Abstract
Aurore Dupin (1804–1886), more widely known under her pen name George Sand, remained engaged in social and political issues both on and off the literary scene throughout her life and career. This engagement manifested itself in different ways in her outward behaviors and activities surrounding the Revolution of 1848, but most of all in many of her novels. In this essay, we bring to bear three critical notions—gender fluidity, the crisis of care, and eco-criticism—as lenses that sharpen the focus of Sand’s narrative agenda to uphold the values of the countryside as a site of renewal in François le champi (1848), the second of her four pastoral novels. In François le champi, Sand portrays the opposition of “la vie primitive”—authentic life marked by an unalienated relationship to nature drawn in largely positive, idyllic terms—and “la vie factice,” artificial life defined by the corruption of norms and mores brought about by modernization.i Through her pastoral novels, Sand furnishes the reader with a unique window into the narrative voice of a female author during the long nineteenth century. This narrative voice valorizes “la vie primitive” that encompasses the richness of rural life and the bounty of nature as much as the human effort needed to sustain one’s self, family, and community.
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Notes
- 1.
Sand’s four pastorals, La mare au diable (1846; The Devil’s Pool), François le champi, La petite Fadette (1849; Little Fadette), and Les maîtres sonneurs (1853; The Bagpipers) were each popular in their own right, but François le champi was immortalized in the opening pages of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927; Remembrance of Things Past) when the narrator’s mother reads it to him to alleviate his separation anxiety.
- 2.
Richard Kerridge, “Ecocritical Approaches to Literary Form and Genre,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, ed. Greg Garrard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 365.
- 3.
George Sand, François le champi (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 39. All translations are our own.
- 4.
Rachel Ginnis Fuchs, Abandoned Children: Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 34–5
- 5.
Isabelle admits that she took him in in the first place “pour avoir tous les mois quelques pièces d’argent blanc” (Sand, 65; to get a few silver coins every month). But she also admits, “c’est un pauvre profit, et tout ce que je reçois de l’hospice passe à son entretien” (Sand, 65; he brings a meager benefit, and everything I get from Public Assistance goes toward his upkeep).
- 6.
Fuchs, Abandoned Children, 241.
- 7.
Fuchs, Abandoned Children, 157.
- 8.
Vicki De Vries, “François le champi: A New Émile,” French Cultural Studies 26, no. 1 (2015): 6.
- 9.
This linguistic opposition of terms whose gender is overtly marked in French (the adjective in the feminine form with a substantive in the masculine form) illustrates the fluidity we are emphasizing.
- 10.
Françoise Massardier-Kenney, Gender in the Fiction of George Sand (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 11.
- 11.
The identity of this framing narrator is plain to the reader, since her interlocutor, Monsieur R., alludes to several of her prior novels including Jeanne (1844) and La mare au diable.
- 12.
In the earlier part of the novel, Madeleine is portrayed as a character having agency; she decides to take the young child in and squirrels away food and money to help Isabelle in order to ensure that François is provided for. Moreover, when Isabelle decides to take the child back to l’Assistance publique, Madeleine offers to buy François from her by using money she has earned weaving hemp into cloth for others in the community.
- 13.
John Heath examines the role of women in the transmission of tales in “Women’s Work: Female Transmission of Mythical Narrative,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 141, no. 1 (2011): 69–104. The parallels he draws between weaving, spinning, and narration could open an entirely different line of inquiry that is not the object of our study. Suffice it to say that while Sand recites a tale recounted by a male narrator, it is clear that she is very much in control of the account as it is put forward to readers.
- 14.
Belinda Jack, “The Novel and Idealism: George Sand’s François le champi,” Gresham College, filmed live on January 27, 2015, YouTube video, 44:09–44:22. https://youtu.be/Ux4lHU5buNw.
- 15.
Jack, “The Novel and Idealism,” 45:14–45:24.
- 16.
To be clear, his successful rescue of Madeleine and her family farm is attributed as much to his moral integrity and work ethic as to the fact that he had the material means to accomplish this task; while he works on the Vertaud farm, we find out that his biological mother had bequeathed him 4,000 francs—albeit anonymously—delivered to him by the parish priest, someone who could attest to the authenticity of this inheritance and keep his biological mother’s secret intact.
- 17.
Romira M. Worvill, “Symbolic Structure in George Sand’s François le champi,” Dalhousie French Studies 84 (2008): 26.
- 18.
Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality (London: Routledge, 2013), 8.
- 19.
Tally Jr. further explains that “the writer … must select the particulars of a given place or story that will allow for the narrative map to be meaningful,” Spatiality, 54.
- 20.
Worvill, too, looks at François and Madeleine’s three encounters at the fountain—introduction, separation, and betrothal—to demonstrate that they represent notable shifts in their relationship from a mother–son bond to one between husband and wife. We build on Worvill’s argument by using an eco-critical framework to show that the fountain itself acts as an equally integral component of the metamorphosis of their relationship, as it represents François’s, and in turn, Madeleine’s unity with nature.
- 21.
Jack, “The Novel and Idealism,” 25:09–25:25.
Bibliography
De Vries, Vicki. “François Le Champi: A New Émile.” French Cultural Studies 26, no. 1 (2015: 3–16).
Faivre, Cyrielle. “Water Imagery in George Sand’s Work Dir. by Françoise Ghillebaert.” Women in French Studies 27, no. 1 (2019: 234–6).
Fraser, Nancy. Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. London: Verso, 2013.
Fuchs, Rachel Ginnis. Abandoned Children: Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984.
Heath, John. “Women’s Work: Female Transmission of Mythical Narrative.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 141, no. 1 (2011: 69–104).
Jack, Belinda. “The Novel and Idealism: George Sand’s François le champi.” Gresham College. Filmed on January 27, 2015. YouTube video, 51:55. https://youtu.be/Ux4lHU5buNw
Kerridge, Richard. “Ecocritical Approaches to Literary Form and Genre.” In The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard, 361–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Massardier-Kenney, Françoise. Gender in the Fiction of George Sand. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.
Sand, George. François le champi. Paris: Gallimard, 2005.
———. Histoire de ma vie. 11 vols. Brussels: Schnée, 1855.
Tally, Robert, Jr. Spatiality. London: Routledge, 2013.
Worvill, Romira M. “Symbolic Structure in George Sand’s François le Champi.” Dalhousie French Studies 84 (2008: 23–28).
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Nayak, A., Tatro, J. (2024). Gender Fluidity, the Crisis of Care, and Eco-criticism in George Sand’s François le champi. In: Martin, C.E., Donato, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Transnational Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40494-8_29
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