I ♥ George Sand

[tenlittlebullets]

Just finished Consuelo. (Which, BTW, I'm pretty sure is the only full-length novel I've read cover-to-cover in French. Novellas and plays? Yes. Most of Les Misérables? Yes, in fits and starts and terribly out of order. Started longer books without finishing? Yep. Finished anything over 150 pages? No, not really.)

I feel like I should say something deep about art and devotion and the redemption of humanity, and all those thoughts are rattling around loose in my brain, but the only thing I can pin down is: god damn, what is it with the Romantics and sepulchral wedding-nights. Seriously, you've got Quasimodo and Esmeralda crumbling into dust together, Hernani and Doña Sol poisoning each other before they can consummate their marriage, Albert dropping dead right after pronouncing his vows and Consuelo holding vigil over his corpse all night--not to mention, tangentially related, that lovely exhumation scene in La Dame aux Camélias. It's wonderfully morbid but good god it's getting repetitive.

I know, I know, trivial. I kvetch because secretly it makes my inner Romantic really happy. Or, well, not happy exactly but satisfied in that "O! Behold, the unity of the altar and the tomb opens up a pathway in my soul whose awe-inspiring passages have not been tread since the last time I read Childe Harold's Pilgrimage!" sort of way.

Comments

[evewithanapple.livejournal.com]

You forgot Elisabeth being strangled on her wedding night (pre-consummation) in Frankenstein. Good thing too- she was bloody irritating.

[10littlebullets.livejournal.com]

Oh right! Wow, I completely forgot about the English there for a second. To the point where before I saw the word Frankenstein I was going "no wait, wasn't Elisabeth shot by an assassi--oh wait."

...one has to wonder if it's a conspiracy to keep Romantic heroines from ever having sex.

[evewithanapple.livejournal.com]

Knowing the common mindsets of the time? Probably.

[10littlebullets.livejournal.com]

Ya rly. Although I'm tempted to give George Sand a pass on this one--if ever there was a woman who thumbed her nose at the Madonna-whore complex, it's her. Not to mention 1. she was prolific as hell and I'm pretty sure some of her other heroines got to have sex, 2. Consuelo has these wonderful things like agency and other fulfilling things to do with her life, 3. Consuelo's sexual purity is symbolic of her greater integrity, not the other way 'round, and 4. equal-opportunity purity! Albert has to stay virgin too.

Actually, "equal-opportunity purity" seems to apply so often (cp. Les Mis, which barges straight past equal-opportunity into affirmative-action purity) that I'm tempted to say the Romantics were just conspiring to keep any of their heroes from having sex. Ever.

[ventresaintgris.livejournal.com]

To add some sepulcral wedding nights to the list:
Chateaubriand's Atala who promised her mother to remain a virgin and poisons herself when she falls in love, Lamartine poems inspired by his real life never consummated love for a consumptive woman (who obviously dies), the spanish romantic version of don juan where he is redeemed by the chaste and pure love of a novice (although they both die before their love is consummated), etc...

[mmebahorel.livejournal.com]

I've never made you read The Coast of Utopia have I? The second play, Shipwreck, is all about "how Romanticism goes wrong". (also, I think, in the first play, Voyage, Belinsky/Bakunin is canon - Bakunin/his sister is also canon.) Sadly, it sort of continues the tradition of "punishment by death or madness" for the women who stray, but it's not Stoppard's fault that the history did that to him. I've read the source material - these people were all insane.

anyway, two of the characters in the second play are obsessed with Consuelo generally, and all the young women in the first two plays are obsessed with George Sand in general. It's a wonderful thread of dorkiness that Stoppard added to tie Natalie Herzen to the Bakunin sisters.

[10littlebullets.livejournal.com]

No, you haven't. It sounds... meta-tastic?

And my gigantic historical crush on George Sand just continues to grow.

[ulkis.livejournal.com]

Albert dropping dead right after pronouncing his vows and Consuelo holding vigil over his corpse all night

Oh man, now I want to read this. I love over-the-top melodrama. And luckily it won't get repetitive for me because I haven't read any of the books you mentioned. *g* (Although I *feel* like I've read Notre-Dame de Paris because I read ever synopses ever when I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on in the musical . . . )

[10littlebullets.livejournal.com]

If you think that's over-the-top melodramatic, you'll be really happy when you get to the well scene, aka the "George Sand scares the SHIT out of her readers and makes 'if Ann Radcliffe had written this chapter' jokes while her character faces imminent watery doom" scene. And Albert is crazycakes. Like, cannot distinguish between his life and the lives of his bloodthirsty dead Czech ancestors, falls into a trance and communicates freaky visions of the redemption of Satan to Consuelo through his violin-playing, has prophetic revelations, crazycakes.

It's kind of wonderful.

[citoyenne.livejournal.com]

"George Sand scares the SHIT out of her readers and makes 'if Ann Radcliffe had written this chapter' jokes

Oh, I'm definitively putting Consuelo high up on my to-read list!