George Sand, Antisex Feminist

Abstract

George Sand's feminist novels of the 1830s often seem to have a “problem” with sex, or to view sex as a problem. In them, heterosexual sex often appears disempowering for women and therefore politically unpalatable; worse, heterosexual desire itself emerges as primordially marked by patriarchal constraints, predicated on the (self-)objectification and subjection of women. This article offers a speculative reading of Sand's early fictions as anticipating similar “antisex” attitudes in later twentieth-century feminism (the so-called antipornography feminism of the 1980s), and uses close readings of moments in Indiana, Mauprat, and Lélia to reflect on the renewed urgency—in the wake of #MeToo—of the sort of ethical questions raised by such feminism during the “sex wars.” If Sand is not, ultimately, an antisex feminist, her novels are nevertheless thought-provoking in their skepticism, or their pessimistic realism, about the possibility of a politically or ethically motivated reform of sex and desire.