Gender in the Fiction of George Sand by Françoise Massardier-Kenney, George Sand’s ‘Nouvelles’: Reflections, Perceptions and the Self by Lisa M. Blair (review)

Abstract

206 Reviews Gender in theFiction of George Sand. By Francoise Massardier-Kenney. Amster? dam: Rodopi. 1999. 197 pp. ?22; $44. ISBN 90-420-0707-9. George Sand's Nouvelles': Reflections,Perceptions and the Self. By Lisa M. Blair. New York: Lang. 1999. $42.95. ISBN 0-8204-4095-7. As curious as it may seem, there has been no full-scale study of gender identity in relation to George Sand's life or her ceuvre. Francoise Massardier-Kenney's work provides a useful departure point with an investigation of Sand's deconstruction of gender oppositions in a select number of her novels. At the core of MassardierKenney 's argument is the claim that Sand articulates a modern conception of gender as social construct, and that her novels repeatedly undermine and invert the surface valorizations of masculinity and femininity that they appear to present. In order to tackleher subject, Massardier-Kenney exposes three areas of narrative strategy which seek to debunk social impositions of gender: 'valorization of women characters as individuals , destabilization of male narrative authority, and deconstruction of female internalization of Romantic male definitionsof women and love' (p. 11). The opening chapter exposes the gender ambiguities in the presentationof protagonists in two key novels, Indiana and Jacques. Here, inconsistent shifts in narration vis-d-vis gender, such as Ralph's transformation from victimizing misogynist to Indiana's ideal male lover at the end ofthe novel, and Jacques's contradictory attitudes to gender relations, where he rejects patriarchal ideology but repeatedly fails back into it, can be read as deliberate narrative devices deployed to expose the limitations of binary gender oppo? sitions. The subsequent chapters concentrate on representations of women in Sand's fictions and the way in which these challenge negative definitions of femininity and an over-valorization of men and masculinity. It is in the final chapter that MassardierKenney turns all too briefly towards Sand's utopia of gender, through a reading of the performative 'blurring' of gender in Nanon (which is mistakenly described as Sand's last full novel). Nanon emerges as Sand's ultimate refusal ofthe essentializing constraints of cultural process, the incarnation of Sand's belief that 'there is only one sex and one class' (p. 179). It is a pity that Massardier-Kenney only refers to Nanon in this final, utopian section of her study, as the concept of one sex is surely one of the most important aspects of Sand's difference and one which is the most important in terms of her contribution to current gender debates. This said, the original and close readings make an important contribution to Sand studies; certainly the chapters offerinteresting new perspectives on several lesser-known Sand novels, such as La Derniere Aldini, Valvedre, Mlle la Quintinie, and Gabriel. Only the tendency to make claims that certain gender details in the novels reflect Sand's own views, without al? ways providing evidence or integration into the theoretical argument, might jar with the reader. The work also suffers from some editorial lapses (pages 118-19 contain several differentways of page referencing; Isabelle Naginski's major work on Sand loses part of its title; the footnote on page 70 appears to be free-floating,to name but a few), but none the less, the work provides a convincing discussion of an aspect of Sand's writing that clearly could sustain repeated investigation. The question of social identity is also the focus of Lisa Blair's work, although here the emphasis lies with perceptions and images of self-identity in five of Sand's nouvelles : La Marquise, Lavinia, Metella, Mattea, and Pauline. The focus of Blair's study is on Sand's reflective technique and the fragmentation of the self that occurs in the psychological evolution of her characters. In a conceptually lightweight introduction, Blair suggests that the characters in these particular short stories can be read as fragments of Sand herself, and promises that after an in-depth investigation, 'the reader will notice how the somewhat flat,two-dimensional characters will develop into "real" people' (p. 4). Herein lies the difricultywith Blair's study, where an interesting pre? miss is let down by the style ofthe literarycriticism. Each ofthe chapters...