Cynthia Harvey
pp. 11–22
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Abstract
This article offers a sociological analysis of George Sand’s Indiana inspired by the method developed by Bourdieu in The Rules of Art. The approach used aims to highlight the position Sand invented at the dawn of the empowerment of literature as well as her importance in the literary history of the nineteenth century.
Dominique Laporte
pp. 23–43
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Abstract
George Sand has been criticized for her failure to actively support feminist action during the 1848 Revolution or the working class struggle under the Paris Commune of 1871. If she did not radicalize her republicanism, she relied, in return, on the subversive power of postures outside the established order. George Sand challenged the doxa in narratives that juxtaposed misogynistic, counter-revolutionary discourse with the words of those on the margins of society (women, artists), where a reexamination of bourgeois values was calling for socio-political changes. From this perspective, a novel such as The Confession of a Young Girl, published six years before the advent of the Third Republic, testifies to a writing which negotiates its relationship to the doxa via an enunciative device, one that establishes a republican reading contract with an increasingly democratized readership in the strategic area between bourgeois convention and revolutionary culture.
Sophie Vanden Abeele
pp. 45–60
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Abstract
If for George Sand, her literary mentor, the novel expresses “the cry of woman against the tyranny of man” for Marie d’Agoult it reveals above all a more overarching form of tyranny: that of society against the weak and the marginal. Reprising the forms and codes of women’s fiction during the July Monarchy, the novelist exploits its typology and themes in order to broaden perspective. In the works of Marie d’Agoult, woman is not merely a victim of the male institutions embodied by father, husband, lover or priest: her heroines break with the established order to live on the margins. Here they join with other marginal individuals such as artists—with whom they share insight about truth and justice—, the weak and the oppressed (represented by the poor and the workers), for whose plight such insight inspires compassion and a spirit of charity. Female destiny reveals in fact what this republican novelist calls “the great voice of unhappiness.” A progressive, she makes woman an emblematic figure whose sacrificial journey is narrated by means of a symbolic redemption that reempowers female iconic models (Beatrice, Niobe or Ondine). Thus, her texts are a re-writing of the contemporary doxa on women: they show that a reevaluation of notions of duty and moral law is needed to enable a rethinking of liberty, the ideological foundation of post-revolutionary society.
Catherine Nesci and Kathryne Adair
pp. 61–85
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Abstract
Inspired by nineteenth-century accounts of creation based on the figure of Prometheus, this article examines the feminization of the myth from George Sand to Rachilde. The novels Méphis by Flora Tristan and Monsieur Vénus by Rachilde are studied to understand how women novelists wrote about the mythical imagination embodied in Mary Shelley’s modern Prometheus and the ways in which their texts depict the creation of Man and the difference between the sexes. Modern stealers of fire and demiurges, these authors also consider the liberation of the female character and call into question a culture centred on male norms. This study focuses on feminine power based on the critique of social institutions in these novels, a critique expressed via the love dynamic portrayed.
Jolanta Rachwalska von Rejchwald
pp. 87–111
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Abstract
My objective is to offer an approach to the relationship between women and power that takes into account the kinesic appropriation of social space by the female body. In historiography, mobility has never been a feminine attribute. Culturally conditioned to be passive, woman as portrayed in nineteenth-century fiction is like a fragile ornament who must stand in wait of he who travels, undertakes, acts—her father, husband or lover. In the society where spaciality is in the service of power, because “women are at the window and men are at the door” (Zola, Germinal), the woman who comes out, by deciding to leave or by adventuring alone into the urban space, is an individual who, consciously or not, moves toward confrontation with the social order. A woman’s free expression of her wishes in the geographic and social space is in no way a passing distraction: such seemingly capricious boldness involves an act that engages her whole existence. For such an act is not only one of revolt, it is also one of transgression that resembles a rite of passage. After a woman dares to cross, symbolically, the threshold of her dwelling, things will no longer be the same; moreover, every notable change in her existence begins with an act: that of leaving, which is itself prolonged by wanderings.
Daniel S. Larangé
pp. 113–134
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Abstract
Abbé Alphonse-Louis Constant (1810-1875) was a little romantic who developed a Mariology, new for his time, based on a political theology. He held that the French Revolution had opened the way for the era of the Paraclete, which saw the Holy Virgin incarnated in humanity. The Second Coming, which necessitated the earthly establishment of the celestial Jerusalem, could not come to pass without the help of woman, wife and mother of society. This social utopia, supported by an eminently poetic and mystical discourse from a heretic who quickly strayed into occultism, nevertheless foreshadowed the Immaculate Conception dogma of Pius ix and the social doctrine of Leo xiii. By identifying woman’s national destiny with the figure of Mary, the author proposes to re-center society on the spiritual authority of woman.