Department of French & Italian Student-Faculty Forum Series presents
Charting Utopia in Sand’s Nanon
by
Patrick Bray
Friday, October 26, 2007
2:30-3:30 pm
Ballantine Hall 144
George Sand's 1872 novel, Nanon, narrates the appropriation of a tool of elite power, the Cartes de Cassini, by a humble peasant girl, who uses them to create a utopian community in the wake of the Revolution of 1789. The novel presents the history of the French Revolution from a displaced perspective: it is told as a memoir by Nanon, an old woman, who remembers her experiences as a young peasant girl in the countryside. Nanon's story is, in terms of time, space, and gender, very far from the official narratives of the Revolution. In the course of the Revolution and the narrative, Nanon must navigate unfamiliar and increasingly vast spaces: first of her own village, and eventually of the regions of France itself. I argue that Nanon's successful blending of idealism and pragmatism is made possible by her navigation of both utopian and cartographic space. Her use of the Cassini map, the first map of the whole of France on a topographic scale and the most advanced cartographic representation at the time, signifies the democratization of knowledge and national space. Nanon appropriates, and indeed internalizes the maps, which she claims to engrave in her memory. They are an image and embodiment of national unity. From her utopian village to the very real places represented on the map, Nanon charts her future and the possibilities of a non-violent socialist Republic.
Patrick Bray is Assistant Professor of French in the Department of French & Italian at Indiana University-Bloomington. He is a specialist of 19th and 20th century French literature, with an emphasis on the interplay of text and image, especially in 19th century narrative.
