George Sand and the Genealogy of Terror

George Sand and the Genealogy of Terror Anne E. McCall N INE YEARS AFTER AN ABORTED REVOLUTION had led France from the ultra and elderly Bourbon, Charles X, to the reputedly gentler leadership of the royal family’s younger and politically liberal branch, France’s original, belated, and born-again enfants du siècle had spoken. A succession of novelists and poets from Chateaubriand to Musset had repeatedly represented what can be de­ scribed as an accurate understanding of the trans-generational decline of patriarchal authority in French national politics and family life1; René, Obermann, Armance, and Louis Lambert frame a long series of epony­ mous male characters who enshrine a gender-specific model for societal marginalization and narrative production in which authorial fertility and power are founded on orphanhood, alienation, impotence and exile.2In spite of and perhaps owing to the commercial popularity and artistic prestige that these figures commanded, the topos was finally, or at least temporarily, beginning to run dry. Dangerous though the protagonist may be to his naïve mistress, Marthe, in George Sand’s 1841 novel Horace, this student is but a paltry replica and amusing parody of his aggrandized literary forefathers. His desk cluttered with the titles and opening pages of works never completed, including the first chapter of Le Nouveau René,3 this affected, lazy, jealous, and vain young man relies, as does his mistress, on novels as models of behavior (Horace 166, 169, 171, 187), and finds his sole redeeming feature in the very literary barrenness and precarious social status that limit his nefarious influence. Two years before completely ridiculing an enfant du siècle, however, and shortly after revising her own feminized mal du siècle novel, Lélia, Sand published in Gabriel a virulent attack on the role that this supposed vic­ tim, his disease and his cultural privilege were playing in a long-standing and deadly reign of terror. In this tale of dynastic strife and identity confusion, the young hero­ ine, Gabriel de Bramante, figures as a legitimist. Secretly raised as the male successor to her paternal grandfather, this young heir apparent rebels abainst Jules de Bramante’s abuse of princely authority and sets off to find her male cousin and rightful heir under salic law, whose name represents as much of a secret to Gabriel as her sexual identity does to 38 W in t e r 1995 M c Call him.4 The heroine’s simultaneous quest for political restoration and original identity outlines a potentially ascending plot taking both pro­ tagonists from ignorance to love and from disorder to order; however, in a hostile environment far from the dreamlike world of Shakespearean comedy or the shimmering reflections that Gautier had favored in Mademoiselle de Maupin, stock comedic elements including hidden iden­ tities, cross-dressing and Italian carnival scenes serve as tragic ploys. Transgression mutilates rather than titillates, self-knowledge alienates, recognition distresses, and the final return to order destroys the heroine. In so doing, Sand’s nightmarish novel of generational blackmail, gender coercion, and political assassination unmasks both the self-serving and deceptive nature of her contemporaries’ fictional claims to exclusion and the equally justifiable, but similarly illusory, representation from her perspective of an Oedipal drama pitting the generation of 1830 more or less successfully against its predecessors.5The recurring scenes of violent containment, death, and repulsion present a blueprint for postrevolu­ tionary society where dynastic, family and gender politics converge in a terrifying depiction of abjection. In the opening line of the novel, Gabriel’s tutor raises the specter of slow patriarchal demise, for he asks the newly arrived and aging Prince Jules, “ Votre altesse est-elle toujours aussi fatiguée?” (Gabriel 47). The ensuing dialogue between the elderly men highlights the visible physical decrepitude of the 80-year-old sovereign: no longer able to travel on horseback and nostalgic for his distant libertine past, he conjures up images of glorious but deceased real monarchs such as Louis XIV and Louis XV, while his ten-year absence suggests a more immediate resem­ blance with France’s geriatric, absolutist and exiled Charles X. It is hard­ ly surprising, from this perspective, that Prince Jules’ eldest...