George Sand: The Fictions of Autobiography

The ambiguous relation of autobiography to narrative fictions triggered by "fictions of the self" have received much critical attention. Seldom has that relation been as clearly exemplified as in the first part of Sand's Histoire de ma vie. Sand describes the conflict between her "two mothers," her aristocratic grandmother and her working class mother, after her father's death each claiming her affection. A feminine "Oedipal triangle" emerges in which the older Sand, the autobiographer casts herself in a heroic role as she strives to resolve the inner and outer conflicts that ensue. However, an early depiction of the situation reverses the pattern presented in her autobiography, offering an almost total contradiction with the later version. Nonetheless through much of Sand's fiction, permutations of the basic triangle pattern appear. It is the compelling "fabulating matrix" of her fictional writing. Beyond the psychoanalytic interpretation that it so clearly suggests it can be considered in terms of the socio-historical situation of French post-revolutionary society. Sand's "two mothers" embody the two classes that a bourgeois society did not accommodate, thus forcing her into its marginal group of artists and writers as a solution to her conflict. Beyond the fictional "mythmaking" the autobiography attains symbolic truth. (GB)