ABSTRACT
George Sand’s Histoire de ma vie is of special interest in any study of systematised alterity, since it provides a view, perhaps unique, of the interactions of six generations of matriarchy and thus gives us a rare example of what Irigaray (1987) calls a female genealogy. This genealogy runs from the forceful and tempestuous Aurora of Koenigsmark (1662-1728), who gives a royal bastard to the house of Saxony, through to Maurice Dudevant (1823-89), almost unique among male writers in choosing to sign his works not only with the name of the mother, Sand, but with a name and a signature that his mother had chosen and created almost ex nihilo. The genealogy comes to an end in the seventh generation, with the childless death of the fourth Aurore in 1961. It features a wild profusion of surnames, which contrasts with a quite deliberate and chosen sequence of given names, Aurore-Maurice-Aurore-MauriceAurore-Maurice-Aurore, which marks the importance of the female line. The only father in the group who was present at his child’s upbringing was the last, Maurice Sand. Every generation, even the sixth-if Sand’s daughter, Solange Dudevant/Sand/ Clésinger was, as is generally believed, an adulterine child-had illegitimate half-siblings, whether or not they were themselves bastards.1 If this modified family tree is compared to that of the Pléiade edition, from which it is taken, it will be seen how distorting ‘normal’ genealogies can be. The Pléiade version admits, necessarily, two bastards, Maurice de Saxe and Marie-Aurore de Saxe, yet omits Sand’s half-brother and -sister, who are equally vital to her story.
