6/28/2023 0 Comments Indiana by George Sand![]() Yet even as the poem seems to reach in those lines towards an idealized androgyny, it also insists that her attempts to deny her “woman’s nature” are vain:įloats back dishevelled strength in agony, Till God unsex thee on the heavenly shore ![]() “To George Sand: A Recognition” ends with a vision of her spirit finally set free of such limits: The sonnets celebrate the power of Sand’s voice and her defiance of convention, particularly her attempt to transcend the limits of her sex. Self-called George Sand! whose soul, amid the lionsĪnd answers roar for roar, as spirits can… And George Sand is … something else.īefore reading Indiana I knew George Sand mostly from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets about her, which I routinely assign in my seminar on the Victorian ‘woman question.’ “Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man,” begins “To George Sand: A Desire”: His name is a byword for literary seriousness: he is the Father of the Modern Novel. ![]() ![]() We thought this would be an interesting choice because Sand is more or less the anti-Flaubert: sentimental where he is relentlessly not, idealist where he is realist, not much esteemed (or at least read) today–note, again, the date of that “new” translation. We settled on Indiana because it was the most readily available (there’s a nice Oxford World’s Classics edition, with a “new” translation and an introduction by eminent literary scholar Naomi Schor). My intrepid book club, which followed up Madame Bovary with Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, decided that our next step would be something by George Sand. ![]()
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