Fuller George Sand

“George Sand smokes, wears male attire, wishes to be addressed as “Mon frère,”--perhaps, if she found those who were as brothers, indeed, she would not care whether she were brother or sister” (284).

I have always read Fuller’s description of George Sand in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (and I have always seen it read) as a completely positive depiction of the kind of performed androgyny for which Fuller is arguing. Additionally, I’ve always considered that, in Fuller’s mind, Sand’s performance of masculinity goes hand in glove with Sand’s profession as a writer. That, in some way, to write was to be masculinized in a positive way--to break out of the strictures of being feminine. But after my latest reading of Woman, I am not so sure. I mean, I still think this is a positive depiction--Fuller speaks of Sand with approbation, but I find myself intrigued by mood of her verbs and by the possibility that Fuller is here critiquing the structure of the gender system, one that forces someone like Sand to perform a masculinity that might be as un-authentic as performing femininity would be. The crux of this issue, it seems to me, is when Fuller keys in on Sand’s “wish” to be “adddressed as ‘Mon frère’”. In a minute, I want to think about the word “brother” (frère) and its connection to friendship and citizenship through Derrida’s critique of fraternité, and then in a later post, I’ll think about the position of this passage about Sand within the structure of Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

It seems to me now that Fuller is instead criticizing Sand, in some way, for being too “masculine” because to agree, as Sand’s performance of masculinity does, that masculinity is needed for equality between the sexes (or for being a writer) seems, to Fuller, to be acquiescing to a fundamental problem in the establishment of any relationship between the sexes (and I’m using “sexes” deliberately since it is Fuller’s term of choice more so than “gender”. I hope, at some point, to ponder that some, too). In the new reading that I’m toying with, the key phrase is “mon frere,” and the key theoretical issue is the question of how much friendship is dependent upon a classical model of friends as brothers. Women, Fuller seems to be arguing in this passage, can be equal partners, equal friends with men, only insofar as they become “brothers” to those men. This leads men to act inappropriately (to always act as brothers) and limits the ability of men and women to have full relationships. Likewise, it leads women to act inappropriately, and either to speak with too much anger (Fuller’s word is “heat”), or to take on roles that are inappropriate to them (which does not mean what it seems to mean because Fuller is not interested in carving out separate spheres so much as she wants to be true to each person’s nature, and therefore each person’s as a gendered person: as she puts it a few pages earlier: a man and a woman in a relationship should work to have a “harmony of mind, and the difference of nature: one thought, but two ways of treating it” 283).

OK, I’ll try to work that out, but for now the insight is that I do not think that Fuller is praising George Sand, but critiquing Sand for acquiescing to a notion of equality that allows room only for brothers.

BROTHERS and FRIENDS

I’ll get to Fuller, but Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship is why I’m keying in on the notion of brotherhood. Derrida’s reading of friendship is argues that women have never been able to be “friends” either to men or to each other because friendship has been limited, as a category of relationship, to consanguineous brothers. Fraternité. “The figure of the friend,” Derrida writes, so regularly com[es] back on stage with the features of the brother....[and] seems spontaneously to belong to a familial, fraternalist, and thus androcentric configuration of politics” (viii). Later on he claims that the “model of friendship that will have dominated, in all its canonical authority, the Greek or Christian discourses” is “the figure of the brother” (103).

And yet, Derrida claims that “there has never been anything natural in the brother figure on whose features has so often been drawn the face of the friend” (159). To simplify, Derrida’s argument is that classical (Greek, Christian, Western) conceptions of friendship have depended on the easy equation of friend for/as brother. This conception of friendship as brotherhood, friendship as consanguineous fraternity, has limited the ability of “friends” as a social category to include those many others who cannot be brothers either with each other or with the standard Western/Christian/Greek subject, who is always already male, white, fairly bourgeois (think who can be a speaker, an “I,” or who can be the narrator of a good standard English novel). Friendship, in this way, becomes in part a form of narcissism, as we limit who our friends are to those who could be our brothers. But it goes somewhat deeper than that as the “we” is also limited to those whom “we” can imagine as fitting into the ideal of the friend.

To be a friend, then, according to this tradition that Derrida is criticizing, is both to be a certain type of person, and to allow only other people like you to be friends. Thus, friendship, which should be the most open and inclusive sort of relationship, because the most exclusive and exclusionary. But, says Derrida, this need not be so: “The brother is not a fact” (159). What Derrida is drawing our attention to here is the “fact” that the way we understand friendship, as consanguineous fraternity, is able to be changed because it is a metaphor, and because that metaphor carries a trace of a new sort of friendship, a new style of being friendly to others as well as to brothers.

Approaching Fuller’s comments on George Sand from this point of view, from a point of view that is suspicious of franternité, one notices the criticism implicit in Fuller’s comments about Sand through Fuller’s use of the concept of brotherhood.

Next up: some thoughts on the structure of Woman in the Nineteenth Century