George Sand has often been criticized for writing so-called “thesis novels,” and the critics allege that there is a fundamental disparity between narrative and idea, between literature and theory, between the concrete and the abstract, so that to commit a thesis novel is to betray the reality narrative is supposed to represent, or worse, to befoul the purity of art. Yet when, in 1862, Octave Feuillet published Histoire de Sibylle, a novel with a thesis about the virtues of Christian marriage, the Catholic press hailed it as a modern marvel, the savior of the novel genre, precisely because it had such an uplifting thesis. The contrast between the praise heaped on Feuillet’s novel due to his thesis and the scorn dumped on her own earlier novels for what on the surface was exactly the same characteristic was bound to grate on Sand’s nerves, all the more so because of her adamant opposition to the Church. Infuriated by the hoopla the affair was stirring up in society, she made up her mind to answer Feuillet tit for tat by writing her own novel about religion and marriage, but with an anti-Catholic thesis, the book that eventually became Mademoiselle La Quintinie (1863).

Mademoiselle la Quintinie is not simply an anti-clerical tract, however. The interest of Sand’s novel for us today is that the text gives a much more subtle and probing representation of the relation of idea and story than is indicated in the usual definitions of the thesis novel, or even in the writer’s own preface. Through the characters, action and the very structure of the text, Sand demonstrates that the logic of purity the critics have used to justify the rejection of the thesis novel is a xenophobic ideology designed to stifle rational free inquiry by excluding the representation of social and political ideas from fiction and threatening those who perpetrate them with the eternal perdition of oblivion reserved for third-rate writers. For Sand, the thesis novel is designed to make people think about problems they would just as soon avoid and questions to which they have accepted ready-made answers.