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 calls a female genealogy. This genealogy runs from the forceful and tempestuous Aurora of Koenigsmark, who gives a royal bastard to the house of Saxony, through to Maurice Dudevant, 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. But mediatory experience is also what permits her to develop multiple identities and eventually leads to her own fictionalisation. Her redoubling in language also permits that other form of mediation, the ironic stance whereby one becomes the eavesdropper or ‘reader’ of the communication between oneself and others.
