(De)masking the “Other” Woman in George Sand’s Indiana

Pratima Prasad

University of Pennsylvania

The emergence and profusion of doubles in the European literary imagery marks the heyday of Romanticism. It finds its roots perhaps in the Romantics’ assumption that character is mutable and not fixed, or in their pathology of alienation, which made them express the distinction between Self and Other in terms of a self-division. There have been many studies of this recurring motif in literature, grounded in psychoanalysis, theology, as well as in literary and cultural history. I would instance Otto Rank’s pioneering study, which, drawing mostly on folk legend and anthropological evidence, traces the motif of the double to narcissistic self-love and the wish for a defense against death.^[1] An example of a more contemporary interpretation of the double can be found in Paul Coates’s work, who juxtaposes the emergence of the double with the expansion of colonialism: the double is a sign of the unrepressed vitality of the Other, which the Self continually strives to cocoon in projections (2). Most studies on the double identify the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jean Paul Richter, Alfred de Musset, and later in the century, Dostoëvsky and Maupassant, as the most creative and effective manipulations of the motif. The characteristic Romantic double, coined as Doppelgänger by Jean Paul Richter, takes different forms, sometimes emerging as a shadow or a reflection of the hero that seems to have a life of its own (Hoffmann’s Lost Reflection, 1820, and Musset’s Nuit de Décembre, 1835), or a figure with a strong and uncanny physical resemblance to the hero (Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs, 1796, and Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixirs, 1815).

George Sand, whose fictional works are replete with doubles, does not receive mention in any of these critical analyses. In fact, gendered doubling, or the splitting of the ego for the feminine subject has not been adequately problematized. In this study, I examine Sand’s innovative rewriting of the topos of the double in one of her early works, Indiana (1832). I will argue that Indiana, by mapping both race and class difference on the female double, makes a claim for a revitalized, hybrid feminine subject, one that goes beyond the existing paradigms of nineteenth-century French fiction. In addition, I hope to account for the centrality of the masquerade in Sand’s working through of the dual feminine subject. In Sand’s text, doubling is both produced by, and expressed through the motif of the masquerade.

When Sand’s heroines, Indiana and her chamber maid Noun, first make their appearance in the text, they are neither mirror images nor two parts of the same soul, but two clearly demarcated antithetical subjectivities. They differ both in physical and in emotional stature:

Noun était la sœur de lait de madame Delmare; ces deux jeunes personnes, élevées ensemble, s’aimaient tendrement. Noun, grande, forte, brillante de santé, vive, alerte, et pleine de sang créole ardent et passionné, effaçait de beaucoup, par sa beauté resplendissante, la beauté pâle et frêle de madame Delmare. (60)^[2]

Moreover, Indiana and Noun are separated racially, socially, and sexually: Indiana is the daughter of a white colonizer, now married to the bourgeois industrialist Delmare; Noun, her chamber-maid, is a black Creole from the island of Bourbon. This social polarization is transposed onto the sexual axis as well: Indiana is a sensually deprived, chaste bourgeois woman while Noun is a sexually active lower-class woman. References to Indiana’s sexuality, when there are any at all, underscore not just her chastity, but speak of her as though she were a virginal child-woman: “Le sourire des anges reposait toujours sur ses lèvres roses comme celles d’une petite fille qui n’a connu encore que les baisers de sa mère” (173). Caught up in a sterile marriage with a man who is more a violent father figure than a partner, and to whom she is bound by the rules of bourgeois marital fidelity, Indiana is divorced from her own desire. Noun, on the other hand, imposes herself as subject of her own desire with her lover Raymon.

On a first level of reading, the sexual and the social poles are presented as irreconcilable for the two female protagonists. Not surprisingly, Indiana has been read as a distressing account of Sand’s traditionalist representation of women. Leslie Rabine, in a particularly trenchant essay (“George Sand and the Myth of Femininity”), states that Sand inscribes her first novel within the dominating masculine ideology of the nineteenth century according to which Noun’s, or the lower class woman’s prostitution was necessary to maintain the chastity of the upper class woman and the stability of the social order. While Rabine’s reading remains compelling, I would argue that if the representation of femininity in Indiana is marked by the paradigm of male-authored texts, it does not mimetically reproduce that model. First, Rabine’s discussion is centered on class and fails to take into account the racial differences between the two heroines. The implications of race and origins (which I discuss later) are crucial to the reading of the female double in Indiana. Second, Sand’s borrowings from another male-centered dualist literary model, the Romantic double, offers a different perspective on the Indiana-Noun pair.

As John Herdman’s study of the Romantic double has shown, Jean Paul defined the Doppelgänger as a second self that is dependent on, but not dominated by the self (Herdman 13–14). Now, it must be remembered that beyond Indiana’s white, bourgeois identity lies another self, reflected in her beginnings outside the metropole. Bought up in the colonies in the absence of her biological mother, she is nursed by a Creole woman who happens to be Noun’s mother. In fact, Indiana’s experience in the text is likened to that of the slaves with whom she spent most of her childhood (“vivant au milieu des esclaves,” 89; “cette femme esclave,” 90). Having grown up with a violent father and been married off to an equally violent husband, she moves from one despotic master to another. Subordinate to those around her, she is in many ways just another Noun: “En épousant Delmare, [Indiana] ne fit que changer de maître, en venant habiter le Lagny, que changer de prison” (88). Men of society perceive her as an exotic “rose de Bengale” (80), a term that is associated on another occasion with the identity of Noun. Most importantly, Indiana and Noun are both Creoles, according to the varying definitions of the word (a Creole being a person of either European or African descent, born and naturalized in the West Indies, Mauritius, Bourbon Island, etc.). What at first seems like a pure and simple opposition between the two women is compounded by a likeness that comes from their shared creolization, their common experience. Noun is the alter-ego who embodies Indiana’s ex-centric, marginal origins and her experience of subordination. Hence, strains of the Romantic Doppelgänger are not absent from the Indiana/Noun pair.

We can now nuance Sand’s position with respect to two contemporary literary paradigms, the dual Romantic subject and the dual woman. On the one hand, as we have already said, while appropriating the paradigm of the Romantic double, she distances her characters from Hoffmann’s or Musset’s doubles. Noun is a character in her own right and not just a projection of Indiana’s self-division or psychic disintegration. On the other hand, the polarization of the two women at two ends of the social and sexual axes is undermined by the solidarity and likeness that binds them together.

This process of splitting and assimilation of the two female subjects pervades the entire text and is recapitulated in two key masquerade episodes. Feminine disguise alternately opposes and merges the identities of the two female protagonists. The masquerade scene in Indiana functions as a focal point, an exclusive space in the text wherein Sand’s characteristic female double is represented in metaphorical terms. I will start by briefly contextualizing these two episodes. Of the two masquerade scenes, the first one occurs quite early, in the first section of the four-part novel. The novel’s first section contains some of the ingredients of an emerging love triangle whose agents are Indiana the heroine, her friend and chamber maid Noun, and Raymon, a savvy Don Juan of sorts belonging to the nobility. When the novel opens, Raymon has already successfully wooed and seduced Noun. Raymon and Noun keep their relationship a secret, mostly because of the large gap between their respective social classes. As early as in the opening chapters of the novel, Raymon is already weary of Noun. His attentions have now turned to her mistress, the unhappy Indiana. It is at this narrative juncture, when both maid and mistress are still unaware of Raymon’s real intentions, that our first scene takes place. The Delmares being absent for a few days, Noun has set up with Raymon a nightly rendez-vous in Indiana’s bedroom. Having taken over her mistress’s private domain, Noun then goes on to appropriate her garments and accessories, which, combined with some other decorative effects, provide a perfect setting for a ceremony of seduction:

A force de penser aux séductions que le luxe devait exercer sur son amant, Noun s’avisa d’un moyen pour lui plaire davantage. Elle se para des atours de sa maîtresse, alluma un grand feu dans la chambre que madame Delmare occupait au Lagny, para la cheminée des plus belles fleurs qu’elle put trouver dans la serre chaude, prépara une collation de fruits et de vins fins. (99)

In an unusual twist to what would have been another clandestine meeting between Noun and her paramour, the phantom of Indiana insinuates itself into the scene. Raymon, described by the narrator as particularly susceptible to illusion, and provoked by the sight of Noun in Indiana’s clothes, starts to interchange the identities of the two women: “Raymon fut saisi d’un étrange frisson en songeant que cette femme enveloppée d’un manteau, qui l’avait conduit jusqu’là, était peut-être Indiana elle-même” (101). The confusion of identities in Raymon’s mind is deepened as the night goes by. Noun’s disguise, coupled with the inebriating strength of the wine, produce a hallucinatory effect on Raymon, and he finally succumbs to his illusions. He spends the entire night with Noun, imagining that he is in Indiana’s arms. Sand describes in fine detail the disturbing effect of Indiana’s attire on Noun’s body and of the power of clothing to masquerade identity in a passage that is one of the most shining examples of her prose.

Si elle [Noun] n’eût pas été ivre comme lui, elle eût compris qu’au plus fort de son délire Raymon songeait à une autre. Elle l’eût vu baiser l’écharpe et les rubans qu’avait portés Indiana, respirer les essences qui la lui rappelaient, froisser dans ses mains ardentes l’étoffe qui avait protégé son sein; mais Noun prenait tous ces transports pour elle-même, lorsque Raymon ne voyait d’elle que la robe d’Indiana. . . . C’était Indiana qu’il voyait dans le nuage du punch que la main de Noun venait d’allumer; c’était elle qui l’appelait et qui lui souriait derrière ces blancs rideaux de mousseline; ce fut elle encore qu’il rêva sur cette couche modeste et sans tache, lorsque, succombant sous l’amour et le vin, il y entraîna sa créole échevelée. (104–05)

The aftermath of this scene proves to be fatal: Noun commits suicide after discovering Raymon’s love for her mistress Indiana. Much later in the text, beginning to suspect the real reason behind Noun’s death, Indiana prepares to unearth the truth in a most disingenuous manner. In this second episode for our consideration, it is the mistress who “dresses up” as her maid. Although Indiana does not carry her disguise to completion like Noun, she engages in a similar play on appearances that befuddles Raymon’s perception.

Indiana lui tournait le dos, elle était enveloppée d’une pelisse doublée de fourrure. Par un étrange hasard, c’était la même que Noun avait prise à l’heure du dernier rendez-vous pour aller à sa rencontre dans le parc. . . . Madame Delmare ne se doutait point de l’effet qu’elle produisait sur Raymon. Elle avait entouré sa tête d’un foulard des Indes, noué négligemment à la manière des créoles; c’était la coiffure ordinaire de Noun. Raymon, vaincu par la peur, faillit tomber à la renverse, en croyant voir ses idées superstitieuses se réaliser. (190–91)

As if to exacerbate this effect, Indiana supplements the unusual head-gear by displaying a lock of the dead Noun’s hair in her hands, thereby giving Raymon the impression that she has cut off a lock of her own hair. When Raymon discovers that it is actually the dead Noun’s hair, he experiences, as Marilyne Lukacher puts it, “an uncanny return of the repressed,” and faints (77).

In this text, Sand gives the masquerade a distinctive form within the private sphere in a creative use of the apparatus of feminine clothing. Ballroom dresses, madras overalls, and colourful scarves serve as a disguise-kit for Sand’s female protagonists, who manipulate vestimentary codes to transcend the boundaries between appearance and reality. As is evident, these two scenes put forth a number of parallels, structural as well as thematic. They both take place in Indiana’s bedroom, which is a privileged locus in the novel, in part due to the symbolic significance of its circularity.^[3] Moreover, both scenes occupy strategic locations in the text itself: the first episode dramatically concludes the first section of the novel, while the second episode inaugurates the third section. The same three characters are involved, and in both cases it is the masculine subject of desire who is duped by the artifice of feminine clothing. Both scenes involve seduction, although in the second case the sexual act is not carried through. In short, these two narrative moments reveal Sand’s predilection for the masquerade as topos. As though propelled by some kind of diegetic compulsion, she returns to the same scene twice in order to milk its creative potentialities. For our purposes, however, the most characteristic feature of these two narrative episodes is the doubling of the female protagonists and their subsequent assimilation or fusion via the masquerade, a diegetic paradigm that any reader of Sand’s later texts would clearly recognize as a distinctive Sandian mark.

Of the two masquerade scenes in Indiana, the episode in which Noun seduces Raymon has been much commented upon. Musset was among the first persons to be entranced by Sand’s literary imagination in this scene, and went as far as to write a poetic interpretation of it. He read the episode as Raymon’s aspiration towards a higher love, in which Noun and Indiana occupy allegorical positions of the Real and the Ideal respectively.^[4] Musset recognizes the thematic of the double in the scene, but evokes it in terms of a splitting of the object of desire. Among more recent interpretations of this episode, Sandy Petrey, in a fascinating essay, contends that Raymon’s desire for Noun is “gendered”: it is not just Noun’s beauty, but the socially-coded attributes with which she surrounds herself (the clothes, the crystal, the lace, etc.) that arouse his desire. Leslie Rabine recognizes the two extreme positions (angel/whore) assigned to woman, but deciphers the episode through the double prism of Raymon’s desire and the male narrator’s comments. Critics in general have been more interested in the presence of the male desiring figure, and have pondered on Raymon’s motivations and comportment. It is time now to look at how the feminine subject conceives of her “doubleness” and of her identity in general. Noun is far from passive and her libidinal economy equally governs the unfolding of the scene. More specifically, in the act of wearing her mistress’s clothes, she sends out certain sartorial messages that deserve a closer look. Moreover, since John Carl Flügel’s psychological work in 1930, theorists have postulated the will to “dress up” in human beings as an act propelled by diverse and sometimes contradictory motivations. The Lacanian psychoanalyst Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni goes so far as to say that clothes not only express desire but also reveal the manner in which the wearer conceives of his/her subject position.

I propose, first, to move the focus away from the center of the episode towards the passages that frame it. The passage that immediately precedes Raymon’s entry, when Noun is alone in Indiana’s room, is a rare moment in the text. If Noun hardly speaks at all in the novel, here the reader penetrates her consciousness, or, to use Genette’s terms, witnesses a moment of “internal focalization” with Noun (206). By examining some of her interior monologues, Noun’s dual appropriation of her mistress’s clothes and private space become clearer. Dressed in Indiana’s clothes, Noun looks at herself:

[Elle] apprêta en un mot toutes les recherches du boudoir auxquelles elle n’avait jamais songé; et, quand elle se regarda dans un grand panneau de glace, elle se rendit justice en se trouvant plus jolie que les fleurs dont elle avait cherché à s’embellir.

—Il m’a souvent répété, se disait-elle, que je n’avais pas besoin de parure pour être belle, et qu’aucune femme de la cour, dans tout l’éclat de ses diamants, ne valait un de mes sourires. Pourtant ces femmes qu’il dédaignait l’occupent maintenant. . . . Peut-être que cette nuit je ressaisirai tout l’amour que je lui avais inspiré. (99–100)

Beyond the most palpable motive of rekindling Raymon’s waning interest in her, Noun expresses here the Rousseauist paradigm of the “natural” woman imposed on her by her paramour. She seems to realize that in his praise of her natural beauty, Raymon confirms her in her naturalness and thereby in her exclusion from the social order. More importantly, presented as she is in self-absorbed contemplation in front of a mirror, Noun is emphasizing her own alienation. Specular identification with oneself can be profoundly alienating for the subject, as the self sees and relates to itself as other, doubled and projected on the specular image. In this passage, Sand incorporates the motif of the-woman-before-the-mirror within the larger scheme of Noun’s social alienation. As Noun gazes into the mirror, she sees not just a split image of herself, but a figure draped in a muslin dress, satin shoes, and ribbons, all of which are sartorial emblems of another social class. And significantly, her thoughts dwell upon her difference from that other class of women, the “women of the court.” By imitating Indiana, her closest known prototype of those upper-class women, Noun reveals the inner anxiety of her alienation and symbolically enacts a private vision of otherness, and the desire to transcend the determinations of her identity. But, paradoxically, in the moment of self-recognition in the mirror, she encounters her alterity, the actual fact of her difference.

Noun’s self-contemplation is cut short when Raymon makes an irruption into this private fantasy. In fact, Noun gazes at herself in anticipation, as she prepares to be contemplated by Raymon. Through Noun’s self-display in dress and adornment, Sand puts forth the notion that self-recognition, as theorists of clothing tell us, is dependent on the gaze of the other. Kaja Silvermann and Lemoine-Luccioni, who ground their arguments in Lacanian psychoanalysis, both underline that the gaze of the Other is central in the constitution of an individual’s subject position (“C’est l’Autre qui détient l’être du sujet,” Lemoine-Luccioni 78). The visual mediation of the mother during the mirror-stage of a child’s development demonstrates that subjectivity, at the most profound level, is determined by the gaze that is outside. They point out further that clothing draws the body and makes it visible to the outside gaze, and is therefore another necessary condition for subjectivity. Travestied in her mistress’s clothing, then, what exactly does Noun wish for Raymon to identify? To accurately answer the question, it is necessary to examine Noun’s disguise in juxtaposition with her appropriation of Indiana’s private bedroom, which she also transforms considerably.

In this central scene, Noun rearranges the configuration of the space of their encounter. The very site of this episode, we realize, is governed by her will: it is she who shifts the place of her nightly tryst with Raymon from an outside kiosk (their regular meeting place) to the interior of Indiana’s bedroom, a decision that will later take Raymon by surprise. Noun’s manipulation of the spatial configuration puts forth a certain conscious or unconscious desire on her part for her so far illicit relationship with Raymon to be sanctioned. That which is exterior to legitimacy (clandestine meetings in the woods) is symbolically imported by her into an interior space, Indiana’s bedroom. This becomes all the more meaningful since in Noun’s context, legitimacy is a doubly charged notion. At this point in the text, Noun has discovered that she is pregnant with Raymon’s illegitimate child. If Noun’s identity as the Creole maid of a bourgeois family is characterized by an alienation from the social structure, that estrangement is now total.

More importantly, Noun “disguises” Indiana’s private space, much like the sartorial transformation over her own body. Just as she manipulates the signs of her identity through costume, she alters the setting in which she has chosen to introduce Raymon. The circular bedroom, as described by the narrator, carries with it all the signs of chastity that constitute Indiana’s sexual identity. From the bed (“ce lit blanc et pudique comme celui d’une vierge,” 101) to the engravings on the walls (“ces gravures que représentaient les pastorales amours de Paul et Virginie,” 101), every part of Indiana’s private living space carries the label of her sexuality. When Noun takes over this space, it is transfigured: the austere whiteness is replaced with a celebration of the senses:

Noun avait effeuillé des roses du Bengale sur le parquet, le divan était semé de violettes, une douce chaleur pénétrait tous les pores, et les cristaux étincelaient sur la table parmi les fruits, qui présentaient coquettement leurs flancs vermeils, mêlés à la mousse des corbeilles. (100–01)

In Noun’s hands, the virginal setting is transformed into an erotic tableau. She plants the distinctive mark of her own identity, that of the sensual woman, on to her mistress’s private space. Not only does she encroach upon Indiana’s territory, but she also metamorphoses the visual semiotics to make it truly her own.

Noun’s manipulation of vestimentary signs and the transformation of Indiana’s room are doubly transgressive and, seen together, throw light upon her motives. On a space that is marked by Indiana, she engraves symbols that point to her specificity, her sexual identity. Similarly, if there is some loss of her own specificity in her mistress’s clothing and adornment, her identity is not obliterated behind this artifice. She borrows the white dress of the virgin, only to recast it in the framework of a ceremony of seduction. As Raymon regretfully remarks, she wears white camelias in her hair, as Indiana would have, but unlike her mistress, she lets the flowers play with her hair sensuously (“dans [un] désordre excitant,” 101). In donning Indiana’s dress and adornment, Noun does not, in any manner, extinguish her sexuality to “become” another Indiana. If, as we have already stated, self-recognition is dependent on the apprehension of the outside gaze, Noun’s gesture is a symbolic one. By masquerading in her mistress’s clothes, Noun makes a demand for recognition in the dual sense of the word. First, her recourse to disguise is much less an attempt to disappear by taking on Indiana’s identity than a means of escaping the fixedness of her identity and exploring the ambiguity created by costume. Behind the costume of the virginal upper-class woman, she calls on Raymon to recognize her, the real Noun. Second, her act is a claim for recognition in the sense of legitimation, or sanctioning of her status.

However, Noun’s attempt is a failed one. The danger for Noun lies, paradoxically, in Raymon’s gaze itself, which fails to acknowledge her call for recognition. Moreover, Noun’s private fantasy is not compatible with Raymon’s. Unable to negotiate the ambiguity created by Noun’s disguise, Raymon’s gaze seeks to re-locate her identity on well-defined binary poles of sexuality. As revealed by his regretful laments after the orgiastic night, he addresses Indiana as one would invoke a divinity (“l’asile de ta pudeur sacrée,” 105; “l’ange qui gardait ton chevet,” 106), whereas Noun is associated with carnal lubricity (“les flancs de cette créole lascive,” 106). The process of repressing Noun occurs through her disguise itself. Her white dress is read metonymically, to represent a part of Indiana’s identity, namely her sexuality (“sa chaste robe,” 101). This in turn gives rise to a chain of metonymies and fetishistic associations for Raymon. Looking at Noun in the mirror, his gaze wanders towards a “purer” reflection of Indiana on her virginal bed (“le lit étroit et virginal,” 102). Every attribute that surrounds Noun becomes a metonym for Indiana’s untouched body and sexuality: “cette couche modeste, sans tache,” “ceinture pudique” (105), “le lin virginal de ta couche” (106). In this scene of high fetishism, Noun, the sensual woman, disappears behind the figure of the ethereal, chaste image conjured by Raymon’s imagination. Noun’s suicide is an expression of that suppression. She becomes a prisoner and a victim of her own game.

After Noun’s death, the menace of suicide, particularly of drowning, follows Indiana throughout the text, and links her destiny to that of her double. Traditionally, as Otto Rank has pointed out, the double is the emissary of death for the Self. The appearance of the double, especially in folkloric tales, is a sign that foretells the imminent death of the hero.^[5] In Indiana’s case, encounters with near-death are many, the most prominent one being the failed suicide pact with her cousin Sir Ralph. However, the novel’s concluding section in the island of Bourbon is ultimately life-affirming: Indiana and Ralph have triumphed over the death instinct to lead a new, utopian existence in the colonies, outside the bounds of the French bourgeois universe. What is more, the text also suggests a certain sexual liberation for the heroine, as she shares her life with her partner outside the realm of marriage. Indiana’s textual trajectory, then, I would argue, is a return to the “Indian” space, that is, to merit or live out her name (Indiana, l’indienne, the Indian woman, or Noun), to reaffirm that part of her subjectivity that Raymon refused to recognize, or suppressed. But she has to do so without literally becoming another Noun, i.e., without dying.

In this perspective, the second scene in Indiana’s bedroom, when Indiana wears Noun’s head-dress, is crucial. This second episode is in many ways a “correction” of the first, as though Indiana were avenging Noun’s death. Firstly, Raymon is being put to test. Indiana’s preparation for the encounter is both deliberate and premeditated as a test: “Elle risqua tout son sort sur une épreuve délicate et singulière contre laquelle Raymon ne pouvait être en garde” (190). Secondly, if Raymon smothered both Noun’s body and her sexuality in the earlier scene, here Indiana corporally reinscribes the repressed woman within the economy of desire. Thirdly, while the fetish was an agent of repression for Raymon, here the lock of hair, fetish par excellence, and disguise are instruments of resuscitation; they revive both Noun’s silenced body and Raymon’s memory. Indiana’s creole head-dress and Noun’s hair are interlocked to fabricate before Raymon’s eyes a dual and indeterminate female object of desire. Raymon is brutally confronted with the ambiguity of feminine identity that he earlier refused to acknowledge.^[6]

The function of the masquerade is thus to delimit Indiana’s identity as double and to reintegrate that which Noun represents in Indiana, indeed to mask difference. But Indiana’s doubleness is already contained in her name. The name “Indiana” incorporates in its morphological structure both Diane (Diana) and Indienne (Indian), and each recounts a different story about her. We have already discussed our heroine’s identity as l’Indienne or the “outsider.” Her likeliness with the mythological Diana is also a striking one. Diana, Apollo’s twin sister, is most commonly known for her passion for hunting and her sexual abstinence. The chaste Indiana also has an immense passion for hunting, as Raymon discovers to his surprise. When hunting wild boar, she displays a vigor, resolution, and physical courage that mark her as an illustrious descendant of Diana. Indiana’s textual destiny, then, is to live out the dual narrative that is inscribed in both Diane and Indienne, narratives that are sometimes incompatible and contradictory. Through the scene of the masquerade, Sand makes an attempt to fuse the split antithetical subjectivity of her heroine, an attempt that seeks to recuperate the alienated double, and the alienated name. It is an effort to reconcile the two extreme images of woman, and to recuperate the “virtuous” and the “degraded” woman as one.

Sand’s own words help shed light on the representation of women in her first novel. When the novel was still in its germinal stage, she described her heroine Indiana (then called Noémie) in a letter to Emile Regnault dated June 1831. For Sand, a series of antitheses qualify at best Noémie’s subjectivity. She is both strong and weak, timid and audacious, capable of carrying the weight of the sky and yet tired by the weight of air, disdainful of the vanities of her century, yet seduced by the man who embodies all of them. These antitheses, however, do not constitute a contradiction for the author. She even goes on to state that “woman” in general can be characterized in a similar manner:

Voilà je crois la femme en général, un incroyable mélange de faiblesse et d’énergie, de grandeur et de petitesse, un être de deux natures opposées, tantôt sublime, tantôt misérable, habile à tromper, facile à l’être. (Correspondance 2:46)

For all its essentialist pathos, what is interesting in this theorization of feminine subjectivity is the notion of mélange or amalgam. Sand lays down a set of received binary oppositions about female nature, only to make the claim that feminine subjectivity is a mixture of tendencies that gravitate towards both ends. The novel Indiana follows a similar pattern. Sand first borrows from conventional binaries of feminine subjectivity and subsequently transcends them through a process of hybridization: opposing narrative destinies are fused and contained in the subject Indiana. The scene of the masquerade emerges as the textual space where Sand theorizes her stance on identity. Through the masquerade, with its power to blur distinctions between Self and Other and to merge antithetical subjectivities, Sand formulates the model of a
creolized, hybrid subject as an alternative representation of femininity in nineteenth-century French fiction.

Works Cited

Coates, Paul. The Double and the Other: Identity as Ideology in Post-Romantic Fiction. London: Macmillan P, 1988.

Flügel, John Carl. The Psychology of Clothes. New York: The International Psychanalytical Library Hogarth P, 1930.

Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 1966.

Haig, Stirling. “La chambre circulaire d’Indiana.” Neophilologus 62 (1978): 505–12

Herdman, John. The Double in Nineteenth Century Fiction. London: Macmillan P, 1990.

Lemoine-Luccioni, Eugénie. La Robe. Paris: Seuil, 1983.

Lukacher, Maryline. Maternal Fictions: Stendhal, Sand, Rachilde and Bataille. Durham: Duke UP, 1994.

Musset, Alfred de. Poésies complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1957.

Petrey, Sandy. “George and Georgina Sand: Realist Gender in Indiana.” Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices. Ed. Judith Still and Michael Worton. Manchester, England: Manchester UP, 1993. 133–47.

Rabine, Leslie. “George Sand and the Myth of Femininity.” Women and Literature 4:2 (1976): 2–17.

Rank, Otto. The Double: A Psychoanalytical Study. Trans. Harry Tucker Jr. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1971.

Sand, George. Correspondance. Paris: Garnier, 1964.

___. Indiana. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1962.

___. Indiana. Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1984.

Silvermann, Kaja. “Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse.” Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture. Ed. Tania Modleski. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 139–52.

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^[1]See Rank, especially chapter 2: “Examples of the Double in Literature.”

^[2]Indiana (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). All subsequent references are to this edition.

^[3]Indiana’s circular room has been described as a privileged space in the novel, indeed the textual analogue of the island of Bourbon, where part of the novel is set. See especially Haig.

^[4]Musset’s poem is reproduced by Pierre Salomon in the 1962 Garnier Frères edition, 87–88n.

^[5]See Rank, Chapters 4 and 5.

^[6]It should be noted that it is at the cost of Raymon’s desire that Indiana’s identity is reclaimed. When faced with the reality of this double female subjectivity, Raymon faints, and wakes up to discover that he no longer loves Indiana. Through this metaphoric death, Sand seems to suggest that Raymon can conceive of female subjectivity only in binary terms. In the scheme of masculine desire, the desired woman occupies only fantasy positions.