At Home [and] Abroad: Cosmopolitanism as Political Practice in George Sand and Pauline Viardot-Garcia

ABSTRACT

Cosmopolitanism has been the subject of considerable recent academic inquiry, but the frequently vexed concept has never attracted much interest, to date, in French studies. Yet a cosmopolitan ethos is central to women's cultural production in nineteenth-century France and provides a valuable lens through which to consider networks of meaning and collaborative conversations across the boundaries of nations/languages/cultures. I read George Sand's Consuelo (1842-43) and the career of mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot-Garcia (1821-1910), to whom the novel was dedicated, as interdependent expressions of women's cosmopolitanism marked by a shared vision of cross-cultural engagement with the politics of difference, mobility, and identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Cosmopolitanism
• George Sand
• Pauline Viardot-Garcia
• Consuelo
• Berlioz’s Orphée
• female cosmopolitanism
• art as political practice

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Cohen and Dever (2002) for an excellent exploration of the transnational novel, which shares some aspects of cosmopolitanism, and Casanova on “the international literary space … of the world republic of letters” (2004, xii).

2 See Wettlaufer, “Cosmopolitan Visions: Gender, Genre, Nation” (2011, 125–34). Cassaliggi (2020), Domenichelli (2015), Jones (2009), Orr (1988), Vincent (2004), Wilkinson (2017), and Wohlgemut also present important discussions of the cosmopolitan implications of Staël’s life and her fiction.

3 Nineteenth-century theories of cosmopolitanism were frequently tied to Rousseau’s writings and often focused on the relations between French and British novels. The first volume of Emile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française (1873) presented a quotation from Rousseau’s Emile to illustrate the meaning of cosmopolite (“Défiez-vous de ces cosmopolites qui vont chercher au loin dans leurs livres des devoirs qu’ils dédaignent de remplir autour d’eux”). Joseph Texte’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les origines du cosmopolitisme littéraire: Étude sur les relations littéraires de la France et de l'Angleterre au XVIIIe Siècle was published in France in 1895 and translated into English in 1899.

4 Contemporary critics have also raised the issue of cosmopolitanism’s relationship to global capitalism. Where Lauren Goodlad insists on the “cosmopolitan character of capital” (Goodlad 2015, 1), Robbins argues that “capital may be cosmopolitan, but that does not make cosmopolitanism an apology for capitalism” (Robbins 1998b, 8). See also Brennan and Walkowitz (2010) for further discussion.

5 For further discussion of these international networks of women writers and poets during the Romantic and Victorian eras, see Chapman (2019) and Winckles, et al. (2017).

6 Pauline’s father, Manuel Garcia, was among the most renowned tenors of the early nineteenth-century and created the role of Almariva in Rossini’s Barbier de Seville. Both of his wives were also singers and Garcia trained his two daughters for brilliant careers in opera. Pauline’s sister, Maria Malibran (thirteen years her elder), was also a legendary mezzo-soprano who captured the Romantic imagination before her early death in 1836.

7 Louis Viardot was the director of the Théâtre-Italien at the time but resigned his position upon his marriage to Pauline.

8 In late July 1842, both Pauline and Louis wrote to Sand expressing their admiration and pleasure in the pages they received; Pauline proclaimed “je suis toute fière d’avoir été un des fragments qui vous ont servi à créer cette admirable figure. Ce sera sans doute ce que j’aurai fait de mieux dans le monde” (Marix-Spire 1959, 44).

9 Letter dated 3 January 1859 in Baker (July 1915): 374. The correspondence between Viardot-Garcia and Rietz was primarily in German (as was this epistle) with occasional passages or even full letters in French, all of which Baker translates into English. The original German text is quoted in Baker, 373.

10 For discussion of “la musique naturelle,” “la musique populaire,” and the Bohemian peasant Zdenko in Consuelo, see Powell 1992 and 2001.

11 For discussion of the role of music and the engagement of (male) artists and musicians in Saint-Simonian thought, see Ballanche, Barrault (1831), Bénichou (2004), Busst (1987), Locke (1986), McCalla (1998a, 1998b), and McWilliam (2004).

12 Consuelo is also known by the name Porporina or Nina, Albert calls her Wanda, and when she is travelling disguised as a boy, she answers to Signor Bertoni, while Haydn is nicknamed Beppo throughout. Albert’s family name, originally Podiebrand, was changed from the Slavic sounding moniker to the Saxon Rudolstadt, while the Bohemian clan also shifted their identity from Protestant to Catholic. Moreover, Albert believes himself to be the reincarnation of his ancestor, Jan Ziska, a Czech national hero, a Radical Hussite, and acclaimed military leader who defeated the army of the Holy Roman Empire and Hungary in 1421. Albert also channels and/or converses with other dead ancestors throughout the novel.

13 In La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, the second novel involving these characters (Sand 1843-44), it turns out that Albert is indeed not dead after all, in a further evocation and ultimately, recasting, of the Orpheus myth.

14 See Margaret Jacob’s 2008 article, “The Cosmopolitan as a Lived Category.”

15 As Viardot-Garcia wrote to her friend Rietz in 1858, “My husband, who is a Republican, as you know, will have nothing to do with the present regime, and of course has no intercourse with its leaders. Everything is accomplished now through protection, but woe to him who must beg for it! He must usually purchase this needful exalted favor with his honor. God be praised, we do not need it; we have never debased our freedom, soiled our honor. Our honor is free in every aspect, our freedom honorable, and these are our dearest treasures, which we shall defend while reason and affection are ours” (Baker 1915, 366). (The original text, in German, may be found on the following page.)

16 The Viardots’ salons in Paris and Baden-Baden (often jeudis), included Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, Rossini, Delacroix, Corot, Doré, Ary Scheffer, Sand, Augier, Renan, Turgenev, Liszt, Goudnod, Fauré, Bizet, and Massenet.

17 Chorley 1862, 2:54. Chorley went on to insist that Meyerbeer was “much indebted to Madame Viardot for suggestion in Le Prophète.”

18 Until this point, mezzo-sopranos and contraltos were generally cast as the “evil” characters (“witches, bitches, and britches”) and always consigned to a secondary role in the opera. Théophile Gautier’s poem “Contralto” (1852, 51–54), which Fauquet suggests may have been inspired by Viardot-Garcia’s performance as Fidès in 1849 (2009, 196), posits the appeal of this lower female register in its gender ambiguity: “Que tu me plais, ô timbre étrange!/Son double, homme et femme à la fois,/ Contralto, bizarre mélange,/Hermaphrodite de la voix!”

19 Gluck had a great influence on Romantic music, especially on Berlioz. See Landon (2015) on Gluck and reform opera.

20 See Fauquet (2009) for detailed enumeration of Berlioz’s changes to Gluck’s Orfeo.

21 As Saint-Simonian Emile Barrault explained “Un seul art garde un vrai pouvoir, c’est la musique … cette langue vague et mystérieuse, qui répond à toutes les âmes et reçoit de leur situation personnelle une traduction particulière, doit être la seule langue commune entre les hommes” (1830, 70–71).

22 As seen in Disdéri’s numerous cartes de visite of Viardot-Garcia as Orphée (1859) [see Fig.1 and http://www.19thcenturyphotos.com/Pauline-Viardot-Garcia-123056.htm], the singer’s pose with a lyre and her costume, which she designed with Delacroix (described by PVG in a letter to Rietz [Baker 1916, 47]), along with her crown of laurels and her melancholy posture bear obvious similarities to Gérard’s Corinne à Cap Misène (1819) (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Corinne_au_Cap_Mis%C3%A8ne_-_Francois_G%C3%A9rard.jpg) and Vigée-Lebrun’s Portrait of Mme de Staël as Corinne (1808) (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/656870). I will discuss this series of images in terms of artistic and literary intertexts (Corinne, Staël, Vigée-Lebrun, Viardot-Garcia, Orphée, Sand, Consuelo) in a separate article.

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Alexandra Wettlaufer

Alexandra Wettlaufer is a professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also serves as the Director of the Plan II Honors Program. A specialist in interdisciplinary nineteenth-century studies, literature and the visual arts, and intersections of gender and genre, she is currently working on a study of George Sand, George Eliot, and the transnational novel with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship.