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• W2622563735 abstract "Reviewed by: Vision in the Novels of George Sand by Manon Mathias Alexandra K. Wettlaufer VISION IN THE NOVELS OF GEORGE SAND, by Manon Mathias. Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 192 pp. $110.00 cloth. Manon Mathias’s elegant and insightful study, Vision in the Novels of George Sand, presents a scrupulously researched and beautifully written exploration of the ideas of physical and abstract vision in George Sand’s oeuvre. Going far beyond its modest title both in the scope of its analyses and in its intellectual range, Mathias’s monograph brings refreshing new perspectives to our understanding of the most important female author in nineteenth-century France. More popular and critically acclaimed than Honoré de Balzac during their lifetimes (Sand was generally considered the better stylist), Sand was eclipsed by the male writers of the period (including Stendhal, Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert) following her death in 1876 and condemned to the literary periphery for nearly a century, reduced to a caricature as a cross-dressing, free-loving, cigar-smoking woman of letters. In the course of the last forty years, Sand has begun to receive the serious attention she deserves from French, British, and American academics who have identified Sand’s influential role as a female author articulating difference and giving voice to vital questions of gender, politics, and identity in French culture from the July Monarchy to the Third Republic. Mathias joins this conversation as she engages with the major scholars in the field—Béatrice Didier, Isabelle Naginski, Margaret Cohen, Naomi Schor, Martine Reid, and Nigel Harkness, among others—and gracefully moves the discussion in productive new directions as she endeavors to venture beyond gender per se to consider Sand within the rich context of contemporary authors and aesthetics: “it is the dialogue between her work and that of her peers which forms the focus of this study” (p. 8). Indeed, while [End Page 221] acknowledging Schor’s ground-breaking work on Sand’s idealism, Mathias returns our attention to Sand’s relationship with realism. Mathias cogently notes that Sand is not usually associated with the visual; as David Powell and others have shown, music tends to dominate her works—reflecting not only the author’s innate sensibilities but also, perhaps, her long-term affair with Frédéric Chopin. Yet, as Mathias deftly demonstrates, seeing, in its physical and metaphoric senses, is central to nearly all of Sand’s novels and foregrounds her ongoing engagement with realism as a dominant mode. Moving more or less chronologically through Sand’s oeuvre, Mathias begins with a chapter on “Realism and Introspection,” where she considers how the author’s early novels—Indiana (1832), Valentine (1832), and Lélia (1833)—simultaneously “adher[e] to certain expectations of realism” and “engag[e] in a dismantling of the binaries on which the realist system relies” as they “questio[n] our ability to understand the world through sight” (p. 6). Thus, where realism is generally understood to posit a world that is, at least on the surface level, coherent and readable through the interpretation of minutely detailed descriptions, Sand resists this logic for a vision of instability and confusion, where seeing and knowing (in French, voir and savoir) no longer cohere and the very project of representation is radically reconsidered. These questions are also central to Balzac, in somewhat different ways, and Mathias does an admirable job presenting realism in more complex terms, introducing the concepts of fluidity and uncertainty into the formulation. Indeed, the nineteenth century was far more skeptical of vision and knowledge than has often been assumed, and by including Sand’s “contribution to the development of a realism that represents reality whilst also revealing the instability of reality and our incapacity to grasp hold of it through sight,” Mathias complicates our views of the nineteenth century in thought-provoking ways (p. 41). Chapter two, “The Visionary,” documents the ways in which abstract vision—that is, dreaming, imagining, envisioning—is tied to a higher truth in Sand’s novels and reflects her increasing political engagement in the 1840s. The search for “la vérité” (the truth) is traced from physical sight to “conceptual seeing..." @default.
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• W2622563735 title "Vision in the Novels of George Sand by Manon Mathias" @default.
• W2622563735 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/tsw.2017.0010" @default.
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