Gender Fluidity, the Crisis of Care, and Eco-criticism in George Sand’s François le champi

Aurore Dupin (1804–1886), more widely known under her pen name George Sand, remained engaged in social and political issues both on and off the literary scene throughout her life and career. This engagement manifested itself in different ways in her outward behaviors and activities surrounding the Revolution of 1848, but most of all in many of her novels. In this essay, we bring to bear three critical notions—gender fluidity, the crisis of care, and eco-criticism—as lenses that sharpen the focus of Sand’s narrative agenda to uphold the values of the countryside as a site of renewal in François le champi (1848), the second of her four pastoral novels. In François le champi, Sand portrays the opposition of “la vie primitive”—authentic life marked by an unalienated relationship to nature drawn in largely positive, idyllic terms—and “la vie factice,” artificial life defined by the corruption of norms and mores brought about by modernization.i Through her pastoral novels, Sand furnishes the reader with a unique window into the narrative voice of a female author during the long nineteenth century. This narrative voice valorizes “la vie primitive” that encompasses the richness of rural life and the bounty of nature as much as the human effort needed to sustain one’s self, family, and community.