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The Edifying Spectacle Of A Drowned Woman: Sympathy And Irony In Indiana, Kate Bonin

Modern Languages and Cultures Faculty Work

Indiana (1832): escapist romance or early feminist roman à these? Issues of stylistic choice and social conscience are intertwined in the question of how George Sand positioned—and re-positioned—her first independent entry into the changing field of the novel. Although the novel treats such serious subjects as a wife’s socially-sanctioned abuse by her husband, and the corruption of the failing years of the Bourbon Restoration, both Indiana’s narrator and Sand herself repeatedly denied that the work was meant to convey any ulterior message or offer moral utility to its reader. These denials should not be dismissed as mere pro forma modesty, …