The Psyche of Feminism: Sand, Colette, Sarraute (review)

Juxtaposed at the beginning of Peebles' preface are passages from George Sand's Lélia and Shoshana Felman's Literature and Psychoanalysis, both of which seem to allude to what Jessica Benjamin has termed the "problem of domination" (occurring, for Sand, in the context of love, and for Felman, in the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature) (ix). Taken together, the two passages serve as a useful point of departure for Peebles' basic premise – that a reading of psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory, and women's writing will initiate a discussion "in which each discourse enlightens and is enlightened by, questions and is questioned by, the others" (x).

Peebles' introduction then delves deeper into the relationship – "actual, possible, and imagined" – between feminism and psychoanalysis, surveying "the history of their entanglement" and affirming "the centrality of a radical psychoanalysis to feminist thought [. . .]" (xiv). If psychoanalysis offers feminism insights into "the psychical workings of gendered sexualities," feminist theory offers psychoanalysis insights into difference, particularly sexual and ethico-political differences (2). The heart of this section is the presentation of Irigaray's and Lacan's respective articulations of sexual difference. Peebles teases out areas where their theories converge and diverge, touching along the way on the work of prominent scholars such as Juliet Mitchell and Joan Copjec.

Having contextualized and fleshed out her theory, Peebles now turns to its application, in three chapters devoted to Sand, Colette, and Sarraute, respectively (for obvious reasons, this review will deal solely with the first). "George Sand and the Impossible Woman" focuses on two texts, Lettres à Marcie and Lélia. The former is an epistolary work, albeit a one-sided one, since it contains only the letters from Marcie's male correspondent, thus obliging Sand to represent the heroine "precisely in, or by way of, her absence" (35). It was never finished because Sand's editor refused to allow a frank treatment of sensitive issues such as divorce. A central question is whether Marcie will choose a conventional route (marriage and motherhood) or a more exceptional one (the life of an artist). Opting for the latter entails the "complete renunciation of any erotic relations whatsoever, in favor of a newly assumed identity (virgin-angel) utterly free from (because far above) the risks of sexuality" (40). Art, posits Peebles intriguingly, is the one domain not "sexed in advance" since it exists in a space where "the virility demanded by public roles and the femininity essential to marriage and maternity cancel each other out once and for all"; it is "not so much the solution to sexual difference" as "the transcendence of it altogether" (41). The solution to the problem of women's role in politics seems less clearcut for Sand. Peebles highlights her critique of the Saint-Simoniennes, cleverly aligning it with Bruce Fink's Lacanian response to a feminist argument regarding the "violence and injustice of patriarchal Law" (45) in order to drive home her point about the mutual need of psychoanalysis and feminism for each other.

Sand characterized Lettres à Marcie as "a sort of novel without events" (qtd. 33), and Peebles provides a similar appraisal of Lélia, calling it "a novel without a plot" (51) and, elsewhere, a "genre-exploding 'novel'" (xiv). Torn between the desire for heterosexual love and the desire to avoid a relationship based on domination, the eponymous heroine aspires to "a something else, a something more, usually conceived as divine, that can never be attained ici-bas" (55), at least in a relationship with a man. It is only in her relationship with her twin sister Pulchérie that Lélia might find what she is looking for. Peebles reads Sand with Aristotle (on the subject of women's slavery), then (lengthily) Wittig ("a warrior against, refugee from, sexual difference") with Irigaray ("a champion of the advent of a different sexual difference") before considering how Sand deals with similar problems of difference, on the one hand, and the limitations...