Elizabeth Harlan
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300104172
- eISBN:
- 9780300130560
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300104172.003.0024
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter illustrates how, even though George Sand's childhood was dominated by a cruel and divisive contest between her mother and grandmother, she nostalgically recounts in her autobiography ...
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This chapter illustrates how, even though George Sand's childhood was dominated by a cruel and divisive contest between her mother and grandmother, she nostalgically recounts in her autobiography that life's “beginnings are so sweet and childhood such a happy time.” This showed that, as a child, Sand's dilemma was her inability to reconcile these differences so as to make harmony out of dissonance. Although Sand casts her inclination toward idealization against the political backdrop of the “terrors of the century,” what she describes as her need to combat the “emptiness and horror of human existence” could be said just as well about her personal and creative life.Less
This chapter illustrates how, even though George Sand's childhood was dominated by a cruel and divisive contest between her mother and grandmother, she nostalgically recounts in her autobiography that life's “beginnings are so sweet and childhood such a happy time.” This showed that, as a child, Sand's dilemma was her inability to reconcile these differences so as to make harmony out of dissonance. Although Sand casts her inclination toward idealization against the political backdrop of the “terrors of the century,” what she describes as her need to combat the “emptiness and horror of human existence” could be said just as well about her personal and creative life.
