L’Identité de genre dans les œuvres de George Sand et Colette by Marion Krauthaker (review)

George Sand and Colette certainly deserve comparison: two zestful, bravely nonconformist women whose prolific literary output matched the irreverence and energy with which they lived their lives. As this book argues, the two also shared a highly original and thoroughly transgressive way of representing gender. Whereas the hegemonic ideology of their (just) overlapping lifetimes made ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ the natural expression of biological sex, both Sand’s and Colette’s work display gendered identities as fluid, variable, and (Butlerian avant la lettre) performed rather than innate. Marion Krauthaker’s study is a little weighed down by a scholarly style and apparatus that smack of a doctoral thesis: lengthy expositions of aims, recapping of progress so far, and the solemn use of ‘nous’ to designate the author. There is also a noticeably high rate of typographical errors. Despite its practical advantages, the limitation of her corpus to three texts per author — Indiana, La Marquise, and Gabriel for Sand, Chéri and its sequel, Le Pur et l’impur, and Bella vista for Colette — can distort the argument. So, for example, the claim that patriarchs are absent from Colette’s œuvre is not quite true (one thinks of Claudine’s father, or Farou in La Seconde, both depicted with a dexterous blend of irony and affection), and the argument on Sand perhaps leans too heavily on the most obviously gender-bending of the texts. However, the thesis-like approach also has its advantages: the argument is splendidly clear and rigorous, and each text studied receives detailed and frequently cogent analysis. A useful, wellobserved part of the Introduction deals with the difficulty of writing about gender at all in the French language, but this is well overcome in a series of chapters that first contextualize the argument in sociohistorical and theoretical terms, then adopt a series of related thematic lenses, including sexuality, transvestism, and the relationship between gender and literary genre. Krauthaker is especially good on the way that both Sand and Colette show male as well as female protagonists having to contend with rigid codes of gender that demand a complex masquerade. ‘Travestissement’, in her perceptive analysis, means not just adopting the external accoutrements of the opposite sex, but also ‘dressing up’ as one’s own. In the end, both writers show the near impossibility of surviving in a patriarchal world outside accepted and hence legible gender codes, and have recourse to fictional hors-lieu such as Indiana’s Île Bourbon or the Llangollen retreat of Colette’s lesbian ‘Ladies’ (Le Pur et l’impur) to represent happy non-normative relationships. If there is an ideal, it is what Colette called ‘hermaphrodisme mental’: both she and Sand could be said to have achieved and represented such a state. Overall, this book is a fine work of comparative analysis that illuminates the radicalism, at once political and aesthetic, of two of France’s major writers.