Une Jeanne d'Arc ignorée: George Sand's Jeanne

George Sand's Jeanne, long considered as a stepping stone to her more successful rustic novels, inaugurates the thematics of the Sandian pastoral whose end is to define woman anew from a matriarchal perspective, moving her from the fringe to the center of the discourse. The utopian idyll for Sand is a space created for and by women, a place originally abandoned by men. In this figurative space where patriarchal conceptions of gender, sexuality and religion are suspended, Sand sets up a subversive, counter-cultural discourse whereby marginalized women are given a valid existence. (SR)