Abstract
In the final part of her autobiography Histoire de ma vie [Story of my Life] (1854–55), George Sand provided a surprising take on her own career trajectory: she would, she claimed, rather have been a digger than a writer. This chapter takes as its point of departure Sand’s fleeting fantasy of a life of hard labour with a view to re-examining her reflections on the legitimacy and ethics of the writer’s vocation. Sand’s dream of class solidarity, achieved through shared physical work, is read alongside her defence of the worker-poet. The latter’s radical refusal of a prevailing social division of manual and intellectual labour provides, it is argued, a model of transgression that informs Sand’s own account of her work as writer.
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Notes
- 1.
English translations are my own, except where indicated.
- 2.
Janet Beizer links this passage from Histoire de ma vie to the central role Sand attributes to the ‘chanvreur’ [hemp raker] in her pastoral trilogy of novels (1846–49). The association of manual labour and writing is born of ‘ce besoin constant d’effectuer une réconciliation’ [this constant need to bring about a reconciliation] (106).
- 3.
In a letter to her son Maurice, written in the Autumn of 1843, Sand described the overhaul of her garden that she was undertaking: ‘Le jardin n’offre que trous, plates-bandes retournées, terres sens dessus dessous. On dirait d’un champ labouré’ [The garden is nothing but holes, dug-up flower beds, and all the ground is turned over. It looks like a ploughed field]. 1970–71, 6, 274.
- 4.
Sand famously played a decisive role in the provisional government, producing propaganda in support of its ideals. See Hamon, 233–302.
- 5.
Working-class writers assisted by Sand include the carpenter Agricol Perdiguier, the locksmith Jérôme Gilland, and the weaver Magu. See also her article on ‘Les poëtes populaires’ of November 1841 (1878, 73–8). For a developed account of Sand’s correspondence with Poncy, see Brigitte Diaz.
- 6.
The note was designed to preface two of his collections of verse: Marines [Seascapes] and Le Chantier [The Building Yard].
- 7.
Diaz discerns a similar imperative in Sand’s correspondence with Poncy: ‘elle tient à ce que le poète n’évince pas en lui l’ouvrier. C’est au contraire l’alliage de ces deux identités, incompatibles selon l’ordre bourgeois, qu’elle prise’ (313) [she is eager for the poet not to replace the worker in him. On the contrary, it is the conjoining of these two identities, held to be incompatible by the bourgeois order, that she values].
- 8.
A similar point is made by William Sewell. Charges of naivety or political inefficacy aside, ‘The very existence of worker-poets, the coupling of the terms poête and ouvrier, was itself a novel and potent statement about labour’ (236).
- 9.
‘Soiez plûtost Maçon, si c’est vostre talent,/Ouvrier estimé dans un art nécessaire,/Qu’Ecrivain du commun et Poëte vulgaire’ [Be a stonemason instead, if this is your talent/An esteemed worker in a necessary art/Than a common writer and a vulgar poet] (Boileau-Despréaux, 110).
- 10.
See Sand’s 1851 ‘Notice’ to Le Compagnon du Tour France [The Companion of the Tour of France] (1840), in which she reflects on the scandal produced by her hero, a ‘prolétaire philosophe’ [proletarian philosopher]: ‘on cria, dans certaines classes, à l’impossible, à l’exagération, on m’accusa de flatter le peuple et de vouloir l’embellir. Eh bien, pourquoi non?’ [in some classes, this was declared impossible, an exaggeration. I was accused of flattering the people, and wanting to embellish them. Well, why not?] (1988, 31).
- 11.
Published in Le Charivari on 26 February 1844. Its caption reads: ‘La mère est dans le feu de la composition, l’enfant est dans l’eau de la baignoire!’ [The mother is in the heat of composition, the baby is in the bathwater!].
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White, C. (2018). George Sand, Digging. In: Waithe, M., White, C. (eds) The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1910. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55253-2_4
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