CC BY
140
https://doi.org/10.29013/EJLL-19-4-51-55
Meng Yuqiu, PhD, Department of French School of European Languages and Cultures Zhejiang International Studies University E-mail: mengyuqiu@zisu.edu.cn
CONTINUE RECANONIZING SAND: CREOLIZING INDIANA
Abstract. This article points to a long neglected aspect of George Sand's novel Indiana, namely, the heroine's being a Creole from a French slave colony island, and reads the novel as a critique of France's differentiated treatment of its colonial subjects along racial lines. Such a socio-political concern ofbringing the Creole back to the metropole, when slave trade and slavery were still French practices of the author's time, gives the Sandian novel a realist dimension.
Keywords: Creole, race, slavery, colonial subject.
One of the most studied novels of George Sand, but has close ties with slavery as an institution. The
Indiana (1832), now occupies a place in the French canon as a work whose achievements not only marked the birth of an author but also contributed to giving the literary genre of novel its lettre de noblesse in France [8, 53]. However, one important aspect of the novel, the colonial element, has long been neglected. For example, although critics immediately discerned Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie as a subtext to the Sandian novel, they tended to disregard the colonial contexts in both and focus primarily on the protagonists' romantic love in the tradition of pastoral. Another telling indication is the time it took critics to even get the novel's geographic setting straight, repeatedly locating the origins of the eponymous heroine in the West Indies [14, 657; 7, 24]. This is why thirty years later, Naomi Schor's call for recanonizing Sand [15] becomes very much relevant again. Only this time, we need to go beyond Schor's metaphoric equation of women's enslavement and marriage, and take into account the specificities of the colonial content and context the novel presents: Indiana was indeed born in a slave colony, brought up among slaves, and in her final retreat to her native island, helps franchise slaves. Therefore the heroine is not just a slave as woman,
discussion on Indiana here engages with the growing scholarship on creolization, race and border crossing, in the hope of bringing about a more productive critical thrust in reading the novel on both ideological and aesthetic grounds.
A major problem of current readings of Indiana, even in the framework of colonial and postcolonial studies, is that scholars allocate the heroine the status of metropolitan subject too quickly. To treat Indiana as the French equivalent ofJane Eyre [10], for example, is not that appropriate because Indiana is not a "metropolitan bourgeois woman" in the same way as the British character. If we look at the plot, Indiana spends the first sixteen years of her life on Île Bourbon, then gets married and follows her husband to France. Her sojourn in France lasts for three years during which she falls in love with Raymon de Ramière. Then she moves back to her island, only to abandon her husband and cross the seas again. After being rejected by Raymon, Indiana goes back to her native island and this time definitively. Therefore, her stay in France is considerately shorter in comparison with her life on Île Bourbon.
The exotic name of Indiana recalls her geographic origin in the Indian Ocean. A true member of island
people, Indiana has a hybrid nature. From what the text tells, Indiana's family is a Spanish one transplanted in metropolitan France and its overseas colonies. Indiana's father, Mr. de Carvajal, "had taken refuge in the French colonies" after the fall ofJoseph, the brother of Napoleon as king of Spain. Her husband's surname, Delmare, contains the Spanish word for "sea," "mar", and the Italian word for "sea", "mare". As for French, "mare" means primarily a pond, or an ocean in a humorous way. Thus the name of Indiana Delmare is closely linked to images of water and navigation, just as in the novel the heroine crosses the oceans many times. Being handed over from his father to Delmare, Indiana sees herself given a double-sealed identity as an overseas emblem. Plus, "mare" in French refers to an amount of liquid, in phrases such as "une mare de sang". The husband inhabits an image that is both a diminutive form of the sea, manifested in his pusillanimity in contrast with Indiana's magnanimity, and that of violence. The presence of Delmare on the island as an adamant follower of Napoleon, alludes to the latter's reestablishment of slavery in the colonies in 1802.
When it comes to another important character, Ralph, everything in the novel suggests he was also born on the island, thus a Creole himself. Despite his pale complexion and British blood, Ralph is given the family name "Brown", whose reference to racial mixture hints at the author's awareness of the ambivalence of the term "créole" [9, 23]. The multilingual environment in which Indiana and Ralph grow up, with its circumstantial irregularities - the children learning a "father tongue" instead of a "mother tongue" [13, 157-58] - reflects a common state of island cultures. What is more, this detail furnishes a realist explanation to Indiana and Ralph's inelo-quence in French when they are in France, besides the metaphorical equation oflack oflanguage and lack of power.
If Indiana and Ralph as a couple inevitably remind Paul and Virginie, the adolescent couple in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's novel, the introduction
of a third character, Noun, transcends racial and social boundaries scrupulously maintained in the eighteenth-century work. Significantly, in contrast with Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's anxiety over the contaminate effect of black milk, Indiana and Noun are "sœurs de lait" and their wet nurse is a black woman ("il [Ralph] me vit venire à lui dans les bras de la négresse qui m'avait nourrie," [13, 157]), establishing ties between Indiana and Noun that are "quasi biological, psychological and spiritual" [11, 84]. Thus the strong and special bond formed among Indiana, Ralph, and Noun despite their social and racial differences illustrates the process of creolization which is a cultural action - material, psychological and physical - based upon the stimulus/response of individuals within the society to their environment and - as white/black, culturally discrete groups - to each other. The scope and quality of this response and interaction were dictated by the circumstances of the society's foundation and composition - a "new" construct, made up of newcomers to the landscape and cultural strangers to each other [3, 296].
Seen this way, the novel can be read as the experience of a group of transplanted colonial subjects in France, a Bildungsroman not for Indiana alone, but for the Creole trio Indiana/Ralph/Noun, who stay together once moved to the metropole. All three have to endure a painful learning curve. Through their experience, the French society's values are put to trial and severely criticized. Their failure to integrate in, then their rejection by and of the French metropolitan society, are adroitly framed into a seduction plot, via their interactions with Raymon de Ramière, whose aristocratic roots, rhetorical hypocrisy and political pragmatism make him the epitome of the Restoration France, and allows the novel to recapitulate a sociopolitical history of France from the 1789 Revolution till the author's own time.
If Indiana is "une femme qui reste étrangère dans la société française" [11, 73], who "does not think through and face up to the often terrifying social and ideological implications ofwhat she does" [4, 156], it
is not because she is a woman, but because she does not know the French society. Her seeming immaturity with regard to society is less a gender problem than an epistemological problem. Also, her consistent and persistent use ofvocabulary of master/slave relationship in her dealing with both her husband and her lover are not, as critics used to claim, just metaphorical. Slavery is her reality, a functional paradigm of the world in which she was brought up, her father being "le planteur le plus rude et le voisin le plus fâcheux" [13, 88]. When, at a moment of emotional effusion, Indiana claims to Raymon that "je suis ton bien, tu es mon maître" [13, 296], she talks as an insider, since legally a slave is indeed defined as "bien meuble" ofhis or her master. In contrast, Raymon's complacent self-description ofbeing an "esclave de [son] organisation grossière" [13, 240], shows an instance of rhetorical cliché, a trope of the metropolitan appropriation of slavery images.
More important, the novel, through the presence of Indiana and Noun, brings the multiracial-ity of Creoleness back to the metropole, putting at work a complex mechanism of the metropole's dealing with its colonial subjects. On the one hand, the multiracial dimension of Creoleness is not possible to erase and its existence has to be recognized. Time and again the two women's "commonality" [7, 28] as Creoles is put into focus ("Femmes de France, vous ne savez pas ce que c'est une créole [...] ce n'est pas vous qu'on dupe et qu'on trahit," [13, 233]), contrasting them constantly with French women. The lack of coherence in Indiana and Noun's characteristics reflects accurately the ambiguity of the very notion of Creoleness. Raymon's desire for both Noun and Indiana reflects the metropolitan France's attraction to and fantasy about colonial sexuality [6].
On the other hand, there is a need to differentiate the Creoles of European descent from those of African and Asian origin. On Île Bourbon, Indiana's native island, whose name later became Réunion, "Creoleness" was a malleable concept for the colonists, which contains a hierarchy in itself:
The "French" identity advanced by Réunions conservatives was their own construction of a pure Frenchness identified with the idea of La Mère-Patrie. It was, to a certain extent, [.] a Creoleness that was not the product of métissage but the pure essence of France, kept unpolluted, untainted, on an Indian Ocean island. The other, the Creole who was the descendant of slaves, of indentured workers and European colonists, represented a "maximal difference" from Frenchness, which had to be erased so that a Frenchman or Frenchwoman could emerge [16, 135].
As we see in the novel, Indiana, whose father is Spanish and whose mother of unknown origin, is presumed French without problem. Especially, once moved to France, her servants do not forget reminding her that she is French, an inculcation Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Virginie also experienced. Whereas no one insists that Noun is French, leaving the descendants of the slaves in a sort of limbo in terms of their nationality.
The Creoles of non-European origins, whether of pure African or Asian ethnicity or mixed blood, are deemed undesirable, even monstrous [16, 231]. Therefore the love triangle of Raymon, Indiana and Noun reveals a new dimension of meaning: below the encounters of a Frenchman with two Creole women lies the deep structure of metropolitan France's differential conceptualization of its colonial subjects along racial lines. Raymon seduces Noun and quickly abandons her and moves his interest to Indiana, because a metropolitan Frenchman must prefer the European Creole over the racially other Creole. There need to be a difference between Indiana and Noun, which makes the former more desirable than the latter. It is exactly what happens in the much commented scene of Indiana dressed in Noun's clothes after the latter's death. Raymon's sensation when he touches Noun's hair, "d'un noir nègre, d'une nature indienne" [13, 192], betrays his urge to set up a racialized criterion. The formulation is worth noting because of its racial connotations. The first is the black color ("noir") qualified as Negro ("nègre"). The second describes the texture
as Indian. Such a combination is accurate, since on the Mascarene Islands, the population is a mixture of three origins: European colonists, African slaves and Indian indentured laborers. By giving Noun's hair the characteristics of a Negro and an Indian, Raymon sin-gularizes the lacking element, the European descent, which, by implication, is that which defines Indiana.
Interestingly, however, the Sandian novel presents Indiana as the one who triumphs over this battle, thus subverting the very mechanism of hierarchy at work. The episode valorizes Indiana's treatment of race as performance. By putting on Noun's madras and wearing Noun's hair, cultural and racial signi-fiers of Creoleness, Indiana sanctifies, retroactively, Noun's previous attempt to dress up like her. Whereas Raymon reads Noun's act as a transgression which produces an erotic desire, Indiana identifies with Noun by reaffirming their common Creole identity. Indiana's vengeance is not selfish, but an act of solidarity, an articulation of her sorority with Noun, a sorority that goes beyond the biological. Indiana's identification to Noun continues later in the text, with an attempted suicide by drowning on her own, in Paris, and then with another attempted suicide by drowning together with Ralph, in Île Bourbon.
But for Indiana to be totally disillusioned, she has to suffer one last ordeal. The scene at Lagny, France in which Indiana confronts Raymon exposes her perilous status in the fullest. Her "haughtiness" and "power" [13, 297] faced with Raymond and his wife, Laure de Nangy, are all the more poignant that she is unaware of the changes that had taken place. Leaving behind her own marriage, she faces the insurmountable constitution in the metropolitan France: marriage.
The scene ofthe last confrontation gains its full significance when we view it in the time frame the novel sets: contrary to some critic's claim that "la révolution de 1830 ne sert que de décor à la tragédie personne" of Indiana [11, 73], the historical event plays a crucial role both in Indiana's personal life and in the narrative ofthe novel. Landing in Bordeaux, the "only provincial city to have a revolutionary journée in July 1830" [2, 479],
Indiana's personal history mingles with the national history. In the confusion Indiana left her personal belongings on the boat, and was therefore denied the boarding of a coach for Paris. She spent two months in a hospital, "au moment où on l'avait portée à l'hôpital, aucun papier qui pût faire connaître son nom. Elle avait été inscrite sous la désignation d'inconnue sur les registres de l'administration et sur ceux de la police" [13, 293].
Thus Indiana's rejection first by the State then by Raymon de Ramière illustrates what the novel calls "l'étrange issue de notre dernière révolution" [13, 128] through the personal fate of one woman. The 1830 Revolution which gave birth to the July Monarchy did not bring any real progress. It only reinforced marriage and propriety, notions sacred to the bourgeoisie, without any difference from the Restoration France that Indiana first came with her husband to inhabit, one where the bourgeois values dominate, as shown in the definition of honnête homme [13, 132]. Study of Sand's correspondence shows her disillusionment with the 1830 Revolution which failed to bring real social changes so hoped for [5, 33].
More important, by making the 1830 Revolution the backdrop of a Creole's personal fate, the Sandian novel inscribes itself into a literary corpus which reflected the intertwining point of two "unfinished businesses," so to speak, that France had to deal with throughout the entire nineteenth century. One was the concept and practice of revolution which put the French society into social and political upheavals and transformed it through a variety of regimes. The other was France's colonial adventure involving slave trade and the institution of slavery in its overseas holdings, those known as "the Old Colonies" ("les Anciennes colonies") in the French Caribbean and East Indies. After an initial traumatic amnesia following the loss of Saint-Domingue, a cluster of texts sustained the revival of interest in matters colonial from the Restoration through the July Monarchy, the Third Republic into the Second Empire and beyond, putting France's colonial enterprise in the background or at the center of their plot, and
having as their main character(s) slaves, ex-slaves, slave-owner(s), Creoles and mulattos.
Sand's sociopolitical concern of bringing the Creole back to the metropole when slave trade was being combated attracted the attention of her contemporary, the young Honoré de Balzac. Balzac's comment that Indiana was "dangerous for his imagination" [12, xlvi] proves to be a self-fulfilled prophecy: the 1834 Balzacian nouvella "La fille aux yeux d'or," whose central female character Paquita Valdez is a Creole slave transplanted to Paris from the West Indies, may well be partially inspired by Indiana. When read side by side, however, Sand the "idealist" anchors her narrative in historical and local referential facts whereas Balzac the "realist" delivers a fantasy tale of money, sex and murder.
The happen ending of Indiana, usually qualified as "unlikely," becomes coherent when we take the novel as a work "ultimately just as concerned with the national problem ofemancipating colonial subjects as it is with
that of emancipating domestic women" [1, 114]. For the Creole couple Indiana and Ralph, totally disillusioned with the metropolitan French society, the novel's dénouement offers a logical and necessary solution. Indiana and Ralph retreat to Ile Bourbon, where they devote themselves to helping slaves. The controversial happy ending of Indiana, therefore, should be regarded a deliberate choice, a generic hybridity. In Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, despite its exaltation of a matriarchal structure and middleclass self-sufficiency, the idyllic adolescent lovers' death dissolves in its own diegesis the very utopian harmony based on class and racial separation. For the Sandian idealism to grow into its own, the couple's suicide must fail, so that, on the one hand, the novel breaks the limitations ofbourgeois realism by letting Indiana and Ralph live on, and on the other hand, by making Indiana and Ralph a couple in free union and childless, Sand's work rejects the fantasy of woman as virgin then mother, imposed by a male-centered society, ancien régime or not.
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