Believe me, we are both right. Both paths lead to the same end. I also like exceptional human beings; I am one myself. I need them to make my ordinary characters stand out, and I never sacrifice them unnecessarily. But the ordinary human beings interest me more than they do you. I make them larger than life; I idealize them in the opposite sense, in their ugliness or in their stupidity. I give their deformities frightful or grotesque proportions. You could not do that; you are smart not to want to look at people and things that would give you nightmares. Idealize what is pretty and what is beautiful, that is a woman’s job.7

According to this plausible if perhaps apocryphal statement, realism—which is in fact a form of negative idealism—is an unfiltered mode of vision that looks harsh reality in the face, while idealism is a prosthetic device that functions to dim the blinding dazzle of truth. Writing as a would-be realist, which is to say as a man, Sand denies in her preface of 1832 any recourse to the prettifying visual aids of idealism: ‘If he [the writer] had felt learned enough to write a really useful book, he would have softened truth instead of presenting it with its crude colours and glaring effects. Such a book would have served the purpose of blue spectacles for faulty eyes.’8

Despite Sand’s strategically placed disclaimer, idealism and not realism came to be her preferred and distinctive aesthetic mode. Hence, just as it is impossible to write about Balzac without writing about realism, no analysis, let alone re-evaluation of Sand’s work can proceed without taking account of her (allegedly feminine) idealist aesthetics, without rethinking idealism, idealism being understood here both as the heightening of an essential characteristic (the pretty and the beautiful, but also the ugly and the stupid), and the promotion of a higher good (freedom, equality, spiritual love). However, so imbricated are realism and idealism at the outset, so great the influence of Balzac on his peers, that Sand did not come on the literary scene as an idealist in full possession of her aesthetic vision. Indiana records the difficult emergence of Sandian idealism from the realist paradigm constituted by Balzacian realism.

Given this state of affairs it is not surprising that Indiana opens with a tableau whose realist insignia are so glaring as to have fooled even Sand’s curmudgeonly mentor, Henri de Latouche. Quickly scanning his pupil’s manuscript he exclaimed: ‘Well! it’s a pastiche, school of Balzac. A pastiche, what can I say? Balzac, what can I say.’9 It was only after having spent the night reading the entire manuscript that he recognized the novel’s originality, and even its superiority to the chief representatives of the realist school: ‘Balzac and Mérimée lie dead under Indiana.’10 What creates the illusion of a pseudo-Balzacian beginning is precisely the tableau like presentation of the characters. Following the realist descriptive code which, as Roland Barthes has shown, consists of appropriating a pictorial model11—in this instance a Rembrandt-like chiaroscuro painting—to mediate the description of brute reality, the initial tableau features three of the novel’s main protagonists grouped around a flickering fire. But there is nothing particularly Balzacian about this triangle, which recalls rather La Nouvelle Héloïse, an unsurprising literary reminiscence on the part of such a daughter of Rousseau as was Sand. The three figures we find glumly arrayed before the fire in Lagny, a manor in Brie, constitute, however, a bizarre Oedipal triangle: Colonel Delmare, the tyrannical and jealous paternal husband who received Indiana from the hands of her brutal father; Sir Ralph, Indiana’s asexual cousin, who watches over her like a brother; and Indiana herself, the oppressed exotic heroine. Soon this static tableau is interrupted by the arrival of the third male protagonist, the dashing aristocrat recently moved to the area, Raymon de la Ramière, the outsider who sets the narrative into motion. Though a stranger to this dysfunctional family circle, Raymon’s irruption onto the scene completes the complex triplication of the male protagonist. Thus the initial pseudo-Oedipal triangle is overlaid and energized by a homosocial triangle, where men seek out and engage with each other through the mediation of a mutually desired woman. What Raymon does, in other words, is to set the ambiguous and latent structure of male rivalry and desire into motion. By contrasting Indiana’s non-rivalrous relationship with her foster-sister Noun with the rivalrous relationship between men that the seductive Raymon brings to the surface, Sand turns received ideas on their ear; it is the rivalry between empowered men and not that between disempowered women that undergirds the social structure.

It has often been argued that each of the male protagonists represents a specific political position along the spectrum of political possibilities available during the waning days of the Restoration and the early days of the July Monarchy. Delmare is the embittered cashiered Napoleonic soldier, Raymon, the opportunistic legitimist, Sir Ralph, the idealistic democrat. Though historically accurate, this somewhat reductive reading does not account for the interest of the novel. What Indiana shows is that politics is not simply the stuff of male debate, it is also the stuff of women’s lives. What makes Delmare such a compelling figure is not his adherence to some sort of Balzacian social typology, rather his instantiation of an idea, the Law, which reduces women to the status of objects of exchange, to the abjection of virtual slaves. What immediately signals Sand’s difference from the prestigious models invoked in her first pages (Chateaubriand for the gloomy decor, Rousseau for the dramatic personae, Balzac for the pictorial code) is the pronounced allegorical drift, which is highlighted in the preface and more fully developed in Lélia, which was published the following year. In Sand’s novel each protagonist incarnates an abstraction; the ideal toward which the idealist novel tends is always a form of allegory.

Read as an allegorical figure, Delmare represents patriarchal law under the regime of the Napoleonic Civil Code; the struggle between Delmare and his rebellious young wife is a struggle between legal oppression and a personal quest for liberation.