Amazing George Sand

By Shireen SENADHIRA

The French Revolution (1789–1799) had its share of feminist militant activism. One such example was the March to Versailles. Activists such as Pauline Leon and Theroigne de Mericourt agitated for full citizenship for women, they failed to gain political rights of ‘active citizenship’ (1791) and ‘democratic citizenship for women’(1793).

Georgesand

While some women chose a militant and often violent path, others chose to influence events through writing, publications and meetings. Olympe de Gouges wrote a number of plays, short stories and novels. Her publications emphasized that women and men are different, but this shouldn’t stop them from equality under the law. In her "Declaration on the Rights of Woman" she insisted that women deserved rights, especially in areas concerning them directly, such as divorce and recognition of illegitimate children.

The above mentioned women are a few among many others who participated in such feminist activities.

Though women did not gain the right to vote as a result of the Revolution, they still greatly expanded their participation and involvement in governing. They set precedents for generations of feminists to come.

A few years after the French Revolution came to an end, Napoleon Bonaparte was Emperor of France from 1804 to 1812. It was at this time of such radical changes in France, a future feminist was born. She was Armandine-Aurore-Lucille Dupin, born on 1 July 1804 in Paris, France, the daughter of a countess.

She was brought up in Nohant, located in the country nearly in the centre of France, by her grandmother, Madame Dupin de Franceuil. There, she had a varied and peculiar education but learned to love and understand the countryside which was found in most of her writing. Afterwards, she studied in a convent in Paris. She was a romantic writer known primarily for her rustic novels. Later she became a prolific writer and she wrote under the pseudonym, George Sand. In 1822, she married Baron Casimir Dudevant and lived in Nohant.

After awhile Aurore soon tired of her well meaning but insensitive husband and had a platonic friendship with the magistrate there and then went onto a passionate liaison with a neighbour.

She left Nohant and went to live in Paris and there she found a good friend in the Director of Le Figaro, Henri de Latouche who accepted some articles of hers that she wrote together with Jules Sandeau, under the pseudonym Jules Sand. Later she changed her pseudonym to George Sand. Under this name she wrote her novel Indiana which brought her immediate fame.

Indiana is the first of many novels, written by George Sand, a woman whose behaviour was often considered more shocking than her writing. Indiana is the story of a woman’s emotional journey, a woman who has had a series of abusive and unhappy relationships.

Was George Sand describing her life? Indiana is partially set in Paris and Reunion Island which was about 400 miles east of Madagascar. The island had a mixed population of African slaves, Chinese, Malays and French emigrants and was an important stopping port for ships plying to and from India and Europe. The French people born on the island were called Creoles. Indiana is a Creole. The book has many themes. One strong theme is a protest against the marriage laws of France for the wife.

Another theme is the rights of women and alteration of marriage laws. The lush beauty, the volcanic nature of the tropical island and its exotic slaves is vividly portrayed in contrast to the Paris of 1830s. Indiana is also about slavery in the sugar plantations and the way of life in the island, in this respect, there is much similarity with Jamaica in the book, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, written a century later.

Sand was an independent, individual and rebellious. This book Indiana gives an insight into her own personal political thoughts and ideas of her time. The book is more than just a read, it is a historical and political text airing out thoughts and ideas of the author’s in Europe.

Love

Her second novel Valentine, explores the relationship between an aristocratic girl, Valentine, who falls desperately in love with Benedict, a poor farmer. In doing so, Valentine challenges the preconceived masculine assumptions about women’s role in society at that time as well as completely rebelling against her family and class.

Another book of George Sand is, The Marquise and Pauline: Two Novellas. In the former story, she makes the Marquise, the narrator of the story and thus gives her the control of the action which deconstructs the myth of the man being the seducer as was the usual, in that era. There are two female protagonists in the story, Pauline, who represent diametrically opposed female roles in the 19th century. Pauline is trapped by the bourgeois strictures of her time while her friend, Laurence, an actress, is intellectual and independent both financially and emotionally.

George Sand was an amazing author and personality. She earned more notoriety for her bohemian lifestyle than her written word. However, she was the most famous woman writer in the 19th century in France.

Just like Charles Dickens of the same vintage (1812 – 1870) in England, George Sand was a prolific author of novels, stories, plays, essays and memoirs. She epitomized French romantic idealism.

She demanded for women the freedom in living which was a matter of course to the men of her day. In her books, she astounded the readers in frank explorations of women’s sexual feeling and their call for women’s freedom to find emotional satisfaction.

She was a brilliant writer but it is her radical personality that makes her an amazing woman, considering the time when she lived. It served her purpose not only for that time but for modern times as well.

Marriage

Sand pushed her limits in all kinds of ways as she was largely temperamental, rashly creative and was very opinionated. Perhaps the most interesting was the way she dressed and behaved. She dressed as a man and smoked in public. She was married to a baron and she changed her name and left him, a scandal at that time.

More to come, she successfully divorced her husband and kept control of her children at a time when such a course of action by a woman was never heard of. She took her two children and moved out on her own to Paris. Sand had open notorious relationships with famous men in Paris. They were artists, writers and musicians.

Sandhat

She was also friendly with Eugene Delacroix, Franz Lizt and most famously with Frederic Chopin. She and Chopin had a complicated relationship. Chopin was a well behaved aristocrat, finicky and very proper in manner while Sand was loud, lewd, shocking and scandalous.

The film, Impromptu, shows the lifestyles of Chopin and Sand and their characters very well in the era they lived. Biographers of Sand often saw Chopin as a mill stone round the neck of this extraordinary and diversely talented woman. It was said for Chopin that, he couldn’t be without Sand and stopped composing after their relationship ended which was two years previous to his death.

Actually, the way she dressed, as a man, was to protest the unequal treatment accorded to women at her time. Sand usually wore men’s suits: shirt, pants, jacket, tie, top hat, the whole deal, so, you can imagine the problem she created then.

Not only did she dress this way but smoked cigars and had a rowdy sense of humour much like Frida Kahlo, the Mexican artist in the time of the Mexican revolution. Strangely, Sand got away with it, perhaps, because she was such a famous writer.

Otherwise, she would surely have been locked away and condemned by society. On the other hand, she can be viewed with admiration for being so very brave as to stand up for rights and ideals by herself in the society of France in that century.

French revolution

“In this age devoted to complete the French Revolution and to the beginning of the Human Revolution, equality between the sexes being part of equality between men, a great woman was needed.

A woman had to prove that she could have all our manly qualities without losing her angelic ones: that she could be strong without ceasing to be gentle. George Sand is that proof. She bequeaths to us the right of woman which draws it proof from woman’s genius. Thus the Revolution is fulfilled.” - from Obseques of George Sand. This is how Victor Hugo described George Sand and her role in life.

By taking on a man’s name, George Sand claimed equality with the male writers of her time. She wanted to be judged purely on her merits and not only as a woman author that men looked upon condescendingly at that time.

Inevitably, she became famous and other women began to copy her style. George Sand’s writing, her words were read by innumerable men and women alike. She became an idol to women of her time as her novels portrayed women as intelligent and morally sound individuals, giving her readers confidence in their worth as females.

The English poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) wrote two poems to George Sand. They were: To George Sand: A Desire and To George Sand: A Recognition. There are many references to George Sand by well known authors and poets. She is referred to by A S Byatt in her book, Possession (1990) and by the American Poet Walt Whitman, in his writings. In Russia her influence was great and Fyodor Dostoevsky and Ivan Turgenev owe much to her.

It is said, in England, to Thackeray and John Stuart Mill, Sand’s diction was akin to music. George Eliot too was a follower of Sand. It is also said that Eliot had more profound knowledge in her thinking as well as in her psychological analysis but as an artist, in the unity of design, in the harmony of treatment, purity and simplicity of language, Sand’s novels were masterpieces and well above the former. She seems to have had much in common with William Wordsworth, as both kept the object in focus and had the visionary gleam and exulted as painters of nature in their writings.

Research

George Sand is not so well known in North America but there is a George Sand Association, a literary society founded at Hofstra University, New York. The purpose of the society is to encourage and foster research and scholarship on George Sand.

Members have access to the society’s discussion group on the internet. The society co-sponsors conferences on George Sand. On the 30th anniversary of this association, some of the founding members gathered to produce the history of the first 10 years of the society.

Literary history, what is it? Fine books are living works. They not only have lived but continue to live on. Such books live in us, in that, our ideas, our conscience and the sentiments that inspire our actions are based little or more on them.

It is easier for us that in former times there had been exceptional individuals who seized ideas, ideals and sentiments as if by magic and made them viable and durable. Such people bequeathed their ideas and sentiments to us. Literary history is then, the perpetual examination of the conscience of humanity. It is certainly part of our lives.

George Sand wrote for 50 years. Research shows that she never let a day pass without writing more pages than most writers do in a month. Her first book shocked people and let in a storm. But she rushed on with her writing with more force and passion in it.

Eugène Ferdinand Victor Delacroix

She has written on almost every subject; on love, the family, social conditions, social institutions and on various forms of government. She was but a mere woman of the 19th century, France who did all this. A study of George Sand shows she was a woman of genius on the evolution of modern thought.

Intimate friends

It was Sainte-Beuve, her intimate friend for more than 30 years, not her lover, who summed up her character thus: “In the great crises of action her intellect, her heart and her temperament are at one. She is thorough woman, but with none of the pettiness, subterfuges and mental reservations of her sex; she loves wide vistas and boundless horizons and instinctively seeks them out; she is concerned for universal happiness and takes thought for the improvement of mankind – the last infirmity and most innocent mania of generous souls.

Her works are in very deed the echo of our times. Wherever we were wounded and stricken her heart bled in sympathy, and all our maladies and miseries evoked from her a lyric wail.”

George Sand died in Nohant in the month of June, 1876 and is buried in the Nohant cemetery. Like her or loathe her, George Sand was a remarkable woman, a prodigious novelist, dramatist and campaigner for all types of political reform.

A fascinating woman she was, one who was not afraid to be herself, the icon she was, the freedom she represented, the boundaries that she completely ignored, the propriety she didn’t bother with and the lives she changed. George Sand, mmmm, an amazing woman for being the woman she was.