Le Musée imaginaire de George Sand: l'ouverture et la médiation (review)

In this volume Gérard Peylet gathers fifteen essays to examine the axes of openness and mediation in George Sand's search for balance and unity in her imaginative world, through movement and dialectical progress. In the first of five parts, Peylet analyses spatial, temporal and oneiric openness, beginning with an essay that perceptively investigates how border lands in Teverino function as places of wandering and searching, wherein characters' transgression of social, geographic and spiritual barriers broaden their lives and their knowledge of self and others. Peylet's second essay queries eschatology and utopian conscience in Sand's metaphysical novel Spiridion, while his third investigates how Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony evokes a cosmic, metaphysical reverie in Sand's Sketches and hints. Part II examines Sand's representation of space and place as retreat and opening, first in her pastoral novels celebrating Berry as geographic and emotional centre, which balances dream with concrete peasant life. Peylet then investigates how Sand's aesthetic appreciation of Mediterranean nature in A Winter in Majorca and Tamaris is outweighed by nostalgia for Berry. Finally he shows that Sand balances topographical description and mythic narrative in Jeanne, whose heroine becomes the embodiment of the mythic place. The third section examines how music and voice in Consuelo are associated with travel, quest and mediation with the other, the collective, and natural as well as divine energy. Peylet's essays examining voice and music that breach limits of visible/invisible, physical/metaphysical, conscious/unconscious in Sand's landscapes and 'nocturnes', however, should have been one essay. Peylet's repetition of quotations from Lettres d'un voyageur and Baudelaire's Confiteor d'un artiste, and long passages from Un hiver à Majorque, Mauprat, Les Maîtres sonneurs and Jeanne (also used in 'Pays et paysage'), as well as his own commentary, indicates that this is a grouping of individual essays rather than one coherent work. In part four Peylet loosely groups essays on Sand's appreciation of her grandmother's influence on her moral and artistic education in Histoire de ma vie, Sand's efforts to use education to develop woman's moral power against oppression in Indiana, Valentine, Mauprat and Jacques, and Le Château des Désertes as ideal space for the education of artists. In the fifth and final section Peylet examines the dialectic of Sand's imaginative world, first between the myth of origin, modernity and utopia in her apprenticeship novels, Le Péché de Monsieur Antoine, Le Compagnon du Tour de France, and second between archaism and modernity in Jeanne, Les Maîtres sonneurs and Nanon (which repeats quotations and points from 'Pays et paysage' and mistakenly refers to the character Lémor as Lénor). Peylet's final essay examines the flux between propriety, shamelessness and impudence in Un hiver à Majorque, Sand's Correspondance and Histoire de ma vie. Peylet's Le Musée imaginaire has no real conclusion and never clarifies how it constitutes a museum. Indicative of this book's careless editing is its bibliographic attribution of Naomi Schor's George Sand and Idealism to Martine Reid.