Sailing a Fragile Bark: Rewriting the Family and the Individual in Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

Within the nineteenth-century French family, collective cohesion and individual fulfillment often came into conflict, particularly for women. This article analyzes autobiographies, essays, and fiction by three successful women writers—George Sand, Marie d'Agoult, and Hortense Allart—to reveal the different ways that they highlighted this tension and how they proposed to resolve it. With the aid offeminist literary theory, it is possible to read these authors' texts as serious critiques of laws, social practices, and cultural constructs that restricted women's develop ment and activities solely on the basis of their sex. The article argues that these authors rewrote the family to enable women to become as fully realized individuals as men, with the implication that such a transformation within the family would entail a transformation ofpublic life as well and legitimize women's participation in it.