SOURCE: "Idealism in the Novel: Recanonizing Sand," in Yale French Studies, No. 75, 1988, pp. 56-73.

Exploring Sand's problematic relationship with the literary canon, Schor argues that the writer's commitment to idealism, rather than her gender, is the cause of her exclusion from the canon during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nonetheless, Schor continues, gender is also important in understanding Sand's position vis-a-vis the canon, since Sand uses idealism in her novels as a strategy of revolt against the phallocentrism inherent in the Balzacian realism exalted by the canon.

Let me begin with an anecdote: in June 1986 I participated in a conference at Georgetown University on "The Representation of the Other." My paper dealt with the representation of men in women's writing and my examples were drawn from the fictions of several major French women writers, among them George Sand, whose novel Indiana I discussed in some detail...