MORE THAN THE SUM OF HER SEX LIFE
By MARILYN FRENCH; Marilyn French's latest novel is ''Her Mother's Daughter.''
Published: July 17, 1988
GEORGE SAND A Brave Man, the Most Womanly Woman. By Donna Dickenson. Illustrated. 190 pp. New York: Berg/St. Martin's Press. Cloth, $25. Paper, $14.95. MARIANNE By George Sand. Edited and translated by Sian Miles. 171 pp. New York: Carroll & Graf. $14.95.
The European intelligentsia of the mid-19th century would probably not have believed that their beloved George Sand could be forgotten. Widely considered the greatest French stylist of her period, Sand was a major figure throughout Europe. In 1842, the English critic George Henry Lewes wrote that Sand was ''the most remarkable writer of the present century''; when she died in 1876, Matthew Arnold predicted that ''the immense vibration of George Sand's voice upon the ear of Europe will not soon die away.'' But she had fallen into oblivion by the turn of the century. It is to answer the question of why she was forgotten that Donna Dickenson, a London-based poet and translator, has written ''George Sand: A Brave Man, the Most Womanly Woman.''
Sand did not exalt herself in the role of artist, nor did she see art as transcending life. She had a running epistolary feud with Flaubert on the purpose of art and the position of the artist. It was a good-tempered, loving argument - Flaubert was a bit of a misanthrope, but he revered Sand and addressed her (with mixed genders) as ''chere maitre.'' Flaubert believed art should be, could be, scientific, impersonal, objective. Sand felt art existed to nourish a society, and she was passionately committed to social change.
Whatever her expectations for her future reputation, she did believe her work would make a difference for women. In reply to critics who judged her work by her life and who excoriated her as scandalous, she wrote, ''The world will know and understand me someday. But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way for other women.'' Her words should have been prophetic, given her impact on the literature, thought and life of her own and succeeding generations. That impact remained significant, but its connection with her was obliterated, and her one selfless hope was not realized: women's battle with laws and customs imprisoning them in voiceless dependency had to be begun over and over in succeeding generations as if it had never been joined before.
Sand lived completely. Born Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin in 1804, the granddaughter of a countess, she married, raised children and grandchildren. She lived in the country, and was familiar with its plants, trees, waters, with the habits of animals and birds, the work of farms and the people who did it. She lived in the city and had a sophisticated understanding of the pretensions of Parisian society, its customs and language, its fascination with power. Indeed, she knew the most powerful people of her age as well as those who challenged them - the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, the radical German writer Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow, and Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist leader, for instance. She knew artists, composers, writers, poets, actors and thinkers of both sexes - Alfred de Vigny, Alfred de Musset, Chopin, Liszt, Marie d'Agoult (Daniel Stern) and Eugene Delacroix are only the most famous. She befriended hosts of them, loved many, in her generosity supported many, and made love with enough of them so that we can sense that she explored her own sexuality widely and deeply.
She was a prolific and versatile artist, turning out several volumes a year. Her fiction, notable on many counts, is great fun to read. Her descriptions of nature remain unequaled because they are based in such careful observation, such intimate knowledge. She had great insight into the intersection of psychology and manners; her analyses of the behavior of people in society always go deeper than comedy of manners. She saw that dishonesty about feeling arises from concern with image, that striving to impress is based in a sense of personal worthlessness. She was an expert in the ways power infects love, transforming it into self-sacrifice or domination.
Beyond this, she was a thinker. She probed the sources of conflict and injustice and isolated one: the need of an elite class of males to dominate all other human beings. Far in advance of her age, she recognized that this need was grounded in lack rather than in power. She created images new to literature, of love between people of different classes and backgrounds, of worthiness in the poor. She was probably the first European writer to consider the rural poor as legitimate subjects for literature and to portray them with sympathy and respect. In fact, these portrayals inspired a wave of revolutionary thought and feeling in the French-speaking culture of Russia. She vividly depicted the oppression of women in marriage and the cruelty and absurdity of religious authority and class domination. She went further: she was deeply involved with the 1848 revolution and, as its unofficial philosopher, produced essays and position papers dealing with socialism, the prejudices and fears of the rich and the need for what we would now term complete participatory democracy.
The list of those she influenced is staggering. It includes novelists - Balzac, Stendhal, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Thackeray, Eliot, Emily and Charlotte Bronte and Henry James, as well as Flaubert. She influenced poets like Heine, Wilde, both Brownings and, pre-eminently, Whitman, who took from her work not only the ideas that inspired ''Leaves of Grass'' but his dress, his role, his manner as the poet of democracy. And social and political thinkers like Ernest Renan, the Carlyles, Mill, Ruskin, Hippolyte Taine, Emerson, Arnold, Margaret Fuller, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve and even Marx - who may, like Arnold, have heard in her work ''the cry of agony and revolt'' - were inspired by its vision of a changed, humane social order.
She was immense. Yet she was forgotten, or remembered only as a sexual legend, a pipe-smoking transvestite, a man-eater. Ms. Dickenson addresses herself to the attacks most frequently leveled at Sand: that she was merely ''a thinking bosom'' with a maternal sexuality, that she exploited or drained Chopin and de Musset, that she was a Romantic, a lesbian, a feminist - and finds her not guilty on all counts.
Most of these attacks concerned Sand's deviations from contemporary standards of femininity. Her worst sin was probably her sexual autonomy; that she was accused of acts that seem mutually exclusive (lesbianism along with nymphomania, promiscuity along with mere motherliness) suggests that it was less the nature of her behavior that offended than the fact that, as a woman, she dared be openly sexual at all. So Baudelaire (who adapted his famous line ''Mon semblable, mon frere'' from Sand), hardly known for his own sexual restraint, called her a ''latrine''; Nietzsche called her a ''writing cow.''
Because the woman-hatred that motivated Sand's critics is alive and well in the late 20th century; because it is still true that women in the public eye are scrutinized by standards different from those for men, and that many critics still seem to believe that the work of women writers emerges like babies fully formed from the uterus (or the life) rather than being shaped by the conscious mind, a defender of Sand risks spilling her personal animus into the argument, making it defensive. Ms. Dickenson does not escape this trap. Wishing to set Sand's record straight, she belabors a wide range of issues of varying importance, but does so by placing Sand in the dock and arguing fiercely, as if Sand's worth depended upon whether she were acquitted or condemned. Thus Ms. Dickenson implicitly, perhaps unconsciously, validates the very act she opposes: condemning a writer because of her personal life. We may care whether Sand was a maternal lover, always seeking younger men, or was a lesbian, or can be considered a feminist; but although opinions about these matters (we cannot aspire to more) may be interesting, they are not a basis for moral judgment of the woman or intellectual judgment of her work.
The main issue about Sand in an age that does not know her work is whether it is good and should be resuscitated. But so formidable was her output - almost 60 novels, 25 plays, an autobiography, essays, reviews, articles and many volumes of letters - as to daunt any critic who wishes to offer an opinion. This reviewer has read only a dozen novels, some essays and letters, and found these works to offer as much pleasure in the reading and often more thematic cohesiveness, substance and intellectual nourishment as her contemporaries Dickens, Balzac, Hugo, Stendhal, Turgenev and Thackeray. If strangers to Sand's work cannot accept the judgment of her own period that she is superior to these writers, they might approach her at least as their equal.
One case in point is her novel ''Marianne,'' reissued in a new translation by Sian Miles, who teaches at the University of Warwick in England. This is one of Sand's last works, a short pastoral romance, a love story in which the impediments arise not from external events but from the psychologies of the characters themselves. It is charming and utterly believable; one of its greatest delights is its depiction of the lives of country people, the small details of their daily round and their environment. One subject frequently found in Sand's work (for example in ''Lelia'' and ''Indiana'') - the attitudes of propertied men toward marriage and women as appropriate grounds for male exploitation - is only backdrop in this novel, although social pressures are as intricately woven into its fabric as are the joys of nature. The translation is a pleasure to read, and Ms. Miles provides an excellent, balanced short biography.
The reason Sand was dismissed and forgotten is not her real or reputed sex life; that was merely the weapon used to send her into oblivion. She was discarded from the canon because she challenged her society, writing powerfully about the oppression of women and the poor. Whether or not she fulfills the criteria for a socialist and feminist in our time, she was both in her own. That she can still speak to us may be because her concerns are still vital, or because she was a wonderful writer, or both.
Drawing of George Sand (David Johnson)