The Problem of Evil in Sand's La Mare au diable and Carl Jung, The Ideology of Sentiment

Abstract

My thesis insists on the theme of evil implicit in Sand's title to her pastoral novel, La Mare au diable (1846). The question of evil as death (le mal métaphysique) stands out in her preface, opens her novel, and defines the challenge faced by the hero in social prejudice (le mal social) and in the heroic journey to overcome internalized obstacles such as fear (le mal psychologique) in order to transform his values. The interplay between good and evil culminating in “the devil's pond” intuits Jung's theory of the convergence of good and evil and the necessity of the latter in the maturation process. The victory of the hero, Germain, is also that of Sand who rises above the ideological partisanship of her opening chapters to bring to life inspirational values open to all.

Keywords:

• evil
• heroic voyage
• Jung
• pastoral novel
• romanticism

Notes

1. See Sand's “Notice”: “Quand j’ai commencé, par la Mare au Diable, une série de romans champêtres” (3). All quotations from the novel are from the Garnier edition. In her discussion of Sand's canonicity, Schor quotes Faguet in 1887 who identifies as Sand's claim to fame her pastoral novels “and above all, la Mare au Diable” (25). For the question of content as opposed to pastoral form, see Hamilton: “Although readers tend not to take seriously the surfacing of evil in the fantastic ambience of the devil's pool, the confrontation with evil constitutes an inherent turning point in the narrative mechanism used by Sand in La Mare au diable” (“Sand's” 46).

2. See Havens 256–59 who stresses Voltaire's preoccupation with the question of evil: “His philosophy in Candide is one of active work against all the man-made evils about us” (219). Voltaire's Candide excels in the exposé of le mal moral of war, slavery, and the auto-da-fé of the Inquisition and contrasts it with “le mal naturel” of shipwrecks, the Lisbon earthquake, pestilence, etc. His distinction aims at invalidating any metaphysical link between moral and natural evil, as in the divine punishment for sins.

3. Dionysus, a deity of agriculture and corn, “is reported to have been the first to yoke oxen to the plough” (Frazer 387).

4. See Schor, who reinterprets “idealism in the novel” (essentially, the idealist novel) to reconcile idealism and feminist criticism in recanonizing Sand so as to include more than the pastoral novels (23–25).

5. See Neumann, who asserts the impotence of Judeo-Christian values to counteract the eruption of collective evil symptomatized by two world wars. His call for “A New Ethic” opens with this declaration: “The problem of evil is one of the most central problems of modern man. No appeal to old values and ideals can shield us from the recognition that we live in a world in which evil in man is emerging from the depths on a gigantic scale and confronting us all, without exception, with the question: ‘How are we to deal with this evil?’” (25). In the context of the nineteenth century, such a dire warning would seem to belong more to the second half of the century as in Émile Zola's indictment of anti-Semitism, “J’Accuse” (1898).

6. Both May and Tolle may be optimistic in their contention that calculated evil, especially evil for evil's sake, is fairly uncommon.

7. See Hamilton, “Symbolic” 51.

8. See Grant 215 for the thesis of an underlying matriarchal culture in La Mare au diable and Bly 230 for the complementarity of patriarchy and matriarchy.

9. Jung's theory of contrasexuality approximates a kind of psychological bisexuality by positing an inherent linkage between genders, a primary feminine in woman's ego and a secondary feminine, the Anima, in man's unconscious. Together they constitute the Feminine. The masculine counterpart of the Anima in woman's psychology is the Animus.

10. This model reflects the psychology of the traditional male hero but does not fit Germain well. His initial mindset comes closer to that of woman's heroic journey, which usually begins not in hubris but in a “submission, humiliation, or humility” (Clift and Clift 33).

11. See Hamilton, “Sand's.”

12. Jung summarizes his theory on the relationship between good and evil and eternal opposites in his Foreward to Neumann: “No one stands beyond good and evil, otherwise he would be out of the world. Life is a continuing balance of opposites, like every other energic process. The abolition of opposites would be the equivalent of death. … There is no good without evil, and no evil without good. The one conditions the other, but it does not become the other or abolish the other” (16–17). The relationship between good and evil is explored by Jung in his Answer to Job (1952).

13. See Frey-Rohn: “Studies of the individuation process corroborate the fact that there can be no self-realization without the experience of evil” (185).

14. “Jung extolled the celebrated Declaratio Assumptionis Mariae of Pope Pius XII as the greatest spiritual deed of the century.” Von Franz indicates some of its reverberations in the Church and in the collective psychology (14–15).

15. See Ulanov and Dueck: “Jung goes so far as to say that the inner voice calling us to be all of ourselves usually sneaks in through something negative, making us conscious of evil” (53).