Living Out Loud: The Mythopoetics of Bodily Representation in the Works of George Sand

This reading privileges the figure of Corambé, a mythic deity invented by Sand during her childhood and described in her autobiography. Examining Sand’s autobiography for traces of her coming to writing, the first chapter of the thesis places Corambé at the centre of Sand’s mythopoetics, as a being that symbolizes the potential of altruism, empathy, and creativity, but resists any fixed form. The subsequent chapters read Sand’s novels under the sign of Corambé, turning to Sand’s fictional depictions of bodies and her engagement with realism, symbolism, religion, and medicine to argue that Sand’s texts promote an alternative approach to the corporeal that accounts for a variety of different forms of experience.

Instead of a fundamental idealism, such a reading instead suggests that Sand’s approach is based on an acceptance of the real qualities of an individual and a rejection of the ideal as a product of the masculine imagination, thereby repositioning Sand as a writer fully engaged in the questions of her age, and interrogating our understanding of her place within what we might call the canon.