Sand, George: Title Commentary

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GEORGE SAND: TITLE COMMENTARY

Indiana

PETER DAYAN (ESSAY DATE APRIL 1998)

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

FRANÇOISE MASSARDIER-KENNEY (ESSAY DATE 2000)

SOURCE: Massardier-Kenney, Françoise. "Victimization in Indiana and Jacques. "In Gender in the Fiction of George Sand, pp. 15-52. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2000.

In the following excerpt, Massardier-Kenney explores Sand's presentation and treatment of female protagonists in her fiction, particularly the novel Indiana.

George Sand's life-long investigation of the meaning of "woman" and her questioning of the hierarchical binary oppositions between men and women is evident in her first novel, the famous Indiana (1832) and the lesser known fine epistolary novel Jacques (1834). In these two works, Sand began to lay bare the cultural mechanisms responsible for gender inequalities and began a pattern of using ambiguous protagonists in order to bring attention to the incoherence of established gender positions. Sand's first novel (1832) attracted considerable attention when it was first published and is one of the few among her works to be systematically discussed by contemporary critics. In 1832, critics focused on its realism and compared it to the work of Stendhal, while recent critics have perceived it as Sand's attempt to find a literary voice separate from realism (i.e., something called "idealism"). As Sandy Petrey has demonstrated in his analysis of the critical reception of 1832, Indiana 's appeal at the time was a "realist" appeal whereby the novel shows that life is formed by forces that vary with time and place, and it is also the reason for its appeal now: gender is one of the "components of human existence that vary with time, place and customs" (134); and gender is interrelated with genre.¹

However, beyond the continuity of its appeal, Indiana continues to give rise to opposite interpretations of what Sand's novel says about gender matters and what character is used to represent Sand's position. In Working for Her Life, Isabelle Naginski has argued that the novel registers Sand's new found literary voice, which is embodied by the character of Ralph²; whereas Marilyn Lukacher reads Indiana as the impossible attempt to choose between two mother figures: Sand's aristocratic grandmother and her plebeian mother and sees a parallel, not between Sand and Ralph, but between Sand and Raymon³. Some critics see the end of the novel where Ralph and Indiana escape to the idyllic setting of Bernica, as a flaw in a realist text⁴ while others attempt to justify the ending as befitting an idealist and/or a feminist text. For instance, in his justification of the end, Nigel Harkness rereads Indiana as proposing an essentialist view and the end as claiming a feminist silence⁵, while Petrey demonstrates that the novel is based on a constructivist notion of gender. Last, some, like Leslie Rabine, argue that Sand represents woman as passive and chaste (i.e., as reproducing a conservative nineteenth-century ideology) while others, like Kathryn Crecelius, point out that Sand shows how "religious, social, and political systems combine to oppress women" (73)⁶. Kristina Wingard Vareille also stresses the importance of Sand's critique of marriage and of the condition of women in Indiana but also points out that this critique is not limited to women since Sand shows that men almost as much as women are victimized by traditional marriage.⁷

These varied and sometimes contradictory interpretations stem from the novel's own contradictions and from a number of narrative shifts that prevent critical attempts to interpret it as a coherent narrative because precisely the novel's theme is the incoherence of gender positions. In Indiana Sand is analyzing and bringing to the surface mechanisms of victimization based on gender, race, and class and is questioning the stability of gender boundaries that buttress power inequalities through a systematic undermining of narrative authority and consistency. Although the final episode of the plot is usually the place where the disruption of the "idealist" is perceived, Sand has undermined the coherence of her own narrative well before the end through the manipulation of the omniscient narrator and through contradictory presentations of characters.

Although interpretations of Indiana vary greatly, there seems to be a critical consensus about the fact that the final episode of Indiana is an idealist happy ending. Whether critics approve of it or criticize it for its switch in mode, they consider what happens after the scene where Ralph and Indiana leap to their death a positive outcome: the protagonists don't die and live together happily ever after. However, their lives on a secluded plantation where they employ old or weak former slaves that they have freed may seem an "idealist" or "happy" solution only if readers identify with the patriarchal omniscient narrator. For this final episode obliterates the character of Indiana who becomes passive and silent⁸. The narrative is made by the male narrator for a male friend as recounted by Ralph the male protagonist who thus becomes the hero of the novel.

FROM THE AUTHOR

ON THE COMPOSITION OF INDIANA

I do not think that I have ever written anything under the influence of a selfish passion; I have never even thought of avoiding it. They who have read me without prejudice understand that I wrote Indiana with a feeling, not deliberately reasoned out, to be sure, but a deep and genuine feeling that the laws which still govern woman's existence in wedlock, in the family and in society are unjust and barbarous. I had not to write a treatise on jurisprudence but to fight against public opinion; for it is that which postpones or advances social reforms. The war will be long and bitter; but I am neither the first nor the last nor the only champion of so noble a cause, and I will defend it so long as the breath of life remains in my body.

Sand, George. From the preface to the 1842 edition of Indiana. Translated by George Burnham Ives. Philadelphia: George Barie & Son, 1900.

Indiana's transformation from a rebellious and articulate victim⁹ into a sweet and languid character [according to the narrator, her eyes have a "douceur incomparable / unique sweetness" (337) and her manners have "quelque chose de lent et de triste qui est naturel aux créoles / something slow and sad that comes naturally to creole women" (337)] starts with the suicide scene where Ralph not only takes over discourse and recounts his long hidden passion for her but also directs all their actions ["il prit sa fiancée dans ses bras et l'emporta pour la précipiter avec lui dans le torrent / he took his fiancée in his arms and led her away to hurl her with him in the torrent" (330)]. The following "idyllic" episode repeats this pattern whereby Ralph controls discourse and action. When the narrator alludes to gossip concerning them among the colonists, Ralph silences him, and once Indiana is out of earshot, he accepts to tell his story "je vous dirai mon histoire, mais pas devant Indiana. Il est des blessures qu'il ne faut pas réveiller / I shall tell you my story, but not in front of Indiana. There are wounds that should not be reopened." (338) [note that he refers to it as his story, not hers], repeating a pattern of silence and withdrawal of information justified by the mistaken goal of protecting weak women. All of a sudden, Indiana's story has become Ralph's story and the novel ends with a dramatic shift away from the mechanisms of victimization of women to the emergence of the male Romantic hero.

While Ralph's own victimization and opposition to patriarchal structures may explain some critics' acceptance of his Romantic positioning as representing the voice of the author, his participation in those very patriarchal power structures and his final effective silencing of Indiana should warn the readers that identifying the author's position may be more difficult than the surface narrative would lead us to expect.

Ralph's surprising and seductive transformation into a passionate, articulate opponent of the debased values of Restoration society, and his endorsement by the omniscient narrator trap the readers into glossing over Indiana's erasure and, more importantly, into ignoring Sand's careful construction of Ralph as a character who participates in the victimization of women even though he is himself the victim of patriarchal law and even though, as Doris Kadish has noticed, he has been "symbolically emasculated and feminized through analogy with women, slaves, and members of oppressed groups" (27).

Sand's association of Ralph with some feminized traits, however, must be seen as part of her attempt to show that the unequal status of the two "sexes" is not based on any natural division but is a complex set of gender positions occupied by men and women who have different amounts of control over their lives. To see that Ralph is silent and submissive (i.e., positioned as a woman) does not mean that he represents the voice of the author. An examination of Ralph's history and personality reveals both his victimization and the extent of his participation in the structures that disenfranchise most women. Thus Sand's construction of Ralph is paradoxical.

Sand uses the omniscient narrator to present Ralph in a deceiving and ultimately inconsistent way. As Crecelius has noted, the presentation of Ralph gives rise to "certain inconsistencies" (77) because he is presented from the point of view of Indiana rather than in an objective way, as Sand's use of an omniscient narrator would lead the readers to expect. I would argue that the entire presentation of Ralph is suspect. The details describing Ralph given at the beginning of the novel consistently undermine the portrait made later. The Ralph of the beginning of the novel is characterized by the omniscient narrator as a well fed, dull character, an "homme dormeur et bien mangeant" (51). His features are "régulièrement fades / regularly dull" (51), his portrait in Indiana's room is insignificant and "only the original is more insignificant than the portrait" (108); still according to the narrator Indiana's and Ralph's personalities are totally incompatible (51). Moreover, Ralph is presented as a friend of Delmare, Indiana's tyrannical husband. Ralph also despises women as the narrator's description of his innermost thoughts indicate. When Ralph expresses his distrust of rhetoric as opposed to ideas (in the idealist belief, one assumes, that ideas can be evaluated separately from the language in which they are articulated), he blames women especially for paying more attention to form than to content, and for being highly susceptible to flattery. Indiana's reaction to his remarks "vous avez un profond dédain pour les femmes / you have a great disdain for women" (58) correctly interprets his comments as expressing his belief in the inferiority of women.

When Noun, Indiana's servant becomes agitated upon hearing that Delmare is out with a gun and risks wounding her secret lover Raymon de Ramière, and when Indiana also shows concern, the narrator makes us privy to Ralph's thoughts "Ces deux femmes sont folles, pensa Sir Ralph. D'ailleurs ajouta-t-il en lui-même, toutes les femmes le sont / these two women are crazy, thought Sir Ralph. Anyway, he thought on to himself, all women are" (61). He adds later "Quelles misérables terreurs de femmes / what miserable women terrors" (62). This is the same Ralph who at the end of the novel is presented as Indiana's ideal lover and interpreted as Sand's voice.

Furthermore, the theme of women's ignorance and specifically of Indiana's ignorance is linked throughout the novel to Ralph's conception of women as intellectually deficient. When, near the end of the novel, Ralph finally tells Indiana of his passion for her and recounts his role in her life: "Je fis de vous ma soeur, ma fille, ma compagne, mon élève, ma société/I made you my sister, my daughter, my companion, my student, my community" (316), the reader may be seduced by his passionate language (his "rhetoric") and forget that it is Ralph's upbringing that has made Indiana into an ignorant person whose subsequent intellectual weakness confirms his patriarchal belief about women's innate inferiority. As the omniscient narrator had reminded the reader, Indiana had been brought up by Ralph "qui avait une médiocre opinion de l'intelligence et du raisonnement chez les femmes … Elle savait donc à peine l'histoire agrégée du monde et toute discussion sérieuse l'accablait d'ennui / who had a poor opinion of women's intelligence and capacity for reasoning … Thus she hardly knew any world history and any serious discussion bored her to tears" (174). This reminder by the narrator about Ralph's responsibility in Indiana's lack of intellectual maturity not only contradicts the same narrator's later endorsement of Ralph but is part of the novel's insistence on the role of men's prejudice in propagating women's ignorance and then blaming them for it. Sand ties the question of women's ignorance to the mechanisms of victimization through which knowledge is withheld from disenfranchised groups, be they women, servants or slaves. Because of her class, Indiana has at least learned to read and write as her letters to Raymon indicate. However, such is not the case for her servant and friend Noun; she makes a number of spelling errors in her letter to the same Raymon, who, upon receiving her letter, decides to leave her as such lack of control of French grammar clearly marks Noun's social inferiority and reminds him of the impossibility of continuing his affair with her.

The withholding of knowledge and of information because of the male characters' belief in the inability of women to understand the information is not the sole prerogative of Ralph; it characterizes all the male characters who have some power but it indicates that Ralph participates in the reproduction of patriarchal structures that are inimical to women. Besides his denial of education to Indiana, who is his sole love and anchor, Ralph also withholds from her crucial information about Noun and Raymon. In agreement with Delmare, Ralph keeps silent about the fact that Indiana's friend and maid is having a secret affair with Raymon, and thus further isolates Noun and allows Indiana to fall prey to Raymon's schemes. Similarly, at the end of the novel, he prevents the narrator from repeating what he has heard in order to protect Indiana as if she were a child. Ralph's role in denying women access to knowledge is incompatible with interpreting him as an ideal androgynous character. On the contrary it suggests that weak and silent characters may participate in their own victimization, as we shall see with Indiana' and Noun's attitudes toward their lover.

Even the facts of Ralph's early life as recounted by Indiana suggest Ralph's acquiescence and implication in the victimization of women. Significantly, it is Indiana who tells Ralph's story, in contrast to the end of the novel where Ralph is in control of the narrative. Indiana recounts to Raymon Ralph's first unhappy years during which he is rejected by his parents who prefer his less shy and more demonstrative older brother. Ralph is so depressed by his life that he is on the verge of committing suicide by drowning in the ocean¹⁰ when he sees his young cousin Indiana (then five years old) who runs to him and hugs him. He decides to live for her and to take care of her (158). Ralph is thus saved from despair by the love of a child. As an adolescent he takes care of the orphaned Indiana, but after his own brother's death, he is forced to marry his brother's fiancee for unspecified family reasons (the reader assumes it is a financial arrangement between the two families). Ralph leaves for England with his wife who loved his brother and abhors him; has a son, and returns to the island of Bourbon after the death of his wife and son. Raymon, to whom Indiana is recounting this story, astutely wonders why Ralph didn't marry Indiana and she invokes her lack of wealth as a reason. The narrative of Ralph's life emphasizes the necessity of having a child-like woman for the melancholy hero to survive, but also Ralph's own victimization. The novel represents the patriarchal pattern of victimization which includes women, slaves, and men who don't occupy a position of power. Ralph is the second son, rejected by his parents and forced to marry for social and financial reasons while Indiana is also ignored by her relatives and married off to a much older man. In both cases families have broken down and have lost their protective vocation. Family structure is presented as the occasion to consolidate power positions. The pervasive corruption of the traditional family in which fathers no longer protect and mothers no longer nurture indicate Sand's conviction that the oppression of the weak—children, women, men, slaves—is endemic to the Restoration society she represents and that, by the logic of their own participation in such family structures, her characters can turn oppressors too.

By agreeing to marry his dead brother's betrothed, even though he knows of her love for his brother, Ralph puts himself in the position of a Delmare. Moreover, since Ralph had a son with this woman, whereas the question of Delmare's actually consummating his marriage with Indiana is left ambiguous, the reader must assume that Ralph forced himself on his wife to produce an heir or at least that he consumed his union knowing of her repulsion. Ralph's consent to marry is explained by his unwillingness to be disowned by his father (by which one assumes he will be disinherited since he has already been rejected emotionally by his parents).

Thus his allegiance to patriarchal values and his participation in oppressive practices, and his long lasting contempt for women must not be forgotten even in the context of his being later presented as the prototypical melancholy and isolated Romantic hero of the "idyllic" end of the novel. Ironically, Ralph is the character who had claimed the superiority of actions and ideas over words, but who is absolved because of his final control of the narrative. The complexity of Ralph's role, the mix of victim and victimizer allows Sand to show the difficulty of escaping oppression as long as human beings accept binary systems of opposition whereby one category is posed as inferior to the other (women to men, slaves to masters). By luring the reader into accepting Ralph as the "idealist" solution to Indiana's fate, by carefully constructing him as the Romantic figure who finally comes to speech, Sand problematizes any notion of liberation that is not accompanied by a radical rethinking of gender and social categories. Ralph loves and saves Indiana but his adherence to paternalistic views of women condemns him to play the role of a traditional husband, one surely more palatable than the old, tyrannical Delmare, but still one which spells the end of Indiana's psychological and moral autonomy.¹¹

This interiorization of patriarchal values by characters who articulate their opposition to the political or social aspects of these structures is shared by women characters as well, an idea to which Sand will return on several occasions and even more pointedly in later novels and which explains in part her reluctance to accept the category "women" as a rallying point because this very notion of woman often stands, as she demonstrates, for definitions of women articulated by and for the benefit of patriarchal subjects.

Women characters in Indiana follow Ralph's pattern of rebellion against the patriarchy while internalizing its norm or simply accepting and reproducing these structures if their position on the power scale allows it. Sand uses a range of women to show their implication in these oppressive practices: from a wealthy aristocrat (Laure de Nagy) to a servant who is possibly a former slave (Noun).

At one end of the power spectrum, Laure de Nagy who marries Raymon because he has the right pedigree and she can control him, occupies the position of "male" power. As Petrey has noticed, "the power granted Laure by historical changes affects nothing less than the obliteration of male hegemony" (141), but it is not so much male hegemony that is obliterated as the demonstration that gender performance has replaced notions of natural biological sexual differences to found inequalities. Laure de Nagy performs as a male. The obliteration of the power of the individual male leaves the structure intact. The character of Laure occupies a "masculine" position and thus further demonstrates the constructedness of notions of masculinity and femininity. Her social and economic position (an orphan from an old noble family who has been adopted by a rich industrialist), gives her the power to assess the desirability of potential male partners and to decide whom she will marry. Even before she becomes a major character, Sand introduces her as one of the spectators and commentators at the ball where Raymon recognizes Indiana and starts flirting with her. While Indiana innocently falls for Raymon's attentions, Laura watches him and invites gossip and information about him in a scene that inverts gender roles by placing her as the subject gazing. Laura's biological sexual identity is compensated by her social position; her gender role is that of male domination in contrast to Indiana's lower position and victimization, and later adoption of female submission. By providing these opposite examples of feminine performance, a tactic she will use as well in the novels discussed in subsequent chapters, Sand suggests that masculinity and femininity are positions that are linked to social and economic power more than to "nature" and that they could be negotiated. Sand shows that these gender inequalities are enforced through external pressures and through internal mechanisms (when individuals internalize imposed definitions and come to consider them natural, i.e., women can't think, women are weak, women are natural mothers, etc).

Whereas Laure de Nagy's mental attitude is one of extreme power, Indiana's and Noun's reflect their inferior status and their ultimate acceptance of their inferiority. The orphan Indiana, daughter of an impoverished noble family was given to a much older man (she is sixteen and he is sixty), ex-soldier turned business man whose money endeared him to her relatives, whereas Noun is a servant who follows Indiana wherever she moves. Although we are given no details (we don't know whether Noun's mother was a slave or free, or even whether Noun is black), her position as a domestic is clear and provides a more pronounced version of Indiana's own situation of servitude.

What is less evident is the importance of servitude in shaping these characters' own attitudes. Indiana may denounce the inequity of the laws that allow her husband's domination but when she leaves Bourbon to join Raymon, she can only speak in terms of abjection and servitude "c'est ton esclave que tu as rappelée de l'exil / here is your slave that you called back from exile" (296), and "Je viens pour te donner du bonheur, pour être ce que tu voudras, ta compagne, ta servante ou ta maîtresse / I come to give you some happiness, to be what you want, your companion, your servant or your mistress" (296), "je suis ton bien, tu es mon maître / Iam your thing, you are my master" (297). Indiana's discourse, which is steeped in the vocabulary of slavery and which is a part of a pattern where relationships between men and women are described with a vocabulary of enslavement and subjection, reveals Sand's understanding of the mechanisms of subjection: the long-lasting subjection and state of ignorance in which women have been forced to live have resulted in their acceptance and internalization of the hierarchical structures that created their bondage; as a result, even when these structures of coercion are removed (i.e., when Indiana escapes from her husband), the women characters retain a mental frame that conceptualizes "love" as bondage or as a relation of inequality.

When Noun attempts to regain Raymon's favors after she finds out that she is pregnant, she rejects his offers of financial support and uses the same metaphors that Indiana would later use. She even proposes to Raymon to work as his servant (as she is already his mistress, it is the only position that she can envision). She tells him "Je ne suis pas exigeante; je n'ambitionne point ce qu'une autre à ma place aurait peut-être eu l'art d'obtenir. Mais permettez-moi d'être votre servante / Iam not demanding; I don't hope for what another woman in my place would have been artful enough to obtain. But allow me to be your servant." (110). So while Noun feels insulted by Raymon's offer of money (an offer which clearly means the end of their relationship), she is ready to surrender her whole being in order to be next to him. Isabelle Naginski has remarked that Noun is almost without speech (64) but actually it is the force of her eloquence that convinces Raymon not to break up as he intended. The narrator's comment on her appeal "Noun parla longtemps ainsi. Elle ne se servit peut-être pas des mêmes mots, mais elle dit les mêmes choses, bien mieux, cent fois que je ne pourrais les redire / Noun spoke thus for a long time. She perhaps did not use exactly the same words, but she said the same things, much better, a hundred times better than I could repeat them" (102). Noun may use the language of female subjection as Naginski and others have argued, but it is an extremely articulate language that describes accurately that state of mental bondage that characterizes women who don't benefit from a social position that can counterbalance gender positions. Indiana's and Noun's statements both articulate their acceptance that what they are is defined by what the male other wants. Indiana's "Je serai ce que tu voudras / I will be what you want" (296) echoes Noun's "Je me hais puisque je ne vous plais plus / I hate myself since I no longer please you" (102). The grammatical slip of the "what" instead of a "who" indicates the extent of Indiana's vision of herself as an object rather than as a subject, even in a situation which is the result of her will and of remarkable determination and courage.

In Indiana, love is thus presented as another locus for women's oppression. Not surprisingly Laure de Nagy, the only powerful woman in the novel, rejects the idea of "love" because she knows that, paradoxically, her wealth will make it impossible for her to disentangle genuine affection from ambition or greed. The ignorant and powerless Indiana and Noun who embrace romantic notions of love are destroyed by their acceptance of love as a relation that disempowers them. Whether this love includes a sexual relation or not, it is a negative experience¹². The sexual relation just increases the chance that the woman will be victimized more quickly, as happens with Noun or with the other women that Raymon has discredited. Sexuality, like romantic love and marriage, has no positive ideological function in Indiana. The new order proposed at the end of the novel is very problematic as the previous analysis of its implication has shown. Although Kristina Wingard argues that Sand discretely suggests that Ralph and Indiana consummate their union¹³ and that Indiana can finally accept her sexuality without danger or suffering, the final episode is curiously ambiguous about their status as a couple. This ambiguity reflects Sand's own ambiguity about the limits of the figure of Ralph as a solution. Her heroes are cut off from the external social structures of the world but they have interiorized gender roles. Thus the question of sexuality is erased¹⁴. Criticism of Sand for representing Indiana as a chaste bourgeoise fails to notice that Sand presents all the scenarios possible for a woman: marriage with sex (Laure de Nagy), love and sex (Noun), love without sex (Indiana), and that none of these scenarios can be fulfilling because of the power structure¹⁵.

Sand's commitment to providing her readers with a constructivist conception of gender is such that the novel presents an unusual number of women who either are not mothers (thus whose lives as women contradicts traditional conceptions of "femininity" that rely on maternity as its linchpin or who as mothers or mother figures function as agents of reproduction of the social order. Sand's deconstruction of stable gender categories includes a reexamination of the roles of mothers in the reproduction of patriarchy and femininity.

First of all maternity and the ability to procreate among women of child bearing age is associated with death. Ralph's wife and his young son are dead by the beginning of the novel and, of course, Noun commits suicide while pregnant because her lover Raymon no longer wishes to carry on their affair. The other protagonists who are young women and who survive—Indiana and Laure de Nagy—are both childless and their own mothers are dead, an interesting coincidence if one recalls Sand's discussion of gender differences in which she mentions maternity as the only difference separating the sexes.

The older women who are actual mothers (for instance, Raymon's mother) or who are mother substitutes (Mme de Carvajal, Indiana's aunt) are both aristocrats who are presented as opportunistic survivors of political and social upheavals or as educating their male offsprings to be victimizers. Mme de Carjaval, who has ignored her niece, starts to show her much affection when she realizes that Delmare has become a successful businessman ("Madame de Carvajal aux yeux de qui la fortune était la première recommendation, témoigna beaucoup d'affection à sa nièce et lui promit le reste de son héritage / Madame de Carvajal who considered wealth of foremost importance, showed her niece much affection and promised her the rest of her inheritance" (86). The details of her life provided by the narrator draw the portrait of an opportunist for whom fortune and appearances are foremost: a widowed Spanish aristocrat who was an admirer of Napoleon, she has made a fortune speculating on the stock market and, according to the narrator "A force d'esprit, d'intrigues et de dévotion elle avait obtenu, en outre, les faveurs de la cour / Through her wit, schemes, and devotion she had moreover obtained the favors of the court" (85). Mme de Carjaval uses her pretty niece Indiana to attract young fashionable men to her salon. She sees no objection to her niece's involvement with Raymon but is ready to disown her when gossip about their alleged affair threatens to break out and sully her reputation as a pious older woman. Sand's biting portrait of Mme de Carjaval as a crafty maneuverer who adopts the current ideologies (religiousness and the monarchy) and who gains power and money shows how little room there is to nurture and protect younger women like Indiana. These characters represent such disparate human types (one powerful, savvy, and independent; the other powerless, naive, and ignorant) that the fact that they are both women becomes irrelevant and cannot lead to any allegiance based on their sex.

In fact, Sand's presentation of women protagonists who belong to an older generation suggests that what these older women nurture is the reproduction of the very patriarchal structures that allow younger women without power to be bartered and exploited. An analysis of the presentation of Raymon's mother also shows the care with which Sand constructed her not as the positive character which most critics have seen, but as a very ambiguous, misguided, not to say negative, figure¹⁶. Sand's portrait of Raymon's mother as a good mother is ironic since that characteristic is always invoked in the context of his mistreatment of women. When the narrator describes Raymon's desertion of the pregnant Noun, he links his action to a class prejudice "Pour lui, une grisette n'était pas une femme / for him a grisette was not a woman" (75), which the narrator exonerates by commenting "Tout cela n'était pas la faute de Raymon; on [read his mother since his father has been long dead] l'avait élevé pour le monde / All this was not Raymon's fault; he had been brought up for fashionable society" (75). His mother is held responsible for his considering lower class women sub-human and not warranting the treatment reserved to "women," that is women of one's class who can provide social and financial alliances.

Thus in Indiana … being a woman has a host of different meanings depending on the class to which an individual woman belongs. The higher the class, the more power she has and the less she shares with other women. The disparity of interests between younger poorer women and older artistocratic women is emphasized by Raymon's reactions to Noun after he attempts to break off with her. The omniscient narrator explains Raymon's eagerness to get rid of Noun by invoking his mother "Il en coûtait à Raymon de tromper une si bonne mère / It was difficult for Raymon to deceive such a good mother" (76).

Raymon's mother is thus directly linked to his treatment of Noun. The narrator follows with an ironically positive portrait of Raymon's mother as a woman with intellectual and moral qualities who has given him "ces excellents principes qui le ramenaient toujours au bien / those excellent principles that always brought him back to good" (78). Since the reader was just told how Raymon avoids responsibility [that would be the "bien" to which he returns] by invoking the need to spare his mother, the principles that his mother has taught him are reduced to simple narcissism¹⁷. Sand thus uses the omniscient narrator to say one thing but to mean another. The positive portrait of Raymon's mother seems to be used to excuse the behavior of the son but actually serves to implicate his mother in his corruption.

The ambiguity of the role of Raymon's mother is further developed through the narrator's comments alluding to the vicissitudes of her life. She is a woman who went through "des époques si différentes que leur esprit a pris toute la souplesse de leur destinée / such different times that their mind has adopted the suppleness of their destiny" (78). While the narrator presents this information positively, it parallels his other comments about Mme de Carjaval's ability to adapt to different moral codes, an ability, as we have seen, which is a sign of corruption. After Noun's suicide, the narrator explains that Raymon feels remorse and thinks of blowing his brains out but "un sentiment louable l'arrêta. Que deviendrait-sa mère … sa mère âgée, débile / a worthy feeling stopped him. What would become of his mother, so old and weak?" (127). Again his mother is the excuse for his failure to act.

The role of Raymon's mother as the explanation and justification for his narcissistic behavior is linked not only to Noun's fate but also to Indiana's. After Noun's suicide, Indiana refuses to see Raymon, but her husband imposes Raymon's visit on her because he has been charmed by Raymon's mother (122). Raymon in turn uses his mother to come visit Indiana who is seduced by her charm "qu'un esprit supérieur joint à une âme noble et généreuse, sait répandre dans ses moindres relations / that a superior mind linked to a noble and generous soul can infuse in all her relationships" 140. Indiana's "fascination de coeur" with Madame de Ramière is linked to her not having known her own mother (141).

The complexity of Raymon's mother's role is further demonstrated in the episode in which Indiana compromises herself by coming to see him late at night and he attempts to make her leave by asking his mother to help. Mme de Ramière acts very generously toward Indiana but as the narrator's analysis makes clear, she has created Raymon's selfishness and self-indulgence: "Le caractère de ce fils impétueux et froid, raisonneur et passionné était une conséquense de son inépuisable amour et de sa tendresse généreuse pour lui … mais elle l'avait habitué à profiter de tous les sacrifices qu'elle consentait à lui faire … A force de générosité, elle n'avait réussi qu'à former un coeur égoïste / The character of this impetuous and cold, reasoning and passionate son was a consequence of her unending love and her generous affection … but she had accustomed him to profit from all the sacrifices she was willing to make for him … By dint of generosity, she had only succeeded in shaping a selfish heart" (223). This analysis presents Raymon's narcissism, not as a natural "male" trait, but as the product of his mother's indulgence, that is as the product of specific cultural practices that reproduce hierarchies. Loving a son means encouraging narcissistic behavior and victimizing women. Ironically, mothers, as Sand presents them in Indiana, are the social agents through which gender inequalities are passed on to the next generation.…

Notes

See Sandy Petrey "George and Georgina: Realist Gender in Indiana. Pp. 133-47 in Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices. Eds. Judith Still and Michael Worton. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.
She states "the story of Ralph recapitulates the writer's progress from initial uncertainty and hesitation to ultimate assurance and eloquence" (56).
Lukacher specifically argues that Raymon figures Sand herself "before the impasse of the double feminine identification" (77). Marilyn Lukacher, Maternal Fictions. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.
This seems to be the view of the French editors of Indiana. See for instance the introduction of Pierre Salomon, ed. Indiana. Paris: Garnier, 1962; and Béatrice Didier, ed. Indiana. Paris: Gallimard (Folio): 1984.
See Nigel Harkness, "Writing under the Sign of Difference: The Conclusion of Indiana" Forum for Modern Language Studies 33.2 (1997): 115-128.
See Kathryn Crecelius, Family Romances. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Like Harkness, Crecelius also believes that Sand posits a difference between men's and women's language (73).
Vareille focuses on the character of Delmare to show that, for Sand, the victims of mariage are men as well as women since they are also frozen in a social role over which they have no control See Kristina Wingard Vareille, Socialité, sexualité et les impasses de l'histoire: l'évolution de la thématique sandienne d'Indiana (1832) à Mauprat (1837), 32-34.
I have showed elsewhere that Sand has constructed Indiana as a very strong character both morally and physically. See Françoise Massardier-Kenney, "Indiana: Lieux et personnages féminins" Nineteenth-Century French Studies (1990): 65-71. Vareille has also showed that while Indiana is presented as a "faible femme" who faints, cries, is emotional, she is also very strong morally: she attends to wounded men, she stands up to her husband, etc. As she will do later in Jeanne, Sand redefines traditional notions of physical and moral strength. It should be noted as well that the very characteristics that mark her as a "femme faible" (crying, fainting, etc) are also typical of the male characters: all three male characters cry at one point or another. Raymon faints when the body of Noun is discovered and Ralph almost swoons when he thinks Indiana died from a horse accident.
Although Indiana is clearly presented as the victim of patriarchal institutions and although the narrative is controlled by a male voice, it is her voice whether in direct discourse or through letters that is the most present. Even the prolix Raymon is not given more space in letters or actual speech than is Indiana.
While a number of critics have noted the link that Sand establishes between water and women, I maintain that they miss a number of occurrences when water is associated with men as well. Noun does commit suicide in the river and, after wandering in Paris, Indiana, almost drowns in the Seine, but there are as many incidents linked to water that are associated by male characters: for instance, Ralph's early suicide thoughts, Raymon's near fall in the very river where Noun drowned, and of course, Ralph's later planned leap in the waterfalls of the Bernica. As I have showed in "Indiana: Lieux et personnages féminins," Ophelia is not a figure for women; it is the name of Indiana's dog and it is the dog that dies from drowning, not Indiana. When Indiana escapes her husband to sail back to France, the dog follows the boat and is killed by coarse sailors. It should not surprise us that Sand refrain from associating women with water, since it would be an essentialist gesture.
Sand's contradictory portrait of Ralph as a positive Romantic figure who opposes conservative social and political practices but whose own gender ideology is ultimately patriarchal will find a development in Jacques (1834), where she will explore the very possibility of the contradictions expressed by the Ralph figure.
Vareille Wingard notes the negativeness of sexuality for women: "for women, sexuality can only be a trap, a threat, an aggressive and destructive domination exerted by the male" (43), but she does not extend her remarks to romantic love in general which is also a domination exerted by the male in that it destroys the female's subjectivity.
Her evidence is mostly based on the fact that the word "virginal" is no longer used in the utopic episode (footnote 61, p. 63) and that Indiana dresses as a bride in the suicide scene.
Of course, Sand's decision to leave the couple childless is a further detail that marks the absence of sexuality from their relation.
In any case, chastity is by no means reserved for women: since Ralph's wife died, he has remained single and sexless.
For example Maryline Lukacher interprets Raymon's mother as a figure representing Sand's grandmother because her last words to Raymon are the same as those Sand's grandmother actually said to her on her death bed (77). Similarly Vareille Wingard, who is usually a very astute reader, fails to notice Sand's irony in depicting Madame de Ramière.
The theme of male narcissism and the role of mothers in fostering such narcissism will be developed and amplified in later novels, most notably in Lucrezia Floriani (1846).

Valentine

DEBRA L. TERZIAN (ESSAY DATE SPRING-SUMMER 1997)

SOURCE: Terzian, Debra L. "Feminism and Family Dysfunction in Sand's Valentine." Nineteenth-Century French Studies 25, nos. 3-4 (spring-summer 1997): 266-79.

In the following essay, Terzian analyzes Sand's particular brand of feminism by exploring the construction of her female characters in Valentine.

C'étaient de beaux et chastes livres, presque tous écrits par des femmes sur des histoires de femmes: Valérie, Eugène de Rothelin, Mademoiselle de Clermont, Delphine. Ces récits touchants et passionnées, ces aperçus d'un monde idéal pour moi élèverent mon âme, mais ils la dévorèrent. Je devins romanesque, caractère le plus infortuné qu'une femme puisse avoir.
George Sand, Leone Leoni

In the passage cited above, a female character from one of Sand's fictional works cites the works of fiction that have most influenced her and that have marked decisive moments in what can be termed her sentimental education. The novels she lists form a veritable corpus of women's literature. Evoking the notion of a continuum of women writers, Sand's protagonist makes plain the problematic and troublesome feature that these works share—their power to both "elevate" and "devour" the reader. For while Sand's Juliette is moved by the beauty and purity of these texts, she is not unaware of the often disheartening, disquieting ways in which women, as gendered subjects, are represented in these works.

Sand's second novel, Valentine (1832), participates in this novelistic tradition of fictionalizing the feminine. Valentine takes its place alongside such literary works as Germaine de Staël's Delphine, published 30 years earlier, and included above by Juliette in her roster of women's fiction. In Valentine, Sand yields to the dominant nineteenth-century textual codes and cultural conventions that govern the social relation of the sexes, and she conforms to the nineteenth century's agenda of subservient femininity in her narration of female Bildung. Yet, in the story she tells, and this is true as well for her Staëlian pre-text, Sand couples this conformity to narrative codes with a feminist critique of the ways in which these codes define and circumscribe the feminine. Admittedly, the feminism inherent in Sand's Valentine has none of the feminist rhetoric and pathos that we read for example, in Staël's Delphine. But, I should like to begin this reading of a Sandian tale of growing up female by taking up the issue of Sand's feminism from the outset.

As Naomi Schor has pointed out, the question of Sand's feminism is an inevitable one for many Sandian critics (71). For some readers of Sand's earliest fictions, Indiana, as well as Valentine, Sand's narratives do not contest, but capitulate to the nineteenth century's construction of the feminine stereotype. This is the view of Leslie Rabine, who writes that the heroine in Indiana "fulfills the desire to epitomize the social ideal of nineteenth-century womanhood" (9). And should any reader need clarification of this point, Rabine defines her terms: "not only is Indiana an imitation of the male nineteenth-century wish-fulfillment work, but also the wish or dream the heroine fulfills is to be the perfect dream-object of the male dreamer" (5). Kathryn Crecelius takes a similar position in her reading of Valentine. Comparing the two novels, she concludes that "as a feminist work, Valentine is surprisingly thin compared to Indiana " (92). For both Rabine and Crecelius then, Sand's early feminocentric fictions represent disappointing works of nineteenth-century feminism.

I foreground their critical perspectives here, for as well argued as they are, I would like to propose a reading of Valentine that takes another look at Sand's feminism, and finds no abandonment of feminist principles, no forsaking of a feminist sensibility. In her recent book, George Sand and Idealism, Naomi Schor undertakes the rather thorny issue of Sand's feminism, and moves the Sandian critic beyond that most formulaic of questions, namely, is Sand a good feminist or a bad one. And, although the nineties have brought about the displacement of feminist criticism from the more privileged status it held in the seventies and eighties—the interrogation of its very conceptual underpinnings—Sand's writings continue to invite and invoke the reader to consider the question of her feminism.¹ Indeed, Schor locates Sand's feminism in her contradictions—the very contradictions that lead Rabine to indict Sand's Indiana as a work that conceals its "conformity to the feminine stereotypes then in force" within its "rhetoric of rebellion" (2). What is important then is that Sand's works put forth these contradictions, not that she fails to resolve them. How Sand does or does not resolve the contradictions in her writings on women's experience is not the issue, for as Schor explains, "Feminism is the debate itself" (76). What follows is an effort to identify the terms of this debate, and to trace how it plays itself out in Valentine.

Valentine's story begins in the absence of the father. Unlike Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, for example, published just one year after Valentine, Sand's novel of female development is not father-driven; female Bildung is not subject to the constraining law of the father. But, we could say that Sand's fiction is sister-driven. Indeed, the first significant event in the heroine's story comes in the early part of the novel with the return of Valentine's sister, Louise, after fifteen years spent in exile. Louise was banished from the château de Raimbault by Valentine's mother (Louise's stepmother) for having fallen victim to the seduction of a Monsieur de Neuville, who, it turns out, was Madame de Raimbault's lover as well. The early part of the novel, dealing with Louise's return and reunion with Valentine is an episode of Valentine's narrative that I will refer to as the sisters' story. It is within the pages of the sisters' story that Sand begins the fiction that is Valentine. The heroine's developmental trajectory is initially presented and articulated within the narrative framework of the sister's story; the heroine's text, to borrow a term from Nancy Miller, is subsumed within, and grows out of this story.² This merging of story marks the novel's opening pages. One example is the following passage in which Valentine's thoughts turn to her sister, whose misfortune and imposed exile have kept them apart:

Cette dernière pensée amena une larme au bord de sa paupière. C'était là le seul événement de la vie de Valentine; mais il l'avait remplie; il avait influé sur son caractère, il lui avait donné à la fois de la timidité et de la hardiesse; de la timidité pour elle-même, de la hardiesse quand il s'agissait de sa soeur. Elle n'avait, il est vrai, jamais pu lui prouver le dévouement courageux dont elle se sentait animée; jamais le nom de sa sœur n'avait été prononcé par sa mère devant elle; jamais on ne lui avait fourni une seule occasion de la servir et de la défendre. Son désir en était d'autant plus vif, et cette sorte de tendresse passionnée, qu'elle nourrissait pour une personne dont l'image se présentait à elle à travers les vagues souvenirs de l'enfance, était réellement la seule affection romanesque qui eût trouvé place dans son âme.
(42)

Louise's first appearance in the novel is also predicated on her tie to Valentine: "je n'aurai pas de repos que je n'aie vu ses traits, entendu le son de sa voix" (11).

The kind of narrative fusion that Sand enacts as she recounts the story of her heroine in relation to that of the sisters puts me in mind of Nancy Chodorow's psychoanalytic account of female development, which is grounded in a sense of "self-in-relationship" to another woman—the mother.³ Sand's narrative makes plain the strong mother-daughter bond that underlies the relationship of the sisters, and it gives fresh articulation to Chodorow's contention that there exists "a tendency in women toward boundary confusion" (110). The parallel between Sand's fiction and Chodorow's theory seems to me to be inevitable for the reader who confronts the novel's opening pages, constructed as they are in such a way as to mirror the permeable ego boundaries that define the relationship between Valentine and her sister.⁴

The sisters' story, at once tragic and idyllic, takes its place in the context of a rather curious fictional family romance. The constellation of family members around Valentine—all of whom are female—makes for an unusual cast of characters to play the role of formative influences in a tale of growing up female. Indeed, the story of Valentine's family reads like a nineteenth-century fictional account of a dysfunctional family. There is Louise, a young single woman raising a child out of wedlock, and banished from her family home by her malicious stepmother. Yet, prior to her exile, Louise did nonetheless play a significant role in raising her younger sister. This stepmother, Madame de Raimbault, biological mother to Valentine, depicted throughout as an aging, repressive, and bitter woman, looks upon her daughters as rivals for male attention and approval. Their youth and beauty are a painful reminder of her own aging, fading attractiveness. Bitter, angry, and resentful, Madame de Raimbault is happiest when she can appear in society alone and without Valentine. As for the third member of the family, Valentine's grandmother, she is presented to the reader as a young and scatterbrained woman: "étourdie et jeune" (41).

Valentine's relationships to these women who have raised her are marked by some curious slippages and displacements, and since these family ties are central to the developmental tale that Sand writes for her heroine, I should like to consider them in some detail. The subject of relationships between women in Sandian fiction represents, of course, a meaningful point of inquiry for the feminist reader, and Valentine offers an interesting case in point. With this novel, Sand gives her fictional account of the mother-daughter relationship under patriarchy. She casts this story in bleak, impoverished terms; she fictionalizes no instances of female bonding between them, and the text effectively severs any notion of female genealogy or transmission from mother to daughter. Sand is far from reinscribing the mother-daughter story as told by Madame de Lafayette in La Princesse de Clèves, or even, to cite a more contemporary example, that told by Balzac in Eugénie Grandet. Instead, the novel enacts a schism in the figure of the mother. This schism is at once prefigured and encapsulated in the episode of Louise's dream in the novel's opening pages. Prior to being reunited with her sister, Louise has a dream in which Valentine falls into the river, and Valentine's mother impedes Louise's efforts to save the drowning child. Her dream plays out the conflict of the good versus the bad mother, and the novel makes it clear that Mme de Raimbault is the bad mother, lacking in maternal feeling, completely alienated from her own child. The text leaves no doubt that Louise is the good mother, linking, in a kind of affective continuum, the love and maternal feelings that she had for the young Valentine with the maternal love she has for her son: "Cet amour d'autrefois pour sa sœur s'était réveillé plus intense et plus maternal avec celui qu'elle avait eu pour son fils" (59). Louise tells of her experience of motherhood in the following way:

Mon fils existe, il ne m'a jamais quittée; c'est moi qui l'ai élevé. Je n'ai point essayé de dissimuler ma faute en l'éloignant de moi ou en lui refusant mon nom. Partout il m'a suivie, partout sa présence a révélé mon malheur et mon repentir. Et le croirastu, Valentine? j'ai fini par mettre ma gloire à me proclamer sa mère.…
(92-93)

A mother-daughter bond grounds the relationship between the sisters and affectively displaces Valentine's biological mother from the mother-daughter dyad. When the sisters are reunited, they confirm the tie that binds them, and that consequently invalidates the figure of Madame de Raimbault as mother:

—Pourquoi ce vous? dit Louise; ne sommes-nous pas sœurs?

—Oh! c'est que vous êtes ma mère aussi! répondit Valentine. Allez, je n'ai rien oublié! Vous êtes encore présente à ma mémoire comme si c'était hier …

—… C'est moi qui t'ai élevée, Valentine, tu t'en souviens!…car ta mère ne s'occupait guère de toi; moi seule, je veillais sur tous tes instants.…
(60-61)

As for Madame de Raimbault, the novel reinforces her distance from her daughter in the very way that it names her. Referred to alternately in the text by her maiden name, Mademoiselle de Chignon, or her title by marriage, la Comtesse de Raimbault, she is firmly rooted in social and patriarchal convention. She is the one who holds the title to the Raimbault property. It was her wealth and fortune that enabled the reacquisition of the Château de Raimbault, which had been sold as national property during the Revolution. In fact, this Sandian mother essentially coopts the role of the father: she assures the transmission of property to the daughter and thus provides her daughter's dowry for her marriage to Monsieur de Lansac. Assimilating Madame de Raimbault into the role of the father, the novel dispossesses this patriarchal mother even further of her textual identification with maternity. On the eve of her wedding day, Madame de Raimbault summons her daughter for a most peculiar mother-daughter chat:

Alors madame de Raimbault entama une grave dissertation d'affaires avec sa fille; elle lui fit remarquer qu'elle lui laissait le château et la terre de Raimbault, dont le nom seul constituait presque tout l'héritage de son père, et dont la valeur réelle, détachée de sa propre fortune, constituait une assez belle dot.… Elle entra dans des détails d'argent qui firent de cette exhortation maternelle une véritable consultation notariée, et termina sa harangue en lui disant qu'elle espérait, au moment où la loi allait les rendre étrangères l'une à l'autre, trouver Valentine disposée à lui accorder des égards et des soins.
(164)

More father-surrogate than nurturing mother, it is Madame de Raimbault who bequeaths the patrimonial legacy to the daughter—"elle lui laissait le château et la terre de Raimbault, dont le nom seul constituait presque tout l'héritage de son père." And, lest the reader need additional evidence of Madame de Raimbault's singular lack of mothering skills—her distaste for the role of motherhood, we need only look to one of the novel's last references to her. After Valentine's marriage to Monsieur de Lansac, Madame de Raimbault takes her leave, relieved to leave her maternal role behind her once and for all: "En se sentant débarrassée des devoirs de la maternité, il lui sembla qu'elle rajeunissait de vingt ans …" (221).

After Valentine's marriage, Madame de Raimbault essentially writes off her daughter. We scarcely hear of her again, and when we do, it is disparagingly, for in the final half of the novel, when the dissolute husband carefully selected for her by her mother has sold Valentine's home and property out from under her, Madame de Raimbault is quick to reject her daughter's pleas for help. And so it is that this mother, who has so summarily written off her daughter, finds herself, in turn, written out of the fiction itself. According to Marianne Hirsch, this is a common feature of nineteenth-century fiction authored by women. Studying the way in which women writers have gone about writing the story of the mother, Hirsch finds that the plots of nineteenth-century women writers are based on maternal repression—the mother's absence, silence, and negativity (The Mother/Daughter Plot 47). Hirsch's book points to what she sees as "the thoroughness with which female realist writers eliminate mothers from their fiction" (50). The novel of female development, anchored as it is in plots of romantic love, is predicated on the absence of the mother. Indeed, the sacrifice of the mother becomes the organizing principle of such fiction.⁵

Valentine takes her place alongside other nineteenth-century heroines by virtue of her motherlessness.⁶ For, long before Sand writes the mother out of her story, she depicts her heroine as an orphan. This is, of course, one significant feature of Sand's fiction of family dysfunction. As we saw earlier, Valentine credits Louise with having raised her, and she discounts and dismisses her mother's role. Yet, since her female role models are all essentially anti-role models, Valentine endeavors to write a new story for her life. She most clearly rejects the script of female conduct that the women in her life have followed. Sand describes her motherless, orphaned heroine in the following way:

La jeune Valentine, élevée tour à tour par sa sœur bannie, par sa mère orgueilleuse, par les religieuses de son couvent, par sa grand'mère étourdie et jeune, n'avait été définitivement élevée par personne. Elle s'était faite elle-même ce qu'elle était, et, faute de trouver des sympathies bien réelles dans sa famille, elle avait pris le goût de l'étude et de la rêverie.
(41)

Elle se promettait d'échapper à ces inclinations ardentes qui faisaient sous ses yeux le malheur des autres: à l'amour du luxe, auquel sa grand'mère sacrifiait toute dignité; à l'ambition, dont les espérances déçues torturaient sa mère; à l'amour, qui avait si cruellement égaré sa sœur.

(42)

This brief excerpt from the narrative of Valentine's family ties speaks volumes about Sand's fiction of female Bildung. Curiously enough, in spite of the fact that Valentine has been mothered by three different women of three different generations, the text ultimately casts her as an orphan and thereby invalidates any trace of female transmission between the women: "La jeune Valentine … n'avait été définitivement élevée par personne. Elle s'était faite elle-mëme ce qu'elle était.…" Valentine will not participate in that which has been the experience and destiny of the women around her. The text disinherits her from any female legacy, and it disidentifies her from her maternal models. She most clearly does not want to be her mother's daughter. Yet, Sand's representation of this failed relationship is not evidence of an anti-feminist stance on the part of the novelist. For what the novel underlines in this story of mother and daughter is the daughter's singularity with respect to the mother. Sand's heroine turns away from the mother. If there is ultimately no female legacy or transmission passed on from mother to daughter, it is due to Valentine who rejects the notion of womanhood and the patriarchal conception of femininity that her mother embodies. To read in Sand's story her inability to fictionalize a nurturing relationship between women without rivalry or jealous rancor seems to me to be a failed reading. For, what it fails to read in this story is the novelist's refusal to make of her heroine a daughter in the economy of patriarchy.

The work of Luce Irigaray can be helpful to a reading of this feature of Sand's fiction, since Irigaray confronts the reality and the consequences of women's existence in Western, male-ordered culture, and, by extension, in its literary productions. She speaks about the rupture in female genealogy as a casualty in the foundation and logic of Western culture. The perpetuation of Western society and culture resides, according to Irigaray, in the silence of, and separation between women: "Pourquoi, en quoi, la société, la socialité trouvent-elles intérêt à leur silence? Pour perpétuer toutes les normes de la société et de la culture existantes qui reposent aussi sur la séparation entre les femmes" (Ethique 103). It is the break in female genealogy, reflected in the relationships between the women in Sand's novel, which, if we play out Irigaray's reasoning, inexorably signals and underlies women's relation to women in a patriarchal economy, subject to the laws of male desire. Irigaray writes: "La verticalité est en quelque sorte toujours enlevée au devenir femme. Le lien entre mère et fille, fille et mère, doit être rompu pour que la fille devienne femme. La généalogie féminine doit être supprimée, au bénéfice de la relation fils-Père, de l'idéalisation du père et du mari comme patriarches" (106).⁷ Reading Irigaray, it is impossible not to think here of the way in which Sand casts Madame Raimbault's troubled relationship to her daughters. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, is another important critical intertext for a reading of Sand. The mother-daughter narrative in Valentine calls to mind Gilbert and Gubar's reading of Grimm's "Snow White." This story of (step)mother and daughter also takes place in the absence of the father. Yet, as Gilbert and Gubar read it, the father/king is present to the extent that the mother has internalized and assimilated his "patriarchal voice of judgment that rules the Queen's—and every other woman's—self-evaluation" (38). Reading the mother-daughter narratives of Grimm and Sand alongside one another reveals the parallel that exists between them: "It is true, of course, that in the patriarchal kingdom of the text these women inhabit, the Queen's life can be literally imperiled by her daughter's beauty, and true … that, given the female vulnerability such perils imply, female bonding is extraordinarily difficult in patriarchy: women almost inevitably turn against women because the voice of the looking glass sets them against each other" (38). Thus, patriarchal plots and representations of the feminine are mirrored in fiction from fairy tale to novel. Textual constructions of the feminine across fictional genres are grounded in the ideology of patriarchy, and bound up in this ideology are both the causes of, and explanations for women's difficult and problematic relationship to women in fiction.

But, shouldn't things work out differently in female-authored fiction? Doesn't gender make a difference? Of course it does, and Valentine provides one example. In Valentine, we can read, on the one hand, the novelist's effort to be faithful to dominant literary traditions, and on the other, her attempt to envision alternate ways in which to write the heroine's text. The course of development for nineteenth-century heroines is marked throughout by their inscription as gendered subjects in culture and fiction. The nineteenth-century feminocentric novel moves its heroine towards the heterosexual romance plot; the most characteristic organization of nineteenth-century narrative.⁸ And, in this, Valentine is no exception. The novel is marked by a writing posture that both inscribes and attempts to circumscribe dominant literary tradition and its ideological underpinnings. Sand's struggle to resist this tradition can be read in the very structure and organization of her narrative. We have already seen that the novel begins with the story of the sisters. And in these early pages, the novel's presentation of the sisters, bound up in their preoedipal attachment to one another, is at once a powerful and a sensuous one. With the exception perhaps of Sand's Lélia, Icanthinkofnoother nineteenth-century text that can possibly come close to matching or rivaling the depiction of the sensuality that pervades Valentine and Louise's reunion within the pages of the sisters' story:

Louise, en se redressant sur son chevet, perdit le mouchoir de soie qui retenait ses longs cheveux bruns. Dans ce désordre, pâle, effrayée, éclairée par un rayon de la lune qui perçait furtivement entre les fentes du rideau, elle se pencha vers la voix qui l'appelait. Deux bras l'enlacent; une bouche fraîche et jeune couvre ses joues de saintes caresses; Louise, interdite, se sent inondée de larmes et de baisers; Valentine, près de défaillir, se laisse tomber, épuisée d'émotion, sur le lit de sa sœur. Quand Louise comprit que ce n'était plus un rêve, que Valentine était dans ses bras, qu'elle y était venue, que son cœur était rempli de tendresse et de joie comme le sien, elle ne put exprimer ce qu'elle sentait que par des étreintes et des sanglots.

(60)

Sand clearly stages and valorizes the heroine's "homosexual" ties to her sister and sets forth the importance of the preoedipal in her presentation of the heroine. Yet, the sisters' story then gives way to the heterosexual romance plot, and thus the story of preoedipal love between the sisters yields to the narrative of the heroine's passage through oedipalization. In this way, Sand respects the prevailing narrative pattern of dominant literary tradition, for her novel enacts a passage from a valorization of homosexual ties to the characteristic preoccupation with heterosexual ones.

By grounding the heroine in a preoedipally organized narrative, and thus depicting the instance of affective merging between the heroine and another woman, Sand opens up the possibility of telling a different developmental story—one that is perhaps more complete—at the least, more faithful to the specificity of female development. The preoedipal is a story that goes untold in the tradition of nineteenth-century narrative; it is a story that is suppressed by the romance plot. The preoedipal is the untold story in Freudian theory as well. Freud acknowledged only belatedly and superficially the importance of the preoedipal for women. In his essay, "Femininity," Freud begins to stress its lingering importance for the specificity of female development: "We knew, of course, that there had been a preliminary stage of attachment to the mother, but we did not know that it could be so rich in content and so long-lasting, and could leave behind so many opportunities for fixations and dispositions.…In short, we get an impression that we cannot understand women unless we appreciate this phase of their pre-Oedipal attachment to the mother" (118). Sand, however, does not neglect to tell this story. On the contrary, she goes to great lengths to do so. Yet, if indeed Sand's attempt to inscribe her heroine in a different story—a preoedipally organized one—ultimately gives way to that more traditional of stories—romantic love, she does, in fact, return to it in an effort to reinscribe it throughout the novel. In the part of the novel concerned with the developing romance between Valentine and Bénédict, it is true that the sisters' story is no longer primary.⁹ Yet, there is an effort on the part of the novelist to bind Louise to this part of Valentine's story. The heterosexual love story in this novel grows out of the sisters' story: Valentine's initial attachment to Bénédict grows out of her love for Louise. It is Bénédict who is responsible for reuniting the sisters, and the love that Valentine comes to feel for Bénédict is initially, as far as the heroine is concerned, a displacement and an extension of her strong feelings for her sister: "elle se levait et courait à la fenêtre; appelant dans son coeur Louise et Bénédict; car Bénédict, ce n'était pour elle, du moins elle le croyait ainsi, qu'une partie de sa soeur détachée vers elle" (78). As the novel moves from recounting the sisters' story to plotting the romance between Valentine and Bénédict, Bénédict plays as important a role in the sisters' story as Louise does in the story of the lovers. Bénédict's role in the sisters' story is clear: he reunites them and serves as intermediary between them, delivering their messages and letters to one another. And, on one occasion, he literally stands in for Louise, when he sings a song to Valentine that she clearly associates with her sister:

—Cet air, dit Valentine dans un instant où elle fut seule avec Bénédict, est celui que ma sœur me chantait de prédilection lorsque j'étais enfant.… Je ne l'ai jamais oublié, et tout à l'heure j'ai failli pleurer quand vous l'avez commencé.

—Je l'ai chanté à dessein, répondit Bénédict; c'était vous parler au nom de Louise.
(83)

In this way, the novel does not simply trade off the preoedipally invested story in favor of the romance. Rather, this subsequent story builds out of and feeds off of the earlier story. The novel binds Louise to the romance plot, making clear that the heroine's love for Bénédict stems from love for her sister. Sand plots Valentine's story in such a way as to continually situate her within a relational triangle with her sister and her lover. In fact, at one point in the romance plot when Valentine clearly understands how deeply she loves Bénédict and how perilous the stakes of romantic love can be, the heroine attempts to draw Louise into the lovers' story, as if Louise's presence could, in some way, legitimize the passion between the lovers: "De son côté, celle-ci s'abandonnait à des dangers dont elle n'était pas trop fâchée de voir sa sœur complice. Elle se laissait emporter par sa destinée, sans vouloir regarder en avant, et puisait dans l'imprévoyance de Louise des excuses pour sa propre faiblesse" (226). Thus, narrative structure in Valentine, passing as it does from the preoedipal to the oedipal, does not simply supplant one story for the other in a kind of hegemonic ordering of story. Instead, it merges the two stories. Fusing the sisters' story and the story of the lovers, the novel presents its heroine in a kind of bisexual relational triangle.¹⁰

In terms of the narrative organization of the novel, the story of the lovers is in turn displaced by the story of the pavilion. There is much to be said of the episode of the pavilion, and this very topic has received important critical attention.¹¹ The novel's story of the pavilion represents the heroine's attempt to reclaim her own story. It is in the absence of her mother and husband that Valentine's quest for self finds definition and fulfilment in the sphere of activity and relationships that she creates within the walls of the pavilion. The importance of the mother's absence on Valentine's freedom and well-being cannot be stressed enough: "Jamais Valentine ne s'était sentie si heureuse; loin des regards de sa mère, loin de la roideur glaciale qui pesait sur tous ses pas, il lui semblait respirer un air plus libre, et, pour la première fois depuis qu'elle était née, vivre de toute sa vie" (105). The pavilion story makes clear that the mother needs to be removed from the daughter's story in order for the daughter to be able to shape and create her own story. It is here that she summons a family of her own choosing and writes a story for herself that takes place outside of, and in opposition to, society's conventions and prejudices: "Ainsi une réunion de circonstances favorables concourait à protéger le bonheur que Louise, Valentine et Bénédict volaient pour ainsi dire à la loi des convenances et des préjugés" (247). Interestingly enough, where the novel sets up a conflict for the mother between motherhood and selfhood—her role as mother clearly effacing any possibility of self-fulfilment for the countess—it celebrates the heroine's quest for self and achievement of self-fulfilment through her creation of family. Valentine's fictional quest is bound up in this desire for family. The story of the pavilion is all about the harmonious coexistence of Louise and her son, Valentin, Bénédict and his cousin and former fiancée, Athénaïs, and Valentine, a group that the novel indeed refers to as a family (257). The novel goes to great lengths to describe the blissful, idyllic refuge from the reality of the social order that the heroine has succeeded in establishing:

Le pavilion était donc pour tous, à la fin du jour, un lieu de repos et de délices. …C'était l'Elysée, le monde poétique, la vie dorée de Valentine; au château, tous les ennuis, toutes les servitudes, toutes les tristesses; …au pavilion, tous les bonheurs, tous les amis, tous les doux rêves, l'oubli des terreurs, et les joies pures d'un amour chaste. C'était comme une île enchantée au milieu de la vie réelle, comme une oasis dans le désert.
(250)

The pavilion is also a space in which social difference is collapsed and where an aristocratic heroine can coexist happily with those from a lower social class (Bénédict and Athénaïs) and those that society has expelled (Louise and Valentin). The pavilion represents Valentine's attempt to create a space for herself and her "family" outside of social difference, as well as outside of desire. The notion of the pavilion as a place for the sublimation of the lovers' desire ultimately proves, as Nancy Miller suggests, to be outside the possibilities of fiction ("Writing (From) the Feminine" 138).

Yet, there is another way in which to read the story of the pavilion. Although the pavilion episode continues to tell the story of the lovers, it shifts and dislocates this story by factoring in the story of Louise, Athénaïs, and Valentin. For the pavilion is not only figured as a site for the sublimation of the lovers' desire, it also opens up a space in which female genealogy, severed throughout the novel, is restored and reaffirmed. Louise is drawn back into the narrative. Her role expands beyond that of being her sister's jealous rival for Bénédict's love¹²; and the legitimate ties to family that had been denied to her are restored in the pavilion story. One of the main activities of this part of the novel becomes the education of Valentin, undertaken and transmitted by both Valentine and Bénédict. Thus, the pavilion story shifts the focus away from the romance plot and figures in other stories. It seems to me that this shift is another example of Sand's effort to rework and revise traditional narrative convention. She marks her dissent from dominant tradition by dislocating the romance plot from the center of the fiction and introducing a story organized around the notion of a group of collective protagonists, a feature of Sandian fiction.

I would like to conclude by returning to Crecelius's indictment of Valentine : "as a feminist work, Valentine is surprisingly thin compared with Indiana. " In the conclusion to her chapter on Valentine, she further states that Valentine 's "literary innovations are also more circumscribed than previously" (92). The reading of the novel that I present here takes issue with these remarks. Granted, the novel does stage women's problematic relation to women in a society in which they compete for male desire and romance. And granted, the novel, although it celebrates the strong, affective ties that can exist between women in its recounting of the sisters' story, it does, as well, debase these ties, in the story of Louise's jealousy. Ties between mother and daughter are severed, and those between sister and sister are compromised in Sand's fiction. Her heroine is the site of this break in female genealogy, and Sand's narrative is an attempt to negotiate a place and a role for her heroine within the terms of such a fiction.

Is Valentine a disappointing feminist work? Let's consider the novel's conclusion. Although it is true that the novel's feminism is subsumed within the social consciousness and conception of social equality that pervades the novel's conclusion, this conclusion does point toward the grounding of a more just and egalitarian society, and heralds the birth of a new generation (reflected in the marriage of Valentin and Athénaïs), founded on the notion of social equality. The novel's ending is not an abandonment of feminist principles. Rather, the novel's conclusion gestures towards the possibility of a society, very much like the one created by Valentine in the brief episode of the pavilion, where feminism is just another word for a more balanced, egalitarian, social relation between the sexes, between men and women as gendered subjects.

Notes

In Schor's reading, the question to be asked is "if a definition of feminism exists that can account for practices and convictions that are heterogeneous and sometimes irreconcilable" (75). According to Schor, a definition of feminism appropriate to a discussion of Sand would be one that "makes of it a sum of contradictions, the nodal point where dissatisfactions with contemporary society and the place it assigns women, claims for equality, claims for singular or plural differences, assertions of an essential and transhistorical female nature, and denunciations of a subaltern condition stemming from specifically historical and contingent factors clash and intertwine" (75-76).
See Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine's Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722-1782.
See Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender.
Although Chodorow's theories have come under attack from a number of scholars in different disciplines, many feminist critics have acknowledged the usefulness of Chodorow's work for an understanding of female experience in literature. See, for example, Marianne Hirsch, "Mothers and Daughters: A Review Essay" 218.
Hirsch traces the mother's evacuation from the daughter's story to her reading of Freud's "Family Romances" with its androcentric bias. Playing out the implications of the Freudian family romance pattern for a female child, Hirsch concludes that the female family romance depends on elimination of the mother from the daughter's fiction and on attachment to the husband/father. Hirsch also draws on Luce Irigaray and her definition of Western culture as inherently matricidal. See Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot 43-58. See also Luce Irigaray who writes: "Dès lors, ce qui apparaît dans les faits les plus quotidiens comme dans l'ensemble de notre société et de notre culture, c'est que celles-ci fonctionnent originairement sur un matricide. Quand Freud décrit et théorise, notamment dans Totem et Tabou, le meurtre du père comme fondateur de la horde primitive, il oublie un meurtre plus archaïque, celui de la femme-mère nécessité par l'établissement d'un certain ordre dans la cité" (Le Corps-à-Corps avec la Mère 15-16).
Adrienne Rich has also written on the motherless heroine. In a compelling essay on Jane Eyre, Rich draws on Phyllis Chesler's assertion that "women are motherless children in patriarchal society" (qtd. in Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence 91).
On the subject of the mother-daughter relationship, Irigaray has this to say: "Pour se faire désirer, aimer de l'homme, il faut évincer la mère, se substituer à elle, l'anéantir pour devenir même. Ce qui détruit la possibilité d'un amour entre mère et fille. Elles sont à la fois complices et rivales pour advenir à l'unique position possible dans le désir de l'homme" (Ethique 101).
See Rachel Blau DuPlessis who points out that the telic romance plot of these fictions is "a trope for the sex-gender system." Heterosexuality, as DuPlessis writes, is "not a natural law," "but a cultural and narrative ideology" (5).
Valentine's romance with Bénédict both predates and survives her marriage to Monsieur de Lansac.
See Nancy Chodorow, who writes that the feminine oedipal configuration is triangular—the course of female development is not seen as an abandonment of the preoedipal. The developmental narrative that Sand writes for Valentine mirrors, in many ways, the narrative of female development put forth by Chodorow and other object relations theorists. See Chodorow 140.
I am thinking here of Nancy Miller's "Writing (From) the Feminine: George Sand and the Novel of Female Pastoral."
Madame de Raimbault, Louise, and Athénaïs, suffer from jealousy over male desire, but this emotion is never attributed to Valentine.

Works Cited

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.

Crecelius, Kathryn J. Family Romances: George Sand's Early Novels. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.

Freud, Sigmund. "Femininity." in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 22. London: Hogarth Press, 1964.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.

——. "Mothers and Daughters: A Review Essay." Signs 7.1 (1981): 200-222.

Irigaray, Luce. Le Corps-à-Corps Avec la Mère. Montréal: Editions de la Pleine Lune, 1981.

——. Ethique de la Différence Sexuelle. Paris: Minuit, 1984.

Miller, Nancy K. The Heroine's Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722-1782. New York: Columbia UP, 1980.

——. "Writing (From) the Feminine: George Sand and the Novel of Female Pastoral." The Representation of Women in Fiction: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1981. Ed. Carolyn J. Heilbrun and Margaret Higonnet. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1983. 124-151.

Rabine, Leslie. "George Sand and the Myth of Femininity." Women and Literature 4.2 (1976): 2-9.

Rich, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978. New York: Norton, 1979.

Sand, George. Valentine. Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1869.

Schor, Naomi. George Sand and Idealism. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.

Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion