Men of their Words: The Poetics of Masculinity in George Sand’s Fiction (review)

Nigel Harkness’s aim in this excellent monograph is to liberate George Sand’s masculinity from the restrictive autobiographical sphere of cross dressing and male pseudonymity and to situate it rather as the driving force of her literary texts. Drawing on a corpus of fifteen novels, he produces a series of authoritative close readings that demonstrate the extent to which the thinking of masculinity, and its inscription in literary representation, are inextricable for Sand. As his title ‘Men of their Words’ suggests, Harkness places language, and especially the discursive performance that is the act of narration, at the core of Sand’s conception of masculinity. Of her own performances of masculinity, it is therefore her adoption of a male narrative voice that best allows her to insert herself subversively into the nexus of language, power and masculinity upon which her novels insistently focus. The opening chapter takes a broadly cultural-studies approach, using historical, social and literary material to explore dominant and marginalized conceptions of masculinity in nineteenth-century France; it closes with a hinge to the argument to follow — that the gender identity that is masculinity is constructed through speech as much as through actions — in the form of a brief discussion of Sand’s fictional Englishmen, for whom a linguistically inferior performance in French appears to equate to a failure of manhood. The second chapter takes the concept of homosociality as the linchpin of the realist poetics of Indiana and Valentine, while the third focuses on three first-person confessional novels, Mauprat, Valvèdre and Le Dernier Amour, to suggest that the linguistic supplement afforded by male self-representation compensates for an otherwise deficient masculinity. Chapter 4 is an especially powerful reading of the ‘significant literary diptych’ (p. 112) constituted by André and Le Péché de Monsieur Antoine. Here Harkness argues that the disfunctional father-son relationships around which the plots turn are inscribed not only within patriarchal and capitalist social structures, but figure Sand’s own struggle with the literary procreators of their Romantic intertexts. Thus, ‘by adapting the codes of realism and rejecting those of Romanticism, she now steers her own course towards a more utopian and politically engaged fiction’ (p. 118). Finally, through an extensive discussion of the two versions of Lélia, and a shorter closing section on Isidora, Chapter 5 again links narrative plotting to metaliterary concerns. Failures of masculinity, in the context of both sexual and narrative desire, are linked to the myths of Pygmalion and Prometheus, and what emerges from these texts is a disruption of the male linguistic power that more typically structures representation in the nineteenth-century novel. In his concluding remarks, Harkness claims of Sand’s fiction that it ‘redirects a critical gaze towards the bonds between maleness and privilege, and away from the pains and fragilities of man as victim of patriarchy’ (p. 148). This, then, is a feminist study of literary masculinity, and as such complements and complicates the stress on representations of women, and the relation between femininity and representation, that has driven the revival of Sand scholarship since the 1980s.