SOURCE: "Writing from the Pavilion: George Sand and the Novel of Female Pastoral," in Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing, Columbia University Press, 1988, pp. 206-28.

In this study of Valentine, Miller explores the spatial and sexual economy of the text to highlight Sand's attempts to provide an alternative to the female plot of marriage within a patriarchal framework.

They were all about love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every relay, horses ridden to death on every page, sombre forests, heartaches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little boatrides in the moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, gentlemen as brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well-dressed, and weeping like fountains.

Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Valentine opens, as do many French nineteenth-century novels, with the fiction of a traveler arriving from Paris who, as a stand-in for the reader, is...