Resisting realist petrification in George Sand's Lélia and Balzac's Sarrasine
QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY BELFAST
This article considers how George Sand's Lélia, which first appeared in 1833 and was extensively rewritten before being republished in 1839, might be read as constituting Sand's critical manifesto on realism. My argument investigates the links between Lélia and Balzac's Sarrasine (1831), which Barthes reads in S/Z as a paradigmatic realist text. This comparison brings out a network of images and structures common to the two novels: petrification, the enigma of sexual identity, the gaze of the male artist, the codes of sculpture and painting, and binary oppositions such as life/death, real/artificial, and plenitude/emptiness. But if, in Balzac's text, this network functions to underpin realist representation, Sand undermines these structures, and the 1839 Lélia becomes a veritable literary battlefield which opposes the petrifying male gaze and the heroine's resistance to the fixity and corporeal imprisonment that this entails. Lélia can thus be interpreted as constituting a self-conscious dismantling and refusal of the gendered structures of the realist text. Moreover, this analysis rewrites Barthes's interpretation of the conclusion of Sarrasine, reading it as the playing out not of a ‘contamination of castration’, but of a ‘contamination of petrification’ whose repercussions can be traced to Balzac's later novel Béatrix.
1 ‘Lélia’, Le National, 29 September 1833, quoted by P. Reboul (ed.) in George Sand, Lélia (Paris, Garnier, 1960), pp. 590–94 (p. 593). Other critics criticized the ‘bavardage mystique’ of the text (Journal de Paris, 20 August 1833, p. 2), its ‘divagations du sophisme et du paradoxe’ (Muret in La Quotidienne, 20 August 1833, p. 2), and, with reference to the revised 1839 text, deplored its ‘ordre logique très peu satisfaisant’ (Le Charivari, 8 November 1839, p. 2). A minority of reviewers did appreciate Lélia's poetic style, with Muret commenting that ‘le style étincelle d'éclat et de poésie’ (ibid.). Only the reviewer of the Journal des Débats expressed unreserved praise, congratulating Sand on ‘ce style plein de magnificence’ and the novel's ‘brillantes couleurs’ (Journal des Débats, 1 September 1833, p. 3).
2 ‘Lélia’, Revue des deux mondes, 15 August 1833, 353–68 (p. 353).
3 George Sand: Writing for her Life (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 107.
4 ‘The Scandal of Realism’, in A New History of French Literature, ed. by Denis Hollier (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 656–61 (p. 659). Interestingly, the same article appears in the French translation of the work under the title ‘Un scandale d'antiréalisme’ (De la littérature française (Paris, Bordas, 1993), pp. 618–23).
5 But Schor's views on the novel are contradictory. In a separate essay on Lélia, she argues that these same feminist concerns also draw Sand towards rather than away from realist representation. Reading Lélia as an allegory of doubt, she contends that, ‘writing in 1833 what amounted to a feminist protest against women's grim post-Napoleonic estate, there was no way that Sand could sustain her female allegory’, and concludes that the story of Lélia ‘could not help exceeding the compass of allegory and shift into the more adequate mode of psychological realism’ (George Sand and Idealism (New York, Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 67–68). In Schor's view, Sand is caught in an aesthetic bind which she is incapable of resolving, and the ensuing tensions between the allegorical/idealist and feminist/realist impulses make Lélia a failure. She argues, therefore, that, ‘buried beneath the text's scintillating new forms, there is a realist novel struggling to get out’ (p. 58). Although Schor attempts to revalorize Sand from the perspective of an idealist poetics, she retains her own preference for realism as an aesthetic category. Consequently, she refuses to see the failures of realism in Lélia as intentional, the result of Sand's analysis of realist representation and of her opposition to an aesthetics which was increasingly asserting its dominance.
6 The Male Malady (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1993), p. 140.
7 Among contemporary critics, only Isabelle Naginski and Béatrice Didier offer a detailed analysis of the 1839 Lélia. Naginski highlights the greater importance afforded to metaphysics in the later edition, whilst acknowledging that ‘some of its pronouncements were more forcefully "feminist" than in the 1833 version’ (George Sand: Writing for Her Life, p. 138). Didier gives a full account of the process of rewriting between 1833 and 1839, and stresses the importance of Sand's ‘aspirations religieuses et sociales’ for the 1839 version. She also considers the issue of the female body, and its denial, in the 1839 Lélia; however, there is a mismatch between the realist methodology which her reading deploys — it focuses on characterization, the psychological duality of Lélia and the fragmented descriptions of the characters — and the anti-realist aesthetics of Sand's novel (see George Sand écrivain: "Un grand fleuve d'Amérique" (Paris, PUF, 1998), pp. 87–168).
8 Although still lacking the social and temporal anchors of the realist text, critical reaction at the time of the novel's publication was more favourable than in 1833. Auguste Buissière noted approvingly that, ‘les personnages sont plus rapprochés des idées qui ont cours dans le monde où nous vivons’ (‘Critique littéraire — 
uvres de George Sand: Lélia’, Revue de Paris, 12 December 1839, pp. 279–92 (p. 292)). In the eyes of this critic at least, Sand had corrected the generic flaws of the 1833 text.
9 ‘Women and fiction in the nineteenth century’, in The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel: From 1800 to the Present, ed. by Timothy Unwin (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 54–72 (p. 59).
10 ‘Castration, Speech Acts and the Realist Difference: S/Z versus Sarrasine’, PMLA, 102 (1987), 153–65 (p. 155).
11 Balzac, Sarrasine in La Comédie humaine, ed. by P.-G. Castex, 12 vols (Paris, Gallimard, 1976–1981), VI, 1060. All subsequent parenthetical references will be to this edition.
12 George Sand, Lélia, ed. by Béatrice Didier, 2 vols (Meylan, Éditions de l'Aurore, 1987), I, 227, note 7. All subsequent parenthetical references will be to this edition.
13 S/Z (Paris, Seuil, 1970), p. 187. Page references to this work are indicated by S/Z in the text.
14 Bodies that Matter (London, Routledge, 1993), p. xi.
15 Françoise Massardier-Kenney's brief but dense analysis of the 1839 Lélia similarly focuses on the ways in which the rewriting of the novel shifts the focus away from the individual (Lélia's inability to love and to feel sensual pleasure) in order to concentrate on ‘the cultural and social mechanisms that make the experience and expression of feminine desires improbable if not impossible’, with the result that, for her, the feminist repercussions of the later edition are much more wide-ranging (Gender in the Fiction of George Sand (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2000), p. 67).
17 I am grateful to Seth Whidden for bringing this to my attention.
18 The Order of Mimesis (Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 12–13.
19 The Order of Mimesis, p. 50. Prendergast goes on to question this static view of mimesis, and argues that it can be re-conceived in more dynamic form, since constructing meaning can involve re-describing the world, and thus releasing new configurations, and new forms of meaning and understanding, rather than simply repeating and copying (see pp. 20–23, and Chapter 7).
20 In the first editions of Sarrasine, the female addressee of the narrative was not named. In the 1835 edition, she became Foedora (of La Peau de chagrin); only in the Furne edition of 1842 was she finally named as Mme de Rochefide. Her later appearance in Béatrix, a novel which includes a character based on George Sand (Félicité des Touches), highlights the operation of intertextual references between Sand's and Balzac's work.
21 Balzac, Béatrix in La Comédie humaine, ed. by P.-G. Castex, 12 vols (Paris, Gallimard, 1976–1981), II, 737.
22 See Alison Finch, Women's Writing in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 208. Finch situates Raoule de Vénérande, the heroine of Rachilde's Monsieur Vénus, in a line of literary heroines beginning with the ‘monstrous’ Lélia.