Conclusion

Having examined the Histoire de ma vie from many different points of view, having discussed the various identities it projects (small child, adolescent girl, young woman, mature writer), the shape the narrative adopts and the tone of its writing, I would hope we have come closer to understanding the person of its author, not least through the ways in which she attempts to accommodate her own particularity within accepted models of autobiographical writing. The resulting text has a certain hybrid quality, which is itself revealing, although it still leaves Sand’s contradictions, particularly those of gender, largely unresolved. If, however, we take a final look at the Histoire, we may be struck by the recurrence of certain privileged images which because of the special intensity of their expression allow us a unique, imaginative access to the child and woman that she ‘really’ was. They are all images of place, ‘images de l’espace heureux’, as Bachelard calls them, ¹ which correspond to Sand’s most basic aspirations as she both experienced and remembers them, and in particular to her finding of herself. The estate of Nohant is of course fundamental at her beginning and her end, as she explains early on in the Histoire: ‘Je dirai quelques mots de cette terre de Nohant où j’ai été élevée, où j’ai passé presque toute ma vie et où je souhaiterais pouvoir mourir’ (I, 122). Paris, its opposite, was equally central and indispensable to her self-construction since here she found the space to grow beyond the family circle. Her autobiography traces that coming and going between these two essential points which began in her childhood and lasted all her life. Yet within this alternation and set apart from it, there are two other, smaller, favoured spaces which Sand presents as directly symbolic of her inner world and expressive of her two opposing but essential needs: the garden and the room of her own. Passionate, lyrical descriptions of both these reappear throughout the Histoire, as places where she felt happiest and most at peace. Taken together, they encapsulate the essential duality in her personality which we have seen 93earlier in different features of the text—that is, her two contrasting attitudes to her womanhood: an instinctive closeness to nature and a need to go beyond her sex.