ABSTRACT
This chapter compares three novels, Mauprat, Valvedre, and Le Dernier Amour, which highlight in different ways the stakes of proper performance of masculinity, and the linguistic supplement that self-representation in narrative affords a deficient masculinity. These three novels enact very different performances of masculinity, but in each, the equation of biological maleness and the status of 'homme' are disrupted. The anxieties and tensions thus generated reveal the role that language and narrative play in the performance of 'normative' masculinity. George Sand thus marks her distance from conceptions of gender in which masculinity is considered as a 'being', and nuances performative theories of gender in which masculinity and femininity are perceived as 'doing'. The chapter offers a critical analysis of the discourses of power which underpin masculinity and exposes the fictions of potency which masculinity generates. Like that of the narrator of Indiana, his intellectual frame of reference is based on his own masculine perspective on the world.
