SubStance

SubStance 32.3 (2003) 92-108

"Une voiture peut en cacher une autre":
Twentieth-Century Women Writers Read George Sand

Melanie Hawthorne

The francophile writer Edith Wharton spent no small amount of time motoring around France in the early twentieth century. As the equally francophile writer Julian Barnes informs us, Wharton also had a habit of naming her cars after French writers. One summer when Wharton had been reading a biography of George Sand, she had not one, but two cars: "we had a large showy car which always started off brilliantly and then broke down at the first hill, and this we christened 'Alfred de Musset,' while the small but indefatigable motor which subsequently replaced 'Alfred' was naturally named 'George.'" ¹ As is often the case in literary history, the "large" and "showy" seems at first "brilliant" and gets all the attention, but, as the road safety slogan reminds us, "une voiture peut en cacher une autre"—one car may obscure the view of another. It certainly seems true that in literary history, the "brilliant" Alfred de Musset has obscured the more "indefatigable" George Sand. Partly, then, this article is about how previously obscured objects may suddenly come into view, but it is also about how one reading may obscure another, and the need for vigilance in not assuming that the first thing that hoves into view is the only thing.

In the case of the way women writers have been obscured and the way their work has started to be appreciated and canonized, the lesson is not a new one. At least for some time to come, twenty-first-century literary historians will look back on the twentieth century as the time when women's writing came into its own, when it began to be treated on an equal footing with that of men. As part of the process of studying the phenomenon of women's writing, the life and work of George Sand (1804-1876) has often been viewed as the paradigm of the French woman writer—hugely successful during her lifetime (when she died, she was given a state funeral), and popular, but not considered a "serious" or "canonical" writer by the academy.

In the last few decades Sand has been rehabilitated as a subject of serious study, but even before she became respectable in academia, Sand was often held up as a popular role model for women in general, and for women writers [End Page 92] in particular. However, an examination of this shifting paradigm reveals how one reading has also obscured another. As early as 1888, when the Pall Mall Gazette asked readers to identify the most important "ladies" in history, Sand ranked first on the list (Joan of Arc came second). More recently, in the wake of the second wave of the women's movement, Sand is often presented as a proto-feminist heroine who changes the social conventions of her time, challenging the norms of her society in many personal aspects of her life: in her courageous decision to leave an abusive husband, in her successful writing career that financed her independence, in her famous love affairs (especially those with romantic figures such as Frederick Chopin), in her cross-dressing that flouted the law, and even—in what now seems a complicated way—in her smoking. Thus, in the "sexually liberated" 1970s, she was presented as an "infamous woman," a title she wears as a badge of honor in Joseph Barry's biography of that name (Doubleday, 1977), while a trade paperback edition of Noel Gerson's 1973 George Sand: A Biography of the First Modern, Liberated Woman shows a cross-dressed Sand smoking what appears to be a water pipe on the front cover, while the blurb on the back luridly proclaims that she "had the strength, courage and imagination to insist on her sexual freedom, to have her hair cut short, to wear men's clothes, to enjoy well-publicised love affairs with men and women, and moreover, to flaunt her knowledge of love in more than...