Citation

Christiansen H. Romance Studies 2015; 33(2): 131-140.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015)

DOI

10.1179/0263990415Z.00000000093

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

It is ironic, given their contentious personal relationship, that George Sand and Marie d'Agoult should be so like-minded in their fiction. Their first novels, Indiana and Nélida, both offer poignant portrayals of the female condition and scathing criticisms of the marriage system that allowed young women to languish in loveless relationships with domineering men, not to mention a certain preoccupation with suicide. When one thinks of suicide in Indiana, it is Noun's drowning or Ralph and Indiana's aborted plunge into the waterfall that naturally come to mind. This study focuses instead on the heroine's first brush with suicide. Reading it with a comparable scene in Nélida provides insights into how the two writers plot a path of resistance for their heroines. As it turns out, the drive to commit suicide can be viewed as a positive force - an attempt, to quote the father of contemporary suicidology, Edwin S. Shneidman, to seek a solution - propelling the heroines toward the self-actualization and social participation that nineteenth-century women, both real and fictional, had such difficulty achieving. © W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2015.

Language: en

Keywords

Women; Suicide; Indiana; D'Agoult; Nélida; Sand