But unlike Emma—and here we must raise the question of the specificity of women’s writing—Indiana is saved, indeed twice, and increasingly implausibly saved from drowning by the good angel figure of Ralph, with whom she lives out her days in the idyllic valley of Bernica. Like so many of Sand’s heroes and heroines, she must complete an erotic developmental trajectory that takes her from an inappropriate object-choice based on infantile narcissism to an appropriate object-choice based on an adult recognition of the moral and spiritual qualities of the worthy love-object.

But it would be too simple if all that were necessary for the novel to reach closure was for the blind heroine or hero to see the truth, as though the truth was simply lying there, only waiting to be unveiled. Such, however, is not the case: just as the romantic would-be heroine must accept the levelling quality of the common language, the good lover must overcome the blockage, the linguistic impotence that prevents his true self from shining forth. On their way toward a higher union both Indiana and Ralph must shed the shackles that have encumbered them. There is much to lend credence to the reading of the novel that views Ralph as Indiana’s true double, in the sense of a kindred spirit, a spiritual brother. Though their relationship is not strictly speaking incestuous, there is more than a suggestion of incest in what is held up to be the ideal love relationship for Indiana. Like Paul and Virginie’s, whose story constitutes their privileged intertext, theirs is first and foremost a fraternal love, even though the brother and sister are not biologically related.

The whiff of incest that pervades the final section of the novel is but one aspect of its problematic nature. Ever since the novel’s publication, critics have taken Sand to task for the novel’s conclusion, which is judged either as inappropriate for a text that advertises its realism, or unsatisfying for a novel that proposes a Utopian way out of the universe of realism. As the defender of realist orthodoxy, Sainte-Beuve was the first and most influential of the former category of critics, writing:

Indiana is not a masterpiece, there is a place in the book right after Noun’s death, after the fatal discovery that pierces Indiana’s heart, after that morning of delirium when she makes her way into Raymon’s bedroom and he rejects her—there is a point, a line of demarcation where the true, felt, and observed part of the novel ends; the rest, which seems almost pure invention, still includes some beautiful sections, great and poetic scenes, but fantasy seeks to prolong reality, imagination has taken it upon itself to crown the adventure.17

For the second category of critics—the pioneering feminist critics mentioned earlier—the Indiana of the epilogue offers scant hope for women in search of a radical transformation of their condition in the post-revolutionary rising capitalist social order: childless and childlike, deprived of all illusions and virtually all direct speech, more dead than alive, in her ultimate incarnation Indiana is hardly a role model for newly born women. And yet one has only to think of the fates of Eugénie Grandet—loveless and sexless marriage—and Emma Bovary—suicide—to know that for all its problematic aspects this epilogue does represent a hopeful innovation. The differences between Sand’s fiction and both Balzac’s—the admired friend of her debut—and Flaubert’s—the dear ‘troubadour’ of her later years—those gigantic figures who sit astride French realism, are more than stylistic, they are political. To insist on locating Sand merely within the great realist tradition is to participate in the very process that has worked to diminish her achievement—the forgetting that there exists another great tradition in nineteenth-century French literature, one that includes Victor Hugo and Émile Zola, and whose great theme is saving the innocent victims of the new bourgeois social order (the poor, the hungry, the enslaved, the disenfranchised, the persecuted). Love in this socialist and humanist tradition is as inextricably bound up with politics as the public and the private are in Balzac. When Indiana dreams, she dreams not of living the high life in Paris but of helping others; when Indiana fantasizes about falling in love, she fantasizes not about meeting a lady’s man, but a messiah. For the idealist woman, and this is perhaps her ultimate and most secretly megalomaniac desire, the ideal lover is a saviour, not to say God.

Allegory is, as we have noted, the trope of idealism, but it is also the trope of exotic primitivism, indeed exotic primitivism is perhaps the most popular form of idealism in early and premodern fiction. The final section of the novel demonstrates that in Sand’s Rousseauistic framework the only way out of a contemporary society viewed as hopelessly corrupt is escape to an exotic space, which is imagined in at least two crucial respects as the opposite of the common European social order: there is no social hierarchy—the relationship between Indiana and Ralph and the slaves they free is one of reciprocity and mutual caring—and the prohibition of incest is lifted. Clearly, as the final dialogue in the novel indicates, the flight from society is a last and desperate resort; Indiana marks in this sense the end of the primitivist solution. Hereafter, Sand will transfer the Utopian space to Europe: thus in the first of her three Utopian socialist novels of the 1840s, The Journeyman Joiner, the circular bedchamber resurfaces but not the wild valley of Bernica.

Ethics, and with it idealism, can hardly be said to have generated much critical heat in recent decades. The canon, by contrast, has been the object of so much critical ferment that it now appears that the very notion of a classic, let alone a world’s classic, is in serious need of reconsideration. Recent writings on realism have done much to demystify the mimetic and mechanical pretences of realism, but they have done little to dismantle realism’s aesthetic hegemony. Sand’s contemporaries already knew that her fate was linked to that of realism, what they could not imagine was that it was also linked to that of feminism. Greeted as a masterpiece in its own time, Indiana has been allowed to go intermittently out of print in ours. If the measure of classic status in France is selection as a text of the agrégation—and only precious few texts are—then Indiana has still not attained supreme institutional recognition. But in the final decades of the twentieth century, when feminism has profoundly affected the way we read and the canon of great works we study, Indiana has attained classic status. If the measure of a classic is that it can be read and reread, then contrary to what James asserts—’George Sand invites reperusal less than any mind of equal eminence’18—Indiana can, has been, and will be reread.

NOTE ON THE TEXT

INDIANA was published in 1832 by J.-P. Roret and H. Dupuy, by Gosselin in 1833, and in a new edition by Perrotin in 1842. An illustrated edition was published by Hetzel in 1853. The last edition to be published in George Sand’s lifetime was by Calmann-Lévy in 1856, and that is the text which has been followed in this translation.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

There is an edited English translation of George Sand’s autobiography: My Life, trans. D.