The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

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CHAPTER 28 The Romantic Hero 47

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As I continue to live, I cannot help realizing that

youthful ideas about the exclusive passion of love and

its eternal rights are false, even fatal. All theories

ought to be allowed. I would give that of conjugal

fidelity to exceptional souls. The majority have other

needs, other strengths. To those others I would grant

reciprocal freedom, tolerance, and renunciation of all

jealous egotism. To others I would concede mystical

ardors, fires brooded over in silence, a long and

voluptuous reserve. Finally, to others I would admit

the calm of angels, fraternal chastity, and an eternal

virginity.—Are all souls alike? Do all men have the

same abilities? Are not some born for the austerity of

religious faith, others for voluptuousness, others for

work and passionate struggle, and others, finally, for

Figure 28.6 EUGÈNE DELACROIX, Portrait of George Sand, 1830. A prolific

writer, Sand produced a body of work—some of which has still not been

translated into English—that would fill at least 150 volumes, twenty-five of

which, each a thousand pages long, would contain her correspondence with

the leading artists and intellectuals of her day.

the author published at her own expense,
Austen wittily attacks sentimental love and
Romantic rapture. Here, as in her other
novels, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park,
Emma, Northanger Abbeyand Persuasion, she
turned her attention to the everyday con-
cerns of England’s provincial middle-class
families. Her heroines, intelligent and gen-
erous in spirit, are concerned with reconcil-
ing economic security with proper social and
moral behavior. Austen’s keen eye for the
details of family life, and for the comic con-
tradictions between human actions and val-
ues, show her to be the first Realist in the
English novel-writing tradition.
Among French writers of the Romantic
era, the most original female voice was that
of Amadine Aurore-Lucile Dupin, who
used the pen name George Sand
(1804–1876). A woman who assumed the
name of a man, Sand self-consciously exam-
ined the popular Romantic stereotypes,
offering not one, but many different points
of view concerning male–female dynamics.
Defending the passions of Romantic love,
one of Sand’s heroines exclaims: “If I give
myself up to love, I want it to wound me
deeply, to electrify me, to break my heart or
to exalt me... What I want is to suffer, to
go crazy.” Sand held that true and complete
love involved the union of the heart, mind,
and body. She avowed that “Love’s ideal is
most certainly everlasting fidelity,” and
most of her more than eighty novels feature
themes of Romantic love and deep, undying
friendship. But for some of her novels, she
created heroines who freely exercised the
right to love outside of marriage. These heroines did not,
however, physically consummate their love, even when
that love was reciprocal.
Sand’s heroines were very unlike Sand herself, whose
numerous love affairs with leading Romantic figures—
including the poet Alfred de Musset, the novelist Prosper
Mérimée, and the composer Frédéric Chopin—impas-
sioned her life and work. When Sand’s affair with Musset
came to an unhappy end, she cut off her hair and sent it to
him encased in a skull. Sand defied society not only by
adopting a life of bohemianism and free love but also by
her notorious habit of wearing men’s clothes and smoking
cigars (Figure 28.6). The female counterpart of the
Byronic hero, Sand confessed, “My emotions have always
been stronger than the arguments of reason, and the
restrictions I tried to impose on myself were to no avail.”
Sand may have been expressing her own ambiguities
concerning matters of love and marriage in her third novel,
Lélia(1833), the pages of which are filled with musings on
the meaning of “true love.” At one point in her spiritual
odyssey, the disenchanted heroine openly ventures: