Passages cited from the novel are in my own off-the-cuff
translations. Endnotes provide the text
in the original French and the chapter in which each occurs.
Amantine Aurore
Dupin, who published under the name George Sand, produced a prodigious body of
work, amounting to perhaps seventy novels and fifty other volumes, becoming one
of the most popular writers of her day. She
was, however, and remains today, at least as well-known for her life as for her
writing. The attention she drew is
hardly surprising as she courted notoriety, smoking tobacco and wearing men’s
clothing while conducting numerous love affairs with both women such as actress
Marie Dorval and with male fellow artists Prosper Mérimée, Alfred de Musset,
and Frédéric Chopin among others. In
spite of her sometimes transgressive ways, her work was immensely popular with
the public while critics, since Victor Hugo at her funeral labeled her an
immortal, have consistently regarded her as one of the greatest novelists of
nineteenth century France.
Just as her
lifestyle in some ways defied the norms of her time, her version of Romanticism
included anti-Romantic parody and ample irony.
The natural description in the conclusion of her first novel Indiana
is more straightforward Romanticism, celebrating Réunion’s simple island
scenery as at once idyllic in its serenity and picturesque in its confusion: “in
the Brulé
de Saint Paul all the forms, all the beauty, all the playful and vigorous
elements, these are all recombined, superimposed and arranged, put together in
a single stormy night.” [1] The
trajectory of the theme as a whole is romantic as well as Romantic with its
happy ending, a satisfying marriage with Ralph, isolated from the world but
sustained by mutual love.
Sand, however,
often casts a caustic satiric eye on society and portrays the provincials as
cruel, hypocritical, and thoughtless.
Romantic assumptions are deflated in the observation that “this was not
the first time that Raymon had seen a woman take love seriously, though,
luckily for society, such examples are rare” [2] The locals are seen as vain and
malicious. “The spirit of a small town
is, as you surely know, the most wicked in the world. Good people are never recognized there, and
any superior minds are natural enemies of the public . . . If you make war on
prejudice, pettiness, vice, you insult them personally, you attack that which
to them is dearest” [3] Sand deserves
the recognition from feminists for
identifying the sexism that unjustly limits women’s roles. Indiana defiantly says to her husband, “I
know I am the slave and you the lord.
The law of the land makes you the master. . . . but my will, monsieur,
is my own.” [4] The novel’s primary plot thread, woven of
Indiana’s contrasting relations with Raymon and Ralph, takes place against a
backdrop of town gossips whose idle talk easily turns malicious.
The general social
critique and its pointed sexist corollary are exemplified in Raymon’s relation
with Indiana. He is no worse than
typical when it seems to him that anyone would be “ungrateful” were he to
“reproach Providence for the unhappiness of others when he himself has had only her smiles and
favors.” [5] He takes advantage of a
vulnerable woman with blithe entitlement and without hesitation. Raymon is surely
exceptional, however, in the extent to which he maintains such an elaborate
façade of Romantic notions. His use of
language is as spirited as it is mendacious.
He had “a rare faculty . . . of refuting positive truth by sheer
talent,” which served him as well in then government as in his personal
life. For him language is “a queen of
prostitutes” and he possesses the “rare skill to refute a plain truth through
his skills.” [6] He repeatedly generates
great smoke-screens of words to obscure his true motives and intentions, most
extravagantly in chapters vi, xvii, xviii, and xxii, with rhetoric. The reader knows his ach-romantic fusillades
are insincere show-pieces, meant only to gain him an amusing if temporary lover
while at the same time displaying his genteel accomplishments.
Right now, Indiana, give me
orders! I am your slave, you know that
perfectly well. I would give my life for
an hour in your arms, I would suffer all my life for one of your smiles. I am willing to be your friend, your brother,
nothing more. If I suffer, you shall not
know it. [7]
He says this, claiming as he does a suffering which he
scarcely feels. His language conceals
the truth, asserting a tender and vulnerable heart while the reader recognizes
that it in fact reveals his cruel duplicity.
The showy fraud
of his language is only emphasized by the contrast with its complement in the
usage of Ralph who feels emotions strongly but says nothing. It is little wonder that the reader does not
perceive the depth of his feelings having read early on that his “only passion
was fox-hunting.” [8] The reader assumes
the omniscient narrator is accurate in the devastating observation that, though
Sir Ralph’s portrait has little to recommend it with all its “puerile fidelities”
and “bourgeois minutiae,” “there was in the world only one thing on earth more
insignificant than the portrait, and that was its original.” [9] Yet this impression turns out tom be wholly
mistaken. Though “giving all the
appearance of coldness and selfishness,” in
fact “hunting and study had been only a pretext to conceal his long and
bitter reveries.” [10] Ironically, while
he is labeled an “egoist” due to his “stone mask,” he was, in fact “born to
love.” [11] This contradiction is for
Ralph “the secret of my life.” [12]
Still, the truth
about Ralph’s emotional life does emerge
He and Indiana contemplate a Romantic double suicide like that of
Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel, but they stop short of that
irrevocable step and claim a happy if isolated life on a remote
plantation. There, with their removal
from the web of social lies, they may tend their gardens in peace.
Such a conclusion
is profoundly Romantic and Sand is routinely and casually called a Romantic, but
this usage is imprecise. In Indiana
she engages Romantic conventions, but only to confute them. The rural setting is satirized rather than
idealized; it is full of venal and vicious types, though Eden recurs in the
“Indian cottage” [13] of the conclusion.
Mme. Delvare’s passions led her only into self-deception. The choice of Ralph, who had earlier seemed impossibly
dull, turns out to be the right one and marriage more satisfying than an affair.
The glorious display of language, the
sort of thing that Wordsworth considered the “spontaneous overflow of powerful
emotion” is in this novel a pernicious and deceitful spectacle. Perhaps in response to the requirements of a
popular novel (and Sand was long a best-selling writer), in spite of the
author’s own counter-cultural lifestyle and her dim view of the provincials,
her leading lady (in spite of her errors of a mésalliance
and an infatuation) and leading man (though more silent than most strong and
silent heroes) are quite conventional.
From the tensions generated by these dialectics – popular and
rebellious, Romantic and Realistic, art as truth and art as lies – rises the
music of the novel.
1. Conclusion ”Dans
le Brûlé de Saint-Paul, toutes les formes, toutes les beautés, toutes les
facéties, toutes les hardiesses ont été réunies, superposées, agencées,
construites en une nuit d’orage.”
2. ch. xii “Ce
n’était pas la première fois que Raymon voyait une femme prendre l’amour au
sérieux, quoique ces exemples soient rares, heureusement pour la société.”
3. ch. xix “L’esprit
des petites villes est, vous le savez sans doute, le plus méchant qui soit au
monde. Là, toujours les gens de bien sont méconnus, les esprits supérieurs sont
ennemis-nés du public . . . Faites-vous la guerre aux préjugés, aux petitesses,
aux vices, vous les insultez personnellement, vous les attaquez dans ce qu’ils
ont de plus cher.”
4. ch. xxi “Je sais
que je suis l’esclave et vous le seigneur. La loi de ce pays vous a fait mon
maître . . . mais sur ma volonté, monsieur, vous ne pouvez.”
5. . ch. x “Quel
homme est assez ingrat envers la Providence pour lui reprocher le malheur des
autres, si pour lui elle n’a eu que des sourires et des bienfaits ?”
6. x “une reine prostituée, ”“Cette rare faculté
qu’il possédait, de réfuter par le talent la vérité positive”
7. xviii “À présent,
ordonne, Indiana ! je suis ton esclave, tu le sais bien. Je donnerais ma vie
pour une heure passée dans tes bras ; mais je puis souffrir toute une vie pour
obtenir un de tes sourires. Je serai ton ami, ton frère, rien de plus. Si je
souffre, tu ne le sauras pas.”
8. vi “un Anglais
passionné seulement pour la chasse du renard!”
9. xxx “toutes ses
puérilités de ressemblance, toutes ses minuties bourgeoises,” “Il n’y avait
qu’une chose au monde qui fût plus insignifiant que ce portrait, c’était l’original.”
10. xxiv “donner
toutes les apparences de la froideur et de l’égoïsme,” “Et pourtant la chasse
et l’étude n’étaient que le prétexte dont il couvrait ses amères et longues
rêveries.”
11. xxx “un masque de
pierre,” “j’etais né pour aimer.”
12. xxx “c’est le
secret de ma vie.”
13. Conclusion “notre
chaumière indienne.”
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