FranÇoise Massardier-Kenney (Essay Date 2000)

SOURCE: Massardier-Kenney, Françoise. "Victimization in Indiana and Jacques. "In Gender in the Fiction of George Sand, pp. 15-52. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2000.

In the following excerpt, Massardier-Kenney explores Sand's presentation and treatment of female protagonists in her fiction, particularly the novel Indiana.

George Sand's life-long investigation of the meaning of "woman" and her questioning of the hierarchical binary oppositions between men and women is evident in her first novel, the famous Indiana (1832) and the lesser known fine epistolary novel Jacques (1834). In these two works, Sand began to lay bare the cultural mechanisms responsible for gender inequalities and began a pattern of using ambiguous protagonists in order to bring attention to the incoherence of established gender positions. Sand's first novel (1832) attracted considerable attention when it was first published and is one of the few among her works to be systematically discussed by...