Histoires de famille: Family Histories in Sand

As Roddy Reid and others (1) have recently argued, fiction, like the discourse of science, constructs common cultural narratives and novels, which, through "their mobilization of imaginary characters and plots produce real effects, articulate emotional and physical responses" and "align subjectivities and social practices"(2). In particular, Reid states that in nineteenth-century France the fictional discourse on the family promoted new ways to understand the family and the self through new concepts of gender, household, and social class. He affirms that "it was primarily through rales of endangered or lost family life that French familial discourse negatively constructed and disseminated new, positive norms of household living" and that "it was as much through the perception of transgression or lack as through idealized scenes of restored family life that cultural narratives produced the desire for the normative conjugal family household" (5). However, Reid's argument that familial discourse did not reflect or represent prediscursive social practices bur constructed the modern domestic family through narratives of loss or absence needs to be nuanced, especially when applied to writers like Sand whom, he claims, adhered to "the discourse that removed women from political life during and after the revolution and who located women in the home, specifically as meres educatrices and tutors of children" (221). On the contrary, not only did Sand offer alternative discourses to the master narrative presented in the 1804 Napoleonic code and in much of the literary production of the times, but through her allegiance to the sentimentalist ideology of the late eighteenth century (2) and to the brief but radical reconceptualization of the family effected by Revolutionary laws before it was redirected in the Code, presented family narratives that put into question the dominant bourgeois hierarchical articulation of family relations. Before turning to an analysis of two novels Jacques (1834) and Valvedre (1861), which are emblematic of Sand's basic family narratives, it is useful to invoke the work of social and legal historians to contextualize Sand's representations of the family and to reflect on the meaning of family and families, perhaps to correct some common misperceptions of what constituted a family at the time. As Jean Louis Flandrin and other historians of families (3) in France have reminded us, the concept of famille, as we now understand it, that is, as a group of persons linked through marriage or filiation or as the succession of individuals who descend from one another, or even, as in the current definition of the Robert dictionary, as "related persons living in the same household, especially the father, mother, and children," is a fairly new concept. Indeed, as Flandrin points out, this type of definition appeared for the first time in a French dictionary like the Littre only in 1869. Before that date, that is during Sand's life and well before that, the term "family" tended to refer to a group of relatives who did not live together, or to a group of co residents not necessarily linked by marriage or blood relations (10). Furthermore, until the end of the eighteenth century, as dictionaries attest, the notion of family was extended to servants and friends of the household (familiers). What linked the members of the family was their common dependence vis-a-vis the pere de famille (pater familias), not their lineage or genealogy. Flandrin also reminds us that among rural populations, the notion of parentage was based on belonging to a village community rather than genealogical ties or alliances (40), and more importantly for our current misconceptions about families, that according to recent statistical studies, the proportion of nuclear families was higher in the eighteenth century than in the nineteenth century. Michelle Perrot and Susan Desan also stress that the shift away from lineage toward conjugal families was accompanied by great regional and class variations in family structures in the 1800s, a time when, depending on regions, families combined elements of Old Regime customs, revolutionary practices and new parameters of the Civil Code. …