George Sand Research Articles

Vision in the Novels of George Sand

Vision in the Novels of George Sand

Vision in the Novels of George Sand by Manon Mathias

Vision in the Novels of George Sand by Manon Mathias

Approaches to Teaching Sand’s Indiana ed. by David A. Powell, Pratima Prasad

Reviews 233 Powell, David A., and Pratima Prasad, eds. Approaches to Teaching Sand’s Indiana. New York: MLA, 2016. ISBN 978-1-60329-210-8. Pp. 232. $24. Divided into two parts, this volume provides fresh and innovative insight into teaching the novel commonly referred to as the “precursor” to Sand’s other fictional works because of its prevalent themes: “the constraints placed on married women by the Napoleonic Code, class inequities, the parallels between marriage and slavery, and the political circumstances of the Bourbon restoration and the July Monarchy” (vii). Having conducted a survey prior to beginning the volume, Powell and Prasad ascertained that Indiana is the most consistently taught novel of all Sand’s works, both in the United States and abroad. Moreover, beyond the novel being included in French literature survey courses as well as specialized courses on nineteenth-century French narrative and culture, French women writers, and French colonial literature, it is frequently taught in English as part of women’s and gender studies offerings and comparative literature courses, “where it is teamed up with novels such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre”(vii). Given such a wide range of courses that include Indiana, this pedagogical volume is much needed. The aim of “Part One: Materials”is to assist instructors with the rich and varied literary and social history of Indiana. In just over six pages, it provides concise information on French editions and English translations; a note on bibliographic notations in Approaches; background readings on French, literary, and colonial history and biographies of George Sand; and, studies of Indiana. “Part Two: Approaches” is divided into four sub-sections:“History and Geography;”“Race, Femininity, and Masculinity;” “Comparative Perspectives;”and“Literary Contexts.”The wide breadth of topics covered in the twenty-one essays will appeal to instructors of courses ranging from French romanticism and realism to interdisciplinary ones on French colonial history or law. Of particular note is how contributors not only described how they teach Indiana, but how they do so in a particular course to a particular group of students. For example, Carolyn Vellenga Berman details in “Creole Emancipation: Indiana and French Colonial Slavery” her strategy for teaching the novel in English translation to upperlevel undergraduates in a self-designed liberal arts degree program: “Since there are generally no prerequisites where I teach and undergraduates with diverse educational backgrounds mix with highly educated auditors in each class, the challenge is to bring students together in a meaningful collective project” (26). Allan H. Pasco explains in “Romantic Realism in Indiana,” that while reviewing the long list of salient themes in Indiana (e.g., frustrated love, passion, melancholy, etc.),“it is also possible to highlight other important but less emphasized preoccupations like youth, the present, narrative devices, and the realism that preoccupied writers throughout much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (185). The volume is essential for those who are new to teaching Indiana and ideal for those seasoned professionals who want to infuse their courses with new perspectives. Fulbright Specialist (NY) Eileen M. Angelini Film edited by Michèle Bissière Boukhrief, Nicolas, réal. Made in France. Int. Malik Zidi, François Civil, Nassim Si Ahmed. Radar, 2015. Made in France a largement été mentionné dans la presse comme le film que les distributeurs ont préféré ne pas sortir parce que son intrigue rappellerait de façon trop aiguë les tragiques massacres du 11 novembre 2015.Voir le film, distribué malgré tout en VOD, permet de constater que s’il propose une immersion au sein d’une cellule qui s’apprête à monter un attentat terroriste, Made in France ne montre rien qui ressemble aux événements en question: pas de massacres dans une salle de concert ou à la terrasse d’un café.En effet,ce qui intéresse Boukhrief,ce sont surtout l’hétérogénéité du groupe et les tensions qui le traversent au fur et à mesure qu’approche le fatidique passage à l’acte. Ces rapports de force nous sont présentés à travers le regard de Sam (Malik Zidi), un journaliste qui a infiltré la cellule et qui...

Manon MATHIAS, Vision in the Novels of George Sand

Manon MATHIAS, Vision in the Novels of George Sand

Histoire et symbolique architecturale: lecture du Compagnon du Tour de France de George Sand

AbstractThis article examines the symbolic treatment of architecture in Le Compagnon du Tour de France, a historical novel by George Sand published in 1840. The novelist creates an architectural space which allows us to read the political history of her age and the social conflicts within it. Thus, the castle of the Villepreux family appears not as a solid block but as a torn edifice where different time-frames intertwine. It evokes the past through its nature as a ruin, it suggests the present through the restoration of the chapel, and it announces the future through its building sites. Inhabited by socially different characters, the manor becomes a place which reflects the complex relations between social classes.RésuméCette étude se propose d’aborder le traitement symbolique de l’architecture dans Le Compagnon du Tour de France, roman historique de George Sand publié en 1840. La romancière esquisse un espace architectural qui donne à lire l’Histoire politique de son époque ainsi que les conflits sociaux qui y existent. Ainsi, le château de la famille noble des Villepreux ne se présente pas comme un bloc solide mais comme un lieu déchiré où les temps se mêlent. Il rappelle le passé par sa nature de ruine, évoque le présent par la restauration de sa chapelle et suggère un avenir en germe dans ses chantiers. Occupé par des personnages socialement différents, ce manoir devient un espace qui reflète les relations complexes entre leurs classes sociales.

‘Dites un mot et daignez nous tendre la main’: The Emergence of Hugo's Lost Feminist Voice from His Oratory in Exile

The silence of oblivion which plagued Hugo throughout his lifetime was never more keenly felt than during his exile. However, it was this fear of nothingness which gave potent urgency to Hugo's public discourse and to his role as a spokesperson for les misérables. During his exile Hugo's voice also reached a distinct, though much less documented group of disfavoured people, namely the female victims of revolution, and leading French and international feminists. Through his eulogies to women like Louise Julien and George Sand, and his extensive epistolary correspondences with women, Hugo became a prominent figure in the feminist struggle both in France and throughout the world in the mid- nineteenth century. His woefully neglected public discourse on women's rights from this time reveals his support for such defining demands in nineteenth-century feminism as women's rights to universal suffrage, equal citizenship, and the participation of women in the future French republic.

A Damned Mob of Corinnes: Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Daughters of de Staël

Consider the biography of a typical mid-nineteenth-century American woman writer: Born on the fourth of July, she grew up fatherless, living with her mother and sister in a large, cold household dominated by wealthy uncles. Early on she showed intelligence but not much practical ability, and so eventually her uncles sent her to one of New England's newly-established colleges. She made a few good friends, but seemed to live mostly in her own world. When she returned home with her impractical degree, she retreated to a gloomy attic bedroom, where she settled into a routine of scribbling through the nights, occasionally burning her writings because of her increasingly intense shyness. She wrote a novel based on her college years. A few copies were published, but she was so embarrassed by its publication that she destroyed every copy she could find. After ten years of seclusion, she gradually emerged, anonymously publishing a few delicate stories that won her some encouragement from the literary world. She married late, and shortly after her marriage published a collection of short stories that earned some real critical acclaim. Despite the praise, she continued to belittle her own writing as scribbling. But she was encouraged by her ventures into the public sphere and desperate for money to feed her growing family, and so she tried her hand at another novel. Eventually she would publish four major novels centered on the great issues facing of the era: sexual freedom, family and domestic economy, social reform, and finally a Corinne-themed novel about American artists in Rome. This thumbnail biography uses feminine pronouns to describe the career of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is a small pronoun switch, but the trick works. Hawthorne's writing career fulfills almost all of the critical commonplaces about nineteenth-century writers, from the decade of lurking in an attic to the rewriting of Germaine de Stael. Does all this imply that Nathaniel Hawthorne considered himself a literary woman? No, probably not. Despite the congruency between Hawthorne's literary career and many nineteenth-century American writers' careers, I am not arguing that Nathaniel Hawthorne should be reclassified as a literary woman. It is not my business to adjudicate the gender identification of a long-dead stranger. Nor is it my intention to shame Hawthorne as a sissy. But I do suggest positioning Nathaniel Hawthorne as a member of the d--d mob of scribbling women who dominated American fiction in the 1850s. When we place Hawthorne's work into a female dominated--or at least female-identified--field of cultural production and read Nathaniel Hawthorne as a participant in a female tradition, many of the questions that are central to Hawthorne scholarship turn sideways. Is Hawthorne's writing Romantic or sentimental? Reactionary or revolutionary? Masculinist or feminist? For this essay, the central question is: Does Nathaniel Hawthorne belong within or outside of the female tradition? Or, to put it more sharply: Was Nathaniel Hawthorne one of the American Corinnes? Although may be somewhat obscure today, according to Ellen Moers, Corinne stands alone ... in its enormous influence upon literary women (174). Since everyone read Corinne, none of the lists quite do justice to the novel's central importance. Nonetheless, Toril Moi offers a partial list: Jane Austen, Mary Godwin Shelley, George Sand, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Margaret Fuller (The Yankee Corinna), Kate Chopin--all of them read Corinne, passionately (145). Even readers today who may not be familiar with would recognize some elements of de Stael's plot, which was refracted through so many nineteenth-century novels. is a beautiful, dark-haired romantic genius who declaims her own improvised poetry on the steps of the Capitol in Rome. The crowds cheer and a visiting British aristocrat falls in love with her. …

Geography, Geocriticism, and Geopoetics

Geography, Geocriticism, and Geopoetics Joshua Parker (bio) Pour une Géographie Littéraire Michel Collot Éditions Corti www.jose-corti.fr/titreslesessais/pour_une_geographie_Collot.html 280 Pages; Print, $24.00 Michel Collot’s Pour une géographie littéraire opens with a suggestion that readers are still more familiar with the notion of literary history than with that of literary geography. Citing a rise in the latter, mostly recent but traceable to roots in the early twentieth century, it goes on to lay out literary geography’s three strains. Geographic approaches study the spatial context in which literary works are produced. Collot links these with linguistic referents, as being concerned with literature’s connections with real places. Geocritical approaches analyze a space’s representations and significations in literature itself, and are concerned with the linguistic signified and with the construction of imaginary universes or landscapes. Finally, geopoetical approaches concentrate on the connections between literary creation and space, and on the way the form of literary works is inspired by the very spaces they describe. Geopoetics concerns itself with the signifying and with a text’s own spatiality. Collot’s work sets itself the task of differentiating the three, but also underlines how and why they are necessarily complimentary. Collot begins by broadly sketching how we’ve arrived at the post-“spatial turn” following the late 1970s to the end of the twentieth century, but also cannot resist, in one of the volume’s most interesting chapters, an examination of earlier precursors to our own era, from Medieval authors to the “geographic determinists” of the nineteenth century. Collot traces geographic determinism, the idea that places have their own “spirits,” back to Montesquieu and Madame de Staël, but finds its zenith in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He then follows the literary regionalism of Jean Charles-Brun, George Sand and Frédéric Mistral, and traces Albert Thibaudet’s and André Ferré’s “literary geography” of the 1920s-1940s. These names may not be familiar to those working outside French literature, but their Anglophone analogues will come easily to readers’s imaginations: Frederick Jackson Turner, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner or Eudora Welty. His focus is [End Page 8] less on the late twentieth-century’s “spatial counterattack” than on the centuries-long, continuous evolution of our notions of literary space. Collot suggests the spirit of place (génie de lieu) has less to do with a place’s own inherent qualities or those projected onto it, than with its “confrontations” or juxtapositioning with other places. It’s no surprise then that while Bertrand Westphal’s geocriticism emphasizes transgressions of epistemological frontiers or borders, Collot’s geopoetics focuses instead on the relativism of entrenched oppositions. Here, transgression or overlapping carries less weight than contrast. Moving on to “geographic approaches,” Collot relies heavily on glosses of Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti and Barbara Piatti, but also touches on some of the inherent problems comparative literature and world literature have faced in representing a “spatialized history” or “temporal geography.” He hesitates to charge world literature as the academic counterpart to a world economic market. While vaguely troubled by possible links between globalizing economies and globalizing literary studies, he sees geographic approaches instead as a means of resisting literary homogenization and of preserving cultural diversity. In short, a contemporary France (indeed a contemporary Europe or America) uneasy at the adverse effects of globalization, should embrace geographic approaches as remedies, not symptoms. Turning to geocritical approaches, Pour une géographie littéraire patiently lauds Westphal’s approach to literature, while doing an excellent job of contextualizing it within literary studies. While Westphal jumps eagerly from Plato, Aristotle or St. Augustine to the postmodern of Brian McHale, Collot does a good bit of work to fill in middle ground Westphal treats with more general gestures: the nineteenth and early twentieth century, with particular attention to non-narrative literature. A poetry specialist at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, he is also not averse to tackling Montesquieu or post-Napoleonic travel writing. Westphal’s geocriticism, he writes, moves “from the author to the place and not from the place toward the author.” While comparative imagology may...

Portrait Stories by Michal Peled Ginsburg

Reviewed by: Portrait Stories by Michal Peled Ginsburg Michelle E. Bloom Michal Peled Ginsburg. Portrait Stories. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. Pp. 224. $50.00. Michal Peled Ginsburg’s Portrait Stories offers a clearly-written, rigorous, in-depth and enlightening examination of fictions about painted portraits. With well-defined chronological, national, and generic parameters, Portrait Stories examines nineteenth-century short stories and novellas from European and American literary traditions (American, British, French, German, and Russian). The timeframe in question reflects the distinctiveness of nineteenth-century stories, according to Ginsburg, in which the figures of the artist and the viewer play as important roles as the portrait itself. Ginsburg suggests that nineteenth-century portrait stories entail a shift away from the equation of the figure represented in the portrait and the person that the image represents (the “subject”). That is, the author notes, the portrait no longer “refers unambiguously to a real, existing, specific person” (4). This shift away from direct referentiality results in a complex dynamic absent from pre-nineteenth-century tales, which more often featured supernatural or magical portraits without a known human creator. Along with the artist and viewer, the process of painting the portrait comes to the foreground in the tales that Ginsburg examines. To her credit, her literary repertoire runs the gamut from the usual suspects, including Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” and Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, to texts [End Page 578] less familiar to the anglophone reader, albeit in some cases by canonical authors. Students and general readers, and even some scholars, are unlikely to be familiar with anglophone stories such as Henry James’s “The Special Type” and “The Tone of Time” no less than French works such as Balzac’s La Maison du chat-qui-pelote and Georges Sand’s “Le Chateau de Pictordu.” In these cases, as well as those on the spectrum between well known and little known, the reader will certainly come away from Portrait Stories with insights into familiar texts or inspiration to read new ones. Ginsburg distinguishes her study from books such as Françoise Meltzer’s Salome and the Dance of Writing, which diminish the specificity of the portrait (10). By contrast, Ginsburg highlights the portrait within stories as the site “where intersubjective relations of desire, identification, rivalry, projection, aggression, guilt, idealization, misrecognition, get organized” (10). Of course, as the author suggests, stories in portraits are purely verbal constructions. In the introduction, Ginsburg frames her subsequent discussions of artist-por-trait-viewer relationships with Charles Sanders Pierce’s concepts of the iconic, the symbolic and the indexical. The “iconic” characterizes the relationships between the portrait and the subject, since the portrait resembles the subject, more or less, but definitionally. Pierce’s symbolic (conventional) may supplement the iconic in describing the portrait-subject connection. Finally, the “indexical” describes the relationship between the artist and the portrait, as the latters bears a trace or imprint of the former (6). Close textual analysis constitutes Ginsburg’s forte here and the book’s prime strength. The highlight of the first chapter, on Poe’s “Oval Portrait,” lies in the analysis of the description of the eponymous portrait’s “absolute life-likeliness of expression.” Ginsburg astutely calls other critics on their slippage from Poe’s neologism “life-likeliness” to the more common word, “life-likeness” (21). She traces “life-likeliness” intertextually to Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” interpreting it as being buried alive (22). Other moments of insightful, nuanced textual analysis that occur include the discussion in Chapter Five of the names “Nicolo” (an orphan) and “Colino” (a Genovese nobleman) in Kleist’s “Der Findling,” ultimately a merely semantic resemblance which fails to prove a connection between the foundling and the portrait of the nobleman, despite suspicions to the contrary (85). Chapter One also sets the stage for several of the themes developed throughout the work, including the portrait as a representation of an individual; the power of the painter over the subject; and the role of gender, albeit not necessarily through the typical paradigm of the male gaze as embodying the male subject’s power over the female object (25). The second chapter, on James’s...

George Sand, George Eliot, and the Politics of Difference

George Sand, George Eliot, and the Politics of Difference

“Que ne sommes-nous assez riches”: Colonialist Reverie in George Sand’s Indiana

This article counters interpretations of George Sand’s Indiana as an antislavery novel, instead examining it as a fictional inscription of colonialist practice and rhetoric. Sand discursively exploits the condition of the enslaved as an extended metaphor for the oppression of women, including that of the novel’s protagonist. At the same time, the novel valorizes the racial discourses and acquisitive ambitions of a colonialist ethos, culminating in a romanticized panorama of French Empire-as-utopia on the island of Bernica, imagined as a space of personal liberation and recuperation for white Creole cousin-lovers Indiana and Ralph. The ideological scaffolding of Sand’s feminist idealism in Indiana rests, at least in part, on the prerogatives of imperial capitalist reverie, inseparable from the exchanges of currency, labor, and black bodies as movable property at the center of the expansion of French Empire. In the novel’s conclusion, Ralph imagines not the abolition of slavery but rather a fantasy of total economic domination—being “rich enough” to purchase all the enslaved bodies of the world.

Therese Bentzon’s American “Other” in New Orleans: Constructing Frenchness and Femininity in Louisiana at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

THERESE Bentzon's Notes de voyages: les Americaines chez elles is culmination of her 1893 voyage to United States, trip that was to last two years and take her to parts of continent as varied as Chicago, New Orleans, Boston, Quebec, and New York. Originally published in serial form in Revue des deux mondes, this travelogue, as title indicates, explicitly evokes gendered perspective. In her voyage, not only spent great deal of time touring schools and universities, but also observing women's daily lives, coming to conclusion that on whole, American young women enjoyed much greater freedoms than their French counterparts. In an 1894 interview with New York Times, explained why she felt it was important to transmit greater knowledge of American culture to France, stating that the young in France shall be transformed by influence of American young girl (Impressions of Th. Bentzon 21). Indeed, one over-arching concern that runs through Bentzon's literary output her novels, translations, travel-writing, and literary criticism--is her ongoing interest in expanding women's professional and educational capacities in France, in this instance via her experiences with North American literature and culture. Within this vast tour of American cultural and educational institutions, reserves privileged place for Francophone America, New Orleans and Quebec. It is in her travels in New Orleans that finds hope for women's education that is absent in her tours of other American cities. She notes that New Orleans a produit des femmes remarquables intellectuellement, des ecrivains, des artistes (Notes de Voyage 397). While she does admit that in comparison to women's education in Northeast, education in New Orleans lags behind, this is not necessarily, in her opinion, detriment; from her perspective cultural specificities that create different intellectual atmosphere in New Orleans are also what connect it more closely to France and therefore create opportunity for change. Th. was pseudonym of Therese Blanc, nee Therese de Solms, who was born in 1840 and died in 1907. Through her stepfather she was introduced to George Sand and under her sponsorship began writing for Revue des Deux Mondes in 1872 (Stanton 598). In addition to her travel writing, she mainly wrote book reviews, critical pieces, and translations, particularly of English and American works by such authors as Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bret Harte, to give only few examples among many. Aside from her work as translator, though, her largest written output was writing about her experiences traveling in North America. And, more specifically, large portions of her writings about North America focus solely on French-speaking spaces, not only New Orleans, but also Quebec, and she saw in these regions an even greater interest in women's opportunities than in other, Anglophone areas of North America she toured, for within them she perceived of capacity to construct an identity both French and other, and thus both familiar and foreign to her readers. In Notes de voyages: les Americaines chez elles, examines women's roles in New Orleans through double lens of French and American identities, creating opportunity for French women to look to their Francophone counterparts in order to gain personal, professional, and educational advances. certainly makes it point to note continuing influence of French language and culture on New Orleans, but she does not stop there. Instead, she posits that New Orleans, with its convergence of French and Anglo-American culture, can in future have just as great an influence as France had on it in past. Furthermore, because sees women as primary force behind maintenance of New World Francophone identity, she endows women of New Orleans, and by extension domestic and educational realms that they inhabit, with cultural power that exceeds that of their male counterparts. …

‘L'esprit, le cœur et les bras’: Rethinking Art as Labour in George Sand

This article examines George Sand's approach to labour both in her commercial negotiations and in her own texts. It argues that the increasingly fraught relationship within the literary market between work, art, and money is played out and reworked in Sand's novels. Whereas in her correspondence Sand oscillates between the practical and the aesthetic, in her narratives she creates utopian, ternary models of labour which resolve this binary. The article thus shows how Sand uses her writing as a tool to question the opposition between art and commerce, offering a vision of artistic work as both product and noble pursuit.

A Comparative Study of the Feminist View of the World Between Na Hye-Sok and George Sand - Focusing on Conscious Vocation of the Artist -

A Comparative Study of the Feminist View of the World Between Na Hye-Sok and George Sand - Focusing on Conscious Vocation of the Artist -

‘Sand’s Way’: The Voices of George Sand’s François the Waif in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past

This paper traces one of the origins of Marcel Proust’s artistic vocation in his fascination for a novel by George Sand, François le Champi (François the Waif). In Remembrance of Things Past, the adult writer explores the gradual recognition of this early phase of his formation: Sand’s novel appears in the ‘Combray’ section in Swann’s Way and it reappears at the moment of apparent illumination regarding his future as a writer in Time Regained. Leaving deliberately aside the psychoanalytic implications of the story, this article will instead emphasise the ‘vocality’ of the story, taken from the oral tradition of the provincial Berry countryside and imbued with colloquial texture, to show how the retelling of this moment in time when the novel was encountered includes a definition of what artistic vocation is for the narrator.

George Sand and Music Ethnography in Nineteenth-Century France

In Les Visions de la nuit dans les campagnes (1851–1853), George Sand responded to the French government’s newly announced project of collecting the ‘popular’ or folk songs of France, with a critique of their methods of collection as perfunctory. Sand was adamant not only about a more rigorous approach to amassing the nation’s folk songs but also about the inclusion of the music with the lyrics, and her concise, insightful critique of archival methods came after nearly two decades of her own occupation with rendering music in her fiction and, more immediately, a decade focused on folk music in many of what are known as her ‘rustic’ novels. In particular, I bring to the fore in this article discussions in Sand’s expansive novel Consuelo; La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1842–1844) which both insist upon the historical, cultural and personal significance of the preservation of folk music and navigate the tensions of preserving an art form that is fundamentally non-static and ephemeral, in order to articulate the value Sand places on musical sensibility, memory and heritage. I argue that Les Visions de la nuit dans les campagnes stands along with Sand’s fiction as an ardent defense against the loss of the musical heritage of provincial France in the hands of the state’s archivists. This article thus situates George Sand’s investment in the cultural production from the Berry region within the early history of nineteenth-century music ethnography in France, while maintaining Sand’s own understanding of her cultural production as poetic rather than scientific.

Tennyson and the Weight of a Pause

Tennyson and the Weight of a Pause Owen Boynton (bio) Tennyson deployed and revised punctuation in his poems with diligent care; his critics have responded in kind.1 Christopher Ricks, Eric Griffiths, Herbert Tucker, and a more recent generation including Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Kirstie Blair have all turned their attention toward the pointing of Tennyson’s verse, but they have turned their attention toward it when looking away from the other matters with which they are chiefly concerned, glancing briefly and occasionally at marks, rather than granting Tennyson’s punctuation the sustained scrutiny it deserves.2 Such scrutiny can take various forms. A critic might enumerate the diverse repercussions of punctuation across works or in a single work, or else a critic might fix upon a single function of punctuation as it pertains to some of Tennyson’s deepest preoccupations. In what follows, I pursue the latter path, hoping, by way of a discussion of Tennyson’s punctuation, to arrive at a greater understanding of Tennyson’s poetic procedures and intentions. Whether it elucidates syntax or whether it modulates rhetorical emphasis, punctuation has an inherently temporal character, with different marks inviting readers to pause for greater or lesser durations. Throughout the nineteenth century, at least four marks of punctuation were synonymous with variously extended pauses, even when they were used also, or primarily, for syntactical elucidation.3 Commas, semicolons, colons, and full stops represented a series of pauses, of relatively increasing duration, such that the comma asks for a smaller pause than the semicolon, which asks for a smaller pause than the colon, and so on. Early and mid-Victorian children were sometimes trained, as school children, to stop and count aloud for one second at each comma, two seconds at each semicolon, three at each colon, and four at each full stop when learning to read. Many Victorian readers were raised in the same world as Maggie Tulliver, who assists in educating her brother with a reminder that: “you ought to stop twice as long at a semicolon as you do at a comma, and you make the longest stops where there ought to be no stop at all.”4 Even today’s readers may recall learning to stop at different marks of punctuation for relatively longer or shorter pauses, to better understand the degrees of relationship between parts of sentences set off by those marks.5 [End Page 229] Any poet may take advantage of the temporal aspect of punctuation, but not all poets will have good reason for doing so. Tennyson did. In his memoir of his father, Hallam Tennyson records an incident that occurred in 1873, when the poet was sixty-four years old: During the evening we consoled ourselves by reading Lélia by George Sand: whose Consuelo and Petite Fadette were favourites of his. Nothing was to be heard at night thro’ the mist but the shrill ticking of a church-clock, which sounded, he said, “in the thick darkness like the cry of a dying man.” He says he once lived near a stable clock which he never heard but which he felt, most ghostly wise, through the boards.6 As time passed in the ticking of a church clock, it passed also along Tennyson’s nerves, intimating human mortality and the terror, or pain, of death. In some of his earliest surviving verse, Tennyson likewise intuits that time can have an exquisitely visceral presence: There is a clock in Pandemonium,Hard by the burning throne of my Great Grandsire,The slow vibrations of whose pendulum,With click-clack alternation to and fro,Sound “Ever, Never!” through the courts of Hell,Piercing the wrung ears of the damned that writheUpon their beds of flame . . . (The Devil and the Lady, I.V. 233–239) 7 The nightmare of Hell, in addition to the agony of the beds of flame, is that it is both eternal and subject to the tangibly “piercing” vibrations of a clock; time becomes as painful, precise, and directed as a metallic tool of torture. In the span of years between these two pieces of writing, time repeatedly features in Tennyson’s poetry as a force of attrition, often...

A Collection of Letters from Famous Writers to Dearest Mother

George Sand was born Amandine-Aurore Dupin in Paris in 1804, the daughter of a mother who was a bird seller and a father who was the great-grandson of King Augustus II of Poland. Her mother married...

Taboo: Corporeal Secrets in Nineteenth-Century France

This monograph is an incisive study of representations of the unspeakable taboo body in texts by George Sand, Rachilde, Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Octave Mirbeau, Barbey d'Aurevilly, and Victor Hugo. The author examines the ways in which these texts show what could not be articulated in the nineteenth century because of social codes and moral boundaries. She argues that ‘the taboo yearns to be spoken’ (p. 12) and that taboo bodies ‘offer a reflexive commentary on the relationship between reader and text’ (p. 7). The author balances analysis of the unspeakable body with investigation of the reader's relationship to the text and the taboos represented therein. The Introduction elucidates the author's conceptualization of the taboo body with passages from the novels and various theoretical studies. Subsequently it clarifies the volume's connection with earlier analyses of bodily representation in realist texts (for example, those of Henri Mitterand, Peter Brooks, Naomi Schor, and Naomi Segal); and it outlines the study's theoretical underpinnings rooted in the ideas of Georges Bataille (eroticism and transgression), Michel Foucault (the eloquence of silence), Roland Barthes (the pleasure of the text and readerly jouissance), Judith Butler (gender as performative construct), Susan Sontag (the deployment of illness and suffering as metaphor), and Cathy Caruth (the need to tell and retell in the revelation of trauma), as opposed to Freud's psychoanalytical paradigm in the previous studies. This careful contextualization of several specific fields of thought shows the complexity of bodily representation in the nineteenth-century novel and sheds light on the many forces and tensions surrounding it. The taboo bodies in the three chapters of Part One suggest that illness (for example, tuberculosis or syphilis) reveals social anxieties about female sexuality and sexual desire in texts by Sand, Rachilde, and Zola. In Les Soirées de Médan and La Débâcle, war — specifically the Franco-Prussian defeat — is the catalyst for a reconsideration of representations of manliness and masculinity. According to Thompson, the ‘weakened state of the French nation’ is represented by the ‘unmanning’ of the male body (p. 81). Part Two focuses on the reader's role in the interpretation of taboo bodies. Chapter 4 explores cruelty and unspeakable pain in Mirbeau's Le Jardin des supplices and Barbey d'Aurevilly's L'Ensorcelée and Les Diaboliques. In the case of both authors, the reader must witness and thereby ‘validate’ (p. 88) the violence in the texts. Mirbeau avoids descriptions of corporeal violence and allows much to the reader's imagination; Barbey conversely ‘privileges’ brutality and agony leaving the reader at the mercy of the text. Chapter 5 focuses on physical deformity and how Hugo's textualization of the monstrous questions the reader's values. His affirmation of the deformed body and rejection of conventional notions of the horrific destabilize the taboo. Chapter 6 reveals the necessity of broaching taboo subjects in Zola's Vérité; even if the unspeakable is obfuscated in the text, traces of it point to its very existence. Thompson's lucid work argues that analysis of the form and function of the taboo encourages readers to re-examine their own values and preconceived notions towards the body. This study is especially useful to scholars of nineteenth-century French literature, gender studies, and disability studies.

Richard Kogan, M.D., to Analyze Chopin’s Mind and Music

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Annual MetingFull AccessRichard Kogan, M.D., to Analyze Chopin’s Mind and MusicNick ZagorskiNick ZagorskiSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:31 Mar 2015https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2015.4b31AbstractThe noted psychiatrist and pianist will discuss how the renowned Polish composer’s troubled mental state influenced his compositions.The duality that can manifest in a troubled mind has long fascinated Richard Kogan, M.D. Accomplished psychiatrist and pianist Richard Kogan, M.D., observes that mental illness can inspire extraordinary creativity.Richard Kogan, M.D.“Mental illness can lead to great disability, but it also can inspire extraordinary acts of creativity,” he said. For Kogan, an award-winning pianist, this intrapsychic conflict is especially poignant among composers, such as Frederic Chopin (1810-1849).Kogan is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, artistic director of the Weill Cornell Music and Medicine Program, and codirector of the Weill Cornell Human Sexuality Program. He studied piano at the Juilliard School and earned his undergraduate and medical degrees at Harvard.At age 20, Chopin left Poland to explore the culture and beauty of Western Europe; just one month later, the November 30 Uprising thrust his homeland into a decades-long period of political turmoil and oppression under czarist Russia. Forced to spend his entire adult life in exile, Chopin, already a musical prodigy, poured his hope and suffering into creating some of the most exceptional solo piano pieces ever written, particularly the polonaises and mazurkas that were a tribute to his homeland.But these masterpieces also coincided with a growing decline of his mental state. Worries about his distant home and family triggered panic attacks, phobias limited his public performances, and a diagnosis of tuberculosis preoccupied his mind with death and melancholy. Kogan will explore this relationship between Chopin’s psyche and his creative output in a special session at APA’s 2015 annual meeting titled “The Mind and Music of Chopin.” The discussion—which will also examine Chopin’s relationship with the brilliant and notorious French novelist George Sand during his later years—will be illuminated by performances of some of the composer’s most celebrated music.Kogan has been providing such melodious insights into the relationship between the inner turmoil and outer creativity of great composers for many years. He hopes his efforts help destigmatize mental illness by showing it in the positive context of the achievements of a renowned historical figure. The session will be held on Saturday, May 16, 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. in Room 102, Level 100, North Building, Toronto Convention Centre. ■To watch a video of Kogan’s presentation at last year’s annual meeting, “Rachmaninoff and His Psychiatrist,” click here. ISSUES NewArchived