's remark that "the true community of mortals, or death as the community, is their impossible communion."21 Recall Sand's experience of the other, nonsubjective voice she hears on the verge of drowning: "I could not tear myself away from the river bank at will and began to question myself, Yes or No, often enough and for a long enough time to risk being thrown by a Yes to the bottom of the clear water which attracted me" (Je ne pouvais plus m'arracher de la rive aussitôt que j'en formais le dessein, et je commençais à me dire: Oui ou Non? assez souvent et assez longtemps pour risquer d'être lançée par le Oui au fond de cette eau transparente qui me magnétisait) (Story of My Life, 793/OA, 1:1096). The basis of Sand's thinking about the nature of community entails a link to this voice, this "yes" that cries out from the other side of subjectivity. The temptation of suicide is also the solicitation of this other voice and of the new community that it portends.
The yes/no alternative of suicide is definitively abandoned in the conclusion of Indiana. In her supplementary ending to Paul et Virginie, Sand breaks away from traditional nineteenth-century institutions while accepting the assumption that culture is fully subsumed under patriarchal laws. In Sir Ralph's words: "Society should demand nothing of the man who expects nothing from it. As for the contagion of example, I do not believe in it; too much energy is required to break with the world, and too much suffering to acquire that energy" (La société ne doit rien exiger de celui qui n'attend rien d'elle. Quant à la contagion de l'exemple, je n'y crois pas; il faut trop d'énergie pour rompre avec le monde, trop de douleurs pour acquérir cette énergie) (Indiana, 4:327/353). The end of the novel moves from France to its colonies and points to the limits of the dominant culture. Indiana does not, however, issue in a strong protest against that culture, since the social implications of the decision of Indiana and Ralph to live for love in a world beyond convention relegate them to a marginal role. Sand's abandonment of the romantic suicide pact gives way to Sir Ralph's criticism of society. In this gesture, we can see a movement that will develop in Sand's subsequent novels. In Mauprat (1837), she succeeds in integrating her personal myths with the Utopian notion of a better society to come.
Notes
1 George Sand, Story of My Life, a group translation, ed. Thelma Jurgrau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 76; all references to Story of My Life will be made to this edition. George Sand, Oeuvres autobiographiques, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade, 1970), 1:13. I will refer to the French original as OA.
2The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1979), 49. Gustave Flaubert-George Sand Correspondence, texte édité, préfacé par Alphonse Jacobs (Paris: Flammarion, 1981), 121.
3 Helene Deutsch, The Psychology of Women, 2 vols. (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1944), 1:304.
4 Ibid., 1:319.
5 Ibid.
6 Phillipe Berthier, "Corambé: Interprétation d'un mythe," in George Sand, ed. Simone Vierne (Paris: SEDES et CDU Réunis, 1983), 11; my translation.
7 Ibid., 15.
8 George Sand, preface to Indiana, in Novels, 20 vols. (Boston and New York: Jefferson Press, 1900-1902), 4:xv; references to Indiana will be made to this English translation, followed by the French text. George Sand, Indiana (Paris: Gamier, 1983), 14-15.
9 Nancy K. Miller, Getting Personal (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 107.
10 Naomi Schor, "Female Fetishism: The Case of George Sand," in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. Susan Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 369.
11 Schor, "Female Fetishism," 370.
12 George Sand, Story of My Life 9. The editor, Thelma Jurgrau, devotes most of her introduction to Sand's Story of My Life to "gender positioning."
13 Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953-74), 17:220. Hereinafter referred to as SE.
14 Ibid., 17:224.
15 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 26.
16 Nancy K. Miller, "Arachnologies: The Woman, the Text, and the Critic," in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 278.
17 Isabelle Hoog Naginski, George Sand: Writing for Her Life (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 75.
18 Miller, Poetics of Gender, 280. Miller has a long discussion in which she demonstrates that Indiana offers a representation of the female signature of protest. See particularly Miller, "Archnologies," 270-81.
19 Kristeva, Black Sun, 256.
20 George Sand, Entretiens journaliers avec le très docte et très habile docteur Piffoël, in OA; 2:1000-1001; my translation.
21 Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1986), 42; my translation.
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