ABSTRACT
George Sand's writing reveals an author adopting an increasingly adversarial stance towards realist poetics, and raising aesthetic and representational concerns that cannot be decoupled from masculinity. The narrative layers of her first novel demonstrate her awareness of the constraining narrative syntax of a realist aesthetic which was to assert its dominance among the modes of literary representation in nineteenth-century France. The performance of narrative masculinity that she undertakes here constantly draws attention to the operation of gender in processes of signification. Human presence is problematic for interpretations that seek to establish the novel as a direct reflection of reality. The visual metaphor of the writer as mirror thus cedes before the image of the author-narrator as performer of the story, and vocality emerges as the dominant trope of Sandian metalanguage. In Indiana, the metanarrative dimension opened up by the conclusion brings to light the homosocial narrative community, which is also an ideological and interpretive community, at the basis of representation.
