Destabilizing Motherhood and Fostering Care in George Sand’s Les Maîtres Sonneurs

This article draws from George Sand studies, motherhood studies, and feminist care ethics to show how Sand’s representations of motherhood and the maternal in Les Maîtres Sonneurs (1853) destabilize and revise the patriarchal narrative of motherhood dominant in nineteenth-century France. Indeed, Les Maîtres Sonneurs offers a vision of motherhood that is unique even within Sand’s own body of work: through Brulette’s role as a foster mother, Sand weaves into the novel a counter apprentice story to that of Joseph, the bagpiper, in which she articulates motherhood as a difficult form of labor that does not come instinctively to Brulette. Further, Sand’s novel condemns the emotional, moral, and physical violence against women that is grounded in rhetoric that simultaneously upholds motherhood as a natural, instinctive, sacred and civic duty and denigrates unwed mothers, with their enfants naturels, as unnatural and degenerate. In the process, there are in Les Maîtres Sonneurs moments of amazement that, I argue, function as an ethical space of relation within which the characters and the readers learn to bear witness as the mother figure negotiates her own identity vis-à-vis the child. These moments of amazement offer other characters and the reader the opportunity to enter into a new, more flexible and ethical relationship with the mother figure through a process of reevaluation of what might or might not be “natural” about motherhood. Finally, I propose that the novel ultimately pushes even further by shifting from a narrative about a nostalgic son’s fantasy of motherhood, a Romantic fantasy that works to eclipse the mother, to a narrative that restores the mother with the help of the daughter.