Marriage of Reasoning: Labour and Morality in George Sand’s Theatre during the Second Republic

Abstract

The French Second Republic (1848-1851) is most well known for its political turbulence and literary afterlife, in works like Gustave Flaubert’s Éducation sentimentale. Literary production during the period has been relatively understudied in the history of French literature. This thesis examines the representations of labour and marriage in the theatrical work of George Sand during the Second Republic. In histories of the Second Republic, Sand’s engagement with politics is often reduced to her disillusionment following the election of Prince-President Louis Napoléon. However, the Republic was also a time when Sand actively experimented with theatre to achieve her political aims – reaching the ‘people’ and ameliorating norms. Placing scholarship on Sand’s theatre in conversation with scholarship on the Second Republic, this thesis engages in an intertextual analysis of two of Sand’s popular original plays from the Second Republic: Claudie and Le Mariage de Victorine. This analysis is supported by Sand’s contemporary correspondence and paratexts (reviews and prefaces) for each play, contextualizing their writing and their reception. In Claudie, one of Sand’s pastoral works set in the Berry region, Sand interlaces labour and morality through the redemption of its eponymous peasant heroine, cemented in her marriage at the play’s conclusion. Le Mariage de Victorine marked a retreat from Sand’s more ambitious attempts to reach the working public, shifting both her target audience and setting to the bourgeois milieu. However, Le Mariage de Victorine mirrored significant elements from the moral schema in Claudie, including its understanding of the importance of emotional sensibility. Throughout, Sand continued to attempt to achieve the long-term success of what she defined as “communism” (which she considered distinct from any contemporaneous “existing” communism).