Germaine De Staël, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist (Volume 1) - Hardcover

Lewis, Linda M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 082621455X ISBN 13: 9780826214553

Publisher: University of Missouri, 2003

Synopsis

By examining literary portraits of the woman as artist, Linda M. Lewis traces the matrilineal inheritance of four Victorian novelists and poets: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Geraldine Jewsbury, and Mrs. Humphry Ward. She argues that while the male Romantic artist saw himself as god and hero, the woman of genius lacked a guiding myth until Germaine de Staël and George Sand created one. The protagonists of Staël’s Corinne and Sand’s Consuelo combine attributes of the goddess Athena, the Virgin Mary, Virgil’s Sibyl, and Dante’s Beatrice. Lewis illustrates how the resulting Corinne/Consuelo effect is exhibited in scores of English artist-as-heroine narratives, particularly in the works of these four prominent writers who most consciously and elaborately allude to the French literary matriarchs.            In her initial chapter, Lewis explains Corinne’s gift as “l’enthousiasme” and Consuelo’s as “la flamme sacrée.” Corinne uses her influence as a political Sibyl to enter the debates of the Napoleonic era; Consuelo employs her sacred fire as a divine Sophia to indict injustice throughout Europe. Subsequent chapters examine the public and private voices of the Sibyls and Sophias of Victorian fiction, as well as the degree to which their gift demands service to art, to God, and to humankind. The closing chapter studies the waning influence of Staël and Sand in the fin-de-siècle “New Woman” novel.The core of Lewis’s book is its treatment of the Victorian author and her feminine aesthetics. In each chapter Lewis uncovers the references to Corinne and Consuelo—subtle or overt, serious or facetious—and reveals the resulting tension when an artist invokes a foremother but avoids merging with the mother whom she emulates. The methodology of this bookincludes myth criticism, feminist commentary, and psychoanalytic theory, but its strength lies in Lewis’s close reading of the intertextuality of ten literary works.Exploring a connection between French and English literature and providing fresh insight, Germaine de Staël, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist makes a major contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century feminism.

About this title

About the Author:

Linda M. Lewis, professor emerita of Bethany College, Lindsborg, Kansas, is the author of four books on British literature, all published by the University of Missouri Press. Titles are: The Promethean Politics of Milton, Blake, and Shelley (1992), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spiritual Progress: Face to Face with God (1998), Germaine de Staël, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist (2003), and Dickens, His Parables, and His Readers (2011). She has published a number of articles, most of them on British authors. Most recently, she served as an editor of The Brownings' Correspondence, volume 24 (2016), and she has an article on rhetorical and linguistic devices of Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit in Dickens Studies Annual (2016).

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 082621455X
• ISBN 13: 9780826214553
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296