George Sand’s volcanic imagination

ABSTRACT

This article proposes that George Sand can be considered as an ecofeminist. While Sand’s texts have often been associated with the natural world, this association has seldom been positive, and has come to define her position in the canon, with her bucolic idealism separating her from the ‘realist’ approach that came to typify the nineteenth-century novel. Shifting the focus from Sand’s depiction of the fields to her representations of volcanoes, this article argues that Sand’s engagement with the natural environment has political connotations that are inseparable from her commitment to undoing gendered subjugation. While the volcano connects Sand to the arch-Romantic notions of transcendence and reverie and therefore to the sublime, analyses of texts including Histoire du rêveur (1831), Indiana (1832) and Laura (1864) show that not only is the volcano linked to creativity but also represents for Sand the potential for destruction and therefore renewal.

Résumé

Cet article propose que George Sand fût écoféministe. On a souvent constaté le rapport entre l’œuvre sandienne et le monde naturel, mais ce rapport est négatif et même détermine sa place dans le canon littéraire; son idéalisme bucolique l’a séparé de l’approche ‘réaliste’ qui caractérise le roman du dix-neuvième siècle. En mettant l’accent sur la représentation des volcans plutôt que sur celle des champs, cet article soutient que l’engagement sandien avec l’environnement a des implications politiques qu’il est impossible de démêler de sa lutte contre l’assujettissement des femmes. Même si le volcan relie Sand aux idées romantiques de la transcendance et de la rêverie, et par conséquent au sublime, des analyses de plusieurs textes comme Histoire du rêveur (1831), Indiana (1832) et Laura (1864) démontrent les associations non seulement entre le volcan et la créativité mais en plus entre l’image volcanique et la destruction, ainsi que le renouvellement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The latest text analysed by Margrave is Staël’s Corinne (1807), published three years after Sand’s birth.

2. The text’s prologue is signed by Élisa D., Marie N., Elv. de W., Marie C., Julie H., Sophie E., Clémence S., Angelina P., Anna de Sch., Henriette B., and Désirée L.

3. In 1822, Jean-François Champollion published his research on the decipherment of hieroglyphs. The testamentary drama of Sand’s novel La famille de Germandre (1861) revolves around the deciphering of glyphs upon a golden sphinx, with the family member able to solve the riddle of the sphinx deemed worthy of the inheritance.

4. This is just one iteration of the Sandian Eden, which is often linked to the volcano. The Eden of Évenor et Leucippe is found in the ‘cratère épuisé’ of a volcano (1856, 185), and volcanoes are an integral aspect of the cosmogony that Sand creates in Le poème de Myrza (1835, 477–82).