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The Education Of Girls In Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Mother-Daughter Relations And Portrayals Of Identity In George Sand And Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Christina Grace Thomas

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis examines the relationships between mothers and daughters against the background of education in early nineteenth-century France. This era was the first time that a large population of French girls was separated from their mothers. Because of their attendance at school, girls created an identity separate from that of the one that their mothers had helped them to create. By using George Sand’s autobiography Histoire de ma vie and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s poem “Ondine à l’ecole,” the process of distinguishing the daughter from the mother has been analyzed from both the mother’s perspective and the daughter’s perspective. For Sand, who …