GEORGE SAND: GENERAL COMMENTARY

MARILYN YALOM (ESSAY DATE 1985)

SOURCE: Yalom, Marilyn. "Towards a History of Female Adolescence: The Contribution of George Sand." In George Sand: Collected Essays, edited by Janis Glasgow, pp. 204-15. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1985.

In the following essay, Yalom examines Sand's contribution to a history of female adolescence, concentrating particularly on the author's autobiography and comparing it with works by other women writers.

When the history of female adolescence is written, it will be seen that the writing of George Sand offers a store of portraits and insights unparalleled in her time and place. Both in her autobiographical and fictive works, Sand proved that adolescence was a subject worthy of observation and a "source of poetry."¹ Like her master Rousseau a century earlier, she both excoriated the corrupted state of adolescence among her contemporaries and immortalized the adolescent soul in its physical restlessness, spiritual awakening, and fitful attempts to integrate conflicting social, psychological and biological pressures.

In early nineteenth century France, the idea of adolescence as a period of life distinct from childhood was not yet a familiar concept. As Philippe Ariès has written in Centuries of Childhood: "People had no idea of what we call adolescence, and the idea was a long time taking shape.… The first typical adolescent of modern times was Wagner's Siegfried. "² Here, as elsewhere, the concept of adolescence was predicated on a male model. Thus Ariès could write that "… Siegfried expressed for the first time that combination of (provisional) purity, physical strength, naturism, spontaneity and joie de vivre which was to make the adolescent the hero of our twentieth century, the century of adolescence."³

But what about the adolescent heroine? Does she not also have an experiential and a literary tradition? And is hers to be encompassed and adequately represented by the generic masculine?

Another example of this one-sided optic is found in Justin O'Brien's book The Novel of Adolescence in France,⁴ in which the author deals exclusively with male writers—Jules Renard, Maurice Barrès, Romain Rolland, Raymond Radiguet, Gide, Cocteau, Montherlant—an impressive array to be sure. His reasons for excluding women writers like Sand, whom he hails as "the first person to recognize that there existed a problem of the adolescent and to point out that literature had ignored it," and Colette, whose name is simply listed in an appendix, are questionable: "It appears that the advent of puberty, whose physiological repercussions are so marked in girls, influences them intellectually and spiritually far less than it does boys(!) …⁵ Had O'Brien been less fettered by received ideas on the nature of women and more open to a genuinely empathic reading of Sand and Colette, to name only the most prominent French women writers with books that fall into the category of the novel of adolescence, he might have been less certain of his criteria for exclusion.

This paper is an initial attempt to explore Sand's contribution to a history of female adolescence. In the interest of space I shall limit myself to Histoire de ma vie, though many of Sand's works of fiction offer rich ground for similar investigations. In addition, for the sake of comparison, I shall occasionally draw upon American and English sources contemporary with Sand so as to include certain characteristics of female adolescence which had currency not only in France but elsewhere in the Western world.⁶

In the nineteenth century France the term "enfance" covered anyone who was not an adult. The word "adolescence" had not yet come to be popularly used to designate that period in life between childhood and adulthood, though both Rousseau in his Confessions and Sand in Histoire de ma vie brought the term into literature. Similarly, in English-speaking countries the term "infancy" had a broad connotation, often designating anyone under eighteen or even twenty-one, and the word "youth" was loosely used to encompass both adolescents and young adults.

In the twentieth century, both French- and English-speaking peoples define adolescence as that period in the life cycle between childhood and adulthood, roughly from twelve to twenty. The first line of demarcation is often clear-cut, a biological fact marking the onset of puberty occurring today, on the average, around age twelve for girls and age fourteen for boys. In the nineteenth century, the average age of puberty took place approximately two years later for both girls and boys. The second line of demarcation is more obscure. When does adolescence end today? When one leaves school? When one begins to earn one's keep? When one marries? Ariès notes that in the twentieth century marriage has ceased to mark the end of adolescence and that the "married adolescent … (has) become one of the most prominent types of our time."⁷

In the time of George Sand, born in 1804, marriage was clearly viewed not only as the end of "enfance" but as the primary context in which female adolescence had meaning. Though Sand herself made no mention of the onset of menstruation in her autobiography—a subject considered too indelicate for literary reference—French medical literature had long been explicit in its understanding of the interface between the physical and social factors marking the female's transition from girl to woman. For example, the noted doctor Marc Colombat de l'Isère, outlining the hygienic rules concerning puberty and menstruation, wrote that the female adolescent "… needs closest watching.…Where as before puberty she existed but for herself alone … she now belongs to the entire species which she is destined to perpetuate.… (I)t is of the highest importance to remove young girls from boarding school, when they approach the age of puberty, in order to exercise a constant watch over them."⁸

Sand's grandmother did just the opposite; she placed her ward in a convent school, but the motivation was the same: to place her in a situation of surveillance so that she would be molded to the purposes of society. As a child, Aurore car-roused with children of both sexes in the countryside she adored; now she had to be sequestered, literally cloistered with other girls, and the implication is unmistakable. Unchaperoned contact with males is dangerous, overly affectionate contact with other females is also dangerous; girls are enjoined never to be alone or in couples, but always in groups of three or more. "Onanism, that execrable and fatal evil, destroys beauty and health and conducts almost always to a premature grave."⁹ With puberty, sex had reared its ugly head and was to be repressed in every way for as long or as short a period as was necessary to fashion the adolescent into a marriageable product and marry her off to the best suitor.

This is how George Sand recalls her grand-mother's decision to send her away from the country estate at Nohant, where she had passed most of her childhood, to a convent school in Paris:

… ma grand-mère me dit: «Ma fille, vous n'avez plus le sens commun. Vous aviez de l'esprit, et vous faites tout votre possible pour devenir ou pour paraître bête. Vous pourriez être agréable, et vous vous faites laide à plaisir. Votre teint est noirci, vos mains gercées, vos pieds vont se dé-former dans les sabots. Votre cerveau se déforme et se dégingande comme votre personne. Tantôt vous répondez à peine et vous avez l'air d'un esprit fort qui dédaigne tout. Tantôt vous parlez à tort et à travers comme une pie qui babille pour babiller. Vous avez été une charmante petite fille, il ne faut pas devenir une jeune personne absurde. Vous n'avez point de tenue, point de grâce, point d'àpropos. Vous avez un bon coeur et une tête pitoyable. Il faut changer tout cela. Vous avez d'ailleurs besoin de maîtres d'agrément, et je ne puis vous en procurer ici. J'ai donc résolu de vous mettre au couvent, et nous allons à Paris à cet effect.»¹⁰

It appears that Aurore's grandmother decided to place her in a boarding school because she could not cope with the tempestuous outbursts and unruly conduct of a young adolescent. Before this decision, Aurore had been allowed to associate with the peasant children who surrounded her grandmother's estate. She spoke their patois, joined in their rustic activities—milking cows and goats, making cheese, dancing country dances, eating wild apples and pears (all of which stood her in good stead later in life when she wrote her pastoral novels). Up to the age of twelve or thirteen she could roam the countryside according to her fancy and read whatever she liked. Her education had been irregular, consisting of periodic excursions to Paris with her grandmother for a smattering of private lessons in handwriting, dancing, music, a bit of geography and history, and back to Nohant with the more regular lessons in Latin and French literature under her father's old tutor, Deschartres.

In the twelve months between her twelfth and thirteenth years, Aurore Dupin grew three inches, attaining a maximum height of five feet two inches. It is at this point that she began to show these signs of adolescence which became the despair of her grandmother—irritability, temper tantrums, outbursts toward her tutor during which she refused to study. Once she threw her books on the floor, exclaiming out loud that she wouldn't study because she didn't want to. At table she began to speak out of turn, laughed at the slightest pretext, was turning by her later accounts into a real "enfant terrible."

Home education by one's mother or a tutor was the prevalent pattern for those privileged girls who were educated at all. As outlined by Albertine Necker de Saussure in a widely read treatise on the education of French girls,¹¹ there was to be essentially no difference in the education of girls and boys up to the age of ten. But after the age of ten, according to Necker de Saussure and other authors of educational manuals, girls should be educated differently in view of the role they would later play as wives and mothers. At this point, the mother-educator, if she educates her daughter at home, or the school, if the girl is at boarding school, should educate the sexes separately. Aurore was sent off to school a little later than girls of her same class, probably because her grandmother, a widow living in the country, wanted to keep her with her, but when the signs of adolescence became too visible, Mme Dupin was forced to think in terms of her grand-daughter's future, and this entailed taming her and transforming her from an unmannered country girl into a marriageable young lady.

Thus Aurore was packed off to a convent school at age thirteen. The description of her convent years in Histoire de ma vie reveals the picture of an active, energetic, curious thirteen-year-old. Although she was immediately aware of the fact that the other girls had superior manners and were more restrained in their activities, she was not about to let this inhibit her. Just as she had romped through the countryside with her peasant friends and turned her grandmother's house into a meeting place for dozens of rowdy companions, so too she demonstrated the same restless energy in her first year at the convent: running into the courtyard at recess, prying into every nook and cranny, exploring underground passages and dangerous rooftops.

The three years at the convent school from age thirteen to sixteen, covering some two hundred pages in Histoire de ma vie, provide an excellent tableau of female adolescence among the privileged classes in early nineteenth century France. While it is true that Aurore Dupin was an unusual child, that she had superior gifts and a superior education, and that she had above all a greater ability to exercise her will than most of her contemporaries, her adolescence has many features which we think of as typical, not only for girls in nineteenth century France but for most Western female adolescents in modern times.

1) First, there is the initial restlessness and energy, which seems, from the vantage point of adults, to have no direction and to "get out of hand." This energy expresses itself physically in raucous activities characterized by unrestrained movement and a sense of adventure, often in defiance of the social norms. This burst of physical energy was recognized by Rousseau, for one, as the first hallmark of puberty.

In this respect, it is interesting to compare George Sand's description of her adolescent years with the prescriptive medical literature of the same period. In Sand's autobiographical accounts, we see numerous robust teen-agers with an insatiable drive toward movement and activity. The prescriptive medical literature, on the other hand, depicted adolescence as a time of great fragility for females, a life crisis where the budding woman was particularly vulnerable to all sorts of disease and fatal conditions.

Sand remembers herself as an unusually strong and active adolescent, making dangerous excursions underground and on the rooftops, enduring the cold of an attic room and the truly spartan conditions that were de rigueur in French convent schools and in English boarding schools even in this century. And despite chilblains and sores on hands and feet, she not only survives with no trace of cough or consumption but she enjoys a healthful constitution—in her case, into her seventies. Adolescence for George Sand was no passage into an adulthood of feminine fragility, but into a vigorous and forceful womanhood. Certainly this was not true of all, or even most female adolescents of her time and place. Many did indeed die of consumption and other ills, but this was probably due more to unhygienic conditions and to poor diet than to a natural vulnerability induced by menarche.

2) Second, there is a spirit of rebellion that characterizes her early adolescence, as indeed her entire adult life. When George Sand entered the convent at the age of thirteen, she immediately allied herself with a group called "les diables." She could have chosen to have joined "les sages," or "les bêtes," but it is, she tells us, in protest against the injustices of Mlle D., headmistress of the children's division. There are several aspects of this alignment with "les diables" which are particularly fascinating. First, there is the very fact that such clearly defined groups exist. What is this need of early adolescents to lock themselves into tightly bound peer groups whose major mission seems to be the exclusion of others from it? Psychologists like Erik Erikson would emphasize the fact that such group affiliation is very important in the process of developing a sense of identity at a time when one is separating oneself from parents and all the familiar supports of childhood.¹² The group proffers an instant sense of identity. But why should some of the girls have chosen to be "good girls" and some have chosen to be "devils?" And why is there so much antisocial behavior during the adolescent years—juvenile delinquency, as we call it today in its extreme form? Clearly, for Aurore Dupin at least, joining "les diables" offered a clearcut means of rebelling against the social norms which she found repugnant.

The leader in this enterprise was one Mary G. and she was surely the antithesis of the fragile Victorian woman, who was the ideal in France as well as in England. Strength, braveness, boldness—these were not characteristics that the convent had set out to inculcate in their young ladies. Little wonder that strong-willed adolescent females like George Sand and Mary G. and others (Juliette Adam springs to mind) refused to become the passive porcelain figures that society wished to make of them.

In common with our twentieth century memories of adolescence, Sand recalls a "secret society" with its rite of initiation, the written notes passed secretly in class, and the spontaneous outbursts of laughter understandable only to the initiated. Certain characteristics seem particularly French; for example, the French regard for form, as in Aurore's first meeting with Mary G., of which she wrote: "C'était à elle, comme plus ancienne, de me faire les avances."¹³ Though the forms were more explicitly hierarchical than our own and the students more embedded in a literary tradition, there is nonetheless a very familiar quality for all who have discovered rebellion in adolescence and enlisted private group support to condone anti-parental or antisocial behavior.

3) Another aspect is, of course, the intense female friendships that are established in this period of life, all the more intense when one is isolated from boys. Sand at the age of fifty remembers in detail a large number of girls whom she loved with great tenderness, not only Mary G., in the lower division, but Valentine de Gouy and Louise de la Rochejaquelein, later Eliza Austen, the most intelligent girl in the school, and also the nuns who served as mother figures. Sand wrote of her great worshipful love for Madame Alicia, "la perle du couvent,"¹⁴ and of her great attachment to the lay sister, Sister Hélène, who did the dirtiest work in the convent. For a small convent of some one hundred and twenty or one hundred and thirty persons, it offered a wide range of deep attachments to various types of persons.¹⁵

4) The religious awakening and conversion experienced by Aurore Dupin during her convent years provides another focal point for the study of adolescence, and one that is closely linked to the historical time in which she lived and to her particular culture, although spiritual awakening in adolescence is not uncommon in all times. Sand divides her convent life into three periods: "La première année, je fus plus que jamais l'enfant terrible. La seconde année, je passais presque subitement à une dévotion ardente et agitée. La troisième année, je me maintins dans un état de dévotion calme, ferme et enjouée."¹⁶

This experience of religious conversion as told by George Sand is not unlike many other experiences undergone by other adolescent girls in France, England and the United States at the same period in history. It may be somewhat ironic to realize that something so infinitely personal as the experience of grace and communion with God can have, in certain historical moments, almost a vogueish quality. In early nineteenth century France, the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy ushered in a vigorous revival of Catholic doctrine in both public and private life. Similarly, in England and America, the Christian revivalist movement promoted the reading of Gospel and the examination of conscience as fundamental nourishment for the soul seeking salvation. Conversion was a socially sanctioned event, a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. In all three countries, it was expected to occur around the time of adolescence and was interpreted as a sign of divine grace marking a new beginning. According to the prevailing philosophy, this much encouraged religious awakening, accompanying the physical awakening of puberty, would give direction to one's resurgent physical and emotional needs. As Barbara Gelpi has written in her work on Victorian girlhood, "To young children religion may well have been drab, boring or repressive, but for many adolescents it became an emotional outlet and an escape from repression."¹⁷ Citing the examples of Sainte Thérèse in France and Catherine Beecher in America, Gelpi concludes that "even those who were not susceptible to the fervent spirituality of their peers … formed their adult personalities in the dialectic between their feelings and the religious expectations for them of those about them."¹⁸

Like many other converts, Sand's attention was drawn to the mystical experience by reading from the "Lives of the Saints," and stimulated through the eye and the ear. At mass there was the superb picture of Jesus in the Garden of Olives, the glitter of stained glass windows, the charm of the chapel at night, the silver candlesticks, the beautiful flowers, all of which seem to blend in that moment of insight—that flash of white light which she experienced in the convent chapel.

L'heure s'avançait, la prière était sonnée, on allait fermer l'église. J'avais tout oublié. Je ne sais ce qui se passait en moi. Je respirais une atmosphère de suavité indicible, et je la respirais par l'âme plus encore que par les sens. Tout à coup je ne sais quel ébranlement se produisit dans tout mon être, un vertige passe devant mes yeux comme une lueur blanche dont je me sens enveloppée. Je crois entendre une voix murmurer à mon oreille: tolle, lege. Je me retourne, croyant que c'est Marie-Alicia qui me parle. J'étais seule.

Je ne me fis pas d'orgueilleuse illusion, je ne crus point à un miracle. Je me rendis fort bien compte de l'espèce d'hallucination où j'étais tombée. Je n'en fus ni enivrée ni effrayée. Je ne cherchai ni à l'augmenter ni à m'y soustraire. Seulement je sentis que la foi s'emparait de moi, comme si je l'avais souhaité, par le coeur. J'en fus si reconnaissante, si ravie, qu'un torrent de larmes inonda mon visage. Je sentis encore que j'aimais Dieu, que ma pensée embrassait et acceptait pleinement cet idéal de justice, de tendresse et de sainteté que je n'avais jamais révoqué en doute, mais avec lequel je ne m'étais jamais trouvée en communication directe; je sentis enfin cette communication s'établir soudainement, comme si un obstacle invincible se fût abîmé entre le foyer d'ardeur infinie et le feu assoupi dans mon âme.¹⁹

Sand's emotionally-charged description of the experience of grace is not unlike those described by others who have been similarly illumined. It is, of course, difficult to know to what extent she embroidered upon her recollection and recreated an experience that was more poetic, more mystical than its historic reality. But we have no reason to doubt the significance of this religious epiphany; during the next sixty years, despite her highly unconventional existence as a novelist, adulteress, cigar-smoking woman in male clothes, political radical, she never completely lost her faith; indeed, she always wrote and spoke reverently of the religious sentiment as an inborn and beneficent force.

Her adolescent religious conversion had immediate social benefits. Just as identification with "les diables" permitted a reprieve from activities for which she felt herself unready, so too the experience of "conversion" provided a rite of passage into a more socially acceptable young womanhood. She wrote that she had exhausted the resources of a disorderly career and was ready for something else, and with Madame Alicia as her role model, the one and only attractive role was that of a believer. Once converted, Aurore set herself a course of piety and goodness that quite astonished her friends. "J'étais devenue sage, obéissante et laborieuse."²⁰ She entertained for some time the notion of becoming a nun, although with little encouragement from the nuns themselves, who realized that her grandmother had other plans for her grand-daughter—namely, to establish her in a marriage suitable to her station.

This period of intense devotion was critical in Sand's adolescence and in her developing sense of self. It forced her to make choices that entailed identifying with socially acceptable behavior and renouncing behaviors that were considered unacceptable for women. At sixteen when George Sand left the convent, she was, by her own retrospective accounts, a cheerful and pious young woman. She left the convent to live once more with her grandmother, while the latter set about finding her a husband.

From the point of view of Sand's time and culture, adolescence had run its course; a rebellious girl had been suitably tamed and transformed into "une femme." Let us pause to remark that the French word "femme" means both woman and wife. (The French have only one word where we have two). Adolescence was thus implicitly and explicably conceived of as a period of transition from the state of being a child or girl to the state of being a woman and wife. This same supposition underlies the structure of a radically different piece of Sand's writing: La Petite Fadette. In that remarkable story of adolescence among the Berrichon peasants, Sand demonstrates the difficulties of growing up female without the support of family and institutions that socialize a girl into her "proper" role. Because Fadette is essentially a pastoral romance, the heroine's adolescent apprenticeship ends happily with an ideal peasant marriage. As we know, Sand's adolescence also culminated in marriage at the age of nineteen, but her story was not to end there.²¹

Notes

1. George Sand, Histoire de ma vie in Oeuvres Auto-biographiques [OA], ed. Georges Lubin, 2 Vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). All translations are my own.
2. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), pp. 29-30.
3. Ibid., p. 30.
4. Justin O'Brien, The Novel of Adolescence in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937).
5. Ibid., pp. 12-13.
6. Much of this work is based upon the collaborative research undertaken by Hellerstein, Hume, Offen, Freedman, Gelpi and Yalom in Victorian Women (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981).
7. Ariès, p. 30.
8. Hellerstein, et al., pp. 91-93.
9. Ibid., p. 93.
10. Sand, OA, I, p. 861.
11. Albertine-Adrienne Necker de Saussure, The Study of the Life of Woman (Philadelphia, 1844). Originally published in Paris in 1838.
12. Erik Erikson, Identity, Youth and Crisis, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968).
13. Sand, OA, I, p. 881.
14. Ibid., I, p. 921.
15. For a comparative analysis of female friendship in nineteenth century America, see Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Women in the Nineteenth Century America," Signs, I, 1 (Autumn 1975), pp. 1-29.
16. Sand, OA, I, p. 869.
17. Barbara Gelpi, Introduction to Part I, "The Girl," in Hellerstein, et al., p. 15.
18. Ibid.
19. Sand, OA, I, pp. 953-954.
20. Ibid., p. 965.
21. Between the writing of this essay and its publication four years later, some literary scholars have begun to pay attention to female, as well as male, models of adolescence, for example, Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Adolescent Idea: Myths of Youth and the Adult Imagination (New York: Basic Books, 1981) and Richard N. Coe, When the Grass Was Taller: Autobiography and the Experience of Childhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).