George Sand and Autobiography

J.A. Hiddleston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781900755252
• eBook ISBN: 9781351198653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

"This book discusses George Sand's autobiography ""Histoire de ma Vie"" from a variety of perspectives - thematic, structural and stylistic - and examines the often contradictory images of the author/narrator that emerge, in particular, from Sand's confused and ambivalent attitude to her gender. At each point, Sand's intriguing work is placed in the context of modern autobiographical and feminist theory, and measured against the conventions of traditional male autobiography. What emerges is a hybrid, androgynous text that combines different modes and voices, giving a unique access to the person of the author herself, both as she wished to appear and as she appears in spite of herself."

Chapter 1
Autobiographical Project

1

Philippe Lejeune has defined the genre of autobiography as a pact between writer and reader which assumes that author, narrator and protagonist are the same person, and that the story the text tells is true. He points out that most autobiographies include an explicit address to the reader where the autobiographer introduces himself and explains what he is going to do and why, as though he feels the need to make clear exactly what the reader may expect from the text he is reading. This usually appears as a kind of preface: ‘S’interroger sur le sens, les moyens, la portée de son geste, tel est le premier acte de l’autobiographe’,¹ but it can also interrupt the narrative at any point as the autobiographer turns back on himself to comment on his own project. This self-consciousness, this tendency towards self-reflection and self-justification is more obvious in autobiographies than in other kinds of writing, perhaps because an autobiography is by definition a problematic text: fact and fiction, immediate and constructed, a hybrid, often containing within itself different kinds of writing from different times: letters, diary entries, authentic historical documents.

In this ‘preface’ which explicitly sets up the conditions of the text, the autobiographer usually justifies his writing in two ways: by stressing the intrinsic interest of his own personality and/or by seeing himself as representative of his time. Either way, the aim is to enlighten and improve, and thus to avoid accusations of vanity or self-indulgent nostalgia. Rousseau is typical in this respect, emphasizing his uniqueness as a person and also the uniqueness of his project at the beginning of the Confessions—‘Je forme une entreprise qui n’eut jamais d’exemple, et dont l’exécution n’aura point d’imitateur. Je veux montrer à mes semblables un homme dans toute la vérité de la nature; et cet homme, ce sera moi. Moi seul […]. Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j’ai vus’—yet also suggesting that this self-portrait may act as a ‘première pièce de comparaison pour l’étude des hommes’.² Stendhal, writing the story of his life (or that of Henri Brulard) sixty years later and ten years or so before Sand, appears exclusively interested in finding out who he is, for himself and perhaps for a hypothetical close friend living in 1880: ‘Je vais avoir cinquante ans, il serait bien temps de me connaître. Qu’ai-je été, que suis-je, en vérité je serais bien embarrassé de le dire.’³ Chateaubriand conceives of his autobiography in both these ways at different times, and his published Mémoires d’outre-tombe reflect the various stages of its conception. In 1832, he saw himself as typical of his time: ‘Si j’étais destiné à vivre, je représenterais dans ma personne, représentée dans mes Mémoires l’épopée de mon temps’,⁴ but in the Avant-Propos of 1846, his project seems more private and personal: to give a multi-layered picture of his inner life through time, largely, he says, for his wife.

Both Stendhal and Chateaubriand clearly have Rousseau in mind when introducing their autobiographies, but Sand refers to him most explicitly and at greatest length in the opening pages of Histoire de ma vie, perhaps suggesting a certain anxiety with regard to her illustrious forebear and a need to explain her project by reference to his. For, while recognizing his greatness, she openly sets her narrative against the Confessions, emphasizing particularly the contrasts between them. She plays down any suggestion of her uniqueness, of her difference from others, and makes much of her solidarity with her fellows, embedding her own story in the history of her time. This is the reason she gives for including so lengthy an account of her ancestors back to the fourth generation, and in particular for devoting almost a third of the text to quoting letters between her father, her grandmother and her mother written before she was born. She exploits the fact that her story encompasses the recent history of France from the point of view not only of the aristocracy through her grandmother (illegitimate grand-daughter of the king of Poland) who was imprisoned in the aftermath of the Revolution, and her father, an officer in the Napoleonic army, but also of the people through her mother, daughter of a birdseller on the quays of Paris. She is ‘à cheval pour ainsi dire sur deux classes’ (I, 629), and thus uniquely representative. As a child she had seen Napoleon, experienced the war in Spain and witnessed the miserable retreat of the French army from Europe; as an adult, she lived through the political upheavals of the 1830s and 40s. She saw history as fundamentally important (as did the realist novelists of her time), since public events made people what they were. She believed in the fatality of circumstance and saw everybody, peasant as well as nobleman, as the product of their heredity, while also allowing for the modifying action of free will. For her, history had a meaning and was going somewhere, and this faith in human progress and perfectibility counteracts her fatalism, informing also her political views, her Utopian socialism: ‘Aujourd’hui l’étude de l’histoire peut être la théorie du progrès; elle peut tracer une ligne grandiose à laquelle viennent se rattacher toutes les lignes jusqu’alors éparses et brisées’ (I, 800).

In this way, she justifies and excuses the inevitable emphasis on her own person as she writes her autobiography: in describing her development, she is giving us a history of her time, as a lesson for everyone; she is doing her duty, reluctantly, she says. She would rather not have to talk about herself, seeing it as ‘ce besoin puéril chez l’homme et dangereux […] chez l’artiste’ (I, 8). She will only describe her life, her sufferings, in so far as these may help other people whose experiences have been similar. She attacks what she sees as Rousseau’s exhibitionism, his obsessive focus on his own inner life, also because it involves accusing others rather than speaking on their behalf. She wishes to help her readers in the living of their lives, not hurt them by casting blame. In this way she aligns herself, albeit implicitly, with the holy St Augustine rather than the worldly Jean-Jacques: ‘Le récit des souffrances et des luttes de la vie de chaque homme est donc l’enseignement de tous […]. C’est dans cette vue sublime […] que saint Augustin écrivit ses Confessions’ (I, 10).

Although Sand never links her difference from Rousseau to her gender, this insistence in the opening pages of the Histoire on her typicality and therefore on her ordinariness, and the self-deprecatory tone which goes with it, are often thought to be characteristic of autobiographies by women, conditioned to see themselves as inferior to men, and as educators and carers rather than achievers:⁵ ‘J’éprouvais, je l’avoue, un dégoût mortel à occuper le public de ma personnalité, qui n’a rien de saillant, lorsque je me sentais le cœur et la tête remplis de personnalités plus fortes, plus logiques, plus complètes, plus idéales, de types supérieurs à moi-même’ (I, 6). Sand seems here to be deliberately playing down what was exceptional about her person and her life in order to conform to conventional notions of what was womanly, to get her (male?) readers on her side. Do we not sense, however, a certain falseness in her modesty, since her story was undoubtedly an extraordinary one as she well knew? Indeed it could be argued that this very emphasis on her mediocrity, her lack of vanity, the parallel with St Augustine itself (as against Rousseau with his unfortunate lapses in taste) acts as a kind of covert self-idealizing more insidious and so arguably more effective than Rousseau’s blatant self-display. The one trivial misdeed which she quotes as an example of her fallibility, her theft of money from her grandmother’s purse to give to the poor, is surely chosen because it is so easily converted into a virtue. Thus her self-deprecation is distinctly ambiguous. On the one hand, we are inclined to believe her when she minimizes the importance of her work in the Histoire, declaring that she forgets a book as soon as she has written it, particularly as this casualness is confirmed by a later letter to her close friend, Flaubert: ‘Je n’ai pas monté aussi haut que toi dans mon ambition. Tu veux écrire pour les temps. Moi je crois que dans cinquante ans je serai parfaitement oubliée et peut-être durement méconnue. C’est la loi des choses qui ne sont pas de premier ordre et je ne me suis jamais crue de ier ordre.’⁶ Elsewhere she ridicules the ‘femme de lettres’ that she was, ‘l’animal le moins intéressant et le plus mal peigné qui soit au monde’,⁷ and contemporaries often commented on her unassuming manner in company⁸ and her generosity to others. On the other hand, the very writing of one’s autobiography, particularly in the authoritative moralist’s and historian’s voice that she adopts, presupposes a certain self-confidence, the assumption that one’s life story is significant and worth telling, and the self that lived it worth attending to. Perhaps there is no way out; perhaps true modesty and the autobiographical project are incompatible, or perhaps Sand is genuinely both diffident and arrogant at the same time, both ‘female’ and ‘male’.⁹

The autobiographical pact, this explicit preface to the text, often includes an undertaking to tell the truth, although not necessarily the whole truth, and not always the truth in strict chronological order. Unlike Rousseau, Sand makes it clear in the first paragraph of the Histoire that she is going to be selective in the telling of her story, including only those memories ‘qui nous paraissent valoir la peine d’être conservés’ (I, 5), those that may act as ‘un stimulant, un encouragement, et même un conseil et un guide pour les autres esprits engagés dans le labyrinthe de la vie’ (I, 9), thus linking her selectivity to her typicality as she sees it and to the overridingly moral aim of the work. What then is the moral message of the Histoire de ma vie which Sand saw as so important? What are the criteria which govern her choice of material and in which direction does she wish to guide her readers?

One might expect her to be addressing herself, however covertly, to other women, to be speaking of her sufferings as especially representative of theirs, to be offering herself as she seems to offer Edmée and Consuelo among others as an example of how women should behave, and thus encourage other women to do as she did, take control of their own lives at whatever cost. Daniel Stern, although she follows Sand’s example by adopting a male pseudonym, openly justifies her autobiography in this way, presenting it as the story by and of a successful woman written as an example for other women: ‘Elle trouvait dans mon sexe même une raison décisive de parler […]. Lorsqu’une femme s’est fait à elle-même sa vie, pensais-je alors, et que cette vie ne s’est pas gouvernée suivant la règle commune, elle en devient responsable, plus responsable qu’un-homme, aux yeux de tous. Quand cette femme, par l’effet du hasard ou de quelque talent, est sortie de l’obscurité, elle a contracté, du même instant, des devoirs virils.’¹⁰ Sand is never as clear as this. Just as we have seen the perspective of the Histoire to be double and contradictory, both female and male, so her explicit attitude to her own sex is distinctly ambiguous. She very rarely discusses her gender identification, as though she did not see it as a problem, and when she does, she seems rather uncomfortably to be having it both ways. Of course she is a woman, she says, nervous and emotional as all women are, and yet because of her education she thinks like a man and prefers the company of men. She accepts that the two sexes are different, implying through the vocabulary she chooses the inferiority of women (although she denies this), but she largely exempts herself from that difference: ‘Je n’étais donc pas tout à fait une femme comme celles que censurent et raillent les moralistes’ (II, 126–7). It is as though when writing in her own voice she has gone sufficiently beyond her own sex almost to cease to be aware of it, and perhaps this is why she does not use her autobiography in the way she uses some of her other works, explicitly as an example of their emancipation. Not seeing herself as a woman, she is not writing expressly for other women; the lesson she offers is universal, addressed to everybody. She preaches a vague kind of altruism, stressing the importance of love, the redemptive power of suffering; and any social awareness she demonstrates is of class rather than gender.¹¹ The implicit message of the Histoire de ma vie, however, its very denial of its own power as a story for women, is perhaps more challenging than an overt call to action would be. In the end it is up to the reader to extrapolate a feminist lesson from Sand’s autobiography if she so wishes; she has not directly put it there.¹²

There is one area, however, in which Sand’s feminism is clear, one issue on which she declares herself openly and unambiguously as a woman speaking for her sex, when she interrupts the story of her legal separation from her husband to give a generalized attack on the inequality and injustice of woman’s position in marriage at that time. At the beginning of the Histoire, she says she will deal once and for all with the question of her marriage to Casimir, and here she refuses to cast any blame, in keeping with the discretion of her general approach which she maintains distinguishes her from Rousseau. But when she reaches this point in the narrative of her life, she is unable to sustain her tolerant, neutral tone as she attacks society’s double standards, its assumption that a man is always master, and the text becomes pure polemic:

Mais ceci n’est rien encore, et l’homme est investi de bien d’autres droits. Il peut déshonorer sa femme, la faire mettre en prison et la condamner ensuite à rentrer sous sa dépendance, à subir son pardon et ses caresses! S’il lui épargne ce dernier outrage, le pire de tous, il peut lui faire une vie de fiel et d’amertume, lui reprocher sa faute à toutes les heures de sa vie, la tenir éternellement sous l’humiliation de la servitude, sous la terreur des menaces. (II, 380)

Although her husband did not stop her leading the life she had chosen in Paris, his presence as master of Nohant constantly marginalized her, put her in her place, and it was only when the separation was decided and Nohant was hers again that she could feel complete, take over his role as well as her own, be, as she puts it, ‘à la fois père et mère de famille’ (II, 406).

In spite of the sense of moral responsibility to others which prescribes what she will include and what she will omit fom her narrative, Sand also insists that she is telling the truth: ‘je veux taire et non arranger ni déguiser plusieurs circonstances de ma vie’ (II, 110). In order to arrive at this truth, all autobiographers rely heavily on memory: at one point in the Histoire, Sand celebrates one affective memory in part...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 Autobiographical Project
• 2 Family Relationships
• 3 Structure
• 4 Identity and Writing
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index