Mother both superior and inferior
Sarah Burton
GEORGE SAND by Elizabeth Harlan Yale, £25, pp. 376, ISBN 00300104170 In January 1831 26-year-old Aurore Dupin Duvenant abandoned her secure provincial existence, her husband and small children, and set out for Paris and la vie bohème. She soon took a 19-year-old lover, adopted male dress, and began to write for a living. The publication of her novel Indiana led to a staff job on La Revue and she became, overnight, both rich and famous. She was no longer Mme Duvenant but known to the world as George Sand.
Aurore adopted her male nom de plume on the advice of her editor who believed that books by women would not sell. However, unlike other female writers who employed gender deception — of whom our own Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) and the Brontës (Ellis, Currer and Acton Bell) are only the best-known — Sand’s transformation was complete: her friends, lovers and even her children called her George. As Harlan observes, ‘She did what no other woman writer using a male pseudonym had ever done: she became one, or synonymous, with her invented self.’ Many have assumed that Sand’s identification with a male persona ran deeper and that she was bisexual. Her cross-dressing has been cited as evidence of her ambivalent sexuality but, as Harlan demonstrates, ‘being, or ... passing, as a man opens doors to otherwise inaccessible places’: thus disguised, Sand was able to get on with the business of living instead of remaining in thrall to the elaborate performance of femininity. Harlan remains sceptical, also, of claims that Sand had affairs with other women. Her many affairs with men were certainly unusual; it is surprising to discover a strong maternal aspect to her love-making: three of her longest liaisons were with the writers Jules Sandeau and Alfred de Musset and the composer Frédéric Chopin, all slightly built men younger than Sand and, interestingly, all suffering serious long-term illnesses. She suspended sexual relations with each of them early on in their affairs, claiming that abstinence would improve their health (an eccentric method of treat ment for which Harlan has found no contemporary medical authority).
Sand told de Musset, ‘I love you like a child’ and said of Chopin, ‘I care for him as my child and he loves me as a mother’, making one immediately wonder how she cared for her real children, a question Harlan tackles with great sensitivity. Besotted with her son Maurice, Sand had a much more tempestuous and unhappy relationship with her daughter, Solange. Following the premature death of her father, Sand’s own childhood had been dominated by a cruel and divisive contest between her mother and grandmother, out of which the young Aurore emerged as both prize and victim. In her turn, Sand was a savage critic of her own daughter and withheld the affection Solange sought and needed. It is always astonishing to find highly intelligent people learning precisely nothing from their own experiences and Sand’s reproduction of her own relationship with a dysfunctional mother shocked even those who knew her best. Chopin wrote, as his own break with Sand coincided with her estrangement from Solange, ‘A strange creature, with all her intellect! Some kind of frenzy has come upon her; she harrows up her own life, she harrows up her daughter’s life.’ This appraisal of the Solange-Sand relationship revises previous accounts which have been inhibited by Sand’s reputation as ‘one of the loftiest and most beautiful [of women]... an almost unprecedented woman by reason of the power of her mind and talent — a name which has become historical and is destined not to be forgotten by, or to disappear from, European humanity’ (Dostoevsky); ‘of all the artists of this century ... the most altruistic’ (Oscar Wilde); and ‘an immortal soul’ (Victor Hugo). Other important revisions in this biography include a well argued case doubting Sand’s paternity and the significance of this, and a fearless and refreshingly undogmatic engagement with the vexed question of Sand’s relationship to contemporary feminism.
Sand counted among her friends Flaubert, Dumas père et fils, Delacroix, Turgenev, the Goncourt brothers, Lamartine, Zola and a cricket called Cricri, who made a home in her writing desk and lived on ink and sealing wax until a servant inadvertently crushed him while closing a window. Such domestic details render Sand imaginable and human, drawing the gentleness out of the giant.
This biography is timely, objective, thoughtful and well-written. Not least of Harlan’s achievements is packing a life that was prolific both in its personal detail and in its literary output into a book of manageable size while losing none of its broad scope. She weaves narrative and analysis into a seamless, insightful and rewarding read.
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