George Sand, Indiana and the Transgressive Work of Idealism

This essay examines how George Sand’s turn to idealism within her early novel Indiana transgresses transgression itself. Critics have long read Indiana as a transgressive novel whose target is marriage and traditional gender identities. Yet, these same critics have not paid sufficient attention to Sand’s coupling of transgression and idealism, understood here as a utopic promotion of a higher ideal and a heightening of certain characteristics like prettiness. The essay contends that utopia provides a vantage point so that the consequences of transgression are not assumed and can be more readily evaluated. Usually linked with material practice, transgression enables the work of social rules to become visible. Nonetheless, Sand recognises that this materialist view of transgression resists evaluation of its consequences since the concrete focus on rule-breaking along with its thrills neither addresses the resilience of the norm nor the gap between rule-breaking and meaningful change. In short, breaking the rules is hardly a guarantee of meaningful change, especially when it is by a single individual. When coupled with transgression, utopia further enables us to see the idealism within transgression: the fact that transgression is typically better at calculating benefits over costs, the change versus the meaning of that change.