Indiana (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

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  Translation, Note on the Text, Explanatory Notes, Chronology

  © Sylvia Raphael 1994

  Introduction, Select Bibliography © Naomi Schor 1994

  Biographical details © Rosemary Lloyd 1994

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  First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1994

  Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2000

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Data available

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Sand, George, 1804–1876.

  [Indiana. English]

  Indiana / George Sand; translated by Sylvia Raphael; with an

  introduction by Naomi Schor.

  p. cm.—(Oxford world’s classics)

  1. France—Social life and customs—19th century—Fiction.

  2. Man—woman relationships—France—Fiction. 3. Marriage—

  France—Fiction. 4. Women—France—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.

  843′.8—dc20 PQ2404.A4 1994 94–621

  ISBN 0–19–283797–4

  6

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

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  Refer to the Table of Contents to navigate through the material in this Oxford World’s Classics ebook. Use the asterisks (*) throughout the text to access the hyperlinked Explanatory Notes.

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  GEORGE SAND

  Indiana

  Translated by

  SYLVIA RAPHAEL

  With an Introduction by

  NAOMI SCHOR

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  INDIANA

  GEORGE SAND was born as Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin on 1 July 1804. From her father’s death in 1808, she was raised at Nohant in Berry, France, which was her grandmother’s home and in which she herself would spend the greater part of her life, although she travelled widely and frequently stayed in Paris. A prolific writer of plays, short stories, novels, and journal articles, she published her first novel, Indiana, in 1832. Closely allied with major socialist thinkers in the years leading up to the revolution of 1848, she was distressed by the violence and brutality of the uprisings and sought in subsequent novels to reconcile socialist theory with the harsh teachings of experience. Her interest in music is strongly reflected in The Master Pipers, while her love of the countryside in the Berry and Bourbonnais regions of France, together with her desire to give permanence to local customs and beliefs, can be seen in her pastoral novels Little Fadette, The Devil’s Pool, and François the Foundling. She continued writing until her death in 1876.

  SYLVIA RAPHAEL taught French language and literature at the universities of Glasgow and London, specializing in nineteenth-century literature. Her translations include Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet and La Cousine Bette, as well as Sand’s Mauprat and Madame de Staël’s Corinne.

  NAOMI SCHOR is William Hanes Wannamaker Professor of Romance Studies and Literature at Duke University. Her publications include Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1987) and George Sand and Idealism (1993).

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of George Sand

  INDIANA

  Introduction

  Preface to the 1832 Edition

  Preface to the 1842 Edition

  Explanatory Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  OF the many legends attached to George Sand’s name, one has particular relevance to the publication of Sand’s stunningly successful first novel, Indiana. Henry James, Sand’s perfidious admirer, puts it this way: ‘About this sudden entrance into literature, into philosophy, into rebellion . . . there are various different things to be said. Very remarkable, indeed, was the immediate development of the literary faculty in this needy young woman who lived in cheap lodgings and looked for “employment”. She wrote as a bird sings; but unlike most birds, she found it unnecessary to indulge, by way of prelude, in twitterings and vocal exercises; she broke out at once with her full volume of expression.’1 Characterized on the basis of her remarkable achievement—Indiana literally launched Sand’s career overnight—as a ‘natural’ writer, Sand was by the same gesture assigned the second rank reserved for writers, particularly female, who are said to serve no apprenticeship, to expend no effort in writing, who like Minerva spring full born from Jupiter’s forehead. Not surprisingly, the apparently flattering notion that Sand was not just a bird but a rare one at that, was to mutate in time into other less flattering natural analogies than the ornithological. Most famously, Nietzsche compared the seemingly effortless flow of her prose to that of a milk-cow.

  Whether or not Sand was a natural writer, James failed to mark a crucial aspect of what made Indiana so exceptional, and its publication such an event: Sand was in no sense a natural author. When it appeared in May 1832 Indiana bore an unfamiliar and enigmatic signature, G. Sand. Was the author male or female? Did the G stand for George or, as one eminent contemporary critic (Gustave Planche) would have it, Georgina? G. Sand was, as it was soon revealed, the pseudonym of Aurore Dudevant, the recently separated wife of the Baron Casimir Dudevant. Specifically enjoined by her mother-in-law not to sully her noble married name in her pursuit of a professional writing career, Sand gradually elaborated what was to become her lifelong pen-name and accompanying male persona. Writing first in collaboration with her lover Jules Sandeau under a series of pen names (Signol, J. Sand, J.S.), when she published her
first solo effort, Indiana, she retained the marginally established and marketable Sand but made it her own by substituting the trace of the lover’s name, the vestigial initial J, by a G. It was only when later that same astonishingly productive year she published her second novel, Valentine, under the name George Sand, that the process of renaming herself was completed.

  Given the peculiar difficulties women encountered in assuming authorship of their writings in both France and England, due to obstacles placed in their paths by a misogynistic social and cultural order buttressed by a legal system which worked to dispossess them of their literary productions, George Sand was hardly the only nineteenth-century woman author to adopt a pseudonym—and of course men too adopted pseudonyms, albeit for different reasons. But she was the first of any standing: breaking with a tradition of anonymity and genteel lady novelist ‘Madame de’ signatures, George Sand, née Aurore Dupin, was the initiator of a tradition linking women’s coming to writing with self-naming, a veritable rebirth: ‘In Paris Mme Dudevant is dead. But George Sand is known as a lusty fellow,’ writes Sand to a friend in the flush of Indiana’s success.2 Because of her immense productivity—her œuvre comprises some sixty-nine novels, twenty-five volumes of correspondence, and other forms of writing—and the international status as a cultural icon she achieved in her lifetime, Sand’s use of a male pseudonym was to prove remarkably influential, and nowhere more so than in Victorian England: the English spelling of George—in French the accepted spelling is Georges—finds its ultimate justification in the pseudonym Marian Evans explicitly borrowed from her French model; I am referring of course to George Eliot.

  Just the sort of demeaning cultural stereotyping that led so many nineteenth-century women authors to adopt male pseudonyms greeted the publication of what was immediately recognized as a major modern work, the literary event of 1832. Confronted by the sexually unmarked initial of the author’s first name, contemporary male critics trotted out familiar clichés to ascribe a sex to the author and hence a value to his work. These clichés fall into two familiar classes: according to one, women’s and men’s writing is essentially different, bodily grounded in man’s strength and woman’s weakness. Thus Edouard d’Anglemont writes, ‘this is a novel written with all the strength of a man’s grip and all the grace of a woman’s pen’.3 Because Indiana combines allegedly masculine and feminine traits, the critic Jacques Lerond can only conclude that this is a two-handed, doubly authored work: ‘this brilliant but unharmonious cloth is the work of two distinct workers.’4

  A second category of clichés involves the relationship between the author and his or her characters: to the extent that an author projects his or her self into a character, he or she gives his or her sex away. Because of Indiana’s extraordinary emphasis on the miseries of female destiny in a patriarchal society, its author could only be a woman; no man could have described woman’s estate as Sand does. By the same token, and more to the point, no man could or would have portrayed the cad Raymon in as clinical a way as Sand does. A similar logic is at work in Baudelaire’s celebrated essay on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. The issue there is not, of course, the sex of the author, which is never in doubt, but the sex of the main female protagonist: for all her femininity, according to Baudelaire, there persists in Emma Bovary a trace of the virility the male author projects on to her, hence her androgyny. An androgynous character can only be the product of an androgynous author. Thus Indiana’s androgynous nature—she is a sort of ultra-feminine Amazon—is viewed not as the result of collaboration between a male and a female author, but rather as the product of her author’s ‘virile character’, her own unstable gender identity.

  Now whereas Flaubert proudly and famously proclaimed his identification with his fictional creation—’ Madame Bovary, c’est moi’, he is reported to have said—in her autobiography Sand protests against the widespread implication that her female protagonists are projections of the author: ‘I am too romantic ever to have seen the heroine of a novel in my mirror.’5 Whereas for male authors identification is cause for boasting, for women authors, as feminist critics have convincingly demonstrated, it is cause for concern, because the identification of a male author with his female creation is taken as an emblem of his imaginative powers, while that of a female author is taken as a proof of her creative deficiency. Far better, then, for the author that Sand is in the process of becoming that her text mirror not herself—’ Indiana ce n’est pas moi,’ she might have cried—but external reality. Of course these are not the same processes of reflection: one involves the public and metaphoric mirror that the realist writer following Stendhal is said to carry down the road, the other, the private and literal mirror of the narcissistic woman.

  Sand came to writing at the very moment when, under the joint impetus of Stendhal and Balzac, the literary movement that has come to be known as realism was rising to the dominant position it was soon to achieve. Seeking to obtain the literary legitimation that being a realist writer bestows, Sand’s first edition of and first preface to Indiana are replete with protestations of her allegiance to the familiar ideology of realism, namely that it has no ideology: it is pure reproduction, a mirror without a curve, a machine that merely registers material phenomena and events without distorting them. ‘The writer is only a mirror which reflects them [society’s inequalities and fate’s whims], a machine which traces their outline, and he has nothing for which to apologize if the impressions are correct and the reflection is faithful.’6

  What the 1832 versions of the preface and text demonstrate is that for a fledgeling writer realism provided the means for distancing oneself from the sort of unreal or idealistic romantic literature often disparagingly associated with femininity, especially in the heyday of the novel’s rise in the eighteenth century. The gendering of the aesthetic categories of realism and idealism is clearly enunciated by Balzac, when in a conversation Sand transcribes in her autobiography, Story of My Life, he tells her:

  You are looking for man as he should be; I take him as he is. Believe me, we are both right. Both paths lead to the same end. I also like exceptional human beings; I am one myself. I need them to make my ordinary characters stand out, and I never sacrifice them unnecessarily. But the ordinary human beings interest me more than they do you. I make them larger than life; I idealize them in the opposite sense, in their ugliness or in their stupidity. I give their deformities frightful or grotesque proportions. You could not do that; you are smart not to want to look at people and things that would give you nightmares. Idealize what is pretty and what is beautiful, that is a woman’s job.7

  According to this plausible if perhaps apocryphal statement, realism—which is in fact a form of negative idealism—is an unfiltered mode of vision that looks harsh reality in the face, while idealism is a prosthetic device that functions to dim the blinding dazzle of truth. Writing as a would-be realist, which is to say as a man, Sand denies in her preface of 1832 any recourse to the prettifying visual aids of idealism: ‘If he [the writer] had felt learned enough to write a really useful book, he would have softened truth instead of presenting it with its crude colours and glaring effects. Such a book would have served the purpose of blue spectacles for faulty eyes.’8

  Despite Sand’s strategically placed disclaimer, idealism and not realism came to be her preferred and distinctive aesthetic mode. Hence, just as it is impossible to write about Balzac without writing about realism, no analysis, let alone re-evaluation of Sand’s work can proceed without taking account of her (allegedly feminine) idealist aesthetics, without rethinking idealism, idealism being understood here both as the heightening of an essential characteristic (the pretty and the beautiful, but also the ugly and the stupid), and the promotion of a higher good (freedom, equality, spiritual love). However, so imbricated are realism and idealism at the outset, so great the influence of Balzac on his peers, that Sand did not come on the literary scene as an idealist in full possession of her aesthetic vision. Indiana records the difficult
emergence of Sandian idealism from the realist paradigm constituted by Balzacian realism.

  Given this state of affairs it is not surprising that Indiana opens with a tableau whose realist insignia are so glaring as to have fooled even Sand’s curmudgeonly mentor, Henri de Latouche. Quickly scanning his pupil’s manuscript he exclaimed: ‘Well! it’s a pastiche, school of Balzac. A pastiche, what can I say? Balzac, what can I say.’9 It was only after having spent the night reading the entire manuscript that he recognized the novel’s originality, and even its superiority to the chief representatives of the realist school: ‘Balzac and Mérimée lie dead under Indiana.’10 What creates the illusion of a pseudo-Balzacian beginning is precisely the tableau like presentation of the characters. Following the realist descriptive code which, as Roland Barthes has shown, consists of appropriating a pictorial model11—in this instance a Rembrandt-like chiaroscuro painting—to mediate the description of brute reality, the initial tableau features three of the novel’s main protagonists grouped around a flickering fire. But there is nothing particularly Balzacian about this triangle, which recalls rather La Nouvelle Héloïse, an unsurprising literary reminiscence on the part of such a daughter of Rousseau as was Sand. The three figures we find glumly arrayed before the fire in Lagny, a manor in Brie, constitute, however, a bizarre Oedipal triangle: Colonel Delmare, the tyrannical and jealous paternal husband who received Indiana from the hands of her brutal father; Sir Ralph, Indiana’s asexual cousin, who watches over her like a brother; and Indiana herself, the oppressed exotic heroine. Soon this static tableau is interrupted by the arrival of the third male protagonist, the dashing aristocrat recently moved to the area, Raymon de la Ramière, the outsider who sets the narrative into motion. Though a stranger to this dysfunctional family circle, Raymon’s irruption onto the scene completes the complex triplication of the male protagonist. Thus the initial pseudo-Oedipal triangle is overlaid and energized by a homosocial triangle, where men seek out and engage with each other through the mediation of a mutually desired woman. What Raymon does, in other words, is to set the ambiguous and latent structure of male rivalry and desire into motion. By contrasting Indiana’s non-rivalrous relationship with her foster-sister Noun with the rivalrous relationship between men that the seductive Raymon brings to the surface, Sand turns received ideas on their ear; it is the rivalry between empowered men and not that between disempowered women that undergirds the social structure.