Vision in the Novels of George Sand by Manon Mathias (review)

From romantic visionariness to scientific objectivism, vision has been central to nineteenth-century French studies, but not necessarily to criticism on George Sand. Influenced by Naomi Schor's pioneering study George Sand and Idealism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), the scholarly debate opposing realism and idealism has traditionally placed Sand in the latter camp, consequently obscuring the significance and the originality of Sand's engagement with vision and seeing. Here, Manon Mathias explores vision from multiple perspectives, emphasizing its relation to literary models (realism and mimesis), pictorial arts, and scientific investigation. She places Sand in dialogue with other nineteenth-century novelists (Stendhal, Balzac, Verne, Zola—but no other women writers are referenced) in order to show that Sand refutes the typical binary logic that divides observation from revelation. Sand develops a distinctive stance that synthesizes bodily sight and conceptual seeing; scientific observation and aesthetic awareness; reality and truth; concrete and abstract. Comparison is effective, but even more compelling is Mathias's skilled use of textual analysis throughout this book (notably of mirror imagery and reflection in Indiana). Mathias's careful attention to the evolution of Sand's writing from Indiana to her novels of the 1840s, as well as to her later, lesser-known works, L'Homme de neige, Valvèdre, and Laura, voyage dans le cristal, clearly maps the move from introspection in the early works to the 'valorization of physical eyesight and scientific study' (p. 4). Chapter 1 identifies a tension between the representation of social reality and romantic introspection in Indiana, Valentine, and Lélia, but Mathias advocates rethinking 'the very terms of realism' (p. 33) rather than maintaining its opposition to idealism. Sand adopts a socially constructed approach to internal vision. In line with Isabelle Naginski's George Sand mythographe (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2007), the second chapter shows how Sand combines the visual and the prophetic in her novels from the 1840s, Le Compagnon du tour de France, Consuelo, Le Meunier d'Angibault, and Le Péché de Monsieur Antoine, as well as in the later novel La Ville noire. Using Balzac's voyants as a foil, Mathias connects Sand's visionary poetics to social and moral engagement. Sand's creative response to the visual arts is examined in Chapter 3 in order to challenge an easy association of realism with the reproduction of reality in art. Instead, Sand's 'notional ekphrasis' exploits the 'moral and emotional power of painting and foregrounds its potential to reconfigure the original' (p. 71). Sidelining Sand's extensive relations with artists, the chapter contains suggestive pages on visual technologies (photography, stereoscope) and a thought-provoking discussion of Un hiver à Majorque among other works. Chapter 4 argues that Sand 'rejects the scientific eye as a means of mastering and fixing the real and celebrates instead the dynamism and mystery of the natural world' (p. 5). Sand's keen interest in the natural sciences meant that her goal as a writer involved revealing the natural world's dynamism and inspiring 'wonderment' rather than appropriating nature through the scientific gaze. Mathias's well-researched and comprehensive book on Sand's distinct syncretic approach to visuality makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century realism.