French Graduate Seminar (5th Week)

5-6.30pm Tuesday November 15^th 

^{All Souls College (Hovenden Room)} 

Lifting the Veil: George Sand’s Mythopoetic Bodies

James Illingworth, University of Belfast

George Sand’s body is infamous. Her numerous amorous liaisons and penchant for dressing in male attire in public gave rise to a sense of scandal that has categorised her reputation both during her lifetime and particularly since her death. Subject to fictionalisation during her life and subsequently mythologised through film and biographies, her literary works tend to be overshadowed by her private life. In the era of the Napoleonic Code, which stripped women of what few rights they had gained in the wake of the Revolution and legislatively reduced them to their generative function, Sand’s defiance of social order stands out. As nineteenth-century bodies suffered ever greater scrutiny through the Code on the one hand and scientific and medical developments on the other, this paper will explore how Sand’s texts can be read as a counter-discursive response to the failure to account for female experience, sketching some of the means by which Sand used her works to confront traditional (patriarchal) depictions of the body through myth, allegory and metaphor, gesturing towards alternative, mythopoetic modes of representing bodies in the nineteenth century novel.

Individual Narratives, National Histories, and Transnational Myths in George Sand’s Jeanne (1844)

Stacie Allan, University of Bristol

The simultaneous emergence of the concept of the nation and the rise of the novel in the nineteenth century are often understood as reflecting each other in their compositional processes. The modern novel, as Benedict Anderson describes, ‘provided the technical means for “re-presenting” the kind of imagined community that is the nation’. The imagining of a story, taking place in bounded horizon and moving through ‘homogenous empty time’, mirrors the space in which the nation acquires meaning. George Sand’s Jeanne (1844), however, intertwines individual narratives, national histories, and transnational myths, which, as this paper argues, challenges this totalising and limited view. The novel is entirely set in Sand's native region of Berry, yet the local is shown to be inextricably linked to the Parisian centre and the wider world through the mobile bourgeoisie and aristocracy, and the arrival of foreign visitors. The central pair of Jeanne and the English nobleman Arthur connects the localised plot to the story of Joan of Arc and the Arthurian legend.

Studying the intersection of the different narrative levels of the novel, Sand's first attempt at a roman-feuilleton, offers a reflection on the tense relationship between creating fiction and writing history. This paper presents Jeanne as a fundamentally cosmopolitan text, questioning the stability of national boundaries and emphasising France's interconnected history with England.