The Feminist Troubadour

GEORGE SAND was an infamous woman. Her much flaunted affairs with Chopin, de Musset and innumerable other artists and writers, her publicized separation from her husband (who probably fathered only one of the two children bearing his name), even her attire and habits--she regularly appeared in Parisian theatres sporting a suit of man's clothes, smoking Turkish cigarettes--provided reams of copy for 19th century scandal sheets and an inexhaustible gossip topic for European salons. But in this new biography, Joseph Barry correctly points out that Sand was more than the mistress of famous men and deserves to be recognized as such. She was a prolific, if now rarely read, novelist and playwright, an early feminist, a virulent anti-clericalist and, until old age and disillusionment set in, a self-declared communist.

It would be difficult to write a colorless biography of a woman who lived through and participated in the French Romantic movement and the countless restorations, republics and revolutions of her century. Barry begins Sand's story by briefly tracing her paternal family tree through several genreations of imaginative but debauched French and Polish aristocrats. He continues to place Sand within a historical framework, interweaving the events in her personal life with those of the literary and political worlds which surrounded, shaped and frequently angered her.

Born Aurore Dupin in 1804, Sand was four when her father died. Barry dwells on Sand's early life, spent shuttling back and forth between her paternal grandmother's provincial estate and her mother's modest dwellings in Paris. The grandmother despised her "socially inferior" daughter-in-law and continually tried to separate her from the child. Sand later described herself as "the apple of discord" between the two rival mothers. Recalling one particularly violent separation from her mother, Sand wrote:

I cried all that night. I felt physically and morally bound to my mother, as if by a diamond chain, which my grandmother, vainly trying to break, tightened all the more around my chest so that I gasped for breath.

Throughout the book, Barry incorporates excerpts from Sand's own extensive autobiographic works and correspondence, without disrupting the flow of his own prose. Although the most memorable phrases in the book are Sand's, Barry too is highly readable. He deals with the potentially trite, unhappy childhood syndrome with just a dash of sentimental emotionalism, making the reader aware of the conflicts and complexes which shaped Sand without turning her life into a soapy saga.

The one difficulty in Barry's early narrative is his feeble pseudo-Freudian attempt to explain Aurore Dupin's later adoption of a "male" personality--George Sand. Shortly before her father's death, she was dressed in a military uniform like her father's. "Not yet four, not yet George Sand, she had found her costume, that of a male," Barry writes. He describes several other childhood incidents: the secret games she played with her imaginary personal god (her first fictional creation), a male who was dressed as a female for special rites; her mourning grandmother calling her "my son" in the days following Sand's father's sudden death; the time she heard an echo and thought she had two selves. Luckily, Barry quickly abandons these naive explanations, admitting they are not the sole key to Sand's life, becoming more sympathetic to the plight facing a woman writer attempting to break out of traditional roles.

In 19th century France, young women from good families were raised with one goal in mind: to marry an eligible bachelor as quickly as possible. Sand married Casimir Dudevant and, according to Barry, spent the first few years of her marriage accepting the prevailing belief that when a wife's interests and needs differed from her husband's, she should sacrifice them. It was soon apparent that Dudevant, who liked to hunt, drink and sleep, had little in common with his intellectual bride. Initially Sand tried to be the perfect and obedient young wife and mother. The attempt did not last. She soon began to question why she, rather than her "master," was required to suppress what was of personal importance.

At first Dudevant attempted to compromise, trying to read the books she offered him, but he invariably fell asleep. They experimented with a modified open marriage. She wouldn't complain about his whores if he would allow her intellectual, though not initially sexual, freedom. In this way, Barry suggests, she tried to make her marriage, which she was not yet willing to abandon, more fulfilling.

However the rift between the Dudevants continued to grow. Sand drew up a marriage contract and began to live half the year on her own in Paris. There her platonic lovers became physical ones, her second child, born during this time, was probably not Dudevant's. After several years of growing antagonism, the Dudevants were legally and scandalously separated.

By this time Sand had established a life of her own. She paraded around Paris unescorted, publicly lived with her lovers and published the first of her more than 70 books. Women writers were not well received by the reading public. Aurore Dupin became George Sand and remained so until her death.

Sand yearned to be a "writer among writers" not a woman among writers or a writer among women. Her first novels, such as Indiana, not surprisingly, attacked marriage, declaring it unfulfilling, demeaning and emotionally deadening for both women and men. Her non-fiction, which Barry quotes from at length, made feminist demands: rigorous intellectual education for women, reform of the divorce laws, repeal of statutes giving husbands full authority over their wives' lives and property. Barry points out that many of the changes Sand demanded were not effected until 1970. Even now, he adds, political and legal equality have not yet brought "that equality to life, in marriage, in the family, in the one-to-one relationship of a man and a woman, which essentially is what George Sand's life and work are all about."

SAND WAS a true Romantic. She wrote she was only happy "when I love" and not always then. She declared, "Love is all." But for Sand, love is only love when both partners are equals, "when two hearts, two minds, two bodies meet in understanding and embrace." She drifted from lover to lover, agonizing over the breaks and partings. She sought the perfect relationship, and if she couldn't have it, she would readily leave one man to join another who was, in her words, "closer to perfection."

Barry dispels several myths about Sand and these relationships. While earlier biographers and critics claimed that she was a frigid nymphomaniac, always seeking and never finding physical satisfaction, except perhaps in her long-term, probably lesbian affair with Marie Dorval, Barry uses Sand's letters and journal entries to show this was far from the case. Nor, Barry proves, was Sand neurotically seeking to be the "male" in her heterosexual relationships. Some of her lovers--including consumptive Chopin--were "weak", younger and easily dominated. But Sand was also capable of being pathetically submissive, promising one brutal lover, on the verge of deserting her, she'd be his "devoted black slave."

After depicting Sand as a feminist, Barry seems to change his mind and say she was not. The ambivalence was Sand's as well. Although she lived her life as a free, relatively "liberated" woman, and although feminist themes appear throughout her writing, she had few female friends and repeatedly refused to identify herself with, or participate in the efforts of the French feminist activists of her day, preferring to devote herself to other political causes. She was "less interested in promoting women's rights than humanities, believing mankind's necessarily preceded women's," Barry writes. Sand herself wrote, "Women cry out against slavery; let them wait until mankind is free, for slavery cannot give birth to freedom." In this respect Sand, as portrayed by Barry, had a narrow view of feminism. Had she lived today, she may well have identified with the Radical feminists, merging her politics with feminism, instead of subordinating the latter.

Sand was deeply committed to non-violent political change, characterizing herself at various points as a "Christian humanist" (she was a lapsed Catholic), a socialist and a communist. She fervently participated in the political upheavals in the 1840s and early '50s, writing "militantly socialist" novels and plays, publishing pamphlets and articles promoting revolution. In a letter, she wrote:

The future of the world relies in the people, especially the working classes...In time, the masses will emerge from the blinding ignorance in which the so-called enlightened classes have kept them...[and finally united] will become the masters of the world, the initiators of a new civilization.

Sand's last political passion was anti-clericalism. Once again--in her sixtieth year--she became "the political clarion of a rising generation," Barry writes. One of her plays, Villemer, denouncing the clergy's political influence that might one day explode "in a vast plot against social and individual freedom" created an uproar in Paris. Literally thousands of students, Barry claims, mobbed the theatre and "escorted her home to the cries of 'Long live George Sand! Down with the clericalists!'" Several students even attempted to unhitch the horses from her carriage to pull it themselves.

The violence, the fear that her own writings had contributed to the bloodiness of the uprisings and the slaughter of many young radicals disillusioned Sand, causing her to retreat to her old country home and withdraw from politics to write peacefully until her death in 1876. Horrified by the violence, she opposed the revolutionary uprisings and the rule of the 1871 Commune. But she retained the belief that socialism would occur gradually at a point distantly in the future, writing, "I am, as always socially red...but one must never impose one's convictions by force."

Unfortunately both Sand's radicalism and her later conservatism are lost in Barry's lengthy and confusing historical accounts, boring for a reader familiar with the history and unenlightening for the uninformed. The political accounts lack coherence and rely too heavily on loosely connected fragments from Sand's journals. Unlike the vivid portrayals of the literary figures, Sand's political associates are names without personalities.

Thus the book is marred--but far from ruined. Ideology exists without a proper context, Barry's conceptions of feminism, sexual roles and "androgynous minds" may occasionally rankle a feminist reader. His effort to prove his sympathy for feminist causes sometimes backfires, making him sound overbearing instead. But these moments are rare. For the most part, Infamous Woman is both a scholarly and an enjoyable book. Barry admirably portrays the complex woman who wrote shortly before her death, "I am still a troubadour) who believes in love, in art, in the ideal, and sings his song while the world jeers and jabbers."