George Sand and George Catlin – Masking Indian Realities

In 1839, George Catlin, the first American painter of Indian life, traveled to Europe with a collection of his paintings and a Wild West show animated by a group of Iowa Indians. While the show was in Paris, George Sand attended it and subsequently published two articles devoted to the Iowas. Although these Indians were known to be highly acculturated, Sand presents them, in stereotypical fashion, as noble savages. In so doing, Sand's text conforms to one of the three types of verisimilitude defined by Tzvetan Todorov, that of the verisimilitude of a text that reflects common opinion. By portraying this popular concept of Indians, Sand's text preserves its verisimilitude in the eyes of the public. The articles also conform to Todorov's verisimilitude of genre and verisimilitude of mask through the use of travel narrative and claims to reality. Had Sand's discourse not conformed to these types of verisimilitude, it would have been neither believable nor interesting to its readers. (SLF)