by George Sand
It has often been argued that each of the male protagonists represents a specific political position along the spectrum of political possibilities available during the waning days of the Restoration and the early days of the July Monarchy. Delmare is the embittered cashiered Napoleonic soldier, Raymon, the opportunistic legitimist, Sir Ralph, the idealistic democrat. Though historically accurate, this somewhat reductive reading does not account for the interest of the novel. What Indiana shows is that politics is not simply the stuff of male debate, it is also the stuff of women’s lives. What makes Delmare such a compelling figure is not his adherence to some sort of Balzacian social typology, rather his instantiation of an idea, the Law, which reduces women to the status of objects of exchange, to the abjection of virtual slaves. What immediately signals Sand’s difference from the prestigious models invoked in her first pages (Chateaubriand for the gloomy decor, Rousseau for the dramatic personae, Balzac for the pictorial code) is the pronounced allegorical drift, which is highlighted in the preface and more fully developed in Lélia, which was published the following year. In Sand’s novel each protagonist incarnates an abstraction; the ideal toward which the idealist novel tends is always a form of allegory.
Read as an allegorical figure, Delmare represents patriarchal law under the regime of the Napoleonic Civil Code; the struggle between Delmare and his rebellious young wife is a struggle between legal oppression and a personal quest for liberation. The immense difficulty of articulating such a struggle in the first half of the nineteenth century is made clear by Sand’s own (re)reading of the novel during her most politically radical decade: thus in the preface of 1842 what was presented as an allegorical struggle between the law and its victims in 1832 is recast into an even more explicit and impassioned protest against the inequity of marriage. In retrospect it becomes clear to Sand that Indiana is the first of a triptych (the other panels of which include Valentine and Lélia) concerned with the institution of marriage, especially as it determines the condition of women. As such it participates in a major trend in nineteenth-century French fiction: like Eugénie Grandet, her provincial Balzacian contemporary, Indiana and, following her, Valentine body forth their rejection of women’s subordination to the patriarchal exchange system by undermining the sexual and reproductive obligations entailed by the marriage contract. Though Indiana’s conjugal sexuality remains shrouded in mystery, the novel is replete with hints at her virginity; such is the undecidability that surrounds the consummation of her marriage vows that critics are divided between those who maintain that Indiana remains a virgin in marriage, and those who view her as the victim of the legalized rape that is marriage in nineteenth-century feminist discourse.
The question that then arises is the extent to which Sand’s novel can be said to be feminist. At least ever since feminist critics began to rediscover Sand under the impulse of second wave feminism, Sand’s feminist credentials have been subjected to close scrutiny. The initial response was one of disappointment and condemnation: perhaps because of its inaugural position and self-styled feminist protest, Indiana was taken to exemplify the deficiencies of Sand’s feminism. The problem, according to these 1970s-style readings, is that Indiana only seems to challenge prevailing representational codes of femininity; in actual fact, ‘the novel’s rhetoric of rebellion conceals but is an integral part of a novelistic structure which encourages conformity to the feminine stereotypes then in force’.12 For all her Amazonian horse-riding and rebellious conduct, in short her androgyny, Indiana’s representation reverts to type; it is no accident that in the novel’s Utopian epilogue, Indiana not only falls silent, is spoken of and for by Ralph, but moreover does not accede to the sensual bliss that is the prerogative of a desiring female subject. The failure of Sand to imagine a heroine endowed with subjectivity goes hand in hand with her failure to imagine a heroine endowed with sexual desire. Does this failure, however, betoken a lack of feminism, indeed of feminist solidarity on the part of George Sand, or is it rather a part of the contradictory legacy that Sand, like Mary Wollstonecraft, inherited from the Enlightenment? According to this essentially Rousseauistic view of the interplay of citizenship and sexual difference, for women participation in the fraternal society of rights and reason can only be purchased at the cost of a deadening of the senses, a curbing of disruptive sexual desire.
But then what is feminism? Can Sand be described as feminist according to one definition, not feminist according to another? Can one escape the pitfalls of anachronism? Feminism as such does not offer a stable semantic ground for deciding these questions one way or another, for feminism too has a history; there is no univocal and universal sense of feminism. Whereas in the age of sexual difference—roughly the 1970s—feminist theory was preoccupied with the existence of female subjectivity, in the age of gender—roughly the 1980s—it came to focus more on the distinction between what is viewed as essential (femaleness) and what is viewed as cultural (femininity), what is natural, what is constructed. There is thus an oscillation between two voices in Indiana: the male authorial voice that echoes the prevailing essentialist discourse on femininity (’women are . . .’), and another voice, the sexually unmarked (and humanist) narrative voice, which asserts that women, and other oppressed human beings, such as the black slaves Ralph and Indiana devote themselves to freeing, are not born naturally inferior; there is no metaphysical essence, no natural difference that marks those that are socially disenfranchised as irredeemably condemned.
And yet this much is certain: Sand and her contemporaries, especially the Saint-Simonians—a highly influential romantic social movement committed to equality between the sexes to which she did not belong but with whom she shared enemies—viewed the institution of marriage as oppressing women; marriage in the French social order instituted by Napoleon’s Civil Code was a prime feminist issue in nineteenth-century France. For this reason Sand never stopped rethinking marriage, transforming it in such Utopian political novels as The Journeyman Joiner and The Miller of Angibault from an instrument of patriarchal oppression into the mainspring of class reconciliation.
Indiana is not of course the only female protagonist in the novel: there is a near-perfect symmetry between the male triangle and the female, which includes Laure de Nangy, the aristocratic heiress to an industrial fortune whom Raymon finally marries, and Noun, Indiana’s foster-sister and servant whom Raymon seduces and abandons, and who commits suicide by drowning. The character of Noun is, as psycho-analytically inclined critics have been quick to observe, of particular interest, for it inscribes at the very threshold of Sand’s career the theme of doubling which recurs throughout her fiction, notably in such works as Jacques and La petite Fadette. But the case of the Indiana and Noun dyad represents not merely a first and quite brilliant manifestation of a persistent myth of doubling: it is rather a unique case of a split within femininity which far exceeds the paradigmatic angel/whore opposition, and renders the very category of woman problematic. The split is inscribed in the very adjective Creole—both maid and mistress are identified as ‘Creoles’—which has in French a double and contradictory meaning: (1) of mixed or black race (multiracial); (2) a white person born in the colonies (monoracial). No more than it can be ascertained whether Indiana is a virgin or not, can one assert that Noun is black or white. And yet if most readers—myself included—assume that she is black,13 that is because they are responding to a series of cues in the novel that lead them to read blatant indications of class difference as signs of a repressed racial difference. However blurred the line between black and white in the novel, however minimal the racial difference between Noun and Indiana, class separates them irrevocably. Noun can dress up as the absent Indiana, and Indiana assume the appearance of the dead Noun, but travesty is no substitute for education, and Noun cannot write like Indiana. In a novel where the command of language constitutes both political and erotic power, language is the emblem of their insuperable social differences.
There is no aspect of the no
vel we have dealt with thus far that does not lead in one way or another towards and then away from what is without a doubt one of the most fascinating spaces in all of Sand’s fiction—Indiana’s circular-shaped bedroom,14 the site of the ultimate confusion of Indiana and Noun. It is difficult here to avoid superimposing a symbolic grid over the novel’s topography, for everything suggests that the description of this strangely configured bedroom exceeds the constraints of realism and opens the way to the idealism of the novel’s surprising and controversial epilogue. But more of that in a moment.
In the first of the three major scenes that will unfold there, Raymon enters this curiously shaped room as though passing from the world of prosaic reality into a dream space and thus dramatizes the uneasy relationship between the two competing aesthetic modes within the novel. It is within this odd excrescence on the body of the realist novel that the contending forces in Indiana—the roman de moeurs and the idyll, realism and idealism, the colonies and the metropolis, Ralph and Raymon—are brought into physical contact, and it is from here that the novel emerges transfigured. Decorated with prints illustrating Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s widely read tale of idyllic love in a tropical island setting, Paul et Virginie on the one hand, and the veiled portrait of Sir Ralph on the other, the secret chamber is a luminous space lodged within the gloomy frame of Balzacian realism. And at the very heart of this Utopian space there is a hall of mirrors, and it is through this specular mechanism that the two female subjects Noun and Indiana become one, and that the mirror of narcissism is enfolded within the mirror of realism.
The question in this novel is which mirror shall triumph: the self-reflecting mirror of narcissism (both male and female) or the other-reflecting mirror of mimeticism, or whether there is fictional life beyond the looking glass? Like so many nineteenth-century French novels, Indiana is centrally concerned with the lure of narcissism, the impossibility of escaping the prison of self-reflection characteristic of the romantic ego and replacing it with a mimesis that strives to accommodate the other’s otherness, but which more often than not is simply a more perfect model of the primary mirror of narcissism. The central issue then is, in René Girard’s terms,15 the démystification of romanticism and the instrument of that démystification is linguistic: thus the space most clearly counterpoised to the circular bedroom is the all too prosaic hotel room in which Indiana lodges when she returns from the Bourbon Island to give herself to Raymon, who has meanwhile, and unbeknownst to her, married. In her humble lodgings, Indiana discovers her place in the world: stripped of the false identity derived from reading romantic literature targeting women, she comes to realize that she is no heroine possessed of a private language, but rather a subject bound by the common laws of language. In a novel centrally concerned with language, the shabby hotel room which Indiana comes to after a stay in the hospital that has deprived her of some of her proudest marks of individuality—her name, her magnificent hair, so catastrophically fetishized by Raymon—is the common place where Indiana is inducted into the law of the symbolic, which is precisely that subjectivity is a pre-assigned position: ‘All these objects belong, as it were, to nobody, by dint of belonging to all comers; no one has left any trace of being there, except to an unknown name sometimes left on a card in the frame of the mirror.’16 Language, which is described earlier on in the novel as a prostitute, belongs to no one: like the objects in the hotel room, words are merely letted out to the individual speaker and simultaneously the mirror has lost its powers of reflection and been reduced to a mere frame.
Like Emma Bovary, Flaubert’s very Sandian heroine, Indiana’s response to the loss of a fantasied, self-aggrandizing uniqueness fed by her readings, and flattered by her involvement with the Don Juanesque Raymon, is deep depression and ultimately an attempted suicide. But unlike Emma—and here we must raise the question of the specificity of women’s writing—Indiana is saved, indeed twice, and increasingly implausibly saved from drowning by the good angel figure of Ralph, with whom she lives out her days in the idyllic valley of Bernica. Like so many of Sand’s heroes and heroines, she must complete an erotic developmental trajectory that takes her from an inappropriate object-choice based on infantile narcissism to an appropriate object-choice based on an adult recognition of the moral and spiritual qualities of the worthy love-object.
But it would be too simple if all that were necessary for the novel to reach closure was for the blind heroine or hero to see the truth, as though the truth was simply lying there, only waiting to be unveiled. Such, however, is not the case: just as the romantic would-be heroine must accept the levelling quality of the common language, the good lover must overcome the blockage, the linguistic impotence that prevents his true self from shining forth. On their way toward a higher union both Indiana and Ralph must shed the shackles that have encumbered them. There is much to lend credence to the reading of the novel that views Ralph as Indiana’s true double, in the sense of a kindred spirit, a spiritual brother. Though their relationship is not strictly speaking incestuous, there is more than a suggestion of incest in what is held up to be the ideal love relationship for Indiana. Like Paul and Virginie’s, whose story constitutes their privileged intertext, theirs is first and foremost a fraternal love, even though the brother and sister are not biologically related.
The whiff of incest that pervades the final section of the novel is but one aspect of its problematic nature. Ever since the novel’s publication, critics have taken Sand to task for the novel’s conclusion, which is judged either as inappropriate for a text that advertises its realism, or unsatisfying for a novel that proposes a Utopian way out of the universe of realism. As the defender of realist orthodoxy, Sainte-Beuve was the first and most influential of the former category of critics, writing:
Indiana is not a masterpiece, there is a place in the book right after Noun’s death, after the fatal discovery that pierces Indiana’s heart, after that morning of delirium when she makes her way into Raymon’s bedroom and he rejects her—there is a point, a line of demarcation where the true, felt, and observed part of the novel ends; the rest, which seems almost pure invention, still includes some beautiful sections, great and poetic scenes, but fantasy seeks to prolong reality, imagination has taken it upon itself to crown the adventure.17
For the second category of critics—the pioneering feminist critics mentioned earlier—the Indiana of the epilogue offers scant hope for women in search of a radical transformation of their condition in the post-revolutionary rising capitalist social order: childless and childlike, deprived of all illusions and virtually all direct speech, more dead than alive, in her ultimate incarnation Indiana is hardly a role model for newly born women. And yet one has only to think of the fates of Eugénie Grandet—loveless and sexless marriage—and Emma Bovary—suicide—to know that for all its problematic aspects this epilogue does represent a hopeful innovation. The differences between Sand’s fiction and both Balzac’s—the admired friend of her debut—and Flaubert’s—the dear ‘troubadour’ of her later years—those gigantic figures who sit astride French realism, are more than stylistic, they are political. To insist on locating Sand merely within the great realist tradition is to participate in the very process that has worked to diminish her achievement—the forgetting that there exists another great tradition in nineteenth-century French literature, one that includes Victor Hugo and Émile Zola, and whose great theme is saving the innocent victims of the new bourgeois social order (the poor, the hungry, the enslaved, the disenfranchised, the persecuted). Love in this socialist and humanist tradition is as inextricably bound up with politics as the public and the private are in Balzac. When Indiana dreams, she dreams not of living the high life in Paris but of helping others; when Indiana fantasizes about falling in love, she fantasizes not about meeting a lady’s man, but a messiah. For the idealist woman, and this is perhaps her ultimate and most secretly megalomaniac desire, the ideal lover is a saviour, not to say God.
Allegory is, as we have not
ed, the trope of idealism, but it is also the trope of exotic primitivism, indeed exotic primitivism is perhaps the most popular form of idealism in early and premodern fiction. The final section of the novel demonstrates that in Sand’s Rousseauistic framework the only way out of a contemporary society viewed as hopelessly corrupt is escape to an exotic space, which is imagined in at least two crucial respects as the opposite of the common European social order: there is no social hierarchy—the relationship between Indiana and Ralph and the slaves they free is one of reciprocity and mutual caring—and the prohibition of incest is lifted. Clearly, as the final dialogue in the novel indicates, the flight from society is a last and desperate resort; Indiana marks in this sense the end of the primitivist solution. Hereafter, Sand will transfer the Utopian space to Europe: thus in the first of her three Utopian socialist novels of the 1840s, The Journeyman Joiner, the circular bedchamber resurfaces but not the wild valley of Bernica.
Ethics, and with it idealism, can hardly be said to have generated much critical heat in recent decades. The canon, by contrast, has been the object of so much critical ferment that it now appears that the very notion of a classic, let alone a world’s classic, is in serious need of reconsideration. Recent writings on realism have done much to demystify the mimetic and mechanical pretences of realism, but they have done little to dismantle realism’s aesthetic hegemony. Sand’s contemporaries already knew that her fate was linked to that of realism, what they could not imagine was that it was also linked to that of feminism. Greeted as a masterpiece in its own time, Indiana has been allowed to go intermittently out of print in ours. If the measure of classic status in France is selection as a text of the agrégation—and only precious few texts are—then Indiana has still not attained supreme institutional recognition. But in the final decades of the twentieth century, when feminism has profoundly affected the way we read and the canon of great works we study, Indiana has attained classic status. If the measure of a classic is that it can be read and reread, then contrary to what James asserts—’George Sand invites reperusal less than any mind of equal eminence’18—Indiana can, has been, and will be reread.
