1. Sarah Kent and Jacqueline Morreau, preface to Women's Images of Men (London, 1985), 1.

2. Sarah Kent, "Looking Back," in ibid., 62.

3. Ibid., 72.

2. Sarah Kent, "Looking Back," in ibid., 62.

3. Ibid., 72.

4. A very recent exception to this rule is Jane Miller's Women Writing About Men (New York, 1986). Though our approaches to the topic could not be more different--at no point does Miller problematize the very issue of representation--a disclaimer she makes in her introduction points to an odd resonance between our analyses: "My book will be a disappointment, I expect, for anyone hoping for a gallery neatly hung with the portraits women have painted of men" (3). Indeed, despite a typological organization largely informed by the categories of kinship--chapter headings include "Fathers and Gentlemen," "Brothers," and "Sons"--Miller's book frustrates any expectation of an exhaustive taxonomy of male imagos in (Anglo-American) women's writing. Unfortunately, it also disappoints in other ways, notably by its lack of theo- soft

retical rigor. Nevertheless, it is a pioneering study of the ways in which women's disempowerment in modern Western societies translates into their writing about men.

5. Janis Glasgow, Une Esthétique de comparaison: Balzac et George Sand (Paris, 1977), 44-45. Translations in the text are mine except where otherwise noted. The awareness of a special handicap in portraying men is shared by other women writers. Charlotte Brontë, for example, writes to a friend: "In delineating male character, I labour under disadvantages; intuition and theory will not adequately supply the place of observation and experience. When I write about women, I am sure of my ground--in the other case I am not so sure"; quoted by Miller, Women Writing About Men , 39. Writing about the same issues some one hundred years later, Virginia Woolf is, if anything, more pessimistic in her conclusions than Sand: "It remains obvious . . . that a man is terribly hampered and partial in his knowledge of women, as a woman is in her knowledge of men"; A Room of One's Own (New York, 1957), 87.

6. K. K. Ruthven, Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction (Cambridge, 1984), 86. The recent polemic over the representation of the male protagonists in Alice Walker's The Color Purple --though it is, of course, immensely complicated by the tension between racism and sexism--provides a telling current example of the violence unleashed by women artists' attacks on male privilege. See, for example, Mel Watkins, "Sexism, Racism and Black Women Writers," The New York Times Book Review , 15 June 1986.

7. On the subject of misogyny through the ages, see Katherine M. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle, 1966).

8. Woolf, Room of One's Own , 94.

9. Ibid., 35.

8. Woolf, Room of One's Own , 94.

9. Ibid., 35.

10. The references here are in turn to Nancy K. Miller, "Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction," in The New Feminist Criticism , ed. Elaine Showalter (New York, 1985), 339-60; Peggy Kamuf, "A Mother's Will," in Fictions of Feminine Desire (Lincoln, Neb., 1982), 67-96; Marianne Hirsch, "A Mother's Discourse: Incorporation and Repetition in La Princesse de Clèves ," Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 67-87; Joan de Jean, "Lafayette's Ellipses: The Privileges of Anonymity," PMLA 99 (October 1984): 884-902. The connection between The Princesse de Clèves and Indiana is the subject of an article by Mario Maurin, "Un Modèle d' Indiana ," French Review 50 (1976): 317-20. Noting the numerous echoes of The Princesse in Indiana , including the portrait scenes, Maurin concludes: "It is not implausible . . . that at the point of inaugurating an independent career as a novelist, George Sand should have unconsciously placed herself under the patronage of her illustrious predecessor" (320).

De Jean's article can be seen as part of a growing trend in feminist literary criticism to refine and rethink the universalist assumptions of pioneering work on "women's writing." Arguing that feminist literary criticism must take into account contextual particularities, especially the historical, de Jean writes: "Writing 'elsewhere' always takes place somewhere" (884), which is also to say someplace. Women writers in seventeenth-century France operate not within an "uncharted utopian space but a territory clearly and self-consciously defined by its creators." The "dream of a common language" (Adrienne Rich) that enabled and informed much early feminist criticism in America corresponded to the hegemony of feminists working within the dominant field of English. As the differences within difference (sexual, racial, ethnic) make their pressures felt, the continuing search for the specificities of women's writing must be coupled with the recognition of the diversity of women. My concern here is with what Miller refers to in passing as "the national constraints on the imagination" (347).

11. Nancy K. Miller, "Parables and Politics: Feminist Criticism in 1986," Paragraph 8 (October 1986): 46. break

12. Mme. de Lafayette, The Princesse de Clèves (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1982), 164, emphasis added. Page numbers given in the text refer to this edition; citations in French refer to La Princesse de Clèves (Paris, 1966).

13. Jean Fabre, as quoted by Kamuf, "A Mother's Will," 68. Kamuf's reading interestingly likens narratorial and maternal omniscience.

14. Nancy K. Miller, "Emphasis Added," 350.

15. Michel Butor, "Sur La Princesse de Clèves ," in Répertoire I (Paris, 1960), 74-78.

16. W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, 1986), in particular p. 113. Symmetry dictates that elsewhere in the novel the scenario we have been tracing is "reversed," if only to show that it is irreversible. I refer to the scene where the princess sees M. de Nemours steal a portrait of her belonging to her husband. The differences between the two portrait scenes are telling: first, the princess's moral dilemma--should she say something to prevent the theft, thereby publicizing Nemours's love for her or, by silently acquiescing to it, encourage Nemours's passion--arises precisely from her inability to occupy the voyeur's position: she knows that Nemours knows that she has witnessed his appropriative gesture. Even in this instance, the male gaze supersedes and recontains the female. Second, rather than experiencing bliss at witnessing Nemours's desire for her portrait, the princess is embarrassed and "very much upset" (97).

17. Dalia Judovitz, "The Aesthetics of Implausibility: La Princesse de Clèves ," Modern Language Notes 99 (1984): 1053.

18. Mme. de Staël, Corinne; or, Italy , trans. Isabel Hill (New York, 1887), 122-23. The page references in the text are to this edition. When the French text is used, the reference is to Corinne; ou, l'Italie (Paris, 1985).

19. Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington, Ind., 1978), 81-114.

20. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (London, 1924), 231-32.

21. A clear distinction must be drawn here between Mme. de Staël's ruining of representation and Corinne's more ambivalent relationship to the image, which is clearly bound up with the law of the father she would both transgress and reinscribe. Thus, when the portrait of Oswald's father (the posthumous lawgiver who prohibits the marriage of Oswald and Corinne) is nearly destroyed by water, Corinne restores it. In Corinne , female masochism and mimesis are shown to be inseparable.

22. See notes by Béatrice Didier in her edition of George Sand, Indiana (Paris, 1984), 359. Subsequent references to the French are to this edition.

23. Sainte-Beuve, Les Grands Ecrivains français: XIXe Siècle, les romanciers (Paris, 1927), 45.

24. George Sand, Indiana , trans. George Burnham Ives (Chicago, 1978), 66. The page references in the text are to this edition.

25. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985).

26. Leslie Rabine, "George Sand and the Myth of Femininity," Women and Literature 4 (1976): 8.

27. Brian Wallis, "What's Wrong with This Picture: An Introduction," in Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York, 1984), xv. A central theme of this anthology is the politics of representation, its complicities with all forms of power, especially the patriarchal.

28. Nathalie Sarraute, as quoted in La Quinzaine Littéraire 192 (August 1974): 29.

29. This remark raises the question of the "consciousness" of the tradition I have been tracing. In her early Essai sur les fictions (Paris, 1979), Mme. de Staël lists The Princesse among the masterpieces written not so much by women as on women for their moral continue

instruction (48). As for Sand's affiliation with Staël, this celebrated lyrical evocation of her youthful readings attests to Sand's keen awareness of her great predecessor: "Happy time! oh my Vallée Noire! Oh Corinne!"; Lettres d'un voyageur (Paris, 1971), 207.

30. Nathalie Sarraute, Portrait of a Man Unknown , trans. Maria Jolas (London, 1959), 84. The page references included in the text are to this edition.

31. The very notion of a "female iconoclasm" is iconoclastic in that, as Mitchell points out, the great iconoclastic discourses of both Lessing and Burke align painting and beauty with the feminine. In a very different perspective, Elizabeth Berg, in an essay titled "Iconoclastic Moments: Reading the Sonnets for Helene , Writing the Portuguese Letters ," interrogates a certain feminist need to constitute secure self-representations, otherwise known as "images of women." She argues, iconoclastically, for a shattering of these "univocal images" in favor of a dissolution of all identities, especially the sexual. In Nancy K. Miller, ed., The Poetics of Gender (New York, 1986), 208-21, in particular 218.

32. When, later on in the novel, Raymon's new wife, Laure de Nangy, signs her paintings, she writes "Pastiche" next to the signatures; Indiana , 286. This crucial word is lost in the translation, which substitutes "copy" (267). Didier reads this scene as a sort of private joke, an ironic allusion to Sand's mentor's (Henri de Latouche) initial dismissal of her novel as a mere pastiche of Balzac. For more on Sand's relationship to the then dominant representational mode embodied by Balzac, see my "Idealism in the Novel: Recanonizing Sand," forthcoming. break

This essay is part of a larger project generously supported by a Henry Rutgers Research Fellowship at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. I would also like to thank Howard Horwitz, Myra Jehlen, and Lynn Wardley for their helpful readings.