Female Fantastic: The Case of George Sand

Female Fantastic: The Case of George Sand Kathryn J. Crecelius I N THE LAST TWENTY YEARS, the fantastic has attracted a great deal of critical attention. The increase in studies on the fantastic and related modes has led on the one hand to renewed interest in both theory and practice of the genre. Authors of fantastic texts who had gone into eclipse suddenly became fashionable again; a notable example is Mérimée, whose “ La Vénus d’llle” and “ Lokis” have been the subject of several recent studies. On the other hand, the proliferation of this work has made definition of the genre extremely difficult. Where are the boundaries between fantasy, the fantastic and science-fiction? Most authors disagree on this most basic of questions. Into this unresolved debate I would like to inject further confusion, at least temporarily, by raising two questions. Is there a body of fantastic texts by women writers? If so, are there any differences between their texts and those of male practitioners of the fantastic? The first issue should be relatively easy to deal with. My own interest in the topic arose from my studies of George Sand, who throughout her career was deeply attracted to the fantastic. Yet major studies of the fan­ tastic in France mention Sand only in connection with E. T. A. H off­ mann. In his 1985 edition of his La Littérature fantastique en France (1964), Marcel Schneider expands his earlier treatment of Sand, but his assessment of her fantastic writings remains superficial.1Todorov men­ tions Ann Radcliffe and Clara Reeves in passing, but curiously enough neither appears in his bibliography.2Continental critics tend not to treat women writers, whereas studies of British literature include Radcliffe, Mary Shelley and Emily Bronte. Perusal of the bibliographies or indices of several recent works on the fantastic yields the names of half a dozen or so women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although the emphasis is on modern writers. Ursula LeGuin is a particular favorite. Clearly, there are women writers of the fantastic, whatever definition of the fantastic is used. The second question involves an area of even greater dispute than the fantastic itself. There are those who argue passionately for the specificity of women’s writing, while others contend just as hotly that artists tranVOL . XXVIII, No. 3 49 L ’E s p r i t C r é a t e u r scend their particular gender. While I am sympathetic to the latter view, I am even more persuaded by the body of work produced by the first group, which includes Elaine Showalter’s A Literature o f Their Own and Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic? I agree that especially for women writing before the mid-twentieth century, social customs, family status and even laws played a key role in preventing their free artistic expression and were translated into their literary productions on the thematic or structural level, or both. For the most part, women authors of the fantastic are not treated by critics as “ women writers,” but as part of the general phenomenon of the fantastic. Ellen Moers’ Literary Women is a notable exception, for she gives serious consideration to Gothic literature as a woman’s genre. Thelma J. Shinn’s Worlds Within Women and Charlotte Spivack’s M erlin’s Daughters also investigate the fantastic from a feminist point of view.4 Both examine contemporary women writers, and find in their work a particular feminist vision. However, their definition of the fan­ tastic is broader than my own, and essentially encompasses myth, fan­ tasy and science fiction, rather than what I would call the “ classic” fan­ tastic that Todorov treats and which is best represented by nineteenthcentury French authors. In this article, I would like to examine the nexus of women’s writing, using George Sand as my test case, and the fan­ tastic, in which events inexplicable by rational standards occur within quotidian reality. I shall investigate how Sand’s fantastic relates to the larger nineteenth-century tradition, as well as to her own œuvre. I shall concentrate on texts that belong clearly to the fantastic genres, as Todorov in particular...