Gender in the Fiction of George Sand (review)

Massardier-Kenney, Françoise. Gender in the Fiction of George Sand. Amsterdam/Atlanta GA.: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2000. Pp. 197. ISBN 90-420-0707-9

Gender in the Fiction of George Sand is an important book which is sure to have a significant impact on the second critical stage of Sand studies in the English-speaking world. In the 1990s Schor's George Sand and Idealism and Naginski's George Sand: Writing for Her Life put Sand on the critical map in this country, thus constituting a kind of introductory stage for Sand studies. Now that the novelist is increasingly accepted as an important figure in the development of the French novel and a narrow Sand canon established (Indiana, Lélia, Consuelo and the pastoral novels), the time has come to expand this canon and to shift the theoretical focus to more specific critical issues. Recently, excellent book-length studies by young scholars such as Anne McCall Saint-Saëns and Nigel Harkness have dealt with the role of epistolarity and narrative voice in Sand's vast literary universe. As part of this second generation of critics, Françoise Massardier-Kenney applies her considerable analytic skills to Sand's views of gender.

Massardier-Kenney's excellent introduction is highly informed by the current scholarship on gender. As she points out, the concept of gender, which is crucial for our understanding of Sand's originality and contemporaneity, has up to now been primarily treated at the psycho-biographical level (4). This book proposes therefore to study gender in the novels. The critic's main thesis, which is remarkably well thought-out, is that Sand's novels are "the site where George Sand articulated a complex and extremely modern conception of gender" (4). In her works Sand questioned patriarchal modes of discourse and redefined notions of masculinity and femininity. Massardier-Kenney argues that the novelist used three major strategies to challenge standard definitions of gender: valorization of women characters, destabilization of male narrative authority, and deconstruction of the female internalization of romantic definitions of love and gender differences (11).

Massardier-Kenney's textual corpus is most original and will do much to broaden the Sandian canon. Of the eleven novels she deals with, only Indiana and Lélia have up to now been routinely discussed. Three of the novels analyzed in this book, La Dernière Aldini, Valvèdre, and Lucrezia Floriani, have virtually never been the subject of critical inquiry up to now. The treatment of novels such as Jacques, Jeanne, Horace, Mademoiselle la Quintinie, Gabriel, and Nanon is clear proof that the attention they are beginning to attract is well-deserved. What is particularly striking in this choice is that the texts span the entire writing career of Sand, ranging from her first novel, Indiana (1832), to the last novel to be published in her lifetime, Nanon (1872). This unusual panorama amply demonstrates that throughout her writing life Sand was concerned with issues of gender, from her denunciation of the victimization of women in the early part of her career, to her paean to feminine empowerment in the final years.

Massardier-Kenney's subtle analyses reflect the fine skills she brings to her examination of the question of gender as it is deployed in Sand's works. Repeatedly, she shows us how Sand sets romantic cultural images of women on their heads and rewrites, with a twist, nineteenth-century female character plots. Her discussions of Jacques, Valvèdre, Gabriel, Lucrezia Floriani, and Nanon are particularly felicitous and represent the high points of the book. Throughout, one can find astute psychological assessments of the power relationships between various characters.

Jacques, in her view, is a novel that recounts the hero's attempt to reject obvious oppressive patriarchal models but also registers his inability to accept new models of relationships. In this epistolary fiction, Sand questions "the mechanisms through which culture naturalizes binary differences" (47). What Jacques...