TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2015//
TI  - Plotting Suicide in George Sand's Indiana and Marie d'Agoult's Nélida
JO  - Romance Studies
A1  - Christiansen, H.
SP  - 131
EP  - 140
VL  - 33
IS  - 2
N2  - 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.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 1745-8153
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/0263990415Z.00000000093
ID  - ref1
ER  -