Germaine de Stael, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist (review)

Linda M. Lewis's recently published study enumerates the influences of Staël's Corinne (1807)and Sand's Consuelo (1842) and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1843) on the work of four Victorian writers: Geraldine Jewsbury, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Mrs. Humphrey Ward. In particular Lewis focuses on English texts whose main female characters are artists and women of great intellect, the direct inheritors of a great woman tradition established by Corinne and Consuelo.

In this epic study, Lewis surveys not only the length and depth of nineteenth-century British literature by women, but also analyses references to many strong textual women - Greek figures of mythology, biblical figures, and romanesque characters as well. The most interesting I found were Lewis's discussion of Ariadne with respect to Conseulo and Erinna in her analysis of The Mill on the Floss. Ultimately Lewis's goal is to show that Corinne and Consuelo,

[a]s representatives of the two generations of Romantic art . . . consciously and carefully brought mythic properties to their female heroes, and each connected the Wisdom myth to herself. Both mythologize their artist/heroines by connecting them to the Sibyl/Minerva/Sophia traditions and to the radical empowerment of humanity inherent in the Prometheus myth. Myth created Corinne and Consuelo; then in England Corinne and Consuelo became the mythology for British women artists of the remainder of the century.

(22)

With this virtual flood of literary heroines and their mythological and biblical foremothers, Lewis seeks to show how a specifically female artist takes form in nineteenth-century British literature. Reading her study, the great degree to which Staël and Sand influenced the British women authors who followed them becomes clear. Sometimes the influences of the French foremothers on their English daughters are quite subtle. For example, Lewis claims that George Eliot's obsession with Erinna - ". . . the Greek maiden who perished because relegated to a woman's sphere and thus denied a voice" (135) - is a reference to Sand's fear of losing her voice. On the whole however, the intertextuality is quite evident. In The Half Sisters by Jewsbury, the heroine, Bianca Pazzi, is half-English, half-Italian and her English father also has a younger daughter, Alice, by his English wife. Furthermore, Jewsbury calls to readers to make the direct comparison with Corinne when, as Alice is reading Corinne, the narrator remarks: ". . . a young girl's first reading of Corinne is an epoch a woman never forgets" (78).

Lewis's close readings of the Victorian literature are insightful and demonstrate a wide breadth of knowledge. Ultimately she shows that these Victorian women writers addressed familiar and still pertinent questions ranging from the effect of gender (in this case feminine) on genius and artistic production to ". . . the female artist's mesmerizing power over her male audience and whether her artistry should - or could - be judged apart from her sexual charms" (249). Additionally, her work on Consuelo and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt touches on many of Sand's other texts and her reading of Consuelo as a "five-movement symphony or a five-act drama," in which each section mimics a different genre, Künstlerroman, Gothic, Picaresque, Comedy, and finally Tragedy, is wonderful.

Lewis's reading of Corinne however is less successful. She locates Corinne's genius in her enthusiasm, and yet never really traces the term back through its complicated philosophical and religious history. According to Lewis, "enthusiasm" is "vivacité de l'esprit" (26, from Corinne, 55) whereas the term is historically and etymologically more complicated, with references to divine inspiration and fury, as we know from the article of the same name in Diderot's Encyclopédie. Moreover, Lewis characterizes Corinne's genius as emanating from within, à la Shelley in A Defence of Poetry, where-as other scholars, including myself, have argued elsewhere that it is imposed more generally from without - she seems to be inhabited by other forces when she...