They ought to lay claim to a better future, to a wise independence, to a greater participation in knowledge, and to more respect, interest and esteem from men. This future, though, is in their own hands."This is wisdom itself. It would be impossible to put it more clearly, and to warn women in a better way, that the greatest danger for their cause would be the triumph of what is called by an ironical term--feminism.
These retractions, though, have very little effect. There is a certain piquancy in showing up an author who is in contradiction with himself, in showing how he refutes his own paradoxes.
But these are striking paradoxes which are not readily forgotten.
What I want to show is that in these first novels by George Sand we have about the whole of the feminist programme of to-day. Everything is there, the right to happiness, the necessity of reforming marriage, the institution, in a more or less near future, of free unions.
Our feminists of to-day, French, English, or Norwegian authoresses, and theoricians like Ellen Key, with her book on _Love and Marriage_, all these rebels have invented nothing. They have done nothing but take up once more the theories of the great feminist of 1832, and expose them with less lyricism but with more cynicism.
George Sand protested against the accusation of having aimed at attacking institutions in her feminist novels. She was wrong in protesting, as it is just this which gives her novels their value and significance.
It is this which dates them and which explains the enormous force of expansion that they have had. They came just after the July Revolution, and we must certainly consider them as one of the results of that.
A throne had just been overturned, and, by way of pastime, churches were being pillaged and an archbishop's palace had been sack-aged. Literature was also attempting an insurrection, by way of diversion. For a long time it had been feeding the revolutionary ferment which it had received from romanticism. Romanticism had demanded the freedom of the individual, and the writers at the head of this movement were Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo and Dumas.
They claimed this freedom for Rene, for Hermann and for Antony, who were men. An example had been given, and women meant to take advantage of it. Women now began their revolution.
Under all these influences, and in the particular atmosphere now created, the matrimonial mishap of Baronne Dudevant appeared to her of considerable importance. She exaggerated and magnified it until it became of social value. Taking this private mishap as her basis, she puts into each of her heroines something of herself.
This explains the passionate tone of the whole story. And this passion could not fail to be contagious for the women who read her stories, and who recognized in the novelist's cause their own cause and the cause of all women.
This, then, is the novelty in George Sand's way of presenting feminist grievances. She had not invented these grievances.
They were already contained in Madame de Stael's books, and I have not forgotten her. Delphine and Corinne, though, were women of genius, and presented to us as such. In order to be pitied by Madame de Stael, it was absolutely necessary to be a woman of genius.
For a woman to be defended by George Sand, it was only necessary that she should not love her husband, and this was a much more general thing.
George Sand had brought feminism within the reach of all women.
This is the characteristic of these novels, the eloquence of which cannot be denied. They are novels for the vulgarization of the feminist theory.
