Out of Place: Family Dysfunction and Displacement in Valentine

"Il me semblait que la Vallee noire, c'etait moi-meme, c'etait le cadre, le vetement de ma propre existence." (1) In the preface to Valentine, George Sand reflects on the Berry region where she grew up and the sense of place it has given her. Valentine, published on the heels of Indiana in 1832, is Sand's first novel set in the Vallee noire, a location both real and imagined that will become a setting of choice for the novelist, notably in her romans champetres. (2) While the descriptive part of her novel was praised, admits Sand in the Notice, the romance plot was more controversial. Valentine indeed reprises some of the contentious themes central to Indiana, such as the perils of "ill-assorted unions," (3) adultery and a perceived Saint-Simonian discourse on feminine emancipation. The novels thwart expectations that the romance should lead to the consolidation of the wholesome patriarchal family. The apparent discrepancy between the novel's decor and its plot is perhaps not as accidental as it may at first appear. In sharp contrast to the author's own sense of rootedness, the characters in Valentine all suffer from being out of place. Physical displacement reflects their alienation from a clear sense of self and from the family. The novel, set in the late 1820s in the Berry countryside, (4) intertwines several romantic plots among the members of two families of different social strata, most prominently the tragic story of transgressive love between Valentine de Raimbault, an aristocrat betrothed to M. de Lansac, and Benedict Lhery, a peasant of means. Valentine and Benedict are torn apart by divergent social classes as symbolized by their opposed dwellings, the chateau and the farm; the lovers, however, have much in common. Both feel displaced and are racked by feelings of obligation, debt and rivalry toward their families; and both dream of new forms of solidarity in self-made or elective community. Beneath the romance in Valentine lies an insightful reflection into the impact of historical transformation on the family, leading to a portrait of family life as an experience of exclusion rather than of belonging. Valentine registers changed expectations in relationships among parents, children and spouses, and challenges to parental and male conjugal authority, which stemmed from the French Revolution. Despite its pastoral setting, the French Revolution is a constant, if implicit, referent in Valentine, and the novel reflects on changes in the social structure borne out of the post-revolutionary era. (5) The Revolution transformed identity in part by changing relationships to the land. The emigres, for example, were dispossessed and their lands converted into biens nationaux; meanwhile, social mobility accompanied the creation of new landed gentry. By challenging the traditional roles of women and men, reevaluating the institution of marriage, reconsidering illegitimacy and fostering a sense of individualism, the Revolution broadly impacted the family. As Claudie Bernard has shown, the Old Regime model of the aristocratic familia, tied to its lands, to its traditions, and to a network of relations, gradually ceded way to a New Regime or democratic family unit, nuclear rather than extended, autonomous rather than relational or affiliative. Valentine draws on these changed relationships between land and family to represent the physical displacement and familial dysfunction of its characters. Criticai readings of Valentine have often drawn on the polarized topography of the novel to map the opposition between the two families, the Raimbaults and the Lherys. Micheline Besnard, in her semiotic analysis of the novel's places, was the first to discuss in depth how topography figures social, individual and even corporeal identities. Observing that the novel's main characters separate themselves from their expected social environments, she argues that "les personnages peuvent se definir par rapport a l'espace auquel ils appartiennent, ou qu'ils fuient, ou qu'ils recherchent" (41). …